BONUS EPISODE - "Innovate Into The Unknown" with Atif Rafiq

In this bonus episode of The Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Scott Allender and Arjun Sahdev talk to Atif Rafiq, the first Chief Digital Officer in Fortune 500 history and former senior executive at McDonald’s, Volvo, and MGM Resorts. Now CEO and co-founder of Ritual, an AI-powered workflow platform, Atif shares how leaders can build decision-making systems that are faster, fairer, and more adaptive in an age of complexity. He explains his core principle of “exploration before alignment” and why premature agreement kills curiosity and weakens problem-solving.

Find out more about Atif Rafiq:

www.ritual.work

www.decisionsprint.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/atif1/

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/re-wire-6765332215867031552/

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)

The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)

Social:

Instagram           @evolvingleader

LinkedIn             The Evolving Leader Podcast

The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Transcript

Scott Allender: 0:12

Hi folks, welcome to the evolving leader, the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender

Arjun Sahdev: 0:21

and I'm Arjun Sahdev.

Scott Allender: 0:23

I'm delighted to be hosting this with you today. Arjun, how are you feeling,

Arjun Sahdev: 0:27

Scott? I'm feeling fantastic. I am. I'm actually missing being on vacation. I've just come back from Turkey, so I'm feeling refreshed. I've come back to cold a wintry London feeling, feeling like I'm missing a bit of sun, but but feeling refreshed, feeling positive, really excited to be talking to yourself and to Atif today.

Scott Allender: 0:52

Excellent. Well, I am feeling the beauty of autumn right now. It's my favourite time of the year, so I am feeling energised, and like you, I've been excited about this conversation. So today we are joined by Atif Rafiq, and He is the former C suite operator who led large scale digital change at McDonald's Volvo and MGM Resorts. And today he's the CEO and co founder of ritual, a workflow AI product focus on upstream problem solving. A def, welcome to the evolving leader.

Atif Rafiq: 1:26

Thank you so much. Scott and Arjun, it's great to be here with you.

Scott Allender: 1:29

So you were officially recognised as the first ever Chief Digital Officer in Fortune 500 history. That's a big deal. So what? What lays behind this? How are you different to other corporate tech leaders at the time? Give us your give us your story.

Atif Rafiq: 1:43

Yeah. So let's go back to 2013. Mark Andreessen, the venture capitalist, coined the phrase, software will eat the world. It actually did. It still is doing that.

Unknown: 3:30

the mistakes they're making when it comes to decision making in ambiguity, the number one pattern is around alignment. Premature alignment is the number one symptom of the problem and or actually, it's the root cause of the problem. And what I mean by that specifically is,

Atif Rafiq: 3:51

you know, suspending, like, the discovery and exploration process. So people might ask like, Why do you ask so many questions in a meeting? You're an executive. You should know what you want from us. And I do know what I want, but I am not. I would like to

Unknown: 4:08

really fill my knowledge gaps. I would like to hear the unknowns that are not in my head that people see. I would like to I think of people almost like sensors in a self driving car. They see different things than what I see, I'd like to get all those cards on the table and for us to see the same pictures, so that we could draw the right conclusions together. So I came up with a mantra, which is exploration before alignment, and that really corrects this human factor pitfall in organisations that we see, which is alignment before exploration,

Scott Allender: 4:43

is that the idea of going upstream essentially. So you know, many leaders try to build speed by pushing work downstream, but as I mentioned in the opening introduction, you suggest that real speed comes from going upstream. So can we hear a little bit more about.

Unknown: 5:00

That, sure. Well, I mean, execution does matter. And I think this idea was really put in the centre of, you know, leadership, by Jack Welch, right? So now we're talking about the 1990s or something like that, and it has persisted for a good amount of time, probably for about 25 years till this sort of Mark Andreessen phase of software is in the world. And then everything changed and became, you know, more more less stable, basically. And so then the world became more complex. So upstream work is essentially a phrase I coined to basically go from like, you know, very high level altitude, 90,000 foot, big ideas or big problems to solve, and then how to purposefully learn. Basically learn in a very purposeful way so that you have a high quality, essentially, knowledge base to then come up with recommendations, I have found that in organisations, there's no method to the madness for this, like, how do you go from the promising idea or the big problem to solve to strong basis for drawing conclusions, making recommendations, aligning people. We all want those things. I'm not saying don't align and whatnot. But I'm just saying that to get to the point of alignment, there is a way of working to do this high quality learning so that you can fan and explain the direction that you're proposing to take with any kind of big idea or initiative.

Scott Allender: 6:39

So I can't have a conversation about decision making without talking about the role of self awareness and emotions that factor into our decision making. I'm always, I've had several conversations, and I always, my mind always goes to the same place with which is, we all think we're good decision makers, right? We don't intentionally make bad decisions. But, you know, we the stock market does better when it's sunny outside, right? There's no There's no rationale for it, but people make decisions based on mood and all of that. So I'm curious with your methodology

Unknown: 7:09

and the sprints that you're running and going upstream, what are the guardrails or some thoughts you have around taking out bias? I think my core idea is actually that the system sits above human factors. And a lot of what you're talking about, Scott, are human factors. And the number one way to avoid the pitfall of human factors, by the way, humans are not bad, it's just they have upside and downside. And the human factors that are downside are things like bias or just being too strongly wedded to your ideas for whatever reason. And so when we haven't, when we look at questions, the part our beat of decision sprint is essentially building a question list and the right breadth and depth of questions. When we take that as a step in our process, we make this objective and neutral. So that's very different than either extreme, because questions that are used to be sceptical about the promise of an idea is very different than neutral questions, and then ignoring critical questions just because you want to move on and start doing the thing is also is the other extreme, but when we're centred and grounded with the work we must do in problem solving, which is essentially the knowledge work we do in companies, in the form of taking, you know, using the idea of like a sprint, where in decision sprint, there is a discrete step for sourcing questions and building the right breadth and depth of questions, then we made that a neutral, objective step, which then kind of cancelled out the human factors and bias, at least for that part. And

Scott Allender: 8:52

I think that's critical. Can we talk about how AI is changing decision making? I'd love to get your thoughts on this, because can already see some signs of people using AI in ways that actually only reinforce maybe some bad decisions. So maybe starting at the top of the org, how can we be thinking about using AI as a partner to help us do all the methodologies that you've outlined for us today? Yeah, I think it's we're in the era where human machine interaction will totally redefine how we run companies, and we're not there yet. I mean, I think a lot of AI adoption is quite tactical, quite operational, quite into

Unknown: 9:37

well defined workflows, something that's back office, customer service, customer operations, right? But it can absolutely redefine how we do strategy from the top of the organisation. So an example of that would be, what are your strategic pillars? How do you break those big rocks into smaller rocks if you were going to do problem solve? Thing on the smaller rocks, are you essentially using AI and human collaboration to define the problems crisply surface the right unknowns build these question lists? Are you or how are people contributing? That's going to change as well, because we will look at contribution in very different ways in five years. You know, today is very loose, like, Oh, what was someone's contribution? But in the future, adding a good question to the mix is going to be a really great contribution. You'll get recognised for that, because machines will be able to connect the dots between outcomes and projects that win and succeed, and why they succeeded, and often, we'll be able to trace it back to who contributed great questions that helped us stand, you know, on stronger footing when we came out the other side With specific recommendations, specific decisions. Will be able to connect decisions with the inputs all the way from the start, and this will redefine everything. So as a, in your current capacity, as a, as a board advisor, as a, as a CEO and co founder, what skills do you think are becoming non negotiable things like, you know, brilliant, brilliant questions or assumption busting. What skills are becoming non negotiable for future leaders in an AI world, it's definitely problem solving and critical thinking, and those are the heart of any knowledge work. And what does that look like day to day? It can be everything from, you know, things like asking questions or, you know, drawing conclusions and coming up with recommendations that aren't obvious. You know, a lot of times when we have to make decisions, it's not one decision, right? Like there's a big idea for McDonald's and Jean Volvo. It's not like a it's it's not one big call. There's very layered things. And so you can make a you can elevate a recommendation by adding something to it, for example. But this is, I think, the heart of the skill sets that are now. There is basically, how do you improve the decision confidence of your organisation? There's a lot of ways to do that, but whatever you can do to contribute to the decision confidence, or increasing the confidence level of a decision to within your organisation, for a thing that is, you know, that is the skill set of the future, and it does come back to critical thinking along the way.

Scott Allender: 12:46

What is a maybe some final thoughts? You want to leave our listeners with something to take, take with them the conclusion of our conversation.

Unknown: 12:54

I think that, you know, I always ask this existential question, does knowledge work mean? The knowledge worker. Those are two different things. Companies will always need knowledge work, right? Because if you're Amazon or Google, you want to be in four more businesses that you're not in today, and you're going to need the knowledge to get into those markets. The knowledge worker hour is a different thing. It's human. And a lot of people think that we won't need the knowledge worker and we'll be able to do amazing knowledge work. And my response to that is

Atif Rafiq: 13:28

that's that's not true.

Unknown: 13:31

I think what we're looking at is the fact that as companies, we haven't really taught people how to do high quality knowledge work for the last three decades, mainly because of coming back to this Jack Welch era, everything was execution, very stable, and we were essentially a lot of people in big companies were doing Knowledge Administration versus knowledge creation. So I would say, to create sustainable jobs, to be rewarded, you know, to feel more secure in your work. What are the things that you can do to contribute? To knowledge creation? Because we will actually, obviously have aI at the centre of that. But human contribution in an era of thinking machines, I believe there is a way forward, you know, centred on, on some of those ideas. Decision sprint is just one way for humans to make that contribution. I'm sure there are, there are a lot more

Scott Allender: 14:25

out of thank you for your sharing your insights. We'll put all the links to you and to your website, to your book, all that be in the show notes. And we, we know our listeners have appreciated your wisdom. So thank you. Much appreciated. Until next time folks remember the world is evolving. Are you? You?