CHRIS PARKER: Hello, this is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity Podcast. I just had another amazing conversation with Joe Pine — second time on the podcast — and this time about his book The Transformation Economy, which gets into the evolution of economic value beyond the experience economy, which he’s so famous for around the world. We get into not only the concept of the transformation economy, but a lot of personal anecdotes and some fun little corners of that universe. But Joe, maybe in your own words, can you share why it would be really valuable for people to spend the time listening to this episode?

JOE PINE: Well, value is exactly the right word, Chris. It’s about creating greater value for your customers by helping them achieve their aspirations. And there’s no greater economic value you can create than to help customers achieve their aspirations — to become who they want to become. And that then increases the value of your business and what you are doing for them, so in the long term you can actually thrive forever, as I like to say. And it’s also about value for you as an individual. There are things that I talk about in there that allow you to see what your own aspirations might be and how you can in fact achieve those, and viscerally understand what transformations are about, and do it for your customers as well.

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CHRIS PARKER: Welcome back to the Business Simplicity Podcast. I have Joe Pine on the podcast again. It was back in 2020 when we had the first conversation, and in that we were talking more about the experience economy. Today we’re going to be taking the next step into the transformation economy. Maybe my own little personal anecdote is — it was when I was a young CIO, and I was, shall we say, frustrated at the amount of waste we were spending on what I call executive ego hobby projects. That’s when I realized — and that was right around when your book Authenticity was first published — I was able to grab on to this thing around the experience economy, like, oh wait, as a north star, this is a framework. And I could never unsee it since then — how we can basically connect the investments of the organization into something that’s meaningful for the customer. So first, thank you for publishing mass customization and then the experience economy. There’s so much that’s been so influential.

So Joe, welcome. One thing I want to kick off on — I know you’ve been asked this before, and when we saw each other a month ago at the kickoff in Amsterdam — I think that’s where you mentioned that this is a book you wanted to write for like 20 or 25 years, that people were basically saying, “Hey, there’s something missing here.” My question to you is: why now? The experience economy, now the transformation economy, which is an evolution of that — can you give us a “why now?” and then maybe a little primer on what the transformation economy is, and we’ll kick it off from there.

JOE PINE: Sure. And I remember the first time we met when you brought your CEO — I think to the Amsterdam area from Belgium — and we talked about these ideas. Even then I think we talked about the transformation economy, because it’s been there from the beginning. I first discovered — I didn’t invent, I just discovered — what companies were naturally doing. The experience economy back in early 1994, and I recognized that experiences were in fact a distinct economic offering, as distinct from services as services are from goods. And I’m always asking, what’s next? What’s next after experiences? I recognized, well, if you take experiences another level, it’s what we often call a life-changing experience — an experience that changes us in some way. And that’s what a transformation is.

So transformation is a distinct economic offering — the fifth and final economic offering: commodities, goods, services, experiences, transformations — where you use experiences as a raw material to guide people to change, to help them achieve their aspiration. Guiding is the economic function of transformations. Like you deliver services, you stage experiences, you guide transformations.

CHRIS PARKER: So if you knew this then — I think that was in 1999 when the experience economy was published — what was the thought process to leave it out?

JOE PINE: No, I didn’t leave it out. It was in there. Well, it’s not on that little progression of economic value — the graph. So yeah, we first published it — Jim Gilmore and I, my partner — first published it in 1997 in an article on strategy and leadership. But in the book, The Experience Economy from 1999, the last two chapters are on transformations. So many people forget that, or didn’t get to the end of the book. I’m not going to accuse you of that, Chris — just that you forgot that we did talk about it there.

And it’s to some degree — the first eight chapters were like a Trojan horse to get you to read the last two chapters, because this is where I knew we were going. But I had been asked since 1999, when are you going to write the full book on transformations? And I just felt two things: one, I didn’t know enough about it, as opposed to all the research we had done on experiences, and two, the world wasn’t ready for it. Transformations is a big, scary word. People — I still had to argue with people about experiences back then. I no longer have to argue that. I just say it and people get it. And now I just talk about transformations and people get it as well. So that’s why I know the world is ready for it.

Part of it is — 2020, we were in COVID, and experiences were all shut down. Coming out of that, I recognized that people, as soon as any experience opened, it was filled to capacity. We so missed having experiences with our loved ones, with our friends, with our colleagues, and even complete strangers in arenas. And what I saw going on — because COVID sort of supercharged this — is that people increasingly wanted not just memorable experiences but meaningful experiences as well. I always considered meaningful experiences as sort of a half step to transformations. Partly Albert Boswijk there in the Netherlands, who I co-founded the European Centre for the Experience Economy with — his book talked a lot about meaningful experiences and impressed that upon me.

And then I realized that half step to transformations means that people were more open to transformations. You see things like the rise of coaching over the last two decades, which was a small little field and now there are hundreds of thousands of coaches around the world helping people achieve their aspirations.

One of the key things — and I didn’t emphasize this as much in the book as I think I should have — is the factor of time. Time is the most precious resource on the planet — the time of individual human beings. And in today’s world, where we have so much abundance compared to not just 250 years ago, but just 50 years ago, 20 years ago — how much more precious our time is. If you look at the opportunity cost of that time, it’s become more precious. We live longer as well. And we want to fill that with experiences. But as it becomes more precious, it’s like — not just how do we spend our time, but how do we invest our time? And that’s what transformations are. Services are time well saved. Experiences are time well spent. Transformations are time well invested — that we invest our time in becoming a better me.

CHRIS PARKER: Now that you bring that up — it’s interesting — there was a review by a Western Kentucky University professor that said this is not a self-help book, but it’s almost like one.

JOE PINE: And that is intentional. I intentionally wrote this so that people would think about themselves. One of the things I’ve always done to get people into experiences is take them on experience expeditions. With clients I’d often take them into a city and say, let’s experience some of the best of the city as consumers — a few of the worst as well — so you can see what a not-good experience is all about. Get them to viscerally feel that, yes, as a consumer I want experiences, and therefore how do I help my customers — even if they’re business people — have those same sorts of experiences?

And here in the book, in the same way, I want people to understand that you as a reader have aspirations. You want to become better in some ways. You have aspects of identity that you want to enhance, or new aspects of identity that you want to gain. And I felt that if they could feel that viscerally, then they’d be more open to the fact that hey, our customers are that way. Our customers have aspirations — and how do we help them achieve that?

CHRIS PARKER: Well, I posted this on LinkedIn as well, and you were kind enough to comment on it, but it’s on page 29 — something just slammed home. I don’t have the book in front of me, so…

JOE PINE: I’ll read it. It’s: “At the heart of business — fostering human flourishing is the true purpose of business. It’s its raison d’être.” So, fostering human flourishing is the true purpose of business.

CHRIS PARKER: I can’t agree with that more, for so many reasons. Can you unpack that? The book is mostly written from the perspective of a company providing transformative experiences — yet this also applies to the staff and the inward-looking dimension, and that’s a bit closer to my heart. My hope is that when people read this book, it’s not only about transforming your company into some sort of guide or sherpa. You can actually apply this really, really close to home. Can you dive into human flourishing and why that is the anchor of all of this?

JOE PINE: Yes. And don’t let me forget to talk about staff as part of that. When I outlined the book — and I always outline my books, but I never follow the outline completely — human flourishing was this little kicker at the end of a chapter where I talked about the four spheres of transformation: the four primary sectors. It keys off of the old English proverb about being healthy, wealthy, and wise. I recognized that the spheres were any business that helps people have health and well-being, wealth and prosperity, knowledge and wisdom, and one that the proverb didn’t have — purpose and meaning. Those are areas where people have aspirations and you can help them transform.

I put them in a Venn diagram and they look like petals. And because I knew they all overlapped — you think about well-being and prosperity, is there a big difference? — I said, well, what’s in the middle? And I recognized, well, that’s human flourishing. What they do is they help us flourish.

My definition of flourishing is the extent to which you are who you are meant to be. I looked up other definitions of flourishing, and some had things like, well, you need four of these seven elements — and I’m like, that’s crazy. It’s going to be different for everybody. What how I flourish, Chris, is different than how you flourish because of the unique human beings that we are.

It became so much bigger that I actually moved it up to the second chapter. I almost think it should be the first chapter if I did it over again. Human flourishing has seen a renaissance in the last 20 years or so in positive psychology. Psychology forever has been negative psychology — we help you recover from trauma. Positive psychology asks: how do we help you flourish? It goes back to Aristotle and the Greek word eudaimonia, which is sort of like living a good life — often earlier translated as happiness, but all the recent translations basically use the word flourishing. And all economic offerings help us flourish — even commodities — because we only ever give up the money in our account for an economic offering if we think that offering has more value than the amount of money.

CHRIS PARKER: Let me grab onto a few of these nuggets and propose something. If the purpose of business is to maximize or enable human flourishing — defined as people becoming the people they should be — is it true then that a primary role, or the primary role, of a business as a collection of humans is to enable flourishing within itself, to enable these humans to be the people they should be, so that they can serve their customers and help them be the people they should be? Because that is somewhat counter to “maximize shareholder value” — in principle they say no, we’re going to hammer these human resource widgets into little boxes so they squeak on demand and squirt out the output that they need. How does that resonate with you? Is this the reason for business? Is this why we congregate as humans?

JOE PINE: Yes. Yes, it absolutely is. Work has forever given people dignity. Work gives life meaning. Where do staff and employee flourishing come from? It’s in that purpose and meaning in large measure. And it doesn’t have to be just professionals — even grunt work can give life meaning. You remember the old parable about building a cathedral, where they got people chipping rocks? You go up to one person and they say, “What are you doing?” — “Well, I’m cracking rock. What does it look like I’m doing?” He’s not getting any meaning out of that work. But you go up to another person and he says, “I’m building a cathedral.” He recognized that his job is crucial to building a cathedral in which people will worship God. And he gets meaning out of that. That is why we congregate together — to get that meaning.

One of the stories in staging transformative experiences is the Crown Worldwide Group as a case study. This was a purpose, meaning, and values initiative where some agencies worked with leadership to discover the deep purpose of the people that work there. What I really liked about it is they didn’t come up with some buzzwords for a poster and try to push it on people — they really engaged with the people in the organization. And they came up with: “We make it simpler for people to live, to work, and to do business anywhere in the world.” They came up with a purpose statement, but they did it in a very experiential way.

CHRIS PARKER: So how was that a transformative experience? I’m asking because I think this is how any company could apply this book at the most basic level. That’s why I grabbed onto that particular case study.

JOE PINE: Exactly. It is a transformative set of experiences for the employees in the organization. And if you want to become a company that guides transformation for customers, and you’re not that today, you’re going to need to transform the company, transform the organization, transform the individual employees within that organization to make that happen. And I do think the first step is coming up with the meaningful purpose of your organization — your corporate raison d’être. Why do you exist in the world other than making a buck?

And I use the words “come up with” — I don’t mean invent. It is uncovering what the purpose of the organization is that people have never really thought about, laid out, and put in stone. It should last for decades, if not forever. And when you do that, you’ll find there’s always some sort of transformational aspect to it. There’s always a reason why people work. It is that meaningful purpose — why people get meaning out of work. Crown Worldwide was a great example of that. Making businesses simpler is a very simple thing, but it actually has a little emotional component too, which I think is important: we exist for others. We’re serving others in making their businesses simpler, and they have this aspiration for their businesses to become simple. It is an aspiration that helps you transform your customers while at the same time transforming yourselves.

CHRIS PARKER: Let’s grab that and connect it to shareholder value, because we pinned that. Can we close that circle?

JOE PINE: Sure. I’m actually writing an article for more of an investor-type audience, and the first line is — paraphrasing a little bit — if you’re a short-term investor, stop reading this article. If you think that shareholder value is maximized on the short term by treating people as widgets, then yeah, you can get a lot of short-term gain, but you’re setting your company up to fail eventually. Instead, you need to set it up to thrive forever — and having meaningful purpose is a key aspect of that.

I do believe that if you understand that your raison d’être is to foster human flourishing — for your customers, but also for your employees, and also for the communities in which you reside, and the greater society, and the planet overall — and to be very clear, I’m not talking about stakeholder capitalism. I’m not talking about these entities having rights on you. I’m saying you have a responsibility to them. And if you understand that and you operationalize it, you will gain much more shareholder value over the long term. You will set yourselves up to thrive forever, as opposed to short-term investment that rises up and then falls into mediocrity and eventually fails.

CHRIS PARKER: Let me maybe confront you with something. The experience economy — you observed it well before 1999 when you published it, and it’s been updated — a second edition, a third edition in 2020. Not all companies around the world consider themselves experience-based organizations, nor should they. So my question is: what is your ambition for the impact of this? Do you feel the experience economy, as an investment of your life energy, made the impact you wanted? And do you feel the transformation economy — the evolution — what impact do you hope that makes?

JOE PINE: I’m very gratified for the impact that the experience economy had. Almost literally not a week goes by without somebody telling me they read it and it changed their lives in some way. It’s just amazing how that happens — many of which I know about, I’ve worked with those companies, or they come up to me. Often just like — I had one last week where somebody said, “I read your book 20 years ago and here’s how it changed my life.” Hearing about those is very gratifying.

I think the transformation economy will have an even greater impact. It’ll take another 10 or 20 years for people to really ascend to the proposition that human flourishing is the raison d’être. There are other people talking about it — John Kay, a professor at London Business School, published a book on 21st century capitalism. I read a review of it in The Economist and they quoted this really ancillary, almost off-handed remark about human flourishing and said, “Hey, this is why this book is so important.” People are starting to recognize it.

And even if they don’t fully ascend to that proposition, but they do recognize that they’re in the transformation business, think about how much more human flourishing will happen because they’re helping people achieve their aspirations — or helping businesses achieve their aspirations, helping their customers achieve their aspirations. I feel that this human flourishing dimension is having the same sort of resonance.

CHRIS PARKER: Let me grab onto terminology. I don’t want to get into too much word-smithing, but way back in the day, we were talking about customer relationship management as a strategic concept of deeply understanding customers — and that turned into Salesforce.com, it’s software now. Then we got customer experience, and now a “customer experience associate” is a call center staff member. Not to diminish that job at all, but I thought this customer experience movement was so much more. It’s been somewhat packaged into tasks and jobs.

JOE PINE: I have a very technical term for this. It’s called bastardization.

CHRIS PARKER: Bastardization. Okay. And now let’s go into transformation — when I first read that, the word transformation — I got it, but I was like, this is such a burned word for me. There are people like myself who have been in corporate transformation, and the T-word is like, we don’t even want to use it anymore because it’s so bastardized already. So what is the ethos of transformation, where can it go, and how might it get bastardized?

JOE PINE: So, CRM was basically a bastardization of my first book, Mass Customization, about understanding individual customers and giving them exactly what they want. Whereas CRM is about understanding individual customers to better sell what we already have — which is very different. CX — bastardization of the experience economy — is about making things nice and easy and convenient, which is the antithesis of an experience, which needs to be memorable and personal and frictionful, not frictionless. CX just gives you great service.

Maybe you’re right that the bastardization of transformation happened before the full book was published — but maybe digital transformation, as it’s so often called, is that internal transformation that is the bastardization. It basically means: let’s not create a better company with better outcomes, let’s get rid of people and lower our costs. That’s what internal transformation so often means. And AI of course can turbocharge that — people think incorrectly that it’s a way of reducing overhead, reducing people, reducing headcount, doing things more efficiently — instead of understanding that what AI is really great at is augmenting people’s skills and abilities. It’s going to be the greatest boon for employment we’ve ever had, as the greatest technological tool invented so far. But I think you’re right — it is that internal transformation, digital transformation, AI transformation that is the bastardization.

CHRIS PARKER: I think let’s grab onto that, but I don’t want to let it pass that you have just explained that you are the father of some major management concept bastards running around the world.

JOE PINE: That’s right. Thank you.

CHRIS PARKER: So okay, we have a title for this episode. I had not made that connection to the word, but yes, I guess you’re right. Remember that word — we have a title for the podcast.

Now, I am busy in the AI space and I am busy in the AI transformation space. One of the clients I had — no lie — called me three or four months ago and said, “Okay, our cloud transformation is done and now we want to implement AI and reduce headcount by 30%. Can you help?” And I was just like — no. I can help with those two separate things maybe, but not in the same breath. Maybe this is where we can start to close the conversation a little bit. You mentioned AI in the book a few times, but it’s light — which I liked, because this is much more of a timeless thing. When organizations are confronted with this superpower of AI augmenting their human capability, what can we take from the transformation economy concepts in order to not mess that up? What are some patterns and anti-patterns that people can use as guiding lights? You want to do AI change right — well, I would say start with human flourishing. Are there other things we can pull out as guiding lights to not destroy companies?

JOE PINE: Yeah. So I agree — start with human flourishing. One of the things I talk about in the book where AI is particularly helpful is experience and transformation platforms. Platforms where you can basically create the set of experiences by which people or companies can transform. One example I give is BetterUp, which is a coaching platform. They work with companies — often when they’re undergoing a digital transformation — and they want to get new behaviors and new mindsets out of people. They open it up to coaching their executives, managers, sometimes frontline personnel. You basically get an app where you provide some personal information, including what you’re looking for personally — so it’s not just what the company wants, but where you want to go in your career. They recommend three different coaches that could best fit with what you’re doing — sort of like swipe left, swipe right — and then you do coaching, often weekly, that helps you transform into who you want to become, combined with who the company wants you to become. And in between, AI fills in the pieces. AI can provide daily inspiration, understand what’s going on on a more daily basis, in concert with what the company wants as well. In the longer term, it’s a great platform to get that internal transformation going.

CHRIS PARKER: I think it’s interesting the path you took on that — BetterUp, and also in the book you talk about Chip Conley’s Modern Elder Academy, which is a mentoring and education platform. My belief is that all of us will need to redefine ourselves professionally in the next five years because of AI. There are some people who will approach that from a position of fear and scarcity and maybe avoid it. And then there are going to be other people and other organizations that lean into these new capabilities — like BetterUp — in order to provide that guidance. Because like it or not, I think we will all have to make that metamorphosis into something new — and still, I hope, become the people that we should become. That’s really the essence of flourishing. And with Modern Elder Academy, the term “chrysalis” was defined — and in that case, we are all, I guess, in that chrysalis right now. Maybe that’s the invitation with AI changing so much — this is the opportunity for organizations to really rethink themselves from the inside out and come up with some new economic offerings as they move forward.

JOE PINE: Exactly. And the chrysalis is a great metaphor for transformation. You go in a caterpillar, you come out a butterfly — that’s a metamorphosis. You’re completely changed. You can’t go back. And organizations can become chrysalises in which you are changed. The Modern Elder Academy — Chip Conley describes it as a chrysalis in which you go.

When I was in the Netherlands and we met again in Amsterdam for the European book launch, I spoke in Rotterdam at a Third Place Summit — all about third places, cafes, bars, libraries, etc. And I emphasized with them that they can be a chrysalis, because a third place is already liminal. It’s neither home nor work — it’s a third place. It’s where people go, and by definition, people come to it often. Every person that comes is undergoing some sort of transformation — maybe multiple transformations at a time. And the third place is a great place to reflect on what’s going on, because your breathing slows down. You’re in this liminal place where you don’t have to think specifically about what’s going on at home or work, but you can think about your life — personally and professionally. I encouraged them to make it a place of reflection, where people are thinking about these things and preparing for the next step in their journey. That’s what a chrysalis is. And there are many organizations — particularly when they have physical places that people come to again and again — that should begin to think of themselves as chrysalises and ask: how do we help people on their transformation journeys?

CHRIS PARKER: Before we pressed record, we talked about connecting somehow to my experience — more in the business-to-business domain, enterprise, oftentimes regulated. There was an organization I was talking to not long ago — a small equipment leasing company based here in Rotterdam called Bquip — a really interesting company. What was fascinating for me in that conversation was that they didn’t really see themselves as a leasing company in a financial sense. In fact, they didn’t want that. They said, “We are not a bank. We do not want that.” And they did large ticket stuff, which inherently is risky. Basically what they’re looking at is: how can they rethink the experience of financing large ticket equipment so that they can enable entrepreneurs to succeed? And I thought that was a transformational view — a really interesting and resonating approach to something I’ve seen done many ways. At LeasePlan when I was there, the tagline was “it’s easier to LeasePlan,” which I always struggled with because we absolutely knew from research that we were not the easiest. So it was aspirational, fine — but also confrontational.

JOE PINE: That’s the bastardization of Authenticity, by the way — x-washing, right-washing, marketing-washing, whatever it is. That’s the bastardization of authenticity. And this is where I love the case of Crown Worldwide — instead of coming up with the x-washing and imposing it, it was really figuring out: for the people that are there, why are they there? What is that evolution, that transformation they’re going through as individuals, and how do you connect that to a greater good?

With B2B in particular, it’s important to understand that no company ever buys your offering because they want your offering. It’s always a means to an end. And if you sell the end rather than the means, you create much more value. You really need to focus on the outcomes your customers achieve. Whatever business you’re in, you need to ask why. Why do they want our offering? Understand that — then ask it again and again, however many times it takes to get down to some core aspiration that you can then think about: how do we subsume what we’re doing today in helping them do that? And that will create the shareholder value when you figure that out and are able to help them achieve those aspirations.

And what Bquip did — and I’ve seen a lot of leasing companies and it’s a little counterintuitive — if they’re there to help entrepreneurs succeed by providing the financing, they don’t look at the entrepreneur first. They look at the asset first. That’s very interesting, because typically with every other bank-based leasing company, they do the credit review of the client first and say, “Okay, this is how much they can afford,” and then try to fit the asset into it. In this case, the company specializes in just a handful of assets they know very, very well — and they say, okay, you need, let’s say, a container — some large metal thing — and they know exactly the lifecycle of that container, the residual value, and from that they’re able to come back and make a really creative deal. To be the experts in something the entrepreneur is not — and then figure out how to make it work. That’s it.

CHRIS PARKER: I don’t know. I think with inspiration from the transformation economy, people can — if they allow themselves — really start to reimagine some of the things that they do, who they do it for, and why they do it. And just do it in a non-bastardized, authentic way.

JOE PINE: Exactly.

CHRIS PARKER: So Joe, how can people benefit from you? Obviously The Transformation Economy has been released about three weeks ago. We’ll put the links in the show notes. I personally would absolutely recommend it — not only for those creating transformational experiences as an offering, but also as a way to just look at their business. Beyond that, Joe, I’ll put Strategic Horizons in the show notes as well. Can you explain a little bit about Strategic Horizons and how people can benefit?

JOE PINE: Sure. We call it a thinking studio, as opposed to a consulting company — a thinking studio that helps people create and design better economic offerings that create more economic value. On that website, at the end of the book, we talk about strategichorizons.com/integration. There’s a framework in the book called Encapsulation, Preparation, Experience, Reflection, Integration — and I model that in the book so the book itself can be transformative. But I can’t do integration — I can’t help you integrate the ideas — so we do have a set of offerings on that page, including one-on-one consulting by the hour, so we can help you think through your offerings.

We also published the Transformation Toolkit at the same time we released the book — a high-value offering on how to do everything that’s in there. There are eight different tools, one for every chapter, plus one that encompasses both the first chapter and the last chapter: if you’re in the transformation business, you actually need to charge for the outcomes your customers achieve, because inputs don’t matter — only outcomes.

And then we’re going to have in August our first Transformation Economy Expert Certification Course. We’ve been doing Experience Economy Expert Certification Courses since 2006. I’m going to start that based off the workbook so that people can get certified in this and really know how to do it inside of their company or with their clients. It’s my full transformation offering, which will come with a transformation guarantee on the outcome you get out of it — to help people really embrace the concepts in the book and have an impact on the world.

CHRIS PARKER: I’ll include all of that in the show notes. Joe Pine, thank you so much for this. It’s always inspirational, fun, and educational. I really appreciate it.

JOE PINE: Thanks, Chris.

Chris Parker: Hello, this is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity Podcast. I have talked with Maarten Mantje from The Only Constant with the backdrop of taste-testing his gin, Stookers Gin, which he created the recipe for with AI a number of years ago. He also tasted some sloe gin that I make at home. So, we’ve been drinking through this conversation, but the essence of this has been around the impact of AI on organizations, how to adopt AI in organizations, and what that means about knowing yourself and knowing the possibilities of technology. While we had fun with gin, we also got deep into what AI is really doing in our lives and in businesses. So Maarten, why would this be valuable? What insights would they get if they listen to this episode?

Maarten Mantje: In essence, the thing we talked about most, and what I think you will get out of it, is to go out, dream big, and start building small things. You will find that both are actually quite possible. So dream big, start building, and you will see that new things will happen.

Chris Parker: Welcome back to the Business Simplicity Podcast. I’m having a conversation and I’m going to be drinking some booze with Maarten Mantje, who is a founder of The Only Constant. We’ll get into what The Only Constant is about regarding his innovation, digital change, and advisory practice here in the Netherlands. He has created, with some fellow co-founders, a gin brand called Stookers. As we’ve been working together in the strategy and adoption subgroup of the Gen AI Circle, he mentioned in passing that he used AI to create gin. Before we pour some gin, Maarten, thank you for joining. Can you share a little bit about your story, where The Only Constant came from, and how that brought you into the world of gin?

Maarten Mantje: Well, first, thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk about transformation, AI, and particularly about booze. One small thing for the Stookers: Stookers has two O’s rather than one, which you would expect in Dutch.

Going way back, I have a master’s degree in management and organization, which I did nothing with for 25 years. I went into working for digital agencies and had a startup. Working in digital agencies and in advertising mostly as a strategic planner, one of the frustrations I always had is that as a planner, you always need other people to do stuff. I can think, I can write, I can create beautiful decks, and then hope for the best. Then this thing, generative AI, came along and it showed me that I could make more than I expected. I had a similar experience with 3D printing before that—the idea that you can create physical stuff.

The gin basically came from the same ambition. We were three friends on a terrace in Austria. The tonic ran out and the gin was disgusting. One of the friends, who is a chemist, said, “I can do better.” I said let’s make that into a product. Finding the right flavor and recipe was a challenge, but getting it into a store legally was way more time-consuming.

We didn’t start out with an AI recipe. The first two flavors, which are still available, are based on tea—Organic Green and Organic Black. But then, my chemist friend is not the one to talk to about flavor. I was curious: what does spring taste like? Or what does Amsterdam taste like? There was this ambition to have a different way of talking about flavor. About two and a half years ago, using a predecessor to Perplexity, I figured let’s see if I can make a distiller recipe for a gin that tastes like the Dutch Summer.

Before I knew it, I was in a conversation with this machine about what a gin recipe is and what a Dutch Summer tastes like. The distilling of gin is kind of a violent and aggressive process. There are a lot of flavors that don’t survive the distilling process. I found myself in a conversation with this machine, and it understood that process; it knew some flavors would be more dominant after distilling than others. After a couple of hours, I had a recipe. The flavor profile, the way the ingredients matched together, was super interesting.

We spent the weekend distilling a very small batch. It turned out to be surprisingly good. We experimented a bit more, only with the amounts of the ingredients, and something really interesting came out. It’s one of the few gins I actually like straight. Through a former colleague, I got in touch with the global master distiller of one of the biggest gin brands in the world. I sent her a bottle, and she sent a message back that she really liked it.

It’s been on the market for a bit over a year and a half now. It was one of the first gins in which the recipe was created by an AI. The thing I found most magical about it is that two guys and a machine can actually create something which is liked by the one defending the flavor of the biggest gin brand in the world. The game changed.

Chris Parker: What I loved about it is that you started with an abstract, very human concept—you wanted something that tastes like Dutch Summer. With the decisions you made with the quantities, was that a bit heretical? Did you break some longstanding industry views?

Maarten Mantje: Yeah. The main thing that makes it Dutch, according to the machine, is strawberry and mint. So, it’s a soft and gentle strawberry-minty gin. The problem with strawberry is you need large quantities to have the flavor in there after distillation. If this had to be a commercially viable product where we needed to live from the revenues, we would never have made it like this because the margins are super thin.

Chris Parker: I have Dutch Summer here in front of me. I’m going to start cracking it. You advised I can just drink it straight?

Maarten Mantje: Straight in. Not too cold, because then you will lose the flavor.

Chris Parker: It just screams freshness to me. It’s not overwhelming. Sort of citrusy to me. I’m not picking up any strawberry going on for me at this moment.

Maarten Mantje: No, wait for it.

Chris Parker: Whoa. That does not hit like gin. It is very soft until it’s not. It hits the palate and then it kind of explodes through your nasal cavity.

Maarten Mantje: Yeah. There are these Chinese flowers that are edible; you put them on your tongue and after a while, it just goes whoosh and grows into this really citrusy flavor.

Chris Parker: That’s the sensation I just had. I took the taste and I was like, well, it’s hardly even alcohol, then it just kind of flowed over the tongue and then… whoa. Really nice.

Maarten Mantje: It is drinkable without tonic. Many variations of hard liquor have this feeling that you feel it going down. That’s not so much here. So, it’s super dangerous.

Chris Parker: My story with gin, which is also why my ears perked up, is actually sloe gin. Sloe gin is let’s call it an infusion. It uses the blackthorn berry, the sloe berry. The traditional recipe is just gin—usually the worst tasting, cheapest gin you can find because you’re not going to taste the gin—berries, and sugar. What I do is a little bit perverse; I like a little bit of flavor, so I put a couple of cloves and a little chunk of a cinnamon stick in there. I have a bottle here.

Maarten Mantje: Can I open it?

Chris Parker: You may open it. It survived an accident, so it should be good. No AI involved.

Maarten Mantje: It’s nice and thick. The clove is there for sure. It’s nice. Very sweet. Dangerous.

Chris Parker: This is like half gin, half berry.

Maarten Mantje: I really like the clove in it. I think otherwise it would be less interesting. It’s very wintry. So basically, with the Dutch Summer and this, we cover the whole year.

Chris Parker: Let’s dive past the booze. You mentioned that two guys and a machine were able to make something of a unique quality. For me, the biggest opportunity—and threat—is two guys in a machine doing something that a legacy organization is unable to even think about. It’s democratizing creation. How are you helping organizations with that via The Only Constant?

Maarten Mantje: The thing we did is basically cheating. There’s nothing new, it’s just faster. We were able to skip a lot of steps because we had access to a machine. The things that were most important in the creation of this recipe were knowing what we wanted and deciding whether we found it or not—briefing and reviewing. I use Stookers as my marketing lab for The Only Constant. Everything I can’t sell, or if I need a market, we just create it in Stookers.

About two years ago, we created a fully autonomous social media department. It’s still live at @stookers on Instagram. It posts seven times a week. We created a social media agency with a boss, a strategy planner, a researcher, copy agent, design agent, PR, and project manager. By automating the department, it taught me that if I automate the whole department, I can learn what I definitely should do and what I definitely should not leave to the machines.

Optimizing oneself or a task within your own job will just make a faster you. We need a way to get people to talk about possibilities. We created a set of cards that allows you to talk about what the machine could do in a certain phase of a process. If you take away hurdles and look at things from a systems theory perspective, you can redesign in a new way.

At The Only Constant, we have three big domains: Ideate, Automate, and Innovate. Ideate is understanding what is possible. Automate is making myself a bit more efficient. Innovate is creating stuff that couldn’t be done before.

Chris Parker: I have a copy of your cards. One I called out is “AI predicts future outcomes.” There are others like “AI converts data formats” and “AI reviews guidelines and standards.” In my experience, people are paralyzed because they don’t know what they do now; they’re constrained by systems. It’s a maturity process of understanding self.

Maarten Mantje: The most fascinating thing is that conversations become active. People stand around the table with these tangible cards, move stuff around, and the thinking will be different. It’s strictly about getting a better understanding of what is possible.

Chris Parker: We are both members of the Gen AI Circle, specifically the strategy and adoption subgroup, and we are working on a playbook. How do you see a collectively written playbook supporting that mission?

Maarten Mantje: I think the thing we try to achieve is that it shows you a way to get to a desired end state. LinkedIn is full of white papers that are super high level but not practical. Or they focus only on the technical process—like “use my prompt to make this video”—without taking into account whether that fits your brand.

We try to help people understand how you could get from random “let’s do stuff” to something more sustainable. We explain why so many AI initiatives fail—often because you haven’t clearly defined the starting point and the end state. I’m proud that it is written in a way that you can imagine people reading it on a Sunday afternoon while drinking their sloe gin or Stookers.

Chris Parker: I was impressed that when we presented this eight-stage framework, it created active conversations. We gave labels to concepts like “Discover Potential” before “Design Solution.” And “Activate,” which is running the proof of value before you scale it. You can condense what used to be a two-year program into a week now on disposable tech to prove it works.

I want to mention the Stookers Instagram again. It’s a bit quirky. There are a few things that are abstract, and every fourth one is just a bottle with a background.

Maarten Mantje: I’ve seen worse! The reason it’s still acceptable is that we were quite strict on defining what it should be. If I tell the model not to put bottles in there, it gives me more bottles. Branding was a problem. But the thing I wanted to prove is that using AI for tasks is only sensible if you have a very clear understanding of what right or wrong output is. If you can’t explain to the model what is right, you will get guesses.

Chris Parker: This is the first episode of 2026. Any last tip or thought on what’s happening this year with Gen AI?

Maarten Mantje: Two things. First, if you want to understand what this technology can do for you, you need to understand how it will destroy your business. If you truly understand that, then you can think about what you should be.

Second, I enjoy the posts of Ethan Mollick. He asks the weirdest questions to AI imaginable. If you want to understand what can be done, be the seven-year-old kid again and ask weird questions. Ask it to make stuff. Asking “Can you help me make a recipe that tastes like Dutch Summer?” made no sense to ask a computer two years ago, but suddenly it was meaningful.

Chris Parker: I love it. Maarten Mantje from theonlyconstant.nl and stookers.nl (that’s with two O’s). Leaving with these points: understand the risk to your business—how will this destroy my business—and have this playful, creative curiosity. Go build with it so you understand yourself more, your company more, and the possibilities more. Happy New Year everyone.

Maarten Mantje: Make more stuff.

Chris Parker: Thank you for listening.

 

Chris Parker: Hello, this is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity Podcast. I had a conversation with Werner Spronk. He is a recruiter and headhunter with Tech Terra Search here in the Netherlands, and he’s focusing on Chief Product Officers and Chief Technology Officers, or the combination of CPTOs. We had a very interesting conversation about his approach, which doesn’t only look at the candidates in the search, but actually the entire leadership team dynamic, the mix, the personalities, the skills, and preferences there. Sometimes even the work type and how those individuals are energized. The point of this is to not only select the right person but really to contribute to having that person be a net add to the team on a long term. It’s a really nice approach. So, Werner, why would it be really valuable for people to listen to this?

Werner Spronk: I believe that if you understand the true team dynamics—what makes a team strong, what makes a team not strong—and if you have proper insight into those, you can hire someone who makes the entire team stronger. Especially on the C-level, I think 70%, 80%, maybe 85% of the success of a person is how they fit into that leadership team. So that should be central when you want to hire someone, when you want to add someone to the team.

Chris Parker: Welcome back to the Business Simplicity Podcast. This is Chris Parker, and I’m having a conversation with Werner Spronk. He is a recruiter and headhunter with his own firm called Tech Terra Search. His specialty is right up my alley, meaning Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, and CPTOs—these hybrid beasts that sometimes I fit into as well. I love it on his LinkedIn; he says he occasionally does CEOs and Commercial Officers, but he’s primarily in the tech and product space in the mid-market and scale-up space.

Werner, you have a certain method that I thought was really cool, and I’m excited to unpack it with you. That method is a way of understanding how a new tech or product leader can best land in a leadership team for the most value. But before we go into that, tell us a little bit about how you got to this point of running Tech Terra with this focus and in this unique way.

Werner Spronk: Thank you. I like being here a lot. If I go back really far, I’m always about understanding something first before judging. I think I stumbled into the domain of a recruiter; there’s no education for it. I think most people somehow end up in it without it being a conscious decision. I noticed that I really like being able to do something for people and for companies. It’s a very people-driven job, but also quite commercial, which blended really well.

When I started in this job 12 years ago, the product position in many companies was still not that mature. So it was pretty complex understanding what type of person you need, how they fit within the company, and what success looks like. That’s why I like the product domain.

What I’ve seen in recruitment and headhunting is that it’s really strange that people focus up to doing a placement and then they take their hands off. That’s supposedly the job of the company or the candidate, but that’s where the journey actually starts. If you look at what makes someone successful in a leadership team, experience and hard skills are hygiene factors—they are a must-have. But what really differentiates if someone is successful is whether they are a fit with the assignment of what the company needs to do and how they fit within that leadership team.

Chris Parker: To do so, you have to assess the leadership team to understand whether they are fit for the future and fit for purpose. And the leadership team has to be open to doing that.

Werner Spronk: Exactly. Before you jump into working on an assignment, you have to have a completely different conversation—quite often with founders in my case—about why they are doing what they’re doing. Are they doing things that give them energy or drain energy? Is it based on ego, or because they don’t see another way?

How I came to my proposition nowadays is that I not only want to find the person that does the job, but I want to find the person that makes the entire team stronger. The job is way more interesting because you end up somewhere between being a coach, a headhunter, and a consultant designing teams. You can help them be successful: how to connect with the team, how to connect with their leader better, and then you start truly making an impact.

Chris Parker: I did a little research, and I couldn’t find any metrics of failure or success for CPTOs specifically. But what I was able to find is a number of risks or known issues. One is bringing the wrong playbook—coming in with a heavy enterprise bureaucratic approach for a smaller scale-up. It’s just not going to fit.

Another issue is when founders are still there. Founders have these personality-driven approaches rather than role-driven ones. If a new Head of Product comes in, does the founder give it away? Are they synced up on prioritization? I think there are so many opportunities for this to go wrong. The thing that triggered me about your approach was that you looked at the management team. It wasn’t only the relationship between the Head of Product and the CEO, but the team dynamic. How did you get to this point where you realized you needed a more holistic approach?

Werner Spronk: I’m quite a curious person, so I always like to find new approaches. Four or five years ago, I got the question quite often: “Do we need a CTO, a CPO, or a CPTO?” I started thinking, can I make a decision tree for this? I did about 30 to 35 interviews with CTOs, CPOs, and CEOs. I found there were so many variables that I couldn’t make a simple decision tree.

So, I went back to those people and asked a different question: “What do I need to ask to understand the context to make the right choice?” That ended up in what I call a “Quick Scan.” It’s between 25 to 30 questions which I use to understand the company, the team, the situation, and the assignment, and then work backwards to getting a profile.

During those discussions, I noticed that people would almost never talk about the team aspect, which is really strange. If I asked, “How do you focus on the team?”, it was often based on gut feel. For me, that was strange because I’ve never seen a C-level hire fail because they lacked hard skills. It’s almost always the team part.

Chris Parker: If I’m understanding this correctly, you’re actually talking about the dynamic between the CEO, probably the CTO, and the new leader. You seem to also be looking at the shift or change this new role brings. You’re looking at a system here, as opposed to just filling a seat on the bus. Is this remarkably different than a typical recruiting process?

Werner Spronk: I believe it is. Normally recruitment or headhunting focuses on a person. If assessments are being done, it’s based on that person. It’s almost never about the team. I’ve only seen one other person doing this in the Netherlands.

I often work with founders who were able to spot their blind spots but were not able to act upon them. I’ve seen it go wrong there. Quite often when someone starts, they do a good job for the first six to nine months. But when pressure hits, or things don’t go as smoothly as expected, tiny things that people felt underwater start to become big things. That becomes the reason for not going further together. That is almost always in the team part or the internal collaboration.

Chris Parker: It sounds like what you’re expressing is that there could be a “lazy” way—just assess the candidate’s hard skills and bring them in. But your way requires a deeper investment of time, energy, reflection, and self-awareness. Can you walk us through the process from the eyes of a CEO? Imagine a founder CEO calls you and says, “Warner, we need a Chief Product Officer.” How does that go?

Werner Spronk: Funny thing is, I don’t pitch at all. I always start by asking a lot of questions. In the end, I say, “I think I can help you, but it’s up to you to decide.” One of the things that needs to happen during that first interview is that I give the other people feedback on what they are doing, what probably works for them, and what doesn’t. If that resonates, I’m in. If it doesn’t resonate, I’m completely out.

Ideally, the CEO needs to be flexible and adaptive to not having his first question (“Do you know what we need?”) answered within 15 minutes. I need a lot more time. I need to understand the CEO, the team, and the assignment. I have to talk to five people for that—usually three, four, or five team members. Then I do an assessment with all those people. Then I give them a Quick Scan debrief with advice on the team, and then I come up with a profile.

Chris Parker: That is remarkable. In processes I’ve been in, as a candidate, I have to do an assessment. I’ve often asked, “Can I see the same assessment for the team I’m joining?” That would give me insight. You’re actually doing it. How do you assess those five people?

Werner Spronk: I use three different perspectives to understand better what the person is good at, what gives them energy, how they collaborate, and how they act under pressure.

First, I use the Big Five Personality traits. It is trait-based and scientifically backed. It helps understand how people relate to each other. For example, if you have three people in a team with a lot of willpower, probably you don’t need a fourth because you’re just going to get a big fight.

The second tool is an Archetype model, which identifies eight archetypes—like Strategist, Builder, Innovator, Coach, or Communicator. It focuses on what gives you energy and where you feel good.

The last one is the Job Fulfillment Matrix. This is a 2×2 matrix: energizing vs. draining on one axis, and good at it vs. bad at it on the other. I ask people to list their main tasks and plot them on this map. In the end, you want to be where it gives you energy and where you’re good at it. Most teams have 60-80% of their tasks in the “good at it and energizing” quadrant. The friction is in the tasks that don’t give energy or where they are bad at it.

Chris Parker: How do you use that insight to come up with a new constellation for the team?

Werner Spronk: If you find the gaps and understand what the company needs to do, you can say, “Maybe we want to hire someone who is strong at that particular perspective.” Then it becomes interesting: do you want someone complimentary to you, or someone who can cross the bridge between where you are right now and where you want to go?

For example, I worked with a startup that wanted to work with big corporates. Do they hire someone who is extremely good with procedures and structure (like a corporate), or do you hire someone who is in between the big corporate and them? Having those understandings of where you are as a person and as a team allows you to have the right discussion about whether that candidate is the right contribution to your team.

Chris Parker: It’s almost “hire the smile and train the rest,” but for executives. If you hire for the personality, engagement, and service, you can fill in the hard skills. I think looking forward, with AI, finding people and selecting on hard skills will be automated in two or three years. So the job of recruitment will shift completely. What is the added value of people in the future? It’s the “Human IP”—understanding stress, motivations, and relationships.

Werner Spronk: Absolutely. AI won’t be able to do that in the near future. AI can detect things like stress, but does it know where the stress comes from? Is the person intimidated by you? Did they have a bad announcement just before? Are they stressed because they have to pick up their kids? From a human perspective, if you can see something is happening, address it, and understand why, that is where the trust and magic happen.

Chris Parker: Before we wrap up, how can people apply this wisdom on their own if they aren’t working with you?

Werner Spronk: The best interview is where the other one speaks more than you do. As a candidate, you have the right to ask the right questions and flip the vibe. Make sure you have your list of questions going in. Ask the unspoken questions. Ask: “What is the team really good at? What does the team need to improve? And what is my own role in that?” If you ask those three questions to a person that interviews you, you’re getting a lot of input for yourself.

Chris Parker: That is brilliant. Werner, thank you so much for joining. This was super cool.

Werner Spronk: Likewise, I love being here.

[00:01]
Hello, this is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity Podcast. I just had a conversation with Karen de Boeck and Jürgen Maus from Green Elephants.

Hey Jürgen, what is it that we spoke about?

We spoke about the launch of Green Elephants, the value we bring to our customers, and also how the Simple Business Design helped us get started.

Hey Karen, why would it be valuable to listen to this podcast?

This would be very valuable because we practically discussed how to get your organization moving forward in a human way. We had a great conversation on the power of purpose and intention, and we talked about business design and how we applied it ourselves.

[00:38]
Welcome to the Business Simplicity Podcast, where we learn about strategies and tactics to succeed through simplicity. I’m your host, Chris Parker. Welcome back.

I’m having a conversation with Karen de Boeck and Jürgen Maus from Green Elephants. Green Elephants was recently launched. You can learn more at greenelephants.be. I am proudly a collaborator—Ebullient and Green Elephants have worked together in the past and certainly will in the future.

I’m delighted to have Karen and Jürgen here to share what Green Elephants is doing in the world, the impact they’re making, and the problems they’re solving. The company launch also used the Simple Business Design Canvas to help craft its foundation, and I’m really excited to hear how that methodology helped.

[01:17]
It’s always special and unexpected when I talk with Karen and Jürgen. Today, we have both of them here. Before we get into learning more about them, I understand they wanted to begin with a question for me.

Yeah, definitely. There’s one question I’ve always wanted to ask you, Chris: Who are you, and what is it that you do?

Wow. Who am I and what do I do? That’s coming back at you—expect that boomerang.

[02:54]
Who am I and what do I do? That distinction between being and doing is perfect and poetic.

I can answer that in many ways. What comes to mind is I’m a child trapped in a man’s body. I see the world playfully and with curiosity. I seek delight, adventure, and experience. My dream job would be Santa Claus. If that job ever becomes available, I’d love to magically conjure things to bring delight to people—not to solve all their problems, because the power and joy of life come through contrast, conflict, challenge, and tension. Satisfaction comes from overcoming obstacles—usually with others, like we’ve done in the past.

A dear friend of mine, Trevor, once described my “user manual” as someone who opens the hidden doors. If there’s a mysterious door in the corner, I’m the one who’ll wander over and see what’s going on. That usually leads to unexpected and mysterious paths—not necessarily toward success but toward experience.

Another way to describe me is through Myers-Briggs. I’m an INTP—introverted, intuitive, thinking, perceiving. I do a lot of work in my mind, but I also love collaboration. I enjoy moments like this.

Is there anything there you didn’t know about me or that you’d like to unpack?

[05:17]
I recognize everything you said. You always ask that question—”Who are you?”—and it reminded me that we do that too, when we’re working with others. We listen first, find out who they are, and connect. That’s why I wanted to start the podcast this way.

…

Chris Parker: Welcome back to the Business Simplicity podcast. This is Chris Parker, and I’m having a conversation with Araz Najarian. She’s a partner with the ELP network. I’m associated with ELP as well and I’ve done some projects with them over the years. Their tagline is “realizing breakthroughs,” and I know them for working with management teams and executive teams, particularly in scale-up, change, and large strategic shift moments. In a moment, I’ll let Araz share deeper into what ELP is doing.

Recently, part of the network had a conversation about psychometrics, and that was hosted by Araz and Michael Newman, another associated member with ELP. I thought it was really fascinating, and some of the insights that came back… I just couldn’t resist. I said, “Hey Araz, can we please talk about this and unpack this? I want to go deeper.” I love having these conversations because this is what I learn and connect.

So we’re going to dive into psychometrics in the context of business leadership, strategizing, and decision-making, and hopefully, when not to use them or how not to use them as well. And soon we’ll define what psychometrics actually are. But Araz, thank you so much for joining. Maybe if you want to express a bit deeper about ELP and the type of work you do there, and then we’ll turn the corner and figure out what psychometrics is all about.

Araz Najarian: Super. Well, I joined ELP quite some time ago, actually. It was in the midst of the first financial crisis of the 2000s, back in 2008. I was also at a period where I was searching for my next step. A mentor of mine from the ISC network, Fernando Lanzer, said, “Maybe before jumping into a single company in the private sector, why don’t I introduce you to the partners of the ELP network?” He introduced me to Nick Van Heck and Tom Cummings, who were both partners at the time, and said, “Why don’t you actually try that out?”

What really attracted me, and why I ended up staying so many years later and becoming part of the partnership, was that when they created the company, there were two main drivers.

One was asking the question: Why is it that some organizations manage to stay relevant and continue growing for 100-plus years, and others fade away? What really makes the difference? The research showed that it’s nothing to do with industry differences or macroeconomic factors. It all comes down to: How are you able to stay connected to the outside world? How do you continue to create value for others—value as perceived by the customer, and value beyond just price?

And then, are we able to successfully organize ourselves to make money so we can pay people, pay our suppliers, and keep reinvesting in the business? Continuing that pattern of renewal is what’s going to help fuel that growth.

To enable that, they saw that some practices in organizations were being run in a very disconnected way. For example, for the strategy process, all the senior people go away and do this “egghead” type of brainy exercise. Then they come back and tell everybody, “Here’s what we’re going to do, here’s why, and here’s what you’re supposed to do.” That’s very much strategy as execution, which, more and more, we see really does not work. Strategy is not some static document. It’s actually strategizing—it’s strategy as learning.

On the other hand, you look at executive leadership development. People would go away on these wonderful offsites, have profound insights, and yet when they’d come back, engagement scores or other sentiment metrics were abysmal. How do people feel about their manager? Do I belong here? Do I feel invited? If you’re creating that kind of workplace, that’s a workforce you have to drag along to get results, versus everybody showing up every day excited and ready to contribute.

That’s essentially where we try to play: to support that renewal of growth and bring strategizing and leadership together.

Chris Parker: Did you guys find a causality from that second order of engagement with that 100-year-ambition of a healthy company? I hope that’s true. The intention is: what makes these long-term sustainable companies is the connection with the outside (a leadership action) and then strategizing and engaging. Are those two concepts the main things that contribute to long-term sustainability, do you think?

Araz Najarian: Well, we looked at it and said those dynamics are actually quite leading and have a heavy weight in the ability to find new ways of creating value, because the world around you also changes. You see that with companies that have been successful, but when competition or new technology comes along and they’re unable to adapt, they’re in a difficult situation playing catchup.

I think what we’re always doing, in terms of our connection to academia, is continuing to renew that research, but also research into the practices. How can some of those practices—that are less tangible to measure than financial metrics—give a sign of whether we are actually healthy and on the path that’s going to eventually show up in our financials?

Chris Parker: Yeah, I think so. You mentioned academic—it’s my association with ELP where I met Amy Edmondson from Harvard around psychological safety and “positive failing.” And I remember when I first met Nick Vanhack, the partner you mentioned, probably 20 years ago when I was with LeasePlan in an executive program. He was simplifying some of these concepts, like value creation versus value capture. People talk about that a lot nowadays, but separating those intents was profound for me at that time. Would you mind diving into that? What is value creation versus value capture? And then I’m curious, how does psychometrics fit into all this?

Araz Najarian: That’s a very good question. We could do hours on this! When you dive into value creation, it’s based on the eyes of the customer. So it’s not something you can consistently and easily measure, because it’s very much a perception. Where I’ve seen the value of decoupling those two… if you look at Michael Porter, he started to talk a lot about “shared value.” That was eye-opening for many because you decouple value purely from shareholder value.

What I like about value creation vs. value capturing is how it separates and shows that stakeholders can have competing interests. There are businesses that make a lot of money, are highly profitable, and make their shareholders very happy, but have a customer base that isn’t satisfied. They may feel stuck, like in a monopoly.

What happens is, eventually, when competition does come along, you start losing your topline because the captive customers you had leave. Then you might start restructuring or buying revenue through acquisitions, but you’re not fundamentally looking at: Who is my customer? What am I serving? And how am I looking at value for them?

Chris Parker: Can you give an example of an engagement when you’re talking about that sustainable business ambition—helping an organization’s leadership connect to the outside world while strategizing to engage the rest of the company, all while keeping an eye on value capture versus value creation? Is this the essence of the engagements ELP steps into?

Araz Najarian: Yeah, it’s definitely one of the iconic pieces. You talked about our tagline, “realizing breakthroughs.” For us, it’s realizing breakthroughs in the context of growth. We talk about “creating space for growth.” We’re looking at growth not purely as you may end up bigger; that’s not necessarily the purpose. It’s not just more of the same.

As Roger Martin talks about: are we exploiting or are we exploring? There’s the part of growth that’s exploration, and that’s very much transformative. So the type of engagement we have really depends on what’s happening in the organization and where the entry point is. In a lot of cases, it does start with the leadership team, because they are the ones setting the context.

I think this ties into psychometrics. When we prepare for an engagement, like an offsite with a leadership team, we talk to the people beforehand to get to know who is in the team and how they are looking at the current situation. Oftentimes, what I hear back is a feeling of doubt: “I think we’re more or less aligned, but I’m not really sure,” or, “We have a plan, but I don’t know how they’re feeling about it.”

It’s the things that are left unsaid, what’s sitting under the surface that doesn’t come up in the day-to-day business. It doesn’t come up in a management meeting because time is too short, or because of that interpersonal risk Amy Edmondson points out. Can I actually bring something up that’s challenging, or a criticism, without people perceiving me as being negative?

Teams have offsites all the time, but sometimes they just become an extended management meeting, which is a pity. Those are the only moments we have as a leadership team to create space to surface those things we aren’t even conscious of and get really aligned on where we actually are today. We all have different definitions of the challenges or the assets we should be leveraging.

Some of that comes down to fundamentally different preferences and behaviors in how we want to problem-solve. That’s where I find tools like psychometrics, depending on how we use them, can be so powerful in a team setting. We get a language to understand why you are thinking that way.

Chris Parker: I was first introduced to psychometrics in my MBA, and later when I was running an international project for LeasePlan, we ran the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for the whole team. It was really revealing. It peeled back another layer of understanding myself, and through that, understanding how others might experience me. And I can see them through a different lens.

When you understand how personalities shift by context—at work, at home, or under stress when a shadow dimension comes out—I think it creates a space of acceptance and sometimes forgiveness. “Oh, that’s who this person is.” Even though they’re behaving oddly, I can see beyond the behavior.

I’ve always been interested in these things to understand myself better. But maybe you can give it a stab: What is psychometrics, and what are some examples? I mentioned Myers-Briggs, but there’s a whole menagerie of different approaches.

Araz Najarian: Chris, before I do that, can I ask you a question back? What you just described, it sounds like the first time you were introduced to something like an MBTI was in a team context?

Chris Parker: Yes.

Araz Najarian: And was that also… you were guided through it?

Chris Parker: Absolutely. The first time was at Nyenrode for the MBA. The process was described to us, we were given the assessment, and we were also given a number of warnings. I found that really interesting. It was an MBA setting, so we were able to share, and it was a bonding thing. We were like, “Oh, I understand you better now.”

So then, when I was tasked to create a company in Ireland, we had about 50 people coming together—internals and externals, people who had never worked together. I was seeking connection and understanding quickly. We did some offsites, and that was the first time I used this type of thing for a team I was responsible for. It was a conversation starter. I think that was the biggest thing.

Araz Najarian: Yeah. I was curious because the first time I was ever introduced to MBTI, it was not a good experience. For me, part of it was because the debriefing was not done very well. We didn’t get out of it what you just described—building understanding and curiosity. It ran the risk of stereotyping and labeling.

It was later on, in a different context, that I was reintroduced to it (I can’t remember if it was MBTI or Insights, another Jungian-based tool), and the debrief made such a difference. We had someone who could give warnings, asking, “Why are we using this? What is it going to say about you?” Keep in mind, no human can be boxed and completely categorized. It sounds like your first introduction, having a good guide, brought benefit rather than just becoming a label.

Chris Parker: I certainly didn’t feel boxed. For me, it’s been very consistent over the years: I’m an INTP (Introvert, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiver) as a natural state. I started to identify with that archetype—kind of a visionary, architect, problem-solver. It gave me validation, like, “Oh, I feel comfortable in my skin when I hear those words.”

What I also realized is that in work, I had trained myself to be in the “J” (Judging). And I noticed this because we’re going to talk about this SPI report… I think there was some J coming out of that as well.

For people who don’t know MBTI, that last acronym (Perceiving vs. Judging) is basically: do you like to keep things open, or do you like to close things and be definitive? In my normal life, I like keeping my options open. But at work, I’ve had to learn that, no, you’ve got to make a decision. Maybe that was a survival response in the corporate world, where having options open forever isn’t always appreciated.

Araz Najarian: It’s a very human thing. A part of us wants to explore, and another part wants to organize the world and bring clarity and stability. We may have a preference, but there’s a difference between having a preference and having a skill. Sometimes people can have a preference and be completely incompetent in that preference. If you like exploring options, you may be very poor at the quality of options you explore.

That’s an important distinction. All psychometric tools, even MBTI, come under criticism. Big Five, which is more robust, also comes under criticism because it’s still self-reporting. And it doesn’t take into account that our brains are neuroplastic; we’ve proven we can teach old dogs new tricks. We can always grow and stretch.

Chris Parker: You mentioned this meeting we had, and I think it’s a little unfair to the listeners because we were there. Why was this meeting held? I checked in, and there were probably 15 people on the call, all deeply skilled in this. It was a very rich conversation. Why was that meeting held, and for you, what were the main outcomes?

Araz Najarian: For me, why it was important—and something I want to keep doing—is, one, psychometrics have come under criticism, just like any tool, (e.g., Balanced Scorecard).

Second, it’s a developing field. There are many more insights now from things like neuro-leadership. For example, Steven Okonoa (who couldn’t join that call) is involved with something called “NeuroColor,” developed by Dr. Helen Fischer. They developed it based on putting people through MRI scans to see which parts of the brain light up. So, it’s important to stay up-to-date on our evolving understanding of the human brain and how it influences our decisions and behaviors. Those were the two main reasons for the conversation.

Chris Parker: I think with the advances in technology and psychology, this is evolving. MBTI is probably 40 years old. Then you have the colors, DISC, etc.

What were the outcomes? I think one reason these things get criticized is they’re used inappropriately. In my world, Agile, Scrum, and SAFe are criticized, but it’s rare that someone actually took the time to understand what it was about. Instead, somebody comes in and does a mechanical implementation—”We have to show up to these meetings and do these tasks”—without any understanding of the intention behind the practices. A lot of great ideas are ruined because they’re used inappropriately.

So let’s go back to the principles. What were the highlight principles that came out of this expert group talking about psychometrics?

Araz Najarian: One of them is spot on what you just mentioned: Why are you actually using a psychometric? For what purpose? What do you want to get out of it? When that’s not clear, it can be used inappropriately.

The main principle coming out of the group is that these are tools better used for development than they are for selection. There’s a tendency for people to get eager, see their team picture, and say, “Oh, we’re missing this profile.” No, that’s not the point. You’re not going to use this to populate your team, because they’re not predictive and they only tell you a fraction of what a person is.

The other thing was the importance of the debrief. It’s not something you just take away for yourself. You need an experienced professional to help debrief the report. A professional can take things out of a report that are not written in the report; they understand you, your team, and your context. The richness is in the conversation; the report is just an input.

What I loved that came out of this conversation was that we landed on: Use psychometrics to ask better questions, not to give answers.

It’s not, “Now I have an answer so I can completely understand myself.” It’s, “Now I have a map that allows me to continue to explore the territory.”

Chris Parker: Can you give an example of that? “Ask better questions instead of providing answers.” What do you mean?

Araz Najarian: It comes down to asking questions to understand each other better; to get to the, “But why is it that you’re doing it that way?”

Chris Parker: I think for me, it’s also looking at understanding myself first. It allows me to ask more questions about myself. For example, with introversion/extroversion, I love performing on stages and doing workshops, but I know I will be drained afterwards. I now have the language to tell people, “Yes, I’m going to be performing, I’ll be rocking it, and I will need to invert afterwards. Just give me some time to go read my book.”

I’ve never done this with my two boys, but I can see one is an extreme introvert and the other an extrovert. You can just watch these conflicts happen! It helps me understand, and then I can bring that language in and give forgiveness. It’s like, “Okay, we’re all tired. When you’re tired, you want to talk more; when you’re tired, you want to go in a hole. Those things are not compatible. Let’s find ways to give each other what we need.”

Araz Najarian: Absolutely. What’s interesting is if you look at classical brainstorming or strategizing processes, some can be heavily biased towards extraversion.

Chris Parker: Oh, yes.

Araz Najarian: That always annoyed me. The people who have a tendency to think out loud—to think while they’re talking—don’t give any space for others who need time to first reflect and gather their thoughts. Both ways of thinking are tremendously valuable. Even if you’re an extroverted thinker, take the time to “extrovert” on a piece of paper with yourself first.

We feel a meeting has to be all about talking, but actually, silence in meetings is golden. Instead of talking about something we haven’t read, let’s take five minutes and all sit silent and read it together.

Chris Parker: Or postpone the meeting.

Araz Najarian: Or postpone the meeting. Or, have people absorb the input, have that silence, and write their thoughts down before they extrovert them. People are scared of it. We don’t like silence or breaks.

Chris Parker: I wonder if there’s a cultural dimension. I’m generalizing, but it’s kind of the American/Anglo hierarchical approach, the “ESTJ leader” dictating , as opposed to what I see in the Netherlands, which is much more consensus-driven. Here, to be silent is not appreciated. It’s like, “Wait a second, we all have opinions. What’s yours?” We all have to have our say.

Araz Najarian: Yes, we all have to have our say. Properly facilitated workshops, of course, are designed for this. Let’s make sure the “wallflowers” are engaged and there’s the right time for the right energies.

Araz Najarian: Understanding this in a team makes it easier. If I’m an extroverted thinker with an introverted thinker, I can label it: “Look, I’d like to share this with you out loud. Is this the right moment?” An introverted thinker, when speaking, has already completed their thinking and is stating their conclusion. An extroverted thinker is thinking out loud and hasn’t reached the conclusion yet. That can be very confusing!

Chris Parker: When I’m coaching, my introversion helps because I’m listening a lot, and then able to look for those unexpected queries to jiggle the conversation.

Chris Parker: In that meeting, you mentioned the SPI (Strategizing Preference Indicator). You mentioned strategizing as a verb. Can you introduce us to the SPI? I was curious, so I took it, and we now have my results. What is the SPI, and how do you use it?

Araz Najarian: Yeah. Before we look at your results, what is the SPI? It was developed by Michael [Newman]. It’s diving into dimensions most relevant for problem-solving, because strategizing is essentially problem-solving —or opportunity creation.

It is a Jungian-based tool, so you can see the connection to MBTI. It takes two of those dimensions.

The first dimension is: How do we like to receive and trust information? This is the preference toward Sensing (factual, concrete, realistic, sequential) versus Intuition (big picture, seeing connections, hearing the bigger story).

The second dimension is our attitude to the external world. Do I look for options and see possibilities? Or do I see decisions that I need to take to bring order? This is the Exploring (open) preference versus the Ordering (judging/closing) preference.

This shows up in teams. Someone with an “Order” preference works toward a deadline in a sequential, organized way, maybe finishing early. Somebody with an “Explore” preference might be like a bumblebee, going around, and then in a final burst of stress, they deliver. That can cause tension.

Araz Najarian: The SPI report shows your dominant preference, your starting point. We describe it as a rainbow: you have your dominant, secondary, tertiary, and inferior (the one you’re least comfortable with, or that comes out under stress).

Chris Parker: So if you have six to eight people on a leadership team, how do you use this? The test was super quick, like 20 statements.

Araz Najarian: Usually, we invite everyone on the team to complete the questionnaire, just like you did. Then, in a live session (online or face-to-face), we debrief. I use an exercise: Which hand do you write with? That’s your dominant hand, your preference. If I put the pen in my left hand, I’m not skilled at it because I haven’t trained it. (My mom was forced to be ambidextrous, but she still prefers her left hand).

Then, we invite everyone to read their report and validate it. Most people recognize themselves.

What’s interesting is to then see the team picture—where are we all in relation to each other? Then I love to put them under stress. We give them a problem to solve right now that has nothing to do with their context. This way, nobody is the “expert,” and we don’t fall into our usual traps. When we’re under pressure, we revert to our default preferences.

Chris Parker: So, you run a simulation activity, put them under stress, and then process that. Great.

Araz Najarian: And then we process it. We have a conversation about what went well and why—not about the content (it’s just a puzzle), but about how we were interacting.

Araz Najarian: I was recently using this with a new team I see every quarter. They were spread across the preferences, but several of them were dominant “Improvisers.”

I mirrored something back to them. The day before, they were looking at strategic choices. They got to the end of the day and deprioritized prioritization. They had all their options and then said, “We’re not going to prioritize spending time on prioritizing.”

I told them, “Do you recognize that’s a bias in your team?” The light bulb went on. They realized, “Oh my god, we just walked right into our preference.” They were all comfortable leaving with that ambiguity.

If they had had a few more “Optimizers” or “Visionaries” in the room, those people might have felt more uncomfortable, saying, “Guys, we need to agree on a date and when this needs to be done.” We had to force that moment to agree this was important, because they needed to give clarity to the organization on what they are and are not going to do.

Chris Parker: I’m thinking of a person I worked with, a head of operations. We had very different opinions. I think in my career, because I’m navigating the middle, I’m a professional generalist; I can adapt. But I do tend toward times of change. When people call me, I describe it: “If you’re looking for someone to squeak out a few percentages of efficiency, I’m not that person. If you want to change, transform, break, and rebuild, I am absolutely your person.” I’m aware there are much better people suited for that important job that is just not me.

In my work in IT and digital, it’s so easy to criticize the past. But you have to realize the past was made by people with different preferences, and there was a good reason back then for that decision. People don’t make bad decisions on purpose. The technology is no longer fit for purpose because the time has changed. The people still hanging onto those 15-year-old technologies are the hardcore “Optimizers” keeping it stable. They have blood, sweat, and tears baked into it. And then you have to come in and say, “Well, we’re going to kill your darling.” Expect a reaction.

Araz Najarian: Expect a reaction. And you better have your case very strong, because they’ve been working on it for 15 years and know it better than you ever will.

Chris Parker: There’s self-awareness there, for sure.

Araz Najarian: That “wisdom of the past” is important. We should try to understand why the system is the way it is. I remember with a big food retailer, they had a massive system change, and certain voices—the optimizers—were not listened to. When it went live, it didn’t work. As a retailer, you are stuck. You cannot get goods in and out of your warehouses. It was a massive scandal. There is a huge benefit to that “Optimizer” energy and stability.

Chris Parker: I think in our world, you hear the McKenzie statement that 80% of transformations fail, or 90% of AI projects fail. Something I love to bring into those conversations is: maybe a lot of those should never have started. They’re just bad ideas.

Araz Najarian: Yeah.

Chris Parker: And some of these people, the “voice of reason,” you can call them saboteurs or “resistance to change.” And sometimes they’re right.

Araz Najarian: Yes, sometimes that wisdom is really calling it.

Chris Parker: It’s lazy leadership versus what I call “love leadership.” And sometimes that’s hard, because you have to sit down and embrace people who have a different opinion. “This makes me feel uncomfortable, but I will live in my discomfort so I can understand you, because maybe intuitively I know there’s a nugget of truth in there.” It’s hard work. Lazy leadership is just, “Oh, he’s just a troublemaker.”

Araz Najarian: And then you have the major scandal where your systems don’t work.

Chris Parker: It comes down to leadership. So, in the spirit of wrapping up: If people out there are inspired and going through their strategizing process and want insights into their preferences, how can they do that?

Araz Najarian: I think the easiest is to get in touch for a conversation. We always want to make sure it makes sense to be using this in this moment. Let’s not just get excited because it’s new and shiny. Sometimes it’s not the right setup.

It first starts with a conversation: “Hey, what’s happening? Why did you get excited about it? And could we actually give follow-up to it?” It’s not a one-off; it’s something we have a commitment as a team to return to and reflect on.

Chris Parker: Yeah, and going back to the principles: have a very clear reason.

Chris Parker: Yes.

Chris Parker: And I think, also, have guidance. Don’t self-administer them. Having a coach or a trained external “sherpa” on the way can help.

Araz Najarian: I would say certainly not debriefing these things on your own.

Chris Parker: Not yet. I can imagine AI will get there, but even then, make sure it’s a well-trained AI used for the right reasons. So, you can get a hold of Araz at elpnetwork.com. I’ll include that in the show notes, and also Araz Najarian on LinkedIn.

I was really positively triggered by the engagement with the ELP group on this. And then I said, “Well, let me do this SPI thing, and let’s process this in the podcast.” Some might say that’s vulnerable, but I think it adds richness for the listener to understand what it is and how it relates to someone.

So, let’s look at mine. It’s a 2×2 matrix. Top-left is “Visionary,” top-right is “Explorer,” bottom-left is “Optimizer,” and bottom-right is “Improviser.”

I am in the top-right “Explorer” quadrant, but I’m in the bottom-left of that, so I’m really close to the center. The dotted line (my zone of comfort) is pretty wide, stretching a little to the north.

It says my first preference is Explorer. Second is Visionary. The one I “find it harder to use” is Optimizer, which is the furthest away. What does this mean?

As I said, I tend toward the middle. But “Explorer”? Yes, you could call me an adventurer. I’m drawn to that term. When I read the description—”create global concepts and connections,” “embrace and enable change,” “see hidden possibilities,” “generate options before deciding,” “embrace freedom”—I’m like, “Tick, tick, tick.” And when I’m “going crazy” (the dark side), it says I can become “rebellious.”

When you saw this representation of me, what are a few things that you would shout out?

Araz Najarian: A few things. One, when you showed me and we looked at that picture together, based on my interactions and how we know each other, I recognized that.

What’s interesting about your zone of comfort is that it’s relatively wide; you were using all different parts of the scale when responding. (Some people have a very narrow zone). Your zone stretches further into the “Visionary” and “Explorer” quadrants, which I recognize in the work we’ve done together. You identify new paths forward, explore new innovations, and are always out there saying, “What if I tried this?”

In terms of the “Visionary” aspect, you’re living in the world of possibilities, but the Visionary also brings a framework to it. That’s probably a skill you’ve developed. You need a framework to be able to filter and make decisions, because you can’t make everybody go after all the options.

Your third preference is “Improviser” (making it real, experimenting), and your fourth, outside your comfort zone, is “Optimizer.” I’m thinking you might encounter tension with people who have a dominant Optimizer preference. They start with reality, saying, “Why the hell are we doing something different when it’s been proven successful? There’s stability here we need to leverage.” If you come up with an idea they don’t see connected to reality, they might think, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Chris Parker: I know that’s not my preference. We’re more similar.

Chris Parker: Araz Najarian, thank you so much for this. This has been great.

Araz Najarian: Thanks, Chris.

Chris Parker: Hello, this is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity podcast and I had a conversation with Vance Morris who was a security guard at a birth control manufacturing facility and early in his career and then spent time as a Disney executive, creating magical experiences and setting up some of the the amenities at some of their parks and then applied a lot of that to other industries carpet cleaning. and we just had a lot of fun, getting into the magic and the mix and the methods to make memorable experiences.

So, Vance, why would this be really valuable for someone to listen to it?

Sure thing, Chris.

I think one of the big things is that we dropped some really practical nuggets on that you can implement really right away.

I mean, it’s something you can just take that nugget this afternoon and come up with an idea and implement it and then see some results.

Welcome to the Business Simplicity podcast where Chris Parker explores how leaders cut through complexity to accelerate strategy, execution, and growth with calm, clarity, and confidence.

Chris Parker: Welcome back to the Business Simplicity podcast.

This is Chris Parker, and I’m having Vance Morris on for a conversation.

And I’m very, very curious to learn from Vance about some of his stories.

He is previously a Disney executive.

I’m sure we’ll get into that.

And he also apparently started his earlier career as a security guard at a birth control facility if I reme read that correctly in one of the emails as well as a number of other steps.

And now he’s doing coaching and advising for companies that are wowing customers with, improved customer experience.

And those that have listened know that customer experience is close to my heart and perhaps even closer is Disney.

So the fact that I have a a Disney exec previously Disney exec on here outstanding.

Thank you so much for joining.

So maybe Vance can you connect some of those dots tell the story of security card to Disney to entrepreneur to coach and trainer.

I think it’s been a an amazing story.

Can you can you connect some of those dots and then we’ll dive into customer experience?

Vance Morris: Certainly, and I appreciate you having me on, Chris.

Thank you so much. yeah, I probably will be the only birth control factory security guard you run into all day today.

So, I’d to consider that a little bit unique. and and I bring that up really as you need to be memorable. and I think that’s really one of the big lessons from Disney and from a lot of the marketing that I do is that take something from your background that is memorable.

If I just said I was a coach or consultant, then okay, you just lump me in with 10,000 others. but I use that to kind of break the ice and say, “Okay, well, this guy might be interesting because who wants to admit to being a security guard at a birth control factory?” which I did for two summers during college.

So, buddy of mine and I worked in New Jersey for a birth control factory. who knew you needed security there?

But anyway, after after school is when I started my Disney career.

So, I think that really, was great because that set the basis and the foundation for everything that I’d be doing moving forward. and one of the big lessons that I learned at Disney, aside from swooping down and picking up pieces of trash really quickly or being nice and doing autographs and those things is that Disney runs on processes and systems.

That was my first big lesson.

And I look back on it and this was 1990, so internet hadn’t really come around yet.

Nobody, not everybody had a computer on their desk and we certainly didn’t have a handheld device.

And during the opening of the Yacht and Beach Club resort, I was on the opening team.

My boss walked me into this training room and there’s just mountains and mountains of 3-in binders.

I’m “What is all this?” He goes, “Well, these are all of the SOPs and OJTs on how to open and operate a Disney resort.” And I was just floored that there was that much detail in their systems and processes and leaving nothing to chance.

So I took that lesson and continued that throughout my career.

I am living proof that people do survive after leaving Disney. we don’t just curl up in a ball somewhere and or get institutionalized.

We’re we can be a functioning member of society after we leave the company.

I spent about eight or so years in corporate hospitality. so I was with the Smithsonian Museum System for a while.

I was director at Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. so a couple of big corporate museum style experiences. along the way, I started to feel that I make a lousy employee. because I don’t to be told what to do. and I I know we alluded before we started recording that probably is the reason that I have two ex-wives.

So, I mean, we can always ask them some other time, but yeah, I just don’t to be told what to do.

So, I started my own business. and I was looking at starting a restaurant. and quickly realized that I do not have the capital to start a restaurant.

Most concepts I was looking at were requiring, a million dollars liquid cash and I just didn’t have that laying around.

So, next with went with the next best thing, which was starting a carpet cleaning business, which I’m sure is what every small boy dreams of doing when they’re the obvious alternative from high-end themed restaurant to carpet cleaning.

Okay.

I mean, I barely vacuumed at the point.

So, but the franchise I was looking at, system I was looking at was as top quality.

I could look any customer in the eye and say every single one of our products works as advertised.

And I figured I would take their product and my experience and marketing knowledge and set out at the beginning creating a premium level service because I don’t know about Amsterdam, but I can tell you here in the States we have telephone polls with phone numbers stapled to them about people who will clean your carpet for $49 or something silly.

So, we were the complete opposite of that. really focusing on an affluent market. and we grew that focusing just on that. people started to ask me, “Geez, Vance, you don’t look you’re working too hard. how are you doing this?” so that kind of birthed the coaching and consulting and advising business. and if you fast forward to today, I still own the home service business.

We actually added two.

I have an oriental rug washing facility and a mold remediation company.

Put a general manager in place and said just run the systems.

I got marketing systems, operation systems, marketing systems.

Don’t screw at anything.

Just manage the systems. and so I spend about 90 minutes a week on those businesses. now. most of that time spent with the general manager reviewing operations and things that and his ideas for improvement. cuz I didn’t want it to just be mine because if it’s going to move along without me, well, it’s got to be able to grow. so I So every week we meet and he says, “Well, why don’t we try this or why don’t we try that?” And once we’ve talked it through, then great, have at it. on the consulting side, one of the fun things I get to do is actually take business owners to Disney, for three and 4 day full immersion boot camps. really seeing how Disney makes the sausage, so to speak.

I have some private clients and I have group coaching.

So, got a number of irons in the fire, but once you put systems and processes in place, you really, it’s just managing those things. and to me, systems generates freedom.

And for me, that’s freedom to come and go from a my business as I please and it’ll still run without me to freedom to choose the clients I work with cuz not everybody’s going to make a great client.

So, that’s my story in a nutshell.

And in a nutshell, it seems fascinating and I’m in love because you’re getting paid to go to Disneyland. okay, that’s a that’s a dream. let me grab on to a few points of that.

So when you first started with Disney at the at the yacht and beach club, you were surprised at the discipline and the documentation, the SOPs, launched that you did other things at Disney as well.

And then is that you applied that to say let’s say more mundane services and activities carpet cleaning.

What are a few things that you literally took from Disney that would be not expected?

So kind of some unexpected things that you applied to let’s just play with carpet cleaning that made a significant difference that how did the Disney or your previous experience maybe if not Disney because you you’ve done other things frame your need for discipline and documentation as well as unique memorable experiences and then you deployed that in carpet cleaning of all things can you what was the mental strategic process that you went through?

Vance Morris: Sure.

Well, some of the things that I I don’t want to say I stole them from Disney because then the Disney attorneys are going to come after me, but appropriated the first one was really about the systems and keeping them simple.

So, and I saw the freedom that those systems gave the employees.

So, they actually, learning to work in a restaurant or valet or what have you, they had their system in the 3-in binder and they learned it and they, repeated it, and most importantly, they practiced it before going out live. and I think that’s key there is that you need to practice your thing before you put it out to the public.

I mean, you wouldn’t start a Broadway show without rehearsals and just throw everybody on stage the first night.

You have rehearsal. but the systems that we use were extremely simple.

And if you think about who’s working at Disney, it’s a lot of minimum wage earn younger employees.

And if they had difficult systems, well, the whole thing would fall apart.

So Disney runs on three words. what to do, how to do it, and most importantly, why do we do it that way?

And I’ve taken that framework everywhere I’ve gone and we have a what, how, why for everything that we do.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a marketing system or something in operations.

We have what we do.

Let’s say it’s answer the telephone. and then we have how do we do it? so we, Disney has figured out how to create experiences out of all the boring, mundane things we do day in and day out. so they’ll tell you, all right, here’s how you answer the phone.

The most important of it, especially if you want strong employee engagement, which most companies do, is the why.

Why do we answer the phone this way?

And it could be for any number of reasons, to be open and welcoming to the guests so that they start their vacation on the right foot. to separate us from everybody else out there if we have a unique way of answering the telephone.

I actually used this with a insurance company. he was a franchise, he was an all-state guy. so there were probably five or six other Allstate guys in his town and probably another 30 or 40 insurance agents and he was having a tough time breaking out.

I mean, it’s a commodity business.

I mean, the dentist is a dentist is a dentist.

There’s only so many ways you can clean teeth, so insurance is highly commoditized.

He’s I got to break out of this.

So, we’re sitting down in his office doing a brainstorming session and I’m looking around and he’s the rock and roll guy.

He’s got posters of the Who and Led Zeppelin and autograph guitars and gold records all over his office.

And I’m thinking, “Dude, you’re the rock and roll insurance agent.” And he he was, “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that, but it doesn’t sound too professional.” I’m “Don’t worry about it. it’s it’s it’s going to be different.” and his receptionist, I’ll never forget the receptionist latched on to that and said, “Well, why don’t we answer the phone this way, because normally you’ll get, thank you for calling Dave’s All State.

How may I help you?” We’ve all heard the phone answered that way.

Well, she suggested, and it’ll sound a little corny, but she suggested, “Thank you for calling Dave’s All State, the agency that rocks.” Now, right, it is a little corny to say it and the first 15 times fine, but answering the phone that way does a bunch of things.

One, it sifts, sorts, and screens out anybody that would be a bad customer for them cuz they’re “What?

What?

What’s this?” but the people that are attracted to that are going to make fantastic customers and he’s, trust me, he’s busy. and it separates him from everybody else.

That was his separating factor that made him not look the rest of the insurance agents in St.

Louis. so I think Disney has that part figured out and I’ve stolen that and used it everywhere, and and I think that’s the lesson.

You look at your customer journey and you identify each point where there is an interaction with the customer and you just think and brainstorm how do we make an experience out of that.

Yeah.

Well, I love the focus as well and and the fact that you brought up a a really clear customer or persona and and build your customer experience to turn off the people you don’t want to serve.

Mhm.

I love that cuz because so often I I see people who want to do everything for everyone and therefore you satisfy and you’re memorable to nothing because you are just bland and boring.

So how did you do that in the in the carpet cleaning? how did you identify that niche that we’re going to go all into?

You mentioned it a little bit. it’s kind of an up, higher expectation affluent something. that there was a definition there.

So you had a target niche there.

And then how did you design for them to be differentiated to to be not, on the telephone poll, pull this phone number?

Well, certainly our our marketing was directed to an affluent market. we actually say part of our USP is that we are here for homeowners.

So that im immediately eliminates rentals completely elim and I’ve been in a lot of rentals and every once you have a in a while you have a unicorn that actually takes care of the property but 99% of the time rentals are just absolutely disgusting. and they they haven’t been maintained and I’m I don’t want to work in that environment.

My employees don’t want to work in that environment.

So why would I want to clean that? so just by identifying the fact that we were only for homeowners really helped us separate in the beginning because we didn’t have a a persona in the marketplace yet.

We didn’t have a reputation yet. so we had to start it with the marketing and as we grew we continued.

So Walt Disney came up with a term called plusing. which is constant process improvement or continually getting better. and so I’m always looking at ways how do we plus what we’re doing. one of the big examples I think in on our customer journey one of the boring mundane things we have to do is get into the home.

So if we can’t get in the house we can’t do our thing. we can’t do the cleaning.

So, we created a complete script and experience out of getting into the home. now I’m going to go through it, but I want to preface it with it took us a year to come up with the final iteration.

So, we were constantly adding little things to it and we’re “Oh, we did that.

Okay, great.

We should probably add this.” and it was a group effort.

So, it was not just me coming up with it.

It was, hey guys, you do this every day.

Hey, how do we make, an exper based on real experience?

I think that’s super valuable.

It’s based on real experience, it sounds .

So, you getting in the home and resolving those little tensions and finding those plus moments.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So, it looks kind of this.

So, it’s and I highly recommend everybody script out and document what they’re doing because then that way it’s clear to everyone.

So, we park in the street.

We don’t park in the driveway cuz god forbid I got an oil leak.

Now, I got something else I got to clean up.

My technician gets out of the van in a clean, crisp uniform because he carries extra uniforms in case he gets dirty on the job beforehand.

He also doesn’t smell because I don’t allow cologne or smoking while you work.

There’s nothing worse than, the Marlboro man showing up in your house smelling he just took a shower in axe.

I mean, it’s just disgusting.

So he’s walks up to the house and he’s got a special mat with him and a little gift and he goes and he lays his the doormat down in front of the door.

We knock on the door.

We don’t ring the bell cuz friends knock.

Salespeople ring the bell.

We take a couple of steps back and Mrs.

McGillicuy will answer the door and we’ll say, “Hi, my name’s Josh.

I’m here to create your healthy home.

May I come in?” So we don’t just barge in.

We ask permission. we also say our mission which is to create a healthy home.

Our job is to clean whether we’re cleaning upholstery, tile, carpet, whatever.

But our broader mission is to create healthier homes. and people latch on to that.

And as we’re walking in and we’ve said that we present Mrs.

McGillicuy with a gift.

Now, I don’t know about anybody else, but I have never had a home service person who comes to my house, pest control, home inspector, electrician, whatever.

Nobody’s given me a gift as they’re walking in the front door.

And we do it because, well, I figured we’re going to somebody’s house.

If you go to somebody’s house for a party or something, you’re bringing a bottle of wine, some more derbs, or something.

So, I figured, well, we should do the same.

So, we give Mrs.

McGillicuy the gift and it’s it’s nothing huge.

It’s a custom little blue box. it’s got a bottle of spot remover, a bag of cookies, and a little note from me thanking us thanking them for allowing us into their home.

That is our entry into the home.

The gift does two things.

One, again, it separates us from everybody else cuz nobody’s doing it.

My competitors know that I’m doing it and they don’t copy it, which beyond me. oh, and I forgot about the mat.

So, before we walk in, we do an exaggeration of wiping our feet on the mat, kind of a show, so that people see us.

And then we put booties on our clean shoes.

So, that gift again separates us, but it also starts a process called reciprocity.

I give something to you, you feel compelled to give something to me.

And we saw a 26% increase in our mid-tier package or about $65,000 a year in additional sales by implementing the gift.

So that’s how I disnified getting into the house for the Did the gift act as a souvenir as well? was it in a tin or something with your number on it or something that?

Or was it more disposable?

It’s a No, it’s it’s a cardboard box.

I mean it’s a nice one, don’t get me wrong.

It’s custom printed and everything. the the box is not meant to be kept, but the inards are.

So there’s a bottle of our spot remover, and they get this regardless of whether we actually clean for them or not, cuz we don’t know if we have the job when we’re walking in.

Sometimes they just want an estimate. so, but the leave behind spot remover, that’ll last them 6 months and they’ll have that in their kitchen cupboard for the next 6 months staring at our name and our phone number.

No, great.

I’m I’m I love it.

Again, dinified something that’s that’s necessary.

It’s a service, but typically you wouldn’t think is a sex and sizzle type of service. this is this is, carpet cleaning.

I’m wondering to go off on a completely different tangent for selfish reasons. cultural differences.

And let me ask a question first because I’m a massive Disney fan and my father worked for Wed Enterprises around the time I was born.

Grew up in Southern California. literally have a Disney tattoo.

Not showing you. and I I do not Disneyland Paris. for me it just doesn’t work.

I think the disification maybe too much by the book and not by the essence, it falls down.

I I would much rather and as I think as Disney park prices increase, the difference of a flight to Florida to, from from Europe at least to Florida or California as a total cost of a Disney trip is also coming down for me at least. how do you feel or how have you observed how Disneyification does or does not cross borders if you even have your opinion?

Yeah. a big lesson opening up what was then Euro Disney, which was a misnomer.

I mean, they changed that name quickly to Disneyland Paris. and they did try to cram a lot of Americanisms into into Paris.

And on paper, it sounds a good idea. because oh, everybody loves to come to Disney World. well, let’s just replicate that, with some subtle changes to architecture and things that. but not realizing the vast differences in how Europeans and especially the French how they vacation and how they take holiday.

So, yes, they they started off bad.

I have a number of friends that were on the opening team of Disneyland Paris and they tell the stories that it was hard.

Could it have been avoided? the one the thing that I’ll grab on to is is the wine because because when they opened Disney had no wine.

Well, other than in Anaheim Club 33, you could get wine there, but that’s a whole other other story. but they they if I remember the the lore and I’ve read the books about it, there was no wine until well they changed it and and then one of the big shifts was I think it was Bush senior or it was a president that came over and that then met with the French prime minister in the park and that was kind of when the French said, “Oh, okay.

This is okay then.” and I think it was a combination of shifts.

I’m wondering could they you you crafted the carpet cleaning experience over a year plus refining based on experience tweaking plusing.

Do you think the Disney Paris disaster for the first couple years could have been avoided intellectually or do or do you just have to go through that experience to discover your customer? what what’s your thought on that?

I think you Yes.

I I think you do need to go through that. and Disney does this with every major opening. whether it be just a single attraction, and I’ll pull u any of the Star Wars attractions at Galaxy’s Edge down in Orlando or California. when they opened up Rise of the Resistance, it was a disaster.

Things were breaking all the time.

It didn’t work. the weights were 8 hours long and then you didn’t get on the I mean it was horrendous for at least the first four to 6 months. and it took them that amount of time to get it working right.

Did that hurt Disney?

Not at all.

I mean yeah there were some cranky people but 80% of the people that are at Disney today if you went down there today they’ve been there before.

It’s only 20% new.

So, it’s still 20% new people% haven’t been there before.

That surprises me. and so, yes, I think that they go through that. you have to go through that for the growing pains to learn. and they know that they’re there for the long hall.

It’s not they’re going to shut their doors down in 5 years if things aren’t going well. they’re there and they’re gonna make it work.

And now we’re on what, year 30 something for for Disneyland Paris. yeah, I think it works more and more.

I think they’ve they’ve adapted it to be a little bit more French.

I don’t know.

In my experience, I’ve one of my favorites with Disney Sea in Tokyo.

I think the Japanese service culture is just on point.

Even more serviceoriented than the Americans.

I bought a watch there. it broke.

I sent it back and saying, “How can I buy a replacement?” I got a box back wrapped in a Disney towel with an apology from management with a replacement watch.

I was just okay, sold for life.

I love you.

I will I will promote you always and it forever.

I went to Shanghai shortly after it opened.

It still was learning itself. clearly they were trained and they were still figuring out what it meant to be Disney.

And and I’ve heard recently that they’re going to do something something in Dubai, which would be even closer for us here.

So, yep.

Yeah, I just it’s going to be enormous.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that’s that’s that’s that’s an yeah exciting thing.

So if we if we come into how to apply this to

other businesses, you have something and I’ll put it in the show notes called wow 52ways.com.

Wow. wow as in number fiveways.com.

And people can download a list of 52 which I think are very practical, very simple ways to add some spice and magic to their experience.

And and some of these you’ve mentioned, let me see if I can find it here again. it was on my email, but things Oh, I can’t.

Where did it go?

But off the top of my head, oh, here it is. simple things personalized thank you note. birthday anniversary cards. these are these these are things create a before and after portfolio.

I’ve been maybe I’ll have my wife listen to this.

She’s an interior designer and I’ve been basically begging her, from an experienced design perspective to leave a little booklet with a before and after, a little mini coffee table book that they could then proudly leave on their table.

So then their friends and family would come over and they go, “Oh, you went from this to this.” and then oh call Melanie. those are the types of things.

So it’s I would really recommend people go to to wow 52ways.com but is there a a special super impactful recommend a a simple thing that that most companies can consider that they’re probably messing up right now?

Anything that jumps out?

Most companies are missing what grandma used to teach or mom used to teach, which is write a darn thank you note.

Yeah.

Literally by hand.

You write the thank you note.

And we I implemented that within the first year of being open.

And I at the time it was me.

So I was handwriting thank you notes to my cleaning customers, thanking them for allowing us into their home. and we look forward to serving him again in the future.

Nobody does that anymore.

Not anymore. and now you’ve got these services and there’s nothing wrong with the services, send out cards and handwritten and all these other things where you can automate it, but you lose the the human touch to it.

You lose the heartfelt thank you, ?

I mean it it it just it it is so simple and it separates you from everybody else cuz nobody else is doing it.

And to receive physical mail these days that is not a solicitation for a credit card or something that.

It’s Christmas in the mailbox, you’re “Oh my, who sent me a letter?” and I will tell people, don’t get sucked into the automation.

I mean, if you’re a major company, I get it.

Coca-Cola is not going to send thank you notes to every time somebody buys a can of Coke.

I get it.

But if you have a service where, you you’re selling 50omes a week, yeah, you should. now it got beyond me.

So, it was getting to the point where I couldn’t do I just didn’t have three hours to write thank you notes anymore.

So, we went and we hired a bunch of grandmas.

We went down to the local senior center and we brought donuts and coffee and the same three grandmas for about the last eight years have been writing our thank you notes for us.

Wow, I love it.

Still handwritten.

Maybe not from me, but it’s still handwritten.

It still has that essence of we give a crap. and it’s it’s just you find ways to do it. and what does that cost me? if you’re looking at a low or no cost one, the coffee and donuts for the three grandmas is nothing.

And it’s postage and some cards for everything else, but people remember it. they remember how you made them feel.

I love it.

Just a card that will will do it for you.

Yeah.

Yeah, a couple stories on cards because Joe Pine who sort of coined the term the experienced economy in the Harvard Business Review probably 20 30 years ago has become a bit of a friend over time and they they make Gilmore is his partner, the Pineing Gilmore.

They make unique themed Christmas cards every year and then hand signed and I look forward to it because every year it’s some it’s some cartoon about the state of the world in something silly and it almost doesn’t even matter what’s in it although it’s always fun and well thought through but the fact that it’s repeated it keeps me engaged with those guys it’s it’s really lovely and my one of my I guess my first well one of my first roles jobs even in high school and in the university I worked with Nordstrom and the and the Europeans wouldn’t know Nordstrom but Nordstrom for so long was the pinnacle of customer service in retail.

It just kind of defined that space as service.

And when I finally got on the sales floor after working in the stock room, you were given this customer book and for loyal customers, you you were trained to write down who they are, who was in the family, what sizes they were, what their preference was, did they the visor guests or whatever cuz I was in men’s men’s clothes.

And indeed, we had the opportunity, to send the cards.

And I haven’t thought of that in so long.

I’m so digital these days.

It’s what a smack in the face to do something lovingly, caringly, authentically analog.

Wow.

I love it.

So the I would I would urge people go to go to wow52 ways.com and you can also go to vance morris.com and learn about maybe even going to behind the scenes at Disney and then applying that and afford it.

That sounds an absolute dream service.

And also on advanceors.com, you’re doing consulting, speaking, coaching, and so there’s other ways that I’m sure you could help organizations with this.

Vance, thank you so much.

This is this is connected me to my inner child.

I I made a decision early to never because I think I’ve passed it, but at one point I had a annual pass for Disney a Disneyland park for over half my life and it’s you I’m too close to Paris now.

I didn’t do that anymore, but to bring that kind of magic and spirit into work life is is such a gift.

So thank you very much.

So again, wow 52ways.com, bance morris.com.

Vance, thank you so much for joining.

Appreciate you having me, Chris.

Thank you so much.

You for listening to the business simplicity podcast.

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Chris Parker: Hello, this is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity podcast and I had a conversation with Hugo Alves who’s the chief product officer of Synthetic Users and this is used by enterprises to do market research with almost an infinite number of synthetic users using Gen AI. I have experimented it with myself and so we go through the journey the origin story of Synthetic Users as a company which is fascinating and Hugo’s coming from psychology research and how it evolved into this quite amazing product and then we also go into my own experience and what I got right what I got wrong and what I learned and how it really shifted my own perspective about my own proposition which I really did not expect going through this it was very confronting in a very positive way. So Hugo, why would it be valuable for people to listen to this conversation?

Hugo Alves: So I think one of the biggest value that they can take is that they can understand what is the purpose of Synthetic Users. Get a little bit of an understanding of how it is built and why we perform the way we do and why we are different from other more general purpose tools like Chat GPT. It’s so easy to think, oh, but this could be done with Chat GPT. And we go in depth as to why those differences really matter when we’re trying to get business effective business results.

Chris Parker: Welcome to the Business Simplicity podcast where Chris Parker explores how leaders cut through complexity to accelerate strategy, execution, and growth with calm, clarity, and confidence. Welcome back to the Business Simplicity podcast. This is Chris Parker and I’m having a conversation with Hugo Alves who is the chief product officer of Synthetic Users. He’s based in Portugal, Lisbon. I think I first came across him when he was presenting this amazing solution. I think it’s amazing on the Gen AI circle meetups and then Gen AI circle is a group bit curated group of about 400 people around the world that are really pushing the limit on AI Gen AI and Synthetic Users is definitely in that space. So, what we’re going to do today is hear a little bit of the origin story from Hugo. Discover a bit who he is and what the company’s all about. And then I’ve also actually applied Synthetic Users to my own company and another company. And I’ve got some questions, feedback, and I just want to unpack that in a really interesting way. So there’s going to be kind of two parts to this. So one, let’s discover what the company and solutions all about and then go into my practical experience. So outstanding. So Hugo, thank you so much for joining. Can you maybe kick us off like the word Synthetic Users? I guess it’s in the name, but can you unpack a little bit about just to start it off strong, what is Synthetic Users and why does it exist?

Hugo Alves: Okay. I think Synthetic Users is one of those products that it does what it says on the tin. The name is quite explicit but for those who might not be as familiar with the space we create synthetic people that can be used for the purposes of research. It can be user research. It can be market research. So what we create is person descriptions that could belong to a particular group to whatever requirement my customers provide. They can be busy moms from Texas. It can be B2B marketing managers at large corporations. It can be even rural farmers from Botswana. And we create versions of people that could belong to those groups that can be used for to be they can be interviewed for any purpose that you want. But typically when you’re building products on when you’re creating new services, you want to have an understanding of the people you’re building for. And sometimes it’s not that easy to find them. And we can accelerate that process. We’re not a replacement for speaking with humans, but we’re a complement for those situations in which you’re willing to do a little bit of a trade-off between speed and accuracy and or you just want to have a first way of the lands to be better informed when you go talk to organic people.

Chris Parker: And who is in your mind the perfect user for this like and what is the job that they’re doing? So if someone’s coming to Synthetic Users, they have a problem in mind that they’re trying to resolve who is that ICP if you will and what is the job they’re doing with Synthetic Users?

Hugo Alves: So typically the way we look at it, it’s insights managers. So people work at large corporations that in which there are different groups working in different service areas, working with different new products in innovations and there’s a constant need for understanding a particular group of people, understanding how a particular new concept might resonate with those people to get feedback, early feedback. So it will be sure that you’re not going on a path that you will end up having to walk back from because humans end up saying that doesn’t work. So whoever is responsible for large research projects and frequent research projects in which innovation and product creation and service design are a focus.

Chris Parker: Yeah. And I guess Because you said large corporates, but I also when I was using it could attribute it to like lean startup, meaning validate fast and kill fast. I’m sure there’s incredible value for smaller organizations that are like, hey, I’ve got this cool idea. It’s really cool but and let me talk to a number of users. And instead of having to go down to the local mall and beg people to look at your widget.

Hugo Alves: Indeed. Indeed. And to be fair, that’s when we started when me and Pwame first started the product the way we were thinking about our GTM or go to market strategy or whatever people like to call it. We wanted to be Canva for research. Cool. And kind of the analogy was always that in the same way that my mom doesn’t open Photoshop to make a birthday card for my son, she can she does use Canva to do that because what it did was it kind of democratized something that was the domain of only experts and all of that. And we thought we can do the same for research. We can make research accessible for people who don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to do a non-leading question. they don’t know how to recruit. They don’t know all the care that you need to put in research for the results to be valuable. And we can help those people. We can help UX freelancers that change customers every month and need to get up to speed with a new vertical or a new domain every month. But we can we come across a couple of challenges. Some of one of is if we’re trying to sell these to people who don’t recognize the value of research, there’s a huge education piece that you need to do and that is always a challenge when building new services and new products. And if you’re talking about UX freelancers and all of that, the it’s not recurring enough the challenge to justify a subscription-based model, which was what we were going for for different reasons, predictability, all of that. And then another thing happened was we were struggling to go for that what’s typically called the lower end of the market. It we weren’t getting as much penetration as we would like to. And then I suddenly start getting emails that I believed were phishing emails because I was like there’s no way this company I can’t name names because this is kind of a too hot of a topic on mind for people to be able to say yes we use Synthetic Users. They use it. happy, but getting into a flame board on LinkedIn is not really what these people want. But I was getting emails from companies that I thought it’s impossible that I’m getting an email from one of the biggest financial firms in the world. It’s impossible. This is a phishing email. And I’m talking to Pwame. I say I’m pretty sure this is a phishing email. They’re asking for a demo, but I’m not sure. Then I started digging and I was like, no, no. I we really are getting an email from this company. And we we ended up closing them as a customer after one year and six months because that’s how enterprise compliance and all of that works but we started filling some pull from larger firms and larger firms if you think about it are better match for us because that point that I mentioned have different groups working with different in different products in different services. So the need for research is constant and it it makes a lot more sense with the business model that we were going for. So we decided to focus for now on more of the enterprise side of businesses. Some we have some Fortune 500 companies. We have some Fortune 100 companies. And we decide to focus on that. We still have this aspiration to be to be able to help mom and pop shops. But I have this thing on my mind. I’ve been I’ve been trying this. I’ve been tagging him quite frequently on Twitter. I have this on my mind that one ideal customer for us would be Shopify because Shopify helps so many people build businesses and I think they could perform even better if they provided the service like ours to their merchants. So the person who’s selling now some jewelry online that is homemade and all can understand what other types of jewelry could they sell. Maybe someone who sells dog food could figure out what other animals could also I don’t know. I think Synthetic Users could be an amazing partner for Shopify. Toby, if you’re listening, here I am again trying to convince you. I think we could be an amazing partner for Shopify because it would allow us to do something that we wanted to do in the beginning to help small businesses understand their customers better and build better products and services, but do it immediately at a scale that will have an amazing impact.

Chris Parker: Yeah. Outstanding. And can you just give me a few words on where it came from? So like how did this emerge because I see on your LinkedIn that you’ve been the chief product officer there since 2023. So it’s not very old. But it must have emerged from some sort of trigger or need in your life or some observation. And then here we are. So where did this come from?

Hugo Alves: So this goes back a lot. So my academic background is quite different. It’s not a techie background. My academic background is clinical psychology. I did a masters in clinical psychology here in Lisbon. And when I finished my masters, I started working at my university as the lab manager for six years. So for 6 years I was the person responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the psychology lab at ISCTE. This actually my job was helping run experimental studies helping with data analysis figuring out new experimental paradigms and a really core part of my job was managing the participant pool. The participant pool is essentially the who is available to be part of studies. And if you’re familiar with academic research in cognitive science, psychology and a lot of topics, you know that first and second year students are kind of the bread and butter of a participant pool. They go they spend half an hour in front of computer making some task and then they get some course credits. And every semester I ran into a big challenge which was I would have some researcher come knock on my door and say Hugo I need 200 participants for this study I need 50 for this one and I need 100 more to pre-test some materials that I want to use in 6 months and every semester I would end up with a balance sheet in terms of participants that didn’t fit. I’ve always I was always lacking participants and this so this challenge of finding people for us to be able to understand and to be able to make sense of what is the human condition and how does do humans work what do they feel what do they think what do they reason about is something that I’ve kind of chased me throughout my life because when I when I was working there I decided this was early days of mobile mobile was finally taking off. So people were starting to have smartphones and tablets. It started to become something quite normal. And I thought people have kind of moments in their lives which when they’re bored, they don’t have anything to do. Why don’t I build a business a service in which researchers can publish their studies to an app and people can be waiting for in the doctor’s office and they can be helping science and making money at the same time. So I left my job at my university to build this but I didn’t have a developer. I wasn’t a developer. So I joined my co my co-founders agency had a design and development and innovation agency at the time. I joined his agency with the idea of stealing a developer. I’m going to join as a social media manager and while I’m there I’m going to convince one of the developers that this is the best idea in the world and we’re going to be building we’re going to build this together. Truth is that I didn’t wasn’t able to convince a developer to join me. Developers are pitched ideas all the time and they’re quite picky in correctly so in what they decide to pursue. But what ended up happening was that I became a product manager and I’ve been a product manager for the last 11 or 12 years in a lot of different domains B2C B2B really early stage companies more on the growth side some AI stuff there too and one of the challenges that as a product manager you keep running into is you know how important it is to do research you know how intro to building great products and great services is to having understanding whoever you’re building for. And you also know that it’s not as easy as it should be that sometimes you’re building products for people are really hard to reach either because they have some rare disease or because they’re the CEO of companies and CEOs don’t just stop and spend half an hour talking with you about the challenges they face with CRM. It’s not it. So there’s challenges in terms of recruiting who who hasn’t been in a session that simply the participant doesn’t show up. It’s expensive. It takes a lot of time. the analysis the all takes it’s it has too much friction and when me and Pwame decided to start building with large language models this was mid 22 before Chat GPT and we we met 11 years ago when I when I was trying to poach one of his developers but we stayed friends and we worked together in a couple of different things before steps And in 2022 I’m sending him messages. Hey, have you seen this with GPT-3 at the time showing him what was now possible and one day he turns to me and says hey come by the office on Monday and on Monday I was in the office and I was like let’s figure out this is a fundamental revolution in terms of capabilities. let’s figure out how can we apply this new stack to help people build better services and better products. But at the time we weren’t sure of how to do that. So we did a lot of different Miro prototypes. So we we decided like okay so Miro is one of those tools that almost everyone uses in product be it the UX researchers be it the designers be it the PMs be it the engineers so let’s build some tools on top of Miro to help and we built a concept map explorer you would put a concept in the center click a button it would create a mind map now this is kind of common but I think we were the first to do this we built a planet-centric canvas assistant. So planet-centric canvas is essentially a way for you to be more aware of second order impacts of the products that you build. Instead of just mapping the user, you map the communities in which the user is involved or the communities that are involved in the sourcing of the materials of whatever you want to build. So it helps teams be more aware of the global impact that their products might have. We build a business model canvas assistant. So you would just give it the your idea of your business and it would fill all the sections of the business model canvas and then we built a persona canvas and we ended up pitching this all of these tools to one big VC firm. I remember being in the call with them and we’re showing all the tools and then being asked so which one are you doing? And I was which one? No, I’m doing all of them. This is kind of a product suite. This is going to help people with different needs. And and they said, “Oh, okay.” And then we we I left the call and I was like, “They’re right. They’re right. They’re absolutely right. I can’t be building all of this.”

Chris Parker: In the call that I seem to remember on the Gen AI circle, did they like confront you with that and they say, “Hugo, you got to decide.” Or did you reveal Did you figure that out afterwards on your own?

Hugo Alves: They didn’t tell me I needed to pick. They implied that they were expecting me to pick one of them. There’s some wisdom there, though.

Chris Parker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course. I’m glad they did.

Hugo Alves: So me and Pwame after the call I turn to Pwame like we need to go do some user research. we need to go talk to some PMs and some UX designers and we need to do some user research and like oh my god it’s going to take so long and suddenly I take the persona canvas that I had built and I I create product design and I ask him hey what are the main challenges you face and suddenly he replies with oh it’s hard to balance aesthetics with functionality it’s hard to recruit people to understand what they need and I’m like Ah, we have something here. We have a people simulator. This is this is going to be our thing. First of all, we don’t want to go for the oh, we’re going to summarize user interviews that they’re going to be hundreds of those companies. There going to be people better positioned than us. Let’s go for this outrageous idea of making of creating people. This is going to be I’m pretty sure that everyone’s going to love us. we were quite aware of how polarizing our product could be. So, we decided to focus exclusively on that. And funny enough, it was called not Synthetic Users, it was called Synths with a Z at the end because I’m really bad at naming. And two days before we launch the our product designer says, “Oh, I was talking with my boyfriend yesterday and he was like, I I don’t know how to pronounce your name and it’s kind of weird to pronounce.” And I just said, “I don’t care. I’m we’re going to be launching in two days anyway. Let’s just call it Synthetic Users for now and then we decide.” What I wasn’t aware at the time was that this name would end up being kind of the de facto category name for this kind of product. And we’ve been quite lucky with having this name because people just search for the Herobot Synthetic Users. They search for it and end up on our website.

Chris Parker: Yeah, it’s nice. The Kleenex of synthetic so to speak. So before I fascinate I love these origin stories because it evolved and someone I researched and I’ve written a book about is Rumi the Persian mystic and philosopher and poet and one of his statements was you will discover the way as you’re walking on the way rough paraphrase and it sounds like you’ve just been with curiosity and intention just walking and then and then also being not too married to your darling. So sounds like you had to kill a lot of darlings along the way. Before I share a little bit about my experience with Synthetic Users and figure out from you what I did right and not right. What is what is the tech stack because this was this is LLM enabled. So you couldn’t have done this really five years ago. So without revealing any secret sauce what is powering these synthetic users?

Hugo Alves: So large language models now we’re supporting vision so it’s not just they’re multimodal models right now too but essentially large language models what we understood was that’s and that’s the reason why we have this prompt engineering description is that these models are extremely capable but you need to be able to you need to understand them really well, to know what are their shortcomings, what are their biases, what are their tendencies, you need to understand even the training process to understand why these models behave in the ways they behave. And each of them has a slightly different flavor. So what we do is I always tell this to investors is that I’m building Legos. someone else is building the Lego pieces and I’m the one who’s assembling them in a way to create something novel. So, we don’t train our own models. We it’s something that is extremely expensive and one lesson that has come throughout these three years of building with AI is that even when you just fine-tune a model, which is something easy, cheaper, all of that, you spend some effort. It’s not expensive, but you need to do put a lot of effort into fine-tuning, creating a good data set to fine-tune a model and then two months after a new state-of-the-art model comes that just beats your fine-tuned model by a lot. So the it’s in my perspective, it’s not worth to invest a lot right now in fine-tuning because the big labs are doing what they do, competing, and the prices are going down. So I’m just privileged to be able to use the models that exist out there. So essentially we use large language models. We have a complex infrastructure because exactly because of the limitations of the models. Sometimes you can’t ask the model to do everything at once. You need to have multi-steps or you have some kind of agent on the background that is managing stuff for you. And we use maybe I would say right now we are using maybe seven or eight different models at different stages of the process of in our in our platform because in some cases speed is extremely important at that stage in that step I need a really fast model. So I’m willing to trade off a little bit of the quality for the speed. In some other cases, it’s like I don’t care. It could take 10 minutes, but I want the best model there is right here. I wanted to reason. I wanted to do all of that. So, it’s a mix of models with then a lot of infrastructure on top of it to coordinate and to kind of crystallize workflows and data streams that we feel can build the best models.

Chris Parker: No. Well, I think let me let me take over and let me explain what I did with the platform and I’m really curious and I think I have some learnings already through that experience. And it and it maybe goes back to your investor thing around focus because I think some of my research might have been not focused enough. But I’ve done five research projects. I was able to get up and running by watching like a nine-minute how-to video. There’s a video someone yeah I guess he said it would be 30 seconds but he immediately said this won’t be 30 seconds but it was like 10 minutes and once you understand that the basic gist of it okay now it’s that so basically it’s that simple okay and I after watching a 10-minute video I can understand how roughly things are happening in the portal and what I decided to do for the first projects is for my own company Ebullient business design I have three propositions there’s strategy Strategy acceleration, execution acceleration, growth acceleration as in personal growth and coaching. And I have three rough personas for that. Strategy is more leadership, execution is more program, get stuff done. And then coaching can be people that are more vibing with me that call me to say, hey, help me out on this challenge or whatever. And I and I ran three projects tying those things together. So, persona 1 to offer one, linearly like that. Fortunately, in the last couple of months, I’ve documented my company pretty extensively using my simple business design framework. And so, I had a real nice wealth of knowledge. And what I use that business design document for is in GPT, I have a I call it my mission bot. And so that helps me like if I ever if I ever need to write something from the context of my business or ask questions I have that in the GPT project as well as some other artifacts and so it’s always context aware exactly what my business is all about. So I had basically everything at my fingertips and I was able to just go fast. The fourth one is I’m involved in a leadership development network and we’re getting together in Switzerland in two weeks and it’s about positioning and sales. So I was like well let me see if I can discover anything from that. Their proposition and persona were less clear. So I had to gather some other artifacts and did some pre-work in GPT in order to prepare it so I could figure out okay what is the proposition what is the customer and then what’s the question as well. I think refining the question is really really important. And then and honestly after doing those four experiments what I also did because you can there’s you can actually it’s amazing to like actually see the answers of these humans. it’s, they’re bought humans, but they’re talking like, oh yeah, last Thursday out over lunch with my wife, I reflected on this and, it was like really human interaction in a really really fascinating way. And then you could then it generates a overall report. There’s some sort of mind map that I was never able get to work in either of them. So, but but anyways, I was I was just chatting with with the rest of the team because I broke the mind the knowledge graph the mind map and I need to fix it. I was like I need this is the my task for the day.

Hugo Alves: Well, I noticed that wasn’t that wasn’t but anyways the overall summary report is really revealing and then you could also download the entire research set in multiple formats. And as an experiment, I dropped a research set into Notebook LM and had it generate a podcast for me because I was like, “Okay, well, what is the essence of this?” And I did that for the leadership development network. And it was it was incredible. It was even though the proposition and persona weren’t totally bang on. I think it was really affirming of a lot of the assumptions we had. And then that got me suspicious. I was like wait a second wait a second because I don’t like affirming. Exactly. Wait like wait a second is this just GPT wanting to please me and just like oh Chris you’re the greatest thing ever like no you little lying bastard machine. And so what I did is I and I advise this to my clients sometimes when I do custom experience work. I use GPT to spin up the most aggressively horrible anti-persona I possibly could. Just everything that I don’t want. Everything everything that is just not who I want to work for. And then that was the fifth experiment I ran and I said, “Okay, let me let me do the same essential questions of my first three, but asking this anti-persona.” How would he love or she love to buy from me? And and and fortunately at the end of like no, they are just not interesting. Some quotes, I’d be cautious about buying from this company right now. While the solution addresses some of the key challenges like alignment and execution delays, there are too many unknowns, unclear ROI, vague implementation, no guarantee and I was like okay okay all right that it was confronting to read it honestly the next one honestly I’d be cautious about buying from this company right now good in theory but I want use cases I want proof I want demonstrated tangible ROI I asked it to be the most hard ass a type personality. ENTJ. fact driven, not empathetic, everything that I am not. And fortunately it there was not a fit. There was not a fit. But what what I but what I discovered through that process was these are valid criticisms of my positioning and my proposition. So I was like okay well a I do want to repel these people but these are this is real valid feedback about gaps in my messaging and gaps in my positioning and so it was really educational. Now, my learning from this and then I’ll hand it over to you to maybe fill in some of the blanks is knowing upfront and this is where because I’m not a research professional, maybe I got it too wrong. I probably went too broad too broad. Knowing upfront what is the hypothesis that you want the actionable answer to I think would for me would have made this more valuable because this has been an amazing valuable experience but maybe having a tighter line on this is the experiment I’m running and I’m sure proper research analysts have frameworks for that. So was but this is the journey that I went through and I would just throw it back to you and I’m just curious what did I do right and what did I just completely miss in this whole process.

Chris Parker: I don’t think you completely missed anything. I think in general you use the tool as we have kind of the expectation one there’s a really important aspect here which is it’s just a tool. it’s just a tool. Any tool that we interact with has a modeling curve, has a let me figure out how to best use this. Some of them the modeling curve is really shallow. It’s like, hey, in 5 minutes I’m an expert. In some of them, the learning curve is really hard. If you talk about people who use Salesforce, they’re going to tell it’s a juggernaut. it’s a juggernaut and it’s not easy to use because the use cases for in which it is used they’re complex ones and there’s a lot of challenge. So there’s huge variability in tools and tools involve a learning process of how to best interact with them. And I know you didn’t have a lot of time because I sent you the link to sign up quite recently. But that’s it. you’re we it’s the same with anything a designer when Figma first came out there was already sketch as kind of the anchor to that kind of interaction. But but Figma was a new one. It has different names. It have different flows and ways of building it and it was Sketch was even more different from Photoshop. So when Sketch first came out, it was quite different from Photoshop, which was a lot of what was used for this. So people need to get used to the tool. It’s just that. So I’m pretty sure that if you keep using Synthetic Users, you will get better at Oh, I know I can’t be too generic. So I don’t know how you gave the input. Just give a little bit context for people who are listening to us. The most basic kind of study. The most the simplest kind of study we have in our in our platform is one that we call research goal. Essentially just takes two inputs. Takes an audience. You describe the audience or you give us what would be your recruitment criteria and the research goal. So what do you want to learn about? So who and what you want to word about and I’m not sure how you went about it but we have that conversation of interface when you first enter this and the reason why we built the conversation of interface was particularly early on when we were still free and people anyone could drop by and run some research. What happened a lot was that on the audience people would people would sign up to experiment would just say people and if you’ve run research and if you’ve run anything you know that people is not a group to be studied. It is in psychology we are trying to understand people in general but we know that for purposes of user or market research there’s no such thing as people because people involve an old person in rural China that lives just from what they cultivate and it involves the highest paid Jeff Bezos so people is too much of a diverse group and that conversational interface that we have there is there exactly to make sure it asks probing questions. You say people and says, “Oh, okay. But what type of people? What?”

Hugo Alves: What I discovered was indeed it was it was probing and it was conversational. It wasn’t just two inputs. It says, “Okay, who who are who’s the persona?” And I gave it my definition of a persona discuss description. And then it asked clarifying questions and then it says, “Okay, what’s your goal?” I said, “Well, what do they think of this proposition?” And then it asked refining questions there. And then at some point, I said, “Just go for it.” And then

Chris Parker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then yeah it kept it discovery. Yeah. It does exactly because of that because we know how important everyone knows this in conventional research and synthetic research the same the bad the inputs make a lot of difference in terms of the outputs. So if your research question is a crisp one something that is already kind of purpose with the context that you need all of that your results are going to be best. the same with synthetic users. It’s just the same. The big advantage and this is I think people sometimes forget how big this is. The big advantage of a product like mine is you can learn my product by spending an afternoon because you run a study and you’re like a little bit too generic. Okay, let me run another one without going through the recruitment process without anything. I can generate anyone I want in five minutes. and let’s iterate. Let’s run. Oh, this one is a little bit better. or you feel it’s a little bit too positive and you look at it like oh my research goal is was kind of a leading was written in a leading way. So let me just rephrase it to say that I’m working with some company and I want this to be destroyed and then the interviewer that we generate is going to be a lot more aggressive in the questions that he ask. So the ability to quickly iterate on both the audience we might feel we might generate the first one and say oh I forgot to say that I only want people from Germany right now because we’re focused on the German market and it gave me people from all across Europe. You can do a new study in five minutes. So this the ability to iterate and to make studies not a oh let’s do a study and let’s spend two weeks recruiting and doing all of that to hey I just ran one and let me run another one.

Hugo Alves: Yeah, I think I did three sessions because indeed after I did the first three on myself and then gave it a night and then after reading it and that was probably two hours of work maybe and then and then all this other stuff starts sparking and you’re like okay well what okay let me do it from another perspective and then let me go out and get that enablers network thing and brought that in and then and then reading that and then that’s when I got this this is very affirmative I want to come at it a different way but it took hours not days.

Chris Parker: Yeah. Yeah. Right. The affirmative. So the affirmative is a common criticism because people are used to interact with products like Chat GPT which recently had one big challenge with the sycophancy issue is an issue since day one with large language models. By the way they are trained. They are pleasing engines. They want to please whoever they’re interacting with. And that’s why a product, a specialized product like mine comes in because if you go to Chat GPT and you say, can you can you generate some personas that could be mashed potato lovers? And he gives you five personas. You say, oh, okay, now pretend you’re one of them and give me feedback on a really terrible idea. And they’re going to say, oh, I love that idea. Because Chat GPT by the way the system prompt is designed by all of the training process that goes there tends to be that pleasing companion to a fault to a huge fault and people don’t people are now kind of pushing back because people want to be challenged. Of course we get comfort from being confirmed but we know that for us to be successful and to be good people in the world we need to be challenged by our family by our friends by our colleagues. So we know the importance of it. So if you use Chat GPT, you’re going to get that kind of result. That’s one of the things that our product I think does best, but it still sometimes goes as you saw into more the affirmative side is to be more challenging because if you run if you create a mashed potato lover on Synthetic Users and then you promote some kind of stupid idea to him, he’s going to say, “No, I don’t like that idea. that idea is worthless or I don’t see why you’re even spending time doing that. So we are not the sycophancy engine that Chat GPT is although it’s something that we need constantly through our evaluation process to be evaluating to know exactly which models have more of this tendency which models need more of a prompt towards a different direction.

Hugo Alves: No. And when I was setting up the research and I don’t know the right answers, you have to pick the number of people, synthetic people. And I think I picked eight or five, I don’t know, but it So, a couple questions on that. What’s What’s the sweet spot of number of respondents? And is there like this library of respondents out there or does it really spin up?

Chris Parker: No, they spin it spins up. it would be impossible for me to predict the respondents that my customers would ask me to generate. So there’s no pre-built. It’s all on the fly. I think that’s one of the powers. The how many interviews should I write on each study. It’s my failure as a product person to have been asked that question so many times. It’s my failure. I don’t know how to sort this out. It’s I always go back to the it’s a tool. It’s a matter of you experimenting. But we don’t allow for example we just increased the maximum amount of interviews per study to 20. Before we it was only 10. Why did we only have 10? Because in the same you have the same concept with organic research which is saturation. Saturation means that you’re running a new interview and no new topics are surfacing. you’ve explored in the previous interviews, you’ve explored what was there to be explored and you’re not getting anything new. So at that time it’s not worth running any more research at least with the same script with the same research guide with the same goal. You might narrow, you might drift, you might go to some other adjacent topic, but with the same one it’s not worse. And what we discovered or VR is one thing that you’re going to notice in our interviews in comparison to organic ones is that the answers that synthetic users give are more are richer are more in depth than humans. And in the early days there were two things that in the early days we had to kind of decide was do we want to make the the so there’s two important aspects in any answer. One is the content which is kind of what topics are mentioned, what challenges, what pains, what goals. So is the the semantic content of the answer the same that you would get from a human interview. And the other one is the form. And when you run user interviews, people some you go through the transcripts and they’re hard to read because when people are speaking, they go on detours. They stop mid-sentence. It’s not fluent. And early on we had to make a decision. We want to make this as human as possible. So both content and form and it’s harder for my customers because they’re going to have what it’s going to be less it’s not going to be that easy to read an interview and we need to run longer interviews to extract everything or do we want just to focus on the content and not the form and we decide just for that.

Hugo Alves: My feeling is eight was more than enough for me. Maybe maybe too many. Maybe five would have been enough. But then but it’s amazing how human it is. And so one of the personas on my anti- study was Marcus Chen. And then there’s this sort of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. which was quite those are quite tight.

Chris Parker: Those are that’s called the big five or the ocean model. It’s the most well validated psychology model. Myers-Briggs tends to be the one that people talk about more, but this is the most scientific one. And I’ll think also I hear about this big five more in marketing and research indeed. And his name’s Marcus Chen. He’s 44 from New York. He’s a CEO. always decision-making style data driven leadership approach command and control risk tolerance moderate work life balance work focused communication preferences direct and concise so not somebody I would hang out with a lot but the first question is what are the most pressing challenges you’re currently facing so that and I didn’t ask that question that the platform asked that because I think it was kind of an orientation question and indeed you can get to know this person and actually also sympathize with this person like like well maybe Marcus wouldn’t be so bad because it’s like one of the biggest challenges I’m dealing with right now is is driven by the inconsistency I see across departments when it comes to executing on key initiatives okay targets are often clear we put the metrics on paper align with them with broader organizational goals laid out the plan but somewhere in the middle there’s a disconnect and honestly that’s my sweet spot that’s why I call it strategy acceleration I’m not going to make strategy for Marcus but I could help Marcus land the strategy with the humans and it’s so I’m like wow I could Marcus okay I can get you and then couple paragraphs down the common thread here is I’m running up against resistance misalignment operational friction that’s draining momentum and for someone like me who thrives on speed performance and results becomes not an organizational issue but a personal frustration too it’s like well this is all catnip for me like wait these tensions are super relevant and that’s all stuff so I expected to hate these people. But as going through this, I was like, “Yeah, there’s value over there.” It was really really fascinating and deeply human and it inspired an empathy from within me through reading through these things. So

Hugo Alves: I think a product like ours can be we joke around where they’re empathy engines. So there’s the products that allow you to build empathy. Empathy you know the I walk on someone’s shoes. You don’t walk on someone’s shoes but you understand them and you understand their motivations and their needs and what better after reading an interview than not at all. I’ve seen people saying oh no the is so bad that it’s better not to do any research at all and I there’s a joke now on LinkedIn. I normally go there and say, “Have you tried it?” Because that can only come from someone who didn’t experience the product because the product is something that allows you to understand how someone else looks at the world in a quite empathic way. Although we tend to think of, oh no, but it’s this are algorithms and it’s just just this it’s mass. It’s not empathic. What we discovered with AI is that math can be quite empathic which is kind of weird even for me who works on this.

Chris Parker: No, it’s incredible and I guess for me the value is now I also have this artifact meaning I have these full research studies that in the future. Did you ask follow-up questions? So we have this ability on any interview to ask follow-up questions.

Hugo Alves: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s the thing is in, and in preparation for this, I went back this morning and I asked and you can tag this little ask to all users or not. I asked a lot of follow-up questions and I tried to keep them consistent. because it seems like the system generates the first 10 questions or so or number amount of questions that gives you an orientation. I’m like, well, I want more sharp. And the last one was, would you buy from this company? Why or why not be as brief as possible? And this is where, I’d like to see proven track record first. And maybe that’s because I didn’t feed it a track record, because I have case studies and credibility, but but this is what this persona is looking for is proof, so that like, okay.

Chris Parker: Yeah. And I for me that the shift has been I believe there’s some real potential value that I can bring to the Marcus Chen of the world as opposed to only working people that I’m more sympathetic with and I think my own messaging and positioning can be shifted on that. And for me this is it’s only through this empathy this reading through this is like wow really interesting. Now, what do people do like? Okay. So, I guess it comes back to the goal of the research and I guess if you’re a professional researcher, you have that goal and you know you’re going to get some outcome and you’re going to make a yes no decision or something like that. Is that the typical where the value really comes from this? So, it’s like if someone’s going to be use Synthetic Users to do some research, the value comes from a decision they take after they’ve done the research, right? or is there is it more?

Hugo Alves: I think right now most people use us not as a replacement of conventional organic research but as a complement in several different stages. So one is just knowing the language. So let me give you a more concrete example. Imagine we’re talking you’re talking about building a new product for or let’s say collectors of stamps. I’m going to go with a kind of weird one. And you feel that hey I collect cards. I’ve built a business around collecting cards but maybe I could extend my business to people who collect stamps. And let me see how this could be played out. So you instead of going immediately and try to find go to forums and try to find stamp collectors, you generate a couple of stamp collectors on Synthetic Users and you generate some interviews to understand what their challenges are, what they would need help with. And from the moment you read the interviews, you understand that they have their specific language to talk about stamps, to talk about businesses, to talk about why they do it. And then when you go talk to a organic to a person out there in the world who’s really a stamp collector, you’re the ability of you to be able to build rapport with that person just went through the roof because you already know the differences between this kind of stamps and these kind of stamps because you already know that one of the big pains is having a hard time keeping them in a pristine condition. So you’ve already built that muscle that now you can do an organic interview and take 10 times the value that you would get you would take if you were directly there. So this is one of the things which is kind of as a preparation for for going talking to a human. One thing that I see a lot happen in my product is that we are used to narrow down options. So you’re a big company. You’re doing an innovation workshop because you want to build a product for a particular demand space and you have at the end of the workshop or mid workshop you have 12 concepts that could play out. You either go and run interviews with with people for each of those concepts to get feedback and decide on which ones to narrow down or you use Synthetic Users to get those 12 to four or five and then you go and use those four or five and go talk to humans to validate that. And the cool thing about this one is that you can then look at what synthetic user said and what human said. And what typically happens with this is that people come back to me and say, “Oh, Hugo, it just boosted my confidence in your product so much because we ended up going talking to humans and humans are talking about one concept and I’m having a deja vu because that’s what your product said about that concept.” And I’m like, “Yes.” So that’s this is one of the things that I say to people and you saw we were talking before we started recording about the post that I did on LinkedIn essentially telling people, hey, if you have an audience and a research goal and you want me to run a study for you, I’ll do it. And one thing that I do to people while I’m demoing is they ask me, “Oh, okay. But how do I know this works?” And I tell them, “Hey, we have a case study. There’s academic research. I could bombard you with academic research in which people who have zero interest in my product. They don’t have anything to do with me. They are testing this idea of large language models being able to reproduce completely different aspects of human nature. So I could kind of bombard you with that. But what I always tell people to do is you’ve probably run some research recently, something that is not kind of obvious. So what I what you should do is you should cut Synthetic Users share of course zero of the outcomes of the research but share the inputs share what was the how did you recruit people and what did you want to learn and run interviews and then you by yourself without me knowing what research you had run or what did my product say you can judge by yourself because there’s nothing like seeing the product work.

Chris Parker: Yeah. Yeah, this is something that we discovered is that if we can get people to this stage of running a comparison study of their research with with what we provide, we’re going to have a quiet we’re going to have a customer. So, is in the spirit of sadly wrapping up because I’m thoroughly enjoying this, but is this the call to action, if you will? So if you are a research analyst and you’re doing some research and you’re triggered by this potential then to reach out to you on LinkedIn and run this kind of sort of blind studies. So take take something you’ve already done maybe in a traditional way and bring in the inputs not the outputs and then compare and contrast in the?

Hugo Alves: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. That’s it. That’s for me that’s the ideal situation is come to me you have you’re going to spend zero I’m going to do it for free come to me send me a message and say Hugo can you run this I just need recruitment criteria how did you find the people you interviewed and what were either your questions your goal whatever it is and I’ll just use the inputs of your research and I’ll give you the output of my platform And then it’s up to you to check and compare.

Chris Parker: Incredible. Well, I found it amazing and fascinating and also also in a SaaS, Gen AI product space to see how you clearly have linked together different engines at different steps of the way, to craft people’s, to prompt them through setting up the research and then, of course, executing the research and then and generating the output. Yeah, outstanding. And again for me, it confronted me about some of my biases, some of my assumptions. So, it definitely did the job for me. So, and we’re just humans. We’re just humans and we’re now we’re benefiting from these giant mirrors, the these LLMs that are able to, reflect back. And I believe if you stay curious and cautious sometimes because GPT wants to please you. So be careful. Don’t make life decisions based on GPT advice please. But this does it at a scale. So, if you’re validating, if you’re, I think if you’re making a major decision on a company product, launch, something to validate, there’s really no reason not to do this. Just to say, hey, am I on the right track? What am I missing? How, if this is what I feel this persona group would really appreciate, am I right? because because we oftentimes are so in love with our product that we’re just blind to the irrelevance or whatever. So, some sort of fly in the ointment that could screw it all up.

Hugo Alves: Yeah. I think when we first launched, we didn’t so what you experience now, it’s what we call a dynamic interview. So we generate a synthetic user on the one side and then we generate some kind of an interviewer that will decide on what questions to ask interactively. In the beginning that was not the case in the beginning that it was we generated the synthetic user but the questions were fixed questions for all the two types of interviews we did and one of the interview types was concept testing and at that time four of the eight questions were negative questions were what concerns do you have about this idea or this concept? What problems do you see in the implementation or the consumption of the product? what ways do you see this product being improved? So my questions were disconfirming questions. I didn’t want that my product to be a yes, I think dog food that your baby can also eat is an amazing idea. No, no, I wanted my product to provide.

Chris Parker: That’s you have something. No, the dog will works the other way though. The dog will eat the baby food.

Hugo Alves: Exactly. Exactly. So I wanted the product to provide to not be a yes man that is not helpful. That we know that we know that if and that’s the concern with people using Chat GPT for this is that Chat GPT is too much of a yes man to be useful in most cases.

Chris Parker: Outstanding. Hugo Alves is coming to us from from Portugal from Lisbon and you can find him at syntheticusers.com. I’ll put the link in the show notes. I’ll also put the LinkedIn there. So, if you are running research and if you’re triggered and inspired by this, I really urge you to reach out to Hugo on LinkedIn and run that test. If you happen to do it, then also let me know or this will be posted on LinkedIn. I’d love it if you go back there and and then let us know what happened with that experiment. I would be just excited to hear that. So, Hugo, thank you so much.

Hugo Alves: Thank you, Chris. It’s always a pleasure talking to you. someone who really values how to build great businesses, how to build effective businesses, and someone who’s curious about this new world of having artificial intelligence helping us helping us help other people. Curious every day. Thank you, Hugo. Cool.

Chris Parker: Thank you for listening to the Business Simplicity podcast. If this conversation resonated, please share it with a fellow leader. Navigating complexity. Visit Ebullient.com to discover how we can partner to simplify your strategy, align your teams, and accelerate meaningful growth.

Chris Parker: This is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity podcast and I just had a conversation with Aline Frankfurt and she’s the author co-author of The Art of Shapership and this is an invitation to create much more positive futures beyond simple leadership and entrepreneurship. And we go wide and far and deep and get into the power of the intuition, the power of beliefs in maintaining the status quo. And we go into some different anecdotes and stories of people that have really changed the world for the positive beyond simple profit motive. It was great. So Aline, why would it be valuable or inspirational for people to listen to this conversation?

Aline Frankfurt: Well, maybe there are some keys for everyone who wants to become a sort of not activist in the usual sense but activist of their own future or life. Just to find, to reclaim the power and freedom to consciously operate some shifts in perspectives and say okay maybe I’m just looking at the world in a way that encourages my life to continue the way it is and I’m happy with it or maybe I’m just feeling the desire for something else and see how much pleasure it might be to consciously choose new ways of looking at the world. And there are some keys in this podcast. I think that we give the best we can and with truth and not with so much theory more inner wisdom.

Chris Parker: Welcome to the Business Simplicity podcast where Chris Parker explores how leaders cut through complexity to accelerate strategy, execution, and growth with calm, clarity, and confidence.

Welcome back to the Business Simplicity podcast. I’m having a conversation with Aline Frankfurt who is coming in from Brussels. We are part of a network of coaches called the Enablers Network and she is involved in many things. Probably too many to mention but as involved in education in coaching consulting book writing and shaping the future or changing the perception of people to change the future. We’re going to unpack all of that. This is a gift for me I feel to unpack the word shapership and earlier she said you know to get beyond the cult of leadership and entrepreneurship and these are just such triggering words for me I cannot wait to discover more about shapership and in the show notes I will include link to her book The Art of Shapership The Eye Only Sees What the Brain is Ready to Understand. What she wrote with Jean Louise Bowen.

I’ll include the link there, but I believe we’ll also go into some new territories. There’s some discovery territory. So, it’s I think in this case strap in your seat belts because this is going to be I hope a wild ride with someone who is so dynamic in her thinking. So, Aline, can you just start with and then we’ll discover how to get there. What is the word shapership mean? Shapership. What is that?

Aline Frankfurt: Yes. So shapership comes from the verb to shape like shaping a diamond. And ship like you have in craftsmanship or in friendship or in leadership in entrepreneurship of course. And so the ship means a craft or a skill in a particular field. And shapership is the art, the craft of shaping new realities. And we as I said to you, we invented this word because we had projects that were called shaping the future and we were so fed up with leadership and entrepreneurship that we began to see as words that needed to be re thought or reinvented because when we turn to someone to find leadership, it’s not always at the top that we find them. And entrepreneurs for us many of them or too many of them might be just creating something a job without thinking far further in terms of what we called shaping or opening new path towards the future. So we invented this word shapership as the art of making new path visible, desirable and actionable.

Now you might say oh this is what entrepreneurs do. But we started to say that maybe some people in the past and in today’s world have been opening new path that were invisible before them in fields like medicine, justice, maybe management, care, whatever. And we decided to look at the way they looked at the world and how they shaped new realities. And of course, shall I give you some words on the already so much we can go into this.

Chris Parker: What I’m really curious is what was it that was making you fed up about leadership and entrepreneurship? What was not allowing this openness for future potentials because you had a reaction there. You’re like leadership and entrepreneurship was failing. Therefore, we needed this new framing of the invitation for the future. So what was it that was failing in the current paradigm of those terms?

Aline Frankfurt: To me it’s of course it’s just my point of view just I felt that we are mixing being at the top of a company with being a leader and status is supposed to give people the to make them deserve the name of leaders but in fact they might be on top of nothing. And very often in my perception they are not on top. They are on top of a pyramid but not on top of complexity. They lack a vision that really opens new doors to the future. And it starts sometimes to be frightening to see how much they like creativity. And so in the board the decision where decision strategic decision happen and sometimes impact thousands of people hundreds or thousands when you decide the direction well for deciding the direction there is a need to have options and creativity and I discovered that at the top of the system very often people lack a lot of creative options so it’s as if they were making decisions out of lack of vision and now they there is a lot of talking going around talking about realism. We need to be realist. Yes. But being realist demands vision otherwise it’s blindness. And so I started to discover that there are many so-called leaders who are little boys as I call them. And I’m sorry to be so critical but it’s really something that that is to be said that it’s first it start with courage which is from the heart. Courage it doesn’t mean to be tough. It means to have an open heart with open mind.

Chris Parker: Let me just be super vulnerable on this and give you an example from my very recent experience and behind the example is is this not a systemic issue meaning these pyramid structures are primarily power-based and authority-based and in my case I was speaking to someone a good friend who’s was a top head hunter in London and we were basically talking about my career and where it’s going because I’ve been a CIO. I’ve been that leadership CIO CTO. I’ve have these C labels and in one hand those are really nice. You have power, you have influence, you have budget, you’ve got people, you can get stuff done that you think is a good idea. You get a lease car and money in the bank and all these nice things. And his feedback to me which was I had to invite him to give me the feedback. He said, “Chris, it’s really unlikely that you will ever again be a chief of a large multinational again.” And he said, “And simply, it’s because of risk. Chris, you’re too creative. You’re too colorful. You move you’re too much of a generalist.” and he said those are all the things I love about you but when it gets to large corporation decision-making for these chief roles there’s a thousand people who are striving for that power internally and finally it gets to the point of what is the least risk appointment they can make and Chris you are risk because you change things you break things you influence things and that was such a gift to hear that black and white from him and I was like yeah looking at my career, I am always involved in a portfolio of things and exploring the new and messing it up a lot and failing and so I get that. My I guess my question is is it not a systemic those little egotistical boys as you called and sometimes girls and the system calls for those people to in a lot of ways to be part of the operational immune system to keep things from changing. So I don’t know I think there’s a systemic dimension and a need for the fresh and the new and the art of the possible. So, so how do you reconcile the those conflicting perspectives?

Aline Frankfurt: I think that there is you’re perfectly right. I think if I share with you there is the system itself, the dominant system, let’s put it that way and the way the economy currently works. We’re talking about this universe of company so far. But in this world, of course, there is a chase for power. That means that you have certain rules to respect if you want to move up the ladder. And of course, obeying those rules rather than disobeying them means that at the top you very often have the most obedient people, not the most creative ones. And disrupting the rules is an art in itself. And there are some leaders who disrupted the rules. Now the thing is that I’m not accusing anyone. I know it’s very complex to be in a system like that.

And you cannot be alone against the system. So how do we change the system from within might be a good question but I would say you talk about power power of decisions power whatever I’m saying something really stupid but I like this idea that I’m observing myself sometimes entering even a bakery with being a customer and sometime with something is dissatisfaction creates dissatisfaction. I’m looking at myself and one day I looked at myself being disagreeable and I thought well who do I think I am suddenly in power or what? And I think that we need to observe our little reactions everyday reactions. How much power might create a certain arrogance the illusion of being on top of something even for a minute or whatever. So resisting power is in itself difficult. Have you seen how the faces of people change when they are in power for a long time? They don’t look more alive. They look like they have lost their soul sometimes. And I say it very clearly. Go in a shop where there are very rich people and look at them. Watch what they how much aliveness there seems to be. What does it mean to be alive? We meet people. we know where they are alive and there is an animation in French anime is a soul it’s the soul so I’m not talking spirituality here I’m talking just basic life now we put words the way you want but what I’m interested in with all the search I’m interested in is about this power and freedom we have as human being to precisely change something which is the microcosm within our mind. I’m not talking about changing the world outside directly but first the power and freedom to change the way we see things and that’s where I thought that the leadership to come to your first question leaders sometimes have lost even the entourage or the people around them and for this little battles with plastic helmets and stages and sometimes they start to be afraid and they don’t realize they are in a power game which doesn’t mean more than power game and life has been sucked out of those companies and I think that it’s a question of bringing it back and starting to make people feel that they can really start to feel where life is in their mind and heart and soul. And that’s where leadership to me is in danger if it becomes soulless and dead like I think we should be careful about that.

And the second thing about entrepreneurship is not it’s Adam Arvinsson. Arvinsson is a Swedish guy who lives in Italy and he wrote a book which I really admire for the difficulty of the entrepreneurs to stand out at the moment and do something that is really differentiating for the world and I believe that entrepreneurship is great and at the same time a friend of mine and she’s in the health business. She said I’m going to create a company. I said great it’s a great idea. What are you going to do? I’m going to sell this product and blah blah blah. And then I presented to her shapership which will come and I said there is another way of thinking which is rather than ego driven or in a narrow scope. How about having an outward scope and really start to focus on what the world demands? What the world demands because this really needs to change. And how about associating the ecosystem to answer that rather than me myself and my company and me being an entrepreneur. How about creating the needed coalition to create the system solutions that the world needs and that would be more powerful. I think there are examples of that which I admire. And there’s still too much ego in entrepreneurship. Sometimes it’s changing. But so the idea is to inspire shapership is a proposal to give added dimensions which will be the subject I guess. the added dimension as an inspiration, potential inspiration to people whatever they do without any obligation.

And maybe the keys we propose are universal because they can be used by a 15-year-old girl or man without status and a guy at the top of something. whoever who is human, whatever age, gender, education might receive this. And that’s what I wanted to grab on that.

Chris Parker: So what the world demands and I’m assuming that this is not I demand a different type of hamburger from McDonald’s. This is not what we’re talking about here. I think we’re talking about a different level of demand. So, I’d love to unpack a word demand and then if you can explore a little bit how shapership can allow that 15-year-old girl to connect with that demand, that purpose, that intent, that I feel where you’re going, but can you walk me down that path of how shapership can enable me to fulfill that demand.

Aline Frankfurt: I feel that if I tell you one of the stories it will be easy to feel the thing and then apply it to whatever question and another person. So is it okay if I tell you a story?

Chris Parker: Please. Yeah, please.

Aline Frankfurt: So, let’s say one of them there is a man in India. He’s 55 years old. He’s an ophthalmic surgeon. He got an arthritis that prevents him from operating people. His name is Dr. V. is living in India and he does the first thing that I think that shapership means. He looks at reality square in the face reality as it is. So he looks at his country and what he sees is that there are millions of people who are becoming blind because of lack of preventive care. So the shapership attitude is first to look at reality as it is and to feel that we don’t need to say this is the way it is. We are not prisoners of fact and then some of them they say screw it. Some they say what I call a big no. A big no is I cannot stand the status quo. This is like being in the middle ages. So this man he says a big no. I cannot stand that. And if you follow this now I’m talking about something a big no is something in our body it’s a I cannot stand that it’s not an idea about something it’s wow somewhere I’m touched and then if we remain in the big no that might be a durable attitude but we need something and feel how much it’s natural to say we need a big yes we need a big yes which is a transformative vision. And so this man, he says, sorry, you want to ask

Chris Parker: What just is exploding in me is and it’s core to one of my beliefs is I see many many people then get stuck in the big no and then they get stuck in the rage against the big no. They talk about the big no. They report on the big no. that’s becoming an activist and it I will give you an example which is famous after because I think it’s a major issue to connect the three and so that’s why I’m saying as Buckminster Fuller the futurist he said if you want to change the system you don’t fight the existing system you create a new one that makes the old obsolete

Aline Frankfurt: Yeah great so what does this man Dr. He says a big yes. And now I’m going to tell you this the sentence which is so interesting. He says I’m going to eliminate useless blindness among the poor. Okay. Useless. Okay. Now this is from this is the amplitude of what Martin Luther King said. I have a dream. He didn’t say I have a nightmare. And I think that this big yes is like this. It’s I’m going to eliminate needless blindness. Everyone puts a finger in their forefront. They say this man is crazy. This is what happens to all the people who make a hole in the bubble. Bubble is the jungle of the representation of what we believe is possible and impossible. If we believe we cannot change the system, we won’t do it. So what the shapership what shapership is is first we make a hole and as we know when we make a hole in a bubble light comes in.

Chris Parker: Yeah.

Aline Frankfurt: Yeah. That creates a tension because we might be in our living room quite satisfied and suddenly there is room coming in and we thought we were very well with super sofa and all that and suddenly we look and say gosh it looks like crap So it creates a tension between the place where we are and a possible other world. This is typical. It’s called a double vision. And so Dr. V says I’m going to eliminate needless blindness. He has seven physicians and he’s going to make it. And that’s the third part. We call it anticipative experimentation. It’s reinventing the world because once you have a big no and a big yes, you’re not going to make a timid incremental movement. You need to reinvent the things otherwise it’s weak.

So this guy is going to create alliances with all the women in rural India who often don’t know how to read is going to create an alliance of the tele medicine centers for early diagnosis. Then the poor are too poor to come to the hospital. is going to create a transportation to bring them there. They are operated seven times faster than in Europe because physicians are there to eliminate needless blindness. That’s the vertebral axis. Then they need glasses because they’re not going to come back. So he creates a glasses factory. And in fact, Dr. had an idea that it’s stupid to see how McDonald can create the same hamburger all over the world and we cannot create a super qualitative eye operation for everybody. So he created the system and he asked the rich to pay for the poor. So one rich pays for two poors because they accept to go to a hotel facility. after 30 years the this hospital was diagnosed the best the best eye care hospital in the world at 1% of what it costs in UK as it was evaluated not because it’s in India because they are driven by a big yes which is beyond ego eliminate needless blindness and in 2020 Dr. V is dead for long and they decided to become to eliminate needless blindness in the world not in India. So what does that mean? They don’t have competition because you don’t have competition with that purpose. But who wants to be trained by those people? Not us European too proud. We have Essilor as a company who is going to India doing the same thing as Dr. V as a company told me. What does that mean? They are selling glasses. Yeah, they are not doing the same thing. So I admire this because there is this idea that what seems impossible is made possible by people who create a movement, the coalition of actors very often without any structure, without power. Yeah. Yeah.

And they’re all the same. They create a movement because what they want to see happen the future they make visible by saying I’m going to eliminate needless blindness. Now I don’t have the numbers in mind. He has not eliminated needless blindness but he has taken care of six million people maybe and now they there is this idea that the the story I told to one man who I mean they manufacture plastic components for bags whatever and so they are in business and bags for blood for dialysis in September 2024. He worked to me. He said I’m in Africa. I’m here created a system for people in the deep in the middle of nowhere in the jungle. Sometimes they lost an arm or a leg or whatever. And I have created a system inspired by all those discussion we had. And now they can take a picture of their missing arm or leg. They send it 600 kilometer away to Kinshasa where there is a 3D factory who prints their missing remember on demand for a budget that is I think it’s really affordable in Africa and they are they receive their prosthesis on demand and it was possible because he created a coalition of actors among the nurses hospitals It was inspired by this story and he said to me shapership shapership because otherwise it wouldn’t he wouldn’t think of it. He’s not creating a business is creating a solution to what the world needs in Africa and the other in India and that’s the expression I use is that we used to focus on what needs are but what the world demands is a well it means it needs to happen somewhere. It’s something we cannot just witness the world like that and say my gosh those people are becoming blind and it means three years to live in India. I’m just witnessing this and I don’t give a damn I mean just I know some people they say I’m going to stand up for something and you’re right some people stay in the know. I don’t know if you remember Sydney Lumet movie Network which is a it’s a guy who there’s Peter Finch and another great actor and she’s in the CEO of a network and one guy he just he’s run out of things as he says. So one day he’s just getting mad and he’s telling in front of everybody, I want you to get mad. I want you to stand up and say, “I’m mad as hell.” And there is a famous scene and he goes to the window and he shouts that I’m mad as hell. And in fact, that’s something it’s a big no. But in the movie is hired by Faye Dunaway to say this big no all again and again and some people are just sitting there until at the end of the movie is just shut down because he’s making too much noise but nobody said a big yes. There is this physicians Dr. Mukwege who was in Africa correcting taking care of women who were violated harshly and I think that he did a great job until the moment that he said I’m surprised I’m taking care of the daughter of the woman I took care of a few years ago and I thought maybe he never said a big yes.

Chris Parker: Yeah, he said a big no. No alternative. Yeah. I do remember the network movie because it’s also a multi-layered meaning there was there was a relationship dimension as well between some people and and indeed that I’m damn mad and then they made a TV show out of it and it was just yeah they then they started selling the no they started pushing the no and one of my beliefs is that the more you spend your energy on and energy in your physical self but also your just your life energy, your essence what you focus on will grow, and if you’re focusing on this no, then that no thing will just grow and grow and grow. So that’s what I particularly see in politics is they’re so raging against each other, which actually just enlarges this whole dynamic of againstness.

Aline Frankfurt: Yeah, I think to make it nuance because there is the no I don’t want to the okay I’m going to challenge the rules which is simply say I’m not a slave to the dogma the dogma that’s something which is again it’s not because the others are doing it this way that I have to do it this way it’s not because people tell me that this is not supposed to be done that I’m not doing it It’s not because the facts seems to show that this is difficult. So it’s like being prisoners in fact of either the facts. We don’t we don’t have to obey the facts. We have to look at the facts. We don’t have the truth. We have momentary truth. We have the dogmas of the past. The best practices might not be the next practices. So it’s always taking a the distance to say okay this is the way it is. what am I where do I stand and then then this is not enough then we need to open something to the way things could be and I think this double double vision because vision is always associated with the future but vision of the present is interesting in an institution I worked with which is a university they told me you’re right we never said the big no so He never said a big a big yes.

Chris Parker: Yeah.

Aline Frankfurt: The system is corrupted to the max with power far from teaching and research. And I said to him to start with a big no. Oh, okay. No, blah, blah. 20 years later, the friend of mine, he said to me, you’re right. We never agreed on the fact that the reality we shared was maintained by our power games, by us, that we were in the game. We never agreed to look at the stories we were telling ourselves that were reinforcing the system. So we never could agree on changing the system.

Chris Parker: And why is that bad? I mean most organizations are as we said systemically bound by power and momentum and operational excellence. So standard operating procedures, stamping out the creativity of people as they’re raising, coming up up the road. Is that bad? And I guess my need for non-judgmental observation. It could probably be better. I guess it’s bad if they don’t like it. I don’t know.

Aline Frankfurt: Oh I think that there might be different way to answer but first I don’t think I say it’s bad I say that we should ourselves free ourselves from our shoulds we use too much should we should do that we must do that blah blah blah who what are those rules that companies should make profit and therefore well-being doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. I just say the shoulds and woulds, the should the should and must. is it how you say in English? The should and must of this world are creating automatic thinking patterns, habits. There is only one way to make business. We should do this. We have to blah blah blah. So we have built a world around rules and we live in a chaotic soup of dogmas and shoulds and blah blah and so at the end we repeat those things without thinking and I’m not saying I have the answer but there is something to say for some companies like I was in the other day in a big industry phosphate industry They’re making a lot of money. Business as usual is going fine. Not as fine as before, but they are starting to think that maybe they are a bit too much damaging the environment. pretending they are in health business in agriculture business and making more innovative soil additive whatever while destroying radically the soils and blah blah blah blah blah. So there is the corporate stuff who says everything is fine until one moment somebody like me some other people say you know what there is a difference between technological advancement and betterment. This is Daniel Schmachtenberger. You might make a more powerful soil additive for industrial agriculture. That means advancement. Is it a betterment for the soil, for civilization, for food, for whatever? Not really. So, at one point our business model business models might have reached its end of the fit for purpose. If we consider that life is our purpose. If we consider that profit is our purpose, maybe not. But if I say well maybe sustaining life is a purpose different than and it’s not because we are making profit that we just consider this is an end in itself. So it depends where we put our questions. And so I don’t say for everybody it’s bad, it’s good.

Chris Parker: I’d like to reach back into our previous conversation before we started this podcast and talk about the role of intuition in your belly because could it be that in these organizations that maybe they’re business models are no longer fit for purpose? Is the early indicator the discomfort within the people involved that because I think people know this as well when they’re walking through life, they’re like, “Well, man, something feels off here.” Like, “Are we sure we want to do this?” Like, “Okay, well, I’m making my bonus. I’ve got my big car.” But I was like, my feeling is people are aware of it. Maybe they have covered that awareness with all these shoulds and woulds and titles and things like that. So then the pain gain equation it’s not uncomfortable enough. But that discomfort I think over time that kind of discomfort can also manifest itself in disease in your body and disease in your organizations. It’s something that’s disconnected in its essence. Is that the early indicator? Like if you’re feeling in your belly, something’s off here for me in this space. Is that the signal or is there other signals that we need to call the lean because we’re on the wrong track here. Like what’s the signal that someone would call you and say please help us shape the future?

Aline Frankfurt: Oh, it’s a different question, Chris. The first one is I feel that if we if we are in good shape more or less we just let’s say human beings are connected minds body and soul or mind heart and guts it depends the way you want to say but that’s very body mind and soul. So we are good at telling ourselves stories and so maybe some people say okay it’s good but I’ll see when I’ll retire until they have a 15-year-old boy or girl in their family and very often I ask him what does your boy say he says dad you’re stupid to go on like that you need you to stop and then I look at the boss the CEO or the whatever if there is a CEO sometimes there is one who is not a manager busy be managing the deadlines and sometimes someone who can get above that and tell me I know he’s right. So why are you waiting? What are you waiting? How old are you? Oh, I’m 55 45 sometimes 35 sometimes. Are you going to wait until you’re retired or it’s just what does it mean? And you are right. Some people they know there are there are many games we play denial like the ostrich. many games we play because the comfort zone is so much we paid so much and with many reasons I feel now I’m using this in inner compass you could call it intuition call it simplicity sometimes you know our rational mind he knows everything and he is ready to justify everything he knows intuition knows best every time from the start so we need to be not either or But start to admit that we are strange creators and creators. Sorry. And it’s fun to play with things. But at one point you remember maybe Bluebeard. Is it how you say it? The story of Bluebeard. The man who was assassinating his wives and putting them in the

Chris Parker: I don’t know. It’s a story of a monster with a blue beard. A blue beard. Okay. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Aline Frankfurt: And one day the one of the wife who was supposed not to go in into the cave to see the dead bodies, she goes there and the keys of the room falls into the blood. And I like the version of the story who says the key was bleeding. She couldn’t hide the fact that she had seen. No, it’s the same for us. Whether we talk about looking at reality as it is, sometimes we see things and we cannot undo erase. And just one word and then the same for the future. Sometimes we know that the world the future we build right now cannot be the same as the as I mean we have to move something. So intuition is the place where we know that we need to stop telling ourselves stories.

Chris Parker: I want to hug this word intuition or inner compass or there’s so much in my work and I have followed some teachings of like Dr. Joe Dispenza, people like that who deeply transformative primarily meditation, mindful breathing techniques, naturally triggered psychedelic experiences like Dr. Joe weeklong retreats you have psychedelic experiences without chemicals and it was through that through one of those moments when I feel I connected with my essence my innerness past my ego past my fear and it took me a couple weeklong events to actually realize how much fear was driving my decisions. And so, so if you get past the ego, past the physical body, and then you’re left with what what’s left. Is that also where the big no comes from? Because I think your repulsion, like if you’re really there and if you’re truly in touch and you’re holding those bloody keys, you cannot ignore the big no. Is that where it’s found or am I just projecting my journey?

Aline Frankfurt: No. I resonate with what you say very much concerning the first the idea that expanding the realm of our connection with whatever we call consciousness, reality etc. through whatever we do meditation etc. expanded experiences of expanded awareness show us how much our daily awareness is restricted and narrow by our rational mind which is okay but there is so much beyond that we need to understand that beyond is a lot and that’s the connection with fear and desire in French desire and desire is exactly the opposite in the desire is being paralyzed and feared and desire is the opposite. it’s like an anagram and I think that there is a I love to play on the fact that what the decisions we make from fear fear of not knowing fear of uncertainty fear fear fear fear are not good enough for our lives and they except if we are in our true survival mode for good reasons I mean just the reptilian mind otherwise I believe there is there this is more interesting to play around the desire. Let’s say for instance a young boy comes to me say wow I have a fear of lacking money the fear of getting bored the fear of being employed and having a career that doesn’t mean mean meaningful things for me the fear of what what what moment what is your desire so what does the fear indicate about what you want more and this articulation might be sometimes very useful because what We say a big no to as we know is very often saying a big no to some to open some space to something we absolutely want. it’s like I see plus V images, sensations, emerging emotions and voices. We are not we are ambivAlinet beings. We have we might have a certain fear of being stuck in our comfort zone and liking it quite a lot and not feeling ready to go but at the same time finding that we might aspire to something more alive and blah blah blah blah blah. So it’s not as if we were shifting like that. But beyond fear as you have lived and I lived it too strangely enough. Suddenly we are very cool. Yeah.

It’s just that this there is a difficulty to connect what we now know about the universe and the the large the breath of our essence. We are much more than what we think in the invisible realm. And now we come and we have to make a something and we are in the material world. How do we bring the spirit into matter in a way that doesn’t betray yeah doesn’t betray and I think that’s what that’s where that inner guidance system that I believe we all have. I believe we are all gifted with that that inner sense of right and wrong. I know other people believe differently but that’s this is just this is how I operate.

Chris Parker: Yeah. Yeah. And does shapership like okay when you’re connected to that deeper self and then and you become aware of the potentiality of vastly greater this is where I guess that visioning can come in that you can then poke that hole in the illusion and then see a potential future that that is beyond the shoulds and the musts and the must nots and it’s beyond all of this tapestry of control.

Aline Frankfurt: But as you say the to give you an example of that there’s a man in the chocolate business with whom I worked who has made the tour of the world alone on a ship sails I mean he has courage he is in an industry as a system which is locked in a certain way of functioning maintaining poor producer on one end, supermarkets on the other and in the middle there are people who buy the chocolate to make pasta and then six industrial who sell the chocolate code blah blah blah then bean to bar some of them and what it takes to call in to talk about the intuition and so on is that we talked about what is before we talked about opening or making a hole is is the CEO of a company. There are people behind with jobs. And so I think we managed together to have a dialogue about what does it mean to look at what is and say is this what you want? No, but I mean just this is how it is and where where do you look first? You look at the dominant system. Where are the people on the at the edge as you say earlier? I looked at people who are fed up with the system who are already making a revolution in their own country in Peru in Africa whatever like the Dr. There are people in chocolate making that. What are they doing? They are they are saying screw industrialist. We never taste our own chocolate and we are poor. We are fed up with that. And so when we look at the different realities while a world is crumbling our world while a model is reaching a certain stage of maturity there there are always different way different places where the future is emerging and we need to be aware that the future is not in time. It’s all it’s here now. So we look at these things and then we we could say okay we are we are not part of we don’t want this relationship of power with the poor people and maintaining this and we opened a vision for them with them on the future they wanted to create which was so far from where they are and need so much coalition that it’s not going to be done like that. So it has to be worked and then we created the portfolio of in initiatives that would allow them to shift the system. In the meantime, the factory was destroyed by the flooding and they were giving money to the producer and I heard a journalist interview the workers in the factory. What do you think about your company giving money to a producer and finding new ways to support them while you were rebuilding your factory and you’re nowhere? And they said, “You know what? We said a big no and a big yes. That’s our project.”

Chris Parker: What was the big no and big yes then?

Aline Frankfurt: The big no was to the power relationship. And the big was for a new type of company built on.

Chris Parker: Oh yeah. So they’re taking a moment to reinvent completely.

Aline Frankfurt: Yeah. And they they are now they gave up fair trade which is finding ways to proudly say we redistribute part of our money to poor people. They said we’re going to help them live. So we’re going to find find a way to interact with them differently. So so it’s they rebuilt the factory. They are starting to get out of the big distribution. That mean they are they are strategically trying to find a way to be coherent with their big no and big yes with people behind them who are proud proud not proud members but proud contributors to the world in a way and say we took position we’re not like the we’re not copying anyone now I think that this is about courage several times. The courage to look at things and say instead of being like the ostrich putting our head in the sand recognize we decide every day to buy the coffee we buy to buy the chocolate we buy. We vote for a world. Now I’m saying that it’s good we don’t have to be under self-surveillance all the time but there are times in our lives moments where we say poof feel and I feel I’m starting to be sick as you say or sorry or sad or so what what is the life I want for myself and for the rest of us and not everyone is going to be Martin Luther King and change the world some are changing the family, three people around them, four, five, what I mean, we don’t have to just pick your big yes.

Chris Parker: I think I do want to get to that question of what is the trigger for people to call you, but before that, I want to see if I can sync up or assimilate our different work because I work on simplicity and one of the artifacts I have is I have this simple business design canvas. Yes. And across the top there’s it starts with purpose and I know purpose is an abused word but in intent impact who’s your customer what’s your product or service and then what’s what’s the emotional journey so and what I really try to do is and it’s so fun to working with a leadership team I have them write their stories separately so I have them answer these questions separately and then I confront it back to them. And it’s astounding how rarely anything is really synced up or aligned. And then what I look for is where are they violently agreeing or violently disagreeing. And violent mean I mean completely. And the reason I look for the violent agreeing is because there could be a false dichotomy there as well. Like okay, you guys all believe this and it could be fundamentally wrong. So let’s pull that out. And then where the disagreements are then it’s an invitation to engage. Oh, okay. So, if this is what you believe the purpose is and this is what you believe the purpose is, this is what like well is there a common ground and what I strive to do is find the connection because the true essence of a company is the some of the humans involved. because if it’s not then it’s just pure marketing. it’s greenwashing or something like that because if they’re not actually living it and breathing it then the people in involved will know it’s inauthentic and the people outside will know it’s inauthentic and so having a discussion around simplicity of then removing the unnecessary with the intention to align intent deep intent is so incredibly powerful and what I’m hearing from you is you actually take is an a huge step further and say that’s great and the art of the possible the potential is even beyond what you’ve thought about on this canvas in this conversation and I love that because what I do feel sometimes is the the gravitational force of now can keep people in an orbit is really close to the comfort zone and what I’m hearing from you is that that there is a way of engaging with something more, something better. And I love that. I was I’m just trying to sync up our two practices in our in our works.

Aline Frankfurt: I think we have a lot in common. just I’m going to tell you a very short May I tell you a short story? I when I was young I admired a lot Cartier-Bresson the photographer and I there is a legend around Cartier-Bresson who is supposed to be the one-click photographer just making wonderful pictures just like that and I thought my gosh this is incredible and one day I read an interview he said my preferred book is Zen and the Arch of Archery.

Chris Parker: Oh, okay. Japanese Japanese boom. I thought you were going to go towards motorcycle maintenance, but you went archery no zen and the art of archery. Okay.

Aline Frankfurt: Archery. So, it’s written by a German guy who goes in Japan to learn this art and it’s very difficult because he’s German, but he needs to let go things like that. And he finally cheats. By the by the way, his master says, “Okay, now is the day you’re going to target this target and aim it at just reaching it.” And takes his bow and he breathes the way he’s learned and he tries to reach the target and his arrow just goes not even in the middle in the distance. And then the master takes his bow and just he just reaches the target in the middle which is very far away the target. And so looks at the master and says master this is impossible. And the master says no Eugene you are aiming at the target. I’m aiming at the infinite.

So this is Dr. V. I’m going to eliminate needless blindness. There’s not a lot of bullshit This is one tensions. It’s like a poof. It’s you feel it. It lasts for years. And I think that beyond just having slogans somewhere, we need to have this helicopter view in tune with reality which makes us say things that are meaningful from the start and nevertheless elevated. So it’s not I want to I want to make people free. It’s I want to eliminate needless blindness because there is something in the world. So this this idea of connecting things goes through our inner self.

Chris Parker: Yeah. Yeah. So what is the trigger when when no before that let me let me go. This is impossible. when I when I hear that sometimes in these sessions and also when I’m coaching I like the the master’s infinite comment but my retort sometimes is is like well if you believe that then you’re right yes absolutely and and then but even even the fact that I’ve introduced the concept of there’s a choice they’re like wait what what do you mean by that and then at least then it opens a conversation and because if if you believe it to be true. This is this creates the frame in which you can see. The the subtitle of your book, the eye only sees what the brain is ready to understand. This is what what resonated with me on that which was if you believe it’s not possible by definition it will never happen.

Aline Frankfurt: It’s a joke of this book with Descartes. I only believe what I see is Descartes but it’s false. you know that people don’t believe what they see also not yeah there’s there’s multiple I preferred Bergson sentence because it’s right of course we we need to prepare our mind and the world is filled with vision that wait for us to see well that that’s I guess that was the other thing is I don’t I think it’s not that we have to invent or create these dramatically new ways of living and existing.

Chris Parker: For me, it it what resonates with me more and I can’t really articulate it is it’s more that we’re that we are remembering them or we are connecting to the existing potentiality. that Dr. the potential for Dr. V to do that has always been there. there there was nothing that was fundamentally disallowing it. It was just a matter of him looking at the pattern slightly differently and if you look at the pattern slightly differently then then something else emerges. So it’s Yeah. I don’t know. I guess like with like the the artist’s way and those types of things where where this inner voice of creativity that emerges from us. it’s coming from somewhere deeper. And if you get rid of this ego and this body and you become in tune with it, maybe inspired by this big no, then you’re then you’re willing to be brave enough to say, “What about that?” Then like why not that? That’s a that’s a much more simple way of doing this. This makes much more sense to me even though it’s counter to what we’ve experienced so far.

Aline Frankfurt: There is there’s a lot to of questions behind that I think because there is the the notion of deep wisdom inside of us or deep knowledge or accessing a a field of whatever we call it consciousness or let’s say wisdom sometimes inner wisdom local knowledge and a friend of mine is working with the Kogi Indian at the moment and they obviously have preserved a connection with the living world that we have lost a lot and I know that even in in Europe we were connected did much more than we think with the plants and and rituals and sacred world and dimensions we have a bit lost. So we probably like Stonehenge and all the sites in the world are demonstrating that we had a knowledge that was astronomic, cosmological and and energetical. Anyway, we need to reconnect with things, but at the same time, I have the feeling that we need to reintegrate old wisdoms and at the same time to reconsider everything we told ourselves in terms of progress and find a way to invent our access to a new level of humanity. I don’t know what it means, but it’s not going back to something we were. To me, it’s disenveloping ourselves from who we believe we are disenveloping. So, some sort of act of unlearning or or yeah, disenveloping. Let’s go with that.

Chris Parker: Yeah, it’s like going in pilgrimage, you know, it’s just getting rid of things and at the same time being looking forward to some some things. How can we invent some I’m not talking about inventing some technology. I’m going to say it clearly that I think that we need to find ways to access our own humanity up to another level and and that might be something that gives us this solidarity that is needed now interplanetary.

Aline Frankfurt: Yes. You just used the word access not create.

Chris Parker: Yes. So is that intentional meaning meaning that there is another evolution of humanity in existence that we need to access? That’s kind of what I feel as well, but I I just Yeah, I can’t articulate it.

Aline Frankfurt: That’s it’s because to to come back to to come back to what we said earlier, if the let’s say in the in the years 80, a guy wrote the Neuronal Man, so the neuronal man pretending that from the activity of our brain cells, consciousness was emerging. And this was the truth. Now hundreds of scientists have talking have talked about the post-materialist paradigm proving that our brain is a good filter and that when we disactivate more or less the filter through whatever we use meditation blah blah blah we expand the access to more what Akashic field consciousness information whatever Now the thing is that it’s obvious for us to say that the orchestra is not in the radio. We but we might change the frequency. Now I believe that post-materialist let’s say proto-truth the truth that this is the truth I believe in and it changes everything because it means that we access we don’t create but at the same time we also have our own unconscious whatever. So by the way and you know that sometimes we access much more knowledge than we can integrate in our own life. So we have we are living double lives as if we were more advanced on another on another plan and then suddenly we come back and we just jump on the person who who says something that we disagree with. So our wisdom and our deep essence is far beyond this little ego who is trying to exist painfully in this material world sometimes. And my question is when I say I mean an alchemist question bring spirit into matter and bring matter up. So we need to find ways to live this world as spiritual beings in charge of of letting life go through us and stop to be obstacles. But by the way I’m not making my whole food myself sometime needs a transaction I sometimes work with it’s complicated. So accessing is something and I believe also that inventing is something like daring a creative jump in our mind like Dr. He did eliminate needless blindness to me is wise but it’s also daring something as human being daring and it means something to invent a friend of mine is currently working with Pakistan from Brussels he’s a geek he’s an inventor is a and he said to me I’m inventing a a filter for water in Pakistan they don’t have water they are making it for me for me with me and now they say we all want that a filter for water at I think a fifth of the price it currently has on the market is inventing something. It’s not it’s wise but is also making a creative jump.

Chris Parker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there there is a a step into the new invited invited by a by maybe a big yes in there as well. is he is he motivated by a a very altruistic

Aline Frankfurt: No. No. at the moment and we we very very often talk about that. Is it shapership or is it money? You said for the moment I need to make money. Well, it can be both, I guess. But anyway, I’m not going to do it. I mean, he’s he’s doing it in a certain way. Yeah. But he’s he has invented glasses or whatever. He’s he needs he needs to make a business. But anyway, he’s doing it in a I think very respectful way. yeah, but the good way I mean another way would be and it’s not impossible to put that on a wiki open open wiki and make it

Chris Parker: just open source it. Yeah, absolutely. So in bit sadly in wrapping up how do you support leaders and entrepreneurs move into shapership like so if if someone’s triggered by this and they go to shapership.com or or or connect with you on LinkedIn and we’ll put all that in the show notes. how might you assist someone on this journey of discovery?

Aline Frankfurt: I think there is there is one question that might trigger a conversation which is the fossil flop of the mind is my my expression for for shapership. It’s to say at one point how do we feel that we need to dare to get out of a box which is not just the usual box it’s the paradigm box and how do we how do we make a shift from business as usual to business as the world needs. If there is an interest for that question, then I can propose a journey which is a structured exploration that helps people just make better choices, wiser choices. I’m not telling them what to decide, but the present is the future in the making every day. So now is the moment. And I I want to say there is something in my heart among the sentences. One group of women in Bolivia said, “Be careful about the present you create because it must it must look like the future you dream of. So if you feel that the present you create is the repetition of some old SOS so same old solutions and if you prefer the save our soul SOS then okay I think a conversation is worth having to enrich the people who are going to decide about your community of work how to challenge the narrative that you maybe not even notice and the limit meditations and open the space so that you will be well proud and and aligned with your with your own intuition that something needs to happen and be creative for good. You can be creative to just improve what already exists. You can also be creative to invent something that is far beyond that. And that’s a conversation which is a strategic one. We call that strategic futuring. And then I want to say one word because I’m currently creating a game. And a game means without me being there, a way to open the possibility for people to seriously play with their mental maps thanks to imagination and intuition through images sometimes without words. it’s not like an oracle, but it’s much more subtle than that. And I think that for companies it’s wonderful. For instance, there is an image that I created of a swamp with dinosaurs. It’s called best in the world jungle. Some of my customer they called they call me say we have a problem say okay let’s call let’s go to the zone in the map which is about strategy on madland. On madland is the world of massive assured destruction. They they say oh we are in this jungle and in the other land nomad land there is the best for the world forum and asked them do you want to be the best in the world or the best for the world say we don’t know crap about being the best for the world and we go go on and they start to laugh but no doubt mad land is where we are somewhere stuck and we may decide to change or not. We don’t have to. So I would say I’m I’m completely I’m an artisan. I’m a craft woman. I’m not a big institution. I’m too much at the edge myself to be in an institution. But I can help institutions very very often. McKinsey or other big consultant are there and they they ask us to go there to bring them what nobody else dares to bring.

Chris Parker: Yeah, I can imagine. Complete challenge. Yeah. And opening the freedom which is a word we rarely use. When will Madland game be available? When can we experience this?

Aline Frankfurt: I think in beginning 26 because we are now prototyping the mechanics of the game. Y and I had the first session and the people were lost for 20 minutes before they started to really play it. So we are correcting this and I’m but I’ll have an in in the following conversation with you. I think I’ll show you something.

Chris Parker: No, great. And if and if you need a prototype playing group, I can I’m sure I can. It sounds really fascinating. So, wow. Thank you for this, Aline Frankfurt, author of Shapership. You can find her at shapership.com on LinkedIn. I knew this was going to be a roller coaster of conversation and thank you so much for for playing playing with me and connecting with me. it was really a delight. Thank you so much.

Aline Frankfurt: Thank you, Chris. It’s a delight to speak with you.

Chris Parker: Thank you for listening to the Business Simplicity podcast. If this conversation resonated, please share it with a fellow leader navigating complexity. Visit ebullient.com to discover how we can partner to simplify your strategy, align your teams, and accelerate meaningful growth.

Chris Parker: This is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity podcast I am having a conversation with Michael Paik who’s coming in from Seoul in Korea and he is the general counsel for Bobble AI and he’s also the founder and CEO of GRC Solutions which he’s educating organizations on risk management systems and compliance in general and what an incredible wealth of knowledge we really dove into what does AI potentially mean for in-house lawyers in-house counsel and we talked about how it could apply to younger starters as well as the head the GC of organization at a management level and got into some education and what it can really mean for lawyers it was fascinating so Michael what why would this be valuable for people to listen to it?

Michael Paik: So in a nutshell for lawyers in particular I think that hopefully it will provide lawyers with the confidence that they are actually surprisingly competent with AI with a few considerations and deliberations that they need to think about in terms of how they engage with it but because of the way we were trained the work that we do it’s a wonderful new tool and there’s no need to be afraid of it.

Chris Parker: The Business Simplicity podcast where we learn about strategies and tactics to succeed through simplicity with your host Chris Parker. Welcome back to the Business Simplicity podcast this is Chris Parker and I’m having a conversation with Michael Paik who is in Korea in Seoul and he like me is a bit of a portfolio professional where he is involved in a number of things and the two main things is he’s general counsel for Bobble AI which I believe is in auditing and certifying AI systems which I’m sure we’re going to unpack that and see what that means as well as the founder and CEO of GRC Solutions which is a training education consulting and risk management and compliance and so and the invitation today is to start to peel back the onion on what can AI mean for the legal profession and I’m excited about this and to make it a bit more personal we’re going to talk about what this can mean for younger lawyers and one of my sons has the aspiration to be a lawyer and he also has dyslexia so I’m also curious to see how Michael has ideas about that and I’m going to share this with him as a insight into what the future of lawyering of the legal profession can be in the age of AI so I’m just super excited about this but before we get into the content Michael can you share a little bit about what you’re doing with Bobble and GRC and maybe a little bit how did you get there like why are why are you so busy with this stuff because you are extremely passionate and busy?

Michael Paik: I probably should start from the beginning so I studied economics in college studied a little bit of operations research in Japan after college but ended up going to business school after which I went to law school but I went to law school with the business school mindset kind of a management mindset and as many of your listeners may know law schools primarily teach kind of a guild approach towards litigation and it’s not really applied in terms of corporate transactions and what businesses need so you have to figure that out after you leave so I started practicing in New York on Wall Street in kind of the junk bond high yield debt market and then went to California back in 98 with the first dot-com boom and that was in Palo Alto Silicon Valley for a while before returning to Korea I couldn’t find work in venture capital which was my focus in Silicon Valley so I started pivoting to developing risk management systems for large Korean companies so tires to begin with shipbuilding steel most recently and so this was kind of a sweet spot for me in that ultimately you’re developing risk management systems with the focus on legal and so that’s what I did for 20 years upon returning to Korea and part of that was learning about different systems for doing so whether it’s COSO or ISO or in one case it was governance risk management and compliance as developed by this group out of Arizona the Open Compliance and Ethics Group and that’s what I’m working with and representing at GRC Solutions Korea so we do training in those governance risk management and compliance and that’s very necessary here in Asia for reasons I’m happy to get into and then AI came around so 2-3 years ago I started working playing around with AI personally and then developing AI apps for risk management and compliance stuff that I knew how to do and that developed into the stage where I wanted to sell those apps to other people other companies and then I was running up against a lot of procurement and compliance questions stuff that I would have asked if I was still in-house and I didn’t have good answers for that in terms of risk and compliance related those to those apps and so that’s how I ended up studying and working in AI audit so I started taking all these courses and Bobble had some great courses and I got qualified as an auditor and I like these guys so much I joined them so that’s kind of the long route that I took towards this it connects in my mind it’s more and more focused but it’s all about risk and compliance whether it’s with regard to AI or human resources.

Chris Parker: Thanks Michael can you unpack a risk management system for because I have it in my mind what that means but can you describe that in a bit more detail so people have an idea of what that’s all about?

Michael Paik: Sure I mean this is a big topic in and of itself but basically focusing on lawyers for example most lawyers are well trained to opine on particular laws or regulations the impact of a particular decision kind of boundary conditions and that’s very helpful as advice and I’m distinguishing from the litigation process but in the corporate transactions and corporate practice a lot of it is advice And this is what law firms tend to provide and what you really need in-house is a system to act upon that advice and evolve as conditions change so this is a management system so everybody has a system finance has a system procurement has a system legal needs a system but historically it was quite ad hoc and the people that came into this as professionals were trained otherwise and so the management mindset of developing a system so that the system works no matter who is tasked to it you have people come and go right the people that are working in your team will come and go and the system needs to evolve but the management system is really kind of the core of modern entities and enterprises and so this plugs into other units overall governance and other systems within the company but if you don’t approach it as a management system then it really just becomes a lot of blah blah blah advice and that’s the problem.

Chris Parker: Clarify system you’re not talking about like an IT solution system as an operator?

Michael Paik: It can be part of it but ultimately it’s the way resources are organized to get stuff done over and over again.

Chris Parker: Yeah like an operational system. Yeah an SOP yeah in my experience having been in IT leadership for banks so highly regulated the governance and compliance system and for me the way I describe that is like people process technology and data synced up and designed to achieve an outcome with efficiency and a high level of performance.

Michael Paik: Indeed you have a number of dimensions to that like what we talk about is like the first second and third line of defense so the first line of defense is having the policies and having those embedded in SOPs so make sure the general people in the organization aren’t doing stupid things or not doing compliant things and then in second line is an internal audit function and the third line is the actual external auditor or the regulator and because it’s such a formally regulated environment we maybe it’s easier to have a risk management system in that place as opposed to organizations that are not externally mandated but still need such a thing for all the right reasons that like oh we’ve got to get our act together for I don’t know GDPR EU AI act or what are the other and it doesn’t have to be legislative it could just be it’s smart to do it it’s wise manage your business AI whatever is coming trade risk management and there are many ways to cut it right so COSO has a system ISO 31,000 is a nice risk management system the point is that you need a system it can be simple as something that you diagram out and work out on a bespoke basis but going back to my experience in Silicon Valley and then here in Korea startups generally don’t have a system when they’re starting right they have different priorities just grow grow grow grow and similarly a lot of large conglomerates in Korea names that you would know grew very quickly in the post-war era post Korean war era looking to government to lead them and support them and so a lot of the risk management was vis-à-vis the government right so lobbying and otherwise getting support and being aware of government priorities as opposed to the history of organizations elsewhere where a lot of it was market driven a lot of lawyers that may sue you for misstatements if you’re a public company and so there are different histories but what happened then was Korean companies that are very large with broad operations globally active had infrastructures for compliance and risk management that were rather inadequate and part of it is also the kind of feudal governance system that we have so owner family a small group of people organized usually a family that is running a large group of companies via cross shareholdings and other mechanisms without really according the proper respect and deference to the minority shareholder and basically a little bit feudal and internally then what happens is all the managers look to the so-called owners and it becomes a political process so your risk management as an executive is really managing your career vis-à-vis the owner and rather than market risk or other transactional risk so that’s changed of course and it’s changing as companies venture out into larger markets and figure out that this isn’t working but there is kind of a bias towards that still so it’s very similar startup practice and large conglomerate practice in Asia more generally.

Chris Parker: So I guess the reason you would have a risk management system is to actually to get away from that personality driven individual driven approach to professionalize it to standardize it and to create a system that is not beholden politically right now. Now if we take this a bit further and the topic of the conversation is the impact of AI on lawyers particularly in-house lawyers. Why is this particularly this topic a passion for you?

Michael Paik: So given all this background on law firm lawyers versus in-house lawyers and the difference between them of course there are exceptions but for in-house lawyers they’re tasked with so many things on an ongoing basis and whether you’re a sole practitioner handling the whole small company or you’re in a team but the company has lots of operations and you specialize in a particular function ultimately the systems are developed and you need to do this repeatedly efficiently for your internal clients using sometimes outside resources such as counsel from law firms accountants and other specialists but it’s a management function so legal risk management inside of companies is not pure lawyering it is in fact management and so this is the big distinction that I’d like to make for in-house practice and so you can specialize in particular things like trade compliance and be an expert lawyer in that regard but you’re going to have to work within the organization via a system and that’s going to be a management system and so this opportunity with AI is to address the management system so I set aside the legal AI for legal applications right so case law and then precedent and contract drafting just looking at the management system there’s a lot of what we call legal operations that can be handled by AI freeing the lawyer who has typically not been trained for this stuff to focus on what he or she has been trained to do more intensively so all the paperwork your colleague reviews all the budgeting all the KPIs all of the stuff that any other team in the company generally needs to do as part of its operations that can be handled very well with AI and for legal in particular this is very nice because we have a lot of outside vendors and parties that we work with we have lots of transactions going through lots of documents AI can be very helpful in this regard so I think AI contrary to what’s portrayed in a lot of the LinkedIn posts and on the media yes there are problems with hallucinations but not all lawyers are litigators actually for the vast majority of us we don’t ever go to court right and for in-house people it doesn’t make sense to go to court that you’re on a different schedule you have you can contract that out so the process management the process of a litigation or the process of a trade dispute or training for your procurement teams regarding antitrust all of this stuff can be helped with AI.

Chris Parker: So if you were speaking to a and let’s answer it in two phases a young just starting in-house lawyer and then we’ll talk about a senior so manager the head of legal for an organization for this new entrance into a company maybe first job what would be one or two or three start here things for you just to improve your operational management productivity not making perhaps legal decisions for you but where would be the best place to start just to put your finger in the water?

Michael Paik: That’s a great question because you can do this at an individual level or at a team level right so if you’re onboarding a new lawyer the first thing he or she should do is understand the organization the business of the organization and in the old days we used to read if it was a public company 10-Ks right and other disclosures IPO documents different public disclosures that were kind of quality controlled with 10b-5 which is material omissions and misstatements rather quality controlled data that you could it was compressed and well written so you could kind of acclimate yourself to the business very quickly then of course the industry right the competitors the competitive landscape so ultimately you’re a business lawyer of course if you’re a nonprofit there’s a little bit of a different context but there’s parallels so understanding the industry and the business and then the processes within the company which are not well understood by many people in the company not just lawyers I went to business school and they never taught about how organizations are actually organized in terms of what does procurement do what does marketing do what does HR do what does compliance do who are trade compliance and what’s quality control all of this stuff needs to be understood by the lawyer because those are your internal clients right you’re advising them on their work enabling them to do better and to take better risks that’s the other second large aspect of is understanding that contrast to academic lawyers or in some cases many law firm lawyers you’re not there to eliminate risk right what you’re doing is you’re helping the organization take better risks in the pursuit of its objectives and so you’re trying to get rid of the bad risks to the extent that you can mitigate them and working with other teams insurance and other mechanisms to enable the organization to pursue those objectives by taking better risks so getting that mindset is very helpful and then thirdly so the first one is downloading as much information as possible secondly taking a different perspective and understanding kind of the holistic purpose of what you’re really doing in this organization and then finally kind of curating your career in terms of specific areas that you may be assigned to right so if you’re with a tech company you may be assigned intellectual property or you may be doing employment HR stuff it depends on the size of the team but really quickly getting acclimated and diving deep to get familiar with what you need not to the level of an expert academic but what’s to the level that’s good enough for the organization in practice and part of that is getting out of your office and reaching out to people and that’s the other part that’s not well taught so talking with other teams having lunch with other teams having coffee with other people going out for a beer whatever it is to understand your internal clients and letting them know that you are there as a service provider right those are the three things I would encourage younger lawyers to do or whatever age you are as you join an in-house team and then as a team that’s also something that you need to think about I have a little matrix for this can I tell you?

Chris Parker: Yeah no yeah oh yeah please.

Michael Paik: So back in the day with Rumsfeld the known knowns the unknown known do you remember this when they were looking for weapons of mass destruction anyway so the context was that but I kind of took that to organize my thinking around how to manage a legal team so at the team level the known are stuff that you already have systems for right how to engage outside counsel for litigation how to deal with particular issues how a contract form management system training for your procurement team these are things that you have already developed the system for the known unknowns are things that you know you need to develop a management system for stuff that you need to train your lawyers as well as your internal clients on right and part of that relates to AI there’s stuff that we already know how to do in terms of creating risk management for AI even though a lot of it is still a black box then for the unknown knowns this is stuff other people in your organization know but the legal team doesn’t and you need to get out of your office walk around and figure out what people know and what their issues are and then you create a system together to manage that issue and then which leaves the hard one the unknown unknowns and a lot of what we see in AI is still out in the unknown unknowns but that doesn’t mean we ignore it right we prepare to become more resilient to whatever risks may be realized so that’s kind of the matrix that I use to organize this work.

Chris Parker: No really smart and I think coming at it from the other side because I have been in many activities that required internal legal support and external legal support on a corporate basis and what I always suggest is like if we’re setting up a new company or new shared service function or doing a massive procurement that there’s probably legal tax procurement involvement don’t wait till the last moment I mean it’s been such a benefit to create the positive relationships because I loved your make better risks as opposed to avoid all. To take better risks is but in order for the in-house legal team to judge that they really need to know the context and the players and so then you also don’t get into an argument about what better means because it’s all a dialogue at some point it’s a decision and usually with unknown unknown dimensions like okay we just don’t know we have to make a decision we have to move forward so it’s a no. And if you were the head of a legal department and you’re applying this framework to that what are just a few things that head of legal could do to step into the age of AI now in order to accelerate performance?

Michael Paik: I mean I’ve served as general counsel for conglomerates with multiple public companies a couple of different times and then I set one up earlier in my career 20 years ago as well so kind of a three-time GC for large companies right it’s a management function right so of course you act as a lawyer and you advise the board and senior executives but you also corral your resources and get things done but with AI there the things that I pointed out with regard to operations right to take care of a lot of the grunt work that will then free your team to either get their other work done more efficiently and simply go home earlier that’s a big one for morale because sometimes you’re not in control of how much you can pay them and how many raises you can get them so the best thing you can do for your team is to let them go home or have some flexibility and also enable their career progression right whether internal to your organization or otherwise but the big benefit to AI I think is to create those efficiencies and to quantify them so you want more budget for your team you want more resources you want more pay you want recognition for your team and that’s all a KPI it’s you can’t leave it as a nebulous oh legal a solid right they’re always there for us how much have you saved them this year right how much have we actually gotten discounts from with regard to external counsel what are operations costs this stuff is eminently for AI is very good with this so using AI to streamline your operations and to do more with less this is not just people but in terms of budget using AI to scrutinize your vendor the bills right why is this here and this is an anomaly and to push back against service providers and really need to manage that very carefully and also demanding that if the law firms are using AI we should share some of those benefits you’re not going to bill us on this hourly billing model if we know that in fact a lot of it was done by AI so a value based approach so it’s a good time to be in house in this regard but finally and most importantly just like the initial for starting for day one lawyer you can use AI to understand your organization better see what more can be done and this is continuing right it’s not only your week one so for the GC it’s really diving deep into the company and seeing what else can be done to help and there’s a limited number of hours in the day so you can speed up that process with AI to better understand what everybody else is doing.

Chris Parker: I absolutely love use it for operational management with another project right now where we’re advising a procurement function of a multinational and we’re just using it to research particularly how what are the current benchmarks of how AI and analytics can support a multi-hundred million procurement team what does that look like how are they organizing how are they planning this so you can also I think just you don’t have to give it any actual internal information you’re just saying hey for a company of this dimension and this kind of thing like well what are people doing and then one thing I didn’t realize is GPT also advised they said well here’s a bunch of benchmark reports out there that I’m drawing from here’s the sources so I was like “Oh well then we can go get those benchmark reports and then use that read them and then use that as a foundation for this quantified advice because we’re talking to the chief procurement officer and that person’s going to need to argue for the funding in the budget.”

Michael Paik: Yeah and what we’re saying is this is a no-brainer but you certainly have to quantify that and do the business case there there are actual processes right so supply chain management supplier code of conduct counterparty due diligence sanctions and export control compliance all of this stuff that needs to get done can be done more easily with less people you’re not going to hire some 50 associate from a law firm to go see each of your suppliers at I don’t know what it is now 600 bucks 800 bucks an hour for a blah blah blah speech right you could just send them a chatbot along with a document then do a conference call and explain to them your supplier code of conduct and that saved you probably thousands of dollars right there for each supplier right so stuff like this I mean there’s a lot of talk about problems with AI and hallucinations and I acknowledge that that’s what I’m doing with audit bias all of this stuff but there’s a lot that still can be done once you understand the probabilistic nature of the outputs of the these models what I call the demon cat from Adventure Time have you ever seen this cartoon?

Chris Parker: No I know Taco Cat.

Michael Paik: Cartoon called Adventure Time and there’s two episodes where the demon cat comes out the demon cat has approximate knowledge of many things not exact knowledge approximate knowledge of many things and so if you add the word probably to that that’s basically what we’re dealing with with regard to LLM so if you understand that there’s a demon cat lurking somewhere in these workflows and you’re just aware of it you can still get a lot done you’re not going to drop a contract in and get an answer out it’s going to have an approximate understanding what you dropped in given parameters prompts and structures around it RAG other documents but at the end of the day the Demon Cat’s still there.

Chris Parker: Let me reach into Schrödinger’s box and grab Demon Cat by the scruff of the neck and pull it out and say “Hey because Demon Cat exists at some moment in there there’s always a probability what should in-house counsel never do with AI let’s look at it the other way like this is an off just don’t do?

Michael Paik: For legal it’s always got to be human in the loop right not simply on the loop it stuff cannot go out without legal signing off at the human level so I don’t think the agents are here yet for legal work.

Chris Parker: Can you so in the loop meaning every word watching all the time every word needs to be read is that?

Michael Paik: Every output every output that goes out your work product and that’s your professional responsibility it’s a licensing requirement in most jurisdictions as well so you need to be responsible for your output so this human in the loop out without your okay is I think a minimum I think it’s also a minimum and a professional responsibility for lawyers to understand how AI works right the demon cat basically and the fact that the demon cat is there in all models so if you look at OpenAI’s service terms if you look at Anthropic service terms if you go into the contract OpenAI and Anthropic’s lawyers have identified the demon cat as a disclaimer on their end right and this is underlying pretty much all models so open source we’ll set that aside because there’s no backstop in some of these in terms of corporate entity service provider and so on from a corporate perspective so individually you may have some different risk tolerances but if you’re going to run this function for an organization of any size you need to very well recognize where the demon cat is and how it’s going to impact your workflows.

Chris Parker: Well based on demon cat terms of service and contracts with these OpenAIs and Anthropics etc what’s your personal principle on putting company information in GPT?

Michael Paik: It’s a very good question especially now because there’s a particular case in New York OpenAI in New York Times where plus and pro accounts they’re holding these these chats and conversations because a judge ordered them to so other than enterprise and education accounts they’re being saved and so this is a large uncertainty.

Chris Parker: Saved and subpoenaed you mean?

Michael Paik: Saved so that if the judge orders in particular litigation you can actually get access to those conversations whether you turned off your save conversation or not whether you’re in anonymous mode or not so this has really put a wrench into particularly OpenAI but this is an open question so I believe that for the time being you need to be very careful and that’s why I focus on operations as opposed to work product for today I think it can be very helpful for anonymized kind of brainstorming research and kind of gathering inputs but I don’t think it’s yet there again contrary to what a lot of service providers that have created these models for sale to legal teams have stated both on the confidentiality because underneath this there’s still the demon cat right so if it’s OpenAI this is a problem and then in terms of the larger picture of kind of over-relying on these technologies unless you have good management systems already in place it’s going to go awry very quickly so and it’s human nature right you want to get things done you have a lot of pressure you’re trying to get work out the door and if you don’t have a quality control system which is a management system around your work product then the tendencies will be to cut corners and if you’re cutting corners the demon cat will show it.

Chris Parker: Well also the level of quality will go down because if you’re just spitting out GPT product without context without crafting without QA yeah you will suffer from that so before we get into the question around like how could we prepare because you mentioned at some point that lawyers need to understand how AI works I’m curious about from an education perspective around lawyers what I often hear and I have mixed emotions about is “Well you can’t use GPT but it’s okay to use Copilot Enterprise it’s safe because it’s Microsoft.” And I’m like “Yep but under Microsoft’s offering if you go deep deep deep to look in the Demon Cat’s still in there.”

Michael Paik: Yeah well yeah the probability error Demon Cat is still there but the technology is the same whether it’s Anthropic or Microsoft there systems put around it boundaries and quality controls but the risk is still there and if you look into their documentation their internal legal teams have identified the risk and have disclaimed it right I mean they’re telling you it’s there you just need to know where to look so you cannot assume that these uncertainties are have been handled but at the same time you can’t wait right you take advantage of these technologies you just need to mitigate against them and the mitigation may not only be a technical mitigation right it may be training your people it may be putting in workflows that have senior kind of persons signing off on this it may be explicitly putting responsibility on people right accountability so for myself too in my custom instructions on all my AI I asked it to remind me at the end of every interaction final liability lies with the human.

Chris Parker: Oh wow with every output because I also tend to human being right so you can move forward with some of this but that last reminder that hey this is it’s on you so the things like this I think are helpful but the education is not only the literacy required by the EU AI act but just understanding a little bit more about how these systems are not simply software in the traditional sense the probabilistic nature the dangers of biases what this potentially means what are the potential consequences and what is what are your companies your employer’s policies on this right and for the employer they need to promulgate those policies and their employees know because if they don’t promulgate policies the employees are already using AI anyways right which they call.

Michael Paik: It’s already happening just. Yeah so they’re going to use it anyway so it’s it’s very important that you educate and I have a I don’t know I hesitate because this is a public podcast but it’s like sex education right so with your children you need to let them know how this all works and not addressing it is not going to make the risk go away so I hope that wasn’t too inappropriate but I.

Chris Parker: You can’t put your head in the ground it’s it’s happening anyways and so you might as well get.

Michael Paik: It’s going to happen anyways so they should understand the consequences the ramifications how to treat this technology with respect people with respect it’s the same idea and so I think that that’s why these management systems are what I keep harping upon because this is all part and parcel of that and ultimately going back to your original question for the GC as the head of that function as a manager as an executive this is his or her primary function in terms of guiding the organization the board and the internal clients towards a better understanding of these technologies and mitigations of these risks now specifically in the context of education maybe for people who are in law school now or aspiring to like my son or if you’re already in the role what would you recommend as far as to up your game now to know the powers and the potentials as well as the risks of this to understand maybe the technology the use cases what do you wish for the legal profession to be educated on related to AI at the moment?

Michael Paik: Okay so I’ll kind of parse it in two ways for the student the temptation as in every other discipline is to use AI to shortcut your education right and to just plow through it very quickly when you’re in law school doing case briefs with AI figuring out the holding with AI and I understand the temptation to do that but the law school or whatever the institutional mechanism in your jurisdiction is the process has been designed to create kind of a way of thinking and a discipline issue rule application conclusion which is the general kind of legal mindset and if you’re going to short circuit that and simply try to get through law school and take the bar exam or whatever the equivalent is in your jurisdiction you’re not going to be prepared for practice because that loop that algorithm actually is not embedded in your mind right so those mental models are not there for you and so if you’re going to try to contract that out to AI you’re going to have the AI lead you by the nose so ultimately for any professional you need to own the mental model you need to own the chain of thought and impose it on the AI lead it use it to augment your thinking and to test your thinking but you need to be driving this and for the students that shortcircuit their education in this way and I get it why you would want to do this because on a day-to-day basis it makes so much sense but looking towards the future you need to put those building blocks into place and then for practice on a professional level many law schools at least in the US are primed to funnel lawyers into law firms and I think young professionals need to look at that very hard because the law firms are set up on a billing model for the most part that is using the associates to bill in a pyramid right and then even if you become partner there’s still basically there are three types of law firm lawyers the finders minders and grinders all associates are by definition grinders finders are the ones who originate clients minders manage right and even amongst the partnership If you’re not if you don’t have a book of clients you’re a grinder you’re basically a glorified associate right or handling administrative work so understanding that ecosystem and what you’re getting into and the fact that if AI is deployed more broadly not only by law firms but by their clients then the grinding function and that billing model is quite tenuous and so they need to think about the business realities of what their profession is and whether it is true remains true that law firms will be a stable path for your career and whether you become partner and then you’ve hopefully you’ll become a finder so you can have clients of your own otherwise if you’re still a grinder then yeah you’re a partner that is really an associate so this kind of business reality and then the opportunities to go in-house I think will become more dear in that it’s going to be very competitive to go in-house because in house there’s a stability there’s other aspects to this kind of.

Chris Parker: Let let me ask a potentially very nasty question before we wrap up but in my world which is technology I have proactively advise my children not to pursue an education in software development and engineering because it’s done ai has disrupted this and that and there’s a whole discussion around that on what does that mean for us but would you recommend people to go into the legal profession is this something that’s still viable or would you do it with certain caveats?

Michael Paik: No I think it is because the legal license is kind of broadly applicable so you can go into litigation you can traditional practice or you can go in-house you can open your own shop you can develop AI software there’s a lot of different things so for example my son is a lawyer in the state government in the buildings department handling sewage and grid connections and I told him basically you’re an AI infrastructure lawyer right water and energy is AI so there’s many ways you can go with law and so that’s the benefit and there’s still some guild protections and so on so barriers to entry but I think the benefit in the age of AI so drilling down to the technology is that lawyers are trained to be wordsmiths right so we’re really good at word association which is what LLMs do so we are natural prompters and we should be able to get the LLMs to do very well once we understand the limitations and parameters of how to work with these LLMs which doesn’t take forever but we’re actually well prepared to prompt as other disciplines may be as well I think there are also benefits to kind of creative creative education and all of this will be augmented with AI coding I’m kind of ambivalent because I’m 55 this year but I’m going backwards because of the AI audit and the things that I’m doing I’m now trying to learn more about computer science belatedly building on kind of operations research linear algebra from 30-some years ago to understand the matrices and so on but if I was a young person starting out I would hedge right do this so computer science minor major philosophy some something broad that really helps you build mental models so that you develop the stubbornness the grit to be able to impose it on an LLM because it’s going to be hard it’s going to be smarter and they’re going to be more more rascally as well as things go on so I think having that discipline philosophy math other disciplines and creative creative endeavors as well because you just think different.

Chris Parker: And creative meaning because this is one of the things with LLM is innovative thought like truly innovative thought is somewhat out of bounds for them because it’s unless it’s a total hallucination and it’s accidental the idea of how to create new value and then use AI and LLM for that I think that the onus is on the user right you have to prompt it in the right way.

Michael Paik: Yeah well the and this is from me for the management flip meaning before managers knew the answers and now the answers are commoditized and so then the question is who’s in the best place to know the question the prompt in order to get the right answer applied to the right situation so and lawyers are particularly good at the questions.

Chris Parker: Yeah no it’s great so it’s like large libraries I don’t know if anybody goes to libraries anymore but large university libraries with millions of volumes you got to find the book so if you have a really good research librarian that you can talk to that will really make a difference but you can’t just wander the stacks.

Michael Paik: No exactly so have some discipline and have a strategy around it and like you said when you’re in law school go through the motion of the work so you build that muscle in your brain to understand the build the discipline.

Chris Parker: Yeah well like I recently with my older son his gaming machine crapped out and we would do the whole process of okay what’s reusable how do you troubleshoot it and the mental process of troubleshooting tech in hardware as well which is hardware operating system application it was great and later he reflected he says like I now look at these machines differently he understands every component piece what the interaction is he understands the logic of deciding how to troubleshoot how to implement what are the different options of swapping things and I know it’s a and I think having that kind of awareness of what LLM can do for you will really be empowering as well.

Michael Paik: And this is for across disciplines right so in ship building you have commissioning this punch list before the system is signed off on understanding that process as a human being enables you then to use AI to make that more efficient right in ship building or steel manufacturing or an artistic endeavor but you really need to build those mental models for yourself so otherwise you’re going to be led by the nose.

Chris Parker: No exactly so understand AI to improve your productivity be the human in the loop because you’re responsible for your output and do all this so you can go home early is what I took from.

Michael Paik: And explore other options right go do yoga or something or interview for other jobs if that’s what you want to do but basically it empowers the human.

Chris Parker: Michael Paik thank you so much for this I will include links to your LinkedIn to Bobble to GRC Solutions all in the show notes and if anyone is really inspired by this well as you can tell what a joy to engage with you and what a source of knowledge and wisdom thank you so much.

Michael Paik: Thank you very much.

Chris Parker: Thank you for listening visit Ebullient.com don’t forget to like and subscribe to the podcast on your favorite player.

Chris Parker: Hello, this is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity podcast and I had a amazing conversation with Deborah Berlinck who originally comes from Brazil and she is and was a international acclaimed journalist and is currently an international leadership coach in the Enablers Network for which I’m also a member. And we talked about her shift from journalism to coaching. And then that brought us into really the art of questioning. And not only the art of questioning, but how how does that empathetic questioning actually make true changes through neuroscience because she brings a lot of neuroscience into her work as well. So it was really an amazing conversation. Deborah, why would this be really valuable for people to listen to it?

Deborah Berlinck: Great question, Chris. And it was such a pleasure to talk to you. I would say that there are three reasons why you should listen to this podcast. First is that you should try to be yourself in the sense of you will not be a great leader if you’re trying to be someone else. So you have to first of all work on yourself. If you want to influence other people, you have to self-reflect on what do you truly want? The second which is linked to this first one is about curiosity. Be curious, genuinely curious about yourself first. This is the self-reflection part and be genuinely curious about other people because you will learn a lot from other people. You don’t know it all. And it’s great the starting point is we don’t know it all. The third reason why you should listen is that we had a wonderful discussion about change. What brings change in behaviors and it’s not what neuroscience teaches is that focusing on the problem will get us nowhere. We have to focus on what some people call a toward state which is what’s my ideal where do I want to get and that’s what you want to focus because once you realize where do you truly want to get then you can start thinking about of ways of getting there. And this is really powerful. So stop focusing on the problem and focus more on the person you want to be.

Chris Parker: Welcome to the Business Simplicity podcast where Chris Parker explores how leaders cut through complexity to accelerate strategy, execution, and growth with calm, clarity, and confidence. Welcome back to the Business Simplicity podcast. I am so excited for this conversation. I’m going to be talking with Deborah Berlinck who is previously a journalist and still is and also a leadership coach and together we are members of the Enablers Network which is a vibrant international community of very unique coaches and consultants and advisors. Everyone has a very fascinating background. And they come together to help organizations and leaders transform to the next step. And in these ages of AI and digital and disruption these types of services are needed maybe even more than ever before.

Now I know Deborah about your past because as an international journalist, you’ve been able to have an interview with Bill Gates, with previous pope. You spent a lot of time in conflict zones and on LinkedIn you have a kind of I guess a newsletter place where the anxiety pill box and one of those in there was the year you nearly died and so you were in Palestine in Gaza and that was a really a high stress situation and what we’re going to talk about today is how did those lessons, that experience that forming you in journalism has made you a world-class leadership coach. And I think that would be interesting for so many people because for me consultants know the answers and coaches know the questions and I think as a journalist, I’ve seen you give your you have a workshop on the art of great questions and it was let’s just bring that together. So maybe kick us off with just filling in some of the blanks on how did you shift from international journalist to international leadership coach. How did that shift happen? And then let’s dive into maybe the similarities and differences between the two. I’m just really looking forward to discover this with you.

Deborah Berlinck: Fantastic. Yeah. Well, first of all, great question and very happy to be here talking to you, Chris. As I said to you before we started this conversation, it’s a pleasure to talk with you in the podcast and outside the podcast. Very much so. How did this shift come? Very good question. In fact, when I was chasing the big stories all over, I was learning a lot about people, how they behave, how they lead, how they react under deep stress. And I was learning a lot about myself as well. How do I behave under stress? How do I connect with people? I did things. I managed to get for example an interview with the president of Poland just by shouting something that made the connection about football because I knew he loved soccer, Brazilian soccer. But I also have terrible experiences with a guy I interviewed in France where the connection didn’t happen and for the first time in 40 years of journalism I had to stop the interview and say this is not working let’s do it another time for lack of connection. So journalism in many ways I always tell people that it was a school of life for me.

And after journalism I think the coming from this very exciting world of being always on the road always in airports always under pressure to the quiet space of coaching it’s equally powerful and I love bringing all this energy that I of the experiences I had and simply being in this quiet space where I can really use some of the best skills journalists gave me which is to listen actively listen. This is the number one skill in journalism even more than questions sometimes and this is why coaching was a natural next step in my life maybe.

Chris Parker: Well I’m curious in coaching we ask questions sometimes very confronting questions and you need but you need to be have that vibe and that connection and in a way you need to be invited to coach, because I think the worst thing is you start coaching people who are like, well, I don’t I don’t need to change, who are you? So that’s something I’ve learned is to be invited to coach and then when you’re in that role to frame your questions. But the intention of that is for the coach, the person to be able to reflect and and perhaps even shift ideally shift a mindset or shift a perspective ultimately to change a behavior or to change an outcome. When you were talking to the people you were interviewing, were you seeking that they have a reflection and a shift or was it much much more that you were seeking the information for the reader for the audience to have a shift? Like was there was there something in between both like were you just gathering the data or were you actually hoping to influence as well?

Deborah Berlinck: Excellent observation which makes it there is a huge difference basically as you said what was my audience when I was a journalist the general audience. So I was less concerned in changing behavior or changing the thoughts of the person I was interviewing and I was more concerned in digging the information from that person as a journalist. But you would say okay digging the information that sounds very automatic. I’m going to dig information from Chris. But in order to dig information from Chris, to get the information I need for the public, I need to connect with you. How do I connect with you? I connect with you by paying attention to what you have to say. by creating this somehow this space of trust. So my number one challenge was always always always to create a space of trust. Can you imagine? I mean most of the time I was interviewing people who never saw me before. Why would they trust me? So that was my first step. I mean, to make sure there was a safe space where they could trust me.

Chris Parker: Well, a safe space with a journalist is not that. Yeah, I think for some of those people, I don’t Yeah, I’m not sure if you could.

Deborah Berlinck: Is not. And depending on who I had in front of me. If I have a criminal, I’m sorry, I’m not going to to be nice to you necessarily, okay? And if you happen to say something stupid, I’m not going to pretend I haven’t heard. But if I’m interviewing as I did in many cases people who were under deep stress in conflict zones for example, I would have more of I would behave more as a coach than as a journalist who wanted to dig at any price the information.

Chris Parker: Well, how did you create that safe space, that rapport very quickly? So you walk into you were talking Bill Gates and the Pope, I’m sure that wasn’t every day for you, but you were talking with influential people that were known in the press and you had achieved entry. What are some tactics, I guess, that you establish that rapport and do those things apply to coaching as well or those different worlds?

Deborah Berlinck: Well, one thing that helped me with different people, right, from the president of Poland to the Pope to the war criminal to the simple person I simply meet on the streets, I happen to knock at people’s door to ask for information. So, you can imagine I have to establish immediately a connection with this person. It’s always about putting myself into their shoes always at the beginning, right? So, and also trying to think what do they like what how could I create this first connection. So, as I said, my biggest my most amazing thing was to get this interview with the president of Poland in Warsaw. His press people were saying, “No, no, no, for I was trying for two months.” They said, “No, there’s no way. There’s no way. There’s no way.” I suddenly see the president coming towards the bathroom. Can you imagine this? Conference room towards the bathroom full of people around him. All the press person that told me no. All of the ministers and so on. Everybody’s surrounding this very powerful person. And I said, well, I have nothing to lose. I already have a no.

So, what will I lose if I try something? And I had done a lot of work about him, prepared for the preparing for the interview. And I knew he was crazy about soccer, Brazilian soccer. I said, why not? So I screamed, hello, President, here’s I’m a Brazilian journalist. I know you love soccer and so on. I just need 10 minutes. And he said something so funny. He said, “Huh? Oh, Brazil soccer. I’ve been to Maracana.” And I said, “I know you’ve been to this is the door of the bathroom was here.”

Chris Parker: Were you in the bathroom at the time?

Deborah Berlinck: No. No. No. People were trying to chase me. Who is this crazy woman trying to talk to the president? And he said, and I said, “Yes, I just need 10 minutes to talk to you.” And he said, “Just wait. I’ll go here and when I come back, we’ll talk.” Wow. And at that time it was something amazing because it was the time when Poland was joining the European Union and Poland was the that was the at the biggest time of the enlargement of the European Union and Poland was the largest country. So I said, “Wow.”

Chris Parker: So I want to pick that apart in a couple different ways, but in order for I want to come into calm is a word and maybe it’s the wrong word, but we were talking about it before we pressed record. In order for you to be empathetic in those moments of potentially high stress, to be in their shoes, and in order for you to be able to zigzag and jockey, you turn around, there’s the president of Poland walking towards you with a crowd. If you were full of anxiety and fearful, there’s no way I don’t think you could have improvised that way. So, my feeling is somehow you have created a space where you are very grounded. You turned around. You knew exactly what you intended. You needed to talk to this person. You’ve done your research and then you launched your volley. Is did you purposely chill yourself in those moments or is that just your natural state of being very situationally aware?

Deborah Berlinck: I think I didn’t think too much about it. What I think drove me to do that was the fact when you think back and you say, “Okay, I tried everything I should have tried through the official channels, what do I have to lose? Nothing. The maximum I can have is a big no, or someone shouting like get out of my way, which is not nice, but and it happens to journalists a lot. But it’s also the fact that I’ve done some homework as well. I knew I had done some research about him and that helps a lot, when you when you know someone when you’ve done some basic research about the person and you can maybe find that little thing to connect with that person. And this is something that in coaching that I bring to leaders as well, because sometimes that’s the little difference that that makes the difference, that little connection. For example, I’m going to talk to the for example when I interviewed the director general of the world trade organization this is not he was not the kind of person I’m not going to cite his name here not the kind of person that it’s very smiling or very welcoming I found out that he was a marathon runner and it happens by coincidence that I’m a marathon runner as well. So I kind of before the interview I said by the way I’ve got I’m going to run the New York marathon and he said that’s great I’ve done it. So immediately you create a connection already before the interview and the interview went quite well.

Chris Parker: And I’m curious, do you when you when you’re doing leadership coaching for executives, do you equally do that kind of research on your coaches and do you advise them to use these same kind of connection tactics with others like how do you bring this approach or these truths into your coaching work?

Deborah Berlinck: Actually in coaching is the opposite. The less you know about the company, for example, the less you know about what people say about that person, the better because you’re going to ask him the person many open questions without biases or to lower your level of biases, And so in coaching that’s different but what I try to bring into the coaching through questions is the awareness to that business leader that if he wants to establish connection there are way other ways effective ways of establishing connection with people and it’s not purely based on logic. You have to trigger something emotional. You have to, maybe touch on something that talks deeply to them.

Chris Parker: Yeah. No. Well, and this function of bias what I aspire to and it’s very much in the core of the Lead from Love with Rumi book that I wrote is to connect and see the essence of the human beyond their ego and their reputation and even the physical behaviors. Because what I find is if I’m coaching to their to the events to the situations that they create around them, those are actually a consequence of whatever is happening within them. And typically, in my experience, I’m curious what you think, executives are very lonely, meaning they don’t have someone to talk to. And so they’re probably struggling with insecurity or fear or whatever that’s going on. And what I find is to be somewhat aware of the situations that their behavior causes. And this is the hard part. How do you put that bias on pause? So I’m not thinking that, okay, this guy is just a complete asshole and you approach, because if you’re approaching with that conclusion, you’re going to have a very different outcome. So, how do you balance that being aware enough of the situations that this person’s behavior causes? Because it’s probably behavior change, in essence, you’re this person is talking to you because they want to solve a problem and they want to change something. So, how do you balance that awareness enough of what’s happening around them with the ability to connect deeply with that human?

Deborah Berlinck: Great question, Chris. And that connects very much with your book that had an impact on me, your book, because it tells about transformation starts from within, from yourself. So basically, you’re not a leader who is trying to be a great leader, he’s not going to achieve that goal. if he’s trying to be someone else. So the transformation comes from within and you say it very in a very clear way all throughout your book. This is the clear message I got from your book. And so on biases what I the way to to contain bias is maybe to be aware of your own biases. Just as a coach, you’re aware of your biases first of all and then contain it. Easy said. Very hard to do it. But how do I turn this around? I don’t want to. For example, I coached someone who had were going through were having going through having difficult behavior within the company. People would come to me to tell me stories and I said, “Okay, I don’t want to know more than that.” And what I did in my coaching is I brought constantly this person out of the problem toward in what we call in neuroscience a toward state. Instead of digging in to everything you did, what kind of person do you want to be? What kind of leader do you want to be? What is your ideal world? And what do you need to get?

Chris Parker: Can you can you expand on the toward state? So I understand clearly what you mean by toward state. My intuition says I love it and but if you can explain it a bit further that would be helpful like what like if toward state is leaning towards solution and then there’s another state which is the other way like what is the story?

Deborah Berlinck: Yeah. The story is if we keep on looking at the past, right? The past is certain. It’s something that we know. If we look at what we want to turn into, maybe this is uncertain. So our brain tends to look at problems in the past because that’s what we know, right? A toward state is Okay, Deborah, you’ve been doing this and that. You’ve been having trouble doing this and that, but what is your real goal in life? Who would you like to be? It’s a deep question, right? Like the question you maybe asked yourself at one point, do I want to be the executive in a company or do I want to be something else? So that’s this big deep question that I ask and that’s what I call what people call a toward state bring you to what you aim to be.

Chris Parker: Well touching on the Lead from Love with Rumi book something else I discovered while embracing Rumi and for those that don’t know it’s he’s a 13th century Persian mystic and poet. One of the things that resonated deeply and also made its way into the book a lot was what you pay attention to grows. This is a paraphrase. And so when you when you talked about this forward state, what I see in my own life and also in others is people are so preoccupied by the current reality and they are reacting to that current reality instead of having a properly regulated response. I’ve been reading your newsletters again. So, this reaction to response was another thing that I read in one of your posts on LinkedIn. And what I seek is instead of being a slave and fixated on my emotional reaction to the current situation or events and then what you pay attention to grows in your life. And so if you’re fixated on this problem and you keep talking about the problem or this trauma and you become identified and it becomes part of your brand, it becomes part of yourself. You just become so entrenched there you will stay there. You will not achieve a change because this is where you’re living. And then there’s a question and this why they need to talk to people like you is okay well what is that forward state? And I love the framing of that. It’s like okay yes the current reality is true now but it doesn’t need to be the truth of tomorrow and if you can shift into an understanding of what that future can be. So, how do you help people discuss like I shared with you before we were talking, I was I felt my energy was quite mixed of being drawn to an executive role and therefore the illusion of security and the title and all those ego things that come with it. While the reality of my action was very much a portfolio, as it’s rarely called interim, but I come into organizations and change things and I and I’m also invited to coach people and run like strategy and execution projects. So it’s very portfolio and what I felt with myself was pursuing these two angles was ensuring that neither was really working and then I had to make it and I consulted the meaningful people in my life and some advisors that are nearby me and came to a conclusion and said okay I’m going to go left I’m going to go pursue what I am and be a better version of that and of course if a lovely executive opportunity comes along I’ll listen to it. But if I’m chasing everything, I will catch nothing is what kind of what I found. That was my own thing. So, how do you help people come from the problem of today to shift their thinking and maybe answer it from a neuroscience perspective because I know you’re trained and certified in neuroscience as well to lean in identify and lean into that forward state and operate mentally and emotionally more from there than the pity party of today.

Deborah Berlinck: It’s basically by tapping into the person’s thinking through questions. Great. And tapping into their own thinking because there’s a lot of we most people love to give advice, right? Everybody. Yes. But your science also shows that advice is the most ineffective way to help people, right? Because everyone gives but no one receives. Exactly. Because you’re trying to solve someone else’s problem through your lenses, through your experiences. But every brain is different, my neuro circuits are not the same as yours. So what’s good for me might not be necessarily good for you. So the how do you get to the state in coaching by tapping into the thinking. That’s why we say that one of the most powerful questions you ask is what’s on your mind? what’s on your mind and what else? What I call the Nespresso question and what else? Because every time you ask and what else and what else, you’re opening up little drawers in your brain, you’re exploring other circuits other than the your natural way of doing things. And it’s interesting that you mentioned Rumi in your book 13th century he was ahead of his time because if he tells that attention it what makes the difference that’s exactly what neuroscience scanning the brains today that’s exactly what neuroscience is saying what will change behavior is attention number one focus Yes.

Chris Parker: Well, yeah, I’m not a neuroscientist by any means, but I am an avid Dr. Joe Dispenza. I know him. And he a lot of his work and practices very meditative breathing exercises and also somewhat neuroscience-based because one of the things that they talk about in that work is what fires together wires together. So and it’s going in the same direction meaning instead of continuing to talk and reminding yourself again and again and again about the trauma about the problem about the situation if you can start thinking towards the solution towards the positive and then strengthening it’s kind of I know I’m sure you’re using the wrong words but it’s like I imagine it be kind of like a muscle and you got to keep working that muscle and if you work the oh sorry, pity me muscle versus the hey, let’s move forward muscle. And establishing some new habits and some new behaviors and then allow that reality to form. No, I get it. It’s focus attention. What are you focusing on? And sorry people, if you’re focusing on TikTok, Instagram, the news, you’re focusing on the wrong thing because that’s not going to be enriching for you. it’s not going to be wholesome for you and it’s not going to be your truth. So it’s, be careful what you’re feeding your brain. I suffer from that as well. So.

Deborah Berlinck: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s very strange because I had to I mean simply by reading about the brain it had so much impact in me because like I was I suddenly and that’s very strange from a journalist to come to this conclusion but I suddenly realized that only by reading bad news that was bringing myself down and you would tend to look at the world like okay that’s how it is and you cannot change it so even maybe this is something I haven’t spoken about but I was a co-founder recently of a journalism startup and I was one of the main voices saying We’ve got to bring more of a journalism of solutions. So, showing that there are people in the world doing great things and bringing solutions to many many problems. Because if you simply listen to traditional media, if you simply read, if you only read traditional media, you get the impression, that you cannot do anything. So let people die around you. And you know, you have this sense of, that’s how the world is. And that’s not true.

Chris Parker: It’s there’s things like the Good News Network. I think that that used to be out there. There are platforms that really seek the positive. And so some criticisms that I receive when I basically say I don’t want I don’t want to know about that. I don’t want to hear about that. you can’t put your head in your sand, like, well, I would like to be aware of the situation, but I don’t want to be fixated on it. Meaning, if if I feel I’m diving into and let’s just name it, let’s talk about Ukraine, let’s talk about Palestine, let’s talk the these, a lot of situations in the world right now that that are that you can easily lose yourself in it. And as empathetic people we can start feeling as we imagine those victims on every side would be feeling and that is a horrible feeling and and I’m thinking to myself that’s not serving me and I don’t think it’s serving them either and if and if we talk about what you focus on grows equally I think if we if we pick up rifles and start fighting against these injustices. My belief is that just creates more power of these injustices. We become, a contributor to the injustice. And what I seek in my life is then, okay, well, instead of fighting against the injustice, how can I find ways to embrace and embolden and empower the justice? and what and it’s not always clear, like in always it’s not always clear how to do that. But for me, I really try to protect myself from the devastation and the sorrow and the despair of some of these situations. be aware of it, don’t ignore it, but then somehow in within myself find okay, how can I be a better more positive contribution to society instead of checking into that travesty? I don’t know this little bit side.

Deborah Berlinck: Yeah. I mean well I think journalism to be very fair we need to put the finger on what is wrong. because that’s our role. It’s an incredible part of our role. But as you said to only fix on the problem to only pay attention to the problem and dig into the problem won’t get us far as humanity let’s put it this way right so that’s why in the startup I used to say okay yes we need to put the finger on the problem but we need to discuss the solutions go and interview people who are working on solutions so that people can say okay there is a way out otherwise you simply read in the news and you say there’s no way out and just to inject a little bit of philosophy in our conversation it’s like our debates our view of the world And if I take two great philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant, they had contrasting views of human nature, right? Thomas Hobbes used to believe people are inherently selfish, and driven by power. So if your view of the world is a Hobbesian I don’t know how do you say it’s the same view as Hobbes you will act like I’m sorry to inject politics here you will act like Donald Trump power power my ways is the way and that’s how you should do it okay I want to negotiate trade. that me simply threaten to raise a tariff to 200% so that people the whole world is scared and they will finally get to the this the same tariff that I want right so that’s the Hobbes world men women we are inherently bad okay but if you look at the Kant Immanuel Kant’s world is Kant used to say that women humanities human beings are capable of morality can be driven by moral and by ethics. So it’s a you see it all starts on how do we view human nature?

Chris Parker: Well, how do you view human nature? What’s coming to my mind is there is a marvelous book, The Finite and Infinite Games and it’s not the one that was published recently. So it’s an older one and there was a statement in there that was all evil comes from someone doing what they believe is good. paraphrasing and I’m sure Trump believes what he’s doing is good of course. And I’m sure people some people consider him inherently evil. So it is the concepts of truth comes up. And what is the truth then because coming from the states and I have family friends that are that are very much in favor of Trump. they feel he’s not doing enough fast enough and I have equally the others and then I guess for me there’s a question and maybe journalism needs to learn a bit more from coaching in one way but the word I want to grab on to right now is curiosity as we are going through life in journalism cases or coaching cases is or as an audience or as an employee in an organization and you have my belief is and I’m curious what your thought is is to strive to withhold that bias-based judgments and to explore with curiosity. I had an opportunity to do this traveling to Texas to visit family recently. Completely different culture, values, beliefs, behaviors. And if I would have gone in as a liberal Californian, Western European socialist and presented myself as that, it would have been really unpleasant. But being able to be very just open and curious and discovering and go to the Baptist church and and do these things just to try to well these are incredible people. These are maybe Kantean these are empathetic incredible people doing what they absolutely believe is right for themselves their community the family that and and humanity even. And for me this was an expression of curiosity. So, how does how does curiosity what does that mean for you? Like this because I know this is some this is how I see you as well. You’re always discovering, super curious. You’re researching, you’re pursuing, neuroscience, you’re applying this to your coaching. So, there’s a boundless curiosity here. So, what does that what does that word mean to you in the concept of coaching?

Deborah Berlinck: It means a lot not only in the concept of coaching but in life in general as you mentioned if you’re not curious even to to listen to the beliefs or to pay attention to the beliefs to try to understand other people’s behavior like in the case of people who voted for Trump some people say ah they’re all bad no They’re not so bad. Not at all. They can be wonderful people. They are simply looking through life through another lens. and what curiosity brings. And I would I this was something that I always kept as a journalist, saying always always try to understand the other side, always to listen to the other side because it’s not black and white. It’s never black and white. And this other person might bring an aspect that you haven’t seen because you’re in a sort of a bubble that happens too. You’re hanging out with the same people, people that more or less think it’s like you have the same interests as you. So curiosity is something that I bring not only to coaching. It’s something that I don’t bring only into journalism but into life. just be genuinely curious about people and you will learn so much from them. I was add genuinely curious without expectation. Absolutely. Meaning I sometimes find people are very curious with agenda and if you have no desired outcomes from it as well. for me I don’t know that this is where I like this. So and that’s why on talking about questions bringing questions into our conversation I always say that the best questions comes from this genuine curiosity if I’m actually curious about you Chris of what you did how how did you come to your book what drove you to write this book and this kind of things which I’m very curious about my questions will come naturally my questions will be naturally good because I’m listening to you and I’m genuinely curious for what you some people pretend they are curious and they’re asking questions automatically I know some people like that but why why They’re not even listening to you. They’re simply asking for the sake of asking. This is nonsense.

Chris Parker: And in a way, what more precious a gift can you give someone than genuine interest and curiosity because we’re all, on this rock hurling through space in our own mind, trapped in our own body. Which can be a very lonely place. and with AI and all these, things going on, of course we’re looking for right and wrong and black and white, so I know that I’m here and I’m safe. But to have someone take a moment, even if a brief moment, to see you and to just be present with you and be fascinated about your perspective, even if they completely disagree with it, doesn’t matter at that point. Just, hey, I’m here with you. I’m just fascinated. Tell me more about that thing. And don’t try to convince me of it. Just tell me about it. Like let’s swim in this space together. Oh, I love that. So, Deborah, we’re wrapping up unless you have another insight to share on that or.

Deborah Berlinck: Yeah, I just have something that we mentioned your experience in America. I have the same experience in Brazil which was highly polarized. One of my brothers was voting for Bolsonaro and for some time we were, in opposite directions, not speaking that much. And today we’re so close, we decided to to concentrate our relationship on things that we have in common. And our relationship improved so much. this is someone I deeply love, and today I’m even capable of putting myself into his shoes and understand that doesn’t mean accept totally, but understand why he made the choices he made, and I think the same on his side.

Chris Parker: Maybe maybe this is the the gift for ourselves. Meaning I don’t you cannot be a coach and not evolve and grow and develop as as a person yourself. That’s like sometimes these things with with Enablers that I absolutely enjoy just I’ll give a little bit a pitch based on the story as we wrap. But the Enablers Network it’s about 40 people of people like Deborah and myself and a number have been on the podcast. They’re just so fascinating people. But we get invited in as a team, five to 10 of us and run really cultural transformation programs oftentimes triggered by a new CEO, a new strategy, M&A, some shift and they need the leadership to align and connect as individuals and as collectives. And it’s a mix of like when we did the work with SV in the past it was a mix of over a couple of quarters they come together for three days for plenary work and simulations so incredibly powerful. the executives are there, also presenting the strategy and connecting it, making sure it’s all really connected to the mission of the company at the moment as well as small group interactions and as well as individual coaching. So, it’s and then sometimes there’s work to do like some projects they need to work on in between to try to embed it into the real life and then they come back and they review it. These aren’t inexpensive for the companies and and this is my point was it is so enriching for me to show up performing with you getting amazing day rate and learning so much. It’s like it’s I almost feel bad getting paid for it because this is like this is just so transformational for myself. So we learn from each other. learn from each other and and add incredible value. So if anyone is listening to this that’s triggered and say I want this energy in my organization, give Deborah myself a call and then we’ll we’ll connect with you and we will with genuine curiosity we will listen.

Deborah Berlinck: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. This was amazing.

Chris Parker: In the show notes, I’ll have the link to Deborah’s website, her LinkedIn, and also to the Enablers Network, so you can find everything there. So, Deborah Berlinck, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Deborah Berlinck: Thank you for listening to the Business Simplicity podcast. If this conversation resonated, please share it with a fellow leader navigating complexity. Visit Ebullient.com to discover how we can partner to simplify your strategy, align your teams, and accelerate meaningful growth.