Episode 50 | Your People Don't Have Change Fatigue. They Have Failure Fatigue | Jess Von Bank

[00:00:00] I don't think people have change fatigue. I think people have failure fatigue and that's different. Change is good and positive when it produces something better. I think changefulness is really being able to metabolize change. It's understanding adaptability as the constant state instead of dasis. When you know that things will always be in flux and that is your steady ground, that's a different mindset.

[00:00:23] Jess Von Bank co-founded Now to Next with Jason Everbook to address the distance between an AI strategy and human outcomes. She has spent 20 plus years on every side of that problem, vendor, buyer, analyst, practitioner, and is now writing her way through it in public with The Human Thesis, a seven-part substack series, and her book, Work Like a Mother, arriving this fall.

[00:00:46] Today, Jess gets into the difference between AI adoption and embodiment. Why handing out licenses and counting logins is a procurement decision, not a transformation. How people don't have change fatigue, but failure fatigue, and what that means for building a changeful organization. And why she spent 10 years writing a journal to her daughters she's never shown them. And what it taught her about the only rule she gives Claude.

[00:01:12] Oh my gosh, I've been so looking forward to this conversation. The fact that we have to record a conversation to make time to talk to each other, right?

[00:01:33] I know, it is kind of weird like that, but it will be a wonderful, scintillating conversation, I have no doubt. We have so much to talk about. But before we get into all of the juicy bits, you are just famous for your incredible races, Jess. And so I'm wondering what is next up for you? And I understand you have a very special and specially named race buddy as well. So what's up with you and your race buddy?

[00:02:03] First of all, if we were to rewind in time, and if you were to tell my brothers growing up that I would become famous for racing, they would laugh their asses off. I was not an athlete. I somehow became one in my 30s. Lo and behold, I learned that I was rather obsessed with racing. I'm not a runner. Like my daily workout is not running. I do not go out for a run unless I'm training for something.

[00:02:28] But I loved racing. I love the community of racing. I love training for an endurance event. I love being out on the court. There's literally nothing like a race on race day. The people, the energy, the types of people you see out there doing something extraordinary. So anyway, it's been a decade of racing. I have something like 35 race medals hanging upstairs in my closet. I'm very proud of them. And I made a commitment to myself more than 10 years ago that I wouldn't go a single year without racing.

[00:02:58] It's a challenge that keeps you sharp. Fitness is all like mental health for me. But also it gives you something physically to like look forward to and train for. We want to hear about your racing buddy. How did you find a racing buddy? And how amazing is it? How do you guys work together on your races? So the first type of race I picked up was actually an obstacle course race called Spartans. They're all over the world. Tori asked me to join a race with her. And I said, sure, what kind? I'd had done some 5Ks and stuff.

[00:03:28] And she said, well, it's a Spartan. I said, that sounds awful. And she goes, we'll love it. And so I joined her for this. Plus, it was like a last minute join. I was on a business trip. I'm like, I don't even get back until Friday night. And she's like, you're fine. You're fine. Just register. We get to the race course on Saturday morning. And the first thing I walk up to is like a five foot wall that I have to jump over to get to the start line. I'm like, what? What is this is how well prepared I was for this obstacle course race that I was about to do.

[00:03:57] I can't even get over the wall to the she's hoisting me over the wall. I'm like, OK, I think I should have probably studied the course map before I got here. Before I know it, I'm throwing spears, flipping tractor tires like it was the craziest thing ever. I got completely hooked after that race. And then my friend Amy saw me doing all these crazy races. And she said, you need to do Ragnar. And I said, what's sure. What's Ragnar?

[00:04:22] A 200 mile relay race. You just run until you're done. Sleep in the van. Pace your runner on the trail. Live in a van. It's crazy. I've done 13 Ragnars now. And I definitely got hooked. So what a way to see like beautiful places and be out with an incredible team doing something cool like that. You guys are amazing. Unsurprising. Amazing people. But so cool that you have an Amy. I recommend everybody get an Amy if you can. It's well worth it. So.

[00:04:52] That's what Tina Fey says, right? Yes. Always bring Amy. Everyone should have an Amy. So Jess, recently you had a change of situation. You founded a company. And so we want to talk a little bit about that. What sort of gaps are out there that you see that need to be filled? Tell us more. If you follow me, you might remember Jason Averbook and I have been conspirators for a while now.

[00:05:20] I joined him pretty early on in LeapGen days, which was a boutique digital transformation consultancy. And remember when digitizing everything, employee experience was all the consulting du jour? Well, that was us. We were, you know, right place, right time. Jason had written another book around the digital workforce experience. And we were talking about experience design and stop rushing to the tech. Think about personas and journey mapping and earn your way into the tooling conversation.

[00:05:50] Like we've been talking about this for a long, long time. We were acquired by Mercer and sort of nestled into their HR and workforce transformation practices, which was a great fit. Honestly, we've embedded all of our digital thinking and tech strategy capabilities inside some of the work Mercer was doing. I spent a few years embedding that and handing over the IP and the reins and trying to leave it behind as best we could. That's when AI hit the scene in a big way.

[00:06:18] And just like every firm out there, we tried to spin up some AI advisory capabilities for our clients to help them understand what they were even asking for. Most of our clients didn't even know what help they were asking for. What AI should I buy? Terrible question. But you sort of backed your way into the better questions they should be asking. And so we were trying to keep up with what clients needed from us. But we could see Mercer needs to disrupt itself. Everybody needs to disrupt itself.

[00:06:48] And we really wanted an opportunity to be out in the market moving a little faster and more nimbly. And so when the time felt right, Jason and I stepped outside of Mercer, co-founded Now to Next. I have to thank Meg. She's one of the few people I treated as a personal sort of sounding board. Like, what does this look like? What should I call myself? Do we have titles? We have a rule. And we do hold ourselves accountable.

[00:07:14] We have a lot of trust between us since we've been working together for almost a decade. And the rule is no old answers. Even like titles and what to call ourselves. Asking why for everything. Why would we do this? Why would we make that hire? And one of the first hires I made was a project manager for myself. And Jason said, I knew you were busy, so I spun up a job description for you. And I said, what? A job description? You just handed me a 1992 template.

[00:07:44] I've started my career as a recruiter. I've seen a thousand job descriptions. There was nothing innovative about this, except that it came from Claude. I was like, Jason, shame on you. And he's like, oh my God, I can't believe I just did that. Goes, well, what do you do instead of job descriptions? Like, not very many companies have the luxury of starting from a truly blank page. And since we are, we get to ask silly questions like this. Well, how do you hire somebody without a job description?

[00:08:14] Don't you need a little bit of a contract? Don't there need to be some terms here? And so just asking ourselves questions like that puts us in the seat of our clients who are saying, OK, how do we do what you keep telling us to do, which is reimagine and redesign the work itself before we sprinkle AI on top of everything? So that's really what we're doing. That's now to next. It's strategy and advice. It's content and media.

[00:08:42] It's a lot of working with leadership teams around problem solving. And again, same thing we were doing at LeapGen, asking them, please, please, please don't start with the tech. That's the easy part. I know it's hard. Nobody's saying tech is easy. But trust me, that is the easier part. We really need to back up the train to mindset and alignment and creating a culture of changefulness. So you're not just doing change management on top of a tech strategy.

[00:09:09] And as you both know and can imagine, there's work like that for days and days and days. That's where everybody's at. I know it's early days. Or have you started hiring people without job descriptions? We have a small team. One of our first hires was somebody we've been talking to for a bit. She was in IBM's AI integration lab. She was client facing. It's so funny. Like if you ask Rachel, she reported directly to the CEO because they had no idea who to roll her up to.

[00:09:38] This team, this sort of like tiger team. So imagine every firm like an IBM, like a mechanic, like everybody's got these tiger teams, I'll call them, because they don't know how else to sort of position them in the business. But they're trying to sprint really hard against these customer problems, which is the right thing to do for now. But we're really looking for people who can be builders, not just and I'm not just talking about the tooling. Yes, she's super savvy in Notion and Claude and she like the girl.

[00:10:08] She can wire up anything. She's incredibly talented. But it's the mindset. It's the builder mindset that we're looking for. So when I hired a project manager, I hired her a week after she graduated from college. But I knew she had that builder mindset. I don't care about the rest. And she's the one I ripped up the job description for. We had a conversation. We both recorded it with our note takers. I said, take everything we just talked about, rewrite it. You are a builder and you own the three outcomes we just talked about.

[00:10:35] Draft whatever you want to draft so you know how to hold yourself accountable for that. I don't know what all that moving forward. It's interesting. We recently had David Blake on the show, founder and CEO of Decreed. And his whole thing is that learners will inherit the earth, right? And the learned will, you know, suffer. Builder is the word right now. It is the trait that everyone is looking for. And if you think about it, a builder is a learner.

[00:11:05] It's a very like practical hands-on learner that we need right now. So it's not just a studier of books and all that, which is important. But really being a curious hands-on learner is that builder. And humble, like pretty humble too. Like when I think about, I waited to transition to Claude until I left Mercer because there was kind of no point.

[00:11:31] Like I wanted to be able to work on a clean machine where I had like no walls. And so I kind of waited to create my personal operating system until I could do it with no restrictions. The first week I was on spring break with Ainsley and she sleeps. She's my 17-year-old. She sleeps till noon. So until noon every day, all I did was learn and just hack everything. And I started with my life. How do I set up one integrated? I had taught Claude how to go fetch this and that and that.

[00:12:00] And I was going to be scheduling all of my kids' softball games and practices and blocking my calendar for the drive time from this field to that field. Like I literally just started with stuff like that that's meaningful to me. If you can get me organized on that and I don't have to manually calendar the next three months. So I started with stuff like that and I was just like, the light bulbs started going up. I was like, wait a minute. Well, if you can do that, can you do that? Can you do that? That's what I did every single morning until noon.

[00:12:28] And then I came back and I didn't have my kids for a week. I don't think I got out of my pajamas for a week. All I did was teach myself Notion and Claude. I realized I was prompting too much. So I started learning how to build more brain. And then I wrote about it. And I was so humble. Jason was like, oh my God, this is the cutest thing ever watching you. I'm like, be quiet. Who is this pacing guy who's writing you job descriptions and calling you were cute? He already arrived there.

[00:12:57] And he was like, this is fascinating watching you learn. I mean, he wasn't being infantilistic or anything like that, but he was like, he had already gotten there. And he was like, oh, I cannot wait. He was weeks ahead of you, Jess. Weeks. Weeks. But you could see like, and then I sent him this like 12 minute voice memo. Like, can you imagine? And it's like 12 minutes of like how the model could work as, you know? And he's like, oh my gosh, she's been unleashed.

[00:13:25] I'm just having massive flashbacks. But the sleep till noon, I don't think we talk enough about what a gift that is. So I was very much of the parenting belief that if they need to sleep, they should sleep. It was super lovely for me. I would have this big block of uninterrupted time to focus on things that I needed to get done to feel able to survive both the job and the home. That's a real thing.

[00:13:52] And I used to say that, you know, I obviously loved my family, but I certainly loved them the most when they were sleeping. Totally. Every year, every year. It's like the Groundhog movie over and over again. The last few days of school and I go, oh my gosh, I cannot wait. I'm almost done with school drop-offs and pickups. Like I'm almost done with this school commute thing. And then in the very next breath, I go, oh my God, they're going to be home with me all day. And then it's like another half beat.

[00:14:22] I'm like, oh yeah, but then they sleep most of the day. And my youngest, Bailey, said, mom, I love summer. You know why? And I said, why? And she goes, I sleep all day and then I wake up and I play softball. Pretty good life, kid. Gotta enjoy it while you got it. That's true. Yeah. So Jess, you've been in the realm of transformation for many, many years and many different cycles, many different kinds of transformation. You talked about digital transformation. What's different now? This one is different.

[00:14:51] It is transformation all over again. It's just the next cycle of there's some shiny object on the market. Everybody rushes to it. Everybody starts with the tech and forgets to do everything that precedes that. Transformation is always psychological before it's ever technical. We just can't seem to remember that every time. And then we go back and we fill in gaps. This one is different because it is speed and scale. Everything's happening bigger and faster. The investment is happening so fast.

[00:15:19] I mean, I hardly show a slide more than once without having to update a figure. The latest figure is $1.5 to $2 trillion going into AI global investment this year. That's an insane number. That is a literally insane number. And a lot of this is enterprise investment, right? You take the scale of that investment and then you take the other number everybody's obsessed over. We haven't stopped quoting 95%, the MIT study that says 95% failure rate.

[00:15:47] So all this money pouring into tech that is reportedly failing all measures of success. Like that's crazy to reconcile. So again, we're doing the same thing we've always done, which is start with the tech and forget to redesign the work that sits underneath it. And we forget to change, manage people. We forget the leadership stuff. We forget all of those things. But I also think we're not being esoteric enough with this particular tech. This is not simple automation.

[00:16:16] Unfortunately, everybody's doing simple automation. So they're kind of surprised when they see like marginal efficiency gains. And they're like, wait a minute. I thought this was supposed to be transformational. Well, it can't be transformational if all you're doing is automating. I hope people understand that. You can put the same workflows into fast tech and you're going to get it to go faster. That's not transformation. That's literally not transformation.

[00:16:40] But if you're thinking, how would we redesign this business process or this workflow from the starting point of AI? That's an even better question than automation, right? Automation is do the same thing faster. Redesigning or reimagining a whole business process from the starting point of AI gets you into more of the innovation conversation. How would we do this differently? How would we do this differently? Or would we do it at all? And that gets you into sort of like the elimination, substitution.

[00:17:10] We have a framework we use called hands and heads and hearts. How would you sort work out between hands? Most of that should be automated. Heads should be fully supported, augmented, well-informed with this tooling. And hearts, you should be creating a lot of capacity for that work. Because that's empathy and nurturing and caregiving and discernment and judgment and taste and all of these buzzwords we like now. There's a way of thinking about how to redesign work with some of these frameworks.

[00:17:38] But I am worried that we're applying the models where they're not quite appropriate. We saw talent acquisition, for example, one of the first disciplines in enterprise to jump all over AI. Because it seemed like, wow, here's tooling that can do a lot of the tactical transactional workflows of talent acquisition better and faster for us. Well, talent acquisition is a lot of evaluating people, right? It's screening resumes.

[00:18:04] It's stack ranking people against a bunch of criteria we give it. And then it's giving us a final slate. It's helping with interviews and stuff. I'm a little bit worried that we're not thinking about the predictive capabilities of these models in the right way. And we're going to put a bunch of human judgment stuff into models that are not appropriate for what we're asking them to do. Which is apply judgment where some human judgment still belongs.

[00:18:34] It's also what should we be doing with AI, but what are these models actually designed to do and where are they appropriately applied to human judgment and decision making? So one of the things you modeled in that arc from the beginning of the conversation is when you talked about your philosophy of no old answers. I think this is a really key point to this.

[00:19:01] How and where do you think about application of tech? And how and where should you think about gaining value from the reimagining of both work and workflows, if you will? The trick is really getting to those building blocks of where is the best addressable opportunity.

[00:19:28] A lot of times the people that are put in charge of leading the change are still bounded in their thinking tied to their existing operational role. So you started with the concept of talent acquisition, right?

[00:19:44] Talent acquisition, you're thinking about operationalizing, creating job descriptions, taking in candidates, evaluating for the best fits, slotting into a job, lather, rinse, repeat, right?

[00:19:58] And because you've bounded yourself with that's the beginning, middle and end of the role, you're then constraining the opportunity based on organizational model and an operating model that was built from a different era, if you will.

[00:20:19] This is where it gets difficult because most people get inserted into roles and organizations that have started before they got there and they mold themselves into the patterns that were created to support that business. And so even being given themselves permission to step away from it for a half a second and ask a different question, which is, what does the business really need right now?

[00:20:49] And where do we get the highest leverage for the business in this moment?

[00:20:56] Back to your modeling, the co-creation of a role based on having a conversation with a candidate that has the right componentry to help you both design a role and figure out how that would evolve and adapt over time based on what the needs are in the moment. That's a very different way of looking at talent acquisition.

[00:21:25] People like you that are starting from a clean sheet of paper and asking an entirely different question, I think can create an alternate path for what might work in this moment. Yeah, totally. And in this case, I was hiring somebody who was early career. And so I didn't want a list of I didn't want a sheet of bullet points of, you know, here's the verified experience and attributes. She's still building. She's still in formation.

[00:21:52] When you shift to outcomes, here's the outcomes that need ownership by you or somebody else. Which of these do you want? Which one? Which of these are you well suited for and you're passionate about? That's a different conversation. And it also frees both of us up from the tasks or the ways that she might go about creating these outcomes. I've got some experience and some savvy and I'm happy to mentor her and help her from, you know, making a mistake that I might see.

[00:22:21] But also, please make mistakes. Please test and try. I don't want to assume that I know how that thing is best accomplished. I know what I've tried before, but we're in such a new world. Like, if we're literally rewriting so much of the way work works, then I want first principles thinking, that kind of growth mindset, that kind of creative adaptability test.

[00:22:46] And that's a cultural decision, too, to give the freedom to test and fail, make recommendations with humility, but also, like, it's okay. We're all iterating together. When you do that at the job level, that's the culture that you're maintaining as well. And that's a culture we very much want because we're assuming that we're all learning as we go. Just as we're coaching our clients, there's so much humility required in this moment.

[00:23:15] Nobody has the answers because this is frontier. This is literally new frontier. Nobody knows what's out in space. We're all just going to go and figure it out together. Another thing I would say about this moment and how it's different is that in previous transformations, it really required a very light amount of imagination, right? It was like, okay, you know, go up on this, get everybody to adopt it, do the change management.

[00:23:41] I mean, granted, it wasn't that simple, but a light level of imagination. This moment requires a high degree of imagination and comes with the incredible risk of completely outsourcing that imagination to the very tool that you're trying to imagine with. And I know you've written about this a lot too, Jess. One of the things that I think is really powerful that you've written about is that it's not about adoption.

[00:24:10] It's about embodiment. I was wondering if you could kind of walk us through what that means and where you're seeing companies actually move from adoption to embodiment. What does that look like? To me, adoption is a procurement decision. You buy a tool, you hand out licenses, you call them users, you measure logins, and then you look for ROI. And this is why everybody says, where's our ROI?

[00:24:36] Because they didn't actually change the way people work, the way they think about work, the way they feel about work, more importantly. So you're not really doing much other than giving them a new tool to log into. I saw this with my mom. My mom was a career nurse. Direct patient care most of her career, even though she could have sat back in a cushy clinic job or sat in an office, she preferred direct patient care. Walking floors, passing meds, lifting patients. That was her calling. She loved it.

[00:25:04] And she had to learn telehealth. She was a COVID nurse, so she had to learn how to—everything had to become virtual. And she couldn't wait to retire, on one hand, because she loathed all of the tools and the modernization, the techifying of what she was used to doing. And she really missed the direct access, the hand on the arm, being able to look her patients in the eye. She swore, the more technology you put in this process, the more we're going to miss.

[00:25:32] Which is interesting because the tech actually helps pick up a lot of patterns. Imagine all the data collection you can do with clinical patient data. And so she saw both sides. For her, it wasn't about adopting tools. Does it really change the way she feels about the act of care and nurturing and what she's actually doing? No. But if you learn to understand the opportunity of the technology to improve patient outcomes, that's more of an embodiment moment.

[00:26:00] It's actually creating sort of the mindset and the heart set around the tooling. It's not just requiring her to log into a new system and calling her adopted. To me, embodiment is more the way you think about a problem. It's not a tooling conversation at all. It's who cares what tools you use. Embodiment is more changing your mindset and your approach to the way you even think about problems or think about all the way work gets done.

[00:26:26] When I call myself or when organizations call themselves AI first, which we hear and we see a lot, eventually every organization is going to have a bunch of AI. They already do. So let's assume everybody has AI. But when you shift mindset and you create embodiment more than adoption, then you've created the kind of workforce that's culturally aligned, that thinks about work differently, that approaches problems differently.

[00:26:53] They actually attack a problem from the starting point of AI, which means they think about solutioning differently. Adoption is all about the tool. It's a user login to a tool, and it's never going to measure transformation. Embodiment is a way of thinking about work, about problem solving. It's more of the mindset shift that most organizations are trying to get at.

[00:27:15] In a recent post, you talked about a telecom that had moved from 5% improvement to 30% and basically said that they moved from adoption to embodiment. And I don't know if you know the details, but maybe we can just kind of parse out what we think might have happened.

[00:27:34] But what specifically do you suppose they did differently to get from that 5% through adoption to 30% through embodiment? That was a story I heard just last week. Yeah, yeah. At the Future Talent. At the Future Talent Summit. So if anybody knows Uder, he's the C.A. Toro at BBC. He told the story. This is a Deloitte case study they told about this telecom.

[00:28:00] And they rolled out tools just like everybody else, and they had all these people begin to use whatever it was. I don't know the details in this case. And they didn't see much of a lift in efficiency, productivity, whatever they decided their KPIs were. 5% sort of minor incremental improvement.

[00:28:18] But when you change the way people work and think about work and give them permission in agency to actually redesign workflows, to reimagine some of their business processes or even what you measure, that's where you see more of the lift in appropriate KPIs, which is how effective is our workforce at producing outcomes, not how efficient is this business process necessarily. So that was his story.

[00:28:44] We have similar examples in some of the early client work we're doing where I'll protect the names of the innocent for now. Like, these are really admirable companies with great cultures. They think they're doing everything right from a leadership and positioning and communicating and creating psychological safety around change. They think they're doing all the right things. It's like Christmas. Everybody gets a tool. Everybody gets a login. And then they go, well, what's happened? Why aren't we seeing as much of a difference as we hoped?

[00:29:14] They're hoping for reinvention. They're literally hoping to be a transformed business and have a reinvented function. Like, we end up working with a lot of people in culture teams, as you can imagine. And a lot of HR teams feel like they need to reinvent themselves before they can reinvent the workforce for the business. And there's this sort of like, well, what we thought that we did this like innovation sprint and this adoption rollout. We gave everybody tools. We even gave them training.

[00:29:44] But I think the thing that's missing, again, is actually challenging people and giving very specific directives around what they're actually supposed to reinvent. Are they supposed to throw away job descriptions? I don't think there's much alignment on where to start and what good looks like. So the only KPIs we have is adoption, which is user logins, use of a tool, but for what? So I'd like to see organizations go a little further and do a better job answering sort of what good looks like.

[00:30:13] Are we going back to the drawing board, creating something entirely new? One organization we're working with, the CEO, looked at this massive people and culture reinvention program. This is a huge investment for this organization. And he said, this isn't bold enough. I still recognize what you're showing me. I shouldn't be able to recognize this if you're doing true reinvention.

[00:30:34] A couple thoughts I have on both the being bold and the role and best use of the people and culture parts of the organization. One of the challenges that we're up against is that there's just too much choice. There's too many vectors and too many places that you could go with AI. Humans, we get very overloaded when we have too many choices.

[00:31:02] That's one presenting symptom that I see happen a lot. This idea of, oh, a thousand flowers bloom. Let's just go see what all could happen. And all they managed to do is scattershot a whole lot of maybe half-baked ideas. And that becomes its own self-fulfilling situation where then it starts to look like the 95% was not adding value.

[00:31:28] I think the other side of that is if we get back to well-covered transformation tools and some of the muscle that we have built over the years, I'm a big fan of the Dan and Shapis books and specifically Switch, How to Change When Change is Hard. And one of the things that they talk about is the criticality of paving the path.

[00:31:53] If you don't help people see where they're going and pave the path, you make it very hard for behaviors to change. You introduce a lot of cognitive dissonance between what you know to be true versus what is new and emerging as true. And so you end up with a whole lot of emotional reaction in people that makes it very hard to do big things.

[00:32:16] And if you're looking for big improvements, you cannot get there by causing everybody in your care to be so overwhelmed that they can't figure out which way to go. You really do need to help create a framework for which people can do something hard and big and feel supported, given permission to learn and fail and adapt and to grow.

[00:32:45] It is so important for organizations to pick one or two initiatives, not thousands, and to build capability and muscle within those one or two big initiatives that prove how transformational it can be to do a big thing with a lot of focus and a lot of energy and a lot of intention.

[00:33:10] And in doing that, you build the foundation for the cultural change and the confidence. So to me, going after culture writ large is like definitionally going to fail because you're trying to do something horizontally that nobody has a mental model for yet.

[00:33:30] If you do something that's very deep vertically, you can create the evidence that people need to see how that culture would be embodied in their work and in their contribution to the organization.

[00:33:46] This frontier moment does require the right kind of people in front, the people that are able to build the maps, do the sense making, figure out what you're going to go after, and then needs a lot of energy on paving the path so that people know and can follow in that direction and feel supported and confident, but pushed to do something big as opposed to just something surface and little.

[00:34:13] I will say my most, this one kind of surprised me because I thought it was cute and kitschy, but I was like, why is my most screenshotted slide ever, ever. I think I put it in every deck because I know the cameras are going to come up and everybody's going to screenshot this slide and it changes the strategy, not the enemy. And I said that one day to Jason, he's like, oh yeah, that's really good. We started putting it all our, like literally in all of our decks for five years. It's the most screenshotted thing we say.

[00:34:41] And I was trying to figure out why is, why do you guys like that? I like some good alliteration too, but it's the whole concept of changefulness. We get asked about this one so much and I fight against change fatigue. Every time I hear it, I said, I don't think people have change fatigue. I think people have failure fatigue and that's different. Change is good and positive when it produces something better than what we had before. People tend to like that. I like it when workouts pay off. I like it when my bank account goes up, not down.

[00:35:11] That's okay change for me. Like we like change when it's good for us. And it almost doesn't matter if we anticipate it, but maybe you could argue that human nature likes a little bit of ability to react and adapt. But I think changefulness is really being able to metabolize change. It's understanding adaptability as the constant state instead of status quo or stasis as the constant state. When you know that things will always be in flux and that is your steady ground.

[00:35:41] And then everything is moving and swirling around you, but your steady ground is, it's okay. I'm adaptable. I'm changeful. I can metabolize this because I'm conditioned for it. That's a different mindset. It's like me rushing an obstacle course. I know there's obstacles on this course. I'm expecting 28 of them. If I were expecting no obstacles and I suddenly came upon 28 of them one after another, that would be a little unnerving.

[00:36:11] Change itself needs a whole new marketing campaign. Because if you think about it as your lever for something better and you learn how to wield it like your best weapon, that's way different than everybody moping around the workplace complaining of change fatigue. Thank goodness for change. Don't we all want something better than what we have today? That is the number one conversation I end up having in every single room. We go back and forth on this change fatigue concept.

[00:36:38] And I say, I think we have to give that one up, people. Like reframe it, let it go into the wind and embrace it. Like literally reframe this for yourselves. My favorite Amy Wilson moment when I joined SuccessFactors and we were having one of our many coffee corner kind of thing. And people asked her, when is this change going to stop? And she's like, no, the goal is not for it to stop. The goal is to get good at change.

[00:37:05] What I find interesting is, to your point, they're not afraid of the change. They're afraid of losing that sense of confidence in themselves and how they're going to be relevant in that next phase. And being in control of the change.

[00:37:22] And I think this gets at something else that you've said, Jess, which is that part of the embodiment problem is that the workforce is not represented in a lot of these AI conversations and decisions and rollouts and plans. And figuring out how to get the workforce represented is challenging.

[00:37:44] How do you find that balance between getting them involved and making them feel like they're in control, not sabotaging everything? And I think it gets a little bit to what Meg was saying in terms of having fewer initiatives and creating these paved paths. And I have this theory about like this golden job, kind of purporting that people should learn how to do.

[00:38:11] But I think even more important from a leadership perspective is to be able to identify the people that can do this job. And I'm calling it the translator. It's the people who can figure out the translation from what was done before to where we're going, the now to next, essentially, through curiosity about AI and intellectual humility and domain expertise and business context and then overall sense making.

[00:38:40] But to be able to say, as a leader, OK, I can ascertain that these three individuals are going to be instrumental for this particular initiative to get us from here to there. They're going to have the right kind of builder mindset, et cetera, to be able to do that and then role model for others what that looks like. And then how do we train that into people?

[00:39:07] Are you seeing your clients starting to adopt these kinds of techniques to bring them forward? Or is that still nascent? If you believe, like we do, that transformation is psychological before it's ever technical, then you believe that any transformation gaps that exist are human gaps. And how we diagnose. So this is the fun part.

[00:39:34] We're playing with a few different kind of diagnostics to say, well, what is the right way to identify where these human gaps might be? And it's not just trust and safety. That's certainly part of it. I notice in what you just said to Amy, this golden job idea has nothing to do with ability to use and learn a tool. So the thing I hate the most about the AI conversation is that we've turned it into winners and losers. You're a fast mover, high adopter. You're a tool expert.

[00:40:02] You're sort of the first to try and learn new. Open maxer. Yes, it's open maxer. Oh, my gosh. Or you're a lagger. You're lagging. You're left behind. Your job is at risk of replacement. You're fearful. Fear of becoming obsolete. And so one of the diagnostic approaches we've been taking is to identify what we think are the wounds of change. And there are no winners and losers in this conversation.

[00:40:30] Everybody feels some of these wounds to some degree. And it is fear of replacement, perhaps, especially if you're sitting closest to the fault lines and your job is definitely at risk. But especially if it's something that you're passionately tied to, your purpose is actually being disrupted, not just your job. Think about my mom as a nurse. The loss of mastery. Every developer, every coder will cry over this one. The loss of mastery.

[00:40:59] Like, are you serious? The machine can code at 100 times the rate that I can. And you're saying that that's just as good as what I spent my entire career learning how to do with excellence. Decision fatigue. I think this technology is spitting out so much. Like, the fire hose is constant. And we're already seeing a lot of interesting studies about correcting work slop and evaluating what's good, you know, even knowing what good looks like anymore.

[00:41:26] If you have 17 agents working for you while you sleep and you wake up and then you've got to consume all this work and redistribute it. Like, so decision fatigue is one of them. Trust erosion we already know and talk a lot about. And identity disruption. If you're redefining everything about work and how we think about human contribution and how performance and value is measured, that's something that people feel a lot. And so I started categorizing these in a few different personas.

[00:41:54] And again, there's no bad persona. In fact, I think each of these, to your point, back to the thinking around the golden job, somebody who has that kind of discernment and critical thinking capability, even like the high adopter, the power user, fully embodied, fully on board.

[00:42:14] There's pros and cons to somebody like that, including the fact that they might actually be difficult to benchmark against because they sort of skew the numbers, you know, sort of thing. I would call myself a pragmatist. Somebody who's a little bit more discerning, probably looks at things with a side eye, asks harder questions, not resistant, maybe just a little bit more evidence driven.

[00:42:37] I think people like that would be super valuable in deployment programs because they're going to say, what are we doing here? Why are we doing it this way? Not can the tool do it? That's a different question. I think we've were mislabeling and shaming some of the resistance or the psychological reactance people are having to some of the tooling.

[00:43:00] I think we need to think about the value some of these perspectives and some of the resistance might bring if you brought them into a design session, for example. If you said, OK, perfect, you're resistant for good reason. What questions do you have? What proof would you need to see? Could you help us test this? Because they're going to be harder testers than somebody who just loves the whiz bang of what the tools can do.

[00:43:25] So I think there would be much more value to be gained by saying, well, who are the ready and willing but stretched? How do we create capacity for them to learn and come up the curve? Who are the resistant and questioning and why? What testing value? What validation could we get out of them? Who are the early adopters and the fast movers? But how do we actually create organizational capacity to turn all of those proofs of concept and all that crazy stuff they're building? That's got to like land in the organization.

[00:43:52] You can't possibly deploy all of that in reality in the organization. So I think there's a lot of benefit to understanding where everybody is at in the journey and resolving each of them uniquely and differently instead of saying, well, they're going to get left behind and they're the ones to call our champions and run hard with.

[00:44:12] You're doing a real like honest workforce assessment and figuring out good strategies for each kind of bucket of people, I suppose. Right. Is that is that kind of what you're saying here? And unfortunately, the headlines that we see a lot of are substitution and replacement headlines.

[00:44:32] And skinning up the workforce so that we can afford all this AI we're investing in or we think we've earned our way into a leaner, more nimble, intelligent workforce because we've redesigned everything for AI. That's that's an interesting play. I think it leaves a lot of value on the table.

[00:44:50] But if you're actually pursuing innovation, reinvention, true transformation, you're probably looking for ways to multiply people, retain and multiply the value of people, which means you do have to understand. Do I have skeptics and fearful and pragmatists? Not just the early adopters, fast movers. Like, how do I take all of these people and move them up the curve respectively?

[00:45:13] But also retain the value of the hard questions and the discernment and the actual redesign capabilities they bring with them, because those are your experts. I don't think you need tool experts. I think you need work experts who deeply understand they have wisdom, experience, expertise. They can apply discernment.

[00:45:34] We're making a big mistake by chasing a bunch of high adopting tool experts and not retaining the workforce for the real value they bring to this. And teaching those folks kind of how to be deeply curious, maybe in a different way than they've had to be in the past. Right. One of my clients deployed a analysis instrument across their workforce. And one of the things that came out from it was super interesting.

[00:46:02] Asking all the questions of how equipped do you feel? Do you feel ready? Do you understand? They asked, what do you self-assess as your prospect? Do you do these types of behaviors? And what they found was that the people that assessed that they were behind or not ready were actually doing things anyway. So it was a super interesting question was, were they undervaluing what they already knew?

[00:46:33] Or did they believe that they had a bigger resistance than they really had? The data we get back is so early. It's hard to tease out the actual perspective. To your point, valuing of how people believe about themselves, where they can contribute, and then figuring out how to meet them where they are.

[00:46:56] It's going to be really a big part of that next level journey, both for paving the path, but also for helping people's nervous systems get open to this changefulness that is part of all of our future. I'll give you a really clear example. I was running a workshop with a client, and we had them doing table exercises. We gave a bunch of business problems to solve.

[00:47:23] And the whole idea was to get them into this mindset, this curiosity, humility, blank page sort of thinking. Forget tools. Let's assume there's some tech out there that could probably accomplish some of this. The whole idea was getting them into that idea state. We gave them business problems that might not necessarily be familiar to them. So one had to do with standing up a call center. I can't remember the details.

[00:47:45] And as I was walking around listening to the room, I heard a woman say, can you imagine if we could collect all the call data in all of this call volume? I can only imagine there are so many insurance products we could create for the gap. People are probably calling in for coverage, questions, claims issues.

[00:48:03] And when we identify that we actually don't have a well-designed product to serve that need, we should be spinning up new products to fill gaps that we would know we have when we assess. And the way I heard her talking, it was not a technology conversation whatsoever. So imagine that. That's an innovation. That's an invention and innovation conversation. Imagine if you started with the tech. If you started with AI and you said, I don't think we need people in call centers anymore.

[00:48:33] This can be fully automated by bots at 10% of the price within five. That is a way different conversation. That is a substitution conversation that just looks for leanness. You're just like, you're looking for pennies, pennies of profit in that conversation versus what new products and services can we create to capture more market, to create more customers than we have today. That is the whole difference between adoption and embodiment.

[00:49:01] You are a prolific storyteller. You have been your whole life and writer. I recently learned that you were a champion persuasive speaker. Oh my gosh. The little known facts about me. When I grew up in small town, North Dakota, and when I graduated from high school, I was the reigning state champion in two categories, extemporaneous speaking and speech to persuade. I was a speech and debate nerd for sure.

[00:49:32] Which is know how to create a really good argument. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to get on the other side of you. So I'm glad we had you on the show in a warm and friendly way. You've been writing for a long time and you have stated that there's a real lack of honest storytelling in this age right now. And you have embarked on a new series. And I wonder if you could just kind of share a little bit about why this, why now?

[00:50:01] Storytelling has always been kind of innate to me. When I was 13 years old, I discovered my mom's journal in her underwear drawer. And it was a very incomplete journal. We're talking about a few scribbled pages. But I was like 13, 14 years old. And I remember opening it up. Like, what is that? I was looking for something. I was not expecting to find an actual journal, which was an inside look into my mother's brain and heart. And I remember being completely shocked.

[00:50:28] There was nothing terrible in it except she was having some very honest conversations with herself. She was scared of things. She was nervous. And how old was she when you were 13? Just so we can remind ourselves how young she was. She was in her 30s. Right. So, like, yeah, she was a child herself. Yes. I remember being so shocked that my mom was a woman. Shocked. She was my mom and she was supposed to have all the answers.

[00:50:51] And so the fact that she didn't have all the answers, that she was scared and vulnerable, that she was actually a woman first, my mom second. That was my first, like, eye-opening moment. And I saw her differently after that. We had different conversations after that. And I'm going deeper than you expected, Amy. So when I got divorced, I spent my first Christmas Day without my daughters. And it was, I mean, you could have, like, scooped my guts out of my body and put them on the table. And, like, it was horrific.

[00:51:21] I could not even imagine that this was real. Like, a mother separated from her children. I might as well have been missing a leg. It was crazy. My mom had sent me a care package. It had cheese and chocolate in it. And, like, a dish towel. And she's like, I know you're alone today. And another friend sent a book. And I was just like, I went to the gym and I came home and I was pissed. And I cracked open my laptop and I started writing. And I started journaling to my daughters.

[00:51:47] I've been writing a journal to my daughters they don't even know exists for 10 years. And I thought that that would probably be private forever or maybe someday I'll share it with them. But it was definitely just for me. It was, like, all the stories of us and being a mom and stuff that I knew that I want them to know one day. So I've always been writing. It's always been a way to make sense of the world. It's therapeutic for me.

[00:52:11] The more I started sharing authentically out loud, like, in the circles where I exist, the response I would get back was sort of like, I feel like you see me. I feel so seen. When you say that, I feel so seen. And that's important to me for women because I champion women. And I don't think anybody should ever feel alone or weird or left out or struggling. Worse, struggling and alone.

[00:52:39] And especially when it comes to mental health. We all know people. We all have stories. When it comes to mental health, when I started talking about my daughter and mental health or my brother and mental health, that's when it became even more meaningful because the more we can say stuff out loud, the more we can not only remove stigma but actually create safety for people who really need safety. I love the act of writing. It is my favorite form of creative expression.

[00:53:08] I love reading. I love words. I love reading somebody else's writing. I like creating it myself. But the storytelling part of it is authentic. It's transparency. It's a way of seeing someone, which is a beautiful way of witnessing someone. I think it comes from there, to be honest. I think everybody deserves that. I'll be walking around at a conference and somebody will come up to me. Like, this just happened. Somebody shared with me, I wanted to call you when my dad died.

[00:53:37] And then I remembered I don't even know you. I've just read you. That's what it does when people feel seen. And if we can do that for each other, I think we'll all be okay. Your writing just has this, like, visceral quality. Some of the analogies that you create, it's really, truly delicious writing. Even when it's hard and raw topics. Yeah. Especially when it's hard and raw topics, I would say. Well, when I started writing the journal to my daughters,

[00:54:05] we'll decide if that ever sees the light of day. It's called Dear Daughters. And again, it's like 10 years of writing. I had three rules when I started that. Write only when I feel like it. It has to be authentic, never forced. Don't edit myself and write for no audience. Because then it does tend to feel a little fabricated for somebody. Or you sort of question. You sort of remove some of the rawness and authenticity of it. So definitely. It's meant to be a journal that you shove into your underwear drawer that your daughters happen to discover someday.

[00:54:35] One day they will happen to discover it and be like, Oh, mom, mom, mom. So when I trained Claude on me, not me on Claude. See the difference there? When I trained Claude on me, the very first rule was never, ever write me. I only write myself. You can research for me. You can structure me. You can question me. We'll play devil's advocate a lot. But never, ever write my full voice. And I got lazy one day. And I'm like, I need something blah, blah, blah.

[00:55:04] Like, write this for me. And Claude said, no. I said, excuse me? Write this. I need a thing. You know, like, write this. And Claude said, no. And I was like, I'm telling you. And then I was like, wait a minute. Don't break your rule. This is going to be really hard to rewrite. So I've maintained that rule ever since. And no shame to people who let AI. Like, no shame. If this is allowing somebody to express themselves in ways that they found it difficult before, fine. Please don't outsource everything.

[00:55:33] I still want to know what people think and feel. Like, please don't outsource all of that. But for me, that's important because my voice is my voice. And everybody deserves to have their authentic voice that in the world. So tell us about your book. The working title is Work Like a Mother. It is titled that way for very good reason. It's not just for women. It's not just for mothers and caregivers. I challenge everyone to look through a different set of lenses and apply maybe a different way of thinking.

[00:56:02] When you think about systems thinking and work design, it's written in that way. So now when I hear that, Jess, I hear work like a motherfucker. Yes. And it's a little cheeky in that way as well. Okay. Yes. What's the working title? And I think it's going to stick. I've got an editor working on it. I had early editors. There are four people who earn special thanks in this book when it comes out. And Meg is one of them. Thank you.

[00:56:32] Meg, you are everywhere. I know. She's a big deal. Did you know that? She's a big deal. When somebody says, hey, I've got an early book. Do you want to read it? I'm like, me, me, pick me, pick me. That's a big ask. I mean, that is a big ask. And I doled it out to a number of people. And I thought, if I get like five people who like read it end to end and actually give me feedback, I'll be lucky. And I got three. There were no men. And I said, I really need a man to read this.

[00:57:02] A man I trust. Jason will write the foreword, by the way. But like he needs to see the final product and then write the foreword. But I had to go out and intentionally find. This is for all readers. Like I literally challenge everyone to pick up a book written by a woman called Work Like a Mother and read it and understand what I'm talking about and what the concept is. I don't want to turn off some readers. This is for everybody.

[00:57:27] But it's very specifically challenging the norms that we bring to the concept of work. If we're going to break it all and redesign it all, I beg us to pick up a different set of lenses than we have. Nurturing, caregiving, human development, communal thinking, maternal thinking as systems thinking. There's a lot of good stuff in there. So Amy, you can imagine I get the early draft and I'm reading it and just have this great

[00:57:53] like system where you could just make comments right in the text, which is so helpful. I've done this for other people where it's been much harder. And anyway, I'm doing this. And then like maybe about a third of the way in, I'm like, oh, I might be over being helpful. You know, it's like I'm having all this, this commentary. And so afterwards I was like, just if I overdid it, I'm sorry. Just take what you like and ignore the rest. Was the response, wow, that was a lot? Exactly. Exactly. I did.

[00:58:23] I did a Meg then. I was grateful for it. In fact, when I had the right feedback from all, I didn't want champions that I knew would be like, good job, Jess. It's all fantastic. I didn't want it's all fantastic. I wanted, have you thought about this? I wanted people to push on it and to challenge it. And I chose not to resolve all of the feedback, all of the comments. I knew I had enough and it was poignant and spot on. And I said, I'm ready for an editor.

[00:58:51] And I just handed it over and I said, and here's all the feedback. I mean, that's what a good editor is for. So I think it'll be fun. I'm trying to get it out for fall. Can't wait. Thank you so much, Jess. This has been wonderful. Thank you for having me. Your heart centered, not just the way that you tell stories, but the way that you show up for everybody in your community is just such a big deal. We are huge, huge fans of yours.

[00:59:19] And we are so proud to see all of the great things that you and Jason are doing in this new business. I think you're exactly what the world needs right now. So thank you for that. We're having fun. I saw an old friend recently and she said, it's like the weight of the world has been lifted off your shoulders. I said, really? That's a funny thing to say to somebody who's watching something new, but I'm having so much fun, which is why not? Why go through this life and not have fun, right? Yep.

[00:59:46] You're embodying your next chapter. So that is so, it's so beautiful. Thank you. You ready to leadership corner, Meg? Always ready for some leadership corner, Amy. All right, here we go. I've watched several senior executives at my company let go recently. People I admire who were, by my measure, doing the job really well. Now I'm being asked to step into one of those roles.

[01:00:16] I don't see what I have that they didn't, and I'm not sure I can handle the pressure. I think I'd rather excel at my current level. What should I do? I'm very cautious when I get asked these kinds of questions because I'm mindful of the fact that not everybody has the same ambitions that I have or maybe even the same priorities. So I try to be very careful.

[01:00:41] So first off, the fact that you're having to pick up the pieces is hard. Just acknowledging that matters. I would tend to want to challenge you on your perspective that you don't have the same level of skill or the same value to add. I tend to think that stretch opportunities are worth taking.

[01:01:06] Again, this is me putting some of my own ambitions and values into play, but I actually think that it's useful to take a swing and learn in that moment versus self-selecting to step back. You can bench test your assumptions versus deciding ahead of time that you're not cut out for it.

[01:01:33] I tend to want to take the role of giving you a nudge to believe in yourself versus giving you permission to step back. Because I think that the opportunity for learning when you're given a nudge, even if you do it for a while and then realize, no, it's not for me. Betting on yourself is something that I'm all about. So I would like to see you bet on yourself.

[01:01:58] And even if betting on yourself is, hey, I don't want to do the job, I totally respect that. As long as the reason you don't want to do the job is because you see yourself thriving in a different path versus you're not sure you can do the job. If it's truly you're just having some imposter syndrome and you don't have full confidence you can do the job, that tells me you should give it a try and figure out what else do you need to do?

[01:02:24] Because putting yourself in a situation you have to grow into is the best catalyst for growth that you can have. So I would encourage you to believe in yourself, give it a go, see what you can do, and test whether you really are capable of stepping into that level and maybe even have a conversation with who's tapping you for this role and say, hey, I recognize people in the past have struggled in this role.

[01:02:53] Help me understand why you want me to step into this role and how I might be able to have a different outcome. So use it as an opportunity to bring some more information towards you and maybe even give you a little bit more confidence. But in general, if in doubt, my vote is to give you a shove and to say, bet on yourself, give it a go. Worst case, doesn't work out, you're back to what you would have done anyway.

[01:03:21] Yeah, I love what you're saying about getting the clarity from a hiring leader. And this gets back a little bit to the leadership corner conversation we had with Han a couple months back in terms of really setting yourself up for success and understanding fully what is it that this leader is looking for in the next leader. So I like that a lot.

[01:03:47] I want to kind of reiterate the is there a lot to learn in this role? Would it give you energy? That's a tricky one because a lot of the times it's going to be an energy drain, especially if there are a lot of pressures and politics and that sort of thing. But are there elements of it that would give you energy? If the answer is that there's no nothing to learn, no energy, then of course not. But those are big pieces.

[01:04:15] And so if there's clarity and there's something to learn and something to be gained from this, and you're still feeling a lot of doubts and fear, I would embark on the exercise of what's the worst that could happen. And really getting pretty thorough with that, write it all out or think it all the way through.

[01:04:40] Like, okay, the worst that could happen is in six months, they fire my ass and I'm out. And what does that mean? What does that mean for your bank account? What does that mean for your family? What does that mean for your future job prospects? Fully think through and imagine what does life look like with this worst case scenario? And can I live with that?

[01:05:07] Would I actually be better off for it? As long as I have the right mindset of this could happen and it would be fine. The worst thing actually is to not think through that, to take a job or not, and to be completely oblivious to what could happen and get to the end and actually get let go and be devastated about it.

[01:05:35] So that's what I have to say, Meg. Yeah. And again, I just like reinforce, we believe that just the fact that you're asking the question means that you would do a great job no matter which choice you take. I'm a big believer in sometimes just making a decision and then make that decision right is the best plan. So whatever decision you take, I want you to feel good about it and I want you to feel

[01:06:03] very clear that you took that choice on purpose. Jess was a marvel as we would have expected. So fun to chat with Jess. Talk about just like somebody that's impressive on every possible level. I just adore how authentic Jess shows up in everything she does. And I think you're going to see a trend.

[01:06:28] Meg is really drawn to people who embody their entire value to the world unapologetically. And I think Jess just fits that bill perfectly. Well, what another great episode, Meg. Well done. This brings me so much joy. Thank you everyone for helping to get us more subscribers. We appreciate it. We love all of the feedback and we appreciate all the leadership corner challenges you're giving us. So please keep that up and let's invent the future together.

[01:06:58] Everyone, I believe in us. Let's make every day count.