As senior leaders we want to focus on the key conversations to have with ourselves, our leadership team, teams and our organizations around change and AI.
What are the essential three conversations to have? We will explore this topic.
Martin discusses the role of a leader as a change champion during a time of change, such as the introduction of AI. He emphasizes the importance of retrospection and self-examination in understanding how leaders and organizations respond to new technologies. He suggests that leaders should reevaluate their belief systems around new tech, especially AI, as it may not follow the normal hype cycles of older technologies. He also encourages leaders to create a culture of engagement and safe spaces for open, growth-based conversations.
In response to a question about whether it's correct to approach AI with a system geared towards yesterday's enterprise, Martin asserts that yesterday's enterprises need to update themselves to stay competitive and take advantage of new opportunities.
Martin then discusses the importance of an organization's culture in challenging leaders. He emphasizes the need for an environment open to challenging and being challenged, and for leaders to model being challenged. He also highlights the importance of having a diverse set of perspectives and developing narratives through storytelling and reflective listening.
Martin also talks about the role of leaders in guiding decisions based on context, understanding, and responsibilities for outcomes. He stresses the importance of supporting people through the losses that come with change and offering opportunities for relearning to those who show the capacity to adapt.
In the third conversation, Martin talks about the importance of continuous learning and adaptation in the face of AI's potential to change current and future paradigms. He suggests promoting experimentation and scaling successful insights to deliver more significant, holistic solutions.
Finally, Martin discusses how to get started with these conversations and the leader's role as the champion of adaptive change. He offers various tools, workshops, and techniques to support leaders in this role.
As senior leaders we want to focus on the key conversations to have with ourselves, our leadership team, teams and our organizations around change and AI.
What are the essential three conversations to have? We will explore this topic.
Martin discusses the role of a leader as a change champion during a time of change, such as the introduction of AI. He emphasizes the importance of retrospection and self-examination in understanding how leaders and organizations respond to new technologies. He suggests that leaders should reevaluate their belief systems around new tech, especially AI, as it may not follow the normal hype cycles of older technologies. He also encourages leaders to create a culture of engagement and safe spaces for open, growth-based conversations.
In response to a question about whether it's correct to approach AI with a system geared towards yesterday's enterprise, Martin asserts that yesterday's enterprises need to update themselves to stay competitive and take advantage of new opportunities.
Martin then discusses the importance of an organization's culture in challenging leaders. He emphasizes the need for an environment open to challenging and being challenged, and for leaders to model being challenged. He also highlights the importance of having a diverse set of perspectives and developing narratives through storytelling and reflective listening.
Martin also talks about the role of leaders in guiding decisions based on context, understanding, and responsibilities for outcomes. He stresses the importance of supporting people through the losses that come with change and offering opportunities for relearning to those who show the capacity to adapt.
In the third conversation, Martin talks about the importance of continuous learning and adaptation in the face of AI's potential to change current and future paradigms. He suggests promoting experimentation and scaling successful insights to deliver more significant, holistic solutions.
Finally, Martin discusses how to get started with these conversations and the leader's role as the champion of adaptive change. He offers various tools, workshops, and techniques to support leaders in this role.
Martin: [00:00:05] Hi, this is Martin West. Thank you for making time today to be part of this this video LinkedIn event. I'm going to be talking about the essential conversations for senior leaders to lead complex change. In that I'll be talking about some important. Considerations for how we respond to generative AI change. And as leaders. One of the parts of the conversation is about how our current belief systems and our current responses to new tech, may not be the right response for. how we treat generative AI. We're expecting generative AI to be an accelerating technology, so increasing with power and change, and it's already had a big impact. And we only expect that to get greater. So I'll be talking about that. One of the questions I wanted to start with was how should we respond to gen AI as we've as should that be as we have been responding to prior new technologies? And if not, what should we be doing differently? I hope during this, this next half hour we'll be able to interact via the chat. I've got some questions, you know, please provide answers if you want to. And also you can raise questions and make comments. And let me tell you a little bit about Janars, my company before I get started. we help leaders lead difficult conversations about change that needs to happen.
Martin: [00:02:03] And we have a conversational platform where you can have these three conversations that we're talking about. And if you're interested in in seeing a demo of that platform, please put demo in my LinkedIn, the DM me on my LinkedIn or put demo the word demo in the in the chat if you're interested. Um. So let me move on to the first slide. The agenda for today is to talk about the about technical and adaptive changes and how we're responding to that, both types within generative AI. And then talk about the three conversations and how the leader is is the change champion for those three conversations. And then to wrap up, we'll talk about some of the resources that we can help with and provide. So. The first question that we wanted to get into was how would you balance traditional response with an adaptive response? So if you could put your answers in the chat and we'll at the end of the section, we'll refer to them and maybe read out a few. And if you've got any questions, please also put those questions in the chat. I'll definitely respond to all of the questions following the event, but hopefully if there's a couple of questions that sort of add a lot of value, we'll we'll bring them up and and talk to them during the session.
Martin: [00:03:40] But there's limited time. So in terms of. Talking about. Technical versus adaptive change. They often come packaged together. As you see the pictures on the left, they sort of get put in a box together and they travel and sometimes separate. Separation is difficult, but sometimes it's obvious. So we thought we'd start with a few definitions to challenge. These are problems that we know how to solve. We have existing knowledge and expertise. Some people think of them as known unknowns. A typical example would be a complex implementation, which is repetitive. And we know we know the process. It's it's not adaptive. It's known. And it just needs to be iterated and improved. And we see people responding. And we've responded in the same way to the generative AI, you know, to do experiments, to set up a cycle of do, learn, check, explore, experience a number of different use cases, a wide range of them if possible, to look at where the landscape is going. What is the vision? What is the roadmap? What should we be looking out for? It makes a lot of sense to try and build out that sort of knowledge. Others have developed AI thought leadership groups and have developed governance around all of this activity, and these are sort of essential learning journeys, tactical technical solutions to the AI and insufficient in total in terms of a generative AI response.
Martin: [00:05:25] So when it comes to the adaptive element of Gen-AI, this is where it's sort of more fundamental change. And we need to develop new insights. And we don't necessarily know the end state or the end outcomes. And while we've got a bit of a path to get there to sort of learn, we don't really know all the steps and we'll learn by and build up knowledge by co-evolving together as a collective. This is not something to get pushed down and sort of directed. It's something that has to be cooked together. And some people refer to these as unknown knowns and require they require us to potentially change our beliefs, our values and our ways of doing things. You can see some of the impacts already, like if you look at education, AI is at posing immediate threats to the current status quo. There are exciting challenges, but they're also somewhat threatening, especially if you've been a teacher for 25 years and you've always done it some way and you pride yourself. Your identity is connected with your subject, and you know, the ability to teach has been sort of based on recollection of facts and being able to bring facts in a structured way together.
Martin: [00:06:53] And that's something that now ChatGPT does. So it's a major fundamental change. Other industries are going to be impacted differently at different times. As AI evolves, there will be more industries even more impacted than we're seeing today. And so the the idea is that when we're responding to adaptive challenges that demand us to to transform, this is a moment to determine how we want to respond and this is where the true leadership shines, is in making that adaptive. response to taking the next step and getting whether we've we've got the crisis now or we'll get it in the future. Getting there first, getting that understanding, building that resilience to to change is, is is critical because as we talked about, the technology is going to accelerate. So if we aren't in the game, if we aren't building resilience, if we aren't building that capability to change now, then we're going to be way, way more behind when that change accelerates. And so leading leading a change starts with leader retrospection. That's on the next section. So I'm going to bring up Faisal and Saqib. And are there any questions, any answers in the chat that you want to bring up and talk about?
Faisal: [00:08:37] No, there is no answers or there just.
Martin: [00:08:50] Now I'm going to talk more about the the three conversations and how the leader is the change champion. So the question we're going to be asking here is what do you need from a senior leader at this time of change or as a senior leader, what is required from you at this time?
Martin: [00:09:36] So the first step is to embrace the self through retrospection Either as an individual or as a leadership group, and examine How we respond, what our beliefs are, And once we do that, we suspend what we know. So for instance. Jeffrey Moore's. Crossing the chasm how do we respond to new technology? Are we innovators? Are we early adopters? Early majority, late majority or laggards? And as a leader, we've probably come to a stance around for the company and for yourself around when we should respond. You know, are we at the front of the hype cycle or not? What are our actions now and then? Do we sort of investigate a little bit now and or do we jump right in.
Martin: [00:10:49] So these are these are sort of belief systems that we have around new tech. And. It's important to reevaluate those based on The new reality of AI. if we were early majority for. Prior technologies. This may be an issue for us, or may not be an issue for us when it comes to AI, because this technology, as we talked about, is going to accelerate and therefore it's not going to follow the normal hype cycles that we've seen of older, prior different technologies. At least that's that's my belief. And so working at who we are in this moment and working out what our beliefs are, do we have allegiances to shareholders expect us to be steady and or do we have commitments to older processes or older technologies? what are our beliefs around all of these these different things so that we can determine the right strategy to respond to AI once we've looked at our identity, we're able to then look at the reality of of what we're facing with, with fresh eyes. And this is a moment to re-see, to not only look at the technology and the opportunities there and the the threats there, but also to look at our biggest dreams as a company, our challenges and constraints.
Martin: [00:12:48] And I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go forward. But it's not just a matter of just looking at the AI changes. So at this time of uncertainty, whether we have an existential crisis today or tomorrow about this change and what is needed for us as a leader, and we talk a little bit about that in the next slide. We're asking the leader having done the retrospection, to lead from a place of uncertainty, with vulnerability based on the learnings from the introspection to help build a culture of engagement and safe, safe spaces to allow and encourage people to. To support people in expressing themselves. Challenging the ideas that people have and really having an open growth based conversation. And and we're also asking the leader to be part of the introspection sessions with the team and be engaged with the collective on challenges with mind, heart and gut and hear the variety of different voices that are around and be part of the conversations as you gather data, prioritize, have small group conversations, have collective conversations, and reflect on your identity in response to these new learnings and and picking out core messages from from those learnings to help communicate to the broader teams and the broader collective and explore old patterns with a new set of eyes. do we have any any answers to this question?
Faisal: [00:15:01] No, there is one question. This process appears to be well established and built on previous charts, as AI is new, like nothing before. Is it correct to approach with a system that is generated toward yesterday's enterprise?
Martin: [00:15:50] yesterday's enterprises have to update themselves with. This new options like to stay competitive to to take up the opportunities that there are now available to them. it's important that. businesses want to be able to do that. I hope that answers that question. Thank you for the question, and thank you for bringing it forward.Faisal.
Martin: [00:16:31] So the next question is you don't have to answer this in chat if it's private. But I'd like you to think about how your organization culture is around challenging leaders.
Martin: [00:16:47] This is the starting point for resolving collective. This is the second part. Second conversation. This conversation starts with storytelling and reflective listening and we request of the leader. To create an environment that is open to challenging being there, open to being challenged. And each people are open to challenging each other, and we ask them to take a collaborative problem solving stance as part of the collective and participate. And it's very easy for leaders to to be the loudest voice in the room and try, you know, try not to be that loudest voice. And there's a number of techniques we talk, we'll talk about to help with that. we're asking the leader to model being challenged, making it acceptable and making it a normal thing for any level of the organization to have a challenging conversation with another member of that organization. And the second part is ensuring an inclusive set of perspectives are included.
Martin: [00:18:06] And we have a comprehensive set of diverse perspectives from the edges of and different parts of the system overall. And where the gaps in that, in that set of perspective, those are identified. And we have learning journeys to to ensure that we understand within the collective that the diverse set of perspectives are represented as part of this resolution, collective process and then more about developing these narratives, people telling individual stories, people working in small groups to try to tease them out. There's a number of methods that I mentioned at the bottom here for doing that.
Martin: [00:19:00] So this this next slide is about taking collaborative problem solving stance. And the role for the leader is to be present in these conversations to enable the collective voice, and has a specific role around guiding decisions because of the context and understanding and. Responsibilities for outcomes and playing that role as a guiding of decisions. The ideas that we had for leadership. Support for these conversations around how the business will operate with Gen-ai, exploring the today's paradigms, tensions and constraints. These are two factors together that should be used to help resolve the leading constraints. The leading constraint may be an existing operational, siloed a set of departments, or it could be a generative AI opportunity to automate something or to serve the customer in a better way.
Martin: [00:20:29] the idea is that both of these come together to identify the leading constraints and tensions, and supporting people in helping resolve those. One of the the core lessons I took away from the Ronald Heifetz adaptive leadership book was the idea that in change there are losses and that supporting people in those losses as part of this resolution process is an important leadership role. And wherever possible, obviously offering people who have lost opportunities, where there are opportunities for relearning to give it to those who show capacity to adapt as those in an ongoing world. Those are the, highly valuable resources. And The result here is early progress builds and adaptive resistance. So, you know, the more we start now, the better our adaptive resistance. When the technology accelerates and the impact accelerates, we're in a better position. And then lastly on participation building a culture of resolution and adaptive capacity, which is, participate in these type of conversations, sense and see the system, the people, the dynamics work with the core interests don't settle with people's positions. Dig beneath those positions just because it's always been done that way or that they want to do it that way, doesn't mean that that's the best way to do it. And so look at core interests and the deeper why in a lot of these conversations and in theory U they have this thing about letting go and prioritizing for the future, as part of our introspection, what can we let go of, and how we act with others, how we organize, what needs to be changed? What are the the core things that are yesterday's news and what do we need for the future? And that's this whole process of resolving collectively.
Martin: [00:23:12] I find that playing roles helps a lot to encourage people to make their voices louder. The Devil's Advocate is a great example of that. Put somebody in that role and and get them to play, play the devil and advocate for change and question and challenge people and ask crazy questions. It's all sort of part of that resolution process and quite a bit of fun as well. And as leaders, as as you notice, the mindset changes that we need to work through. So verbalize those and openly discuss them and the participation, again, going back to that, that role, as you know, the guide for decisions based on knowledge and agreed principles and What you see as, needed for the future of the business.
Martin: [00:24:29] So in the third essential conversation, because we're co-evolving together. We've made that decision to harness collective wisdom, and we acknowledge that the fundamental potential of AI to change current and future paradigms, that we better address it these challenges with collective insights and learnings. It's not something that can be put off to a special specialist committee, and this is how we're going to adapt to AI. that a top down approach given the complexity and adaptability of the whole system and how it needs to change, will not be an effective mechanism. Continuous learning, creating an environment for continuous learning, shifting to a growth and abundance mindset, but also being aware that AI is a is a great enabler, but also a threat and but being open to continually be aware of self, our reactions, our thoughts, how we relate to others, how we organize, what the systems do to really understand how to adapt and execute these opportunities. And, this is sort of very much a technical solution here to promote experimentation to a goal coevolve through small incremental experiments and based on the successes and the successful insights, scale those experiments to deliver more significant, holistic solutions to operations in a broader sense. And then, this is the beginning. we will see a lot more advancement and we'll need to adapt to it.
Martin: [00:26:37] at the core is this four quadrant change, this awareness of self awareness of one's habits, what one's doing, one identity in this change, how we relate to others and how we organize to understand, to adapt. And if we're if we stay open to those, we'll continually co-evolve together.
Martin: [00:27:05] So the last part is I wanted to talk a little bit about how to get started. what really summarized is the leader's role as the champion of adaptive change and Being able to embrace the toughest challenges and scale the capacity for change. As part of your response to generative AI and the changes we expect, we believe that as the senior leader, with your leadership team, this may be the most important role you have in this new environment. And we encourage you to work with these three essential conversations to lead complex change and benefit from the collective wisdom. Enjoy collaborating with your team as you deeply engage, grow, and learn from doing. We have some tools. We have some workshops. We have techniques that have been tested in adaptive change for around 25 years. So they've got a big history and a lot of success. And we want you to know that as as a leader, your leadership is fundamental to the team's growth.
Martin: [00:28:33] And I hope you can see that through through this conversation. It's really, really important. Some of the options we've got available, please DM me. In chat or DM me on LinkedIn for a guide. I will send you a guide for three conversations to lead complex change. If you'd like guidance and support for these conversations, we offer a series of workshops and we have a special that we are offering on the first workshop to cover the leadership group introspection, where we'll examine our response, suspend what we know, explore responses, the belief system, look at things with fresh eyes and be ready to lead. I also have another video event on Tuesday, November 21st where we aim to demo our Janars platform, have it, and where we've got that integrated into ChatGPT where you can develop your own expert voice for team conversations.
Martin: [00:29:54] And thank you for being engaged. Thank you for staying this long and I hope you found it useful. If you're interested, engage. Please sign up for a workshop at Genai.janars.com or chat with me. See my calendar on the button is chat with us on Janars.com and I can also be reached on this email. So thank you very much. Let me just add Saqib and Faisal to the stage. Was there anything else in the chat that we should bring out?
Saquib: [00:30:33] Hello. Hello. Can, can we can spend some two minutes on the question because as we see, some people have wanted to know how they could stabilize, how they could balance between the. Because generally the leadership is between the growth and revenues. So how when the new technologies people should adopt. So there is a there is a constraint or something. There's some uncertainty could be there to adapt AI thing. So so people want that perception also. And what's the vision should people should carry when they are going with this hype of this.
Martin: [00:31:13] maybe I could just try to summarize what I understood and you can help me. the question that is really coming is from the leadership of focused on the revenue and profitability because they see potentially AI impacting that and they're looking to protect it. so
Saquib: [00:31:49]
Martin: [00:31:50] that is a defense response to an understandable because their leaders will be expecting them to to deliver the same or the market will expect them to deliver the same level of response that they've been historically providing. And, there's a gap between the opportunities that have been created with AI and the performance necessarily of the business. And we're at a difficult time at the moment. I can say is that the technology is going to be moving fast and. If leaders aren't responding to the opportunities and looking at their belief systems and how they're responding and why they're responding in certain ways, then I think they're missing an opportunity to to take advantage of the technology and advantage of how they want to position the business forward, and taking a very strong leadership position. Maybe the reality is, and, everybody has their own constraints in what they can do within leadership. But maybe the reality is that, the the focus needs to be on the future, not not necessarily on the exact results in the next three months. And that's sort of conversations that people need to have. And that's why this is tough, right? It's extremely tough because people are demanding continuance, but they're also demanding change. And that's the balancing act. And you know, only through these type of, introspections and conversations, group conversations can these type of issues get get resolved. I don't know if does that does that help Saqib, do you think that answers some of the question.
Saquib: [00:34:10] Yeah, I think so. Martin, based on the vision we said about the what the vision should leadership leaders should see now and what to see from AI perspective. So I think that would be okay. And this is not the last session we have will have more session on these.
Martin: [00:34:28] Thank you Saquib for coming up and giving me that question. Thank you for all the questions. Thank you for staying beyond the 30 minutes. Everybody who's who's still here really appreciate you and look forward to seeing the comments in more detail following this event. I'm going to close it now because I'm over time. But thank you very much for for being here. Appreciate it.