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Welcome to "Visionary Voices" the podcast where we dive into the minds of business owners, founders, executives, and everyone in between.
Each episode brings you face-to-face with the leading lights of industry and innovation.
Join us as we uncover the stories behind the success and the lessons learned along the way.
Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or just starting your business journey, these are the conversations you need to hear - packed with visionary voices and insights.
Let's begin.
So welcome to the visionary voices podcast.
Thank you so much for being here.
Could you give us a top level view about what it is that you're working on right now and
your journey so far?
Yeah, well, fantastic to be here.
My name is Griff Krenbrink.
uh I am the chief commercial officer of a company called Thotium, which is a really uh
loud and boisterous title to say that I look after our customer-facing team of our
organization.
ah We predominantly work in the world of development experiences.
So whether it's helping individuals build skills, whether it's
helping teams build vision or whether it's helping organizations build strategy.
We kind of do that all through the lens of high fidelity, what we call human centered
experiences.
I've been doing this type of work for the better part of 12 years, which is weird to say
out loud.
It's been quite a long period of time.
I'm happy to go through some of those years with you live here.
But I didn't start my career here.
I actually started my career in finance.
quickly found out that my passion was not so much in the world of moving money around.
Not to say that's all finance does, uh I just kind of, uh an itch I've always really had
is to help people achieve big things, kind of see more possibility both for themselves as
individuals and as part of groups, whether that be organizations or companies.
And uh that's what we aim to do with Audient.
We aim to help people.
see, dream, and do better.
Amazing.
I I resonate with the journey massively, right?
Because I also got into the world of finance and numbers at the very start and realized
very quickly that it's just not for me at all.
So, I mean, I'd love to go back to the start then.
So obviously you were kind of working in finance and you transitioned out of there.
So what did you go and do after finance itself?
Was it straight into like the kind of, you know, leadership development side of things
straight away or what did you kind of do in that interim period?
great question.
well, so I also, my mind works in milestones and stories, which I think a lot of our minds
do.
But I vividly remember, I'm gonna share this story with you in the past, but I vividly
remember the first inklings I had of being in the role I was in in the world of finance
and not feeling like something I was really felt called to do.
I had, being a young whippersnapper, so to speak, in your career,
tend to develop a little bit of insecurity when you feel that way because you're like,
should feel good about this.
This is a high paying job.
This is, you know, I'm privileged.
I should be grateful for this, but there's something off.
And I worked up the courage, I mustered the courage to go into my boss's office at the
time.
And what I thought was gonna be a little bit of a tongue lashing for me to just be
appreciative of what I had.
was more a conversation around where my feelings and my thoughts and passions were coming
from.
And I remember it being such a eye-opening conversation of what leadership, even in an
organization, can look like.
ah It doesn't have to just be telling people to get with the program.
It can be helping people see things bigger for them, both within that organization and
more broadly.
And so I didn't know it at the time, but...
That became sort what I wanted my career longer term to be was helping more people be that
for others, if that makes sense.
My path from finance didn't directly go to that.
I don't think many people would look to 23, 24 year olds for leadership wisdom too often
these days, although maybe they should.
There's a lot to learn from people of different ages and walks of life, but I actually did
a little bit of a detour.
I was working in internal strategy for the same bank.
um I did kind of work around implementing strategic initiatives, new sales models for our
commercial team, operational efficiency gigs, et cetera, market research.
uh And uh while I found that work to be very interesting intellectually, the gap that I
always, bar none, saw was that uh the effect or the impact of those initiatives rarely was
related to the...
the quality of the idea, but rather the amount of investment put into helping the
organization metabolize whatever it was trying to eat.
And that metabolism being how do you help people go and do the thing that you say they
should.
And if there's anything we know that's true about the world of behavior change is that
behavior change is a uniquely individual journey.
We can say and tell people to do things, but the reality is like only you or I can change
the things we do over time.
Now we can like create incentive and we can put carrot and sticks out there and all that
can start to sway and persuade behavior, but it takes you to go and do something
different, right?
What I just saw on my world of strategy consulting was in being internal in the world of
strategy was just like there wasn't ah a realization of just how hard that is to.
how hard it is change behavior.
And I say this to our team kind of kitschily at times at Thaudium, which is like, you're
in some of the hardest work that exists in the world.
Like you might not be a rocket scientist, you might not be uh exploring how to get to
Mars, but you're in the world of behavior change.
And if the statistics tell us anything, it's like, that's one of the hardest things to do
in the world is to convince someone to do something different.
ah And so like in being in that internal strategy where I just, what I became infatuated
with was.
how to help organizations help their people do what they needed them to do to drive, to
drive strategy.
And that's not to say that strategy's not important, it's not to say that you don't need
to have really good, clear direction, but how much time and effort and uh resources put
behind helping people make that a reality.
So that's kind where I wanted to then go and jump in, and I found a company, and I worked
for a number of years in an organization that was sort of in the space of what they called
making strategy personal, which if you peel back the layers of that purpose, the whole
concept of that organization was how do we help people see their part in the puzzle and
then go and do something about it.
And what that looked, yeah.
a more of a mission, right?
Like, cause I think that's the biggest thing that I found when I worked in a, in a big
corporation was, know, your work, you don't see really the output of your work.
You don't see the change it has.
And so you can't really get bought into the mission of it either.
Um, and so I like, I feel like that's the biggest, you know, it's in big organizations.
It's definitely the biggest thing, especially my friends, right?
A lot of my friends work in like the banks and things like that as well.
And they find the same thing where they kind of move papers around, but they don't
actually see the, any type of impacts of that.
And so it's really hard to get on board and get into the mission of it if you don't see
that.
And I think from motivation, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think, you know, it's a good call out.
But to me, it's not an either or, right?
I think you need to be able to see or feel part of the mission.
But part of that is do you feel like you had any say in what that mission is?
And it's not to say that everyone in your organization needs to be picking up the pen to
doctor your strategy, but you should be bringing people in at every level of your
organization to understand.
ah how they can help craft their part of that mission.
And I think the analogy here is somewhat akin to having a mission to go to space, which is
like you can make the JFK-like speech, which is like, by the end of this decade, we will
have a man on Mars.
But if you don't start to put the investments in helping people understand, you know, what
engine technology gets us there, or are you actually putting resource behind...
upskilling people to invest in the sciences that lead us there.
I mean, think that's kind of where you need to have the ambitious goal.
You need to make sure people feel like they are a part of that and are bought into it.
But then you also need to make sure you're making the necessary investments, human capital
investments, financial investments, time investments that show people that it's not just a
strategy with no execution.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
It's quite interesting.
I was having a conversation with, you know, someone else who has a business here in the UK
and we're talking about, how do we, how do we get our employees brought into the mission
of our businesses, right?
And the main thing that we came across was like, it's just visibility because I think it's
all well and good, like having a speech, right?
Saying, cool, this is the mission, this is what we're going to do.
But then if they can't accurately see where like their cog fits into the machine and like
the impact of it, then ultimately like there's, it's just not going to
it's not going to latch on, right?
They're not going to really be brought into it from just like just saying it.
And so what we've, you know, start to build out internally is, you know, how does this
department actually connect to the wider kind of goals and, and, you keepers that we set
or whatever that's going to be for the, for the wider company as well.
So they can clearly see kind of the inputs that they're doing on like the day-to-day
basis.
How does that like kind of add together?
into the end goal that we all have, that we're all bought into.
And so it's a really cool way of visualizing it.
And I think that's also the other thing that I've noticed when, you know, working with
companies, but also working like within companies as well, is that there's a lack of
visibility.
So they might say, you know, the beginning of the course are cool.
These are our goals for the course.
So we're to do this, this, this, but then, you know, after a couple of weeks, you don't
really see how your work is kind of tied into that.
So I think visibility is a huge one.
And because I think a lot of companies do...
you know, they do do goal setting, they do do all these things, but then it kind of just
drops off.
em And so yeah, for what I found out, think visibility is, yeah.
to your point, I mean, like, we have such good examples to pull from history of how, of
how, like, leaders, charismatic leaders do this.
Like, one of the things, we do a lot of work in this space around helping leaders, helping
organizations, not just create vision and create strategy, but then we call it, like, you
have to create it, then you have to cast it.
And the casting is when you get people bought in and you get them excited and you get them
enthusiastic.
But we don't take the lessons from really good charismatic leaders who show us the path to
do this.
The person who is the best at this, whether or not you like him, is not really important.
But Steve Jobs is the perfect example of someone who knew how to cast vision better than
anybody else.
I I oftentimes pull up the video of his introduction to the iPhone.
And, um, as one of the best examples ever of a casting of vision to a broader group.
And if you, I don't know if you're familiar with that, that, that launch of the iPhone,
but you think, you know, go back to 2007 when this is happening and like, if you, if you
think about all the challenges people were going through in their world of portable
technology, was like they had their walkman or they had their iPod and then they had their
cell phone and they had all these cords.
And it was like, they were walking around, they had to wear khaki shorts because of all
the, the,
Yeah
technology they're carrying.
so Steve Jobs, he's releasing the most powerful piece of portable technology that's ever
existed in the world, the iPhone.
And he could go on and on about the specs, or he could go on and on about the beauty of
the color, or could do whatever, right?
And instead he uses that speech, that product release, to be about creating three products
that exist in one.
And it was just about taking a phone, a music device, and an internet communication
device.
and that just being in one.
And that was how we sold the iPhone.
It wasn't like this beautiful piece of technology, it was about what it was going to allow
people to do, which was to take all your technology with you wherever you wanted to go.
And I think that's what I always ask leaders is like, are you taking the time to tell or
to cast your people the iPhone or what the iPhone allows them to do?
Because that's what they'll sign up for, is what the iPhone allows them to do.
They don't sign up for the iPhone, they sign up for the things that the iPhone
to do and I think that's the, maybe to put a bow on our conversation, it's like when
you're trying to get people to sign up to big things, putting it in the from-tos that
you're trying to help them actualize is always gonna be the way that you get people to
jump in and become followers.
Yeah, absolutely.
And when we talk about human behavior, right, which as we said is the hardest, one of the
hardest things to, to change, has to come from like emotion, right?
That's how you do it.
You get them bought in on an emotional level.
And it's the same in like sales, for example, in marketing, you can't just speak features
over someone because they're just going to get lost, lost in it.
And, know, that's such something that I used to do quite a lot because I'm, quite a
technical person.
So I love the details.
I love the technical specs.
And when I was trying to sell, you know, our services, was running down this spec list of
everything we're going to do.
And, people just got lost.
uh And I look back at some of the calls I did and you can just see on people's faces, like
it just isn't resonating at all.
uh So yeah, I think it's getting them bought in on that emotional level.
As you said, casting that vision uh is just so important.
I guess when it comes down to the companies you work with today, then like what are those
companies that like, you do work with a broad range of companies or how does that work?
Yeah, yeah, we've been really fortunate, ah both in my current, both in my time, you know,
helping to run Thodium as well as, you know, more broadly to have worked across industry,
across company size.
I've had the privilege of working alongside some of the largest, most notable
organizations in the world.
I've also had the esteemed privilege of working alongside high growth startups.
ah I've also had an amazing amount of opportunity to help nonprofit organizations and uh
what I find.
You know, I think there's a couple of schools of thought.
One is like find your customer niche and go hard in that niche.
I've taken a little bit of a different path, which is like, think I can bring
translational uh insights or reflections across very different uh customer or industry or
ah structural segmentations.
Because I think, and I this is maybe sounding a little cliche, but when it comes to
leadership and being a good leader, we learn everything we need to know about a time or 12
of what it takes to be a good leader.
You don't get new knowledge of what it takes to be a good leader, what you just get is new
situations.
And in my mind, giving people as diverse a perspective as possible what those situations
look like.
is the best way to understand how to contextualize creative leadership.
we've maybe to go back to answer your question is like, actually love being able to one
day work with one of the largest, uh, payment technology companies.
And then the next day, turn around and work with a college.
Uh, and then the next day I turn around and work with an energy company because
Again, some people might say, how are you ever going to build expertise in those different
industries?
And I would say the value I'm bringing is not knowing your industry.
The value I'm bringing is being able to contextualize leadership to your situation.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
And the thing with niches and ICPs, and this is actually something one of my friends told
me about, and this is completely, I'll bring it back and then connect all in a second.
But basically he's in web design, right?
And so, you know, people are saying, hey, you to niche down in an industry, you need to
niche down in a specific sector.
And what he did was he was like, well, no, my niche is gonna be the platform that we build
on.
And so he builds like Squarespace, for example, and he can then serve all industries that
want to build on that specific platform.
And it got me really thinking about ICPs and who want to serve and all these different
things.
And, you know, a lot of people say, hey, you need to raise focus into this one industry,
right?
And that's how they segment their ICPs.
Like this is the industry you need to go after.
But what I found is that there's well, there's commonalities across multiple different
industries.
And at certain levels that they've all got the same problem.
Right?
And so you can actually serve all industries because you're solving some specific problem
which resonates to them across all these industries itself.
in a sense of what you're saying, right, is all these different levels of leadership or
whatever that they all have in a way like the similar problems which you can tackle,
right?
And so, yeah, I just wanted to kind of bring that in because I think it's so interesting.
I mean, I love the way you frame that.
It's so funny.
know, it's part of what we do at Thaudium.
We get the opportunity to run a lot of leadership development programs for first-line
leaders, second-line leaders, executives, you know, different parts of the leadership
spectrum.
And all those different lines of leadership will have different, very, very different
challenges.
But what's funny is, you know, when you do these programs, one of the things that tends to
be a big takeaway.
It's like it feels good to know that I'm not alone and the challenges that I'm up against
because leadership in general is a lonely endeavor.
If you're leading a team, just by nature, it puts you on an island.
And this relates to our conversation more broadly, which is like when you're doing
leadership development programming, making sure you're making it a social endeavor, which
is allowing leaders to learn from one another.
alongside say a facilitator or a piece of content or whatever it may be because the
residual, in my estimation, actual bigger benefit of that is that people feel like they're
not alone.
And I'll bring that back to this conversation around like, niching and finding ICP and all
that.
Like there's a lot of good case to be made to razor sharp focus your business on a
particular industry or a type of persona.
And I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that, but.
There could be another school of thought which is like being able to have lived through at
a certain depth many different situations and contexts, which to us, we call ourselves a
human-centric business.
But to some people, like, what the heck does that mean?
And in our mind, it's like we just really want to get to know when we work with a company,
like, what are the human beings in your organization going through?
And then how do we then contextualize everything we'll build with you through the lens of
that experience?
And us being us doing that in like a company that's in your industry, like I don't
necessarily know how much more beneficial that is other than the fact that like we might
actually come in with too much bias, which is like, we saw this in a company that's very
much like you.
So we're just not going to go any deeper.
We're going to leave it at that because we know this we've seen it.
Whereas I think some, if you push yourself to continue to kind of expand in the ways and
the types of
problems you're solving across a wider set, you don't, at least in my opinion, you might
not fall as privy to confirmation bias.
Yeah, no, I think that's a great point.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but the other thing as well is you can take learnings from
different industries and apply it to others as well, right?
Different types of businesses and apply it.
And if you are just laser focused and one, then you kind of have, you kind of siloed right
into that one.
And as you said, right, you will have that bias then going into it as well.
So I think that's a really cool point for sure.
And then I guess with the business as well, from a business sense, in terms of business
growth, like what are you guys doing in that realm, right?
Because...
Of course, my background is marketing, so we love to dive into a little bit of that as
well.
So curious to know what's working for you, what you guys doing, and what's been a big
needle mover for yourself.
you know, think so we're a professional services business and I think if most professional
services businesses are honest, they get their start by word of mouth relationships,
network mining, those kind of things.
And, you know, we are very alike to other organizations who are similar to us or in
similar size where we grew a lot by.
making sure that we were reaching out to folks in our first, second, and third degrees to
show them the value that we could provide, ensuring that organizations who do sign up with
us know they have clear agency to introduce us to either other organizations or other
individuals who can benefit from the work we do.
ah We are now eight years into our company journey, which we're running into a little bit
of, I don't want to say the ceiling of that approach.
But definitely the recognition that if we're wanting to hit maybe a hyper scale moment,
there needs to be a bit more of a proactive focus put on things like external marketing,
more strategic business development type of initiatives.
And so we've been leaning more into that in the last 12 months where we've stood up
marketing campaigns.
We're trying to get a bit more provocative in our messaging and any social posts.
We're trying to get a lot more tangible about the out.
comes we're driving.
All we're trying to stay true to our ethos, which is this idea of human beings working
with other human beings to solve problems for human beings, which is the same human beings
a lot of times on purpose.
So I think we're very much in the throes right now of trying to figure out what's our mind
share generator?
Because we are not, I mean look, we're a 20 person.
professional services firm that like we've built a really good brand in our community, our
ah impact crater network, if you will.
What we're actively trying to figure out is like, how do we take the things that people
love about working with us, package up in a way that's like digestible for people who
don't know us from Joe Smith or Anna Smith on the street.
So all that to say is like what you're asking, we are in the throes of right now trying to
figure out.
ah
How do we, and I think this is maybe the age old, ah you know, small business or startup,
maybe more so small business.
I don't know about startups that haven't really been in that realm running a startup, but
for me the age old problem in the small business is like, how do you, how do you package
up what it feels like to work with your team and tell that as a story to people who don't
know it yet?
Because when they experience it, they totally get it.
But it's like, how do you make it interesting, digestible, and
visual enough or tangible enough ah to ensure that people can know what it feels like to
work with you.
the last thing I'll say on it is what's hard in being in the services world is you're
selling you.
You're selling your team.
You're selling your time.
You're selling the access to working with the folks that are on your uh organizational
chart.
And so the value you're bringing is in the third dimension, which is the actual execution.
So how do you frame that in a two-dimensional way so people can see the three-dimensional
impact?
A challenge we're dealing with every day.
Absolutely.
mean, this is like what the biggest, I guess the biggest challenge, a lot of the clients
that I work with as well, like that they face and we also face the same thing, right?
How do we package what is that we do?
Not in a technical way, but through stories and just trying to resonate on that level.
And it's all about like the messaging and the message market fit as well, right?
Like how do you kind of kind of marry those up depending on the persona that you're going
after.
And it definitely is, it definitely is a challenge.
I think the biggest thing that helped us was
creating essentially like mini soundboards essentially within the company.
So let's take for example, like your top five clients or whatever that could be is what we
did is we said to them, look, we're gonna drop in a call with you like for 15 minutes
every month or every two weeks and hear from them essentially like what's happening in
their industry, like what's going on and just understand that at a deeper level because a
lot of the things that we try and do from a marketing perspective is we're very reactive
to things.
So we'll see something on the news like,
something's happened, some laws have been passed, whatever, and then we use that in our
messaging.
But what we would know if we went to our clients first is that we'll get that before
essentially anyone else, right?
And then we can use actual client insights to tailor our messaging across the board.
And so that's what we've done on our side, right?
And it's allowed us to speak to our potential clients much, much better because we
understand from them, like themselves, what's actually going on in their industry and in
their field and their market.
Even if it's not specific to
the services that we have, but just understanding as like a whole, as a picture, like
what's going on in their industry.
That's been the biggest unlock for us, to be honest, because we really struggled for this
for a long time on how do we make podcasting.
Yeah, exactly.
How do we make podcasting?
How do we get someone to need a podcast?
It's kind of challenging to do that.
so creating those soundboards throughout the business at different levels as well.
So what we found is, you know, want...
Like a bit of a variety, especially if you have a variety in terms of a client base is
like, know, a pool of them, right?
Like different personas and then you can understand from them.
Yeah, you're bringing up, you're speaking into like a very tangible existence, something
that I got advice to do a while ago, but maybe you're giving me good impetus to go do it
more tactically was it's this concept of like, how do you use a board of advisors as a
problem solving um apparatus?
Not just like a lot of times we think of a board of advisors as like something that sits
over top of company and it's sort of like stewards the overarching direction, but
a good friend of mine brought this concept forward of using that board of advisors
approach to any big problem you're trying to solve.
So if you have a marketing problem, how can you put a board of advisors around that
marketing problem, which could be a subset of customers, it could be some folks on the
team, it could be even some external community members who you just want to get their say
in there, but it's like board of advising around problems, not just companies.
And I think what you're sharing is probably a tactical example of how you bring that to
life with the concept of the soundboard.
It sounds very similar.
Yeah, exactly that.
And the other thing that we found as well...
um
You know, if for example, putting a sound board together is something that works is from
like the meetings and calls that you have.
And again, this comes into kind of the next segment of our conversation, right?
It's like AI and automation, how we can use it.
Something that we found is from every call that we have with someone online is like, we
always take, you know, the call recording of that and then feed it into AI and then it
spits out some of the insights or challenges that people have had.
Because it's a conversation we're having anyway, right?
And so we might as well see what other value we can get off the back of it.
And it's always interesting what you find out, right?
What you uncover from those things.
week you get a list of ideas and potential angles based on real world conversations.
So there's some really cool things you can do now.
I mean, on your side as well, with automation and AI, how are you guys starting to imprint
this technology and what do you think is going to shift as well in your industry as well
with this technology?
start by saying what a interesting and anxious time.
think just in general around, mean, this is having not necessarily lived through like the
dot com revolution in the business world or obviously not seeing something like the
industrial revolution, but like this feels akin to, um, the potential there is to totally
revolutionize how we spend our time, which is just
I mean, obviously very exciting, but if there's anything true about the human experience,
it's that uncertainty is more painful than a negative certainty.
Like we'd rather get stung by a bee than think about a bee sting.
And I think we're probably in a little bit of that frame right now, which is like, there
are people who are running fast towards it.
There are people who are running against it.
I...
I try to fancy myself like a curiosity focused, like what can I learn from maybe folks who
are diving head first in and what are the folks who are kind of leaning out.
And I think there's a couple of interesting threats.
If you were to kind of like bring a couple of the schools of thought, and I'll bring this
back to our industry, but I think it's just good to kind of talk more broadly.
think it's absolutely clear that adding things like generative AI and other.
AI focused tools to the productivity suite of your team is going to, if done correctly,
give you a productivity boost.
That's clear.
It's just taking things that used to take us hours, days to do, and it's packaging it up
in a way that ah allows us to do that in minutes, with a little bit of refinement around
the edges.
think about one thing that...
ah
you know, being in the world of finance, like financial modeling, like you used to
literally spend hours, like days, weeks, building assumption sets, like testing those
assumptions, running Monte Carlo analyses on the different potential outcomes of any type
of investment.
And you can do that now in minutes, right?
And so that's really exciting.
If I were to pull on my like naysayer hat then, ah which I think is something that's
really important to call out is like,
Right now people are using this tool with a fair amount of, the word that's being thrown
around a lot is like the ability to discern what's good and not so good.
And I think the naysayers would say, what happens if like from blunt trauma perspective,
we lose the ability just because most folks are just prompting versus doing that we
actually lose the ability to understand what is truly good from what we're getting.
uh I don't have an answer for that.
I think that's going to be something that I think needs to be front and center.
There is a lot of data that's coming out that is suggesting people who use these tools
very frequently.
There is a cognitive change in critical thinking style and capability.
I can't uh cite the studies off the top of my head, but I do know there things coming out
from different universities and I think even Microsoft.
put out a study that suggested that people who were joining the workforce, their quote
unquote critical thinking capacity was different than previous generations because they've
sort of had this like AI buddy to help them through challenging situations.
ah think bringing back to the world that we're in, I think like how does AI supercharge
learning or personal development is...
the forefront conversation with any client we're talking to, I think that we firmly
believe at Thaudium that any learning experience, anyone trying to do anything different,
inherently there needs to be a component of that that is human oriented.
To have a disruptive, truly, to have a disruptive in your path takes an experience.
And I just don't know if I believe that like,
the way to do that is to have an AI coach.
I think having a, so maybe I'll walk through an example of how this could work, and I
think in a way that could be really powerful.
Let's say that you're trying to empower a group of leaders to think more strategically.
One school of thought would be like, oh, why don't we just give them, we'll load all of
this information on what great strategic leadership looks like into a GPT.
and we'll have them just basically go through like scenarios and get coached and like do
role plays and all that.
And all that probably can get to like a certain level of fluency, but what you'll miss is
sort of like the moments where you're all together, like talking with other leaders who
have lived through the scar tissue of not doing it well.
Or you'll miss some of the energy of just being around other people who are trying to work
on something similar.
And so what like maybe a good version of that would be like you don't do that to start,
but you bring people together to kind of talk about the stakes of being what a good
strategic leader.
You put them through some live simulation or role play or where you get a chance to
debrief with others and you get a chance to like talk about applying that in real time.
And then maybe you go back to your job and now you have an AI coach who's on who's
alongside you, who's like helping you with reinforcement.
offering you like safe playground space to do some reinforcement or role playing in the
moment if you're getting ready for like a conversation where you have to be strategically
thinking or leading from a strategic altitude.
So, like I think I'm maybe like kind of going in a few different directions from your
question, but I think in my mind, it obviously is gonna be a huge part of how people learn
and do in the future.
I think what I'm...
what I and what thought I am, what we're trying to continuously figure out and try to hold
onto is like, how do we make sure we're not throwing away the human element of learning?
Because at the end of the day, we need people to do things.
And we know people learn from others as much as they learn from technology.
So let's not lose that aspect just because we're excited about it.
Yeah, exactly.
it kind of loops back to what we were saying at the start, right?
Where people change from emotions, right?
And getting that emotional buy-in and these emotional conversations.
So from an AI perspective, right?
Can it achieve that same thing, right?
If you're speaking to an AI, do you have any type of emotional buy-in to the conversation?
Probably not.
Now in the future that might change because, you know, another train of thought about it
and maybe not, you know,
in the next kind of five, five, 10 years, but like the next generation coming up who've
been born with AI, like AI being about, they'll probably be able to connect to AI and have
a conversation, right, and be emotionally born.
So it's gonna be interesting on a generation to generation basis, uh how it affects,
because what we might find is that, you know, the older generation, you know, might try
and do some AI.
type of workshop with them, right?
And it will just go over their heads.
But then the younger generation, oh, it's great.
And they're brought in and able to resonate with it.
So I think it's gonna be interesting to see how that also changes over the years.
as, you know, the juniors now, all the people come into the workforce now, as they start
getting older and older, they're gonna be the seniors, the older guys who have been
brought up with AI.
And so it's gonna be bit of different story.
But I do think, yeah, sorry, go.
but just on that front, one of the things that I also think is interesting to continue to
explore is that I do think at times we, we do typecast like, like typecast an entire
generation, like typecasting a billion people into a specific uh relationship with
technology or critical thinking capacity.
Like I'm even, you know, I'm calling out a few of things I share.
That is at the general level how things and people are talking.
Potentially one of the coolest things about the technology revolution that we're under is
that we do recognize the sheer individuality of everyone that exists on this planet with
very unique experiences and very unique situations that they've been through and ah very
unique preferences to learning and very unique uh preferences to engagement and
connection.
And I think that sometimes it's just easy for us as humans to like...
There's a loneliness epidemic.
There's a critical thinking capacity challenge and all that sounds like we can just look
at someone and be like, okay, you're in this generation.
So you must, you must need to find meaning in your work.
You must be totally addicted to your phone.
You be like totally lonely and you must be like bed rotting on Saturdays.
Right.
Like, but I think also we need to call ourselves back to be like human beings are just
down.
Let's get down to the single digits.
There's the ones of what human beings are going through before me.
Maybe just.
yeah.
believe in the overarching typecasting we do sometimes.
Yeah, no, I think that's a great point.
think 100 % you're right, right?
At all levels, There's a lot of just differences between everyone, right?
And so I think you're definitely right there.
But I think just going back to the kind of AI point as well um is the human to human
element.
And that's something that we're also quite fixed on as well is I think at least right now
the human to human component, if your business requires it, then it shouldn't be like
outsourced to AI.
um
Like we're seeing a lot in the kind of marketing and sales space where people are using
like AISDRs and BDRs and know, AI sales teams, AR reps, all these different things.
And what we say to our clients, right, is it's about the relationships, it's about
building this actual connection, like real connection to someone else who is your
potential client or whatever that could be.
And so can AI do that right now?
I don't think it can.
But I'm seeing a lot of companies start to try and outsource it to...
AI at moment.
It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.
think the next kind of two to three years is really critical as well to see how that how
this shapes because like we saw today or yesterday where OpenAI came out saying that
integrating with all these apps now as well.
And so essentially what it could mean is that you could, you know, one sentence and you're
setting up a whole chain of events very easily through the platform natively to send
emails to so and so and to do whatever it's going to be doing.
I think it's going to be interesting to see which
which companies hold onto that human element and which companies like kind of outsource it
and then the results of that a little bit later on uh and how that impacts it.
Because so far with the companies that I've worked with, a lot of them have tried the AI
route using SDRs, know, messaging, whatever, and it just didn't work for them like at all.
And um so it's interesting that they've not had any success with it, but it'll be
interesting to see how it all plays out.
an interesting, to me it always then you can, you can go back to like, what's, if you're
using one of these pieces of technology, what's the outcome you're trying to drive?
And is that the best way to drive that outcome?
Like I, even if I were just to walk through my own personal preference of interacting with
like an AI avatar or something, like what I want, like what I want an AI SDR to call my
business and try to sell me on like a product, absolutely not.
Because in my mind the outcome there is you're trying to create some initial connection
with me and me as a person.
I'd rather connect with someone who's trying to sell me something with an actual other
individual or another human being.
Converse that though, when I call in to get my furnace fixed, if I just needed
information, if I just need someone to give me the answer to how I do this, I really don't
care if it's a human being as long as my problem gets solved.
Again, this is just me personally.
And I think sometimes it's easy to like put it, put the technology in the lens of how it
helps you, but you lose sight of the like the human being that you're trying to get to do
something, the outcome you're trying to drive.
How is that going to help drive that outcome with that person?
Like is that AI, SDR, BDR going to be able to make enough intimate connection with a
business owner to drive them to want to increase their propensity to buy.
I don't know, maybe some folks in their industry is like, yes, absolutely.
In my industry, if I tried to unleash like an AI SDR and say that we're a human centered
development company and they were talking to an AI about like working with us, like I
don't think that would come off as very ingenuous to our our ethos in our brand.
So I think again, like I'm again, I'm in no way bastardizing or saying the technology is
not really useful, but I think it's like.
What is the North Star you're trying to use it for, for the people you're trying to do
things for, if that makes sense?
um And just asking yourself the honest question, is this truly gonna be the thing that
gets us there?
Yeah, yeah.
And I think you, you raise a good point is especially in this point in time now where
things are changing so much and everything is we know ourselves how we would want to be,
um, say for example, sold to, right?
And so if we know ourselves that, know, I would never apply to an AISDR BDR, then we
probably shouldn't look to input that into our business either.
should maybe let's stick to what it is that we know ourselves and how we would like to be
sold to or whatever that could be for this specific scenario.
a key way, would also, I would add to that and the lens of we can't just let our personal
preference or bias be the deciding factor because like I just, in my mind, it's like,
well, I might not want that, but maybe someone who runs another organization that is in
someone's target customer profile actually does.
And maybe that is like the best way they want to interact.
And so again, like I think this is where,
I think when we talk about huge revolutions or technology advances, we tend to just say,
it's going to change everything, but we don't talk about how it's gonna be best used down
to the micro level.
The macroeconomics are easy to picture for us, the microeconomics is where it truly
becomes valuable or not.
And I think that's where I just wanna spend more of my own brain power, is how is it
actually good in helping people learn?
to do new things and do them better and sustain that behavior, not is it the devil or not.
Yeah.
It's one of those where it's happening anyway.
So, you know, there's no point of just saying, you know, I'm not even gonna bother looking
at it at all.
And like bury our heads in the sand with it because ultimately we know it's happening.
We know it's gonna change the world and it already is.
Okay.
Amazing.
So one of the final questions we always ask guests in the show is if you can go back to
your 18 year old self and only take three lessons with you, whether it's philosophical
knowledge, some business knowledge, some general advice, what would those three lessons
be?
and what would be those three things.
Oh, that's a good question.
Well, I was hoping that I still looked 18.
ah But, ah so I'll say that that was only a few years ago.
ah So the first one would be, ah look, being a high achiever and wanting to achieve big
things in your life is a paradox because the more you strive...
the more you feel like you haven't done.
And be okay with the discomfort of trying to strive to do big things because you'll never
feel like you arrived.
I think that would probably be one big thing.
ah The second big thing would be...
Remember this is your life and ah most people's biggest regret on their deathbed is living
a life they think everyone else wanted them to live, not the life that they want.
That would be number two.
And number three would be meet every single person in the world with curiosity and open
mind and no judgment and you'll be surprised the level of friendship and the relationships
that you're able
Amazing, I think there's some amazing lessons there for sure.
And I agree with all of them.
I have nothing really I could add to it.
I think you phrased it really, really well there.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time today and joining us on the show.
Really enjoy this conversation.
I think there's so many good nuggets there for everyone listening.
And so yeah, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me on.
was a blast.
I hope in some of my rambling there were some useful pieces of knowledge or nuggets from
my experience.
hey, I really look forward to maybe hearing feedback on how people will experience this
and would love to do it again sometime.
Amazing, thank you so much.
Yeah.