When Emotions Become Data, Leaders Finally Hear: James Warren

Start with a bold idea: stories are data. Not the soft kind you file under “nice to have,” but structured, analysable insight that explains why people choose, stay, leave or change. We sit down with James Warren, founder of Share More Stories, to unpack how narrative plus AI can outclass dashboards built on clicks and demographics, and why the shift begins with designing for trust.

James walks us through SEEQ, a platform that invites customers and employees to share personal experiences in writing or audio, primed by sensory prompts that activate memory and emotion. Instead of over-engineered chatbots, a simple, humane flow draws out richer accounts and reduces performance pressure. Those stories are then segmented and analysed across 55 emotional signals, creating an emotional map leaders can act on. The payoff is clarity: not just what happened, but how it felt and what is likely to happen next.

We dive into privacy and ethics—anonymised identities, clear boundaries between “personal” and “private,” and reporting that avoids exposing individuals. Then we get practical about leadership. When trust is shaky, go first and model vulnerability; when trust exists, step back and listen before you speak. A recent energy-sector case shows how new hire and hiring leader stories revealed overlooked friction and emotional strain, guiding more humane fixes than another round of survey tweaks.

As AI-generated content floods every channel, authentic human voice becomes a competitive advantage. Real-time querying and emotion-aware analysis can scale insight, but meaning still starts with people willing to share. If you’re in HR, marketing, or internal comms, and you’re tired of numbers that don’t move behaviour, this conversation offers a cleaner path: fewer assumptions, deeper listening, and decisions anchored in emotion-driven truth. If it resonates, follow the show, share it with a colleague who cares about culture, and leave a review with one story you think leaders need to hear.

Chapters

• 0:00 Season Setup And Guest Preview
• 2:11 James Warren’s Journey To Story-Led Research
• 6:23 Stories As Data And Emotional Mapping
• 10:50 How SEEK Collects Authentic Stories
• 14:20 Why Not Chatbots For Capture
• 18:03 Blending Story And AI For Insight
• 22:38 Privacy, Anonymity And Trust Design
• 27:14 Convincing Leaders To Truly Listen
• 32:12 Case Study: Fixing New Hire Experience
• 36:45 The Community Of Storytellers

Transcript

Stephen King: 0:03

And welcome back, and here we are for I think episode 9 of the Incongruenti 5, which has been going so so well. I hope you've all been enjoying it. My name's Stephen King, and today I am joined once again by Radhika Mathur. Hello Rhadika.

Radhika Mathur: 0:22

Hi Stephen.

Stephen King: 0:26

So, Radhika, we've had a beautiful story today. We had a beautiful story, that's a really good way of saying it. Who did we speak to?

Radhika Mathur: 0:33

We spoke to James Warren and we talked to him about his latest venture, which is uh titled Share More Stories, and it's all about learning about customer and employee experience through AI.

Stephen King: 0:46

It is, and it's a very very for those of you who are doing research, whether it's academic or customer research, there's a very good discussion here about the strengths and weaknesses of AI chatbots and whether the old way of using uh form-based collection is still uh uh a useful uh methodology. So that was really interesting from that perspective. Uh we also looked at the importance of the listening organization uh using other data points rather than regular surveys that just keep measuring percentages on a light code scale. So this was a it was a really, really, really good conversation. Uh-code, was there a point that really stood out to you?

Radhika Mathur: 1:30

I really liked how we touched on the topics of ethics and uh privacy and what he had to say about that, and how his platform is different from many others out there.

Stephen King: 1:42

Ethics and privacy was key to making sure people feel safe about sharing what their thoughts were, especially from an employee's point of view. So, some really, really valuable content here. Uh if you're into HR or if you're into marketing or internal communications or brand building in general, this was a fantastic story. And uh if you're already, we're going to go here we go.

Radhika Mathur: 2:11

Welcome to another podcast of the Informing. A human experience insights innovator, strategist and writer, James empowers people and brands to share their stories with the world. He believes the stories we crave, the stories we learn the most from, and the stories we long to share come from a place of authenticity, courage, and curiosity. So we're proud to welcome James Warren to our podcast today. Um, for nearly 30 years, James has nurtured a passion for storytelling and entrepreneurship. During his time in Columbia University's creative writing program, James finally began writing in earnest. In 2005, he started exploring the space between publishing and technology with the digital book project and experiment in online novel writing. Around the same time, James also led various CPG brand management and business development efforts at Ultra Group, including a number of new brands and new products in its introductions. Following a successful corporate marketing career, James took the plunge and started Share More Stories in the summer of 2014, uniting his passion for stories and love for entrepreneurship. Share More Stories is a human experience research company and through its AI-powered seek platform, focuses on helping companies understand employee experience and customer experience with a focus on improving them. Welcome to the podcast, Jane.

James Warren: 3:34

Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to this conversation.

Radhika Mathur: 3:38

We're excited to have you on and learn more about Share More Stories. So let's get right into it. Our first question is: could you share some of your career history and explain what pushed you to leave corporate marketing and build Share More Stories?

James Warren: 3:53

Yeah, I mean, I think some of it you you touched on a little bit, but um I started my corporate career in communications and then eventually moved into brand management. And from that point, I got a chance early in my career to work on lots of like new things, new projects, new initiatives, new brands, new business inside the company. And that for a while really, really sort of fueled my my entrepreneurial drive. And you know, I think when you have that bug where you where you're more of a builder and you like building more than you do managing, um, it's hard to let that go. And so as my career progressed, I kept opting in for or raising my hand for more and more of those types of projects and programs where I could be leading something that the company hadn't really done before. And I it kind of goes back to this advice I got um early in my career from uh a friend we had worked on one of these really, really big complicated new projects on. And I remember him saying to me, I was maybe three or four years into my career, and he had like 25 years, and he said, you know, whenever you can in your career do something that's first, first for the company or first in the industry. Um, because you may, others may come behind you and it's their job to make it better or improve on it, but they'll never be able to say they did it first. And the amount you learn from that personally for the organization is significant. So I think that was really a driver for me. I've always sought out um things that maybe feel initially maybe complex or really hard to do. But then if you build the right team and you build the right approach and you listen deeply, you can start to find a pathway through it. And I think when it was when it was time to sort of transition career, entrepreneurship was the big, big thing that was calling me and saying it's time to do this. If I didn't do it then, I I knew I would regret it for the rest of my life. So that's that's why I took the plunge and I had a really um supportive spouse who made that a relatively easy decision. Um, because I had another friend who told me, another mentor who said, when you start a business, um, if you're already married or you have a long-term partner, it's like having another child in the family because it's it's another mouth to feed, it's it's another thing you care deeply about and want to be successful, and it will also test your your emotions from time to time. And that has been absolutely true. So that's kind of a little bit of the journey I've taken so far and why I do what I do today.

Radhika Mathur: 6:21

That's uh really interesting. Um, can you explain how your Seek platform blends narrative with data to uncover the why behind behavior?

James Warren: 6:31

Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things I like to say is that stories are data. You know, so often people will sort of juxtapose, well, you have the stories and you have the data. And I've probably been um part of that, you know, misconception myself. But the story, you know, if I if I think of data as as information, not just quantified, but qualitative information that I can make a decision on or I can put some data together, see what the picture is and start to have a point of view, then stories are absolutely data. And in fact, they they've been our original data for millennia because you know, before we could do any any number of things, we could share stories in our most tribal and even um pre-original states. That's how we communicated with one another, that's how we knew what was safe or what was dangerous, that's how we eventually moved past that state of existence and started sharing and passing wisdom. And so that to us is really the purpose of the story. It's to learn from as much as it is to connect. So in the SIG platform, what we're doing is we're asking people who maybe are consumers of a brand or associates of a company, or they live in a particular community that's navigating a certain issue or topic or challenge. We bring them into the platform, we give them a place to share their story, a personal story about that experience that's usually, you know, considerably longer than they would spend time thinking about a quick Facebook post or a tweet or what have you. So it's it's a different level of engagement for them. Um, and when they share that story, we prompt them through not only the topic, but how to get that story out of them. So we talk about their emotions, we talk about their senses, we ask them to kind of go back in their memory and recall that experience with detail. And that gives them a really um powerful feeling. Sometimes it's like catharsis, but a lot of the time it's just this idea of like, oh wow, I didn't I didn't realize I had that in me. So it's a little bit of curiosity and self-discovery. For us, it becomes, you know, the playground for data because you've got the story itself. We process those stories for emotional scores and predictions. So each story actually gets broken up into smaller segments, and we run those against a number of algorithms that we built that predict 55 different emotions. That data, those emotions and the stories themselves give us a really rich picture of who those consumers, our employees, our community members are.

Stephen King: 8:59

So that's taken into some of this technology side of the machine learning. Uh so how do you uh capture these stories? Is it uh done through text prompts? Are people talking to a chatbot? Is it done by video recordings to people sent through voice uh memos? How is it that you're collecting this uh these stories?

James Warren: 9:24

Yeah, so typically in a like in a normal research project where you would qualify individuals if they were going through research or in any other means you would have a link to a project, you'd bring them in. Um most of the most of the collection today, well, all the collection to this point has been written. We've just rolled out audio um as a collection method. So typewritten and audio stories are what we're collecting. That's because mainly those allow the participant to focus on their response, whereas the video stories tend to have the participant focus on how they look. Um, and and it's it's just a different um level of authenticity or emotional detail. When they write or when they talk about their experience, they're a lot closer in their how they're approaching the content, but also how they're sharing their perspectives and experiences. And that makes it a lot easier, uh, a lot easier for us to analyze those two methods consistently. Um when they come to the seek platform, if they've never been there, they register and then they go right to their project. They see a prompt, they see some information about that prompt, and then it just steps them through, um, getting them to a place where they've got a screen to type in, answer a few questions and they're done, or a screen where they hit the mic and record their story, um, answer a few questions and they're done. So we try to keep the story journey um as clean and simple as possible, while also recognizing that for some people, if they don't think they're a storyteller or they don't think they're a writer, that may be a barrier for them. So we want them to know like you don't have to be a professional. This isn't a matter of, you know, do you have great grammar? This is none of that is important. What's most important is you sharing your authentic experience in your voice in the platform so we can analyze it.

Stephen King: 11:06

Yeah, that's an interesting question. So is is this I'm assuming it's chatbot related, it's not uh a form related, it's a it's an interactive conversation that the that they will have, or no, it's it's a it's a form.

James Warren: 11:21

So they get to the prompt gives them a high-level prompt to think about. They might say, tell me about or think about the most um impactful travel experience you've ever had. And then it'll give them some subprompts. When you think about this, think about who you are with, where you went, maybe why you went, what you took away from that experience, and how it made you feel. Um, then we actually they'll click the next step of their journey and we will show them a series of visual cues that start them to have their sensory recall. Who do you remember being with? What were you doing? So they can click a couple of tiles that are standardized across all of our projects. Now they're a little bit more emotionally invested, and also they're bringing their memory up a little bit more. Then they click a button to the next section and they start to go through and select what do you remember tasting, smelling, um, touching, hearing. By that point, they're really activated to share their story. And so the last button that they push is I'm ready, and they get to a form where they type in their story, their title, etc. So we we don't use and don't really want to use a chat bot for that experience. We want them to feel um prompted, but also ready to really go through their own experience versus a series of QA's that build a story, if you will. We experimented with that kind of interaction early in our process and just found that it it didn't really help the participant think of their experience in a kind of complete way. It really just became a QA, which is not a bad thing. That's just a different type of capture method than what we were looking for.

Stephen King: 12:53

That's quite that's quite interesting because there uh every single type of data capture has its own strengths and weaknesses. And I don't think we've actually explored the weaknesses of chatbots um uh as much as you know it should be done. I think they they've just been rolled out everywhere. That's that's that's really interesting. Uh Radically, do we have oh sorry, go ahead.

James Warren: 13:15

I was gonna say that's an interesting point because in they are being rolled out in more and more use cases, but obviously, the you know, up until recently, the vast majority of their use cases were in a quote unquote customer service um experience, which has a lot of sort of collective memory or frustration with it. You know, like I don't have a lot of good memories of using chatbots when I wanted something done. Um, almost every chatbot experience I've ever had has frustrated the you know what out of me, the hell out of me, because I'm like, no, that's not right. No, that's the wrong question, that's all for the wrong answer, and I don't have the time or energy to fix it. And some of that has carried over into these chatbots as data capture, um, where you see a little bit of a too filtered, too formulated, too framed of a conversation that makes it hard to get what you really want to know.

Stephen King: 14:07

And I would probably predict people are a little bit scared of what is going on. I think with its aesthetic QA form, people know what they're doing. They can they can also go back and download it and print it, and there's there is that kind of familiarity with that kind of uh with that kind of tool. That's great. Radica, do we have uh what's the what's the next question?

Radhika Mathur: 14:29

Yes, um so many see storytelling and AI as opposites, one deeply human, the other mechanistic. How do you see them working together?

James Warren: 14:41

I love this question. Um you know, in the in the there is something fundamentally and and we'll see how transformative but clearly transformative in AI in terms of big tech things that have changed our lives over the last 30, 40, 50 years. And at least in today's, as far as we can see, as far as most of us can see today, it is a very, very, very powerful tool. So we're leaning hard into that. We're leaning hard into the it is a tool that can be used in a lot of different ways. Our focus on using the tool is in the analytic space to say, well, some predictive and some analytic to to predict what are the emotions that are present in these stories so that we can zoom out and have an emotional map of that group of consumers or employees. Why does that matter? Because our argument for the C-suite is demos don't really tell you anything much anymore. They they're useful in some places, but they really don't predict behavior. Even behavioral analytics are limited because while two customers or consumers may exhibit the exact same behaviors, if you don't understand their underlying motives and their context changes, one will continue to behave that way and the other person will be different. Like, what happened? And if you and if you just say, oh, that's just the you know, we didn't get it right X percent of the time, but you could get it maybe right more times if you understood the motives and the drivers. And the emotions are a really, really good way to understand that level of of driving behavior, the underlying emotions, the underlying feelings and thoughts and needs that are shaping our actions, both conscious and semi-conscious. There are certain things we do at a at a at a subconscious unconscious level all the time. We blink, we breathe. Those things, there's not a ton of emotions that we can we can you know attribute to them. Although in times of high, high stress, we know that we might blink faster, breathe deeper, breathe faster. But those are still sort of bodily responses to known things that throughout the human genome, basically, we know that we know to be scared of, we know to be anxious about, we know to be frightened, and we have a very well documented response to that. But there's a gazillion other things that as humans we experience that aren't in that pretty clearly defined bucket of normal human responses to the same set of sort of triggers or situations. And that's how we live, that's how we interact with our families, that's how we go to work, that's how we buy what we buy, um, or write what we write or say what we say. And for those types of decisions and actions, there's a lot of emotion that is behind them. That's what we're trying to quantify, that's what we're trying to decode. And so when we present our our customers back with, hey, these consumers, these are their experiences, this is what they're talking about, but this is how it's making them feel, and this is why they're expressing these stories. It's a different conversation for them in terms of what they can do with it.

Stephen King: 17:38

Privacy becomes the next thing then, because you're not just talking about uh people's cognitive uh experiences and what they actually see realize, you're getting really deep into their minds and into their into their feelings and the emotions, as you've said. Uh how are you protecting this information? How are you assuring that kind of uh privacy for the people that participate, whether it's employees or customers?

James Warren: 18:04

Yeah, great question. Um the first thing we do is you know, some of this, of course, at a system level, what do we do in our platform to keep it secure? How have we designed access to the platform? That's why you know people have to register because we have to verify that you're an individual with an identity and you're an adult. And you have a you then you then get an anonymized user ID. Some users change their ID to fit some version of their knowable identity, I guess, but most users keep that anonymized ID. And so, unless you have, say, project admin or system admin rights, you would never be able to know the person behind the ID. Um, that's one step. The second step is in how we prompt people, and the way we prompt them is we say things like, you should feel comfortable sharing, you know, this is a private and secure platform, and your your data um is anonymized, and you have the choice on how you want to express yourself. Um, I often tell people, you should feel comfortable saying things that are deeply personal, but not necessarily private. Not because we're worried about your data leaking out, but that's the kind that's the sort of security you want them to feel, that it's not, you know, an open field on their information because hardly ever do we give, do we willingly give that level of permission to companies that we work with or buy from. And so we want them to feel that same level of security that if we were in a room and you were worried about that person over there who's a supervisor knowing what you're about to say, we want you to know that you don't have to worry about that in this platform, that you can say what you need to say. But we generally encourage them, go personal, go deep. But if this is a place where the information were like, you know, confidentially HR-related, it's probably not the right venue for it. Or if this were a place where you needed to express something you would observe that would otherwise involve the authorities, probably not a good place for it. Um, but a good place to explore experiences that matter deeply to you, even personal ones, and why they impacted you the way they did. That's really what we try to focus them on, and then just reassure them in our process and our technology and our practices that their information is definitely secure. So when we're doing analyses for clients and partners, what we're really focused on is hey, let's zoom out, let's look at this group in a different way, which oftentimes really dominates what they can can handle and consume and absorb because they've rarely looked at their audiences or their teams in this sort of emotionally segmented way. They've usually only looked at them demographically and behaviorally. So that alone gives them plenty to chew on. Um, and then of course, if if certain segments are too small, you wouldn't be providing that type of information anyway.

Stephen King: 20:50

Uh the next three questions sort of are very interlinked. I mean, you we spoke earlier and you mentioned earlier about how this is like uh a new baby in the house. And I feel you, I feel that uh startup business, and you're trying to tell everyone that you have this fantastic new tool, and people are not ready to receive that information. So, how do you convince companies that uh listening to their employees, let's face it, okay, I think they're uh you uh listening to customers, I think has been grudgingly become uh a norm, but listening to employees is still uh is still quite a novel concept, unfortunately. So, how do you convince them to do though? And have you got examples of you know uh how this has worked, uh either to spot a blind spot or to prove uh something effective?

James Warren: 21:42

Yeah, I mean you hit the nail on the head. The challenge in much of business in general, but especially leadership, whether you're in the for-profit sector, not for profit sector, or public sectors, you know, a lot of our leaders who are in positions of leadership today are you know generally of a similar generation or two, and they've grown up under a certain mindset of what it means to lead, which means I gotta have all the answers. And and as one executive once said to me, um, I don't ask questions, I don't know the answer to. And I was like, How the hell do you learn anything? Um, and and I was like, I make it my business to know everything. I'm like, that's not possible. And so our biggest challenge has been to really help leaders who are willing to go down this process to get a little bit more vulnerable than they're they're typically comfortable with. And that vulnerability could show up in two ways. One, if you have trust, but your organization or a level of trust, I should say, but say your organization doesn't necessarily feel that you hear what they have to say, which by the way, if that continues to happen, you won't have trust. But let's say you're you're in that sort of place where there's room to salvage it and fix it, then your job is not to dominate the process by saying, Here's my experience, now tell me yours. Your job is literally to start with, tell me yours, because that type of group is waiting to tell you. On the other hand, if you've already lost trust or you never had it, they need to see you get vulnerable before you ask them to get vulnerable. And that leader needs to do the opposite. They need to actually say, I know this is, I'm I know I'm asking something that you might not feel comfortable with, or you might not even trust me. Let me demonstrate for you that I'm willing to be vulnerable. And they share out of an experience themselves. And so those are like two tactical approaches we take with leaders, especially on the organizational side. To your point, there's a little bit more supposed rational and objective reasoning for saying we should listen to customers. And yet, many, many leaders of companies and brands don't, because even still they have a strong belief that, you know, I know better what the I know better what this customer wants and needs than they do themselves. It's kind of almost this ego-driven violation of people's own agency. No, the customer knows, they definitely know better than you what they want and need. They still may not know all that they want and need, but I'm pretty sure they know better than you because they know their own lives, they know their own experiences. So what we're trying to do is close that gap by saying, look, when you listen to people in a certain kind of way, they tell you what you really need to know rather than just what you want to hear. And that is the shift in sort of insight and leadership action that we're trying to work with. So has it been a challenge? You bet, because we've been early for a long time. But I but I do feel of late we've started to find a really good groove where we've been able to identify our target customer much more clearly in the market and engage them. And you know, you talk about some of the success stories, that's become part of that conversation. When you're building something that's really different, it is hard to collect cases. So those cases take longer, they they're harder to validate, but if you stay at it long enough, you get them. And we've worked with, you know, organizations as recently as an energy company where they engaged us to help solve a very specific problem. They were hiring lots of people. And they said, you know, we have a feeling that our new hire experience is not very good, not just for the people we're hiring, but for the people hiring them. And that was brilliant that they were at least open enough to say that's a problem we think we have. So we engaged uh a significant percentage of all of their new hires in the past three years and all of the hiring leaders through the Seek platform to share their stories of that, you know, brand new hire or hiring process experience. On one hand, sort of not the most emotionally resonant topic, and yet those participants went to town on it. They had a lot to say about not just things like this system works or doesn't work, or I liked my cube or I didn't, but really how the experience of being recruited, hired, onboarded, and set up for success, how that experience went for them. And the hiring leaders equally were saying things like, I want to lead my team more effectively, but I'm stressed and strained and pulled in these directions because of this process. And so when you think about those kinds of insights, it really helps those executive leaders focus in on what do we need to do to make that particular process, which is, you know, only get one chance to make a first impression. How do we really go solve that problem with our with our new talent?

Stephen King: 26:30

That's that's fun because I've just seen on LinkedIn a HR manager complaining about his own HR processes and how long it takes. You're you're in charge, man. I mean, seriously. I don't think he was actually referring to his own practice, he was pointing fingers elsewhere. But I'm pretty sure there was something in there. Uh Radica, I think we're up to our last three questions. Good.

Radhika Mathur: 26:57

Um, so how does your community of 8,000 storytellers shape or challenge your work?

James Warren: 27:05

Yeah, you know, the the community we have, we we have probably even much more than that, because that's that's almost thinking about the community of people that engage with us and on our channels. And and you know, when we started building the company, we really we really had sought out, when we started building the company, we had really sought out um people who valued stories, period. Like stories are what we're building, we believe in the value of sharing them. And so we were seeking people who also had that value. As we grew, we started to attract people who also were leaning into where we were going, which is stories as insight. And so the curiosity of people started to emerge. Um, the questions that they were asking about their own experiences, about where they worked, about who they bought from and where they lived, those were starting to percolate up. And so I would say, you know, we've been able to engage our own community often, especially around new projects. Um, some of our community members are really passionate about expressing themselves and being heard. As we moved from doing this work in a largely kind of facilitated session, think, you know, focus group on steroids, which is probably not a great analogy, but it's what one of our customers once said, we used to do it all in person and then COVID hit, but we were still doing them all as sessions online. And then we said, no, we really need to move forward to make this a platform so that it's easier for people to use. My biggest fear was that we would lose the um the emotional intimacy of being in a room together, being vulnerable enough to share, and then immediately seeing that there was somebody in that room across the room or even next to you, is like, and they'll say, I can relate to that. And I valued those moments in the live sessions deeply because they were so um just emotionally rich. It was like we called it the magic moment. Everybody would be quiet, they'd start writing, and when they had time to share, they'd say, Okay, I'll go ahead and I'll share. And then immediately the room would reinforce that. So I was afraid we would lose that. And we didn't. In fact, when we went to the platform, it shocked me in our very first project that people went deeper and they had more to say. And I think some of that was because they weren't worried about being on a schedule and o'clock in a session. They weren't worried about having to even think about somebody next to them in the room because it was them and the tool. And so that's why we believe for our partners, it really is an opportunity to bring truly the voice of your customer or your employee as a leader, as an executive into your own, like at your fingertips. You know, with our with our tool, we're using a GPT type function as well for real time analysis. So if you're the CEO or the analyst, you can log in and ask questions of your story set. What are people feeling about this? How do people feel about that? And you're getting a real time answer. And so, you know, I just think that the the way the community has has grown with us, yes, people. Who probably only thought we would stay a writing platform for frustrated writers because that was our first idea, because that was the problem very close to home that I wanted to solve. As that faded quickly and we became more focused on a story sharing platform for everybody, and then a platform for really making ourselves heard, and then a platform for really developing insights so that people can deliver better experiences, the community's evolved too, but I would say they've been extremely supportive and they've grown along the way. So it's it's just made our job more fun and more interesting and even a little bit easier.

Radhika Mathur: 30:36

Yeah, that's really interesting because people do want a safe space where they can sort of share what they're thinking, what they're feeling. So having also the anonymity of being able to share it without you know being scrutinized or maybe you know put on the spot for what you've said. Uh I'm sure that is also a comforting um aspect for the people engaging in your community.

James Warren: 31:01

I think that's exactly right because even if I'm in a room, you know, we'd have sessions as small as eight people, which felt like, okay, if I if I like to write or I like to share stories, being around five, six, seven other people is not that big of a deal. But some of our sessions would be with 70 people in the room. And they'd all write and they'd all submit, but you could tell there was we had to get them over a hump of fear of being vulnerable. And they went right to where they needed to go in the platform-based experience. Because I think you're onto something there when you talk about this idea of I don't want to be not even just on spot, I don't want to be maybe observed because not a lot of people like writing in front of a lot of other people that I'm aware of. Um, so I think there's something interesting to that for sure.

Radhika Mathur: 31:44

Yeah. So um as AI tools become more common, how do you think the role of story will evolve in business and society?

James Warren: 31:53

Yeah, you know, some of these things we've already started to see, and you see it all over places like LinkedIn. Um, and then you see like the entertainment version of it on places like, you know, X and Facebook and TikTok. The amount of AI generated content that people publish as user-generated content is in in a year and a half become overwhelming. I mean, people aren't even bothering to put the little disclaimers on anymore because they don't care, and the platforms probably can't catch them. So the stuff that sort of just we have to wade through. I our bet, our belief, our our platform is built on this notion that humans still matter and human experiences still matter, and humans' abilities to express those experiences still matters. So if those things are true, um stories in one form or another are going to continue to be really, really crucial for humankind because they are a fundamental way we communicate with each other and learn from each other. The tool will change. I'm sure, you know, back in the day when the printing press first emerged, you know, people were like, you can't put that control in the in the hands of people who who aren't literate. That's a shame. And then as as other tools came, you know, my goodness, this computer is is making me write easier. Am I cheating that I don't have to think as hard and make, you know, have error-free thoughts before I write them down in long hand with this quill and this ink? You know, when people had more and more tools, people who were used to the previous tools questioned whether or not those tools gave them an unfair advantage, or even more changed the essence of what they were going to express. And I think tools always change how we express or do a thing. The question is whether or not they change it in small, incremental, in other words, tolerable ways, or whether they're changing them in transformative ways that we can't fully appreciate or understand. We might be it at that moment with the way AI content creation is at the fingertips of anybody. Um, but I also believe we're oversaturating our channels and markets with that amount of content that we won't soon be able to consume. We're racing to the bottom, and that's going to give an opportunity for people to differentiate more meaningful expressions and like stories.

Stephen King: 34:10

I've seen a lot of stuff coming for the podcasting. Uh, just on the tool that we use, it creates lovely. If we were doing video, it would create lovely little video shorts for me. I've got a number of emails from people saying, Oh, we'll go through the whole transcript and we will come up with uh summaries. Um there's there's a lot of stuff which will then transport transform that into some sort of animated news function that's going down. So and then they'll take uh keywords, and then over the course of your series, they will build up a notebook and showing all the different terms that keep repeating, gives you analysis. So there's there's there's a there's an enormous number of people who are coming up with really, really interesting ways to use all of this uh generated data. Uh uh, how do you see the future? I mean, this is I think is our last one. Uh how do you see the future of workplace listening? I mean, we've got so much content out there, we're we're we're identifying new ways of of capturing it and evaluating it. Three, four, five, ten years. We said ten years. I don't know whether it's possible to go there. But how how far ahead are you looking and on what do you think it's gonna come to in terms of workplace listening? Rather than customer listening, but workplace listening.

James Warren: 35:31

Yeah. I mean companies aren't suffering for a lack of data. They they've got plenty of data. The real the real challenge we believe is making meaning out of that data. And and it's hard to make meaning out of observed data or reported clicks and yeses data without some version of like, what's the voice behind this? You know, and and when I want to explain, like I may maybe I write something and somebody says, Can you explain it to me? That means they need my voice. My voice needs to be added to even what I've already expressed. And that's that's normal, that's human. We say things, we follow up with things, we take this is what I really mean, or this is what's really important about what I had to say. And that's hard to do in passive or extractive data collection. So the role of listening, I think, is going to become a differentiator for leaders and therefore their companies, because their ability to sift through massive amounts of passively collected, actively collected, or observed data to say what's really important about this employees' experience. We might be able to replace or at least make sense of all of this data we have over here if we just listened to this person for five minutes. And we know that to be true in human-to-human interactions. Um, when I stop presuming, assuming, and I ask a question and I get an answer. Actually, a lot can shift in a very, very short amount of time. So I so I think, you know, work is work is itself undergoing an overhaul. I think our relationship to work is is shifting both globally and definitely in certain social or socioeconomic contexts. And all of that is going to make it harder for people to navigate to what is meaningful work for me and for companies to say what is valuable work to us. And finding that balance, finding that sweet spot to me, I would bet on listening as a much better way to determine that than say just collecting 10,000 surveys.

Stephen King: 37:33

That's wonderful. I really love the way that you're approaching this in the ethical way that uh your tool could be used because I've seen so many other staff surveys and what I think they've been run to death. Uh thank you so very much, Radhika. Would you like to close us down because I think we've had that's the end of our time.

Radhika Mathur: 37:50

Yes, thank you so much for being on our podcast, James, and telling us all about Share More Stories. And for all of you guys listening, thank you for tuning in to another episode. Do like, share, and comment wherever possible, and be sure to join us on the next one.