Conducting Capacity: Atiba de Souza on How AI Agents Let Leaders Reclaim Their Human Agency

TL;DR:

How does the traditional org chart set us up for failure? What prevents leaders from giving their teams the time they need? Why is community the answer to today’s problems, and what pivotal role does small business play in this? Author, leadership coach, marketing strategist and AI systems builder Atiba de Souza returns with his insatiable energy, this time to talk with Phil Rose about how clever use of AI agents can lead to more human brilliance, not less.

Full Show Notes:

As humans, we crave community now more than ever. In this episode, author, coach, marketing strategist, and AI systems builder Atiba de Souza explains how he’s seen AI agents plug capacity gaps, reclaim his leaders’ time, unlock his creatives’ brilliance, and restore real human connection.

It’s a story of not just surviving but thriving in our changing age, and as tech speeds up, he shows how AI can allow us to slow down and think. As company owners shift from being the orchestra’s director to the owner of a house of symphonies, he relates how he turned his own marketing agency, a team made up almost entirely of creatives, into a team that builds its own software.

So, for a completely fresh way of looking at your org chart, Atiba de Souza is back on Sparks for Growth for part two of his conversation with Phil Rose. He’s the author of The Delegation Trap: It’s Not Them, It’s You, and the founder of Impossible Means Go, where he teaches business owners to build companies that can think without them.

In this episode, discover:

•        Why community, inside and outside your business, is the survival strategy for the decade.

•        What the parable of the rich fool teaches leaders who try to solve every problem on their own.

•        The three roles hidden in every position of the organisation chart, how not being able to do all three unfairly sets people up for failure and what to do about it.

•        Why culture alone doesn’t cut it and what happens when you don’t have a clear vision.

•        What you need as you shift from orchestra conductor to owner of the symphony hall.

•        The Theory of Constraints and how it helps you find the one bottleneck worth fixing first.

•        Why Atiba expects his team to spend at least 30% of the week thinking and who gets left behind when people won’t.

•        The three things Atiba wants every entrepreneur to take on board, and not one of them mentions AI.

 

Recorded close to midnight in the Philippines, this is a story-rich episode that starts with an ancient parable and ends with a bold belief: that small business owners have the power to change the world.

One image will stay with you long after the recording ends. Atiba says that for years, CEOs have been conductors, hiring the violinists and drummers, stepping onto the podium and making the music of business. Now the role has expanded, as AI has expanded possibilities and new human connections. You become the owner of the symphony house, running several shows at once, with the audience wanting to come back for more. It’s a heartening reframe for any founder.

🎧 You'll love listening to this episode as much as we loved recording it. Remember to like and subscribe to get the word out to others and drop us a comment too. We'd love to hear what you think.

♻️ Feel good about sharing this podcast with someone who'll find it helpful; that would mean so much to us and them.

More about Atiba

Atiba de Souza is an entrepreneur, coach and the author of The Delegation Trap: It’s Not Them, It’s You. He sold his first company’s search engine in 1996, ran a boutique SEO agency for fifteen years and now runs an AI-powered video marketing agency for cash-based medical practices. Through Impossible Means Go, he teaches business owners his Organizational Independence framework (building a company that can think without its owner) and runs hands-on AI build labs in Las Vegas, Singapore, the Philippines and online. A former championship football coach, Atiba lives in the Philippines, and he and Phil first explored delegation and the Hero, Villain, Guide framework in part one of this conversation.

Website: impossiblemeansgo.com

The Architect (org chart, constraint and AI employee tool): architect.impossiblemeansgo.com

LinkedIn: meetatiba.com

Part one with Atiba on Sparks for Growth: The Delegation Trap: Atiba de Souza talks about the Hero, Villain, Guide Framework for Scaling

Atiba also runs free monthly events where you can talk AI and leadership with him.

Key nuggets to listen out for:

“With community, you show up to community to what? To give and to receive.”

“Every position on the org chart actually breaks down into three distinct roles… No human that I’ve ever met or ever heard of can do more than two of the three roles within a position.”

“Now we’re no longer the conductor of this orchestra playing this song. Our role now has expanded. We are now the owner of the symphony house.”

“If you’re unwilling to think, yes, the world is going to become a very cold place for you in the next 10 years.”

“AI was not mentioned in those three… It’s just a tool. It is not the thing.”

Coaching questions for listeners:

1.     Where in your business are you storing up problems and trying to solve them alone, when you could take them to the ‘city gates’ and solve them with others?

2.     Take your three most important positions. Who is covering the strategic, analytical and tactical roles in each, and which role is sitting empty?

3.     Which person in your team have you been frustrated with, and how much of that frustration comes from a role they were never set up to fill?

4.     If you applied the Theory of Constraints today, what is the one bottleneck holding your business back from its goal?

5.     Which recurring task is eating hours of a key person’s week, and what would they do with that time if an AI agent took it on?

6.     How much of your own week is genuinely spent thinking, and how clearly have you shared your vision so your team can play the same tune?

Resources:

Atiba de Souza – The Delegation Trap: It’s Not Them, It’s You

Michael E. Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited

Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox – The Goal

Gary Keller and Jay Papasan – The ONE Thing

Chase Hughes – The Behavior Ops Manual

Geoff Woods – The AI-Driven Leader

Edward de Bono – Six Thinking Hats

Gallup and Meta – The Global State of Social Connections (research on loneliness worldwide)

The Architect by Impossible Means Go – architect.impossiblemeansgo.com

Sparks for Growth – Geoff Woods on The CRIT Framework

Learn More:

•        Visit the Ignium website: https://www.igniumconsult.com

•        Subscribe for more exclusive content in the Ignium Spark Tank: https://www.igniumconsult.com/the-spark-tank

•        Listen to the show on Transistor: https://sparksbyignium.transistor.fm/episodes

•        Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/sparks-by-ignium/id1525777023

•        Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7KDlz9FFdVJuJTJWAZmrvG?si=9d3c43e07d9b4478

•        Sparks for Growth series page: https://sparksforgrowth.transistor.fm/

Creators and Guests

Host

Phil Rose

What is Sparks for Growth?

Energetic conversations with some of the world's most amazing business founders, leaders and experts, examining the changing landscape of leadership, purpose, business growth, Scaling Up and change with business leaders, founders and team members in mind. We talk about a mix of topics designed to ignite (and re-ignite) your SPARK, help you SCALE, SUSTAIN your growth and remember to SAVOUR the journey one conversation at a time.

Learn More: visit the Ignium https://www.igniumconsult.com/
Subscribe for more exclusive content in the Ignium Spark Tank: https://www.igniumconsult.com/the-spark-tank/
Connect with your host Phil Rose on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachphilrose/

Want to recommend a guest? Drop phil a note at phil (at) igniumconsult.com

Phil Rose: Welcome back to the Sparks for Growth podcast. I'm Phil, your host, and today I'm delighted again to be welcoming Atiba de Souza. Last time we talked to Atiba back in September, we talked about The Delegation Trap and how his business experience has led him to understand how he was the bottleneck because we talked about his hero, villain and guide and he realized he was villainizing all his employees because he was trying to be the hero to everyone. Today we're shifting the channel a bit and we're talking about leadership development and how we can help entrepreneurs and CEOs really develop their skills around this.
Atiba has another business, I should have guessed, because he's a multi-business CEO, called Impossible Means Go. And I want to drill into some of the thoughts Atiba's got around helping people understand how do you delegate, but also think about the future of business that's coming up, because we don't know what's coming yet, but Atiba's got a vision. I think he's got a crystal ball really, to understand what's coming up in the world. And we're going to talk about how different roles can come to play, but also how we can use AI to help us do some delegation. But first we have to build trust in our teams.
So Atiba, welcome back to the Sparks for Growth podcast.
Atiba de Souza: Phil, thank you. And you know, one of the things that I love, is you're a man of action and a man of your word. You know, so many times, and I know you've had this too, when you do a show and a host is like, this was a great conversation, we should have another one and you never hear from him again. Right. And so, my friend, I appreciate you.
Phil Rose: Thank you. And thank you, appreciate that. Because actually it is good. I always like to follow on the call straight away, but obviously time goes on, but it's good to get this in the diary again. And also things have evolved as well for you because you've talked about leadership and what that means for you. And when I've just been Googling Impossible Means Go, this is a process you've been talking about for some years as well. This is not a new thing for you because as you've talked about before, you're a CEO juggling many different businesses. So you've had to learn to delegate and you've had to use other tools.
And we're gonna delve into this a bit here because I mentioned before, I'm going to Dallas next week and we're gonna be talking about what I'm doing in Dallas with the Inc. 5000 Conference. But you used the phrase when we talked earlier about the businesses that will survive are the ones who have to do things differently. And I'd love to just start off with that in terms of where do you see the future of businesses if we don't get this right?
Atiba de Souza: Yeah, well, the thing that we have to get right as businesses going into the future, Phil, and everyone listening is community. We have to understand and we have to realize that we are human. And humans crave community. And we've seen it time and time again over the decades that as technology got faster.
Yes, we all jumped in and we all went ballistic and it was all wonderful. And then we found a way to get back to one-on-one or small group community.
Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because that word community, you know, we think about that in terms of where we were. You know, prior to this, we were talking about our past experience. And I started my business life back in 1989. So for me, you know, when we talked about community then, we had to go to the club or the bar or we went to a squash club or things like that. Or we went to some event place where you'd learn about the community. You'd hang out with people, but you did it all face to face.
And fast forward over the last 40 years almost, if that's right, things have changed, but we still hang out and we like to be part of those communities. And at some stage of the last 30 years, we lost the ability to do that. So let's just talk a bit about that. What went wrong for us and how are we correcting?
Atiba de Souza: Well, I think a lot went wrong for us. And COVID didn't help any. And we're gonna have an interesting time with this generation of kids who had so much of their formative and developmental years stunted by that COVID time frame of being locked in the house. But the reality is what ended up happening is things got faster, things got more expensive, things got harder.
And when those things started to get harder, the thing that we again, what do humans do? When things get harder, we start to look inward. You know, I gotta tell this story. And I hope you don't mind, but I gotta tell this story. So there was a there was a book that I used to love as a kid that my mother used to read to me. And then once I started reading, I used to read it to myself all the time.
Phil Rose: Now go for it, story's key.
Atiba de Souza: And it was the parable of the rich fool.
Now, as a kid, I love the story and I love reading the story and I read it and read it and read it and read it and read it. And it was all about this guy who he had some slaves and he had a lot of land and he had his slaves planting crop and wheat, and it was a time of great abundance and so he had all of this wheat and so he thought to himself, what should I do with all of this wheat? And so he built a storehouse.
And he put all the wheat in his storehouse. Then his servants came to him and said, Master, the storehouse is full. What should we do with all the excess wheat? And so he built more storehouses. Now, interestingly enough, as I grew up, I learned that Scrooge McDuck was based on this character. And remember, Scrooge used to swim in all his gold in his storehouses? Was based on this character, right? And you know.
As the story went on, what we learned is eventually one of the storehouses, it rained a bit and all of the wheat molded. Another one of the storehouses, worms got in. Another one of the storehouses, the birds came and ate it all. And in the end, he ended up with nothing. Right?
And you know, as a little kid, I always thought, you know, it's about greed and being too greedy and sure. But as I grew and learned and studied more about the context of the time of that story, and especially from a biblical perspective of that story, in that time frame, in that time frame when you had a problem that needed to be solved.
You woke up early in the morning and you went to the gates of your city, and at the gates of your city sat the elders. And you brought your problem to the elders, and collectively you solved the problem. Again, community. You solved the problem collectively, and then you went back and executed the solution. But what did the rich fool do? He thought to himself.
Phil Rose: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, keeping it to himself rather than looking out to the community to help solve the problem.
Atiba de Souza: And this is what we have done over the last 20 years as life has gotten harder. As life has gotten harder, we're making more money, just about all of us, but we're spending more money, just about all of us, right? And we've now started just looking inward at ourselves. And how do we solve the problem? And we've gone away from community.
Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? You're right. So that's an interesting parable, as you say, the rich fool, because actually, you know, looking to solve it yourself doesn't solve it.
So let's just think about that. We're creating this vision of somebody who wasn't going to the city gates to get advice, trying to do it themselves. Now there's a parallel, isn't there? Because you started this off by talking about COVID. That was six and a half years ago. That COVID pandemic started for us all around the world. And we all went insular.
But we also started jumping online for conversations like this. So we tried to build our communities online. Whereas before that, we had been sitting around the table having conversations. And I love just now you started telling a story because to me, before we could all write, as I hold up my piece of paper with my words on it, we just sit around the campfire and tell stories. And that's what passed down the knowledge. And that was our community. And people think, you know, where's your tribe? And actually the key here is we had to have a tribe because that's what we were. We hung out in those areas.
And in some ways we've lost a bit of that over time.
Atiba de Souza: Not a bit. We've lost a lot of it.
Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. And you and I were talking about Facebook earlier and how things like that and you know, back in the back in the day when you got back involved in the internet, we talked about this last time, you know, we had some areas where we got inundated with emails at some stage and back in the late 90s, emails started to take over our lives. And we weren't picking up the phone, we weren't looking at phone books to ring people. So we were trying to do this on our own, effectively. So the world changed a bit.
We then got into Facebook and things like that. And then there was something you mentioned to me earlier, which I think was a key part of that. So Facebook decided to do groups.
Atiba de Souza: Yes. Because they realized it had that problem. Right. And so it was, you know, people were posting on and on their wall and they were creating all this content on their wall, but they were realizing that real connection wasn't happening. And so right around 2009, if you go back and look at the Facebook history, Facebook came up with this concept of groups and said, Let's allow people to create groups where they can now congregate around aligned topics. Why? Because that's what we do as humans.
Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we started this off by saying, you know, the businesses that will survive will understand they have to build a community. But we get that, you know, you and I are entrepreneurs, we've been doing this for number of times. But actually, the key there is, you know, if you want to sell something, you could have a community who want to buy things from you. If you want to market to them, you've got to have a community because not everyone wants to listen to your message, not everyone wants to listen to my message.
But there's a small segment of the nine and half billion people out there in the world who want to listen to what we've got to say. So what has to change? Because obviously there's a bit more, you know, it's 2009, Facebook came around. Now, if I fast forward to 2020, we all jumped on Zoom. We got in teams, eventually got themselves together. We went online and we, some of us went to virtual networking groups to join in with, you know, virtual things because we're missing out on that. But then we come out the other side and we've now got AI on our doorstep as well that we didn't have really six years ago, that we would just tinker around in the edges with ChatGPT and creating funny things out of it. But where are we now in that case? Because that's the key that we need to move forward to. What's happened? What need to do differently?
Atiba de Souza: Yeah. So we're in this place where we have been a bunch of times before with technology as it's sped up. And so there is right now this mass adoption of AI and this feeling because it's so interesting. It's so interesting because one of the things that you hear from people is, my gosh, this would be great because then I don't have to deal with people.
Right. And a lot of let's be honest, you're listening to us, a lot of your feeling about AI and moving forward is can I get rid of humans and just use AI to do everything? That would be so much easier for me. Right. And so we end up there. And so there's gonna be a race to that. The challenge is actually, let me back up before I even get to the challenge there. Let me back up. Gallup did a study. And forgive me that I'm going to misquote this study, but they s this it's one of we can validate it, but it is a an a real study. It's one of the few studies that have been done, that's a worldwide study, where they went around and deliberately went to massive numbers of countries around the world and got massive perspectives.
Phil Rose: Okay, we can find the details later.
Atiba de Souza: From around the world of people ages thirteen and up.
And in this study, what came out of it is something close to forty-five percent of people aged thirteen and up worldwide classified themselves somewhere on the loneliness spectrum.
Phil Rose: Wow. Just tell us that percentage again, because that's scary.
Atiba de Souza: Forty five percent. I'm pretty sure that's the number, but we can Google it and double check. Okay.
Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, we'll check it out. We'll check it out later. Yeah, we'll find that we'll find the fact. Yeah.
Atiba de Souza: But just think about how scary that is. And so understand that is what this was pre-COVID. This is what's coming into COVID. Then we have COVID. Now we're going into AI, which is going to be this mass of for the next five, six years or so, this mass of, my gosh, I can get away from people. Yay.
Phil Rose: We didn't want to be doing that.
Atiba de Souza: And then we're going to end up with the reality of humans being humans once again, Phil, and saying, but no, I actually do need people and I do need community because I am really lonely and I need connection. And then we're going to couple that with the reality of I have a friend. And if you listen to this, my friend, I'm not going to say your name, but you know who I'm who you are when you hear this because you just posted he's a friend. He's a pasty white guy.
Okay, in his fifties, and he just posted on Facebook a video of him in hammer pants breakdancing. Now we all know it's not real. We all know it's AI.
Phil Rose: AI generated.
Atiba de Souza: Right, but here's the truth. Somebody who doesn't know him doesn't know it's AI. I know him. I know it is. And so that's also going to fuel our need for community. And not just community, but real in-person touch community, because I don't know what if what I'm seeing online is real.
Phil Rose: Yeah, and they see it for real. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So just hold your thought there. I think that's an amazing fact, isn't it? You've got a guy there putting posts up there because he wants to get noticed. Some people are noticing it and saying that's real. Other people like you who know him say that's not real. But he's looking for something. He's looking for some form of connection. Looking to build something where people can start understanding him again. And I think this is fundamental fact, isn't it? We've got a world that's divided by AI at the moment. I read a fact recently, fact this morning that 90% of 13 to 24 year olds in the UK are using AI every day. 90% of 13 to 24 year olds are using every day. And I can't remember the exact figures of other people, but most people are for business. But if those young people are doing it now, we've only been in the AI world now for realistically maybe three years. We know it's been around longer. Yeah, so those young people are picking up. They're going to be the next level into business. My daughter uses it all the time now.
So they've got to make some discernment around what's real and what's not. But what you're saying is we need to get out and shake hands with each other and meet people, give each other a hug and actually find out who the real person is again. Because otherwise we're just seeing the screen.
Atiba de Souza: Yes. Yes. And understand I'm not I'm also saying that there's going to be hybrid. Okay? Because it isn't always possible for us to do everything in person. I mean, we are half a world apart right now physically, right? You and I. Right? And so yeah, it isn't always, but when we can get people together, that's going to become really important for business.
Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, you're in the Philippines, I'm in here, yeah.
Atiba de Souza: And the building of true community, not community for me to sell you a product, but true community. Right? Where you're aligning around something, which is the mission behind why this business exists, the mission behind why these customers care about this business existing, right? But the key though, Phil, is we can't get to that community.
And creating that as business owners, if we don't first create community internally with our team.
Phil Rose: So community internally, okay. So if I then put my cultural hat on, so community internally is interesting. We have a cultural business. Every business has a cult to it, some which is a good culture, some which might not be. But what you're saying is we need to build community in the business to start with. So what does that community mean to you as an internal perspective? Because I put the word culture out there. What does community mean from your perspective though?
Atiba de Souza: Yeah, so culture is definitely part of it, right? And culture is a massive part of it. But it goes further than just even the culture because you can have a really great culture that gets nothing done.
Phil Rose: Hmm, very true. Yeah. Yeah.
Atiba de Souza: Right. And you can get a that aligns around nothing, but we just have fun. Okay, that's cool, but that's not a business objective. And so this internal culture is is one in this internal community of I have ownership over my part of this community.
And you have ownership over your part of this community. And together, our ownership creates this community. Right? And so a as we talk about delegation like we did the last time, when you exist in the old world where I'm the boss and you do what I tell you, there is no frickin' community. You might have culture, but there is no community there. I show up and do you what you do your bidding and you give me a salary.
Phil Rose: Yeah. And that's really interesting, isn't it? Because actually there we've got people who've got agency over being part of that community and helping to build it themselves and they feel part of it. And that's the key to it.
Atiba de Souza: That's it.
Yes, it is absolutely the key to it. Because if there isn't that agency, if there isn't that ownership, and this is the same thing with the external community, if everyone doesn't and that's the key. With community, you show up to community to what? To give and to receive.
I give and I receive. And when I do that, I feel great. I feel like I was able to pour out and I was poured into. If I only show up and pour out, then I end up feeling empty.
Phil Rose: Yeah, because I want to get something back as well.
So there's something here, isn't it? As business owners, we need to enable our business to build this community. We need to work with people in the business. So as you said, culture is only a part of it, because there's something else to it in that case. So thinking about this as a business, you and I talked about a slide you showed me just now, or diagram you showed me just now, with a view of building on that word trust. And we talked about trust there because...
We have to know and understand and trust the people we work with. I always say no liking and trust is what builds people together, whether that's in a business or in a networking situation or just at home. So we have to build on trust. So what are the fundamental things we need to be thinking about to help us build this community within our business to enable us to give and receive and learn from each other?
Atiba de Souza: Yeah. So my answer is going to be counter what most people are going to think the answer should be to this. All right. So everybody, hold on. Stay with me. Okay?
Part of the challenge with trust in your company and with the people in your company is you and I have been taught to understand the org chart incorrectly.
Let's face facts. Just face facts. There isn't right now somebody in your company that you're not unhappy with. You're unhappy with everyone in your company. Because everyone in your company, even the people that you love the most, you have that moment of, but they don't do this that well. Man, if they could only do this other thing too within their position, my gosh, they it would just be.
Okay, it's just hey, it's just me and you talking right now. Phil's not even listening. It's just me and you talking right now. You can tell me the truth. You know that's how you feel. You may not say that out of your mouth, but
Phil Rose: Yeah, there's something going on. Yeah, yeah. Because nobody does it the way they should be doing it, relative to what I want them to be doing.
Atiba de Souza: Okay. Or they're not capable, et cetera, et cetera. There's just so many different reasons and things that happen. And the question is why? And I'm going to submit to you that the challenge that we have had is we've been looking at the org chart incorrectly. Now we probably all know what an org chart looks like, right? You've got the CEO at the top, depending on how you draw it. Then you've got, you know, the top level managers and then the middle managers and the frontline people, how however it you've got all these positions and you want to fill the positions. And if you did your org chart correctly and you drew it all out, you realize that, my gosh, my name goes in all these different boxes and I only got three people in out of 10 in boxes and so on and so forth, right?
And that's the reality. And we just say, okay, that's business. That's how we were all learned to draw it out. That's what it is. But wait, there's more. And here is the fundamental challenge. Okay. Here's the fundamental challenge. And I learned this from Michael Gerber and The E-Myth Revisited. And here's what I learned: every position on the org chart actually breaks down into three distinct roles. Now, here's what's crazy, Phil, about these three distinct roles. No human that I've ever met or ever heard of can do more than two of the three roles within a position. Which means every single person that you hire for a position is fundamentally flawed.
Phil Rose: Because they can only be good at one or two of those things rather than all three of those things.
Atiba de Souza: Exactly. A superhuman is good at two. A regular human is good at one of those roles. Not all three. What are the three roles? Strategic, analytical, tactical. Every position on your org chart has these three roles. And most of the people we hire can only do one of those roles, leaving the other two empty.
Phil Rose: And therefore not getting done. There's an element of their job which could be they presented a job not getting done every day.
Atiba de Souza: And what happens then is if it becomes critical, you, I, CEO, fill in the gap, or we hire somebody else to fill in the gap, or it doesn't get done and it is the downfall of that part of the company, et cetera, et cetera.
This is the reality.
Phil Rose: So just come back there and I've got my Michael E. Gerber book sitting in front of me here. And if I think about that, I was given this by my accountant when I started my first business in 2004, before she was my accountant effectively. And she said to me, go and read this beforehand. And you mentioned, Atiba, that when people build their org chart, as an entrepreneur, typically your names in everything. Now we know that most entrepreneurs, for one, are human and therefore can't do all three of those roles, but they try to.
So therefore they have to learn to trust somebody else to step in to do something for them at some stage. But what you're saying is that org chart, even if I'm doing this from base principles, I'm building my org chart for my new business. I'm putting my name in it because I've got to do a of marketing, I've got to do some sales, I've got to make some product, and I've got to do the accounting. So I'm trying to do it all. But you're saying there's one of those three elements have to be in each of strategic, analytical, and tactical.
So as the entrepreneur, I haven't got all those ideas. So what do I have to do to find a way of building that? Because this is news to me effectively. And again, I need to re-read Michael's book.
Atiba de Souza: Yeah. And so this is where now, as we talk about delegation, AI starts to fit. And so you have a position on your org chart. You've hired a person who now, when you go look at the people that you have, start to ask, are they strategic? Are they analytical? Are they tactical? Like where are they really good? And as you start to ask those questions, and you start to realize, you know what? They are really good at the tactical part. Like I give you an example. I have and have had some really great social media content creators on my team for a very long time. Right? And they create some beautiful things that work really well. And I had cause to ask them, well why does it work? They have no clue. Because they're really great at the tactical.
Phil Rose: Rather than doing the analytical to find out what's happening.
Atiba de Souza: But they're like, analytics? We never saw those. We don't look at those. What do they mean?
Phil Rose: Hmm. Hmm. Really interesting, isn't it? So you've hired people to do what you want them to do, which is produce great posts, but they weren't able to analyse what was going on to make them great posts in the first place. Yeah.
Atiba de Souza: Okay. And so every position has the three roles. And so in this moment of time, it's to realize, okay, you are brilliant at actually creating the post. You're receiving the strategy from your manager. Okay. So that's without that is happening, right? But now the
Phil Rose: Yeah. Told you what to do. Yeah.
Atiba de Souza: Analytical side of being able to figure out or and or predict that this post that I just created, how it's going to do, you have no clue. You're clueless about that. And so this is where now we look at building an AI agent or an AI employee that sits in that analytical role.
Phil Rose: Okay, so we've now got an extra member of our team that can step in there, but that is an AI agent to do that role. So here we are, you know, it's 2026 as we record this. OpenAI is out there, Anthropic is out there producing Claude, we've got Manus, we've got Perplexity and many others out there as well. These are tools that we're using in different ways. What you're saying is we can use AI to help become one of our team members to fit into that organisational chart to support us doing our job. Okay.
Atiba de Souza: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. And it's bigger than ChatGPT and Claude.ai and Manus and we're actually you can actually create an employee that does the job and communicates with the humans and you create the whole feedback loop and we learn and we go. Yeah.
Phil Rose: Okay. Okay. This is interesting in that case. So now there's one issue I'm to put out there in that case. We talked about building community. Obviously we've now gone, and we talked also previously about how email communication, the internet was taking away that community because we wanted to talk to you about. Now we're putting in place an agent of some kind to do some work for us. How does that help us build community?
Atiba de Souza: Yeah, it's a great question. Here's how it helps us build community. And this may sound counterintuitive, but it's the reality. How many of us can raise our hands right now and say our place runneth over with things to do? Yeah, all of us. Right? And truthfully, our staff can as well. And not only can our staff do that, but our staff, even though they can't articulate their shortcomings,
Phil Rose: Everybody, we're all busy.
Atiba de Souza: They know they have their shortcoming. And that gives them feeling of what? Inadequacy in their role. Well, what did we talk about earlier? When humans start to feel that inadequate adequacy, what are we going to do? Turn inward.
Okay. We're going to turn inward. And so what we're doing here now is we're actually saying to the human, hey, we understand and realize that what the thing that you have called an inadequacy forever isn't actually. And here is a tool, here is an AI agent that will help you complete your job so that you can feel more complete, which then helps shrink what's on your plate. So you have margin on your plate now so that you can start to look outward and realize, crap, we've got community here.
Phil Rose: Yeah, okay. Okay. So the bit you just said, the last bit, that's the key bit of it, because you've now taken things off my plate. My cup is now not as full as it used to be. Therefore, I've got time to do community build, because the AI agent is doing the stuff that I'm not so good at, but I need to do as part of my role.
And it's communicating with me that information. Okay, and you mentioned before about strategic, analytical, So in simple terms, it's up to me to identify where my weak spots are and then do something about it.
Atiba de Souza: Yeah. So let me give you, let me bring this home as a in a real practical example. So I have my number two. She's a wonderful, wonderful human. She's gonna take over this company soon enough. And yeah, it's gonna be great. Really excited about that, right? And the reality is one of the things that is on her plate is I am still acting as the CEO. And as a CEO, I show up sometimes and I will say, Hey, how are we doing with this thing? Right? In this area. And at that point, she has to go and pull all the KPIs and pull all the stuff because she also understands if she comes back to me and she says a number, I might be okay with that number, or I may want justification for that number and what's really going on. So she's got to go and pull everything together and make the whole case and blah, blah, blah.
And so she got to a place where, which she should have, she was preemptive and started pulling everything together. So when I said, hey, what's going on? She already had it.
That was taking 10 hours a week of her time. 10 hours a week of her time to have that level of information across the entire company. To be able to answer anything, not knowing which question I was going to come and ask.
Phil Rose: Because you're going to ask one of those questions so she had to be prepared to answer whatever question you asked at that time.
Atiba de Souza: Whether I was gonna ask it this week or not, right? So it took her 10 hours a week to do that. That's a lot of freaking time. And it's and she's got a cup that's runneth over already. And so looking at that, right, and that is a very analytical role, right? So looking at that, she built an AI agent that now understands everything and goes out and pulls all of that together. And now it takes her three minutes a week, Phil. And so, but here's the key: it takes her three minutes a week. And the thing that I've been saying to her for a while is you need to be spending 50 to 60 percent of your week just thinking about the team, not actually doing work.
And she was always saying to me, Well, where am I going to find that time? Because, like, I'm spending 10 hours just writing and pulling together these reports. Well, guess what? Where do you think that 10 hours is going now? Into her thinking about the team and how to help the team grow and be better, which does what? Builds community.
Phil Rose: So if I just recap what it says in case, so by her identifying where the issue was, it said 10 hours a week, she's now got a machine, something that does it and reduces that time that she doesn't have to input apart from three minutes of understanding it. It's taken away that analytical things and it gives her the information. So she says, Atiba, here's the information. And it frees up that time for her to go and do something else with it. Okay.
So this is interesting, isn't it? Because I wrote down hero, villain, guide just now, because one thing we talked about in the last podcast was, you know, when we've been delegating things to people in the past, they haven't done it, we've made them the villain because they're not able to do it. And we've then had to step in as the hero to take it over. But this is a step further, isn't it? Because if we now get clear that we're the guide, our job is now to educate, inform people that actually there's another member of the team they can delegate to.
Because that helps them be better because I could say to you Atiba, you're not so good at the analyst and analytical things, go and do this. You can then take it on board and that then gives you twice as much power to go and do things in the same period of time.
Atiba de Souza: It's even bigger than that. It's even bigger than that. But you're right. You're absolutely right, but it's bigger. So most of us, as you say, most all of us as CEOs, we exist as conductors of an orchestra.
And we hire people to play the violin and to play the bass and to be a drummer and to be a flute and to be blah blah blah. And we hire all these people. And then we put on our fancy outfit, we stand in front of the podium, and we take our hands and yes, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta! And that is the beauty of business. We're making the music of business.
That's who we've always been.
That's what it's always been.
And this future is changing it for us because now we're no longer the conductor of this orchestra playing this song. Our role now has expanded. We are now the owner of the symphony house.
Phil Rose: So we're not just stood on the podium as the conductor, we're doing something bigger.
Atiba de Souza: So now we have multiple shows happening in our symphony house that we are orchestrating. And our goal now is to create for the audience the experience that they enjoyed this symphony so well that now they want to come back next week to the next one. And so now we are looking at how do we position the different symphonies together.
And so what that looks like, what that ends up looking like is this: a conversation in which so my chief of staff has hated the platform that we used for timesheets and for tracking time forever, and so had major problems with it. And so guess what? What does she do? Right. In that position, it's a tactical thing. She built a tactical agent that now handles all employee timesheets and all employee time tracking. Okay. My number two, who has built the KPI side of everything, right? Ran into a challenge and is saying, okay, I've got all this stuff really well, but we're not getting the data out of ClickUp the way we need to get the data out of ClickUp. My chief of staff is saying, yeah, and you know, they're doing all their tasks in ClickUp, but then I'm not able to translate from ClickUp into my timesheet app well enough, right? And I'm facilitating this conversation into, so let's replace ClickUp.
Phil Rose: Okay, because ClickUp is the bottleneck in your mind.
Atiba de Souza: ClickUp is a bottleneck here. None of us like the way it works. So let's now just go build our own ClickUp that now connects into her app, connects into her app, actually does what we want.
Again, the owner of the symphony house. Right? I've got multiple conductors now and now I'm putting them together and I'm putting this together and I'm put and that's what you start to see.
Phil Rose: Yeah. So effectively we are leveraging our own time, which we know that AI can do a lot of that. We're leveraging our own time to do stuff, but here we're talking now we've stepped up from being the conductor to being the owner of the symphony house to be able to get more stuff done. And therefore we've got other people conducting each of the symphonies to be able to produce the music that we produce. So there's thoughts in mind here. You've got someone here who's producing the time sheet tracking, but she's noticed that she needs to be more tactical to do that. So she's got a process in mind. How do you identify what these problems are? Well, you know, at the end of the day, we could say, you know, I think I'm more of a strategic person. You appear to be more strategic, but you've obviously got a very analytical mind as well. So how do you identify firstly, what your strength is? And therefore, what's the constraint on you?
Atiba de Souza: Yeah, that's a great question. And so number one, it's it starts there with understanding and drawing out that org chart. Right. And we actually created so everything I'm about to tell you, we've actually created a tool and we help businesses do this. Okay. And so it starts off with you've got to understand the business you're in, then you've got to draw out your org chart. You've got to put the people in the places where they are on the org chart.
And then you layer on something that I'm amazed more people don't know about, which is called the Theory of Constraints. And the Theory of Constraints is a brilliant and simple process that helps you realize and find that there is typically one major bottleneck in your business as at a time. So often, and y'all know this, we have a problem.
We think we know the solution and what will solve the problem. We go off and we do that thing and the problem's still there. So clearly that wasn't where I was supposed to be, right? And we do that over and over again, and we keep ending up in the same problem. And that's because we haven't gone all the way down to the root and found what the actual bottleneck is and unravel that. And so the Theory of Constraints is a process to help you figure out what that actual root cause problem is. And so what we've done is we've built a tool that helps you map out your org chart, then it helps you set your goal in terms of where you want to go. And then based on that, we're able to help you find where the bottleneck is on your org chart, in which role. Once we have that defined, then it's able to create the spec for the AI employee for you.
Phil Rose: Okay, so let's just back up in that case. We're first of all identifying the constraint. We're using a tool called the Theory of Constraints. And whenever you mention that, I always think about The Goal by Eli Goldratt as a prototype. If people haven't read that book, it's worth reading. And what we're saying is here, we're identifying where that constraint is. We're finding the biggest thing in your business at the moment, the bottleneck. And Goldratt talks about it being a production line, but any business which isn't a production line is still making something.
So identify that and then once we've found that constraint, what your tool is helping you do then is identify the job spec within the org chart of what needs to be in place to alleviate that constraint.
Okay, I like that. So you've got a process. So we're bringing in a process of identifying what that constraint is on the business and that might be on the individual because as you said earlier, people are great at one of three things, strategic, analytical, tactical. They can't be great at all of those three things. So we're finding out what that might be and we're then identifying what needs to be taken off that person's plate and another role created on the job chart effectively, on the org chart.
Atiba de Souza: Well, the role's already there, just no one sitting in it. Or yeah, it's there. It's being either it's being ignored, it's being done ineffectively, or it's creating a burden on other people to do it.
Phil Rose: Yeah, okay. So if I'm now sitting in that role where you've identified it for me, what we're doing is we're identifying what needs to be on my job spec so I can have that thing done and we're finding an AI agent. So does that mean you need to train me how to create AI agents myself as an employee so I can go and do it? Or do you have somebody in the organisation who comes and says, Phil, you need this AI agent, we're doing it for you.
Atiba de Souza: Yeah, so that's a really great question. And there isn't a right answer to that question. It depends on how you want to build your company and your business. Here's what we did. We've been a marketing agency forever. And as a marketing agency, we create marketing. Go figure. Which means the majority of the people in my agency are all creatives.
Matter fact, I told you about the two only two non-creatives in the company, my number two and the chief of staff. Everyone else is a creative, right? They write, they sing, they draw, they dance, they're and like they're creatives in their life and they're creators in their work. They are creatives, okay?
And about two years ago, just under two years ago, because it about 19 months ago, I realized where we were going as a company. And I said, I'm either going to have to dust off and go and hire developers like I used to back in the day, and we become a development company, or I take the challenge in everything that I'm I teach, which talks about how to help your organization become independent of the owner.
What if I took that challenge and proved that we could turn a company full of creatives into a company that actually created software?
Phil Rose: Which is a different type of role. So you've got a couple of creatives producing software, but that's not their main, that's not what floats their boat.
Atiba de Souza: But it does. But it does. Because again, going back to the whole thing here. So for example, we have Arcy, who is my head of video. She is a brilliant video editor. Creative, right?
She is a and the brilliance of her video editing is the fact that she understands the strategy of how to put a video together. Right? Okay. Point of fact, she doesn't actually like video editing. She loves the strategy of pulling the story together.
Phil Rose: Yeah, okay, but not the editing piece which is the bit that we take, a bit of analytical and a bit of tactical to do it.
Atiba de Souza: And so she created Script IQ, which took all of her frameworks of how she does video editing, and it's a video editing platform that edits videos based on all of her frameworks. And so now she can do her piece, it takes in her strategy.
It takes in a raw video and boom, it goes in it chops video, it puts things in, it creates, uses AI to create B-roll, it does caption, it does and it produces video. But get this, it produces video, Phil. A video that would have taken her four, six hours, it does it in 30 minutes.
Phil Rose: So if it's effectively what you've done, you've extracted the knowledge from her of how she does it. She's taught AI how to do what she does as a human and then produced it for her. So she's today to produce a strategic creative piece above it, but the editing of it is now done automatically once she's done her beautiful work.
Atiba de Souza: And so that's how we have turned a team of creatives into a team that is creating software because we didn't take them outside of their role.
Phil Rose: Yeah, they're still doing what they're really good at.
Atiba de Souza: Right? I didn't ask RC to create accounting software. No, you are a brilliant video editor and a brilliant video strategist. Create stuff that will help you with video.
Phil Rose: Yeah, so it's interesting, isn't it? So we've now got a team. So one of my fears about AI is we're going to be outsourcing a lot of our work to the machine, where some people would step in to do that work, because there's somebody out there who would have been a very good video editor and loved doing it. But what you're enabling yourself to do there is they've been able to take their creative element and produce the video from it in a very simple space. You say, reducing it down to 30 minutes work.
Is there a danger here that we are reducing the human piece in here? Because we come back to that word community, we've now got team of five that would have normally been a of, I'm making it up, 20. So therefore we've lost our internal community because we've outsourced to the machine to do it. So where's the human conundrum going to take us in that case?
Atiba de Souza: Yeah, that's a great question.
Let me be blunt in what I'm about to say, and a lot of people aren't gonna like it. There are going to be people who are gonna be left out, and those are the people who are unwilling to think.
If you're unwilling to think, yes, the world is going to become a very cold place for you in the next 10 years. If you just need to be dictated to, the world is going to become a very cold place for you in the next 10 years.
Right. Again, remember what I told my number two. You need to be spending sixty percent of your time thinking.
Right. In our company, we have a mandate that on your timesheet, I need to see, depending on your position, minimum thirty percent of your week is thinking.
Phil Rose: Okay, so let me just start with that. Okay, so this is now this strategic piece, isn't it? Because I'm thinking about things, so you're now paying someone to think, which is what we should be doing. I've got a book on my bookshelf over there by Edward de Bono teaching on how to teach a team to think. So what we're doing is now enabling them to think. So we're now freeing up time so that person has got that time to think in the first place. Because if I had my glass on my table here and I could say my glasses here, everyone you said just now, my glasses are full, they're overrunning.
So we're doing now, we're now freeing up time to enable that 30% to be elevated. And those people who haven't got the ability to think are gonna be out of work doing the work we want to be doing. So therefore they've got two choices, learn or die effectively. Again, you say some people won't like it and you're right. So we've got now to build a team of people who are able to use this because going forward and whether it's five years or 10 years, we will have to do things differently. So we're now making our businesses more efficient, but we're also enabling people more time to think. Now, the other point you mentioned, you just come back to the word community, because I think that's key to this as well. When we first started talking earlier today, we talked about that word community and you said, you know, the businesses that survive will be the ones who understand how to build a community. What we're talking about here is now we're putting machines in here which will learn how to do some of the roles which will enable us to free up time to go and do those things that are important to build the business. So community then comes out from this. So I'm linking the dots here about this word delegation which we talked about last time. So I'm now delegating some of my time to a machine to do stuff that I'm just not able to do. What I am able to do is to think how to produce it in the first place.
Okay. So we're looking at a very different world going forwards in that case aren't we? Because this redesign the org chart is key and you mentioned that you've got a tool already that will enable you to go and identify the constraint on the system today and then come forward and look at this and say Phil this is what you need to work on. So your team of creatives are now becoming software business, how about say leaders, software business people but they're still doing what they really enjoy doing as well.
Atiba de Souza: Yes, and there's another sub layer to this, okay, is what's being created are tools, agents, employees that work in our business the way our business works. What have we always done as business owners or in the last really 20 years? Whenever there was a problem, we went out and bought a new SaaS product to help us solve that problem.
Right. There's a new technology product. And no SaaS product ever actually met the requirement that we wanted because it the they were designed to work by whoever created them, which is not the way our business works. Guess what? What I told you about what RC just created is designed to work perfectly in our marketing agency. It will not work with anyone else's marketing agency.
It's built on us.
Phil Rose: That's powerful. Yeah, okay. That point needs to sink in, doesn't it, though? Because we've now got the tools to build our own SaaS within our own business, effectively, rather than having to buy someone else's and paying for it. We've now got our own service that we're just building ourselves.
Atiba de Souza: Yes. And so I have coined that OIS Organizational Independence Software. So my framework is called Organizational Independence, of how I think about all of this stuff. And we're now building Organizational Independence Software. This is software that is only going to work in our company because it's tuned to us, but that's what makes it so freaking powerful.
Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's bespoke, isn't it? It's bespoke. Think when I back in 1999, was I was working with a consultancy and we were trying to put SAP into our business to prevent us having the year 2000 problem. We SAP off the shelf and then made it work for us. But we had to do what they want us to do. We had to then reorder all of business systems to fit into the SAP mold.
Atiba de Souza: And their way.
Phil Rose: Whereas what Organizational Independence does is enable you to have software that does what you want it to do in your business today.
Love it. So we've gone here a bit of a trek here in terms of we're delegating, we're looking at turning the organisational chart on it here. We're delving into identifying where people's strengths are around strategy, analytical or tactical. We're helping people understand what needs to be done and we're there going into the constraint on the system today to help you elevate to do the business better. And your phrase about you're now becoming the owner of the symphony hall rather than the conductor of the symphony.
I can now do more because I've now got more time to do stuff I enjoy doing.
Atiba de Souza: Yes. You do. And there isn't and this is why it's called Impossible Means Go. And why we call this an organization that. Because all the things that were impossible before, you now can do. And so you can go. So when I love it, and we have that in our culture. Like when someone says I can't do that or this is going to be impossible. No, let's go do it then. Let's go. Right? Because now that we have software that runs our business, agents that run our business in our way, there isn't anything that we want that we can't have.
Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, because we can just do whatever we want. We can develop any tool we need within the AI.
Atiba de Souza: Everything we want, we can have the way we need it.
Phil Rose: Yeah. So there's some business owners out there listening to this at the moment saying two things to themselves. One is, I haven't got time to go and learn this because I'm busy doing the things I need to be doing over here. And we know that's a lie, you've got to learn how to do it. And the other is saying, I haven't got the ability to do it. How can you help both of those?
Atiba de Souza: Yeah. Yeah. So earlier today I which I do for a select group of businesses, I led a I led their quarterly board meeting and quarterly planning. Okay. And so I was talking to the leader of this company and we were talking about just this topic, right? And here's the reality, if I will, behind this.
We exist in and I think there's a third existence there from what you the two that you just said, right? The time or I don't have the expertise is there's also such a big gap between me and my team. That's another one that a lot of business owners say as well. Like they're just not smart enough. There's a big gap. And here's what I've found, Phil, about that and what I believe is true here. Okay.
As the owner of the Symphony Hall, it is our job to expose ourselves to experiences here in this AI world. We have to learn. We have to read. We have to study. We have to learn. Okay? And then as we learn, it is our role to then expose our teams to experiences. Okay.
Right. And so that like I'll give you a really practical way that we do that internally. Okay. I read a ton. I consume a lot. Okay. And I realized the team was consuming, but they weren't necessarily consuming as much, which is fine. I understand that. Right? I understand that. And
Phil Rose: Okay, because they're busy doing their thing, yeah? Yeah.
Atiba de Souza: I also started realizing that I had one person over here learning about something and then four months later this other person over here learning about the same thing and there was never any knowledge transfer.
Okay. And so in Slack, which is our major communication tool, we built a channel which we've had forever. It's called the Daily One Thing. Right? And you know, it's from based on the book The ONE Thing. Right. And so we implemented it based on that book. And so what I did was I turned the attention of that channel to say, what is the one thing you learned in AI today?
Okay. And again with exposure. And I told him you can go anywhere, but here's a list of places where I go learn stuff. So you can feel free to go there and learn as well. Exposure.
Okay. Now this is where you become the Symphony Hall owner. Most people are just okay, I did that. And then people posted stuff, or maybe they didn't post stuff, or what have you. As a Symphony Hall owner, I said, huh, they're all posting all this stuff. And I started seeing similarities. And so now I'm looking at that and I said, Well, we need an analytical agent here.
But here's what the analytical agent does. The analytical agent, Phil, just scours that channel and pulls out what people said that they learned and then looks and see who else is learning about this. And then it makes connections between those people and says, hey, two months ago, this person was learning about this too. Y'all should have a conversation about what they learned and what you're learning.
Phil Rose: Love it. So it's facilitating the community.
Atiba de Souza: And that is the role of the symphony hall owner.
Phil Rose: Yeah, love that, love that. That connecting the dots as well. So, yeah, so I love that. And you can only do that because you're freeing up your time as well to enable you to do that. Because if you're stuck in doing the work, you're not going to have the time to do these things. So when you talked before about the strategic, tactical and analytical, you're enabling yourself to be strategic as the symphony hall owner, as opposed to getting stuck in doing the tactical thing. So your team can do that.
Atiba de Souza: Yes, you start to see those things.
Phil Rose: And I loved earlier when I said about you know, there's some blockages there. You said that, you know, being really clear about, you know, the gap between me and the team is widening, but what we're aiming us to do is to then put in the tools to help us help them do their job better. So it all comes full circle around this because you as the Symphony Hall owner are delegating your work to AI as well and to real humans. The humans are getting more time to do the work they love doing and getting the other work done. So actually everything is slowly increasing the performance and yeah, love that.
Atiba de Souza: Right. All right, let me give you let me give you one more quick story that happened today. And you know, that's one of the things I don't like to talk about things that happened long in the past. I want to tell you what's going on like now, and because it's real, right? And so we have built a suite of AI agents called Athena, which brings together all of this organizational independence. It's got my brain, it's got the entire company, it knows, it knows everything. Okay. It communicates in Slack, it teaches our people, so it does a whole lot of stuff. We can talk about that a whole that's a whole nother episode. But I'm out on a walk this morning and I'm listening to a book, The Behavior Ops Manual. Now I've listened to this book a few times, and so I'm listening again, and I'm in this chapter.
And it's a chapter on confidence. And we just had my comms team here last week, and we were the whole theme of the week was confidence and how you are confident in communication and so on and so forth, right? And so confidence is obviously big on my mind right now. And I'm listening to this chapter on confidence and the different pillars of confidence and so on and so forth, and the ways that you develop confidence, and then he says, and one of the best ways to develop confidence is to revisit past wins. Right? And I'm, and so all the things that he said before that was like, yeah, that's true, that's true. And you know, that's something that the individual has to do, the individual has to do, the individual has to do, the individual has to do. Well, when he said that, my brain just went, poof, and this is the this is the point of having the space on the plate, the freedom. My brain just went, poof.
Phil Rose: Which give you the success in the past. Yeah, okay, yeah.
Atiba de Souza: And I went to Athena and I said, Hey, let's talk about building confidence in the team and wins. Now, you have the ability, you see all of their wins. And you also see all of theirs when they're struggling, and because you're in all of the Slack communication channels, and so you can see when someone is struggling with something, right? And when their confidence might be waning a little bit. Could you build a system where you're tracking all of those wins?
And then when you see that this person is struggling, that you can figure out wins to bring back to their attention to remind them of the greatness that they've done in the past to boost their confidence. And we have we go back and forth in Slack, Athena, the AI agent, on that. And now, Phil, now 12 hours later, it's built and running.
Phil Rose: So you've interrogated through Slack, Athena's gone and picked it up and actually gone and done this. So Athena has become your chief of staff to do that stuff that you needed doing.
Well, that's really powerful. So there's a whole load of things on there here because, you know, last podcast, we talked about delegation, hero, villain, guide. We talked about how you develop systems around that. And that was based on your experience of running businesses since you sold your original algorithm business for your massive 2,600, whatever it was at the time. Now you've got that experience. Yeah. You're bringing that forward here. So we've now got a complete transformation, haven't we? We've got a business that is based on
Atiba de Souza: Yeah. Thirty five hundred. Yeah.
Phil Rose: AI based on the Theory of Constraints, helping people understand what they're good at and what they're not good at. And we start this off because you said we're looking at building community. Whereas what we've now got here is a team that enables us to free up time to do that. And when we can have conversations because Athena is going in and putting people in touch with each other to have conversations to build other communities. So we've got this whole process here, which actually helps us build a better business longer term. And those people who want to be on the bus can do that because we've now got a collective brain that just connects everything, which is what Athena is doing effectively.
And we're just continually improving, improving, improving through a bit of a continuous improvement loop. Love that. Yeah. So as we, as we come towards the wrapping up this podcast today, in the case, if you were to think about the top three things that business owners listening to this podcast, world wide need to take away. Are the, what are the top three things that the entrepreneurs who are keen to do something can do with this from now?
Atiba de Souza: Yes, that's exactly it.
Yeah, so the top three things, Phil.
Let's distill that down into to three. So number one is you have to become a better leader.
Okay. You have to realize that it's not about you conducting this orchestra anymore. You are the symphony hall owner. And you have to see yourself that way and you have to think of yourself that way. And you have to position yourself in that way in terms of how you learn and take stuff in, the experiences that you have, the exposure, and then sharing that exposure with your team. So that's number one.
Number two is very tightly tied to that, which we have not talked about at all, but is very, very tightly tied to that, which is you must have clear vision.
Because if you're building something and it is unclear what you're building, and/or it is unclear the songs that need to be played and
Phil Rose: Yeah, so that enables people to march to the same tune. I have a phrase which I've used before and it's a phrase from the Bible and it says, without vision the people will perish.
Atiba de Souza: A hundred percent, all the time. And you know, when you talk about that, you talk about the wall of Jericho being built, right? And in that process that when you go back and you study the wall of Jericho being built, you realize that the vision was passed down every single day. It was said every single day. And that's how it got done in such short space of time.
Okay. And so yes, without vision, the people will perish. And you know, we've talked about this. If I want to move this from here to here, it requires vision. The smallest of actions require vision. It isn't just about the big grandiose things. It requires vision.
It requires vision. Okay. So that's number two. And then the third one, which we've talked about, is realizing that it's not your fault, but it's time to see the org chart in a new way.
It's time to see the org chart in a new way. It's time to see your people in a new way. And it might be time to forgive some of because you might have been kinda rough on some of And it wasn't their fault. They were set up for failure.
Phil Rose: And you've been set up for failure as the CEO as well because you haven't had an understanding. You've been trying to do it all. You've been trying to spin all those plates. And actually now we're getting an understanding that I don't need it all because that's that number one thing, isn't it? Become a better leader. So now I'm a symphony hall owner. I can now identify the things that are constraining my performance, do better at it and do that. So they've become a better leader, develop the clear vision and see the org chart in a new way. Those are the things that align it because it helps me elevate my own self to do better in the business and therefore we're all going to elevate ourselves together.
Atiba de Souza: Yes, and I want to be very clear. AI was not mentioned in those three.
Phil Rose: Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's an enabler. It's not one of the top three things, but it enables you to do, in it enables you to all of those three things in different ways. But it isn't.
Atiba de Souza: It's just a tool. But it's not the it's just a tool. It is not the thing. It's just a tool.
Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's interesting. Interesting, actually. I mentioned I'm going to Dallas next week, last year when I was in Austin, I met Geoff Woods, who's written a great book, The AI-Driven Leader. And in his podcast, we didn't talk about AI, but it's called The AI-Driven Leader for that same reason. I think this is the key thing. Atiba, you're based in the Philippines. I know you're heading to Dallas. You're doing things in Las Vegas.
How do people go find you to find out more about this? Because there's a whole load of learnings they can get and it doesn't have to all be online.
Atiba de Souza: Yeah, absolutely. So you know, we've been talking about Impossible Means Go. You can go to impossiblemeansgo.com. But where I really love you to go is architect.impossiblemeansgo.com. That's the actual tool that we've built that helps you get to this place. Okay. That helps you build that org chart, that helps you find that constraint, that helps you build a spec for the agent that you need to build.
Okay. Yeah, do that and you know, always you can always find me on LinkedIn, meetatiba.com. Always on LinkedIn. We do lots of events. I do lot of free events as well, monthly. So you can come and we can talk AI, we can talk leadership and so on and so forth.
Phil Rose: Okay, that's good. Yeah.
Wonderful. Okay. And you got events coming up in Las Vegas, got events coming up in Dallas, but actually people can connect with you remotely and have these conversations as well. So, Atiba, I know we said we were going to talk for a short while, we've gone for a lot longer and it's now half past 12 for you midnight in the Philippines. This has been an amazing conversation. It follows on from The Delegation Trap and I appreciate you making the time to have this conversation because it gives us so much more richness to it. And I think...
Again, we could have gone for another day talking about this. Let's just try and limit it because most people are going to finish their gym session, their workout, whatever they're doing in the spirit of time. But we should have looked again. At the end of this is an evolving knowledge. And I think there's a whole load of stories here. You said, talk about Athena, could be other things. So we will get back and we'll get this together again. And we'll try and tie it down in the next few months to do another podcast, if you're up for that, to talk about some of these other things. Because I think it's just a powerful message. But as you said, it's not about AI.
This is not about AI at all. It's about AI being just an enabler to help us do better. It's another member of the team. Just happened to be called AI. We could call it Atiba if we wanted, but it's just...
But thank you. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate your time again. I'm not going to ask you the last question which I was asked, which you know, if you could go back in time and do things differently, what would it be? Because we did that last time. But the question I'm going to ask is, if you could cast a magic spell and transform the lives of business owners with what we've talked about today.
Atiba de Souza: Exactly. Like well said.
Phil Rose: What would be the ultimate result that you would see in five to 10 years time if everyone started picking this up? And that's a hard question to put on the spot there.
Atiba de Souza: Yeah. It isn't a hard question at all. It's one that I think about all the time. So thanks. You know, one of the joys of my life is I get to travel and I get to see and meet people all around the world. Much like you do. And I think you probably have a very similar experience than I with that I do with this of no matter where we go, people complain.
Right now, around the world, people are complaining. People are unhappy with the way things are in the world, in their lives right now. And as they complain, subtly in there, and sometimes not even subtly, overtly in there, they're expecting someone else to fix the problem. Government's going to step in and do this. So-and-so, big business, the church is going some and that's a reality that so many people live in. And it's a really bad reality, it's a really sad reality in my personal opinion, especially when we are business owners, small business owners, and I believe this wholeheartedly. So if I could cast a spell, this is why I wrote the book, this is why I do the organizational independence work and teach leadership, is because I fully believe that we, as small business owners, have the power to change the world. No one else, no other group in the world touches more humans on a daily basis than small business owners. And so therefore, and so therefore, if we as small business owners can raise our leadership lid and become better leaders to the people in our organizations as we create these communities, that then spills over into their families and what they take into their homes. And all of a sudden we start to see change in humanity.
Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what we need. I think that's an amazing story that she had here because actually small business make up the majority of the world's employers. Yes, we've got the big corporates out there, but these small businesses, the little mum and pop businesses, the ones that can change things if they get thinking about this and we can all do more. And when I asked you just now about, you know, what will stop things and I said about, you know, the people who won't want to learn.
Actually it's inherent in all of us as small business owners to encourage our teams to do that. So if we can have 30% of thinking time, that 30% thinking time could be about learning a new skill as well, because then we can all up our game worldwide to do better.
Love it. What a great end point to end. Atiba, thank you. Love that story. You enlightened us up with lots of stories there. I love the storytelling and it started in lots of ways. And I think, you know, if I come back to your parable you told at the beginning about putting your grain in the barn and not going to ask people at the city gates. To me, this is a method where we can ask people at the city gates and we can get more information back in. So I hope you will reach out to you to find out where they can do more. At the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do. So thank you very much. Love the story. Good night.
Atiba de Souza: Thank you, Phil. Appreciate you.
Phil Rose: Thanks, Atiba.
Atiba de Souza: You're welcome. Thank you.
Phil Rose: So I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Atiba de Souza. I think there's so many messages we put out there. It's not about AI. It's not just about delegation. It's about rewriting things. And those three messages that Atiba gave us at the end, I think are the key to this. Up your leadership skill. Get the division clear. And really be clear about how you see the org chart. Because if you were in a business today, you'd be thinking about those three things. And you might think I haven't got time to up my leadership skills. My view is you haven't not got time to do it. You have to do this.
So look at how you can do that. What's the methods? Hey, reach out. We're coaches. We do leadership development. We help people up their skills. We do lots of these things to help you do these things. And that links into that point about having a vision. Because if you're a business leader or a founder today, you probably have got a vision of where you're going, where you want to go. Again, get really clear about what that is. We're recording this October, 2026. The show's going to go out latter half of this year. So when you think about 2027, what is it you plan to do? What's your vision for the future?
Because that's the way you carry people along with you and they start to be part of your movement. And the key part of that is making sure you've got the right people in your org chart. Because we talked about this in how you can sit in a different way. Maybe those people aren't humans at the moment, but it's people who can enable to do more because you're facilitating their thinking. And that's the three things, because when it says about becoming a better leader, Atiba also talks here about how you become better people as well. So go back and listen to that last question I asked you and think about how that might impact you.
As always, I can't hold you to account for what you're going to be doing, but if you needed us to, that's what coaching does. At Ignium, we have a great team of coaches. We have a great team of people who put together leadership development programs, who put together coaching, and above all, we help you scale your business. When we talk about spark, scale, and sustain, this conversation here might spark your imagination, it might help you scale, and it definitely will help you sustain your momentum. If you need any help, reach out. If you have any conversational questions, reach out, let us know what you want to talk about. And again, please feel good about sending this to other people who you feel might benefit from this Sparks for Growth podcast. We want to get this message out worldwide. We're one of the top 10% podcasts so far, and we want to increase that over 2027. So let us know who you want to appear on the show. What books have you read that we want to talk to those authors? That's what we're looking for. Above all, enjoy your business, enjoy your life, and go out and spread the message and do more.