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Made To DO
Most transformations fail for the same reason AI is going wrong - we keep treating people as the cost of change instead of the source of it.
I've spent fifteen years working with thousands of employees of Fortune 500 companies and over 50,000 entrepreneurs across 110 countries trying to make change happen. And the one thing I know for certain: the most important conversations are not happening in the boardrooms or the tech labs. They are happening with the people actually doing the work.
This show is where those conversations go public. Every episode, I sit down with a global leader working on the most pressing challenges of our time.
I'm Florian Hoffmann, founder of The DO School. This is Made to DO.
Made To DO
Bet on the Humans: Laurie Richardson, Google, on Trust, Safety and Leading Through AI
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Bet on the Humans: Laurie Richardson on Trust, Safety and Leading Through AI
Every day, someone has to decide what "safe" looks like for the technology billions of people use. At Google, that person is Laurie Richardson. As Vice President of Trust and Safety, she leads the global team that writes and enforces the policies covering Search, Ads, Play, Cloud and Google's generative AI products. Her work spans fraud and scams, child safety and the new harms that AI agents bring with them.
In this episode of Made to DO, Florian Hoffmann sits down with Laurie in San Francisco's Presidio. Her path started a long way from Silicon Valley: she was a lawyer, then chief of staff at the US Treasury, where she worked through the aftermath of the financial crisis and Brexit. Later she helped write Google's original AI principles. That mix gives her an unusual view of how good decisions get made when there's no perfect option on the table.
The conversation covers a lot of ground: staged product launches, regulation, demo slams, entrepreneurship and the redwoods. Through all of it, Laurie keeps coming back to one belief. However much AI changes the world, she bets on people's ability to adapt.
Key takeaways
- Most big decisions aren't binary. Laurie separates what her team knows from what it hasn't been able to test, then uses staged rollouts and provisional calls she can adjust instead of a single yes-or-no launch.
- Doing right by users tends to keep you ahead of regulation. When the Digital Services Act and the AI Act arrived, much of what they asked for matched what her team was already doing. Mostly they had to formalise it.
- You can't plan for every future, but you can prepare for it. Critical thinking, a beginner's mindset and the courage to challenge each other matter more than any single plan. So do structures like her "strategic command" team, which takes charge when a crisis breaks.
- Measure impact, not adoption. Her team dropped "AI touch rate" as a metric because using AI isn't the same as transforming the work. Competitive, playful demo slams have done more for real progress than mandates have.
- Leaders need to use the technology themselves. Laurie's advice to CEOs, ministers and board members is to start with something small, like an agent that manages your inbox, and build literacy before setting direction.
Video chapters
0:00 — Opening
0:25 — Meet Laurie Richardson
1:45 — What Government Teaches Silicon Valley
4:50 — What Silicon Valley Teaches Government
7:00 — Deciding Without Perfect Information
9:10 — Regulation, the DSA and the AI Act
11:55 — Preparing Teams for an Unpredictable Future
14:05 — How AI Is Changing Trust and Safety
16:00 — The Human in the Loop
17:55 — Lifting Teams Up: Metrics and Demo Slams
22:10 — Overhyped or Underestimated?
25:15 — Skills, Opportunity and Entrepreneurship
28:10 — Questions Every Leader Should Ask
30:30 — Staying Grounded in Turbulent Times
31:40 — Closing
There's a dimension here where I think we are underestimating human ingenuity and adaptivity. As much as I buy into how much AI is going to transform the world around us, I tend to bet always on humans who are so extraordinary and adaptive.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Made to Doom, the podcast exploring the ways people can still be the most important part of the transformation of our economies and society. I'm your host, Florian Hoffman. Listen on to find out more. Let's get right to it. On the question of how safe is AI. It's a question we're all grappling with, no matter whether it's a dad, a teacher, a CEO, or government leader. Do we understand enough of what we've unleashed to be able to judge its impact on our world? Absolutely thrilled to speak with Laurie Richardson, Vice President of Trust and Safety at Google about these questions. Laurie's career started far from Silicon Valley in Washington, D.C. actually, as a lawyer and later chief of staff at the U.S. Treasury Department during the Obama administration. Joining Google, she was senior advisor to the CEO and today runs the global team deciding how AI policies impact billions of people's speech and safety online, including protecting older adults from AI-driven scams. Trust and safety might be the purest test of this show's whole question. How can AI serve people? And Laurie makes that call every day at a scale very few others get to do. In our conversation, we're touching on what government taught her that came handy in Silicon Valley, how AI is transforming the way she and her team are overseeing trust and safety, and how she deals with the responsibility of her role. Here's my conversation with Laurie Richardson and Joy. Laurie, we're sitting here, San Francisco Presidio. It's much colder than I had expected outside of Foggy. And it's amazing to have you with us. You've had such a distinguished career up to this point between government and now at Google leading trust and safety. And so what we were talking already downstairs with some of the entrepreneurs I wanted to double down on a bit is sort of from the experience of living in these different worlds and navigating that when you switched what do you think Silicon Valley was able to learn from government and vice versa?
SPEAKER_01Well, thanks for the question and thanks for having me here today to speak with your amazing community. It was real truly inspiring to see the young people in our conversation previously and what they're up to in the world that they're building. So I have had such a fascination with that question that you're asking, which is sort of what can government learn from the private sector and what can the private sector learn from government? I was so privileged to be able to serve in the Obama administration and then in 2017 to come out to Silicon Valley at a time when a lot of really deep questions were being asked about the impact of tech on the world around us. And to take some of the dexterity and public policy thinking that I was able to develop and hone in government and bring it out to my job at Google. And I've had a few jobs there. But the the crux of, I think, the skills that transfer from government to the private sector. And I was just having this conversation with some of the, some of the folks downstairs, are you learn in government how to look at a scenario where you don't really have a perfect option and you have to navigate your way forward. So I was at the Treasury Department and we dealt with all kinds of situations where we didn't exactly have an easy course to chart through post-financial crisis, Puerto Rico and its financial challenges, Brexit. And in all of those scenarios, you're trying to look at data, you're bringing the right experts together, you're challenging and setting up a conversation. And you're figuring out if I don't have the perfect option, what's the right next step? So I was able to use that skill at Google and try to navigate through some of the thorny questions that we were facing at the time. When I first got to Google, we were thinking a lot about the world that was coming with AI, and we were thinking about crafting a set of principles that would help orient us toward that future and commit us to the kind of future we wanted to build. So I got to help write and lead the team that wrote the original AI principles at Google. We were thinking a lot about content challenges and what we owe not just to our end user, but to the world around us. That government skillset is so um helpful when you're navigating very thorny, hard problems. And I learned a lot at Google too, things that I didn't know when I was in government. I'm happy to speak about that.
SPEAKER_00Yes, please. So what's the what's the flip side of the coin there?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So the thing that I found and that I had to sort of absorb and learn how to work within is a company like Google, and I think this is true for the valley at large, that really thrives on innovation and good ideas, is built around hearing every voice in the room. And government is much more hierarchical, and it's there's a utility to that because you understand who's accountable for a decision, and that decision is made, and there's an order around it, and it's documented, and you move on. It's a lot wilder and looser in the decisions are made in ways that are that are quite different than that. And there's a benefit to that. It means that good ideas can be heard, amazing breakthrough, world-changing products can be built by a small team over the weekend. Um, there are lots of examples out there of how that happened. And I think that culture is a really beneficial one to practice curiosity and growth. Um, and it changed me as a leader too, because I had to find ways to listen to more voices than I maybe was was used to listening to and to sort good ideas and to try them. There's also a culture around not getting it right and that being okay, because part of the sort of natural innovation climate is you're gonna fail a lot before you get it right. And that's built into the DNA of my company and others like ours. Um, I was I was telling the folks um earlier that there's a leader at Google that I respect a lot that keeps a failure resume on his on his wall and he shows all the times that he tried to do something and it didn't work out, and he encourages his team to do the same. I think that's really important. When when there's no one right answer um and you're trying to figure out uh the world that we're creating and how we're gonna navigate through it, understanding that you may not get it right the first time, the second time, the third time, and being able to be okay with that and look at it objectively and understand what went wrong and then move forward, that's super important. And I've I've really loved learning how to do that better at Google.
SPEAKER_00And if we translate that now into the concrete day-to-day decision making, how do you how do you practice that then in in the day-to-day? I'm spending a lot of time with leaders at the moment, and what I'm seeing is that there's such a sense of unclarity about the future and the sort of the multiple shocks that everybody is dealing with and the speed of AI. And so a lot of people I think are trying to focus very much on the short term, and you're basically in your role having to take decisions that have repercussions far into the future, and at the same time, you're probably not gonna have all the perfect information at one point in time because the situation is evolving so quickly. So, what's your, if you like, your analytical or mental framework for saying, okay, when is when do I have enough information to be able to take a decision? And how do I get to that point?
SPEAKER_01So, when I'm thinking about something like what does good and safety look like when a product is launching, just to make it concrete. I want to understand what I know and what the team knows from their testing and from their training and from the various engagements that we've had with the technology before it's out in the world. And I want to understand what we don't know, what we haven't been able to test for, where the spots are that we may be surprised. If I have a good grasp on that, it sort of helps me get to a decision of okay, should we launch or not? And that question itself is not binary. So I think understanding where questions aren't binary and you have more optionality within them is really important. So we may launch, but we may not launch to everyone, all of our consumers all at once. We may stage it, we may go to more sophisticated developers, our enterprise customers first before we bring a new feature to a broad audience. Once we bring a feature to a broad audience, we may test against it and try to learn and before we refine it further. And so I think for me, taking a step back, good decisions are made with data that you look at very clearly, with an understanding and a depth around where you don't have answers and being very clear-eyed about that, knowing what your levers are for decisions, and really being able to tell the difference between when is something final and we're locked into it, and when can I make a provisional call, continue to monitor it and adjust as we go. And so much of what we do calls for that. And thankfully, the nature of technology is that you're always iterating, you're always growing, you're always adapting. So if you're smart and you're learning as you go, you can really bend it even and make it even better over time.
SPEAKER_00And even from uh, because you deal with a lot of regulatory questions, right? Is that that sense of being agile in the decision making possible in that context? And how do you deal with uh sort of also questions of trust even within your team? Of do we do we feel comfortable taking decisions knowing that the ground beneath our feet is shifting so quickly?
SPEAKER_01I have found the transition. So in the space that I'm accountable for, we've become much more highly regulated with the passage of the Digital Services Act and now the AI Act, which just came into effect this month, and lots of other regulations from around the world. So when I joined the team four years ago, we didn't have such broad, sweeping content regulations. There were, there were some, but not the state that we're in. And one of the elements of my job that I have found most fascinating is being able to say to the team, and we have incredible compliance experts who work to make sure that we really are hitting our marks and being responsive and reporting and being transparent and meeting all the requirements of the regulation, how much of this is consistent with what we're already doing? We may not have been documenting it in the exact same format that they're asking for, but when we were making decisions just based on what's right for our users, how close were we coming to where the regulation was ultimately asking us to go? And I have found that it's often very, very aligned. And this isn't true, I think, for every space, every sphere, every vertical that's now subject to more regulation. But in the content space, it happens to be true so far that if you're asking questions and you're responsive to the true needs of users, you tend to be fairly aligned with where regulatory regimes are ending up. There are, you know, we've always looked at content harms and verticals. We've always tried to test our policies and our operations and our enforcement against those. The DSA asks us to do that in a much more formal way and we're able to do it, but it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of what we're doing. We're always going to be innovating a little bit ahead of where regulation is. And so I think our North Star as a company and as a team has to be on thinking about what's good for our users and what's responsible to societies that we operate in that we're accountable to. If we get those right and we have to be agile in getting them right, then we tend to be in line with what regulation is ultimately asking us to do. And thankfully, the new regulatory regimes are agile and flexible enough to account for the way technology shifts and changes, allow us to innovate on the responsibility side. And so far, that's working pretty well.
SPEAKER_00And so when, so just to to finishing that piece on the on the leadership skills or practice, when somebody comes to you and says, Well, I'm working in a very different industry, and I see that people are pretty much fear-driven at the moment, or they're concerned, or they're much more conservative than they used to be about taking big decisions because they have the feeling that things are moving so quickly. How what advice would you give them from your own perspective in terms of how decision making can be bold and pragmatic and agile at the same time?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I look, I think it's a hard set of questions. We don't want to we want to recognize that the future is dynamic and is changing fast. And I try to build my team in a way where you can't always plan for exactly what's going to happen, but you can prepare. So understanding what does it mean for my team to prepare for the future no matter what comes, I know what they need to be good at. They have to be really strong critical thinkers, they have to have beginners' mindsets, they have to take all the context from what they've learned over 20 years of doing trust and safety, and they have to ask themselves questions anew. They have to have courage and be able to challenge themselves, their team members, and others. And all of those are sort of evergreen. And I think if we build that sort of preparation into the DNA of the team, we're going to be prepared for whatever future comes our way. We also have to have mechanisms and forums and governance structures that allow us to name a problem statement and adjust to it quickly when it does arise. And so because I exist in this very dynamic content space, whatever's happening in the world plays out across Google platforms. And that means I have to have a team that actually is designed to very quickly account for anything that's changing in the world and the way that it may play out. So I'm actually, I've actually built mechanisms into the team that allow us to be agile and responsive.
SPEAKER_00So almost like task forces or Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I mean, it's a we call it a strategic command team. And so whenever anything hits a certain threshold, a major war breaks out, uh, a terrorist event, something that is going to change the nature of the way that information is flowing and create more of a high-stakes information environment, that team quickly is able to take command, understand and get to the bottom of what's happening, and be very thoughtful and agile about how to move us forward.
SPEAKER_00And speaking about team, I'm I'm super curious, how is AI changing the way you work and the way you guys work together?
SPEAKER_01The power of AI for this type of work is so palpable. Um, and and so what do I mean by that? My team writes policies for our mini products across Google. So Google Ads, Google Play, Cloud, Search, and our Gen AI products. Um, we enforce those policies. So we have analysts that actually look at data, reams of data of what's happening on any given day in our products and try to pick out where abnormalities or aberrations are showing us that things aren't working as they should. Being able to just see more and detect patterns more quickly is a huge breakthrough for the team. They're able to, we depend on classifiers and they, the classifier development went from six months to two days to be able to be able to detect and pattern match a particular new and emerging harm. Um, and I'm watching the teams innovate in really exciting and interesting ways. Like they know their own space the best, and we're giving them access to tools to try it and trying to create a culture of experimentation and innovation and making it okay to not get it perfect so that we can, you know, shorten the low part of the J curve and climb very quickly to be able to use these tools. There's always going to be like way more to do than we're able to do. Fraud, scams, child safety, agentic harms, there's so many new and cross-cutting types of abuse. Um, so being able to just stay a step ahead is requiring us to adopt very sophisticated tools and approaches. And the teams really embrace that.
SPEAKER_00And are you then sitting at home sometimes in the evening and uh talk to your partner or friends about, oh, I might not need this team in the future anymore? Or, you know, there's like seeing deficiencies or the opportunity for pivoting towards doing other work. This this whole question of the human in the loop. Do you have the feeling that in a couple of months or years, certain part of the um writing of policies can be done solely by AI? And do you have philosophically the feeling that there always needs to be a person there? What's the do you have a conviction there?
SPEAKER_01We have done historically a lot of manual work that we can that is not fun to do, that we can lift out of in a in a way that we couldn't have before. And that's actually pretty exciting for the team members. But the scale of the problem that we are facing and accountable for continues to grow. And in fact, of course, with AI, bad actors are able to use it and leverage it in ways that we sort of have to stay one step ahead of. So I see a future where the teen is being challenged to lift up, to be critical thinkers, to be strategic leaders of their space and orchestrators, and not trapped and stuck in the sort of manual individual reactive feedback loops. And that feels, by and large, of a really positive future to me. How we get from here to there and acknowledging and recognizing that there is a lot of very natural, and I feel it too sometimes, concern about not wanting to give over what's best and the kind of work that we do and that we need to do, and not wanting to sort of turn that over and let go of it. I think you have to have a lot of very honest and open conversations as a leader right now with your team, listen to them, hear them, and really understand and paint a future that is human-centered, but where we're using these tools to just do what we do better.
SPEAKER_00And uh, and can you speak a bit more about because you have a you're overseeing a lot of people, right? When you're saying hearing their concerns and their voices, sort of is there a practical how-to guide on how to lift our teams up that's been working for you.
SPEAKER_01Well, I first of all, I'd love to see hear, you know, how you counsel and advise on this, because that's sort of the key question. Um, we tried to take a dual approach. One is I mentioned encouraging a lot of experimentation and safety around experimentation and creating a culture around that in the way that we just talk as a team, setting North Star goals, really making it part of our language, sharing and up leveling the vocabulary that we're using, um, debating and lifting up when we have a very specific tool that's solving a specific problem, creating forums and mechanisms where that information can be shared from team to team. And so that's sort of the bottoms-up approach that we've taken. But we also have a tops-down approach where we're really trying to look at clinically what skills do our people need to be able to succeed? What programs and tools are we gonna have to personally transform and change? And what's our accountability around all that? What goals should we set and how do we keep ourselves accountable? So we have a program in place that is trying to do that tops down. We've we've had some interesting experiments. We had this um metric that we were using, which is just AI touch rate, how many of our individual analysts are actually touching AI in their day-to-day job. It turned out to be sort of a poor proxy because it doesn't tell you much about transformation and uplift that we're getting. And by the way, with the cost of compute, it's not obvious that just because you can use AI, you should use AI in every single process. And so we've we've pushed our metrics and tried to get to something that is more meaningful, that is about impact and output and insight. Um, and we're continuing to iterate on that. But I think it's taken uh it's taken a couple of years to even make sure that we're asking the right questions. And I think there's a humility to that that's like very real that we need to acknowledge that change is incremental and hard, and that you can spend six months chasing one vision that turns out not to be the right transformation for you. And so I think we've had to stay, and we will continue to stay very agile and curious about what real transformation looks and feels like.
SPEAKER_00It's super interesting. I mean, that's very similar to the experience that we're making in with working with leaders in different industries, and you know, especially non-tech industries, uh, a lot of the focus is in AI technology implementation. And then afterwards, the question okay, how do I get my people to actually use it? Yeah. And then the currency becomes adoption, or and adoption is in the end not necessarily creating value. Right. Right. And so and so what what I'm seeing is that leaders and teams that are actually putting the people at the core of the transformation of introducing AI and utilizing it instead of the afterthought of here's something that you now need to use, and I'm measuring how you use it, uh, they are much more successful. And but it also means it's a different mindset from the top-down strategy, technically. Exactly. Right. But you basically need to get your people on board for a joint understanding of where you're going. And the North Star conversation that we had earlier today, um, uh that that's not so easy sometimes.
SPEAKER_01Our most successful, I think, bursts of progress have been when we frame exercises around what we will call in the tech industry a demo slam, where teams can come in, bring an idea, you're given a time limit. It's super fun, it's competitive, they show the front to of the way that they're transforming their space. They get inspired by each other. We've had a lot of success. I have a leader who sits in India who's been incredibly inspirational and like encouraging his team to just play and creating fun and a celebratory culture around it. We've learned the most, I think, from that, from that sort of activity. And it's, and then of course, you have to have what are my goals and how am I measuring against them? But when we're really getting in and experimenting and playing, we're making a lot more progress than otherwise.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that sounds sounds super cool also to actually observe the team since he's working.
SPEAKER_01It's so inspiring. It's so inspiring. And some of them have had ideas that become real features that get built into products and really change the way that Google products work. So it's very cool.
SPEAKER_00I'm super curious when we sort of um leave Google behind a little bit, how you personally look at the bigger picture of how we're talking about AI right now. And you know, there's this whole debate are we looking at the bubble or is it just shifting in ways that we can't even perceive? Um, if you had to sort of just anecdotally um uh give sort of a sense of what's a piece where you say this is where you think we're we might be overestimating what AI does or how it changes our world? And maybe also something where you feel that people are not even understanding yet how it will shape the way we're gonna live in the future.
SPEAKER_01Uh such a great question. Um I am a believer that this we are truly in a moment of deep, uh pervasive, profound transformation. And I believe that because I touch the technology every day and because I'm leading a team that is going to be heavily, heavily impacted by it. Um and and so I don't sort of buy into discussion about whether the whole thing, I don't think there's I don't I sort of don't think it can be overhyped in terms of the real transformational potential of everything that we care about, of how we learn and how we communicate and uh how we how we do jobs that are meaningful to us. I think there's a lot of change that's ahead for us that's very, very real. There's a dimension here where I think we are underestimating human ingenuity and adaptivity. As much as I buy into how much AI is going to transform the world around us, I tend to bet always on humans who are so extraordinary and adaptive. I mean, all I have to look at is my own team that did not have the vocabulary that they have now three years ago and are world-class experts in what they're doing using these new tools and then how to shepherd them responsibly into the world. I've seen this hyper adaptive culture able to learn new vocabulary, learn new techniques, um, figure out how to challenge each other in ways we couldn't have imagined, you know, five years ago, exactly how it would play out. We of course knew that this was coming, but we didn't know exactly how it would look and feel. And I've watched the team adapt a lot. And so I think that's true in education too. I think that young people are gonna learn how to remain human-centered in the way that they learn and challenge themselves and grow. One of the things that I've thought was most interesting about adaptivity online is there's a culture where young people actually read comments under, you know, they sort of crowdsource veracity of information online. We've done some research on that, but I think it's so fascinating. It's not something we the products were designed for necessarily, but it is something that they have learned to do to be able to try to separate truth from falsity. So I think there's there's a positive feature that is hard to imagine as much as there is a feature that we may be worried about that is that is daunting and hard to imagine. That I but I have faith in humanity to adapt in ways that are gonna surprise us to the positive.
SPEAKER_00And let's stick to the moment of uh of education a little bit. So the what are then the skills that you feel you mentioned a couple of them, right? Critical thinking, sort of a beginner's mindset, curiosity. Um, but if I'm sort of thinking, I'm, you know, I've um I've gone through high school, I uh went to like we did, you know, that got a bachelor's, then went into grad school. Um and now I'm facing a reality where it's going to be very hard at in certain countries to get a good entry-level job, right? Because the requirements are shifting so quickly. How can I keep evolving? What should I learn? What capabilities should I um uh sort of try to know more about or or uh acquire?
SPEAKER_01So I'm inspired by the potential for entrepreneurship. I'm from Macon, Georgia, and I know so acutely. I came up in public schools in Macon and I know, I know that talent and opportunity are not distributed equally. And so the lower barrier to entry to being able to code and design and build and launch is something that I find really exciting. I think about people I went to high school with who could not have imagined their way into a future like that because they didn't have access to or insight into the institutions that would teach you how to do that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I think there's something really powerful that is that we're at the cusp of here. Um, and I don't say that to underestimate the challenges in the shifting job market and in the generations of folks that may struggle as we go through this transition and try to find our way through it. Um, but I know you're doing really interesting work in this space as well and trying to think about, okay, well, if it's not going to look like this, what can it look like? And where is the new opportunity? And I see a lot of that too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm I'm super excited about this piece that uh what AI does, it it democratizes, I think, the opportunity for local entrepreneurship. Yes. You know, that's not necessarily a venture capital-backed idea that needs to uh become a unicorn, but lots and lots of small um ideas and projects that can create jobs locally, that can solve problems locally, um, and that thereby sort of create a different type of employment than what we're seeing. I I think that's a that's for me one of the most positive uh sort of visions that that I've heard and that I believe in next to maybe healthcare and personalized healthcare and all of that.
SPEAKER_01Personalized healthcare is very powerful and exciting too. And there's so many fields and industries that are ripe for transformation: government service delivery, healthcare, science, innovation on the sort of medical front. It's really exciting what we're on the cusp of, and I can just see whole new swathes of ways of working and thinking and challenging ourselves and creating breakthroughs are ahead.
SPEAKER_00So let's maybe, if I made the last question that I'll ask you, um, sort of switch from the the young people that are just growing into this economy to people that are currently um having the burden or the privilege to calling the shots. And you said you're quite optimistic about, you know, positive outlook on how humans will shape this incredible power. Um what do you think, you know, ministers or people in government, but also the CEOs, um, the board members that are listening to this, what are the questions that they should ask themselves? Or maybe what are also some of the questions when it comes to trust and safety or also broader mandates of what business does in society that they should be looking into when it comes to AI in order to actually push forward more the positive narrative instead of the concerns?
SPEAKER_01I think to be able, I think that every leader should be experimenting and touching this technology for themselves. Find ways to make it relevant to you, use an agent to help organize your inbox or your calendar and start to ask questions and think about what's what the utility and usefulness is. So I think the first is to become literate in and of yours, you know, to equip yourself to really be able to understand what we talk about when we talk about AI. That's sort of table sakes. Um I think that being trying to be optimistic but grounded and understanding that change is not going to be linear, um, and preparing ourselves for a future where we're gonna have to have very grounded ways of asking hard questions of our industries, of our companies, of our teams, um, to take account of the moment we're in and be able to adapt toward it and deal with difficult moments, understanding there will be ups and downs in the way the economy adapts. I think all of this is something that leaders should be absorbing and preparing for. I mean, we've seen it play out where leaders are that are trained for one thing or came up in in one skill set now also have to be, you know, chief communication officers and crisis managers. And they're also gonna have to be transformation leaders. And so just building that toolkit for yourself, challenging yourself in it, and then being able to be as calm and steady presence for your team as you can during turbulent times, I think is what we're being called to do right now.
SPEAKER_00Last question when you talk about turbulent times, when I can imagine you have lots of moments that seem uh quite turbulent. What's sort of the the go-to moment or the the sort of your energy driver or element of peace that you go to that gives you the calm and the the level of um maybe um just um relaxation in order to deal with what you're dealing on on a daily basis?
SPEAKER_01What's thanks for asking that question because when I became a leader, I didn't have a good enough answer and I really struggled. So I had to learn what works for me. So it's for me, it's a couple of things. Nature is really important and remembering and stepping back and walking through the redwoods and thinking about how long they've been there and how much longer they've been there than me and my human concerns is really a holy experience for me. Breath work and prayer, really important to step back, find my center, be able to connect with something bigger and family and people that I love. Very important to just have human connection and touch and laughter. Um, all super important to be able to get through the hard times that we live in and the awesome times that we live in.
SPEAKER_00Lori, thanks so much for being with us today. Thanks for great.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Made To Do. If you enjoyed the show, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find us. You can find show notes, links, and more at thedo.world or join the conversation on my LinkedIn Hello. Until next time, I'm Florin Hoffman, and I hope you're inspired to get out there and do.