Jorge 0:00

The idea that these technologies can be used to make us wiser, more compassionate people is really exciting, particularly if the people we're talking about are leaders whose decisions impact so many other people, right?

Narrator 0:23

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge 0:34

Harry, great to see you again.

Harry 0:35

Hey, good to see you, Jorge. It's always a pleasure.

Jorge 0:39

It's a pleasure to see you as well. How have you been?

Harry 0:42

I've been great. I've been traveling a little bit, really enjoying getting out of my regular routines and patterns and a little bit of the, "I got to work and I don't know how I got here 'cause I was daydreaming." And it's hard to do that when you're traveling. It's fresh and new experiences. Puts me on alert that i'm in a new and alive environment.

Jorge 1:09

Oh, fantastic. I would love to talk more about travel, and I have some travel coming up too, but I've actually brought a reading that I would love to share with you and maybe have a little bit of a discussion about.

Harry 1:24

I can't wait. bring it on, man.

Jorge 1:29

Alright. In the history of work. We humans have moved through the agricultural, industrial, and information ages and have now entered the age of augmentation. In all the past ages, the tools we used were passive like a shovel to dig a hole or an email system to share information, these tools were dormant until we chose to use them. But with AI, we have moved into a new era where our tools are actively interacting with us in ways that change how we perceive and engage with the world. "Instead of waiting to be used, generative AI tools are listening, analyzing, learning, and predicting what we want or what we need. AI can now read and write for us, identify our strengths and weaknesses, and shape or curate our media diet. It influences what we learn, think, do and say. This advancement has moved us from the information age to the age of augmentation. "What is augmentation? Augmentation is the process of improving something by adding to it. Whether you realize it or not, you're already augmented in many ways. For example, how many phone numbers of friends can you remember? Probably not many. Why? You now use your smartphone to augment your memory. "The key principle of augmentation in the context of AI and leadership is to adopt a both and mindset. You must leverage both the power of AI and your most human qualities." And now I'm going to skip a bit. "To enable good synergistic collaboration between AI and humans, we must understand how the mind operates. From a cognitive science perspective, most models of the mind describe in different words three key qualities, perception, discernment, and response. Everything we think and do is filtered through the cycle of neurological qualities. Therefore to understand how we as humans get the best of the augmentation with ai, we must understand these neurological qualities. In the context of cultivating good leadership, we call these three qualities, awareness, wisdom, and compassion." I'm going to stop there.

Harry 3:58

Wow. I have not, I don't believe I've read that, and I'm super curious to hear what it's from.

Jorge 4:05

So this is from a fairly new book. It's called More Human, the and the subtitle is How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead. And it's by Rasmus Hougaard I dunno how to pronounce this Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter with Marissa Afton and Rob Stembridge. This is fairly new, it was released in March of this year, I believe.

Harry 4:40

Okay. I love the orientation to unpack augmentation and what it means to be in relationship with the technology in a more active way. I almost wondered if it was an author by the name of Nicholas Carr who wrote a book called The Glass Cage. I don't know if you've read that. If you're a designer or a designer type, Glass Cage is about designing systems and interacting with systems. The principal metaphor in the Glass Cage is all the electronic interfaces inside a cockpit of an airplane, for example, and our relationship to those and what the book that you've just introduced is not just this more passive relationship, but a more active relationship where the conversation is more intentional. And we have to be more alert to what our relationship with this technology is because it's no longer just about our point of view. It's an augmented point of view.

Jorge 5:58

There's a couple of key ideas there. One idea is this notion that, for most of human history, the tools that we've created to help us augment our capabilities in various ways, right? And they talked about the smartphone as a way to augment your memory, right? Like you don't need to remember your friend's phone numbers anymore. You and I are both wearing glasses right now, and I have astigmatism and if not for the eyeglasses, I'd have a hard time reading what's on my screen. So this augments my visual abilities. But I think that the first key point that they made there is that we now have this new technology that is on a different order because all of these other technologies that come before are in some way, passive in that we reach out to them to do stuff. You use your contact list in your smartphone when you're wanting to get your friend's phone number. Whereas AI is more proactive, and this idea that it's monitoring our activities and surfacing things for us without us necessarily asking for it. And I think it's a little bit aspirational. I think that they're describing something like an agentic system, which as this recording are few and far between, but the possible capabilities are there, right? That's one key distinction that they introduced there. Another one, and for this, I am gonna have to go back to the book, another one is that it's one thing to augment our memory by writing down phone numbers either on your smartphone's contacts app or in a little black book, right? Like, those are all augmentations of your memory. It's one thing to augment your memory, and it's another thing to augment your mind writ large of which memory is a part, right? And, this might have come across. in the fragment that I read, this book is specifically written for people in positions of leadership who are looking to use AI to augment their minds. And they say here that there are three particular qualities of the mind that we need to be on the lookout for. They talked about perception, discernment, and response. And they mapped those to three qualities of good leadership. And the qualities were awareness, wisdom, and compassion, which I think are thematically related to other things we've talked about in this podcast.

Harry 8:51

I'm now drawing the connection between my comment about the Glass Cage and Nicolas Carr and the reading that you had, because of course, when I've walked away from the glass cage, the concept, because that's very much about autopilots, right? It's about being able to turn over as an as pilot, which is a leadership position to turn over control to a set of systems that are now very much informed by very sophisticated I don't know how much machine learning has gone into an autopilot, but certainly the type of pattern recognition, sense and response mechanisms, all of that is built into being able to keep a plane up in the air and flying where it's supposed to be. And the concept that I walked away with was, as a designer and as a user of these systems, you have to be very attuned to learned complacency. And that this notion of learned complacency is... Nicholas de Carr talks about the alert systems have to be designed in such a way that you just don't end up ignoring them after a while because they're trying to communicate with you. And it seems AI and I'm certainly involved in a number of AI projects right now, I haven't done any autonomous agentic work, but before that, working on developing agents and systems to produce agents inside of enterprise environments. And also on the more creative side, these are systems that, they... it's not just about you set it to do something and it goes and does it and then tries to warn you if it's not working properly, it's doing stuff on your behalf and it may have permissions that you've given it and rights to go interact in the world or in parts of the world electronically on your behalf. And it really requires a very different kind of awareness and a much more active type of discernment. It can't just be a subconscious discernment where when things show up, try to discern them in a "wise" way and then respond to them rather than react to them in a more resourceful way. This is a situation where we have to be much more attuned to having bits and pieces of ourselves out in the world acting on our behalf and generating triggering events and activities out in the world that we then have to be alert to and then have to discern and then have to respond to. And so, it's much more... that notion of augmentation, I think about it in a musical sense, but now it's it's almost like extended augmentation. It's like, it's not just, I have new superpowers, it's like those superpowers are being released into the world and now I have to pay attention to what's happening in the world beyond my immediate reach now because it's part of me and part of how I'm interacting in the world.

Jorge 12:05

One of the theses of this book, and I don't know if it's explicit or if it's just one of the things that I got from it, is the notion that, for somebody who is in a position of leadership, and the reason I bring leadership to the table here is that if you want to have traction at scale, that's really hard to do on your own. Like, eventually, you're going to be working with other people and if we have this augmentation technology that can improve our abilities to perceive, improve our ability to discern things, explore different ways of responding. If we agree that those are very broad characteristics of the mind that a leader needs to work on, then we can use them both to become better leaders, but also to open up space by getting rid of the drudgery, like the aspects of those things that are rote or that can be delegated more effectively to an AI, to open up space for our humanity, to bring forth our humanity. And I think that the authors are pretty clear-eyed on what AIs can and cannot do. For example, there's a whole section on empathy. Empathy is not something that AIs can do, empathy is something that human beings can do. Compassion is something that human beings can demonstrate. And, to me, the idea that these technologies can be used to make us wiser, more compassionate people is really exciting, particularly if the people we're talking about are leaders whose decisions impact so many other people, right? It just feels like a positive message.

Harry 14:07

There's maybe an interesting angle on this that I hadn't really considered before. One of the questions that always comes up is, what is the only thing a leader needs? And my answer to that is, followers who are willing and able to follow. But not just willing and able to follow, but actually do follow. And in this regard, if you look at AI, especially agentic, solutions. Willing? Yes. Able? Sometimes. Do? Yes. Part of what's happening now is it's not just for leaders. It's anybody who is leading or wants to lead can now mobilize followers. Those followers hopefully are... there's humans and humanity in them. But there are also increasingly agents on behalf of somebody who wants to affect change and get something done. And to be able to mobilize doers and maybe at the discreet task level or at the orchestrated task level to get stuff done. I think part of what I'm taking away from this is, maybe we need to rethink a little bit what it means to be a leader. Because if you, as a person in the world who wants to affect change, if I'm able to mobilize not just people, but now, doers on my behalf, then it becomes a question of how creative can I be with respect to those agents and what do I mobilize them to do and how do I release them in the world on my behalf? So maybe in some ways, this historical distinction between followers, management, leaders, so on and so forth, is starting to blur as we become more capable of wielding... I don't know how to talk about it like this because they're in effect. I have more agency with agents. You know what I'm saying?

Jorge 16:35

Yeah, for sure. Well, I say "for sure" as though the distinctions are clear. They're fuzzy, to your point. They're fuzzy. I do think often about the distinction between leadership and management. I do think that those are distinct things and I've seen many articles suggesting that management skills are going to be very important in a world where AI agents are a thing. Many of the basic things that someone needs to do when they're a manager of humans map over to the skills needed to effectively work with agentic AI systems. But I don't think that's the same thing as leadership. And I don't know that we need to get into defining what leadership is. I wouldn't be able to do it on the fly. But, but I think that there's an aspect to this that is earned, like leadership is earned. And your quote about, what does a leader need? Followers. That's it. People follow you because they believe that you can lead them effectively. And we all lead in different situations. I was just thinking like my wife and I, take turns leading the family in different situations, right? Sometimes our kids take turns leading the family, based on whatever situation is happening we can choose to follow them, follow what they're asking us to do. But I think that the kind of leadership that we're talking about here, and certainly the kind of leadership that this book is written for, are people who are leading organizations and teams in organizations, who are trying to get them to maybe a different place, who are trying to get them to perform at a different level. And again, I don't think that kind of leadership is granted. It's something that is earned. And to earn it, you have to work on it. And I love this idea that the core "work on it" consists of working on your mind. I think that is right, that the basic skills that you need to work on, or not basic, the most foundational skills that you need to work on are the skills that have to do with your mind.

Harry 19:15

I'm really excited to read that book and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's something in that book somewhere that I bring back to one of our conversations because it's really rich. And it's prompting me to think about what does it mean to want to lead as an agent of change in the world where, if you buy that all the only thing a leader needs is followers who are willing and able and actually do follow, then it becomes a question of where does that start and what is the path to leadership? Because you can start small and you can go big, and to the extent that you're able to do that in a somewhat intentional way and grow that followership, as it's being earned, as you are empathizing through the world and demonstrating compassion and responding rather than reacting in a powerful and human way to create the kind of world that we wanna live in. I think thinking these thoughts and asking ourselves these questions is really important and it's easy to inadvertently put our head in the sand while all of this AI work is happening because it is changing so quickly.

Jorge 20:33

You know what's funny is I came to this book because I was in a conversation when, where someone mentioned it as a good book for leadership and AI, and I came to it primarily for the AI bit. But, I guess it was a surprise to me and a pleasant one at that, that they were like, you really need to look at these foundational things. And I'm saying this because this is not these author's first book. They have a previous book called The Mind of the Leader. I haven't read that, but I suspect that book is more about this framework where it's you need to really unpack your mind if you're going to do this right.

Harry 21:13

Oh, I'm gonna go read that book first.

Jorge 21:15

I was gonna say, it's like maybe you tackle that one and you bring that one to our conversation

Harry 21:20

Yeah.

Jorge 21:21

That might be up your alley. And in the meantime, I still have to hit the books that you recommended in our last conversation, the Pirsig books. Maybe I'll bring one of those to work to one of our future conversations, Harry.

Harry 21:38

It's funny, it feels like it's all getting very focused on a set of themes here. I think you've brought this up a number of times, but at some point we ought to step back and look at what are those themes and what are the key points that underpin those themes and look at the foundational ideas here. They're coming out on the calls, I just wonder what it would look like if they were all distilled.

Jorge 22:01

That's a great prompt and it's something that we might do when we have more of these conversations in the can, we might actually put them through an AI and say, "Hey, what themes you find here?" But and I say that in kind of half jokingly because I think that we are having these conversations at the right time in that I agree with the authors of this book that AI is a different kind of technology in that it does prompt these questions about, "how does the mind work? And how does my mind work? And can I do that better?" Like, we are in a very introspective moment with regards to cognition. So I think that having these conversations about traction and discovering that so many of them are pointing to inner work is not a coincidence.

Harry 22:55

Yeah, it's pretty wonderful. One of the folks I'm working with, a CTO at one of the companies that I'm a fractional executive and executive coach on, talks about the LLMs as being just a super fancy auto complete, and that's not my experience of it. So that while it might be true, it is not at all my personal experience of it because what it may be auto completing are thoughts I haven't had yet, and that doesn't seem like auto complete to me.

Jorge 23:29

We might get into that in greater depth in the future conversations. But, for now, once again, i've had a great time talking with you.

Harry 23:39

I really appreciate you making the time. What a great read. That was really cool. Thank you.

Narrator 23:46

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.