Success by Design: Why the AI Era Demands a Change-Ready Leader

Why do 70% of business transformations fail? While many blame the technology, Damian Kirk argues it is rarely a people problem—it is a design failure. 

In this episode, Damian joins us to pull back the curtain on organizational resilience. We explore why AI is currently exposing the existing cracks in leadership and how to move from "traditional management" to "modern leadership." 

Learn the 6 Foundations of Leadership, the 3 C’s of Organizational Readiness, and why the most successful leaders in the age of AI are the ones who spend 10% of their time "drinking coffee" and looking outside their own walls.

https://www.damiankirk.com/

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

https://www.humain.org/

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

Transcript

Tempo: 120.0

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Humane Leaders, Organizational Resilience in the Age of AI. I'm Susan Caesar, and I lead ethical AI where trust matters most: human development, coaching, and professional standards. Because resilience isn't just about surviving disruption, it's about staying coherent, protecting what's essential when everything is speeding up. In the age of AI, that means building organizations that can adapt fast without outsourcing responsibility, innovate without eroding human dignity, and scale technology without breaking trust. On this show, we explore a simple idea. The real question isn't only what AI can do, it's what it should never erode agency, accountability, and the conditions people need to learn, grow, and do their best work. I sit down with researchers, executives, leaders, and builders who bring rigor, not hype, to the work of leading through complexity. We'll talk about what trustworthy AI looks like in practice, how to create cultures where people feel seen and supported, and how to strengthen the human systems, sense making, judgment, learning, repair that make resilience real. If you're leading AI adoption, culture change, or professional standards, and you want to move forward with clarity and integrity, you're in the right place. This is humane leaders, organizational resilience in the age of AI. Let's begin. Why change is still so hard, why so many transformation efforts fall short, and why AI is exposing the same strengths and weaknesses inside organizations that were already there. What actually makes organizations change ready? Why do some organizations navigate change and AI successfully while others struggle? And what does leadership have to do with it? This is not really an episode about AI tools. It's an episode about whether organizations are built to adapt and whether leaders are creating the conditions for people and change to succeed. My guest, Damien, brings a practical lens to this, not just on leadership in theory, but on the conditions organizations need to perform, adapt, and actually deliver change successfully. Damien, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about why this topic matters to you?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Yeah, thanks for inviting me on this Susan. We're really looking forward to it. Just a bit about me. I've spent most of my career as an executive director working across both IT and business operation functions, large-scale businesses as well. I've typically been bought into organizations where performance or custom experience or service or even the PL needed significant improvement, and often doing chief operating officer type roles. At the large, if I was running like a five billion pound business where they're at 5,000 people, I do like to think I've got a kind of a very practical lens on all of this, as you mentioned at the beginning. And over the last few years, though, I've been running my own business, providing hands-on consulting and mentoring with leaders and their teams, helping them improve their performance, their culture, and how their organizations cooperate day-to-day. So their kind of ways of working. This topic matters to me kind of loads because I consistently have seen that when things aren't working, it's hardly ever a people problem. It's usually about how the organization has been set up to succeed or not in this in certain cases. So this whole conversation for me today is really about kind of leadership. It's whether leaders are creating the conditions where people can perform, where change can land and be sustained and successful, where new opportunities like AI can actually deliver the value we want it to.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

And we've said uh up front this isn't just a conversation about AI, it's really a conversation about this organizational readiness. Why do you believe organizations struggle with change?

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Let me start with something here. So uh if a car manufacturer designed a new model and seven out of ten of the engines blew up as we sped up onto a motorwave, they wouldn't be sitting there saying, oh, this is a this is a challenging market, and that's why it's happening, or it's the driver's fault they didn't learn to drive the car. We'll be sitting there saying, that's a really serious design failure. However, you've got a stat that's been around for about 30 years, multiple research companies and McKinsey have led with it, saying that 70% of business transformations failed, kind of either fail or failed to get a return on their investment. I've got to use the word. You sit there and you go, that's bonkers. Why do we allow that to happen? It isn't like a one-off, it's been up in there for years. We accept that. And most recently, I did a keynote Susan at recently, and I asked four questions. The first question was I asked a whole audience of business owners and business leaders to put their hands up to say how many people in the room have had a change fail or fail to return on investment, and everyone put their hands up. And then I said, uh, how many people have had successful change? And by that I mean it's returned, it's got more than always achieve what it set out to do. And everyone put their hands up, which is what I was expecting. And then I asked everybody to, I went and got a flip chart, and I drew a line down the flip chart and I thought, fail and success. And I asked them to shout out reasons for failure. The reasons for failure, I could have gone for hours doing these failure and success reasons, by the way. I had to stop it. So I got a few, but the reasons for failure were consistent with what's in all the research. It's it's things like no ownership or blurred ownership. It's things like no real clear purpose or the clarity why we're doing that change and where it's gonna help us in the organization. It's things like everyone's working in silos, or there's too much change and um and kind of resistance to it, or a fear of change, right? Which is really common actually. And the success side of it was things like, well, we had a really clear purpose, we could see where it's gonna take us. We had um single accountability, which is what I love and maybe talk about later. A big word, consistency, was kind of said quite a few times in the audience, and that's again in the research. It's about having a consistent approach to delivering change and making it sustainable. And one of the ladies shouted out, and I thought it was fantastic. I thought this might, this word might have been said in the failure reasons, but it was said in the success reasons. She shouted belief. I just thought that's brilliant. I just thought that's just brilliant. The reason it was successful in an organization was people believed in it. And what a great answer. People have got to believe in what you're doing. Fantastic. And the last one, which I think is really important, and probably linked to some of the things around silos and things, is operational readiness. Genuinely delivering change into some live operation of some kind for them to receive it and then to sustain it to get the return. Most of the time, we don't give the operational the capability, the space, the time to sustain it. It carries on. Operational readiness was put out there as a success when it was successful. What became really clear, not only in all this research of 30 years, but by very little research in a keynote with over 100 business leaders and owners, was that we all agreed and we all knew why change failed and why it succeeded. It was remarkably predictable. My view on the AI bit of it, if AI follows the same path in those same organizations, you're going to get the same answer.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Yeah, the conditions for success being around belief, being around harnessing the power of people, or getting that organizational readiness in place so that the people can succeed with it. I think that's important. But if people haven't got that muscle within the business, how are they going to be able to put that in place when AI needs a different type of pattern? Like it needs to be more experimental or it needs to be iterative. How exposed might those businesses be, do you think, given that they haven't got change figure out at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 8:12

I think you'll find if people are honest with themselves, the ones that are exposed to where their change approach is either the real traditional approach, which is very big and we get a big program, and we deliver it over big milestones. And they're the ones that generally fail because they're not experimental, they're not and succeeding small, and overall it's a big success. What they're doing is generally failing big and that's it, they're not succeeding, but basically it's not an opposite to it. Another part of transformations for me, which occurs a lot, and particularly in my experience, is that you'll find we're going to transform a business and we're going to improve it. And it starts then with a new structure. Oh, it's the cost-cutting exercise. People that then don't understand it, or straight away they've got they're going into a fear-based change curve, right? Anxiety and things. When you start looking at the people who got to deliver it and they don't know how what God deliver then, who owns it? When you start looking at how do we get back organizing an organization, what I get to is I call this like the three C's. So that is clarity, culture, and capability. The way you start to first of all set your organization up is you're starting to think about clarity is right. Do people really understand the vision and the goals? And I think it's at two levels there's an organizational level clarity and there's a change level clarity. They've got to work together. So at the organizational level, it's the vision and goals. At the change level, it's the purpose of the change. What is the outcome we're wanting from it? Is that really clear? And it's you've got to see a line of sight between change and your goals and visions. Clarity is the first thing. The cultural part is is change a part of how we do things around here. Is it something or is it something we do to people? It's a real conscious thought about culture. What culture do you need and want? And if you think about all organizations, should have change built into their culture. It shouldn't be something that's a change management process. It's a change team over here. It should be part of the whole mindset thing. And the third C was capability. And I mean this in the broadest sense. Capability is it is like your governance and your structure and all that kind of thing. But it's also like your leadership, your delivery teams of change, and it's also your operations people all working in alignment together, in consistent together. Your leadership creates the purpose and they should alone the change, it should be really clear. Your change teams, whoever they may be, create it and deliver it and implement it. But they're working with operations or the receivers to make sure that it's all aligned and it isn't just dumped in, it's carried through to sustain. And your operations people are set up with a space to do it. Clarity, culture, capability, I think is an easy way to first of all think about how we get an organization that can deliver change successfully. And if you remember, I think change doesn't fail because people can't do it, it fails because the organization isn't set up for it.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

If I reflect on uh what you've just been describing and the fact that the lady in the audience mentioned belief, harnessing your people seems to be one of the keys to success. The 70% of transformations that are failing are probably not failing because of the technology. It sounds like it's the way that we either design or set up those systems so that people can deliver it effectively or adapt to the change successfully. The three things you mentioned, those three C's of clarity, capability, and culture are people-related things.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

They're all people-related.

SPEAKER_00 11:33

And I know all the way through your career, your key superpower, if you like, is how you harness people, how how people believe in you, how people follow you. So, what's your uh secret source?

SPEAKER_01 11:43

I don't think there's a secret source. I actually think it's common sense is a secret source. And there's a word I also use a lot, and I'll use it probably a lot in this podcast, and it's the word conscious. And I think we don't think consciously enough about things. In terms of leadership, I think there are some core core foundations that you've got to have in place as a leader. I think there's two parts to this. One is the core foundations, and it's about your impact, which we're sure we can come on to. And the core foundations for me are around these six things. It's first of all, whether they consciously think about it, not just like kind of the beginning of their tenure as a leader of that team or that business, but throughout their leadership, are they consciously aware that these things are in place, they're consciously building on them. And these six things are around first of all, it's trust. It's well known that trust is one of the key things. So you need to trust your people and they need to trust you as a leader, and kind of then how you gain that trust. And that trust has got to be, it's not in kind of the posts on the walls, it's it's not in policies or anything like that. It's in uh and it's not in PowerPoints, in meetings, it's in the little things they do, the small things you do. It's in acting on what you said, it's in getting that belief that you believe it and they believe it. It's getting that confidence that with yourself and with people that we're in it together, and the support's there, and I'm helping to create the environment and I'm listening and I understand the business, that kind of thing. So trust is really important. It's a first foundation. I think the second one, and you'll find these are all linked together, by the way. The second one again comes as no surprise, it's psychological safety. And I can say that I've been in organizations in the last few years running my own business where people have never even heard of it. Or they've not heard of the words, the terms, but they did know, well, when we explained it, they understood, oh, that's yeah, I'll do that, I understand that. But the very nature that was from the word, they'd never heard the word psychological safety, or neither how to describe it. That says it's not fully there, it's not thought of, it's not at the front of mind, it's not conscious. And so psychological safety, making sure that people can speak up without fear of any kind of retribution, punishment, or anything like that. They can challenge the norms or challenge decisions and ask questions and get curious aware and the people they're asking of, or well, don't take it personal, or there's no fear there, basically. So you get trust in psychological safety, you've got a really great foundation straight away to build on the rest of the things. The next one for me is around understanding change. When I lead teams and work with teams, one of the things I do straight up fairly quickly is these foundations, and I'll say, Do we even understand what change is? And I'll explain what change is. I'll explain the human side of change. And I know you've done this in some of your previous podcasts about the impact of like AI on humans, the change curve that's been around for years. Previously, the grief curve, it's a grief curve for a reason. The change curve followed on that from that for a reason. If they don't understand what change is, first of all, they then don't know how to deal with it, and they won't even know about change curve. If you start to explain to people about change, about change curves, and we understand as leaders when we deliver change that you might go through this, and we understand you go through it at different times and that kind of stuff. So straight away you're building this relationship, you're building this end-to-end consistent way of thinking and working. And then you start to get to a place where people don't get around change curves because then you start to get them involved in the thinking of change. So actually, when you've got trust, psychological safety, and an understanding of change and a change mindset in your business, because that change bit moves from understanding to a kind of growth mindset where people are doing it and they're innovating, they're experimenting, as you just said a minute ago, and you start to create a business that's kind of always looking forward, always continuously improving, and when you've got bigger change coming in, because they're always ready to receive it without going down to this very dip of a curve. I've just mentioned growth mindset, that's what the fourth foundation for me is. Another one which people probably might not think of, friends which can't be sitting, but I'm really into strengths-based leadership and development. I have a really strong view, and I have a mantra that I say, enjoy passion success. And I just say that if people enjoy what they're doing, you'll have a passion for it. If you've got a passion for you, it'd always be successful. So when I work with people, I say, Do you enjoy what you're doing? Or what do you enjoy doing? to find out. And if they pause or don't know, they're probably not in the they're probably not enjoying it right now. It probably isn't a bit enjoy and strength are kind of the same thing, really. They come together as the same thing in a work environment. So if I really enjoy data analytics and things like that, but I'm actually just leading 1500 people, I probably I might want to do it, but I won't be playing to my best strengths of being in a data analytics team or leadership role or something. If you get conscious about creating an organization that plays to people's strengths and develops those strengths, gets people to make decisions about the weaknesses, like improve them, mass them, or avoid them, you start to create an organization that everyone's enjoying what we're doing. It's a powerful culture and everyone enjoys what we're doing. And the final one is inclusive thinking. Inclusive thinking is the people are fantastic and they've all got something to give. And people have got wonderful backgrounds, cultures, experiences. Everyone can contribute. And I think it's important that leaders create an environment where you make the most of your people. You bring all those experiences and backgrounds and talented business, and also the way people think you know, Susan Red, I'm massive ADHD. I'm also dyslexic. Only diagnosed in the last couple of years, though, but I've had some inklings over the years. And people with my mindset has been an amazing strength for me in the way I lead and think and challenge norms and things. As a leader, it's best to kind of get that out of everybody. Imagine the organization you create when you've got trust, psychological safety, people understand what change is and how it impacts them, and they learn about that. Imagine when they've got a growth mindset and everyone's looking to grow and move the business forward. Imagine if everyone's enjoying what they do, they're playing to the strengths. Finally, you're bringing in all of their the way they think, their experiences, cultures. That is a powerful foundation to work from. But actually, it's very easy to implement because you're asking most people to be themselves. It's really simple, really. So all of those six words and explanations, all I'm saying is, can you bring yourself to work? Can you be professional and adult about it? And I'm gonna create an environment where you can do all of that, and can you help us be our best? That's what you're asking for. It really is simple, it's just we make it complicated as humans.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

I love the simplicity in your six criteria features of leadership. And I know you've practiced that throughout your whole career, and it seems like actually we need more of that, more leaders. If they followed these steps, they would create the conditions for success that actually would allow humans to thrive and navigate these changes successfully. And when I think about AI, you know, we've basically had the same kind of ways of working that were established back in the industrial age, you know, the the factory mentality, if you like, that we have hierarchy, that we have productivity stats, that we have KPIs that reflect that. All of those things really are not, they weren't conducive to being human. And here we have a transformation that's happening with AI that is going to be really good at doing those task-oriented productivity things. So it frees us up as humans to do the things, the six things you just described will allow our people to thrive. We already know what we need to do in order to make the best of both what AI can do, but also what humans can bring to the workforce.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

I think the AI bit for me is the AI is pretty powerful, and I think it's a very different kind of change-bringing the organization. And if I can talk about AI itself in a minute in terms of its impact on an organization, but if you just come back to the foundations and then you come back to what's a leadership, a leader's role in setting that up. A leader's role in creating a change-ready operation, let's call it, it starts with them. It's to make sure they're self-aware, it's to make sure they understand the kind of leader they want to be, it's to make sure they be themselves as well, and they uh are vulnerable to listening and learning. And it's to make sure that as leaders, they think for themselves about okay, so what are my strengths, what are my weaknesses, what kind of organization do I want to run? How do I want my people to feel and behave? And how do what ways of working would I enjoy? What would I want to put in the organization that will get the best out of people? And actually, as a leader, I created a diagnostic tool recently, and I've had about over 100 people complete it. There's the six pillars on this diagnostic tool, kind of covering some of the things I've spoken about already today. The last pillar is called future focus. It's like, how much time do you spend on you? Over 90% of the people that responded, that either says, I don't or I do very little, which says to me they're probably spending most of their time managing, not leading, spending most of their time in meetings, being reported to, not being present in. I think I might have asked you this question before, Susan. I won't ask it now on this podcast, but people I've worked with and for over many years, and definitely now when I mentor people as well, I ask them what their definition of a leader is. And I don't think a wrong definition is what your definition is. The point is, most people have never really thought about it. They've never really thought about what their definition of a leader is. And so when they answer the question, they'll their eyes will go to the ceiling and then they'll be thinking, and then they'll come out with a few words or a few sentences. And that's absolutely fine. But as a leader, I think it's really important to understand what your definition of a leader is. So then you can start to measure yourself against being that kind of leader. And I'll give you my definition, and it's four things. My definition of a leader is it's to provide structuring direction. So it's that clarity I've talked about earlier. The second bit, which I think is what we're talking about a lot here, is to provide an environment where people can be their best every day. And that is the foundations and all that kind of stuff. The third one is to be a point of escalation for anybody in the organization or outside the organization. I think as a leader, you should be available if people need you. In some way, shape, or form, you shouldn't you should be available to those people. And the fourth one is to drink coffee. Now that always gets a bit of a smile. You've just smiled now. And And the drink coffee is really the future focus thing I've just talked about. I think you should be spending about 10% of your time, minimum 5% of your time. So 5 to 10% of your time as a leader doing things that are not your day job. So it's it's kind of we're doing this now, a podcast. We speak regularly and we're we're buddies, right? We we enjoy each other's kind of brain and company and challenge of each other. Get a mentor, a coach, go and visit other organizations. How are they doing it? Other industries, other sectors. Go for a run, get your mind in a different place. But you should be spending five to 10% of your time as a leader not doing your day job. And I've done that throughout my entire career, and I run five billion pound businesses, three and a half billion pound operations, 800 million pound pay nails. If you can do it, and I think if you talk to the high performing leaders in the globe, you'll find they don't spend 100% of the time in their day job. They'll spend time out of it learning, finding out new things, being challenged, being vulnerable, or whatever. So I think it's really important that a leader understands what the definition is, and they set themselves up for success, kind of before they're setting their business up for success.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

Yeah, I agree. It's uh finding time to look outside of your organization, look outside of yourself, actually, to be conscious, uh, going back to the word that you use. And in that consciousness, being very clear about your intentions. It's what what's the purpose, what are the outcomes, what are the values that you can bring to your organization and that your organization delivers to the world.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

And people will always say, I'm too busy. There's a um people I follow called do leaders. I think it's on Instagram or somewhere. They learned a poem, a busy poem, they produce. It's a very short poem about being busy. It's like busy is lazy, busy is a choice, busy is and it and it's I read it to people tell me when I have this conversation about kind of being a leader, not a manager, and giving people space to be leaders in your team and giving space for people to operate and develop and make some mistakes and learn from them. And your role is to kind of mentor and coach, provide the space for people to be successful, not to spend your life in meetings being reported up to and all this kind of stuff. But people say they're too busy. I think that's a choice, then. They don't want to go and do it all the scared of doing it themselves to learning and getting out there. You and I are both people that have done that in our careers, and we find it really powerful. And all these people we meet, they're brilliant. I think it's really important that leaders look at themselves first, the impact they have and want to have on their teams and their business. And then I think it's then that helps shape the foundations that we talked about already. And then you start to get into how do I set my business up for success then? What do I do I do that? I think then that's about going through kind of what are your values, did clarity, what is your culture on, what is your and the capability one, the three C's we talked about.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

You've talked about your belief in people, and I know again, through your career, you've transformed large organizations based on that belief. Do you see yourself as a pioneer?

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Uh no, I don't think it's pioneer because I think there'll be other people doing it as well. But I see myself open to having a go at stuff. I like to experiment, I like to try things. Uh in one of my businesses, we had a thousand-person business that was a three and a half billion operation. We did a whole management model, no targets. I don't really set targets in my business. I was always set them, but I never set them. I like ambition. Buyers say, go and get me 10 widgets, Susan, you'll find solutions to 10 widgets. If I said to you, go for your life, see what you can achieve, you'll go, you'll think about it all very, very differently. And there was an example of that actually with one of my colleagues previously who um I took on a business and we had a debt function. It was like normally every year they get a debt target to reduce it by or something. I got asked the same question when I joined from my ports, uh, and I wouldn't give a target. And in the end, I just said, What do you think you can achieve? What do you think you can do? And they come back. And then in the end said to me, Daniel, about two weeks into this conversation, I'm sure you've got a target. Just kind of give me a target. I said, okay then, I want zero debt. Zero. And he said, You can't have zero debt, it'll always be debt because that's how it works. And uh, I said, You misunderstanding me. It's about a mindset, it's about how you think. I says, I want to problem solve to go. How do I get to zero debt? Not that I may ever get there, but the solutions you come up with to solve that query will be different to say if I say take 10% off it. And they were. And some of those things were things like we'd have to change the regulation to do that, and that'll take years, or how many years? Two years. Okay, let's start now, then I said, and we'll see. It changed in two years. And actually, that changed as a real example. That changed took six months in the industry because everyone was thinking it, everyone to do it, including the regulator. So without that thinking, we wouldn't have got to, and that decision said, well, start now in two years' time to be done. Yeah, it wouldn't have got to a six-month change that benefited everybody. How you set your business of success is really important. People that chase targets, you're you're creating behaviors, people that chase updates and get tighter when performance is not getting as good. Generally, things constrain and constrict. That's the last thing you want to do. You want to create more thinking, more freedom, more let's have a go at something else, then it's experiment more because you need it, because you're not performing as good. So as humans, we kind of revert to the opposite of what needs to happen. And that's where the word conscious comes in. Because if you get conscious about all of this, you wouldn't do that. It wouldn't be a choice if you actually thought about it. It wouldn't be a common sense choice.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

You're right. I mean, I think I mentioned that the conditions historically in workplaces around productivity has not necessarily been the best way to get the best out of humans, you know, allowing our biological systems to go slower, to reflect on what's happening, to maybe think about things in a different way. So you expand that uh potential by giving people audacious goals, if you like, or they set them themselves. So themselves, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Yeah, absolutely. What's interesting, um, and aside that I've just thought of COVID and hybrid working and all that kind of thing, we were forced into trusting everyone to work from home. And I very often hear things like the press or whatever, or even in real life, that we're getting people back in the office. Why? Because they're not as productive at home. And I sit there and go, well, where's that problem start from then? And and my view, that's a leadership problem. It's not a when I talk to a lot of people I that inspire me, people like you and people that are leading teams, have led teams, and did it through COVID, and lots of colleagues that know across the industry in all different sectors, people that really inspire me and I look up to. I ask them the question about why the hybrid working, and then they never answer with a productivity problem. It's never been an issue because they've got their team set up for success and they trust their people. It's all these foundations are there. There's there's that safety that's all there. And what they're saying is actually we're missing kind of collaboration in time or that that copy chat that is so valuable. There's a real big void between, let's just call it, I just think I call it traditional thinking of lead humans or manage human beings to I don't know, for the word modern thinking now, which is around creating the foundation where people can be the best, that really is enabling them to work how they need to work. To if you're sitting there saying I'm bringing them back in the office because I can't get them to work properly from home, that's not their problem, it's yours as a leader, it's the point we're trying to make on that. And I think that's a real test of your leadership impact, as we talked about not long ago, about what impact are you having, what impact do you want to have? You as a leader need to decide how you want to lead. It's as simple as that. My decision is I believe people first, I believe in custom procession, and I believe that performance comes from is an outcome of people first approach with a customer obsessive mindset, not because I focused on targets or I've always outperformed as a business and been successful, I think because of focusing on people and not focusing on targets. I focus on outcomes and ambition.

SPEAKER_00 29:41

Well, and if we turn our attention to how AI may impact all of these things that we've just been talking about, when we think about AI and the fact that we now will have agentic AI working alongside humans, so you've got machines and people working together within an organizational structure or your operating model. How different might the operating model be? So if we think about uh the intelligence being pushed out to the edge, so the people closest to the customer are the ones that are going to be most empowered to make change happen, not necessarily needing a centralized C-suite or a centralized operating model. It becomes decentralized. So I just wonder about those comments around productivity and COVID and trust, et cetera. How different do we need to be thinking as leaders to design an organization for this AI era?

SPEAKER_01 30:32

First of all, how exciting is that? The way you just described that very exciting to say the people who are working with our customers the most, they have got the empowerment to challenge the norm, to make change, to do things. That's where the most successful organizations before AI are getting success from, anyway. Recent research, isn't there, that says that 95% of existing AI pilots are failing to deliver on the return on investment. Then they say that the 5% that are achieving the return on investment are seeing a greater than 40% productivity gain. And they're saying that the difference here isn't AI. The difference is the research, it shows those 5% of organizations that are getting that massive benefit out of the AI pilots, are the organizations that are already getting benefit out of non-AI change. They're the ones that were high performing, the ones that add it as part of their ways of working, their cultural well-being. And they had they had all the single accountability, they add clarity at organization and change level, they add people not working in silos, it was kind of integrated. In that research, which is AI research, it demonstrated that AI wasn't the determining factor, it was the organizational setup pre-AI, determining whether AI was going to be successful or not in the organization. So what I said to me is it doesn't matter whether it's AI or not, it's it matters whether you're good today at change or not, basically. And you've got an organization that has got those foundations, it's got trust, psychological safety, it's got understanding of change and a growth mindset, and you're playing to people's strengths and you're playing to people's experiences and backgrounds and types of brains and things. So I think it's a really powerful piece of research that backs up the original research that said the 70% was failing because of this, and you should have this. And AI has just done the same thing and gone, and we agree. And when you get into AI, Susan, that we've had these conversations a few times, but I think AI is a different type of change, though. So we've never seen anything like AI before. AI has come out of the tech world as a tech thing, but I think it's a capability, I call it. I don't call it like an IT system or something, I call it a capability. Some people call it a resource, even. I think that's one of the things it can be instead. Like you just mentioned, it can be, it can be a full-time agent servicing customers, and you could have a head count of 50 people and actual 50 resources, 20 humans and 30 era AI agents, right? In the future as an operating model. AI, in its broadest sense, I think, is a capability. I don't think we've seen anything like AI before. The difference would expose things because anything before has been like, oh, it's improving a purpose of something like comms or it's a bidding system, or it's the internet or social media or something. It's got a purpose. It's very clear where it fits. Whereas AI isn't clear. It doesn't necessarily need to sit in IT as an owner. It delivers things a lot faster. It ignores today's boundaries of governance and structures and things. It can operate in any industry, in any sector, in life or work. I was with people yesterday, Susan, who two people created a new business. None of them have been in tech before, they're not developers, and in three weeks, they created a product to market around AI. You look at your front line of an organization, a big operation, there's two parts. One is it's very powerful. You can start to support front lines with AI and support them in knowledge or help or whatever. You can start to take off mundane tasks and speed things up. There will be replacements in certain parts, but you can also allow people to think more, to create the intelligence, to become the challengers to improve how AI works rather than how they work. AI is a massive opportunity. I don't think people need to be scared of it. I think people need to embrace it. And it's probably might make your job more exciting and more playing towards your strengths or something, right? It's already here. It's been around for years anyway. It's just we've got to treat AI as a capability, not as an IT system. We've got to treat it as a it's kind of a normal change, but exposes organizations that aren't set up for success in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

I think what I'm hearing around change and around the change that is happening, it's already here in terms of the significant impact that AI is having in getting us to reimagine what a job is, reimagine what a workplace is, reimagine what leadership is. If you could expand on the change approach, how how differently do we have to think about that?

SPEAKER_01 34:54

I always believe that if you deliver small, but often, it has multiple benefits. But I used to do it for all my change, everything. Whether it was a big program, I break it down into two weekly or weekly sprints, basically. And the reason for that is one, you could be experimenting all the time with ideas and having to go at things. I think the experimental approach is definitely where the AI capability sits. You've got to experiment with it. Can it do this? Can it do that? Would it be the best solution for it? But it also brings benefits. That change approach, which AI will force, as in the experimental approach, to do small steps often. You can't beat success. Success breeds success. So if you start doing lots of small actions every week, every fortnight, a lot of people can be involved in those little changes, those little actions, and they're all feeling successful. So all of a sudden, you've got lots of green shoes going on across your business. People are feeling successful, and that all that breeds is more success. And what you also get is failure, because failure happens a lot anyway. But what you get is small failure. So people very often ask me, say, when did you have a big failure or something? And I don't have many because I don't deliver change in a big way. I deliver it in a thousand steps rather than five. Fail, like kind of an analogy where if I get a boat from Portsmouth to New York, I set the direction once. If I don't look at it for months, then I was one degree out of the beginning, I end up in Mexico or somewhere, right? But if I actually check that according the next day and the next day, and I realize I'm off, I've only gone off a little bit, I tweak it back again, I tweak it back again the other way, and I can adapt to it and be flexible with it. For me, the change approach, I think AI will force lots of actions often. I think that can only be good for organizations on many levels. Failure for success, for creating success that breeds success, for developing people, for learning about how to deliver change better. Failure will go down, yeah, more success will happen. I just think it will change the whole way we deliver change in organizations because they'll be forced to do it. And the ones that are fighting it will be forced because their competitors will start doing it. And they'll be getting to market quicker, they'll be launching things quicker, they'll be they'll be doing version ones, twos, threes, fours live.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Just recently I saw in a news broadcast. The journalist asked one of the military leaders what they were learning from the war uh situation at the moment. And the military leader responded by saying, we are a learning organization. Everything that we do, we are constantly course-correcting, understanding the insights, what's working, what's not. So I, if we think about our organizations in that way, that it's uh an organic learning organization where people thrive.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

I love that, I love that those words altogether, organic learning and where people thrive, I think that they are great words to use. Because I think that is what any organization is, I think, trying to always do. I don't think any organization is not trying to get the best out of the people. Every organization works with good intent. I just don't think the leaders in organizations think about their own impact and think consciously about what impact they want to have and how they want to set the business up success. And when more start doing it consciously, it will get significantly better. They'll have more success in their overall performance of the business. And I also think they will have a whole world of opportunity opened up with AI and what that can do for the business if they consciously think about setting the business of success and create a whole change mindset as part of the business day-to-day, part of how we do things around it.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

Well, and it's being very mindful about the design, the design of your organization, the design of the work that you're doing, or the design of a change program. Putting those design principles in place first and the conditions of success that you mentioned, knowing why you're doing the change, what's the outcome that you're expecting of it, and how do you design for that? So if listeners take one idea away from this conversation, what would you most want it to be?

SPEAKER_01 38:43

I think it's about being a change-ready leader. And I think it's about your organization is about success by design, and it's about conscious design. So I'd say it's about change-ready leaders and success by design. And then I think the challenge is that leaders have to consciously design change to be a part of their organizational being, the way they work, their mindset, and they have to realize it starts with them.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

Brilliant. Damien, is there anything else that you would like to share with us today?

SPEAKER_01 39:14

I don't think so. I think I've talked a lot, but thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it, Susan. And uh, I hope people have got something out of this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 39:24

Absolutely. No, uh, thank you so much for your time today, Damien, and uh sharing your wisdom and your insights and your conscious intent. Uh thank you very much. No worries, thank you. Thank you.