Episode Transcript
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Welcome to Power CEOs, the truth behind the business. I'm Jen Goday, your fearless host, entrepreneur, investor and business strategist. Why are we here? Because iron sharpens iron. And when we bring industry leaders, entrepreneurs and executives to share what's working in business and even what's not, we're all able to learn and grow.
As a result, our businesses grow. And the ripple effect impacts not only ourselves, our teams and their businesses, but also our communities in our world. Today, we're going to go straight into one of the biggest questions leaders are facing right now.
Yes, we're going to talk about AI, but more specifically, what does it mean to be human when AI, quantum automation and rapidly evolving technology can do more of what we used to call work?
For years we rewarded people for memorizing, following instructions, completing tasks and producing predictable output. But now tech is getting very good at that. So where does that leave us?
I've brought Chad Lefebvre here, founder and CVO of the Most Important Conversations. Chad is a design thinker, strategist, speaker and founder whose work sits at the intersection of design, human creativity, systems thinking, transformation and problem solving. We're going to dive into the future of work. Why task based roles are under pressure and what upskilling actually needs to look like. And why human discernment, judgment, lived experience and creativity may become the most valuable assets in this AI age. Because the truth is, the companies that win will not be the ones that simply automate the most. They're going to be the ones that remember how humans create value.
Chad, welcome to the show.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Thanks Jen. It's such a pleasure to be here and great to see you again, Chad.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: I opened with the question that I know you and I have had many conversations about and so I'm just going to put it to you.
We've spent years thinking and talking about AI from a tools perspective, but the deeper issue is identity.
So if intelligence, information and task execution are no longer unique human advantages, what does it mean to be human in this age?
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Yeah, that is such an important question and one that so many people struggle with because we've never really had to think about it except in deep philosophical circles.
And I just want to actually start by saying I know some of our conversation is going to drift in and out of philosophy today and for some people they might be like, what is the point of this? How do I apply it to my business? How do I apply it to my company?
And I would say that philosophy is actually the most pragmatic thing that you could actually engage in if applied. So I just wanted to start with that because some of what we're going to be talking about will verge on the edge of philosophy. And by the way, philosophy becomes pragmatic when you actually implement it. So we want to kind of start there and then drill down. So thinking about the question of what does it mean to be human?
You know, ultimately, at the end of the day, we are asking what distinguishes humans from any other living being. And for that matter, in this case, when we're talking about artificial intelligence, we're asking that question also to include what distinguishes humans from now artificial beings as we kind of move into that sort of realm. I've given a lot of thought about this over the years and the only thing I can continue to come up with is creativity. That creativity is the thing that authentically distinguishes human beings from all other living things. And I do believe it is still creativity that gives humans the edge over AI. Now the problem, which I know we're going to get into is that our economic model was not designed for this. And, and this is where we're hitting these sort of friction points right now.
So I would just say creativity is the thing. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself because I could talk for a whole hour on this and I want to have a conversation with you. So.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So let's dive into creativity a little bit because some people listening are thinking about creativity and what they're thinking as content creation, right? Yeah, that's not what we're talking about here, folks. When we talk about creativity, it's not just about content creation. So can you dive into a little more depth on what actually is creativity and what does creativity look like in business and in the workplace and how can we foster that?
[00:04:50] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of big questions there. So first of all, producing content can be creative or not creative.
So it's not the mistake we often make. And this is because of the way we have been conditioned. All of us were born into an economic model and an economic system that relies on human beings being a certain way.
And the way that we expect human beings to be is actually not to be human beings, but to be human doings. And so you can, you can produce content from a strictly non creative, almost unintentional unconscious just place and you can create, you can produce that content. But that wouldn't be engaging in creativity. When we think of creativity, we want to think about things like imagination, intention, awareness, presence, the power of visualization, things that are required to bring something from nothing. And that really is a key distinction when we think about creativity, which is that creativity is bringing something from nothing.
If we think about creativity in the context of the existing systems, if we can have a systems level conversation for a moment, that's really the level of conversation we need to be having right now. Because in this case, our economy is a system that's driven by inputs and outputs and everything that has happened in everything that happens in between the inputs and outputs. The economic model that we have is system systemically jobs focused or doing focus. So people are hired to do tasks, and these tasks are now tasks that AI and robotics are starting to replace. But I believe that AI will run into the creative wall, at least for a while.
AI still requires inputs to produce an output, just like humans in jobs. But the input is the creative part. And few people in our current economic model and the way we structure companies that are basically nodes inside of this economic model, few people in our companies and therefore in our economy are empowered to participate in the input part, what is actually happening. Usually that's a directive from management that is really only conserved with preserving what is versus creating what's possible.
And so you have to think of it from a system standpoint that systems are always designed to protect the system that exists and to eliminate any idea that would put the system at risk, which is antithetical to creativity. Now, a new economic model where humans are rewarded for being human, for being creators, for being innovators, for being part of an emergent system versus a highly controlled and predictable system is really what we need to start thinking about. The current system is built to satiate one aspect of what it means to be human, the need to know part. But we really know very little. I mean, even Socrates said, I know nothing, right? So this is in and of itself an act of creativity, which is that we are creating a story that we can know something and control something. And then we went ahead and created an economic model and built that around our need to know and control to assuage that part of ourself that lives in fear of the unknown.
Creators can't fear the unknown. In fact, true creativity drives straight into the unknown.
Except that the unknown has been positioned these days in our economic model as bad or dangerous or intolerable, as risky. In fact, I would say that we have an economic model and the way that companies operate, et cetera, to de risk.
So if you think about this, to create, to be a creator, is to step into the unknown and to create something from nothing, to bring ideas into the world of effects, the world that we can interact with, the world that we can do something with. But the only way that process works is if we don't fear the unknown. So we've kind of put ourselves in a bit of a box here where on the one hand, we've now created artificial intelligence, a tool that can replace theoretically many of the doings that human beings have been paid to do over the last 80 plus years.
And we've effectively created the conditions where we have de incentivized the innate creative nature of human beings. And part of that creative nature requires our ability to step into and be at peace with the unknown. And yet we have a whole economic model that wants to de risk and eliminate the unknown and bring control. And so these two things are antithetical and really at war with each other. So coming back to your question though, about content creation, yes, you can create content, but it really is determined from where you're coming from. So if you're coming from a place of creativity, visualization, imagination, intentionality, content could be an act of creation. I mean, Picasso created content called paintings, and we call him a creator, right? So it really has less to do with the output and more to do with the intention behind the input.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: And so I just want to sort of wrap this with a bow because we are getting kind of close towards the commercial break. And folks, if you're watching this, this is really a very big difference. We are moving away from what we have valued for so long, which is people have jobs that are task oriented, and AI is really taking those tasks off of our plates. And so the question becomes, what is left? And what is left is quite frankly uncomfortable because we haven't had to think in this way, we haven't operated in this way, we haven't been trained to operate in this way. And the reward system has quite frankly, not been stimulating on the creative side of things. So what Chad is bringing forth to light is we have to ask these more deep questions so we can understand how do we evolve and how do we reward creative thinking, creative problem solving, innovation, so that we can shape the future instead of having the future shape us.
And you know, honestly, it comes from our lived experiences. It comes from being willing to push the envelope and being willing to allow our teams to make mistakes as they move forward in their problem solving journey. We do have to take a brief break, but we will be back in a few moments.
I do want to just have you stop asking, what can AI do? What what can humans do? And ask, where does the unique human creativity live. Where is that discernment? Where do we create or protect value? We'll be right back after these messages.
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Let's get right back into our conversation du jour. We left before the break talking about the human aspect and what does it mean to be human in an AI age?
Task based work is under pressure. That is what AI is great at. It is great at the doing the repetitive tasks.
But the reality is if AI is taking over those tasks, that doesn't mean that people have no value.
What it means for us is that leaders need to redesign roles around judgment, context, relationships, creativity and problem solving. I'm going to just point to Microsoft's Work Trend Index. That said, the need to decide where AI should automate work, where human AI collaboration creates value, and where human judgment remains essential was published recently. And so Chad, let's dive into this. How should leaders be thinking about roles that have traditionally been heavily task based?
What do we need to do for our teams for those employees who are finding that their job or their job description are changing completely?
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Yeah, this is a big challenge for companies. I mean, at the end of the day, we have to redevelop our people.
And the only, the simplest way that I can put it is we have to help employees become entrepreneurs. And by that I don't necessarily mean running their own company. I'm saying that even inside of companies, we need to, inside of that corporate structure, we need to create a context where employees can be entrepreneurial in terms of their thinking, in terms of their creativity. And this is going to require a new culture of trust because most companies, whether, you know, regardless of what they say, they don't really fundamentally trust their employees. And that's not saying something bad about them. That's because the system hasn't required them to trust their employees. The system is, is designed right now to have basically employees just be sort of, you know, for the most part just doing these task based things that are repetitive and redundant and they don't require creativity and they don't require imagination or any kind of thought like that. And once you do A task like that enough, it becomes so habituated that trust isn't even really required by the, by, by a company. So some people's jobs unfortunately will be replaced by AI because it's just the economies of scale that AI are able to bring to a company are just going to be, you know, too great for a company to avoid taking advantage of. But many people inside a company who have task based jobs can be, can be reallocated, can be retrained, can be redeveloped inside of the organization. But it's going to require having those employees tap into their creativity, which for many of us was conditioned out of us when we were very young. Because the system didn't require everybody to have these very natural innate skills of creativity that we all have. I mean, all of us when we were, you know, children, no one had to teach us how to play, how to imagine, how to visualize. We just did that. We imagined worlds and we created those worlds. And it was through the conditioning of our school system and our friends, family and community, and the conditioning of the people around us that that was eventually sort of removed from our everyday life, from the way that we think. Now we're in a situation where companies have an opportunity, as I see it, to actually redevelop their employees to be entrepreneurs, to be entrepreneurially minded, to be entrepreneurial in terms of their thinking, to reactivate that creative assets within themselves and to bring new ideas into the company, to bring new solutions, new processes, new techniques, new ways to potentially reach a market. I mean, it depends on the nature of the company and what it is that they're selling. But there are opportunities to turn your corporation, your company, into an extremely powerful creative hub that will give you an advantage in a competitive marketplace where everyone is going to be using AI. So, you know, no one has an extra advantage really, you know, from that perspective, because AI is going to be available to everyone. So the thing that's really going to drive, I believe, corporate success is to what extent does your culture inside of the organization actually foster entrepreneurial thinking and creativity as a way of being and operating for your employees.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: Yeah, and I mean, I just want to sort of recap this at a high level. Like what you're talking about is upskilling, but it's not go learn AI upskilling. What it really is, is creating that and fostering a space where innovation becomes the culture of the company. And it's a psychologically safe space for people to try new things, to learn, to come up with ideas and creatively problem solve and We've seen this shift towards more psychological safety, more transparent communication, but now we're talking about completely redesigning the nature of work in many industries, actually. So, Chad, I guess my next question is it's twofold. What's the compassionate but honest way to bring employees whose jobs are completely changing into this conversation? And as leaders, how do we redesign work instead of just letting people go?
What does that look like so that, you know, what should we develop now as we see this transition coming and it's coming fast?
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Yeah, two questions there. So in terms of how we can bring empathy and compassion to how we address those who we may not need in the company anymore because of just the changes that AI is bringing, I believe it's imperative that any company that wants to think of itself as being ethical and compassionate and caring about their. Their people.
Even before you know exactly who you may need to downsize and what people you may need to let go of today, like tomorrow, you should start thinking about how can we start to support people that we may need to let go and people that we plan on keeping by helping to redevelop them for creative and entrepreneurial thinking. Because anyone you let go, if you've at least have a program inside of your organization, which incidentally, is something that, you know, our group, the most important conversations is, is. Is actively working on, that you have a program inside of your company that allows people to be developed as entrepreneurs. If you end up having to let that person go at some point, even if you don't know right now whether you will or you won't, you're setting them on the right foot, because at least they're going to be going out into a marketplace. If they're no longer an employee with your company with some entrepreneurial, creative skills that will allow them to either start their own business or at least be relevant to another company that is also making the same transformation that you may be making.
So in terms of how we compassionately handle having to let people go from our company, it's to set them up with some kind of development and training in the area of entrepreneurial thinking and creativity so that they can meet this market where it is, as opposed to being under duress, looking for another job and not having any of the skills required by this new economy and this new way of doing business.
So I'll pause there. That was your first question. Did you have anything you wanted to kind of add to that?
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I just. You know, in our previous. In a previous episode, we talked a lot about getting curious and unlocking curiosity and the importance of transparent and compassionate communication. And so I think you've just really driven that home. So folks, if you're watching, you've heard it before, like the changes are coming. If you're in a leadership position, now is the time to start unlocking some of that curiosity, some of that problem solving skills in your teams.
So I'm going to go ahead and just kick it right back to you, Chad. Like what, what, how do we do, like how do we do that?
[00:20:34] Speaker B: So inside of an organization, again, this is a totally different way of thinking. But you have a gold mine in your employees that you have not had to tap because up until this point, they've just been hired to do a task. And as long as they did that, they were compensated for it and they kept their job. But you have no idea the creative power, the potential, the new ideas that they can bring to your organization if there is only the conditions created inside of your organization to actually draw that out. So one of the ways that we can reactivate and re engage employees for this new creative economy is to actually involve them in creative sessions inside of your organization around problems that you may actually be dealing with. Now, a lot of companies, I just want to pause on this. A lot of companies are in reaction to things they think are the problems that they're dealing with, when they really are just the conditions on the surface. And the deeper problems in every single company that I've ever worked with and dealt with are kind of below the level of awareness. Okay, so we've got these three sort of elements that you can think of. So there's the rational element, which is everything that's, that is in the world where we usually exist, we like to exist in a rational world. We have reasons for what we do. We justify those reasons. We believe there's a certain logic to it. And humans, especially inside of corporate structures, like to stay there. They like to hang out in the rational realm. But then we have the emotional realm and we have the political, or I would say the power dynamic realms which are usually below the surface of the awareness.
Usually we don't want to deal with these kinds of realms in organizations because they're uncomfortable where we're dealing with how people feel about things, or we're dealing with how people are posturing and positioning for power inside of an organization.
And so because of these three things, the rational, the emotional and political, and because we don't want to deal with the emotional and the political, as human beings, we tend to try to avoid Those kinds of things.
What that ends up doing is relegating. We relegate, we create systems inside of our organizations to relegate most of the people in our organization to just the task based jobs that they have. We don't have to deal with the human side of them. And humans are emotional and they also are interested in power. Who has it and how can I get it?
And so you need to create a context, a new context inside your organization where you can actually bring people together from other departments who maybe in the past were just fulfilling a particular role, but they have so much more to provide to the organization. You just don't know what it is. So you have to create these creative opportunities, these sessions where collaboration, creative thinking, ideation, innovation can actually occur as part of day to day work, not just in reaction to a problem.
So one way to look at how you could do that is you could take any problem that you think you have. It may not be the actual root of the problem. Usually the root of the problems are rooted in the emotional and the power dynamic realms that we want to avoid dealing with.
But you could take any problem that you have and you could actually start inviting anyone who touches that problem that you're aware of in your company into a creative session to collaborate and work through different ways of coming at solutions. And you'll find that you'll be surprised at what they come up with. They have so much knowledge about your company that you are not aware of because they haven't needed it for their job. So they just keep it to themselves. But in the right context, if we shift the context and it's a context towards creative collaboration, new solutions will emerge from, from places you never would have thought of. And so it's really about reorienting the culture of your organization.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: Absolutely. So like we do have to break, but basically folks, stop building your job descriptions around tasks. Stop siloing your people, bring your people together and build your job descriptions around outcomes, judgment points, problem ownerships and insights. What Chad was just saying is so incredibly important. If you've got a problem, bring everybody who touches it there so that you can get a more comprehensive view, more perspective, so that you can actually stimulate that creative problem solving. And in each and every employees, if you're watching this, that is your action step for for now. Next we're going to go after the school system because somewhere between kindergarten and high school, creativity is trained out of us. What do we need to do as business leaders after these messages?
[00:25:20] Speaker B: Foreign.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: Welcome back to power CEOs. The truth behind the business. We have been talking about what it means to be human in an age of AI. What do we as leaders need to do in order to stay stimulate creative problem solving and really empower our people to step into that next level as the tasks are being taken away by automations. And now we want to dive into really kind of a little bit more of a root of the problem, folks. We didn't lose creativity. We were trained to stop trusting it. Most of us entered a workforce that was trained to follow rules, to chase the right answer, to avoid mistakes and to wait for permission. That's an industrial age model. It doesn't work in an AI driven economy.
Our human advantage now depends on curiosity, experimentation, creativity and asking better questions. I'm here with Chad Lefebvre and we have been diving deep into this. So Chad, when you talk about reintroducing human creative problem solving and how traditional education trained that out of us, what does Design Summit, Design Lab do differently that helps us to re stimulate that or maybe get rid of some of those behavioral conditions.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a big deal. We've all gone through it, as you've just said. Well, from a very young age we were told that we needed to fall in line and follow the rules.
And ostensibly someone created those lines and those rules that we're following. And so we're not the creator of them, we are simply operating inside of them. And so what Design Summit and the Design Lab model that TMIC has does differently is it creates a context for creativity to emerge. When we do live sessions, the environments are conducive to curiosity and creativity. We bring in books and toys and the environment is movable and we have walls that you can write on.
And the whole culture of why we're coming together in a Design Summit is to actually mine and activate the creative brilliance and the experiential genius of people in your organization or people around a particular problem that touch that problem.
And then we also have, as you mentioned, our Design Summit program, which also includes an online opportunity, which are really just labs where people can work together to stimulate, to reactivate and stimulate the creative thinking. We do that by using hundreds of different modules that are creative and playful in themselves. We're working with other people, we're exchanging ideas, we're being challenged in terms of our thinking to break through limiting beliefs, to break through knowing the answer, you know, being trapped in what we know. I always say in our work, don't be trapped in what you're right about, which is a tendency of the human brain and human beings, because the human brain wants to predict, it wants to know, it want, and it equates that with safety, security.
So early on we were all conditioned out of creativity because it made us pliable, it made us controllable, and it allowed us to fit into a pre existing model. Now all of these models, you know, that are being reinvented in terms of how our society functions, how our economy functions, et cetera, we now need the very, the very skill set that fundamentally defines what it means to be human reactivated in everyone. And that's really the intention of Design Summit and the Design Lab is to create the conditions to not only solve problems, but in doing so, we have to activate the creative potential, the creative thinking, the imagination and the envisioning of the participants. And so just by participating, that starts to get turned back on again. I'll say one quick thing as well, before I turn it back to you.
One of the, one of the things when we do like a full three day Design Summit, the first eight hours of that Design Summit is by design intended to burn off all of the habitual thinking that everyone walked into the room with. It's, it's just inescapable. We as human, we as human beings will always have this habitual thinking. We want to burn that off so that we can get to the genius underneath that creative genius that is underneath every single one of us and unlock it so that it can benefit the company or the organization that we may be working with, or the group that we may be working with.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: So let me ask you, because I know people are wondering this, they're thinking, well, wait a minute, Chad, I'm not a creative person. So what happens when people who do not see themselves self identify or believe themselves to be creative, what happens when now they have to solve these complex problems? And how can business leaders make this creativity operational? And instead of treating it like another soft skill, because really it's not a soft skill, it's something that's innately ours that's just been sort of pushed down.
So how do we as leaders make that creativity a part of the operations of our business?
[00:30:40] Speaker B: Well, this is actually what Design Summit does really well. And you know, in my fantasy, Jan, I would imagine every company of the future having a, a room on site in their building that is, that is outfitted for creative purposes in terms of the environment and in terms of the type of work that goes on there. So to answer your question though, the way that we can make people who don't think of themselves Being creative and how we can help them access that creativity. Because you are, by the way, anyone who thinks they're not a creator, you are because you're human. And that's the essence of what it means to be human. All that's happened is that your creativity has been conditioned out of you and has been buried.
So, you know, Buckminster Fuller is quoted as saying, that environment is more powerful than willpower. And so if you create the conditions, if you create the context, if you create the environment that fosters creativity and pulls for it, even people who are not, don't believe themselves to be creative will show that creativity. It will come out.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: So let me ask you the next question, because I know this is a big problem, and I'm sure many of our viewers are going to identify with this.
Teams have this approach or this response. It's kind of an automated response that won't work anytime you suggest something new. I mean, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm always solving problems, and I'm looking for a better way. And I always hear that won't work. That's not how we've ever done it before.
Of course that's not going to happen that way. So how do we shift that mindset in our teams to more of a what would make it work? How do we. What other things could we do that could make that possible?
So how do we lead teams to move through that transition?
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's about creating a culture of prototyping is really the way that I think about it. And we can do this. You can do this at an individual level. Like I actually teach in my workshops, that you should live your life as though your whole life is a prototype. And by extension, if we take that level of thinking into our companies and we create cultures of prototyping, and then there's no sort of definitiveness of saying that won't work or that will work because we're prototyping, we're exploring, we're getting curious, we're playful with it.
And if we can bring that type of way of being, this is, again, the human beingness part of this. We have to shift how we are being from human doings to human beings. And human beings thrive when we are prototyping, when we are creating, when we are playing. So how we do that is by creating a culture of prototyping.
And if we. And if you can create that culture of prototyping, which is really giving permission for people to ask questions, to be curious, to try things, to not be afraid of failure.
And in Fact, there's no such thing as failure in the creative process because everything that you do inside of the creative process leads to new learning, leads to new adaptation, leads to new creation. So there's no such thing as failure. Failure only in GRIs exists in a binary based model where it's right or wrong, good or bad, this or that, which is the model that we're currently in. You'll notice as soon as you shift your culture to creativity, to prototyping, to bringing an element of playfulness, to how you interact and collaborate and work together towards a common objective that we are creating together, you'll notice that, that, that the creativity just starts to leak out of people and this sort of binary thinking of that won't work, starts to dissipate. So there's no like pill to take. It's just shift the culture, shift the environment, shift the context, and it ripples through everyone and every system that is in the organization that constitutes it.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: That makes perfect sense. And so, like, I just want to kind of recap a little bit about what we've been talking about, folks. We introduced kind of like that Design Summit, Design Lab, Creative Fostering environment, setting up the conditions for creativity. It's not just an event or a workshop. It's really an environment where leaders can practice. How do we see problems differently? How do we break through assumptions? How do we work across disciplines? How do we test ideas quickly, that whole prototyping idea, how do we use technology without surrendering our human agency and our judgment? How do we build solutions with that human context? And so what that looks like operationally is you're now having a creative problem solving process in business as opposed to a personality trait. I truly believe the companies that solve problems faster and better are going to adapt faster. And adaptation is going to keep you relevant and keep your future value. We do have to take a brief break, but if you're watching this and you're a founder, bringing your team together on one real business problem this week is the action step. Chad laid it out. If you need to catch the pod and rewind, don't ask for updates. Ask for three ways to solve it. And have your team work this in practice to set that for success. Coming up, we're going to bring this back to leadership. Because AI doesn't eliminate the need for leaders. It actually exposes whether leaders have built thinkers or order takers. After these messages.
Welcome back to power CEOs of truth behind the Business, folks. The future belongs to leaders who can tell the difference between an answer and a Decision.
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I really believe our next leadership advantage is not having the answers.
It really is getting curious and creatively problem solving which answers deserve action, which is a discernment question. Chad, what does discernment mean in a business context as we move forward, as we unlock our creativity and we do this shift towards the business of the future?
[00:37:24] Speaker B: Well, discernment is really the ability to eliminate options and to be able to know which options are in alignment with the trajectory that you're on for your organization, whether that's to solve a problem or to create something.
Now, in order to discern, well, you need options because you have to eliminate them. And the best way to ensure that you have all of the options available to you around a particular challenge or problem you might be dealing with is to continue challenging that you've ever arrived at the answer in the first place. Now, I mean, at some point, the decisiveness is required, and that's where discernment comes in. You will know when the moment is to be decisive. But what happens in most organizations is they're just too quick to want to be decisive. And so they don't actually create the context or the environment or the conditions for creativity to produce multiple possibilities that then discernment would come and help you be decisive around. So the creative process is again required here to, to activate that curiosity. And, you know, if you have a methodology like, like we have with, you know, Design Summit and a process to help unlock that curiosity and unlock that creativity, that's fine. You should use it if you don't have it. You know, that's what we're here for, and there's other organizations that do that. But you really need to create the conditions for curiosity because otherwise your discernment isn't really discernment at all. It's just trying to get to any answer as fast as possible to avoid the pain and the discomfort of not having an answer. And this is where so many companies, I feel, fall into a trap.
You know, it satiates that itch that we all have to just know to be done with something to move on.
But oftentimes it actually puts us in a worse position than if we had actually taken a little bit more time and created the context and the environment in which more possibilities emerged so that we could exercise our discernment in deciding which one is the appropriate one.
And oftentimes what I found when I've worked with organizations is that if you create this context and culture of curiosity, that ideas that become solutions that you would never have thought of and never even contemplated usually come near the end of the creative process, not the beginning. Because most organizations don't even have a creative methodology that constitutes how their culture operates. They're not actually getting the best possibilities, the best ideas, you know, rising to the top. They're usually just taking the most expedient, the ones that cost the less and are de risk the most versus ones that could actually propel them to new levels of success and growth.
[00:40:16] Speaker A: So while you're, while you're talking about this, I know what people are thinking. They're thinking, wait a minute, we have to be moving fast, moving decision making decisions quickly so that we can continue to operate in economically as we are now and continue to move this forward. How do I balance that speed of implementation, that quick decisiveness that is required in the now while I am facilitating this creative process to explore how we are evolving and where our business is growing too? How do they balance that speed with that creative process and wisdom?
[00:40:54] Speaker B: Well, again, this comes down to totally re architecting how your organization operates.
And so usually, and I think you had alluded to it before the break, usually what we have with management and leadership in organizations is they're effectively just order takers, as you put it, which I think is a genius way of putting it.
What we need to do is reconstitute how we are running as an organization, which is to say that new organizations of the future should have whole departments that are devoted just to creative thinking around the problems that the company is dealing with, so that there's always an input and an output that then the rest of the company can take the output and act on. So it's not going to happen immediately. We have to transform our entire organizational model where we have a part of our company whose job is to take the things that we're dealing with, the problems that we're dealing with, and to bring them into a creative, collaborative container and work out solutions that then get handed off to the rest of the organization to implement. So you will get economies of scale and you will be able to go Fast, eventually. But as I always tell people, you've got to go slow to go fast. Especially as we're reinventing the entire model of how corporations are going to need to function.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And we see this a lot in the M and A world. Like you buy a company and then there's two different cultures, there's integration that happens. And the failures always happen when we try to move that through too quickly instead of really understanding what makes the most sense and getting that creative. Yes. And so let me ask you briefly something that I know is on everybody's mind. And that's what should never be fully outsourced to AI and actually more importantly is how do we ensure our people are challenging what AI is spitting out? Because it's not correct all the time. It's going to have answers that may not be right for our company or maybe a hallucination altogether. So I guess how do you know when AI is improving thinking versus replacing it? And what do we need to be encouraging or training our people on so that they can challenge the machine?
Still leveraging what it does best, but without blindly following?
[00:43:12] Speaker B: Well, again, so this goes to not giving our creative autonomy to artificial intelligence. That that should always remain in the domain of human beings because those human beings who are engaged in the creative process are also engaged in critical thinking.
By its very nature, creativity requires critical thinking.
And so if you have a body in your organization responsible for the creative thinking of the organization.
You know, that's incidentally what I always envisioned and thought chief Innovation officers should have been. They should have basically overseen an entire creative cohort of the organization to address the problems that the company is dealing with. And so if that is in existence, then when you're engaging with artificial intelligence, you will have the creative and the critical thinking skills to be able to challenge what AI is suggesting. AI is a tool. We have too many people right now who are looking at it as though it's sort of this omnipresent, omniscient, all powerful being that's going to take over all of, you know, a corporation. Well, we still have agency and choice in that.
And so, you know, that's what we should never outsource. We should never outsource to AI our creative thinking and our critical thinking skills. In fact, the opposite. We have to insource it inside the organization and actually have it built into how we operate, which most companies don't have that right now.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: You're right. The operational shift for you folks. Train your teams to use AI as A partner, not a decision maker, and really combine that technological leverage with your human trust, judgment and adaptability. Chad, this has been a fascinating conversation. How can people reach out to you if they'd like to learn more about you, the most important conversation or design summits and bringing this sort of container into their organizations?
[00:44:57] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, TMIC global.com is the most important conversations website.
That's TMIC global.com and then you can go to my website, which is just my first and last name, chadlefevre.com, where I do work one on one with leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, et cetera, who are trying to develop their own creative potential as well and bring it out into the world. So you can either go to chadlafab.com or tmicglobal.com thank you so much.
[00:45:28] Speaker A: This has been a really powerful conversation. I appreciate you. Thank you for your time and your expertise.
[00:45:34] Speaker B: Thanks. It was a pleasure, Jen, as always. Delighted to be here.
[00:45:37] Speaker A: And if you're watching this and you are thinking, hey, I need to understand where this is going, the first question you can ask is, where does human judgment still sit inside your AI enabled workflows? If you can't answer this clearly, it's a warning sign and it's a signal for you to look a little bit closer. The reality is, for those leaders who are watching, AI is here, Quantum is coming, Technology is accelerating. Whether we're ready or not, the question is, no longer can we stop the change? We cannot. The better question is, can we build humans, teams and companies capable of adapting faster than the change, of unlocking our human creativity, and of really escalating to the next level where we want to be. Because the companies that win are not going to be the ones that simply replace people with tools. They're going to be the ones that completely redesign work, redevelop human capacity, and rebuild that creative problem solving as a serious business advantage?
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, including this show. But the good news is that we are going to be here, same time, same station, next week. Until then, I want you to take action on something today. Because if you just watched this conversation, you're no better tomorrow than you were today. It's the action, the implementation, where you're able to move powerfully forward. So pick the one thing you heard today and put it into action right now. Not tomorrow, not next week, week, so that you can move that momentum forward and create the change that you want to create with the company and set yourself up for success. We'll see you same time, Same station next week. Until then, win today, win this week, and I'll see you next time.
