Ep 125: Democratizing Coaching and Strengthening Human Agency with Diane Weaver

[00:00:09] Hey everyone, it's Bob. Welcome back to Elevate Your AIQ, your go-to source for insightful conversations on human-centric AI readiness, talent transformation, responsible innovation, and the future of work. Today I am delighted to be joined by Diane Weaver. She's the co-founder of Varyons and a seasoned education technology or edtech entrepreneur whose career has been defined by one through line, helping people see themselves and their potential more clearly.

[00:00:34] Varyons is a voice-based AI platform designed to support the human dynamics that drive alignment, decision-making, and execution. Diane and I talk about what it actually looks like to build AI that puts human agency at the center, why she believes the real crisis facing today's workforce is not a technology problem but a human one, and how Varyons is trying to give every employee access to the kind of personalized support that has historically only been available to people at the top.

[00:01:02] If you believe that the future of work depends on how well we use AI to maximize human potential, this is a conversation you will not want to miss. Thank you so much for tuning in, and let's get into it with Diane. Hey everyone, welcome back to Elevate Your AIQ. I am your host, Bob Pulver, and with me today, I have the pleasure speaking to Ms. Diane Weaver. How are you today, Diane? Hi, doing great. Thanks for having me on.

[00:01:25] Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation. Varyons is doing some really intriguing things and area of human potential, I'll call it. You may call it something different, but we'll get into that as we go. But Diane, I just thought you could give my listeners a little bit about your background through all the different entrepreneurial ventures that you've had and the different roles that you've played and what led you to co-found Varyons.

[00:01:51] Sure, happy to. You know, I'm all about telling stories about journeys. My Route 66 back there is probably a good indicator, and I love that you have a road as well, right? Indeed. Something that we instantly clicked on. So I like to kind of frame my story with, I grew up working on the family farm and getting chased by paparazzi.

[00:02:18] And I kind of, I live my life with a similar kind of dichotomy or like, you know, with a getting to know and understand the extremes and then finding my own kind of middle ground or path.

[00:02:34] You know, I like to take the best of both worlds, but understand that we each navigate through many worlds. And no matter what world we're in or what reality we perceive for ourselves, there's always multiple perspectives to try on and, and broaden our thinking. And I, I jump into that very quickly because I think that probably is one of the strongest threads in, in my current startup. It's called Varyons.

[00:03:03] And my whole journey over to this is one full of, you know, ed tech and curiosity, a lot of linguistics. One point when I was younger, and I always think about like bringing this back up, but I was, I was fluent in four different languages and several computer languages as well.

[00:03:28] And there's a lot, and there's a lot of, I still am. I'm just rusty, right? But, but also, you know, so I've had, I've had many roles through my past where I've been that translator, where I've either translated a vision or translated a product for an audience or translated a problem from an audience to a product or, or technical team.

[00:03:53] And that kind of, you know, role was very comfortable to me as, as it probably makes a ton of sense now with the working on the farm and getting chased by paparazzi.

[00:04:08] But, but also, you know, I, I really started to see that, that there's, there's such a need for leadership that can speak multiple languages too and have, and address things with a level of empathy.

[00:04:24] So one of the, the really big problems that I've spent my career solving is this idea of, you know, when we, when we as adults are, find ourselves in the workplace, there's a pretty pervasive feeling or sense of academia not preparing a person enough and the workplace not preparing a person enough to help.

[00:04:54] That person feel successful, right?

[00:05:24] Really from within. Really from within. And so really from that kind of standpoint, you know, I, I helped solve, I helped contribute to products, technical technology products, right? Within the learning space that solve different components of this problem. But I was always kind of dancing around it.

[00:05:46] And there was this big moment when, when I was working for Pearson education and we were working on statewide longitudinal data systems, which is a very technical way of saying how we bring all the data together into these big data sets to try to understand whole populations of people, what their needs are and how can we best serve them.

[00:06:12] So a lot of policymakers continue to use those data sets in their policy making.

[00:06:20] And so, and so that was, that was phenomenal because it was finally like starting to see the problems from like, from a big enough standpoint that a systems thinker like me can, can stop like getting distracted or spinning off into outer space and the what ifs, because I can see like finally the, the full picture. And it always felt like we were working with Swiss cheese.

[00:06:48] So we were the, the actual, what did they learn when, how, and why was kind of a black box. So I went on to another role, another executive role to help, help myself understand the role of curriculum and curriculum development and personalization. And then from there, I was a couple of co-founders. We, we founded a company called Course Tune.

[00:07:16] And what that did is it helped to crowdsource all of the learning elements that go into the planning of, of the learning, the what, what, how, when, and why. And it was a great four years. It was a fast four years, right? The days were long, the years were short.

[00:07:34] And we created this very human first visual way to help people not just see all their data in one place, but like think about it differently. And to kind of, to help people see the, see the picture in a slightly different perspective to help shift the conversations that were happening between the humans. And so we got it patented.

[00:08:04] It was amazing. And four years later, we were acquired by a really fantastic company. And at that point of acquisition, the number of universities using Course Tune doubled. And within a year, it doubled again. And that was phenomenal. And it was time for me to like step away. And so I closed my laptop. I had a proper identity crisis, like a lot of startup founders do.

[00:08:32] Went and cried somewhere for three days. And two months later, OpenAI released ChatGPT. And I was like, okay, this is, this is a different moment. And, and so I, you know, folks started reaching out to me and asking me about what am I going to do next?

[00:08:55] And of course, I had some ideas, but I really wanted to hear how people were thinking about this moment in time from the standpoint of like, what does this mean for humanity? Because again, systems thinker and always kind of blowing it up big, big existential crisis, right? So, so most people were talking about just bringing the yellow pages online.

[00:09:20] If you remember the early internet years, that's like, we recreated our current reality online, right? And this moment in time with AI, like, we know AI has been around since the 60s. We've all been using AI for decades. It's the generative AI that makes the difference.

[00:09:43] And that it's actually released and open and, you know, some form of it is free and available and democratized to everybody. That's the big difference. And that's the leap forward. And so, you know, I was like, I really want to be working with people who want to be doing something that was impossible to do before.

[00:10:06] And so I reached out to Mike Ruska and Mike Ruska is, he was the CEO of a great group called Problem Solutions. They're still around. Check them out. Look them up. It's now under Mike Pino's direction. He's the executive director over there. We're like sister companies. So I know Mike Pino. Yes. Excellent. Yeah. He's awesome. So I reached out to Mike and I said, hey, if anyone's thinking about this differently, it's probably you.

[00:10:36] And he told me and it was like, sure enough, we're on the same brainwave. And he introduced me to Brooks Canavesi and then they introduced me to Ryan Krynjek and now the four of us are the four co-founders of Baryons. So that's the journey in a nutshell. Quite a journey. So, OK, so before we dig into all of that, what was the paparazzi chasing you for? Oh, yes. So my grandfather was a television pioneer, Pat Weaver. Oh, my goodness.

[00:11:05] And he created the Today Show and the Tonight Show. And my favorite invention of his is the 30-second commercial because it really helped democratize the funding of programming, which helped, which helped back then in the 1940s and 50s, helped them really elevate the quality and the educational quality and the quality overall of programming that was available to the public.

[00:11:35] So he really impressed on me early on that every wave of technology must be used for the benefit of humanity and just this undying kind of optimism and curiosity for life. So those are some of the qualities that I've sought after myself. Fantastic. I think the timing of this conversation is really appropriate.

[00:12:03] I was just on one of my sort of think tank calls earlier today. We were talking about, among other things, we were talking about Pope Leo's encyclical about humanity and how, you know, AI and all these powerful technologies really need to be used,

[00:12:21] not just in an ethical and responsible way, but really all under the, I guess, umbrella of supporting, you know, humans and making us, in fact, more human. So how can we, you know, sort of use it to augment ourselves, to better ourselves, make us better humans?

[00:12:41] And so, so I love, you know, the concept of what you guys have built and the sort of genesis, you know, of that, given the through line of all the work that you've been doing. So give us a little breakdown of what Baryons is and does. Who are you, who are you targeting? What's, what's the approach? Because I thought it was, I thought it was fascinating. So I just want my listeners to get a sense of what you've built. Thank you for that.

[00:13:09] And thank you for kind of anchoring us in with, with Pope Leo's words. And, and, and I want to, I want to kind of double down on that for just a second as, as I jump into Baryon. Because, of course, we saw alignment up front and we ran the Pope's, I think it was like a 45-page document. No, it was so, it was longer. It was even longer.

[00:13:38] I think it was, yeah, I think it was 60 or 70. Thank you. Yeah. 60 or 70 pages. And we ran it through because we were curious what our own AI would, would think about the alignment between, you know, kind of what's guiding us. And, and, and what the Pope had said in that, in that document to the world, which, and there was so much alignment. It, it was actually phenomenal. And for me, and I'm, I'm not a religious person.

[00:14:08] And so I have to kind of say that I'm like my grandfather, I'm a humanist. And, and, but when, when Pope Leo chose his name, this was, this was, gosh, three years ago, four years ago? When he chose his name, the last Pope Leo was the Pope during the Industrial Revolution.

[00:14:31] So he very intentionally chose Leo because he knew that this would be the technological revolution. And it's not just AI, it's robotics, it's quantum. It's a lot of other things that we haven't even created yet. Right. So, so it's with that foresight.

[00:14:52] I mean, I really think that he has a futurist brain, you know, and, and some real foresight there that the world needs that voice and all of our voices. Right. But truly like, you know, one of the guiding principles of Baryons is human agency. And at a time, and that's a huge theme in Pope Leo's writings too, but, but we declared it even before this, this came out, right?

[00:15:22] But at a time, yeah. Yeah. At a time when, you know, there's more pressure on our workforce than ever. And there's more pressure to, to increase productivity levels, but also to change, to change how we think about work, to change how we do our work.

[00:15:45] And there's, there's just a ton of external pressure and things feel like they're out of our control from an individual standpoint. Right. And so we're seeing a ton of burnout, disengagement. All of those things are at an all time high. There's a mental health crisis right now. All of this is at an all time high in part because it feels like these things are being forced on us.

[00:16:15] The change is being forced into this moment.

[00:16:18] And the incredible thing about fostering and promoting and actually not just talking about, but doing the daily practice that increases our sense of human agency, our sense of individual personhood, and our capacity of kind of our growth mindset capacity.

[00:16:46] Those are really critical tools for people to practice on a daily basis. And when we look at high performers in the C-suite or, you know, or, you know, elite athletes, we see a lot of very similar kind of daily discipline happening. And a lot of that, some of that looks like grounding techniques. Some of that looks like practicing.

[00:17:16] Some of that looks like visualization. Some of that looks like, you know, being able to take care of our, we call it mental wealth and brain health. Right. And it's basically like doing sit-ups for our brain. Our neurological selves will thank us as we exercise our brains. But also, and that's like exercising our critical thinking and all of these different things.

[00:17:45] The way we process things, the way we name and process emotions is a big factor in this. The way we move our bodies and actually exercise our bodies really get into brain health and nutrition and everything. It's all interconnected. Right. And it's overwhelming. And taking care of ourselves is like at the bottom of our list when we feel like we're in survival mode. Right.

[00:18:11] So when folks use Baryons and you can go to Baryons.com and you can get a free trial to Baryons. It's $20 a month after that. Or you can take Baryons to work and you can, you can use it across your whole company. And when you do this, you start to engage in different things.

[00:18:35] Again, you have agency about how you want to implement Baryons and which model you want to use or not. It's not like an LLM model. I just used the wrong word. It's modes. Which modes you want to use. So we, we frame it in four different ways. There's the check-in mode where you can call it up and it's all voice. It's all based on voice. So you just dial your friend Baryon.

[00:19:05] You put them in, in your contacts. You choose, you choose male or female voice. Right. And whatever makes you comfortable. Because you're going to be talking to this voice. And it's going to be listening to you. And it's going to, it has a patent pending approach to memory. And you can ask it to do different things for you. Like send you emails or create things for you. Or, you know, book things on your calendar and things like that.

[00:19:35] So there's some productivity tools in it. But when you call it in the morning to kind of start your day, we call that the check-in call. And it's a two-minute call. And it helps you prioritize your day. It helps you figure out what is the main goal that I need to accomplish today. And you can show up to that call not knowing.

[00:19:59] You can show up to that call at 3 a.m. when the mountain of to-dos have just woken you out of your deep sleep and anxiety. Right. You can do that call anytime. The whole point is to. Hey, this is William Tincup. And you should know about the You Should Know podcast. It's a topical, fun podcast with Ryan, myself, and a guest or guest plural sometimes. And we tackle the most timely topics of the day.

[00:20:30] Give it a look. Give it a listen. And subscribe. Thanks. Verbalize it. Get it out there. And in the process of doing that, you're organizing your thoughts around those actions. You're visualizing yourself doing that high-priority action. And your chances of doing that throughout the day are instantly much higher. So when you sign up for your Baryon, you receive a text message and it actually gives you contact cards.

[00:20:58] So you can add your Baryon to your favorites in your phone and then just one click and call. Or if, you know, if you drive for work or, you know, if you commute to work, a lot of folks say that they like to have that conversation with their Baryon on their way to or from work or walking the dog or something like that.

[00:21:22] But the point is that we're democratizing the experience because truly right now the individual transformation that needs to happen is helping people shift from technology users to technology stewards. And so we didn't want people to have to learn an interface, download lots of, you know, apps or read lots of guides or anything like that.

[00:21:50] We wanted it to be a much more intuitive and very personal experience where the interface is more of your inner world than anything else. And so when you first call in during the day, it's a very quick kind of two-minute call. And this call, it helps you kind of orient yourself for the day, helps you start to visualize what is the top priority or main goal for my day.

[00:22:19] And you can come to that call not knowing. You can show up to that call at 3 a.m. when your mountain of to-dos have kind of woken you out of your slumber in a cold sweat, right? And you can show up to that call however you need to, and it will help you.

[00:22:39] It will talk you through and kind of guide you through a process where you not only verbalize, you're organizing your thoughts, you're verbalizing it, but you're also envisioning it. And when you visualize it and you verbalize it to another, well, ideally human being, but this is an AI surrogate for that. And not to replace that, but, you know, to help us through and we don't always have that.

[00:23:09] Yeah. And so the, so just that process is like a, it's a daily practice that many high performers do just on the regular. It's part of their discipline. And when you can do all of those things for yourself, your chances of actually accomplishing that thing are, have increased a lot. And, and then, and then I'm going to jump to the end of the day and then I'll go back to what happens in the middle.

[00:23:36] But at the end of the day, you can call your barion and you can have what we call a checkout call. This is a little bit longer, not super long, but a little bit longer. It really can be as long as you need, but it's that moment of reflection where you do an, a cognitive offloading.

[00:23:56] And this is really helping you clear your brain so that you can confidently like move on from your, from your work day and kind of mimic that, you know, when we all used to work in offices and some people still do and some people never did.

[00:24:13] But like to really help with that, you know, kind of closing out the work day and beginning what happens after work, however you spend your evening day with family, with friends, with pets, you know, however you spend it.

[00:24:28] And this helps people to show up to, to that, that kind of next, you know, phase of the day with a much more clear head and really feeling like a sense of security that the AI that you've just offloaded all of your thoughts to, it's going to remember that there's a patent pending approach to memory with each of these things.

[00:24:59] And, and so the next morning you can ask it to tell you, you know, instead of telling it your, your top priority thing, you can also say, well, what did I tell you last night? Okay, great. Now I know what my priority thing is, right? But truly, so you can kind of set this aside and leave it and, and move on with a clear head and sleep better, right? That would be amazing too. So the two other modes are actually the most exciting modes.

[00:25:27] And one is that the thinking partner, the thinking partner really does help you. It's, it's where you can role play, you can ask it to, you know, challenge your perspectives or you can, you know, present your ideas and you can ask it to like, to show you where your blind spots might be. Or what am I missing? Or, you know, different things like that.

[00:25:52] So really like practicing through and talking through the problems that you're solving at work to help improve the decision making. Now, all of that sounds great and in flow, but we know we all get stuck. We all get stuck at work. And we know from executive coaching and the tremendous ROI that happens with executive coaching.

[00:26:18] And it's impossible for a company to, to hire executive coaches for every single employee. And so this fourth mode is really where people tell us the magic is, and it's the growth partner. This is your flourishing partner because at the, at the foundation of baryons is this, is this foundation of science and research about the human flourishing index.

[00:26:45] And Harvard has done actually a lot of work around human flourishing, but human flourishing has been a, you know, an actual, you know, researched and, and scientific study now for, for many years.

[00:27:03] And so we've taken, we've built a library of this, but then we've also identified and created a new way to actually process your conversation in real time through 26 different processes to help provide insights about how, how we are doing as human beings.

[00:27:29] And so when you talk to your flourishing partner, that's where you get into what might be holding you back professionally, where you might get stuck and helping you really identify some of those root causes.

[00:27:46] But most importantly, helping you identify the human resources that are available to you or how to seek out human resources that aren't available to you.

[00:28:01] We talk about ourselves as being the first AI that is truly built and designed to get people off of AI and back connecting with human beings in the real world. Because if we're not using this to be better humans with each other, what is even the point? So the fourth mode is my favorite. Yeah. I mean, there's so much to unpack there.

[00:28:30] I think the, well, first let's, we can start with the democratization, right? To your point, you know, this type of personalized and often executive coaching, we generally see this as part of some, some, you know, executive compensation package. It's a additional benefit. It might be, you know, I suppose there are some mental health benefits that come with, you know, a robust,

[00:29:00] you know, benefits package if you work at a company that provides that. But in general, this type of one-on-one training that's actually helping you work through, you know, on the daily, these types of issues. You know, how do I, you know, navigate this tricky, you know, situation? How do I get sort of unstuck from my own, you know, mental, you know, anxiety or, you know, whatever it is that I'm trying to work through?

[00:29:27] And then having some level of, I don't know if you would categorize it as sort of an accountability kind of partner, but I'm imagining that that's at least one way in which that could be personalized for how you would best get value from something like this. Definitely. In fact, if it's been a couple days since you've called your Barry on, it will text you like an accountability partner would.

[00:29:55] And it will say, it will say, it will reference something that you've shared with it in the past and ask you how that's going. And even just getting that in a ballpark takes a lot of programming. There's no large language model that does that, no chatbot that does that out of the box. And we are LLM agnostics.

[00:30:17] So truly there's an orchestrator and many, many, many agents that are working with lots of different LLM providers and things like that to kind of bring this all together in that experience, right? But I love that you brought up accountability partner because it is.

[00:30:37] It is in part an accountability partner and it's and that part is critical to have still in your circle of human network, right? But there may also need to be an accountability partner that is nonjudgmental and perfectly patient.

[00:31:00] Because oftentimes when we're when we're working with an executive coach, we we turn ourselves on, we put the mask on, we turn ourselves on, right? We're performative and we want that person to see our best side because that's the side that we're presenting at work. And that's what we're trying to improve, right?

[00:31:24] And so when you're talking with your flourishing partner, with your Baryon, and it goes deep, we're hearing from people that they are able to go deeper because they know it's anonymous, it's private, it's secure. It is nonjudgmental. It's perfectly patient.

[00:31:48] I can talk to it about the same problem 50 times and it's not going to like be, it's not going to. Diane, we've been over this. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. So then it can be what I need it to be.

[00:32:04] But here's the interesting thing too, because we did a lot of design in the experience so that it's also not just mirror and it's not just a rabbit hole of affirmation. It's not motivated to keep you talking to it for hours. It's not. That's also how it's different, which is really quite dangerous when you think about that.

[00:32:32] And it is designed to help you get curious and to explore, but to find what might be at the root, but then also to kind of help shift perspective around it, to see it differently than you might have seen it before or consider things that we might not have considered before.

[00:33:27] Yeah. But it may take, could it take action and make comments to help you think differently about, you know, how dots are connected or how things are related? Basically coaching you as a systems thinker without actually using those words? Definitely.

[00:33:50] So, and part of that is because we've trained some of those agents, not all of them, but some of them on different mental models. And so it will recognize what mental model you typically go to or what metaphors you typically use and kind of like, how do you frame your sense of reality? Right.

[00:34:13] And, and importantly, it will ask you questions to help you explore a different mental model than you might've expressed before. Just by asking the questions, you know, the way that it does.

[00:34:31] And what that helps us do is break out of our patterns just enough to get some neural elasticity going. And sometimes that's enough to get the flow going and, and things just change, shift for us. And it, sometimes it doesn't take very much at all, but it will certainly, you know, ask you follow up questions that will help you.

[00:34:59] Kind of explore that differently. So, I mean, voice certainly, you know, with your background and, and linguistics and languages, it seems like voice is the optimal way to handle this, perhaps from a psychological safety, you know, standpoint, the comfort level. Can we have an honest, on top of, you know, the, the privacy preservation and all of that.

[00:35:26] But this is a very natural way to have this conversation. And for someone to, you know, speak as openly and honestly as, as they possibly could. Whereas, you know, certainly we see a lot of coaching and interviewing kind of technology. We're trying to use avatars. I think the technology at a minimum is not quite there yet.

[00:35:51] And also it's going to be off-putting is to, you know, try to have, try to have that sort of represent, you know, this, this unbiased, you know, sort of helper or coach or however you want to sort of frame it. Yeah.

[00:36:09] There's a lot of kind of uncanny valley or mixed signals that we pick up even subconsciously once we're, once our visual senses are engaged as well. Right. And especially with, with AI.

[00:36:25] And if I'm, if I'm really resistant to AI in the first place, the last thing I want to do is look at a humanoid, you know, robotic humanoid, you know, rendition in an avatar, knowing that it's, you know, knowing, knowing that it's an AI.

[00:36:42] It's, there's that, there is that psychological safety because at the heart of all of this is trust and rebuilding trust between humans. And I want to be really clear that when I'm talking about trust, I'm, I'm talking about trust between human beings and, and not trust between like people and AI or, or technology and not trust.

[00:37:12] I'm not talking about trust between employees and, and, and a company or corporation. Right. I'm talking about trust between human beings.

[00:37:20] And in order for us to show up differently and be, and increase our own capacity to trust where it is warranted, because we always have to be safe and we need to practice good boundaries and all, all of those things. Right.

[00:37:44] But in order for us to really practice those skills, using the voice-based AI like Barry-ons is a really great way to practice some of those skills before we, before we engage with other human beings in a, in a trust building or trust rebuilding exercise. There's a really great way to practice some of those skills before we, before we engage with other human beings in a trust building or building.

[00:38:08] There's a really great user story that I like to share to kind of illustrate this point because there's also, you know, we, we all have our own past experiences that, that we, we just, we can't help but, but filter our current experience through our past experiences. Right. And so we had a user who shared with us and, and gave us permission to share.

[00:38:35] She actually shared this on our podcast, which is, it's called the, the new F word, F stands for flourishing. And, and so, so she shared this on that podcast that, you know, she, she was having a really challenging, she had a friendship that kind of took a turn and it became very challenging to even talk to this person because they just kept, they both just kept circling around the same argument.

[00:39:04] And so she did, she was doing a lot of work with her Baryon, you know, on the side and she asked her friend if she could have the Baryon listen. Then they engaged the way that they normally engaged. And then she called the Baryon after the phone call and, and asked it to tell her. Get ready to turn up the volume on your HR game.

[00:39:31] I'm Jay Arnold, former musician turned HR leader and hosts a backstage pass to HR rockstar. Each episode pulls back the curtain on key HR topics from leadership lessons and bold career pivots to the latest in HR tech and talent strategies featuring the rockstars within their industries. If you're ready to shake up the status quo and amplify your impact, this is your all access pass. You can catch the show on the work to find podcast network and wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe now. Let's rock the future of work together.

[00:40:00] What it heard. And just hearing that non-biased third party, you know, almost like mediator of, of the signals that were happening in that conversation was enough to completely shift her perspective on, on, on what they were both trying to communicate.

[00:40:24] And she ended up calling her friend and apologizing for her part of the dysfunction and miscommunication. And then that also, you know, really warmed things up. So her friend was also able to recognize and see where they also were miscommunicating and adding to the dysfunction. So we had apologies happening on both sides and their friendship and communication is flowing a lot better. Right.

[00:40:54] Really interesting. Really interesting. Because I, I bet there are people who would assume that the Marion would have taken the side of, of your, your client, of the person who was interacting with it regularly. There would be some sort of, you know, bias towards, or protectionism towards, towards you and your side of the argument or whatever. But no, it stayed, it stayed neutral. That's great.

[00:41:21] While still understanding her much more than it understood the other person. It was able to take this, yeah, non-biased, productive perspective. Yeah. And that's, that's understandable as well, right? It's not, it has, as you mentioned before, it has this, this memory. It knows, it certainly knows one person better than the other. So that, so that makes, makes total sense.

[00:41:46] One of the things that you, one of the phrases that you mentioned before, Diane, I wanted to just unpack a little bit. Mental wealth, not mental health, but mental wealth.

[00:41:56] What comes to mind when I see that phrase is, goes back to how I kind of kick things off around, like, human potential and people sort of understanding themselves a little bit better to almost, like, get out of their own way in some ways.

[00:42:17] And to help to, help them to achieve that potential and therefore feel, I guess, feel more, feel richer, I suppose, as a person. Not, not monetarily, of course, but, but just more like a complete person who understands themselves a little bit better or whatever. I mean, am I sort of going a little too far trying to interpret that? Or how, how do you define that? No, I think, I think that's very accurate.

[00:42:44] I think the word that comes to me the most when I, you know, really think about this part and, and what we're trying to contribute to mental wealth. Because like you're saying, there, there are a few factors that go into that and can really impact that. And the, the one that just keeps coming back to me in addition to human agency is resilience.

[00:43:09] And when we can build our resilience, we have, we get this kind of, it's not confidence, but it's this, this knowing, or maybe it is trust, trust in the self, that whatever happens, things are going to be okay.

[00:43:32] I'm going, I'm, I'm, I'm going to move forward in my way that's true to me and my inner compass and my values and my virtues and things like that. And when people, so it's like this groundedness and resilience that's not dependent on anything external, if that makes sense.

[00:43:54] And that resilience muscle is, it's, you know, a lot of folks think about just the, that we flex it when we're having trials in our life, right? When things get really bad or we hit rock bottom or we fail really hard, that's when we flex the resilience muscle. And that's true. And that's true. That's true. That's true.

[00:44:19] But we flex it constantly on kind of a, on like a smaller, the image that's coming to my brain is like a wavelength, right? So instead of like massive peaks and valleys, just think about more like the moguls or the little like rolling hills.

[00:44:41] And when we think about, because, you know, our day to day brings as many disappointments as joy. And it's our conscious decision or how we kind of curate our thoughts about, do we remember the joy or do we remember, do we remember the disappointments?

[00:45:03] It's much easier, like we're physically wired to remember disappointments much more often than the points of joy. So it takes a lot more brain power and resilience. Flexing that muscle to remember like the good times over the bad times. Flexing that muscle to remember. And so when, when you're working with your baryon once a week, it will actually send you a resonance report.

[00:45:33] And this resonance report, it tells you things like your energy level. It tells you like the wins that you shared. It also tells you what to watch and what to act on. Just suggestions. It's not telling you what to do. Suggestions. Marrying back. Like, sometimes you might look at the report and be like, well, that's interesting. I talked about these topics when really these were these other topics like were much more significant throughout the week.

[00:46:02] Maybe I'll change what I'm, you know, my conversations or what I say to it accordingly. Right. But it does provide kind of insights and pattern recognition that we don't typically have about ourselves.

[00:46:16] And we're always talking on the team about it doesn't matter that an individual resonance or even a team, because when you take your baryon to work, you do receive group and team and group resonance reports that are anonymized and aggregated. So three or more people have to talk about it.

[00:46:44] For it to show up on that group resonance report. And so when I'm looking at that group resonance report and when we talk about building out these group resonance reports and like what's the most helpful thing for people to see about themselves or about the dynamics of the team. And it's early indicators of burnout.

[00:47:10] And then it's this resiliency piece where it doesn't matter. As as a manager, I actually do want to see that my team trusts their baryons enough to tell it some negative things. I do want to see things go up and down. Right. What I want to see over time is that the down points are shorter over time.

[00:47:39] So if my team like we pushed really hard, it didn't work. And then my team is like burned out for two weeks over that. They just can't get over it. They're still talking about it. Right. And then the next time we push ourselves really hard and let's say something just as negative or detrimental happens. And this time they're only talking about it two or three days. And then we've moved on.

[00:48:06] That's like a much better success metric than any productivity tool can show me about a team. And that's because that's truly what middle management and executive and C-suite are missing. Those kind of insights. They in the quest of these productivity, like endless productivity tools that show, you know, the hockey stick.

[00:48:35] Like everything's going up. But it's that kind of thing when everything's always trending up that you know as a leader, okay, they've gamed the system. I was going to say the metrics are probably not mature enough to even look at some of these things. I mean, what does productivity even mean? And do people care how they got there or do they just care about the result? Right.

[00:49:03] Like they don't even necessarily know what levers to pull in the future or what worked. They just know that something worked and just do more of it. Right. So that when something goes wrong, they don't actually know how to fix it. Right. If they're not tracking these types of things. Right. Like they don't know what's going on with the team on a sort of life and human brain level. Right. So how are you going to replicate it? How are you going to course correct? Yes.

[00:49:32] And they're certainly not talking about it like a team. So Dan, one of the things I was going to ask you was, you know, there's a lot of conversation these days. You've seen, you know, headline grabbing, you know, either statistics or executive decisions that, you know, they're going to, you know, cut some double digit percentage of the workforce or an anticipation of, you know, these gains that they're going to get from replacing humans with.

[00:50:02] With AI.

[00:50:32] For the companies that are. For the companies that are. For the companies that are wedded to these sort of legacy, either legacy or short term metrics and aren't seeing the big picture. Like, how do you, like, how do you, how do you sort of get them to buy into this? Right. Like, how do you, I guess I'm just curious how your conversations have gone with some of the people who are just trying to, I guess maybe they don't have a human centric lens to begin with.

[00:50:59] I mean, do you just not bother approaching those prospects or is I, honestly, I get into that myself. Like, do I want to grab, you know, drag people kicking and screaming to this, you know, to human centric, you know, AI readiness and a human centric future? Or do I want to focus on the people who do believe in it? They're just not sure how to get there and they need solutions like variants to help get them there. Yeah, this is such a great question.

[00:51:28] It's such a great question. And I think this does go back to. And it does matter who we go into business with.

[00:51:46] It matters more than ever as, as founders, as software developers, that we, you know, that we show up to solving these problems with the right intent and that we demand, you know, fidelity in, in not just in usage and adoption of, of products that are ethical.

[00:52:13] But in, in the intent of the employer as they're, as they're rolling this out, there, there's so much. And, and what you just mentioned with layoffs and AI replacing certain roles and certainly changing everyone else's roles. Those are the hot topics and hot critical buttons.

[00:52:41] But the great leaders who are the best partners for us are the ones who recognize that running a business, there will always be some kind of dysfunction. There will always be the internal fight to fight that's like tripping us up. Right. And that it is a really human problem. This isn't a technology problem. So this is a human problem.

[00:53:09] And there are six domains that are really well researched in, in this too, in organizational psychology. That coordination, shared reality, which means like alignment. Are we looking at the same problem? We don't have to look at it the same way, but are we looking at the same problem? Early risk visibility.

[00:53:34] Are we able to see some of these hidden signals with our people? Do we have trust with, amongst the people that we, and, and relationships that are happening where we can see some of these early indicators? What is our decision quality? Do we have the right people who are curious and willing to acknowledge the fallacies of their decision quality?

[00:54:03] Or do we, or do our people think, I make great decisions, everyone else doesn't, right? Like, you know, there's that mentality that often happens too. But if there's a desire to improve decision quality overall, if there's a desire to improve engagement, and then the last one is the learning velocity.

[00:54:24] Which is, with my ed tech background, adult learners, when we do trainings at work, 80% of it is lost within the first 30 days. And so, yeah. And it's because if we're not applying it, it is, it is not going to stick to anything. Because we all have full lives, a lot of things that are taking, you know, pulling on our attention.

[00:54:54] And our capacity to grow and improve, it truly, it is like bite-sized pieces, right? And so, we designed variants to help with these long-standing problems. Because even though the tech is the distraction now, and it is. And I don't want to just dismiss that, right?

[00:55:20] Because it is doing, it is making disruption and waves that are hurtful and harmful in ways that we haven't seen in our lifetimes. But those six things, the six functions of the organization have to be repaired, or they may survive all of this tech disruption. They're still going to be dysfunctional, right?

[00:55:49] So, it's coordination, shared reality, early risk visibility, decision quality, engagement, and learning velocity. Any company that is wanting to work on those six things with their workforce to build up their resilience, to get out ahead of the burnout, to fix their attrition problems. Those are the good partners for us. Excellent. I love the framework. I love those key principles.

[00:56:17] I think any, like you said, any strong leader who has this sort of human-centric lens and knows what it's going to take to get their people all working effectively together, not individually productive, but collectively effective, I think will recognize that they need to do things to sort of optimize everyone's experience as part of the team. So, this has been fantastic, Diane.

[00:56:48] Anything on the horizon that my listeners should be aware of? You know, I feel like it's always such an exciting time. So, definitely go to Baryons.com, sign up for Baryons, and just start using it. And then you'll start getting, you know, some email outreaches.

[00:57:08] And, you know, I think some really exciting things that are happening from a system thinking perspective and what's going on with the industry.

[00:57:20] Several communities and cities are meeting throughout this summer in the coming months to rethink brain health, mental wealth, capacity of communities, and to rethink third spaces and the roles of third spaces within the communities. And how do we really support our people who live in this area? And we're involved in a few of those.

[00:57:48] And what excites me about that is this feeling of, like, of using all of the technology and tools and non-tech and non-tools, right, at our disposal to be more connected with the human beings locally, you know, within our local communities.

[00:58:13] And I think that's critical for healing our communities, you know, and rebuilding trust that way, too. So, you know, I think that's also really critical work that's happening, too. Keep an eye out for it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, I could, I can echo some of that community, you know, involvement. We've got New York City Tech Week kicking off today.

[00:58:36] And I know that there's a whole lot of events really talking about, you know, the human, keeping the human at the center of all of these efforts and what that means, not just within organizations, but across, you know, stakeholder communities, across a municipality, for example. But for New York, it's easy for me to say that being in New York because there's so much activity in such a big city.

[00:58:58] But I would echo what you described and look wherever you live in your own local community and see what you can do in terms of the partnerships you can establish between academia and, you know, civic, you know, engagement and organizations and individuals. I think there's so much that we can do together. So, you know, I think that's great.

[00:59:22] Diane, thank you again for such a really intriguing conversation on important topics. And thank you for all the work that you and the team are doing at Baryons. I think we need more solutions like this in the marketplace. Thank you so much. Thank you, Bob. This was great. All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for listening. We will see you next time. Thanks again, Diane.