Ep 143: Building AI Fluency and Establishing Ownership of Work Design with Phil Kirschner

[00:00:09] [SPEAKER_01] Hey everyone, it's Bob. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Elevate Your AIQ, your go-to source for insightful conversations on human-centric AI readiness, workforce transformation, responsible innovation, and the future of work. Today I'm excited to share my conversation with Phil Kirschner. He's the founder of PK Consulting, creator of the Workline newsletter and transformation partner at Lead with AI. Phil previously led workplace and employee experience strategy at McKinsey and WeWork, among other well-known brands, and today helps senior leaders make the hard decisions about how we can help.

[00:00:39] [SPEAKER_01] How Work Gets Done Across Organizations. He argues that too many transformations lose momentum because leaders jump straight to communicating the change without first defining why it's needed or where they're headed, and that skipping this step is especially risky with AI, where employees could easily resist or just go through the motions. We talk about why leaders need to build their own AI fluency and be honest about what they don't know before they can guide anyone else and why organizations need a chief of work to own how work gets redesigned across HR, IT, and the workplace instead of leaving it to each department.

[00:01:09] [SPEAKER_01] If you're trying to move your organization from simply adopting AI tools to truly transforming the way your people work, you'll want to hear this one. And as always, thank you for listening. Let's go talk to Phil. Hey everyone, it's Bob Pulver. Welcome back to Elevate Your AIQ. Today I am excited for my conversation with Mr. Phil Kirschner. How are you today, Phil?

[00:01:28] [SPEAKER_00] I'm good and getting better now that both of us have new cups of coffee.

[00:01:31] [SPEAKER_01] Yes, I definitely needed more caffeine after a long week at HR Tech last week and somewhat exhausting weekend, even though I didn't really do a whole lot, but still catching up on my sleep and getting old. So Phil, before we dig into all manner of future of work and everything that's going on with AI and HR and talent and transformation, I thought we could just hear a little bit about your non-traditional background.

[00:02:00] [SPEAKER_01] I think people may recognize your name and face from your rework days and your McKinsey days, but you've done a lot of things and you're doing a lot of things now. So give us a little whirlwind tour.

[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_00] I appreciate that you think I have a non-traditional background. I think I have a non-traditional background or sort of an accidental series of paths that have led me to where I am today. The very short version is I studied computer science. I'm a technologist by training. Increasingly, I've been saying a lot in the context of the AI, fluency and transformation work that I do that I was that kid in high school. It was like helping my parents' friends set up computers and bank websites and all manner of technical support.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_00] So that is like teaching other people how to use technology is a deeply ingrained part of who I am. It's been years, informally as a kid, and then all my earliest jobs were like QA desktop support. But I started my post-university professional career in cybersecurity, training risk assessments at a bank, credit to us, and then fell into cost management through internal contacts.

[00:03:06] [SPEAKER_00] It went from being surrounded by engineers and IT architecture types to accountants and financial planning and analysis with no formal finance training to speak of. But my internal clients were the same. It used to be, I'm here to kind of get into the underbelly of how your group works for technical risk-related reasons.

[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_00] Then it was the same conversation with the same people. Now it's about cost, specifically about cost for consultants and other forms of like outsourced services, which is to say not a commodity expense line. Like you fly, I fly, we all fly. It's the same thing. But for the reasons that one group works with a consultant and another group works for a consultant could be radically different. So very much again, why?

[00:03:54] [SPEAKER_00] I think now I, in reflection, believe it had a lot to do with work design or at least work and process kind of articulation to figure out what are you doing that makes you want to spend this money? And then, again, quite by accident, fell into workplace strategy, helping the bank build its internal mobility program. So that's, let's all share everything when we come to work. I was my only introduction to real estate. I never did corporate real estate the old way.

[00:04:21] [SPEAKER_00] Butts in seats. I have my own seat. Like, none of that was part of my narrative. I learned, let's do it the hard way. Like, doing shared workplace forces different conversations between IT, HR, and real estate. So groups I was in or working with very closely and set me on the path I have been on ever since. As a consultant, first in sort of pure play workplace strategy, then more extensively in employee experience, the role of community and activating spaces through my time at WeWork.

[00:04:51] [SPEAKER_00] Then the last two years ago, which were up until two years ago, I was in McKinsey's people and real estate practices separately, getting to see a little bit above the clouds and dealing with the tectonic changes and the nature of work because of COVID, leading right up to this moment with AI being the new sort of feature of work, but have been back out on my own for the last two years or so. So I run a company I call Peacock Consulting, also created and run a newsletter called The Workline.

[00:05:21] [SPEAKER_00] And generally fancy myself as someone who likes to be embedded with my clients and help them, as I say, lead across the lines of modern work. I believe a lot of the sort of failures in employee experience or failures in groups, in particular real estate, to elevate themselves or to truly tackle the transformative change challenges that things like AI present,

[00:05:44] [SPEAKER_00] have a lot to do with the incumbent bias and politics and perspectives that come from us all like working on our silos. And the answers will come from building cross-functional courage and change. So that's where we are now here in New York City where I'm born and raised native, which also has a lot to do with, I think, who I am and how I operate.

[00:06:07] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, no, that's excellent to hear like the connection points across some of those domains. I probably have some similar experiences, not with, you know, sort of real estate, but looking at employee experience and I saw the real estate angle from a different side. I mean, working for NBC at 30 Rock, the real estate is quite limited. So you had to do that very carefully. And there was always some sensitivities to that with deference to news.

[00:06:38] [SPEAKER_00] My one joke with that arc that I never could have predicted in advance is that of the sort of four companies that I've worked for, JLL being the only one that I've mentioned by name before, WeWork is still here and the 150-year-old Swiss bank, that's correct, Swiss, is not, which is crazy and endlessly surprising.

[00:06:55] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it's weird how things have unfolded and ebbed and flowed. When we think about workplace transformation, you know, there's a lot of statistics and surveys about, you know, transformation success or lack thereof. You know, what are you seeing? What are you hearing either through, you know, your consulting work, your work with Don at Lead with AI?

[00:07:21] [SPEAKER_01] And, I mean, you have a lot of very high-level, you know, conversations with people who are tasked with, you know, making sure they get things right. And track record has not been great. So what are your thoughts there?

[00:07:35] [SPEAKER_00] Yes. Oh, and thank you for pointing out, sir. About one of my many portfolio things I do now is as a transformation partner with an organization called Lead with AI. So we work with organizations to do human-centered AI fluency and transformation. So that's, like, one of my things. But I guess generally for change, I believe kind of deeply that in order for change to stick, you have to do the AECONT, but in particular the ones that involve a lot of employee behavior change,

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_00] need to be defined properly. Like, why are we changing? Need a clear North Star vision. Where are we going? You need to have leaders and sponsors and managers sort of modeling that change in a very productive way and understanding who is actually sponsoring and leading these changes. You need to get employees involved. You need to be prepared to change the sort of skeleton of the systems around the change,

[00:08:32] [SPEAKER_00] which could be like onboarding or policies or, you know, everything to help make it stick in the long term. And then you need metrics. You need outcomes that you can point to to know is it working or not, and if it's not, knowing what you're going to do about it. And across all the change programs I've ever had anything to do with, even back to my cybersecurity days, like everybody thinks of change, right? Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

[00:09:01] [SPEAKER_00] And I'm going to try to tell you in a way that makes you okay with what's going on, but often fail to truly define and then communicate the like, what was broken? Why are we doing this? Who decided that it was broken? What's going to happen if we don't get it right? What are all the things that are going to change around you?

[00:09:24] [SPEAKER_00] And again, the clear articulation of where we're going so that I can decide to start moving or that the sponsors can decide to start sponsoring before you get into the teaching and the communicating and the learning and all that kind of stuff. In particular for resistible changes.

[00:09:46] [SPEAKER_00] So something where an employee can, if they want to, sit on their hands and telling them where to work around COVID, hybrid, remote, that's one of them. Telling them you have to use AI now, like to reimagine your job when they are seeing a lot of signals in the environment that are very scary. Right. About layoffs and now is the robot going to take my job?

[00:10:11] [SPEAKER_00] Those are different changes than telling someone like we're rolling out a new version of Windows, like or work. We've merged two departments and you may be in one department that is affected by that change. You may not like someone who's in the other department that is now like part of your team. But you can't just come in on Monday and decide I'm going to pretend it didn't happen. Like it happened. It is rolling out of a new system. It's happening.

[00:10:40] [SPEAKER_00] You may not like it, but it's happening. But the ones like I want you to work, I want you to come in the office more. I want you to use that tool. I want you to redesign everything about your job. Like those are resistible changes. So the importance on those first couple of steps, defining the change, setting North Star, like preemptively thinking through all the resistance you're going to encounter is so much more important. And I just don't see enough of it happening.

[00:11:09] [SPEAKER_00] Rather than when I had to be brought in to talk about a program and then I asked those earlier questions, routinely say that there aren't a lot of answers to even the surface level. Like why? So that's why I think contributes to it, if not failing, not sustaining after the initial push.

[00:11:27] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, I feel like some of these lessons go back probably centuries, right? Like, you know, spend 80% of the time defining the problem, questioning hypotheses, and then, you know, solving this should be, you know, in the minority of the time spent across the exercise.

[00:11:50] [SPEAKER_01] And so certainly the transformations that I've been a part of over the years at Fortune 500 companies, I mean, this is a Herculean effort sometimes. And I agree with all your points. And I think nowadays with AI, you do have this sort of exacerbated friction points, right? Where people can just be either complete detractors, which is obviously problematic, but otherwise it's just...

[00:12:19] [SPEAKER_00] Or just phone it in, right? They'll be like, yeah, yeah, I'm using the tool because you told me to use the tool.

[00:12:24] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

[00:12:25] [SPEAKER_00] It doesn't mean that I'm actually changing anything. Right. Yeah, I know. I should say, like, from a data perspective, I'm not a... I could say I have proof at a societal level. But I read a weekly newsletter now. I have written some things about change frameworks, like defining, like, questions that define change or a model for setting a North Star, which I do not actively advertise. And they are the ones that, like, seem to always be at the top of things that get stumbled upon.

[00:12:50] [SPEAKER_00] I'm like, so people are looking for this, at least as a high-level signal that it is not covered enough, despite the fact that so many, like, significant thought leadership teachers or research you see from consultants be like, we have to focus on change management. But I have not seen any demonstrable change in the nature of those kinds of people that you are hiring. It's still very communications-oriented, or at least appears.

[00:13:39] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I think we're certainly on the same team trying to push this, right? And so one of the things that I've contended for probably, at least as long as I've been doing this show for two and a half years, is individual productivity is almost like a vanity metric. Like, look at how productive I am. Well, that's great.

[00:14:03] [SPEAKER_01] But, you know, if you're part of an organization, you're part of a team in any sense, there are other sort of stakeholders in your workflows, in your output, in your value creation, right?

[00:14:15] [SPEAKER_01] So I think if I understand how you think about this, whether it's through, you know, independent consulting or through some of the programs that you're affiliated with, it seems like you are in agreement with me that we're really trying to enable.

[00:14:33] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, you might be directly enabling leaders, but it is with the intent that these leaders are going to elevate, you know, I would say elevate their own AIQ such that they can make sure that they're guiding, you know, their teams and their peers, you know, properly. So they're sort of the, you're sort of deputizing them to be like the champion and be able to recognize both, you know, risks and opportunities. So I just thought we'd unpack that a little bit.

[00:15:00] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Oh, yeah. So much to unpack there. Yes. So behavior matters. I don't think you can get people to transform whatever is in their little empire, which could just be them or my team or my department or my company until they've gone through it personally.

[00:15:16] [SPEAKER_00] We've heard a number of examples of people coming to the Lead with AI programs, senior leaders, mostly non-technical senior leaders, who have either come to the realization themselves or been told by one of our alumni that before you can go and try, I'm going to transform the marketing department. Whatever it is.

[00:16:03] [SPEAKER_00] And I like society, right?

[00:16:32] [SPEAKER_00] And I'm going to have a lot of people in some population. And I'm going to have a lot of people in some populations. And I am so glad that there are people who are qualified to do that. And we need them. And some of them were in this course. And I told them, listen, like, I want you to be there. We need you to be there at that level of transformation about leadership. But you can't get to that stage. You will be last off that stage.

[00:16:54] [SPEAKER_00] You will not be able to conduct the research rigorously enough until your own level of fluency is high enough that you are able to shift from using AI as kind of a chat bot or as we go, you know, talking to chat GPT, like I talked to Google, up to using those AI tools well. So deliberate choices around which tool, which model, which modality, knowing how to judge the output.

[00:17:23] [SPEAKER_00] And that was a big one for them. Like, how do I know it's not lying to me or that I'm not being misled for research where it matters? Ultimately, up to the level of thinking of AI as a teammate or like integrating it into work and constantly looking to build your workflow literacy to identify the parts of your research or science or teaching your travel where it will make a material difference.

[00:17:45] [SPEAKER_00] To then let you do the more profound higher order activity, which in that case may be like helping all of us interpret this. But it all starts with personal fluency. And maybe a timely thing. Last week, I was at Charter's Workplace Summit here in New York. They just released a really great report. They called the Charter AI Pulse. And the finding that I found most interesting, sort of a two-parter about managers.

[00:18:12] [SPEAKER_00] One, that of all, like a very high percentage of all the activities that are most accreted to individual employees or success with AI has to do with manager behavior. But then they found that there's somewhere between a 20 and 30 percentage point gap across a number of different factors between how often managers say that they are doing something personally when it comes to AI activities and how often their employees say they see them doing it.

[00:18:41] [SPEAKER_00] And going back to 16-year-old me, like the little desktop support kid, my inclination there and my experience now through these courses and some of our transformation work and even my private clients is that, you know, those managers are not putting on a show, but it is really hard. It demands a high level of vulnerability to say, I, the person who is meant to be overseeing all of you, have no idea what I'm doing.

[00:19:08] [SPEAKER_00] So they don't say, they'll be like, yes, I'm, I'm very fluent. My AIQ, very hard. But really it's not. And yeah, it makes me think I'm like back to just being a teenager and someone, someone telling you like, I know what's wrong with my computer. Like, how early did you do? That's why you called me. And I'm not saying that to put you down, but I have to ascertain exactly where your level of education and current comfort is with the same that you have bought yourself.

[00:19:37] [SPEAKER_00] So that I can help you raise it. Like, I want what is best for you. I want to be vested in your success. But we have to be honest with each other about where you are. I think that's cascading. So, you know, all those and the individual fluency at every level is the gateway to every other level of transformation.

[00:19:54] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, I think if you, I'm starting to see more organizations actually try to measure that fluency, what I might call readiness. We won't get into the semantics there. But I think this is all important to what we were talking about before to drive that successful transformation.

[00:20:14] [SPEAKER_01] If you have a better understanding of what people's starting points are and you can get as close to an honest response to some of these things. Or, you know, it's a self-evaluation of your capabilities. However you need to do it, if a leader has the humility to say, look, I'm learning this too, right? I think that goes a long way to build, you know, that transparency. I think goes a long way to build trust and trust is paramount for all of this.

[00:20:44] [SPEAKER_01] But if you don't, my contention is, you know, dipping a little bit into the human centricity, you know, topic. I think transformation requires changes in behavior and incentives and metrics like you were talking about before.

[00:20:59] [SPEAKER_01] And so an organization can't really know if they're sort of ready for this type of transformation, if they're ready to fully sort of, you know, invest in this sort of human and AI partnership, if you will, or finding the appropriate synergies depending on context and domain, things like that. But without knowing if your people are ready, how can you know if the organization itself is ready?

[00:21:25] [SPEAKER_01] Having the budget and having a mature, having the data maturity and good architects and things like that is great. But again, if the people are driving your growth and your strategy, and if they're not ready, all bets are off.

[00:21:42] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Yeah, there's an interesting anecdote at the same conference I'm from a company she's talking about. They're most leading edge, most off-the-deep-end AI super ninja engineers. They're sometimes even the most vulnerable about what they do and don't know because they're so living at the edge and that capabilities are changing so fast that someone's like, I'll see two engineers like sitting across from each other working on something.

[00:22:09] [SPEAKER_00] And one will either see or hear from the other and be like, oh my gosh, what's that? They're like, yeah, this came out yesterday. And I'm trying it now. They're like, oh, I was sick yesterday. So I missed it. There's no putting anyone down, but it's just so fast that it's completely okay to be like, I had no idea that that was possible, even for your most deeply tactical AI engineers.

[00:22:29] [SPEAKER_00] So why shouldn't that play out at the ranks of just a very capable, very tenured traditional knowledge management kind of leader to say, yeah, how can I possibly know what's possible now? And let's all share and just make it a community practice.

[00:22:45] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I mean, I think things are moving way too fast in general for the average person to keep up. I mean, even, you know, I've been in boot camps and stuff where it's just like, you know, by the time you get to week six, they've already had to modify, you know, some of the things that they were doing. And I just, I don't know, that's, to me, a little bit, you're getting a little bit of shiny object syndrome, which I've certainly been a victim of.

[00:23:10] [SPEAKER_01] But I try to focus on actual capabilities and the reliability of those capabilities as opposed to just looking at, am I, you know, spending fewer, you know, tokens or can it now do this little? Because we're getting into like feature function kinds of things in software terms.

[00:23:25] [SPEAKER_01] And I just think you've got to keep your eye on that, as you alluded to before, keep your eye on the sort of North Star, like where are we really going in as our AI investments, including those in people, guiding us towards the actual, you know, business strategy. We're not just, you know, focusing on the technology for technology's sake.

[00:23:45] [SPEAKER_00] Agreed. And yeah, even just from an individual fluency perspective, we, at Lead with AI, like we deliberately start with a North Star exercise, not like my organization, Super North Star, me. What do you want to do with the time that you may reclaim because of your starting to use AI tools? And it doesn't necessarily have to be professional either. Can be, I want to spend more time with my family or write a book or take the class.

[00:24:15] [SPEAKER_00] But you have to, you have to decide what that is, sort of keep it pinned up there in front of you. Otherwise, something called Parkinson's law steps in and implies that like our effort will fill the space that we have. Or said another way, we'll just send more emails because, oh, I sent that email faster. So I'll send more instead of doing something higher value. It's really important. And we find really powerful people will say like, what am I going to do at that time? There's higher impact than the things I'm doing now.

[00:24:42] [SPEAKER_00] It keeps you at least moving in that direction and talking about the goal that you want, even if you do not know the capability that will get in there. Instead of just like, I'm doing productivity and it's for me, fast as I go.

[00:24:54] [SPEAKER_01] I feel like that's a conversation that, you know, people can have that with themselves. But I also think organizationally, you know, as you think about the, you know, getting ROI from these investments, that companies are struggling a little bit to say what, what percentage of whatever, you know, cost savings, cost avoidance, you know, whatever it is. What percentage of that gets sort of reinvested and where?

[00:25:22] [SPEAKER_01] So sometimes I do agree that you need to personally think about that, but you may not have full, you know, sort of autonomy to do that in isolation, right? Like you've got to think about, okay, the team is benefiting from this. The organization is benefiting from this. And so obviously they're going to try to recoup some of that for the company, but you've got to be careful, right?

[00:25:48] [SPEAKER_01] In terms of not creating, you know, backlash or, you know, just piling on more work because then you just have other potential repercussions, right? With, you know, burnout or what have you. Sometimes people need to go get that second cup of coffee, right? Yes.

[00:26:05] [SPEAKER_01] So when you think about who's sort of the ringleader over all of this within an organization, I know you've talked a lot about, you know, the chief of work or chief work officer, that kind of concept. Is that the right owner? How does that person work with like maybe a chief AI officer? Like how do you think about like leadership roles and all of that?

[00:26:32] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Yeah. So, right. So I talk about and write about a lot. It's concept of a chief work, which can take many forms. But the problem that I have leaned into, even if you, even if you pin AI for a second, just pretend it didn't happen. In the service area of work, my experience as an employee of what it feels like to work for my company.

[00:26:54] [SPEAKER_00] If you ask, notably, HR, real estate, IT, maybe sort of communications and general communications and marketing, you get different answers about the factors that influence my day-to-day work experience. And you'll see, for example, an HR team will cite all sorts of things that influence the employee's experience, which are true, you know, the behavior of the manager, benefits and compensation.

[00:27:24] [SPEAKER_00] But largely will not dip into like, do my communication tools support me or do I come to the office often or do I like my office or anything like that? And if you believe, as I do, that like organizations are going to be more fluid in a number of different ways, right?

[00:27:45] [SPEAKER_00] More skills-based resourcing and more people coming in and out of like project-based work faster, where maybe I'm not just serving one kind of part of my organization. I might be a full-time employee, but could be serving lots of internal clients and lots of different projects. This is certainly true in any kind of professional services firm now where client teams are broken apart and mashed together again. But I think we have yet to get to the, I've read this yet, but I grumbled it.

[00:28:15] [SPEAKER_00] Jordan, last week, flash teams. We've yet to get to this future. AI will make it even easier. But if you believe in that and you put power to the edges, we're like my little organization, my little team, we've been funded to do a thing. So I have a lot of autonomy about how we're going to do that or where we're going to do that or who I hire.

[00:28:32] [SPEAKER_00] Who helps all those much more autonomous and fast-moving heads-down teams know if the changes and the choices that they are making about the experience of work holistically are the right needs or are working? Who's the feedback loop? Because if you ask real estate, like what should I do or how things are going, it's highly unlikely you're going to hear from someone in a real estate function that that office is terrible. Right?

[00:29:01] [SPEAKER_00] Or HR, same thing like that. Like that manager's terrible. Like they're not going to say that. So I believe we need some kind of independent body to act as a little bit of the sort of like Fitbit of the organization. To just say, I hoover up all these things. Who's coming? What the experiences are? The engagement levels? The IT tickets? To all this friction points.

[00:29:24] [SPEAKER_00] And like I look at it independently and I make it available or I both look for common signals and best practices but can make it available to the teams and the people who own those efforts. Some GM somewhere to just say like, how's it going? And to know that there's ground truth in that data.

[00:29:43] [SPEAKER_00] And that if they need help improving something, that that same sort of central body of effort and resources, when it sees a signal like, oh, there's a lot of friction in the process of onboarding new employees, which is a very common journey. That that group could go with a totally unbiased lens and start exploring that friction. Oh, okay. It's a little bit that some bit of the IT process needs help.

[00:30:10] [SPEAKER_00] It's a little bit of our actual like day one training program, which maybe HR runs like could use a little boost. It's a little bit that we don't have great physical space for those like welcome events and all those things. Data and like work transformation type process improvement types, recklessly optimistic and curious change forward kind of people.

[00:30:32] [SPEAKER_00] I think a parallel back when I was at Credit Suisse, like there was there and there does exist in a lot of other, at least banks, some form of internal consulting group, which may sit in sort of the office of the CEO or COO, CAO land, which is to say not in those core functions that are the ones that own a piece of the day-to-day employee experience. If such an independent group exists, that's a great place.

[00:31:00] [SPEAKER_00] I think you could put a tiger team like this. You could put the data, but it's the independence that's the key because it is so cross-functional and the employees don't care or see the lines, right? If I have a terrible day, I have a terrible day. And that may affect how much I want to, you know, resubscribe to the product that is my company. So that's what I believe in. I talked about a long time.

[00:31:28] [SPEAKER_00] Some manifestation, this idea of like independent, being a Fitbit, providing the data, going after the consistent problems that across organization gets solved, whether it is actually an executive called the chief of work or just some directional body there. I'm a big believer.

[00:31:46] [SPEAKER_00] Then when you introduce AI into the equation, I do see a lot of tension between organizations that are hiring like VP of AI transformation, who at least are the people that I know and the roles that I have seen, tends to gravitate towards identifying the highest and best, you know, use of the company's limited resources for the truly agentic implementation of AI.

[00:32:14] [SPEAKER_00] Like for the business of the business at the leading edge, it has the greatest impact on your bottom line, on your customers, and that work could absolutely happen.

[00:32:23] [SPEAKER_00] What it tends to leave out is the question of who is looking at the broader spectrum patterns of usage of these tools, who is going out and advising and coaching the leaders of individual teams on baseline level fluency, people who are not at the edge of the sort of business of the business.

[00:32:47] [SPEAKER_00] And despite the fact that, especially in the technology organizations, you hear roles like forward deployed engineers, which is excellent. If you can take deeply technical talent and you can have them go sit with a marketing function and watch what they're doing and build stuff with them in real time. I would take that all day, every day if I was burning marketing. But again, there's a little bit of implied bias.

[00:33:12] [SPEAKER_00] A forward deployed engineer is only successful if they have something to engineer. They're going to be looking for, you know, it's a hammer looking for an ant. I see a process, I ought to make the process. And I think that maybe you get diminishing returns from that at some point where the person who is then missing, as I wrote recently, using a term that I saw first put sort of in writing from OpenAI's C-HRO Arvin KC. He called it a forward deployed black belt.

[00:33:41] [SPEAKER_00] And it's that independent process improvement oriented, if not Six Sigma trained, but an independent person who can help with and advise with redesigning the work and the fluency levels to take advantage of what the technology is capable of. Instead of, you know, having the bias of like the technical problem.

[00:34:08] [SPEAKER_00] So the two concepts are really what I thought like chief of work and the employee experience sense and the interplay between VP of AI and whether it's learning and development or anybody else who's there to actually help do the work design that's really complicated.

[00:34:22] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I think we do use the role of engineer, at least as job title suffix, quite liberally over the last, you know, decade or so. It's not just in the age of AI. And so I do think a fair amount of technical, you know, knowledge and comfort is important.

[00:34:43] [SPEAKER_01] But I also think to your point about like redesigning process, understanding, you know, before we called it process transformation, I was doing process reengineering work. So the engineer title was there early in my career, going back quite a ways.

[00:35:00] [SPEAKER_01] But I do think it takes a special person with perhaps a nontraditional background like you and I to be able to sort of seamlessly go back and forth, be customer facing, understand where the friction points are and how to potentially remove them or mitigate them.

[00:35:19] [SPEAKER_01] While also being able to, you know, enhance the keyboard, as we used to say, you know, actually go in and, you know, build skills, build the literal sort of in AI terms, you know, the skills and the artifacts and whatever else needs needs to be built and and sort of construct it. So it's a multi, it's a multi-discipline sort of sort of background that makes a good FTE a really valuable asset. I would agree with that.

[00:35:46] [SPEAKER_00] I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And right. Do you need both? Like when you get to the truth and you're like, right, we should build agents for this. And the person in the team doesn't know how to do it. I'd love to have someone who could just do it. But that conversation, like the work redesign, especially since the redesign efforts increasingly are crossing organizational boundaries, which comes back to the change part. Like, ooh, we actually see that this whole thing should be flipped around the other way.

[00:36:10] [SPEAKER_00] And that's going to be uncomfortable because it will create a liminal space where, you know, I read about this actually hearing a parable at an event. Somebody telling you the parable of a trapeze, like talking about liminal spaces. Real change only happens using that metaphor.

[00:36:32] [SPEAKER_00] Like when you let go of the bar, the first bar, and you're hurtling towards a second one in midair and like you haven't quite landed yet. And I played out that metaphor of this for AI. I think it's like so many people are just like white knuckled gripping onto that first bar that they've left off the platform. They're swinging, swinging, swinging, swinging, swinging. I'm using it. I'm doing it. I'm using my tokens. We're like, we're all taking AI classes. It's great.

[00:36:57] [SPEAKER_00] But like haven't really let go, like into this unknown, which is a state of change anyway. But only there can you look at the people next to you. Like, right, we're all here right now. And when we land, like some of us will be taking on new tasks or one of us is going to own an agent that we don't now. And we're going to be reevaluating like whether this whole process is working. But we're all here. We did it.

[00:37:24] [SPEAKER_00] And no significant changes can happen until people are ready to do that, which is a lot of organizational and psychological safety.

[00:37:32] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I think I'm just trying to play out that metaphor, like thinking about whether or not you have a, you've grabbed the second bar, but do you have a good grip? Do you really?

[00:37:42] [SPEAKER_00] Right. Or do you stay secure with the second bar, but you haven't actually done it yet? And then you could really play out like, is there a safety net or are you a very daring circus act that does it without the net? Yeah.

[00:37:52] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, one of the roles, as I was thinking a lot over the past year or so about like the future of the CHRO role or chief people officer role. I mean, one of the hats that I thought that person would need to wear is, I mean, I just called it strategic work architect as opposed to, you know, workforce as you've got to incorporate, you know, the AI and AI agents and things like that.

[00:38:15] [SPEAKER_01] But not that I expect to be a true architect, but some, it's some hybrid role where, you know, we're already seeing people take on, you know, a transformation title or, you know, the AI, you know, pieces in that role.

[00:38:33] [SPEAKER_01] But I think the way you think about it is actually probably more effective because you just can get into the weeds and you can have an understanding of how people are actually working as opposed to being a little bit too high level, perhaps. One of the things I was going to connect what you're describing to these sort of, you know, pods and the flash, you know, teams and things like that. People have been talking about this for a long time.

[00:39:01] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, I remember reading, it was either like Dave Gray or, or Dion Hinchcliffe, like back probably at least 15 years ago, talking about like pods, like the podular design of potential, you know, teams that could be a lot more nimble and things like that. And so, so this is all sort of coming back in the age of, of AI as a lot of things are.

[00:39:22] [SPEAKER_01] And so, so I think about that and I think about the conversation that you were just having with, with our friend Ben Zweig from Rebellio Labs about the territorial nature of, of incentives with managers. And I don't want to let their best people go and take on other assignments, even though it's in the best interest of the employee and in the best interest of the organization for them to move on. That manager is, is measured on certain, you know, things and you're taking my team lead or, you know, one of my best players or whatever.

[00:39:51] [SPEAKER_01] But I feel like those friction points have existed when it comes to like talent marketplaces and just internal mobility programs in general for a while. And so you can, you can change the incentives, but I feel like now we have the opportunity to do exactly what, what the book you're, you're reading and, and what people are thinking about in terms of the agility of not just individuals,

[00:40:16] [SPEAKER_01] but teams and the way that they can go and sort of tackle, you know, different projects and different domains and things like that. Because I feel like that is, can be incredibly effective for everything that organizations are trying to do from a transformation standpoint, but also the engagement, the upskilling and the cross domain. Now, I forget the phrase you used at the beginning, but that cross domain, you know, sort of, sort of capability.

[00:40:44] [SPEAKER_01] I feel like it strengthens the whole organization.

[00:40:46] [SPEAKER_00] I think so. And, you know, like just a couple maybe personal experiences. Like I've spent time at consulting firms and consulting firms operate this way. So I have seen the power of particularly like McKinsey, nobody has a boss on the client side. Like you don't have a boss at any level, which means you, you know, every team is somewhat dynamic, but you also have this attitude of like, oh, I worked with Bob that one time on a project and we did awesome stuff. And I think Bob was awesome.

[00:41:12] [SPEAKER_00] So like I'm keeping an eye on Bob until they sent that I'm senior enough to create genuine opportunities for other people that I'm like going to lean into my, the kind of clients that I work with, the kind of work that I do and create opportunities to be like, because I have a rock star. So someone I know, I'm going to call them the very second you sign this thing, because I can, I can recombine teams that I put in the past or meet new people. And it's like, it's dynamic and it's amazing.

[00:41:40] [SPEAKER_00] Then like sample size of one small extract, but like I'm currently doing for the first time in this mindset, but like doing a consulting project for a client where the client decided that they knew me and someone else and have asked us to do this work together. I've had lots of other sort of partnerships and subcontract relationships with other people as independent consultants. But this is the first time where it was client like, I met two people, you're both really interesting. I think you see different signs of my same problem. So I want you to do this work together. Someone I've never met before otherwise.

[00:42:11] [SPEAKER_00] And that's a really interesting forcing function for both. Like I now have to serve this client and answer the question while jockeying with somebody else. It's just like, I don't know you, you don't know me. We're trying to learn from each other and we use different systems or we come from different backgrounds or we're fluent with different things. And it's, I mean, it is, it is cognitively challenging, but really motivating. And thank goodness the technology makes some of the hard parts easier. And that's what I think this book will probably say when I open it.

[00:42:40] [SPEAKER_00] Is that AI now, like, it's the coordination that makes that whole construct so hard. And even we forget, like, this isn't just about internal employees. I've met lots of companies and even for anyone who struggles in this market to apply for and get a new job. Like, I don't know how many times I either have or I've met other people who are like, yeah, I interviewed with a team. Like, we got along really well. And they went some other direction. Maybe they picked how they wanted to prioritize who they hired. And so they leaned into a quality that, like, I don't have as much of as someone else does.

[00:43:10] [SPEAKER_00] So, like, that's fine. I can't fault them for that. But they're like, but there's this moment. We're like, oh, we were vibing for a second. And, like, there's a part of what you said you have a challenge with that the person you have hired can't do immediately. Like, the minority thing that you said you have. It shouldn't be so hard for that company to be like, you know what? I really liked you. Do you want to do a quick, like, 100-hour thing?

[00:43:38] [SPEAKER_00] Like, just, we could hang out together for, like, a little amount of time. And you just helped me with that little problem. And then if it was amazing, maybe we have more opportunities. If it's not great or, like, we don't end up working together, then you still get to keep something. We shake hands. We part ways as adults and be like, that was fine. It's so hard for most organizations to even imagine what it would take to make that one little thing possible. The procurement hurdles, the you name it.

[00:44:07] [SPEAKER_00] I had to get fingerprinted once for a client to do what amount of two, a very small engagement. That was not confidential. And I still had to get fingerprinted because of their policy. It shouldn't be that hard, right? The security, the access, the coordination, the calendar, the what tools you're using, what email, like, I'm optimistic that AI will take some of that coordination layer apart.

[00:44:32] [SPEAKER_00] So that it is easier to be more permeable, to put teams together, or to bring an expert into a team for a short amount of time to do a very discreet thing where you're not giving away the goods. And they're, like, totally ring-fenced technically, right, to work on one file with you. You know, like, I'm done or not. It's, like, never happened. So if the tech makes it easier, I think people will do it more.

[00:44:55] [SPEAKER_00] I think hopefully it will help make the idea of meeting new companies or working with new companies that people have more of a portfolio career in the future, like, easier. But that's going to pull the power to the edges of those teams and go back to the organization. Like, how are you helping all of them operate in that dynamic model?

[00:45:14] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, I saw this ages ago. I mean, I guess at IBM I was sort of spoiled by having a lot of, you know, toys from IBM Research and from software teams and things like that. But I remember even on the consulting side, there was a whole program called Liquid Teams. And they were doing exactly what you described because they had the autonomy from leadership and the buy-in that says this is, you know, obviously way before some of the technical capabilities that we have now.

[00:45:44] [SPEAKER_01] But it was just trying to move the way the market seemed to demand. And if you've got the wherewithal to do it and the resources to do it, yeah, I mean, so I saw some of those consulting models of that. And I also see just from entrepreneurial, you know, friends. I know sometimes serial entrepreneurs, that's exactly how they have continued success because they pull back in the, you know, the founding team.

[00:46:11] [SPEAKER_01] And, you know, they get the band back together and they had success before. They know these guys can work through. They've seen them, you know, work through real life, you know, challenges. And so you can almost bypass a traditional sort of, you know, recruiting, you know, process by just saying, you know, if you guys are available, I could use you even, you know, 10 hours a week or whatever it is, and let's see if we can make this work.

[00:46:34] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Yeah. You know, I used to say, like, if you Googled future of work and you name it, BCG, Deloitte, McKinsey, somebody like in 2018, you largely would have gotten two categories of big think pieces, like automation and gig work, like fluid workforces. Like that was the future. Then COVID hit everybody upside the head. And if you Googled future of work and McKinsey in 2020, you would exclusively get COVID hybrid. Like that was it.

[00:47:03] [SPEAKER_00] It was like the other two things fell to the wayside. Then Chad Tukit showed up. All of a sudden, automation's back. Like COVID hybrid remote still here, still comes up. Hasn't totally gone away, but it is not the center of retention anymore. And like that gig, fluid, workforce liquid teams, all that, like flash teams, it's still there. And it's not growing in the same way. And I don't think it will have the same inflection point. But we shouldn't forget that that's not a new construct, as you said.

[00:47:31] [SPEAKER_00] And it will, it is the linchpin of why I believe in so many of these other things about the need for achieve a work, like the need for more dynamic ways of how we sit in spaces and meeting us where we are and helping us understand the choices that we're making. If they're working or not, kind of like Netflix saying, like, you watch this movie and you like it. So you probably like this.

[00:47:51] [SPEAKER_01] Right.

[00:47:52] [SPEAKER_00] It's the same before.

[00:47:53] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I don't know where all that, you know, these fluid teams or whatever, I don't know where that sits on any kind of, you know, hype cycle. But I feel like we've done experimentation for, you know, at least 15, 20 years. I know, you know, Deloitte had a pixel, you know, program where they were trying to cross-pollinate talent. I do agree with you on the necessary sort of changes to how, you know, incentives are structured and how teams leadership is established. I think there's some financial things that people need to get through.

[00:48:21] [SPEAKER_01] But I've started to see people sort of integrate even like extended workforce stuff out of procurement, bring it back into at least get a visibility, you know, combined with HRS data with your full-time, you know, workforce. And so I think, and then, of course, people are building HRSs for agents as well. So that's a whole other topic for another time. But I think you do.

[00:48:44] [SPEAKER_00] If not by turning their own HRS, you know.

[00:48:46] [SPEAKER_01] Right. Right. But I do think, you know, whether it's the chief of work or, you know, concept of a strategic work architect, you have to have all the pieces on the table to know how to put the puzzle together. And so I think that visibility and that sort of centralization of some of that data is important as you make those decisions. Indeed. Yeah. I mean, just I guess as we wrap up, I want to be respectful of your time. Phil, I could talk to you all day.

[00:49:12] [SPEAKER_01] Some takeaways and some closing thoughts about where you think we're going and where can people find you?

[00:49:18] [SPEAKER_00] Well, people can find me at walktheworkline.com, which is my newsletter, my main website, or on LinkedIn, where I am very active and very responsive to messages. So very easy to find me generally. I give my newsletters weekly if you want the best of my thinking across the lines of modern work. As I said, providing cross-functional courage as much as I can. The observations, I try not to write about headlines and real stories and profiles from the road.

[00:49:42] [SPEAKER_00] And I said this on a brief page with Ben Erlo, this takes a certain level of curiosity and independence and willingness to lock up for the larger companies to keep up with the ones that are AI native. And it is very much a risk that the person who is most likely to eat your lunch is not a person you think of as your peer now. It's someone who's going to do it from the ground without using the kind of operating system that we're talking about.

[00:50:10] [SPEAKER_00] So it is, what's all I'm fresh on? We need to redesign the work and we need more people focusing on change management. That's what everybody's saying. And I just keep saying it can't be leadership has to do that. We've got to kind of decide who and what kind of people and then not outsource that expertise just to consultants outside of your wall. It's going to have to be somebody in the inside independent who will get you there, whether that's a chief of work or head of work design.

[00:50:37] [SPEAKER_00] I don't know, but I'm endlessly fascinated about this journey and love sharing the profiles of people who are trying to do something different. And I'll keep doing that. You know any, anybody hearing this, I would love to hear about that and showcase that because that's the only way we're going to learn.

[00:50:50] [SPEAKER_01] Phil, thank you again for spending some valuable time with me. Yeah, this is fantastic. So I really appreciate it. Thanks everyone for joining. We'll see you next time.