In this episode, the host’s guest is Don Jones, a human potential architect and experiential learning pioneer who has designed immersive behavioral simulations for more than 40,000 leaders in over 70 countries. The conversation delves into the concept of “Human Potential Architecture” and how organizational systems, culture, processes, and structure, either amplify or suppress individual and team potential. Don explains why most companies remain stuck in an industrial-era model, limiting agility and engagement, and outlines how immersive simulations (like Mission Possible) allow leaders to confront real-world challenges in a safe yet high-stress environment. They discuss the pitfalls of large-scale technology transformations that overlook employee insights, the importance of reducing friction between insight and impact, and why AI can’t replace a thriving, well-architected human workforce.
Through real-life examples, from a Fortune 500 tech-upgrade that wasted over a billion dollars when employees were excluded, to the transformational story of a public utility that used simulation to rewire its culture, listeners hear practical lessons on redesigning systems to unlock creativity and adaptability. Don also shares a powerful vision for re-centering humanity in the age of AI by “putting Marissa on Time Magazine’s cover” as a metaphor for valuing every person’s innate brilliance. This episode challenges executives to rethink governance, job design, and leadership frameworks to create environments where people thrive rather than simply execute.
About the Guest:
Don Jones is the founder and chief experience designer at Experience It, Inc., where he has spent over three decades crafting story-driven behavioral simulations and distributed immersive reality experiences for clients such as Boeing, Microsoft, Cisco, and American Express. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Architectural Potential, a researcher on organizational design, and a sought-after speaker on human potential, leadership, and experiential learning.
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Contact Munir Haque | ActionEdge Executive Development: Website:
AEEDNow.com LinkedIn: Action Edge Executive Development Inc.
Podcast Production:
Recording: PushySix Studios
Transcript:
Today on the Boardroom 180 podcast, I'm joined by Don Jones, a pioneer in experimental learning and human potential design. For over three decades, Don has been crafting immersive story-driven behavioral simulations that have transformed leadership development across the globe. He's the founder and chief experience designer at Experience It, Inc.
(...)
And he's a thought leader, author, and keynote speaker whose work has shaped how Fortune 500 companies think about human systems and transformation.(...) Don, welcome to the show.
(...) Thanks so much, Manera. It's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate meeting you and the team actually.
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Well, thanks. You know, I, you know, as I often do with previous guests, I reach out and ask who they, who would they suggest? And, you know, your recommendation came from Phil DeMont.(...) You know, he's episode, I think he's episode 16.
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And, you know, Phil's a freelance broadcast journalist. In fact, I actually heard him on the radio this morning. So did I. Talking about Tesla sales and Fortnite, yeah. Okay, heard him this morning.
He does a very nice job of that. I listened this morning as well.
Yeah.
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And what he, he said two things about you. He said, reading it verbatim, really smart, dot, dot, dot. Also world ranked sailor.(...) So like Phil, I kept your introduction relatively short. And I thought I would let you unpack it a little bit. I mean, maybe that maybe to kind of lead off what I want you unpack is I went to LinkedIn and I looked at, you know, essentially what your profile tag is, or, you know, kind of the description that you use right at the top of the page. And it says,
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human potential architect, 30 years creating behavioral learning simulations and distributed immersive reality experiences for global clients. So there's a bit to unpack there for those of us who, you know, don't understand all the lingo here. Sure. So, I mean, the question is like,
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what's that mean?
(...) Sure. First of all,(...) yes, Phil's a long time friend of mine and we used to play a lot of basketball together. And I do not sail at all, zero.
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Would like to. So I am not, I am neither a world-class sailor or really smart. So I would like to be one of those, but let's just start base level.
He never said you were highly ranked. He just said you were ranked, maybe you're ranked at the bottom.
Yeah, listen,
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I really loved basketball, played it a lot of my life, worked for Canvas Olympic teams, did a lot of stuff that was interesting before I started my company. But to your great question, what does all that jargon mean on LinkedIn, human potential architect? You don't hear that every day. And honestly, I started my business over three decades ago. And I always cared deeply about human potential, whether it was kids, you know, doing well in school, or people starting their own business, or me developing my own potential in what I wanted to do. And I started a company to design behavioral simulations. And that took off and we ended up working in 40 countries digitally,
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physically, and then 70 plus countries digitally, working with Fortune 500 companies like Boeing, GE, Microsoft, Cisco, American Express, and others.
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And we designed behavioral simulations that allow people to see their own behavior and grow and develop.
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But over the years, I realized, well, what's the core of what it is that I care about and that I am trying to in some way improve my craft around? And it was around human potential. But the reason I developed the idea of human protection architecture, which my book is called "The Architectural Potential" that I'm writing right now,
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and have been researching and will talk about,
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is that I always used to think as human potential as individual, Manir, like you have a number of kids and you want them to develop their potential. And we want them to have the will to do that, the security to grow and develop. But also, as I've grown older and been around this profession a long time, I realized the architecture matters. And one of the basic premises of my research is that architecture is never neutral.(...) It's either amplifying or suppressing your potential.
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And so I realized that the architecture of potential is a great determinant of many people's success. Yes, we need individual initiative, absolutely. And I admire that more than talent, actually. But we also need an architecture. And what is architecture from my perspective?(...) Well, architecture, let's say in the workplace, are the systems, the processes, the culture, the environment that you're in, is the architecture. And it's either amplifying your potential, you individually or your team's potential collectively, or the organization collectively, or it's suppressing it. And quite honestly, my research says the organizations today are mostly suppressing it. They've never been set up, designed for the amplification of human potential. They've been set up really an industrial era model.
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That it was always designed to limit potential, keep you in a box and stay within a cogs relationship to other cogs to make the whole machine work. We've long moved past that, but I'll pause right there because I could just keep going down that rabbit hole for a long time, but I'll pause there, see where you wanna take this, and then I'll jump back in.
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I think I'm okay if you keep on going, but one of the things that kind of flags in my mind when you talk about this was like, 37 years looking at it. And the idea that how have things changed over that, part of me is like, well, how did you do the simulations back then versus how you do them now? But really in your mind,
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maybe the definition of human potential, how has that changed in your mind over that period?(...) Maybe you can talk a little to that.
(...) Sure.
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As I was mentioning earlier, it really started out because I was an athlete as a kid. I would stay up all night shooting hoops. I would break into gyms so I could turn one light on in the middle of the night and shoot till I could hit 10 foul shots with my eyes closed, till I could hit 100 in a row without missing pretty consistently. So I was fanatic, it was all about will, but what changed over time really is the sense that we really do need to pay a lot more attention
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to the architecture around that.
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But one of the most interesting questions,
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yes, what has changed is an interesting question, but I heard Jeff Bezos say this a couple of years ago and I thought it was really brilliant. He said, "The question that's not asked enough "is what hasn't changed?"(...) Because if it hasn't changed, then it won't change over the next 20 years, you can bet on it. And what hasn't changed is that human nature has not fundamentally changed. And so we took a billion years to evolve, however long it took for us to evolve and develop. We're not changing that tonight or tomorrow or with the next business cycle or because AI is coming in. We're not changing our fundamental human nature. We might evolve it over millennium in time. And so I think the thing that has stuck with me the most because as I was mentioning in our pre-call and I really appreciate how well prepared you are,
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about 40,000 leaders around the world have gone, and these are all successful people. They're all doing fine, have gone through our simulations. And the wonderful thing from being the architect of those simulations, myself and my team, but I'm involved with every one of them, we kind of get to see human behavior. It's not what leaders say they do. It's the behavior they exhibit in these environments that are designed to stress them. They're fun, but designed to stress them and pull them into a really surreal VUCA world, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, and then see how they FIO, figure it out.(...) And so with that, we've seen a lot of patterns.(...) And the thing that sticks with me is not what has changed, but what hasn't changed. And some of those patterns have remained the same across more than three decades. And they're getting in the way of where we need to be in any kind of collective, call it organization, call it your church, call it your community, call it whatever you wanna call it, but we're really misunderstanding what's possible for individual humans and for us collectively. I think we're on the cusp of an era that will release productivity and benefit to the human race that will make the industrial revolution look like chump change. I think it will, I think we're about to explode, but explode in a good way in terms of productivity and resources that we can develop,(...) but we're not on that track right now, and we don't realize. So one of the things that the World Economic Forum says, they say we're in the fourth or the fifth wave of the industrial revolution.(...) I think that's very lazy language. I think it's very dangerous language because they're so influential. So all these leaders from all over the world that have these governance responsibilities of their own, whatever level they have at the World Economic Forum, it's usually pretty high level governance, but they go to those forums and they leave thinking we're in the fourth or fifth wave of the industrial revolution.(...) Well, no.
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If there's four or fifth waves, they're not revolutions anymore. I'm sorry, but they're evolutions. You might wanna take the idea that you're revolutionary. No, but they did that once. They were revolutionary. They fundamentally changed the way farmers, agrarian society changed. No one's done that since. You're evolutionary. So if you wanna be radical, evolutionary, then call yourself that, that's okay. But we do need a revolution, but we need a human revolution. We can't stay in an industrial revolution mindset for much longer because it's killing us. 21% of people in the workplace are engaged. Think about that. That's where people, and that's a 11 year consistent stat by Gallup globally across, I don't know how many countries, 40 countries. But it's been one of the most consistent statistics. That means that 79% are unengaged and within that, 19% are actively, negatively disengaged. So that's the basketball team you wanna play against. They don't have a hope of solving big problems. We can't afford it. Those are the places that humans spend more than half of their working lives and they're disengaged, 21%.
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We're wasting human potential in such a massive level that we're never gonna be able to tackle the big problems in our society and our world and our corporation and our team.
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Unless we really tackle though, what's at the core of that. And that's what my book is about, the architecture of potential is there's some things we can do.
So you talked about the Gallup poll. 21% of people are not engaged, disengaged.
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21% are engaged.
Oh, engaged, sorry. 79% yeah.
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Sorry, I misspoke there.
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Is that essentially across the board? Like are there any examples of companies or organizations that have developed kind of outside of that industrial kind of mindset? I'm thinking maybe something like companies that involved in AI or high tech that they work on things that require a lot of human potential and brainpower to move things forward. Are there any examples of people who are organizations that are kind of doing it, right?
(...) Yeah, there are. And there's some interesting experiments going on. And those experiments are revealing some ways of working differently. But you think that high tech companies are gonna be the ones to do it, the new startups, but they're not. It's not ping pong tables and foosball. It's meaning and purpose and it's respect. And it's allowing the system to give, to allow you to have the freedom to be human. One of the questions we talked about the other day was, why are you hiring humans?(...) And that's not a rhetorical question. It's a real question that has to be asked and answered.
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And the reason it does is because there's alternatives now. Why not just hire an AI? So if you're not hiring AI, which does some things incredibly well, then you need to know why you're hiring a human. And if you're hiring a human, you need then to create an environment where humans thrive.(...) And we know that as organizations, organizations increase in numbers and as cities increase in numbers to scale,(...) cities increase product, individual productivity.(...) And the bigger it gets, the more individual productivity goes up. In the organization, it's the opposite. As they scale, organizational productivity goes down. And I have some theories about that that are backed up by our simulations.(...) But if I wanna start a business with you,(...) I can just call you up and say, "Why don't we start the business?" And you'd say, "Hey, Don, no, not interested, fine, but I can do it." But if I wanna take an initiative inside any organization today, it's very, very difficult. Unless that's very specifically defined in my job description. Humans like to solve problems. They want to solve problems. They want to take initiatives.
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But most organizations aren't. So talking about the organizations that are doing well, it's usually the big mammoth companies are losing market share to the smaller, it's all relative, but $100 million companies instead of the behemoth companies. So the smaller ones are winning out, but it's not just being about small, it's being about having a different system,
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a different architecture that enables humans to use more of their human characteristics.
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Kind of going back to your LinkedIn page when you talked about the distributed immersive reality experience. That's one of the other things that kind of really piques my interest. And trying to understand what that actually means(...) and how corporations have been using it. I think you said that you have clients all over the globe.(...) Some of them are Fortune 500 companies.
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I like to get a better understanding of how you're conducting that. And I guess also how you're drawing information out of that and how your clients are drawing information out of that.
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Yeah, and maybe, I don't know if you can roll one of those videos now and I can talk to it.
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What you're gonna see is a simulation. We just ran an Amsterdam for one of the largest chip makers.
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They would describe it differently and more accurately. But one of the largest chip makers in the world out of Holland and a very successful company. And they flew their organization, they flew their people in from around the world to play beautiful hotel just outside Amsterdam. And we took 25 of their leaders and put them in something called Mission Possible.(...) Mission Possible, yup. And it's designed as a one and a half day immersive simulation. It's stressful, it's challenging, it's enjoyable, it's fun. But people are gonna go into it and they have to work. They're gonna be challenged to work inside. There's 25 people on their team. They're divided into hierarchies. And those hierarchies are like an organization, somewhat dysfunctional, somewhat isolated. They have a communication system that doesn't quite work all around the organization.(...) And they're set out to achieve a mission. In this case, it's a fictional mission. And this has been used by Microsoft High Performance Talent. It's been used by GE for thousands of leaders.(...) It's been used by Arizona Public Service to transform their company on behalf of the customer. So it's been used lots and lots of times. And they go into this simulation. And their first mission is to make sure that they stop the pink panthers from stealing the diamonds. And they have a 25 person SWAT team divided into five different functional areas that have to do that. So they're thrown into a very complex world. They know nothing about.
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And they have to master it and save these, and there's three hostages and there's three SWAT team members that go onto the ground, fly the helicopter down to the ground to save the day.(...) Now, they go into the alpha mission on the first morning of the day and a half program.(...) And inside that mission, they usually fail. They usually fail. And they're measured on, did you get any of your people stuck? No one dies, but are they stuck? Did your team members get stuck on the ground? Did any of the hostages get stuck with the pink panthers? Did you achieve the mission? How much time did it take?(...) And if you did achieve it, how much time? How many resources did you have to use to do that? So they're measured on all these metrics. So then we come out of that and we have an after action review. And we say, well, within that immersive, challenging, somewhat stressful simulation,
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how did you do? And what went right and what went wrong? And then we introduced, we put a layer of sort of a frame around it to take a look at that. And we examine it. They come up with some principles around the way that the organization got in their way, that they really couldn't do the job. We said, well, how about this? Why don't you present to us? So the second video we have is them actually presenting to us because we say tomorrow you've all afternoon to change the company.
So you see right here, they're having a team review. That's the president of the company. They've run into trouble. They're trying to get together and figure out how can we get through this? So people are deeply immersed in this simulation. They spend the whole first day in it. And then we ask them to make a presentation to us, which you'll see in the second video, where they spend all afternoon, sometimes they spend a lot of the evening to present to the board of directors saying,
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here's what we have to do tomorrow. And then we throw a curve at them saying, well, you're gonna have to figure out an organizational system in a way of being with each other, because you're gonna have half the resources tomorrow. You're gonna have half the people and you're gonna have an even tougher mission to accomplish. So when they go into that second thing, they're gonna have to present to us what are the principles they see that will allow them to do so much more with less, less people, less resources, but achieve a tougher mission. And so they think about that, they analyze it. So this is where they're making their presentation to us. They go to a great extent to think through how this works. We kind of, the board of directors approves it, might push them a little bit for more details or metrics and all that kind of stuff. But then they go in, they rearrange the organization. Now there's two teams competing against each other on time, metrics, all that stuff. And they blow away what they did the second, the day before with less resources.
so that gives you a sense. So they really dive deep in there. And then we come out of the second beta run, the alpha run, the beta run. And we say, well, what's the difference between those two? Because in the first instance, it's really like an industrial era,(...) modern day organization, which is where most organizations are today. The second time they throw, they think about those, they don't throw out all the rules, but they say, why are people being confined so much? How can we free them up to solve problems on an ongoing basis without us having to go six layers up and back? How can we allow people to solve problems right where they are? And one of the biggest metrics in here,(...) in the entire thing, one of the biggest lessons from all the behavioral patterns that we saw from 40,000 leaders, it's a leading indicator, is how much friction do you have between insight and impact? That is a huge tell. It's a leading indicator of how sick your system is in terms of its ability to respond quickly and flexibly to change, which every organization has to do right now. And so whether you're a janitor in the organization, whether you're a middle manager, whether you're the CEO, how fast from your insight to impact can you go? And oftentimes in organizations today, and that insight doesn't go anywhere other than your head because no one wants to hear it. So we're really a long way from where we have to be to free up people's potential. But if we do it, first if we believe it, that it's possible, and then if we commit to it,
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we can do some incredible things. And I think we're just on the cusp of that human revolution, but we need more examples and we need more people to believe. That's why I'm writing this book. That's why I'm on this path.
(...) So who's, I mean, you mentioned already, who's participating in this? Is it the senior executives? Is it the kind of middle management?
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And I think you said they report to board of directors as actually the board of directors?
(...) No, and that's the simulated board of directors. But mostly for us and our 30-year careers mostly been spent with middle and upper middle management. So just under the executive level and their teams. So oftentimes we'll look with middle levels and their teams. And so it's mostly in that bandwidth that we've worked for 30 years. And I think it's the most misunderstood
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and most important role in organizations today. And Roger Martin writes a lot about this and he writes exceptionally well about it. That we need to get more of our resources down through the middle into the frontline because strategy, capital I, capital S is execution.
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And we really misunderstand how much thinking has to be done at every level of the organization. It isn't simply by the brain trust at the top.(...) And we need to get the entire organization involved. And you can tell with a 21% engagement level,
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that's just not gonna happen. But that engagement level isn't gonna change because of workshops. It's gonna change because people decide they're gonna change not only the culture, but the systems that are in place and the way we define the roles in organizations.
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I think that you kind of, you referred to kind of middle management maybe as being a bit of an untapped resource.
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And some of that might be self-imposed
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but kind of working there with the senior leadership,
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how are you getting them to shift(...) to sort of open those doors for that freer thinking, higher potential coming out of everybody right down from the lowest level of the company?
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Well, you know, one of my friends that I've worked with for many years, a wonderful guy named Ron Christian,(...) used to say, "You know, Don,
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"we're not trying to fix these people. "They're already successful. "They're doing just fine."
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And one of the roles inside organizations that is most picked on is middle management. Is middle management. And I'm gonna challenge one of the norms in our industry that everybody believes. Everybody in our industry has stated it, not everybody, but pretty much everybody. I don't believe it. It's that when people leave organizations,
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they say the number one, or no, top three, one of the top three reasons that they're leaving is their manager.
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That's consistent.(...) I've read the raw data. It does say that. So then why would I say if the raw data says that, that I don't believe it and I don't? So here was my first clue, Manir.
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I've worked with this, the middle management group for over three decades. I know I don't know them personally. I'm not working with them. They could change their behavior when they're in our training programs. But for the most part, they're an incredibly talented, hardworking, sincere group of people trying to do a great job, mostly. From my observation over three decades, working pretty closely with that group.
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So then why do people say that, I'm leaving because of my manager. And if that was true, why haven't we solved it long ago? Because you can get rid of managers. You can put new managers in there, it hasn't solved it. The people who were complaining about it became managers, it hasn't solved it.
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So what's the problem? Well, here's the problem.
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Let's picture that we're living in a poor community.
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And we run into a, say a 16 year old girl and say, "Hey, Sherry, what's up?" And she says, "I'm leaving home." You know, Sherry, you're leaving home, what's wrong? She goes, "Well, my mom is a blank, fill in the blank."(...) She says, "She's terrible. She never does anything with us. She's never around. She's the worst mom. We never do anything together."(...) All of this, you go, "That's really bad, Sherry.
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What does she do in the evening?" I don't know where she goes. She comes home from work, then she goes out. I don't see her. What about the weekends? It's the same, she's never around.(...) Well, where do you think she's going in the evenings? Oh, I know where, I sort of know where she's going. I just don't know where it is. It's her second job. Where does she go on the weekend? Oh, she works part time on the weekends as well.(...) Okay, well, what about your dad, Sherry? Where's your dad? Oh, my dad left when I was two years old. I've never known him.(...) So Sherry, have you ever been out of a home, homeless? No, no, mom, we've always had a home. How about food on the table? No, we have food on the table. Okay, but your mom is a terrible mom. She never does anything with me. Okay, so you're leaving home, statistic would say, because your mom's a terrible mom.(...) Well, I think if they hired someone like me in the human services area, let's say, to go in and train that mom to be another mom, I hope she would push me out of the house, push someone like me out of the house, and say, "Get out of my home," because she doesn't deserve someone to fix her. She deserves someone to say,
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help her put her feet up,(...) and wash her feet, massage her feet, and thank her for supporting her 16-year-old so well all that time by having three jobs.(...) Now, I think that's what's happening to managers.(...) We save managers, they're leaving because of their managers. Well, their managers are being crunched in a system that doesn't work.(...) And when you get promoted to that manager after you complete that managerial job, after you complained about them all that time, the statistics don't change about how many people leave their managers. So we blame it on the managers, but truly it's the systems that are dysfunctional. Of course, those managers can improve.(...) But until we really come to grips with, we've got to look at the systems that change people, and they're like I started this conversation with, they're never neutral, and for the most part today, they're actually constraining people's potential. They're not amplifying it.
(...) Yeah, I know it goes back to the idea of design or architecture, that you've got to design in an environment that is, I guess, more nurturing,
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and to kind of bring out that human potential. I've been in organizations where middle management, it's one of the worst,
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it's one of these places you strive to be, but once you get there, you realize you're actually sandwiched between executive leadership and your staff.
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And often a lot of stuff kind of falls on your shoulders. And I think from both sides, there's a bit of understanding in terms of empathy and understanding what position people are put in and how they can react to things and how they have the ability to react to things. But I think what you're saying here is that, it's that ability to react to things kind of using your own intuition and your own insight to move things forward.
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I've also been in organizations where it's all about, what's the term, like shit flows downhill. Anything goes around, it goes all the way down to the bottom, to the person literally on the floor
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who kind of put the widget together type thing. It's like, well, why did you do it that way? And as I said, it's a system
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that's been designed over time. And one of our previous guests, Brad Sugars, I think he was episode four.
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One of the things he says,(...) "The biggest roadblock to success of your company or corporation is the mindset that that's the way we've always done it. Or that's the way things have always been done." Another thing that he often says is that,(...) a failure of managers and leaders is to say,(...) my door is always open.(...) Meaning that if you have an issue, you come to me, I'll solve it. As opposed to my door shut,
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figure it out for yourself, not figure out for yourself, but help them kind of work through the problem themselves, give them a little bit more potential.
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And I think there's authors like, I think Marshall Goldsmith who talk a lot about that
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in terms of developing potential in the people that you work with.
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Maybe you wanna go back to the simulations that you do and the work you do with clients. Give me a little bit of a story around somebody who's been through it. And then there is this aha or this light going off in their head and they're able to shift things. So like, people listening to this may not be able to understand that or conceptually they can understand, but don't know how it's happening. So can you maybe--
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Yeah.
Yeah, and first of all, absolutely. So that's, turning that light bulb on is why we're in experiential learning. We want people to learn from their experience, not from the guru on the stage. I mean, I like my ideas, I don't mind sharing them, but I actually don't want anybody to buy them. I want them to test them and I want them to challenge them. So I'll give you a great example, a very successful turnaround.
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So when we designed Mission Possible, it was actually called Tyranny of Numbers. And it was designed for a public service, Arizona Public Service that ran a nuclear power facility in Palo Verde,
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anyway, in Arizona.
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And they ran that, they were the second worst public utility in the United States.(...) The first worst Florida public utility went bankrupt. So they became de facto the worst.
See, they're ranked. They, yeah. They're ranked at the bottom. So back to your sailing experience.
There you go, yes. That's about where I would be if I was put in a boat, by the way. And I would love to be in a boat as long as someone else was sailing it. But they hired a company, Henry Champie's company, who years ago wrote the book, "Reengineering the Corporation."
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Very popular, bestseller. And then they hired our company to team up with them to create the experiential part of that transformation for their company.
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Great opportunity.(...) And so we went in there to design the simulation and they put most of the organization through it. And there's thousands of people. I'm not sure how many went through it. But what Henry Champie's company said is what the simulation did for them. And I've never forgotten what they described. They said, "What you did, Don, and your team did "is you laid down the cultural tracks "for the strategy to run out on." So inside the experience, they experienced, he said, "You brought them six months "into the transformation." So rather than talking about where you're going, the simulation actually put you there. Like we just talked about that simulation now, the Alpha and the Beta run. You went from the Alpha run, which was current state, which has really anchored in the past, to creating your own future state and then living within it and feeling and seeing the difference, both culturally and from an architectural perspective. What's the difference? So we did that at Arizona Public Service. They became the number one company in Arizona, not just public service, but the number one company. Now, am I saying experience it was the reason? No, we're not the reason. But we were a significant part of that transformation(...) with that organization. And we were the experiential part that, as Champie's company said, brought them into the future. And that's why we designed simulations to help you get past that resistance piece and live within it and look around and say, "Well, this doesn't work for me." And just say that. And then with your colleagues and with our team say, "Well, what's getting in the way? Let's solve that together." We don't go in with a series of precepts that you have to buy. For instance, when this book is published, if someone asks our company to come out and say, "Train us in those big seven lessons from the patterns of behavior of 40,000 executives over time, like reduce the friction from insight to impact, redefine roles in a human way that we talked about above the line and below the line in a way that we don't do today." We have a number of these things that we deeply believe in. But if someone came in and said, "Don, come into our company and do a train the trainer for our HR staff and our teams on those seven principles that come out of your book," I'd say, "That's not what I'm going to do. I'm not going to do that." And they would, "What would you do?" I'd say, "I'll go into any company that is coming into this to challenge my principles,
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to think for themselves."
(...)
Because there is no formula. I believe in our principles. I spent 30 years developing these things. I care deeply about them. But if you just buy them and blindly implement them, you're doing exactly what the Industrial Revolution asked you to do.
(...)
I mean, I respect my ideas. I respect other people's ideas. So respect the ideas. But I would love people to challenge them and say, "Hey, Don, I like these five," or, "We like these five, but we don't believe these two fit our organization." So how can we adjust those and together find a way for them to do that? Now, that doesn't mean that their new seven are the ones I would take on for some other organization. It doesn't mean that at all. It means for them.
(...)
That's the way they should do it. But that would be the wrong thing to say, "Oh, well, now I'm going to sell those seven." That's not what it's about. Here's the seven that I've researched, done a lot of work in. But unless you're willing to challenge those, I'm not willing to work with the organization. I'm not young and I don't have to make a living, you know, and put my kids through school and all that. I just want to work with people that really want to think and apply and make something true happen for their organization. And that's why I really love this stage of my career and my life, is that I can do that. And so let's do this well, let's do it together, and let's do it for the sake of humanity. Because all the research says(...) that it's not just about organizations where we're wasting potential, it's also in education and it's also in society. So the book is about all of those things. Mm-hmm.
(...)
You know, I think, you talked a little bit about aha moments and sometimes, you know, organizations don't see that aha moments, aha moment until they see somebody else fail.
(...)
So, you know, I'm just wondering if you have any examples of companies, you don't necessarily have to name any names that have kind of spiraled down and didn't come,
(...)
didn't kind of tap into their entire potential. And because of that, you started talking a little bit about the company that you'd worked with, but do you have any examples?
(...)
I do, unfortunately, and big ones and big mistakes. But there's some consistent patterns where these mistakes have happened.
(...)
And they're billion dollar mistakes with some of our companies.
(...)
So we worked with one very successful company, I'm not gonna name it right now, it'll be in the book,
(...)
but they went into a technology transformation, as many companies do. And they went in from my perspective and in retrospect,
(...)
with the idea that technology was gonna drive the future of their organization. So they hired a lot of outside experts,
(...)
very experienced, very credible people to transform the technological infrastructure(...) and literally spent over a billion dollars on that technological infrastructure.(...) Three years later, after many, many, much, much more resources to try to fix that billion dollar investment, they scrapped it all,(...) all of it. And what did they do wrong? A very, very basic thing. They underestimated their employees.(...) They hired amazing outside experts, nothing wrong with outside expert at all.
(...)
But unless you're really taking advantage of the knowledge in your organization and realize how much your employees, they know what they need, they know how the systems work. If you get too many people outside your organization
(...)
implementing a technological transformation,(...) there's no way talking amongst themselves, they can get it right. And so, I mean, there's a lot of examples that aren't a billion dollar bubble that just gets burst, but I've seen a couple that are, and it's consistently by underestimating the people that you already have inside your organization.
(...)
And allowing them outside of their role, their small role, doesn't matter how big the role is, but within a very narrow box,
(...)
to think about how can they make a difference? And yes, you some outside experts working with you, but reporting to you, not the other way around.(...) Well, and so yes, I've seen a number of things. You know, I did a talk called "Going Human in a Digital World" in some conferences.(...) And I said, "What's one of the number one things?" It would be slightly changed nowadays. But I said, "The number one thing you don't wanna hear in your organization is that, you know, we're doing a technological transformation."
(...)
You know, what you do wanna hear is we're doubling down on humans
(...)
and we're leveraging technology after that. But to say that we're, you know, going digital, we're going digital, we're going digital. Well, you've never gone human. You really haven't, you haven't. You, oh, yes, you've spent money on leadership development and good, that's fine, it's important, wonderful. But you've stopped there. You haven't said, "Well, how do the systems work for humans?" Oh, no, don't worry about that. We'll figure that out. We'll just add up the job descriptions. And as you and I talked about before,(...) when was the last time people looked at their job descriptions? Like never, they're fiction. As soon as you're hired, they become fiction. Well, we need to redefine the way we define job descriptions. And in my keynotes, I talk about above the line and below the line. Below the line are things that are standardized in your job descriptions that are measurable.(...) Things that you're hired to do that are measurable. Well, anything that's standardized and measurable is perfect for AI, okay? So if you're hiring a human and you're just giving them the things that are below the line, that are standardized, that human's not gonna be there very long. So if you're hiring a human, not a rhetorical question, hire them for the things that they bring above the line that AI doesn't come close to.(...) And that's things like ethics.(...) That's things like ability to make connections and build strong connections that last. Ability to change those connections.
(...)
Initiative, creativity,(...) awe and wonder. These aren't trivial things. They're not flaws in our human system. They're part of our evolutionary survival mechanism that has allowed us to be the most adapted creature in the known universe. And I like to keep saying, as I've said to you, that the most evolved, complex intelligence system in the entire known universe is your children or your children and you and me and anybody listening to this. And we forget that. We take each other for granted. We go out and hire tech experts when we've got the most amazing creatures inside our organization today that never get the chance to show their brilliance so you don't pick them when the big opportunity comes up because you've already locked them in a box and hire someone that's not locked in the same box. Well,(...) we're wasting potential and we can't afford to. When the, I think the biggest opportunity of our time, I believe the biggest opportunity of our time is to unlock human potential in the ways we lead, learn and live. So at work, in the education space and in society. And that's what my keynotes are about. That's what I care deeply about. That's what I'll prophesize for the next 10 years of my career.
(...)
Yeah, I think it sounds like something that used to be, as you said, as we live and learn, we said live, learn.
(...)
It's where you lead, learn and live. Where you lead, learn and live, yep.
(...) Yeah, I know, I think this is the kind of ideas that need to start while children are young, even before they get to school, the parents are untapping that potential in them. But you send them off to school and they become somebody else's problem trying to rein them in while they're trying to explore their potential.
(...)
You talked a little bit about this in terms of, my last guest was, we talked to an expert on AI governance. So now we're talking about human,(...) more like human governance in this changing world where AI is coming in. You've kind of touched on that a bit more, but like,
(...)
how do you see us pushing that requirement? When, as you said, AI is soon taking over a lot of stuff.
(...)
Well, you know, the easiest way for anybody to get money in an organization from their board or from investors is to say they're going AI. If you say, oh, I'm doubling down on our human capital, they say, well, that's boring. We've done that for a hundred years. No, you haven't. But the only way to optimize AI, and the only AI will become, I mean, it's everybody will have access to AI.(...) So that's not a differentiator. It's how you use AI that is the differentiator for your customers, for your strategy, for your vision, for your mission. And that takes human intelligence, but it doesn't take 21% of your workforce to be engaged. It takes every person in your workforce to be fully engaged, leveraging AI, leveraging their relationships with each other and going forward to create a future.(...) And if you're not doubling down on those carbon-based units,
(...)
you're really abandoning the ship. You know, you've been hired to keep the fire going all night and you fell asleep. And we've been asleep at the wheel of human governance for a long time. And I think the problem is, you know, HR has been saying for a long time, we want to seat at the table,(...) but it's not enough to have the seat at the table. You need a different voice. It isn't about more training and it isn't about more benefits.(...) It's about fundamentally changing the cage in which we put humans in, changing the systems, the structures that we allow humans to express themselves.
(...)
And HR hasn't stepped up to that role yet. They haven't, they'd said, "Oh no, that's the operational side. We don't tackle that." Well, you need to tackle that. That's like, you know, you need to tackle it in partnership with the organization.
(...)
We kind of talked a bit in our pre-interview, our pre-discussion on this was about, you know,
(...)
governance isn't necessarily your background(...) or corporate governance, but I think given the work you do, you have an understanding of, you know, leadership from the top. And so, and even in your simulation, you use a board of directors. So what role do you see a board of directors having kind of at a corporate level in pushing this agenda?
(...)
And then kind of also on the flip side of that is, you know, what is required on an individual level for a board member to kind of be going, getting involved in that type of organization?
(...)
Well, you know, the first thing they need is a vision.
(...)
I mean, it's not good enough to say, I have governance over this organization.
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Towards what end?
(...)
Towards what end? Is it truly, do they truly have a vision for the future of this organization?
(...)
And if that few, if their vision for the future doesn't include at its core,
(...)
deeply enabled human creatures,
(...)
they've abandoned the future. They're just paddling upstream. They're living in the past.
(...)
It's not AI.
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AI is going to not, AI is important. I believe it will solve all kinds of cancers. It's going to do a lot of great things. Of course, it's dangerous as well, but it will do all kinds of great things and it's not going to stop.(...) But unless we have really enabled engaged humans at the wheel,
(...)
then what is your governance doing? Are you really doing anything by saying, we're going to invest $500 million in AI? And what about the way you are enabling your humans? Oh, no, no, no, we're doing just fine there. Well, no, you're not. No, you're not.(...) And for the few examples that can say we get optimal human performance out of our talent,(...) great. Oh, I want to hear from them. I'll write them up in the book, wonderful.(...) But for the most part, the numbers don't lie. They've been around for a long time. We've kept people constrained as a way of controlling rather than enabling.
(...)
And we've done that out of, I think a lack of vision for what the true human potential is, what the capability of that is. And I think I mentioned to you, Beau, I did mention to you about Marissa, my vision for the future. So this is about,
(...)
we're so for, who is ever listening,(...) I like using visuals to motivate me. I'm on a quest, a 10 year quest that is gonna be a huge amount of work. And I keep this visual in mind to just keep me going because I love it, I love this space.
(...)
But I also care deeply about why I'm in this space. And Marissa is my visual example of that. And Marissa is a little brown baby girl. She's sitting on a pink blanket and she barely can hold her head up because she's just been born. And she's been born into a poor neighborhood in the US. I have more stats on the US than I do any other country. So she's born in a poor neighborhood in the US. And she's on the cover of Time Magazine. There she is, Marissa, beautiful little girl.
(...)
And why do I want that to happen?
(...)
Well, I wanna shame Time Magazine into putting her on the cover because do you know how many covers of that magazine have been dedicated to tech founders and tech equipment? 78 covers by my counting, it could be off, but that's the number I've counted. Do you know how many times they've celebrated the birth of a baby on Time Magazine?
(...)
Zero. The most evolved complex intelligence system in the known universe. And if the tech people could replicate what's in Marissa's mind and body and spirit, if they could replicate that, they'd get a trillion dollars thrown at them tomorrow morning, but they can't, they can't. And then I wanna put her on the cover and why? I don't want it to be a real baby because it would be too much pressure on some girl to grow up like this.(...) But I wanted her to represent all of us, not just babies, but all of us, people as old as I am, everybody.
(...)
But the reason I want us to do that is because then we as a society have to say, what's the architecture in that poor neighborhood that Marissa runs into to maximize her potential when she's three,(...) when she's six, when she turns 13, when she turns 18, 24, 35, 45, 65. What's the architecture of her potential? Is it amplifying Marissa or is it suppressing her? Well, we know if she's born into,(...) where she's born into, that she has a very small chance of getting, even getting an undergraduate degree.
(...)
Do we really believe that's because of her innate potential? Well, of course it's not. We know that brilliance is absolutely, there is no superficial divide around men, women, rich, poor, ethnicities, religions, cultures. There's brilliance down there at that level everywhere. And we simply can't afford to waste Marissa's. If we're gonna solve the break problem, we need Marissa and Jose and Bill and Mary, and we need them all to contribute their unique brilliance, whatever that is. And until we do that,(...) we're never going to solve the big problems that we need to solve in this world, whether they're organizational, we gotta create the architecture for Marissa. We have to hold ourselves accountable to that and say, my gosh, let's celebrate that gal and let's give her the best architecture. And I've always said, I don't know one great country in the world in here. And I live in Canada, I'm proud of Canada. I'm very proud of Canada. I love to live here. Do I consider ourselves a great country for any country great? I don't. And when I hear some countries say we're a great country, whoever they are, I just don't buy it. Because here's how I define a great country. And it doesn't have to be anybody else's definition. But until you take care of your most vulnerable at a very high level, whether they're old people, young babies, born into poverty, with disabilities, whatever, until you take care of your most vulnerable in society, you're not a great country. Not a great country. You can be a rich country, you can be a powerful country. But to me, you're not a great country. If you could let your grandmother and grandfather not do well, or someone else's grandfather not do well, if you can let some kid like Marissa suffer on the vine in poverty, you're not a great country. Forget it. Don't talk to me like that. Because I'm not interested. You could be a powerful country. I can respect lots of things you do, but you're not great. And neither are we. We've got a long way to go in Canada. We're working at it. So, you know, I don't think anybody's doing as good a job as we need to, but we can't afford to let those go. And think of the opposite, Manir. Think of AI doing exceptionally well. And by the way, AI doesn't flourish on its own. It needs $500 billion at a shot to grow. And then we go, well, oh, but Marissa, she can take care of herself, right?(...) No, she needs investment too. So picture AI growing and doing amazing and us having really dwarfed human beings, stunted human beings because we haven't invested in them. Well, then who's running the show? Who's making those connections? Who has the empathy and who has the vision, who can adapt, who sees the context? Those are humans. If we're dwarfing them or stopping them, their growth,
(...)
then the world is in big trouble. But the opposite,(...) by developing them, we can have a more productive, more humane,
(...)
blossoming planet that will make the industrial revolution look this big compared to the productivity gains. So that's my 10-year goal. That's what I talk about when I'm out speaking about this. And that's what I care deeply about. And I wanna enlist you and other people eventually to sign my petition to shame Time Magazine into putting the most evolved complex system in the known universe, Marissa, on their cover for once.
(...)
I can tell, it's obvious how passionate you are about this and how it gets your blood flowing.
(...)
And I'm kind of, I'm cognizant of our time here too. So I just wanna kind of say like, for our listeners out there, whether they sit on a board, they're executives(...) or they're kind of middle management,
(...)
is there kind of a call, like a one call to action that you can suggest for them kind of tapping into this human potential?
(...)
That's a good question.
(...)
I think what's happening to humanity right now, Minear, is I think we're losing confidence in ourself.
(...)
I believe it, I believe it. I think we see the marvelous, amazing strides that AI is making. And we're kind of looking in the mirror as humanity and going, well, gee, I know how dumb I am sometimes. I forget my keys all the time. If you ask me why is phone number? And I think, oh gosh, I've been just pushing the button.(...) So we know all our flaws, we've been around us. And I'm not saying humanity's always great. We know my God, how horrible humanity can be to other humans. But what I am saying is that I think we've lost confidence in our basic, brilliant and good nature. There's a wonderful book called "Human Kind"
(...)
that I recommend everybody read. And it's about that the history has got it wrong.(...) We're not inherently selfish. We're not inherently bad. We're actually inherently good. Most of our neighbors, your neighbors, my neighbors are good people. That's true for most people in the world. It's just when we think about them as others and someone away, they're evil. They're evil or they're, no, they're not. For the most part, they're not. And so I think the one thing I'd say to people is don't lose confidence in humans. Double down, believe. If you don't believe in humans, if you don't believe the future needs to be human driven,
(...)
you're not gonna be successful. I mean, you may make a lot of money in the short term, but you're not gonna be successful. And neither is our planet. So double down on humans, believe it. And then think about both, yes, individual will, but think about the architecture and being willing to challenge it in a significant way.
(...)
Oh, thank you for that point.(...) And I'd like to end with asking you, where can people find out more about you? Where can our listeners find out more about you? I know that you have a TED Talk coming up. So why don't you let us know?
Yep, absolutely.
(...)
I'll give you some links, but experienceit.com is the name of our website. You could always connect with me and us through there. My author website is being designed right now, and that's where a picture of Marissa's going up. Say sign the petition to get to "Shame Time Magazine" into putting the most evolved complex intelligence system in the known universe finally on their cover.
(...)
So I'll send you those links, but I'll experienceit.com is the easiest way right now. Easy to remember, experienceit.com.
Okay, sounds good. Well, I'm gonna have to thank Phil for making this introduction. It's been a great conversation.
(...)
I said I knew from our pre-interviewer, pre-discussion that this would flow quite nicely. And I think there's a lot of things that even in my
(...)
kind of questions that I thought of coming to this, we couldn't get to.
(...)
So once again, I'd like to thank you for kind of making the time to join us from the East Coast there,(...) and thanks once again.
(...)
Thank you, Manir, and thanks for all your organization and behind the scenes people as well. So I appreciate it, thank you so much.
(...)
Thank you.(...) Okay, bye for now. And then now we kind of re-roll.