Doyin Olorunfemi, PhD - From Computer Engineering To Empowering Women: A Journey Of Purpose

What if your life’s through-line is a flowchart—clear steps, smart loops, and a decision diamond that always points back to people? Meet Dr Do, an academic and entrepreneur who turned a “lame” degree in computer engineering into a powerful discipline for building community, scaling women-led enterprise, and teaching with clarity. Her story moves from a redundancy letter to leading a thousand-strong network, from sold-out conferences to a fully funded PhD, and it all rests on a simple philosophy: live well, live full, live out.

We dig into her early ventures that created access, not just income, and the moment she chose to set her own terms at work and in life. You’ll hear how MAPHA—her framework for motivating, preparing, and elevating women—grew from kitchen-table strategy to global stages, and why acronyms like CROP (Create, Rank, Optimise, Plan) help complex ideas travel and stick. The heartbeat of the conversation is her triad: Live Well (cultivate joy and reward), Live Full (align to purpose and values), Live Out (extend knowledge and opportunity). It’s practical, generous, and deeply human.

We also tackle AI with nuance. She uses it daily to synthesise and clarify, yet warns against outsourcing your core competence. We explore how to bookend AI with human thinking—start with your own ideas, refine with tools, finish with your judgment—so you protect cognition and keep your edge. As an academic champion for employability, she bridges research, industry, and classroom, embedding entrepreneurial learning and elevating Global South perspectives so innovation reflects more than one story.

If you’re craving a map for meaningful progress—one that blends process with purpose, and ambition with compassion—this conversation will give you frameworks you can use today. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a lift, and leave a review with the one idea you’ll live out this week.

Transcript

Meet Dr Do: Roots And Identity

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Okay. Can you see me?

SPEAKER_03 0:22

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Well, sorry about that, first of all. Can you hear me, okay? What do you mean? Come on. Lovely to see you. I've I've done a little bit of research. Not a lot. Oh, okay. And incredible. But I mean, before we get into stuff at all, if you'd just like to introduce yourself. Folks who maybe aren't aware of who you are or what you do, if we can start off with that.

Choosing Engineering And Finding Process

First Ventures And Teaching Instinct

SPEAKER_03 0:56

Is that okay? Okay. So uh the simple introduction is I am doing a lorophemy. Some people like to call me Dr. Doo uh because I'm an academic and my initials are D-O, and I think I'm action-driven. So um a lot of my friends and people that know me well call me Dr. Doo. I am wife and mother of two lovely girls. Ladies, sorry, not girls. And um, yeah, Nigerian originally by birth, and I live yeah, in the UK now, and I have been for just the last 25 years. Oh wow, okay. So the very, very beginning. Um I I I was born, like I said, Nigerian-born, and I intentionally said that because in Nigeria, um, there are two assumptions about knowledge, uh, intelligence, and uh what you should be doing with your life. And there's an assumption that uh knowledge means everyone must go to university. That's it. Otherwise, you haven't satisfied your mother and your father. And um, when you go to university, you have to study what I call lame, because everybody has to be an in-court professional. And you have to study one of the lame degrees, and I call them lame intentionally. I don't know whether anybody else does, because it has to be law, accounting, medicine, or engineering. So um, and that's how it goes if you are to go and study anything. And I remember when I, as I as I started looking out to university and I decided, what do you really want to study? And I didn't know. So when the results came out and I had done very well in maths and physics and further maths, those sort of subjects, I thought, okay, of the lame, engineering fits most. And then I thought, which of the engineering will I study? And I had just um, this is way, way, way back. So I was going to university in 1990, right? And um, then computers had just become a big, a big deal. And so I thought, oh, all the engineering, I think I'll do computer engineering. So I did, and my first degree was in computer engineering. And I lay that as a background because when I look back on my time in uni first, I don't think I should have studied anything to do with engineering. Nah, I think I was more a people person. I think I was more a people person, but I don't believe anything is accidental. So um what I took away from studying computer engineering was process, systems, flowcharts. And up till date, there's always a flowchart in my head. Whether I want to make a meal, whether I want to host you in my house, Joel, there would always be a flowchart in my head because I think university education disciplines you to think in a certain way. And so I came out of university and I had my first um, my first experience of what people will say entrepreneurship in university. Not because I wanted to raise money particularly the very first time. It was because a lot, I had a few students who were struggling to make ends meet. And we were in university, the very um remote kind of market town. And so the nearest big town, I don't know, for people that know in Nigeria, was Ibadon, and it was about an hour away. And students like to eat things like fried rice, exotic kind of meals. So we used to go and buy this um produce from Ibado and bring it back to Ilefe where I studied, and we had a small stall, and we used to sell those, and I encouraged some people that were um a little bit short on cash to join me and we would sell that. And it was a lot of fun. And as I continued, when I started getting into this computing thing, um I had uh uh an instance, an opportunity to work in a computing firm, which I might get to later when I talk about my story of becoming. But I then had a computer and a print um in my room, which was which was very, very big deal then. And I did another business, which was to help people to typeset and create their projects or their dissertations. And I did that business in my final year. So that was me uh going into uni as a potential computer engineer. I did come out with my computer engineering degree and a job, but I also came out as an entrepreneur. So that was the beginning if you want to ask. I was thinking about that today because I didn't start the first business to make money. I started the business to create access. And I really had to pinpoint this this morning and think it was more like why what can we do to help these people that um needed money? And honestly, I've never believed in giving people fish. I believe in teaching people to fish even till today. Ask my siblings, and they'll tell you that she's just kind of like that. Um, so but I've I enjoyed that process of taking something to market and making some form of money. And I think I have since matured to respect entrepreneurship as such. Um, so I came out of uni and uh decided I got a job, like I said, while I was in uni, which was another thing. Um I had I was doing, you know, like what we would call industrial attachments, we called it at the time, or what we would call in the West internships in my fourth year, because in Nigeria engineering was five years. Those days it was popular to do Microsoft certification. Um I did the Microsoft certified trainer track, and that was when it clicked for me. Okay. Finally clicked. I want to pass on knowledge. I don't want to do the engineering stuff, I just want to teach people what I know. And I can vaguely remember as a child telling my parents I wanted to be a teacher, and maybe hearing someone tell me, are you saying you want to be poor for the rest of your life? But there was always that desire to personal knowledge. Even now, teachers are poor, Joel. You won't believe it, but anyway, hey, that's a different thing.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Oh, I do. Well, you know, my my my lovely fiance now, yeah, she's head of art, she teaches. So I'm very, very familiar with the teacher life, the teacher philosophy. Uh and yeah, unfortunately, uh, especially in the UK, uh financially it is what it is.

Redundancy, Resolve, And A New Business

SPEAKER_03 7:37

Everywhere, Joe, because even in Nigeria, then I remember that was why my mom would never say. She would say, use your brains to make money. Why would you want to be a teacher? And so I have come full circle to go into uni, studying computer engineering, working as a systems engineer in a very, very reputable firm, stamping my um, putting my stamp in the work um landscape then. A few people knew me and they thought, oh wow, she's somebody to reckon with. And then I had the opportunity to then go and do this MCT track, and I thought, this is what I want to do with this computer engineering. And so I moved to the UK right after, and I said, I just want to teach. I just want to teach. I would teach computer engineering, I would teach Microsoft um product. And I started working in a CRM, customer relationship management in 2000. That was a big deal there. And then I was teaching and doing all that. And um, sadly for me, I was made redundant. I was made redundant in was it 2002, 2002, October, yeah. And I thought, I'm always the best employee. Why? How dare they make me redundant? And um I thought I would never work for anybody anymore. I would oh, how dare they make me redundant? You know, I had had a baby January of that yeah, yeah, September of the previous year, and I was asked, you know, to come back to work because they were struggling to get anybody to fill my position. And I had to go back to work when my daughter was in less than, she was just about 13 weeks old. And this is me 10 months later, they're making me redundant. How dare they make me redundant, you know? So that was the that was the feeling. But that was January of 2002, and I remembered um October 2002 when I got that redundancy letter, it just didn't add up. I'm thinking, what has changed in 10 months? And I think that was when I made up my mind that I would I would only work for myself, I would not work for anybody, I would only call the shots. I'm good enough to create my own space and live in my space. And so December, I started the business um doing um skincare consultancy, makeup sales, skincare sales, and all those sort of things. And I had set up that company. I had set up that business, and in January, my company called me back uh to come back to work. I took the job in my own terms. Uh so I worked and I earned the same thing that I was earning. I uh I got back. It was it was beautiful actually, because I got my salary for working only 10 days, which is mad, you know. So, and then if I worked extra to 10 days. You negotiated well, yes, you know. And because then, you know, contracting and all those kind of things, it was quite new. So I could say maybe a type of contract, but I was like, this is how much you pay me if you let me come because I want to take care of my child. I don't want to come back, I don't want to leave my daughter at home, you know, and care for kids and all that was quite different in 2002 anyway. So um yeah, and so I did that. I kept doing the IT contract and building my business until 2005, baby number two came along, and then I decided that no, I'll just be at home and build my business. And I did. I did. Um, and it was really, really fun because the business allowed me to uh mentor and work with um other women that were interested in doing the same thing. So not only was I selling, not only was I having my own thing, but the key part of it was that transference of skills, of knowledge, and to build a team. And um the last time we tried to do the numbers, I think over the 19 years that I did that actively, I had well over a thousand women pass through my team. And uh these were women that I had to help to set up their business and to help them put strategy in their business. Now doing it on a big scale because it wasn't just about helping them make a few bucks, it was about helping them make a living. Because for many women, there is strength in being commercially um able and astute as well. So whereas you never the few research papers that have recently come out and challenging the fact that does entrepreneurship on a small scale make women poor? Because if you don't do it on a big scale and you keep getting hampered by family um dynamics and all those kinds of things, you might be better off actually going to work because you might be expending more than you're making. And you get into this cycle of um visual cycle of poverty, so to say. Um, except you do it on a big scale. One of the things that you find is that uh women, they like to, first of all, achieve some form of efficacy before they go out there and launch big time. Not all women, I generalize, you know, but a significant number of women. And so helping women put that strategy in place to say you don't have to just do this to make ends meet, but you can explore big opportunity and you can be all you want to be and build this. And there's no difference actually when you can agenda, it's just what is in the mind. And so in 2015, I decided to take that one step further and I started a company called MapH Limited. And MAPHA, um, M A P, it's uh an acronym. Motivate, I don't prepare. Um, Motivate I don't prepare. I just felt let's work on the inside, let's make her look good and feel good on the outside, and let's prepare her to take over the world. So we called the company MapHa Limited, and it was dedicated to women, ambitious women who wanted to make a change in their life, who wanted to just do something positive. And yeah, that was how I went full on and then registered a proper business and had all those things put in place, and I really, really enjoyed it. And I used to do conferences, I had a book up.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

That's amazing. I mean, what have I been to yourself? Well there's there's a different way of ingesting information, right? Let let's put it that way. And to be in this setting and just listen, right? And I'm doing that classic man thing of at this point I really am paying attention, or I'm trying to pay attention. There is and keep me honest, Tedway, please. There is for me a theme already where there is such a strong advocacy for community. Right? I mean, if if as I said, I'm I'm listening to you and I'm hearing, okay, it's not just about making a buck, it's about okay, operationalizing, it's about creating frameworks that enable other people to be self-sufficient, um, but not only just create those frameworks, but be an advocate for them. To be visible. That's incredibly powerful.

Scaling A Women-Led Enterprise

SPEAKER_03 15:24

Thank you. And I think Does that make sense what I've just tried to describe? Yeah, definitely. And now you say it that way, being powerful is actually stepping forward and doing it too. You know, because it's all good to say, this is a path that I have um charted for you, walking it without actually doing the walk. And I think one of the things that I've always held there in anything I've done in my life is are you going to say it or are you going to leave it? Are you going to be the one to step forward first and do it? I mean, even with the girls, I have never requested anything or required anything of them that I wasn't first ready to do. Um, it is it's it it's tricky, it's it's difficult, but I I believe that that's the way to do it. Yeah. So I don't know whether it's called advocacy, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

No, it's it's a brilliant trait um that you clearly have. And again, it's your story, right? And from college days, from uni days, it was about community. It was about enabling, it was about utilizing the opportunities that were presented, sometimes then m moving to, I guess, creating those opportunities. Whether they were born out of, you know, a random situation or whether they were deliberately curated, but the the the foundations of what you've done previously and clearly what you are doing incredibly successfully now. Thus far, I I can see that thread. I can see that thread of community, of advocacy, of enablement. And you said it already. Um, yeah, you'd rather help people learn how to fish as opposed to just give them fish. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:28

I think that's. And if you were my student and I was marking your dissertation, I would have just said, Joel, you analyzed the data properly, and you have extracted the right findings. So, yeah, I I I will not disagree with some of the things that you said. And you know, I don't want people to think, oh, altruistic, uh doing she's just doing it for people. I have never lost money on any business. And I think one day we sat down and counted, and I had done seven different kinds of enterprises in my lifetime, in my short lifetime. Um, and I never lost money. Maybe I never made any of them a unicorn, but I always made money. I always covered my basis. So the numbers have always been important to me, and that's what I advocate for. Just this morning, one of my friends was telling me about something she wanted to do, launch a book, and she had told me how she wanted to do it. And immediately I just went into strategy mode. And she said, Oh my God, every time I make you have a phone call with you, I should get a piece of paper and a pen before I come on the call. Because I'm going to be thinking of how we can not only explore new opportunity, but fully, fully exploit this opportunity in such a way that delivers expected outcomes to every stakeholder involved. Um, so it's it's it's my it's my default way of thinking. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

But it's that return on investment, right? That has always been critical. Uh it's on your critical path for what you've done. Um so okay. So So we continue the story.

SPEAKER_04 19:08

Where are we then? Yeah, so we started Mapha Limited. Go ahead.

MAPHA: Motivate, Prepare, And Purpose

SPEAKER_03 19:12

Yeah, yeah. So we started Mapha Limited, and Mappa was fun. Um, it was into uh we did, I had a YouTube channel, which I don't know, we kind of lost. I don't know what my husband did. Uh no. Okay. I know what happened. I think it had something to do with no changing. It's not it's not his fault. I just like to say it that way. But uh we we lost our Google account somehow, and everything was packed under that account. Again, if it's not yours, it's not yours. So I had a YouTube channel and I had over 150 videos there, and I started doing something called minute motivation. Actually, it started that as minute motivation. Minute motivation. And I tried to give um, I started it in 2014, December, so just nuggets in one minute. And then I'm very pro-acronic. I think there's too much stress in life. If I could just make it an acronym, then people will remember. So I created one, for instance, for productivity called CROP. And CROP means create a list, rank the items on the list, optimize each item, put a plan in place. So I think if I do a speech and somebody and I make it into an acronym, you only have to remember one word. And if you remember the one word, you might eventually figure out the other elements of the speech. So with Mabha, I was in conferences which were sold out. They were very popular, actually. They scared me. And I got a lot of speaking gigs, both here and in the US. And people would just reach out to me and ask me, would you speak here? And I had, like I said, the unique selling point of whatever speech I made, I could always summarize it as an as a one-word acronym. So that's MAPA. And then we continued with that. And why did I pack it up? I'll tell you what happened to me one day. I invited a speaker to speak at one of my conferences. And she was just talking. She's brilliant, right? People liked her, and people recommended, people had requested that can she be one of the speakers. And I was looking at her and thinking, you've never run a business in your life. All you know is just book knowledge. And so, of course, my husband and I are very close. I mean, I first met my husband when I was in my teens, and we're just very close, right? And so I tell him everything, wisely or foolishly, I don't know. So I went home that day and I was telling my husband about how this woman had never run a business in her life. And everything she just had was book knowledge and just book knowledge. And he said to me, he said, wisely, he said, I wonder if when you speak, people think all she just knows is practical knowledge and she's never read a book in her life. And I was like, how dare they think I've never read a book in her life? And so I kept that in my mind. And MAP 2017, um, one aspect of it was a strength finder test where we had this psychologist that came and she you traced back as far back as you could remember. You tried to capture what your strengths are so that you could exploit it for, um, based on what the current macro environment provided as opportunities. And one thing that ran through in that trade was teaching, was um that value from academia, something like from studying that kind of strong value system that was heavily linked to education. And so I came out of there. We normally used to have map in June, and I came out of that and thought maybe I should take on this challenge and actually go and read a book in my life so that when I speak next, I can combine practice with um academic knowledge. And so that very week, I went to the corridors of University of London, went to the different ones in Bloomsbury, we have UCL there, we have SOAS. And Berkbeik happened to be having an open evening, and I went there and I just loved the fact that there were older people there. And so I said, I'm gonna be here. And I came home, announced I'm gonna start um uh Busters because I I was told you have to do a business master's for you to do a PhD. And I wasn't certain I wanted to do a PhD at the time. I just wanted to get knowledge that the next time I spoke, I could also put academic knowledge in my experience. And uh so, and then I announced, and I think some people choked on their food that day on the table. Those doubters family members. No. How dare you! You know, but Joe, I'm the kind of person that used to say before, why do we want to go to school? Is it not just to make money? Please, let's all be making the money, you know. What's cool? I'd said it a few times, so you can't blame the people that choked on their food. Um, but that was it. October that year, I was in school and I loved it. I loved, I mean, when I would come home, back was in the evening, and even when I arrived home very late at night, I would still be buzzing. And I thought, I'm back to where I belong in this classroom. Without hesitation, I put in for a PhD. I was fortunate to get full funding and stipend for my PhD. And I thought, if they believe in me, then I can do my part. And I started the PhD. Now, one of the things that I would say is that in the map hard days, one of the things that I'm I'm a very reflective person. So I like to look back and I would summarize the year. And I had written two hashtags in 2016. Hashtags were just becoming very funky and a thing then. And I wrote the first hashtag, don't laugh, stilettos at 80.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Okay. Like it, like it, love it.

SPEAKER_03 25:07

Still love it. But you know what stilettos at 80 did for me? It told me I had to exercise, I had to eat well, I had to do if I wanted to wear stilettos at 80, I had to have a lifestyle that supported me being able to wear stilettos at 80. So it wasn't just a hashtag of No, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

So now we've gone from mnemonics to metaphors.

SPEAKER_03 25:33

Hmm, interesting. Fantastic. Interesting. Interesting. Fantastic. Stilettos at 80 was everything for me. It meant eat well. Make an effort with your health journey. Don't just sit on the couch and watch TV all day. Do things yourself that would help you to be agile and able to rock stilettos at 80. Another hashtag I wrote was I was writing one of those um um those acronyms, and I had written leave L-I-V-E, and then I added three things to the leave. So there was hashtag live well, hashtag live full, and hashtag live out. So many of my social media posts always still have carry this hashtags till date. And so I defined live well as enjoying the full things of life. You know, Joe, um I'm all for that sort of thing. You know, live your life, enjoy it. Just, you know, I don't want to break into songs. Gotta be done. That philosophy. I'm just like, just leave, enjoy a little bit. How many people have, you know, collapsed and died, and we're still saving to leave tomorrow. So I'm fully into living well. Daily. I'm I'm go, go, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 26:53

Keep going. I'm loving it.

Practice Meets Academia

SPEAKER_01 26:57

Already. Already. I'm here. Um, this is it. Where are you speaking next? I'm just gonna get like a season ticket.

SPEAKER_03 27:05

No, no, no. I don't do that anymore. I I only do that in the classroom. Liveful for me was let's not just live well, but let's live out, live full, let's live according to purpose. So for me, fullness was a connection to something bigger. Now, one thing I should say is that at a very young age, when I was 10, I decided to be a committed Christian. And I always say that because that has shaped many of my actions, my value system. I've always judged everything in the light of not just morality, but a godedness. Like, do I think this is something that God wants me to do? And if it's something that God wants me to do, it must have eternal value. It must have some form of value beyond just for today. It must be something I can carry on. So it's it's shaped most of what I have done. It's curtailed me from the excesses and it has also propelled me to being very intentional in the things I do and how I do them, right? So that I must say because in my desire to live well, um, I'm I'm curtailed by the the, shall I say, the supportive desire to also live full, to find purpose and live it out, right? And then the last one is live out, which is to extend what I have to others, which honestly summarizes who I've always been and who I've always secretly just desired to be, where that thing of extending knowledge that is found to others and to places where it might not necessarily reside. Um, so I started hashtagging. So all those map workshops that we did over the years that we did it would carry one or two of the hashtags. So I could say map 2019, for instance, was live out, live well and live out. And it had, I think the theme was maximize me or significant me. The thing was significant me where we did a lot about health and how you could, in a black community, you know, connect with your health as you live well, and then to live out in terms of have impact within your sphere of influence. Um, so every map workshop would have one or two of this sort of thing. And the seventh map, when we've reached our peak, I just felt it was time to let it go. And everybody was like, why you know? I don't want to ever leave map. So the last map carried the three hashtags. Um is this book? When when is this when's the book coming out? I've authored four books. I'm an author. My first book was published in 2017. Um 2017, a letter to my daughters. And a letter to my daughters was all about just passing on um what I had learned and what I had learned over the years. Daughter One was turning 16, and I challenged myself to write high story. Um, and so that was that. And I've done Grow With Goals, I've done Days of Grace, I've done Reading Journal. So I've done a few things that I published along the way on Amazon, and it it went hand in hand with my YouTube channel, and it served as a token that people used to recognize me, and that was why I got a few speaking engagements and all those geeks at the time as an author.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

For sure.

SPEAKER_03 30:40

Do I want to write something else? The issue with being an academic is that there's such a high-level standard that you want to meet, that nothing ever feels good enough. So it might be more difficult to write another book now because you keep putting a standard and yeah, unlike before where I just sat down and just wrote what I thought. Now I have to research it, validate it, and put all sorts of things in it. Anyway, so maybe let's see. Let's see how it goes.

Live Well, Live Full, Live Out

SPEAKER_01 31:10

Just listening to that aspect of our lovely conversation. Um, there's there's one of those phrases that that I've come out with and I bore everybody with. Um smiling is the only currency worth anything. And as you were sharing your frameworks, your metaphors, they all for me, it really, really resonated with you need to be happy. Yeah. And I think the m the way that you've described, and with the the passion and the exuberance that you are describing the things that you've done. I mean, I can see you, I mean podcast is audio only, but it's it's validating for me that success goes hand in hand with smiling and and sharing those smiles. You could be the epicenter of something, but then how you plan that, how you demonstrate that via whatever methodology, how it's fulfilled, how it is supported, all of those things are so evident in what you are talking about. And just that way of thinking. It's I d um it's just wonderful. It's just so so awesome to hear.

SPEAKER_03 32:49

Thank you. And you know, when you said success, I I remember what my my MSc dissertation was all about. And I was interviewing a set of people that had were successful entrepreneurs who had failed at a previous venture. And we were trying to unpack this idea of success. And one of my main findings and the framework that I backed that dissertation with was the live world, live full, live out framework. Whether you go to the Bill Gates, they got to a point where it wasn't just about making enough money to buy the newest car, to connecting with something that they felt that, okay, you know what? I then want to help the world get rid of malaria and I want to empower other people. So you could always trace that live well, live full, live out cycle with them that it's almost like a cycle of life. And we interviewed 25 entrepreneurs at the time for my master's dissertation, and all of them, you could see this coming out and through it. And honestly, people ask me, but what does it really mean to live well? Is it about just amassing wealth and everything? Okay, so let me give you a practical example, make it less abstract. So last month, haha, I never know whether I'm so I'm allowed to say this yet. I guess I am. I won't tell you what show I did. I got it into my head that I wanted to be on a TV show, on a mainstream TV show. Why not? Why not? I wanted to, if I could end money, if I could win some money, fine. But I just really like game shows. I like it when people are excited, when people come in with no money and they win something. And I really like the ones that are just built on luck. That, you know, the chase is good and I love it. You know, we love you. Okay. Um, but it's very knowledge-centered and oriented. I prefer tipping points where you're just dropping a coin and you don't ever know where the coin is going to head. Of course, there's some questions as well, but you know what I mean. I really, really like the ones that I just serendipity, luck, something like that. Anyway, so I applied and I was on the set of this game show.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

Oh, that's me. I can't wait to see him.

SPEAKER_03 35:08

My husband, he took the day off to drive me there. Because now I think initially he used to think, what's wrong with you? But now he's just like, okay, let's go. It makes you so happy. And I remember when I was doing my PhD, I just thought I need something to motivate me. Because honestly, if you've never, I'm not discouraging anybody from doing a PhD. Do it, do it, do it. It's good. But the many times I just thought, you were successful, making a lot of money. What are you doing to yourself? What are you doing? And it was very tough. And so I said, I need a big, big motivation that aligns with my person. And so I thought, why not? Let's do A to Z of all the countries. I go to a country for every letter of the alphabet.

SPEAKER_04 35:54

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 35:56

And so when I did anything, I just went, I just traveled. The rule was I had to spend 48 hours minimum in that country. And I just did it. I have three left. I still have three left because I think I was traveled out. Last year I didn't do any of them. I just I just got tired. Um, but that's for me. It's just a reward system that is not based on being frivolous or being um, you know, but just something that just makes you feel I'm worth it. And why not? Why not? If I want to, if I can afford it and I want to go to a nice restaurant, then why not? Do you understand? So that's what I mean by living well. Just giving yourself that deserving thumbs up every now and then.

SPEAKER_01 36:43

100%. Yeah, I I try to live by the same philosophy. Right? When you can, um I think I think you should. Right? It's it's not even a maybe. It's like, yeah, okay, we can do this, so let's do this. Um and it's very, very important because you work hard and you have to be honest to yourself, I think. Yeah? Um, all work and no play. Maybe it's a reward mechanism, maybe it's just that sense of satisfaction that adds to the end of an equation that says, I have achieved.

Joy, Rewards, And Everyday Agency

SPEAKER_03 37:26

And do you know who needs this the most in our families? Tell me. Maybe women. Tell me. Maybe women. Maybe women, Joel, you know, because you make the dinner, you've you've spent ages in that kitchen, and you made a mistake, you double salted. The children are not nice. Oh, mommy, is it salty? So I think one of the things I no, no, no, and I I generalize, you know, but one of the things I found I could give to women as I helped them on their journey of becoming was a little hint of this philosophy. Take a break and just reward you and just connect with what makes you. And I did the extremes of the holidays and the game show. Because it doesn't cost to go to a game show, right? It doesn't cost to say I'm going to have a walk around South Bank for the whole of today and just say hi to people I meet. If that's what makes you feel good, then do it. And if it's on the other extreme of I want to be able to, it's a smile, like you said. I've just done different things that I just put under my live well um, you know, banner and just say, I just want to do this because I just want to live. I just want to live well, I just want to enjoy my life.

SPEAKER_01 38:45

It is so, so important. It really, really is. No one's perfect. Yeah. We can all literally or metaphorically put a little bit too much salt in the pot, right? Um and it's not just about acknowledging it, it's about how you recover, it's about maintaining your mojo, all of the things that make us all whom we are. But I've always found, yeah, there's always ups and downs, right? There's always ups and downs. If we're blessed enough to have partners, friends, family, whomever it is that can be there for us and we can be there for them, it's incredibly important. And again, listening to your story, um I'm hearing those elements as well. Um they keep us honest, right? These souls who surround us. Um you mentioned, you know, your husband and his support and very vocal about well, yeah, we're going, you know, when you're talking about the game show. And And that a lot of times folks might think, yeah, it's well, what's that all? It's it's not significant. It is so significant. We're we're smiling, we're happy. And I think that part, particularly now, um in a in the world that we are in, it doesn't get spoken about enough. It definitely doesn't get celebrated enough. Um the latest thing, and I'm just gonna switch gears now if it's okay with you. I mean, you've got a technical background, process background, frameworks all about enablement, culture, but with purpose, with success criteria. And we've now, as a planet collectively, we we've got this new toy to play with, the AI. How do you where what's what's your take on this this new technological paradigm?

SPEAKER_03 41:14

So shall I speak as an academic or as a child?

SPEAKER_01 41:21

You speak as you. I want to hear from Doane. I don't want, you know, that's that's all I'm interested in.

Community, Support, And Smiles

SPEAKER_03 41:29

Um we say that uh I remember writing one time, I don't know where I saw it, but I it was one of the quotes that I stole at the early onset of AI to say that AI is not the dreaded dystopia, but it is not the promised utopia as well. So it doesn't do everything, right? And but it should not be dreaded. Now, um, okay. One paper that I I toyed with that I wrote as an academic was one day on the realization that and this is this is not yet founded. This is just like a hypothesis that I'm still working on and developing. And I was thinking of the fact that maybe we just didn't hear about it, but dementia Alzheimer's seems to be on the rise. One of the other things that I'm sure of, though, was that 25 years ago I knew my 16-digit credit card number. And I didn't need to look at the stored phone to say all my friends' phone numbers. I mean, my friends that I still remember their phone numbers are those that have kept their numbers for 25 years. I still remember it, right? And the advancement of technology, of these phones, of these smart devices, of everything that tries to ensure that we do not use the natural thinking ability that humans have. Seems to be, and I said, seems to be, I'm choosing my words carefully because it hasn't been scientifically founded or proven. Um, seems to be correlating with the loss of the memory mass in terms of how it's it's a memory. So if we don't use it, we lose it over time. And I don't know what it is. I don't know whether the whole agenda is to make us also robotic, that we just follow some commands. Um, so I love AI. I use it, I don't think there's any day that I don't use some form of AI, and I don't use it for search, I use it to sometimes query and um I use it also seriously sometimes if I want to do some focused work that I want to save time on. I use it a lot for synthesizing. So if I think I've written a lot for students to consume and I want to synthesize into one table, still form of what you talked about automation and all those kinds of things, I would use AI for it. But I'm also very cautious not to lose my ability to do mental maths, not to lose my ability to think because I am outsourcing that ability to um a device uh uh uh to AI, pretty much. Um yeah, so does does that answer your question? I've I've spoken like a politician.

SPEAKER_01 44:31

You've you've Yeah, okay, I'll take that, but you've opened so many other doors, which I knew you would. I just had this funny feeling, okay, I'm talking to an incredibly motivated, intelligent woman, and yeah, that's a very, very serious opening to a whole new set of questions. And you're quite right. I can still remember the phone number of our first house when I was a kid, right? I can recall mobile numbers and even house numbers of um friends of mine, um family, to this day I can remember those. Not hundreds, right? I'm not that kind of strange person, um, but at least twenty, twenty-five of them. Now, when mobile phones came into play, how many mobile phone numbers can I regurgitate? Next to none. Because the framework that was developed, it wasn't a number I had to remember anymore because it technology took away the need for me to remember the number, because then we could just save the number against somebody's name.

SPEAKER_02 45:59

Exactly. Exactly.

The AI Question: Help Or Hindrance

SPEAKER_01 46:01

Right? So it's it's it's a kind of shift of focus. Um, but as you've eloquently said, that particular observation, yeah, the jury's out. Um maybe there's some papers somewhere that people have done, haven't done, whatever. Um, but I think the broader observation, I I completely agree with you. Um yeah, technology, yes, it can make things easier, but then are we diminishing our own cognitive ability?

SPEAKER_03 46:35

Absolutely. And there's a paper that's MIT. Yeah, so MIT did a study and they were looking at AI. And of course, MIT will never rubbish artificial intelligence. They are the seat of technological learning, right? And one of the things they found was they were looking at different levels of um introduction of AI, and then they found that the best one was when the human had owned the thought pattern, had considered things themselves first and just used AI to fine-tune, and then came back at the end to conclude. Because what they found was that the people that started stuff straight away from AI, their cognitive ability diminished over the period of the study. It's scary stuff, you know. I know people talk about oh, you know, zombie days and all those kinds of things. And that is what I put forward to myself. Like, don't lose your strong point. I mean, there's a case study about Dell, right? And Dell, we all know Dell computer, and they outsourced most of their um their activities and all the things they did, and they outsourced at some point their core competence, which was the motherboard. And the way it goes is that at some point, nobody that was working in the main office could troubleshoot the motherboard, right? This is a retold story that I read in a book. So I can't say that I have researched this myself. But what they did was that they began to lose their competitive advantage because their core competence had been outsourced. So if you look at your core competence now, like let's talk about this podcast that we're doing, right? We would say that your core competence is chatting with me. You could outsource the editing, you could outsource the finishing. I don't know who does it, but you can. But the day you begin to outsource and you say, oh, I'm gonna give AI to ask the questions because it can be smarter and it can actually analyze the things that are being said before me and make it better, may give me better output. That's the day that the program begins to die. And and I think that's the the warning bell that's and it's not I'm not putting out scary stuff there. It's I still have to tell myself this all the time. Like be careful what you're outsourcing. But I think it's artificial.

SPEAKER_01 49:02

It's incredibly, incredibly important because the velocity that this new technology is, I won't use the word progressing, but the velocity at which it is moving, it's scary. Um thankfully there are some frameworks now. The EU have started to think a little bit more and deploy governance um structures around it now, uh, which is great. Um, but the ability to think, to understand how just to think, and then be able to articulate a message so that the recipients can not only receive it, but then understand it and then share that. And like you're saying, if you use the example of this episode of the podcast, we're having a conversation. I'm having a great time. Um, I could outsource the editing, I could do whatever, whatever. I don't think I would be comfortable with that. Because I'm I'm learning so much about doing this, um, and I'm enjoying myself tremendously with doing this. I'm learning about people, I'm learning about their stories, and honestly, it's such a joy. Um, again, smiling. We're back to smiling, right? Um and that's that's just gorgeous. So I think AI's got a place, you're right. Yes, um, but I think we need to fundamentally understand what makes us who we are, and be not maybe obsessive, but be ri more responsible.

SPEAKER_02 51:06

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 51:10

Where's the personalization? Where's the essence of whatever it is? Um, you cited how you utilize it. What what I was thinking as soon as you were saying that is I do use large language models in the same way. But literally 60 to 70 percent of the information that comes back, it's all what they're telling me now as a hallucination. Absolutely. It's not it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. So if you if you asked it a question, maybe you're writing an academic paper and you wanted not to do the graunchy work back in the days of the library and sourcing the information.

SPEAKER_03 51:56

But we're not even allowed to use it for reading, actually. We're not allowed to use it. That's a different discussion.

SPEAKER_01 52:02

You know, but if Well, for sure. But if um, you know, students do, right? Um and it will bring back 60% complete garbage. I mean, sometimes with the stuff that I've written, um, it's just made things up. Which is weird. It's so weird. So I think the governance and the due diligence are incredibly important. Um and we need more people like you who can marry the technical okay, I'll take that. That was a very generous who know that there is a technology to be utilized, but know that the technology is a subordinate. It is not the be-all and end all of it. It's there to help. But we still have to, as parents, we still have to have it about ourselves to challenge. But no, that's great. We've been happening now for about an hour.

Guarding Core Competence In A Tech Age

SPEAKER_03 53:08

Sorry, AI has something to be said, something said for AI for DAI though, because I mean, and English is not my first language, okay? So when I've written things that a little bit convoluted, AI is great to say, rewrite this in a hundred word, um in hundred words and target it to this sort of audience and let it have this sort of feel. I mean, the speed at which it does that, I could not produce that quality, right? So, but like the MIT study, what I should then do is use that to teach myself so that next time, maybe I will have the ability to be that concise and sharp in writing it. So I'm not rubbish in here. It's very, very useful. Times when the girls have gone to travel travel and they say, I have 200 pounds, I want to go to Prague, recommend here. Even when we traveled, I said, recommend the best way to go from Hogada to Cairo and the best company to do it. It's searching and it finds things for you, for you for you to so please, it's excellent. It's just what we use it for and how we bookend both sides of the utilization with imputing our own ideas and choosing our own ideas from what it gives us. I I think that's what is very important.

SPEAKER_01 54:31

Context is King. 100%. And I think it will get better, it will mature. Um, yeah, I'm just hoping that the governance gets better. And it looks like it's heading in the right direction. Um so what's next? What's next for you for for Duen?

Using AI Wisely And Well

SPEAKER_03 54:51

Um, what's next is very linked to where we started from. That beautiful introduction as a lecturer, an academic, and Dr. Do. And one of the things I say to myself is while I will not keep driving, looking at the rear view mirror, there is some form of context to see in that rear view mirror because if you don't look at it, apart from the fact that you'll never pass your driving test, you probably will not drive properly. And so I'm looking back, um, when you get to a certain age, you do a lot of reflection and trying to bring pieces from my past and trying to integrate it into the big word legacy and what I want my legacy to be. So as an academic, I went back to that whole philosophy of not just getting it for myself, but passing it on. I know before we said talk about AI, we were looking at the live well philosophy, which I always emphasize has to be balanced by strong, live full, and live out. And so in my living out and living full, I've gone back fully academia. And that's why when you called, when you introduced me and I did not mention the fact that I was an entrepreneur, it's because sometimes I look at the entrepreneurship process and the time as a becoming season rather than an endpoint. So when I look at myself as an endpoint, I look at myself as someone who helps others to explore and exploit their unique potential. Whether this is in an academic space or whether this is in life generally, as a coach, mentor, teacher, anything that allows me to do that will always be my next step. I'm loving doing that where I work right now, where I can actually research things and feed it back into classroom. And I'm not just a lecturer, I'm something called an ACE, which is academic champion for embedding employability and enterprise with a strong, um, strong assignment to ensure that our students are not just coming out with a degree, but also connectivity to industry for job focus. I love that because I can then leverage all what I've learned in the industry, those that I know, the processes that I've learned, I know what works and what doesn't work, haven't worked that season, and pass it on to this young crop of students. It's I'm fascinated by students. I can't tell you how much because I'm not just changing one person's life. It's a generation. It's a generation. A student walked up to me yesterday and said, Dr. Doin, I want to start a careers club. Would you help us? I said, of course. Go and start it. I would support you. For me, that is the joy to know that this student, it doesn't end here. It has the domino effect of their children and their children's children and all that to go on. So I want to continue to So, so important. To embed in context that allow me to do that. So I would, I think academic space, I would always be in. I'm I'm also very passionate about writing. I think what we write out leaves us. And while I'm not writing my funky books on and that I sell on Amazon anymore, I'm really working on very strong publications that makes us practice what we do in the workspace and um practice as a trigger for entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial learning. And like entrepreneurial learning, not just starting a venture, that sort of entrepreneurship, but developing the mindset that is entrepreneurial. That's why you said my PhD is an entrepreneurial learning, the skills, the those um mechanics that we employ that helps us to be innovative, creative, comes um to confront the status quo and to come up with something. So most of the things that I write are along that line. And I'm passionate about bringing out the global south context as well. I think nobody can actually tell your story like you can. So I want to look at um global south, and I write some articles that are global south-centric. I'm African by descent. So I want to bring the African way into conversations on innovation, on entrepreneurship, or shall I say innovativeness, not innovation, um, entrepreneurship, criticality, and all that, and it kind of like merge these indigenous knowledge systems with what is the norm and the known knowledge systems in a way that does not put one down at the expense of the other, but nexus and brings rich um insights to them. So that's what I'm writing. And maybe tomorrow I might move to other aspects of doing this more on a policy level. But the whole idea would always be to help people to explore and then exploit their uniqueness such that they can leverage this for competitive advantage. advantage in whatever sphere of life they find themselves.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:05

Amazing. There's so much we can learn as a planet that presently we just don't. Different cultures up until now, let's put it that way, it's been quite deine them. You go to school and Western philosophies are front and center. You don't necessarily get to study or you know as as a a general theme African, uh Asian, South Asian, um indigenous populations philosophies, they become closeted, they become specialisms. And I think the work that you're looking to do is to bring them into a broader sphere so that we celebrate these specialisms but we celebrate them appropriately with everything else that's on our planet because one culture, one people yeah, there's so much to learn from everybody. I think that's incredibly important. So fantastic again fantastic fantastic work. My share your wisdom it's it's I can't thank you enough, Dwayne. It's it's been a wonderful wonderful episode.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:48

Oh thank you so much very very kind of you it's been lovely to just have a laugh in the middle of a walk day again we're living well again smiling is the only currency worth anything.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:04

Fantastic