What If Tech Could Be More Human?
In this episode of “What If? So What?” Jim Hertzfeld sits down with Kate O’Neill, tech futurist, keynote speaker, and author of “What Matters Next: A Leader's Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That's Moving Too Fast.”
Kate shares with listeners her perspective on balancing innovation with responsibility, exploring how leaders can make thoughtful decisions about technology that prioritize both human experience and business success.
Kate challenges conventional wisdom and inspires leaders to think beyond transactions to focus on what truly matters. Don’t miss this thought-provoking conversation!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kate O'Neill (00:05):
What are the decisions and actions you need
to take today and every daygoing forward to close the gap
between the most probableoutcome and the most preferred
outcome?
And truly that's a million plusdollar question, Like every
organization can benefit fromthinking that way.
Jim Hertzfeld (00:25):
Welcome to what If so what, the podcast where we
explore what's possible withdigital and discover how to make
it real in your business.
I'm your host, jim Hertzfeld,and we get shit done by asking
digital leaders the rightquestions what, if so what?
And, most importantly now, what?
Hey everybody, welcome to thepodcast.
I'm really excited for a greatguest.
She's a lot of fun.
(00:45):
I would call you a futuristpart-time provocateur, kate
O'Neill.
Kate O'Neill (00:49):
Kate, welcome to the show.
Jim Hertzfeld (00:51):
Thank you, Kate.
You've got a great background.
You've done a few things.
What got you here today?
What's your story?
Kate O'Neill (01:02):
30 years in tech in one form or another, and it's
across a wide variety of fieldsand disciplines.
But you know, some of thehighlights include, you know,
having been at Netflix as one ofthe first hundred employees,
their first content manager, sothat was a really fun and
interesting and formative sortof experience for me.
I also built the first intranetat Toshiba.
(01:23):
I built the first departmentalwebsite at the University of
Illinois at Chicago when I wasmanaging the language laboratory
there.
So I've had this career thatwas shaped by a bunch of
pioneering firsts in a way, overthe next couple of decades,
(01:47):
some work around trying to helppeople understand how to build
good products, how to make gooddecisions, how to, you know,
balance this need to beinnovative and chase the next
new thing with being responsibleand creating good things for
humans.
Jim Hertzfeld (02:00):
Awesome and in fact I kind of called you kind
of building off of one of thebooks.
Kate O'Neill (02:25):
Awesome and in fact I kind of called you, kind
of building off of one of thebooks.
You are a tech contradictionsor apparent contradictions, and
tech humanist sort of embodiesthat apparent contradiction.
But I don't think that it is orshould be a contradiction.
I think that what we often feelis that tech is at odds with
humanity or that humanity is atodds with tech.
And then there's this thirdkind of hidden piece to that
(02:47):
equation, which is business.
Because most of the time thattech meets humanity it is
through the rollout of business,like business has determined
some need that will be met atscale through the use of
technology and that takes shapein the form of some human
experience.
And it is not usually that wellthought out, it's not often
(03:10):
thought through of how that'sgoing to reshape society or
humanity in some way.
So that's what I have tried todo for the last decade and a
half or so has really been toask those fundamental questions,
be, you know, just a little bitof a provocateur, but mostly to
(03:30):
be, I hope, a force for good.
You know someone who's askingpeople to just like slow down
just a second, just you know,just enough to step back and
think about what's going tohappen when we make this
decision?
Jim Hertzfeld (03:44):
I have a meeting today and I always challenge
meetings that I get invited towith no agenda, like okay.
So my favorite question Ilearned this from a customer
years ago was to ask whatproblem are we solving?
It's a bit of a provocateurquestion, but you just triggered
that memory, because when we'recombining technology and
humankind and business, kind ofwading through this question of
(04:06):
like how do we make money withit?
How does it make money Likethis is a great idea?
How do we make more profit outof it?
So there's more to it than that, obviously.
Kate O'Neill (04:13):
Yeah, and the profit question is going to be
the sort of it's the drivingquestion in the business
operating system.
So we don't even have to askthat question.
There's no world in which we'renot going to be trying to
answer that question.
So I think it's the secondaryquestions that often go unspoken
.
What purpose of the company arewe fulfilling in some greater
(04:35):
way by building this function?
We could make money or make aprofit in any number of ways.
When I was at Maganesecom weused to joke that we could sell
pizzas out the back door if wewere just trying to make a buck.
You know that that's not reallywhat the company is about.
So I think that the opportunityto bring things back to a sense
(04:56):
of purpose and values, you know, but but purpose not in this
kind of fuzzy headed, you know,soft sort of way, but in a, in a
distillation of what thecompany exists to do and is
trying to do at scale.
So, really, getting back toyour, what problem are we trying
to solve?
Jim Hertzfeld (05:14):
Right, Questions and decision-making.
I love that.
Well, we're going to get intomore of these, these tugs of war
right, these seeminglycontradictions that we have to
get through.
So I love where you're andyou've kind of built how you've
kind of built that into yourwork.
Speaking of your work, you havea book coming out and I want to
know kind of there's a lot ofchange going on in the world.
(05:34):
For sure, we're recording thisin January of 2025.
And you know we've been under afast pace of change on a number
of levels for the last severalyears.
But what has sort of changed inthe world for you, or what sort
of motivated you to write thislatest book?
Kate O'Neill (05:52):
Yeah, I think the big thing is that I hear
consistently from leaders howmuch is changing, how fast the
world is changing, technology ischanging and how hard it is to
keep up with, and I feel likewe're at a point where the
decisions that leaders makeabout the deployment of
technology is having vastimpacts on human experience as
(06:15):
well as on the potential futuresthat we have the opportunity to
have.
So I think that leaders feelthat too.
I think that leaders feeldaunted by the scale and scope
of the decisions that they haveto make.
So what I think is lacking is Imean, there's just there's
plenty of tech trends andpredictions and lots of people
(06:36):
who are willing to be a futuristif it means being a provocateur
, right Like I'm willing to sayI predict this thing is going to
happen.
But what there is a dearth of,I think, is meaningful,
actionable frameworks andtoolkits that actually help
leaders make sensible decisionsthat balance a need for
(06:58):
innovation and competitiveadvantage with making
responsible choices, with kindof figuring out what the impact
on humanity, on human experience, on communities that are
affected downstream of thesedecisions, how those kind of
play together and how we canmake those decisions more
responsibly.
Jim Hertzfeld (07:15):
So I have a theory we can, you and I can,
workshop at some point, becauseI think if people are listening
to this and thinking that thosekinds of decisions are for the
board or they're for the CEO,they're really for everyone.
And I think that my theorybehind that that we can workshop
later is that the sort of themass or the gravity of decisions
(07:38):
that people have to make, thescope of what people have to
make, is bigger and bigger andbigger, because we're working
with more complex systems.
You know, I have a friend whois a product owner at a large
retail chain and is responsiblefor this.
It sounds like a really smallpart which is how you fulfill
the order when you're doingcurbside pickup.
(08:00):
In a nutshell, it's a lot morecomplicated than it sounds.
They have to think ofeverything, for every product
category, they have to think ofevery situation, they have to
think of every region, they haveto think of the weather and
they have to.
So even at seemingly smalldecisions you're going to, you
know you're going to impactpeople's lives or customers'
lives, the colleagues, the teammembers' lives.
(08:20):
So my theory is that even atsmaller let's say lower you know
, quote unquote lower levels ofthe organization, the size, the
magnitude of the decisions arebigger than ever, sort of like a
Moore's law of decision-making,because what you're getting at
is again maybe a CEO 10, 15years ago, maybe not even that
long ago the magnitude of thosedecisions when you just had to
(08:44):
get some product to a store andget it out the door.
You know it's a lot morecomplicated these days.
Kate O'Neill (08:49):
So yeah, there's two things that you brilliantly
said, brilliantly observed, buttwo things that you made me
think of.
One is that CEOs are making alot of those kinds of decisions
and they're often ascending tothose roles not out of
technology backgrounds.
Right, you probably know aswell as I do in the world that
(09:10):
we move in and interact with alot of executives.
Very few CEOs ascend to thatrole out of a technology
background.
It's usually more marketing orsales, or operations, or finance
.
You know, in some cases,finance rarely too.
The money guys, yeah, yeah,right, not often the money guy
makes it to the CEO seat.
So that's one factor is thatyou do find people who are in
(09:33):
that top executive role, who aremaking these decisions and
don't come from a technologybackground.
But even more important is thatobservation you made, which is
so many decisions are madedownstream of that top executive
role, and they're some of themost vivid examples that we can
think of too.
Like, the one of my favoritestories to tell over the last
(09:55):
few years has been that ofAmazon Go, and most people by
now are familiar with it thejust walk out grocery concept,
and they have hundreds of themrolled out and they're
integrating that technology intoWhole Foods stores, so hundreds
more of those across thecontinent.
But the interesting thing to meabout Amazon Go is that when you
(10:19):
first open that app because youhave to do it you come in
through the gates, you scan theapp on your phone, you gather up
your groceries and then youscan the app again as you just
walk out and it tallies up allof your groceries and you never
have to go through a cashregister or cashier in a
traditional sense, but it'scameras and sensors and a
(10:40):
constellation of surveillancetechnology that's making that
possible.
But what I thought was sointeresting is that when you
first open that Amazon Go app,you get this kind of onboarding
wizard that walks you throughhow it's going to work, and one
of the things it says is thatbecause you're charged for
everything you take off theshelf, don't take anything off
(11:00):
the shelf for anyone else, andI've used that for so many years
in audiences and in keynotes.
I would ask the audience just apoll question raise your hand
if you have ever taken somethingoff the shelf for anybody else,
or if somebody has ever takensomething off the shelf for you,
and, like 100%, people in theroom will raise their hands.
So this is not an unusual, thisis not an edge case kind of
(11:24):
thing that some Amazon engineerwas like, hmm, how do we solve
for this problem?
Well, hardly anybody ever doesthis.
Joe (11:30):
Let's just make it an impossibility in the system,
right.
Kate O'Neill (11:34):
So what happens there is that now, within an
Amazon Go store, we're notallowed to help each other, but,
as we just talked about,there's hundreds of these
instances.
They're rolling out partnershipswith Starbucks, mobile pickup
they're using it too.
So you've got, this platform isgoing to become one of the
dominant paradigms of retail andof how we interact with one
(11:56):
another.
So you're telling me thatthat's not going to impact how
we actually help one another,how we show up for one another.
As time goes on, overgenerations of how this, you
know, maybe it gets fixed, butthe point is still there that
someone, somewhere, had anopportunity to say this is a
challenge.
I don't know how to solve this,and so the way I'm going to
(12:16):
solve it is to simply make it,you know, forbidden within the
confines of the system, and it'snot natural to human experience
that that is the way that thatplayed out.
So, yes, many, many, many veryconsequential decisions are
happening at quote unquote lowlevels, just operational levels,
all throughout organizations,and it's critically important
(12:39):
that people are thinking aboutthat long range impact of the
decisions that they make.
Jim Hertzfeld (12:45):
The consequences right and the maybe sometimes
unintended consequences.
Joe (12:49):
Right.
Jim Hertzfeld (12:50):
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
You kind of set up maybe thefirst gosh.
I don't know what to call thesenow, kate, are these
contradictions, provocations?
But they're really, I think,just I like provocations,
provocations, modern wisdom.
We'll go with that.
So I want to run a few thingspast you, because these are,
these are provocations that youbrought up.
(13:12):
I collected a few of them and Ithink it'd be great for the
audience to hear.
Hear them because one we needto evolve our mindset First of
all, which I think you'rehelping us do, okay, honestly,
and I think people are lookingfor the next tactic, they're
looking for the next move, likethat's again the genesis of this
show is how do we make thesethings real.
So I'm going to run a few ofthese things past you and I want
(13:35):
your kind of the Kate O'Neillexplanation, like what are you
talking about?
And let's talk about how we canopen a mind or provide kind of
a new tactic, and I'll set upsort of the conventional wisdom
and then I'll hand it off to youto sort of describe what I
think is your provocation.
So for years, you know, for gosh15 years, I think Forrester
(13:56):
came out and said in 2010,.
You know, this is the age ofthe customer.
I think that was more or lesswhen this sort of Web 2.0
digital transformation era sortof took off At least that's how
I saw it.
So we started to think aboutcustomer centricity.
Let's think about the customer,and the customer is at the
center of everything.
And we started doing reallygetting into personas and
(14:18):
journey mapping and all thatstuff to call it, which is great
, right, which is great, but yousort of, I think are are
telling us like we need to thinkabout the human experience.
So explain to us what's thedifference between just a
customer and a human experience?
Kate O'Neill (14:34):
yeah, it.
It's so true that that there'sa there's this terminology and
it seems like they should beconsistent or that they're in
contradiction with one another.
But the customer is just a rolethat humans operate within, and
so there absolutely is a timeand place when customer
experience design or customerjourney mapping and that sort of
thing is relevant, because whenyou're thinking about humans in
(14:55):
the role of customer, we wantthem to have the ideal journey
or experience or whatever.
But we also need to thinkbeyond that customer role into,
you know, how does this impactpeople in their lives that go
beyond that, that interaction,the transactional nature of a
fixed relationship as customer.
(15:16):
How is this going to, you know,for example, with that Amazon
go thing like?
How does this impact beyond thecustomer?
Experience is perhaps fine ofbeing able to purchase your
groceries and not have to, youknow, help anybody else.
You know, maybe that makes youin and out of the store faster.
If you're indifferent to otherpeople, that might be good.
(15:38):
But how does it affect thelives of people who are there
and they, you know, maybe havesome kind of physical limitation
and can't reach the top shelfor something like that?
How does this affect the livesof people who rely on a sense of
connectedness at the grocerystore with other people, Because
maybe some people who are olderor infirm or lonely in some way
(16:02):
, like these little moments ofconnection are really all that
sometimes people have whenthey're out and doing their,
their errands.
So I think these these littlemoments that give us glimpses
into how to think about what itreally means to be human and how
our decisions that seem sodisconnected, so many steps
removed from from those kinds ofof realities, how those
(16:25):
actually play out in people'slives.
Jim Hertzfeld (16:28):
That's great and I often think of, like
healthcare journeys where I'm acaregiver right and I'm taking
care of my father and I'mpicking up his prescription.
These are real stories we canget into.
So I love that.
I love that advancement.
So another one is when we thinkabout customers.
I have a lot of clients who say, okay, I get it, I buy into the
(16:49):
customer experience.
Now I got to go figure out whatthey want.
So, wait, who is my customer?
And wait, what do they reallywant?
What problems are they tryingto solve?
Going back to one of myfavorite questions, and so we
launched these research projects.
I have a lot of customers whowill say, okay, timeout, I want
to get it right.
We'll come back to predictingin a bit.
So I launched this hugeresearch project where I look
(17:13):
back at the last two, threeyears of sales history and
customer complaints to get toknow my customer.
But I think you're suggestingkind of a new adoption of
foresight.
So insight's great, but isforesight better?
Kate O'Neill (17:28):
Yeah.
So I come from a backgroundthat is heavily invested in
analytics and I definitely amnot negative on analytics.
I think it's really importantto be able to find the data you
need to validate decisions youknow, get some confidence in
investments you're going to makeand so on.
But that's not insight, as muchas analysts would love to use
(17:52):
that word, conflate those terms.
Insight is so much more to dowith wisdom, so much more to do
with finding seeminglyconflicting patterns and
understanding the tension inthose seemingly conflicting
truths, and something that'stimeless, something that reveals
something to us in a human way.
(18:12):
Again and again and again,insight is just, it's a nugget,
that is, it's a lens that we canlook through, and that's what
insights do.
Foresight is an opportunity, tosay, as we try to understand
the complexity of the terrainwe're, we're assessing, like, as
we ask meaningful questions andwe find that there are multiple
(18:33):
conflicting answers in thosequestions and we arrive at these
, you know, beautiful insightlenses.
We might be able to thendistill that down to a timely
approach, like we need to make adecision today, so we can't,
you know, spend two months justdeliberating like a philosopher
in a cave.
You know what are, what is thedecision we need to make?
(18:53):
We need to make a decision now,so that's a timely approach.
But what also happens in thedistillation to that timely
approach is that we have sort ofexhaust that comes off, and I
call that exhaust bankableforesight.
I like to think that there's,with really good consideration,
with, you know, really goodinsight, analysis, you know,
(19:13):
really thinking things through,asking good questions, really
listening, pondering humanexperience, what we come to is
this sense that there are thingsthat are going to be true, most
likely in the future, thataren't necessarily true now,
like priorities we can tellwe're going to have to face up
to that, aren't necessarilyrequiring us to adapt to them
(19:35):
today, but what we can do istriangulate our decisions with
those foresights.
We can begin to lay in placetimely approaches, day by day by
day, quarter by quarter, thatstart to move us incrementally
in the direction that foresightis pulling us.
And I think that that itdoesn't necessarily contradict,
(19:56):
like you said, the, theunderstanding of the user
experience or the you know, theanalytics about a person, or
looking at the all of thedifferent data that we can
gather about human performanceor behavior into this better,
more well-rounded way ofreframing our thinking and our
(20:21):
decision-making so that it ismore human-informed.
And, by the way, you can use AItools generative AI in this
processing.
I think it just requires that westay awake at the wheel using
these tools to review theresults that we get back from
the sort of crunching of thisdata and what's suggested back
(20:43):
to us.
If something comes back fromgenerative AI, that's that has
the ring of truth.
Well, wonderful, you know, likethat's a, that's a great use of
the tool, but we have torecognize it as the ring of
truth and then figure out how itapplies and how we're going to
distill timely approaches andwhat kind of bankable foresights
come from those humanintelligence on which we'll come
(21:06):
, we'll come back to.
Jim Hertzfeld (21:07):
So you know, I love, I love research projects
there's.
Sometimes they're frustratingbecause even even kind of small
incremental research, becauseyou know, sometimes it's it's
satisfying you, you do thatquery or you the survey comes
back, and it's satisfying.
When you do that query or thesurvey comes back and it's like,
wow, it didn't really tell meanything, so it's satisfying.
Okay, we're on the right track.
That's sort of validating.
But then you get excited whenthere's something you didn't see
(21:30):
coming, like, oh my gosh, nowthere's something we didn't know
about, there's something thatchallenges us, right.
But then the human intelligencekicks in again.
Kate O'Neill (21:42):
You're like, well, wait a minute, is that real,
right, right, exactly.
That's what the best is whenyou have two different sources,
like an internal and external,and they validate one another,
and then you can just feel like,all right, cool, we're good
here, we're done, we did ourresearch.
Jim Hertzfeld (21:53):
That is nice, but let's, let's, let's agree.
It's way more fun when theycontradict Like well, you
thought this, but you didn'tknow.
This is what they were thinking.
I love that.
Kate O'Neill (22:03):
Yeah, but I always tell my clients you don't pay a
consultant to come in and tellyou something you don't know.
You pay a consultant to come inand tell you.
You are very smart, you arethinking the exact right thing.
Jim Hertzfeld (22:13):
You're very smart for hiring us.
So I think that you know,behind what you're saying and
some of this sort of with thisforesight, is the ability and we
talked about sort of predictingthe future and future proofing
and I think what's behind thatis because we feel like Mike,
you know, we, we, we get oneshot like we get this, one shot
(22:33):
that making the best productever and it's either going to
we're either going to be winnersor losers, and if it doesn't
pan out, we'll never get achance to do this again.
So we have to know everything,we have to predict every
possible outcome, every possiblefuture, so that we don't paint
ourselves in the corner or getstuck or have technical debt or
(22:55):
whatever thing we're worriedabout and scared about.
So you talk about not justpredicting but preparing for the
future or maybe being futureready.
So what's behind that, kate?
Kate O'Neill (23:04):
Yeah, there's this term, future proof.
I've always had a problem withit just strikes me as such a
silly articulation of thisconcept, because you can never
be future proof.
That's not a thing that reallyhappens, like the.
The idea it makes me think ofwhen you know you're, you're, uh
, bringing a kid over.
I don't have kids, so it's whena kid would be coming over to
(23:27):
my house and I have to kid proofmy living room or my kitchen
right yeah so that doesn't makeany sense, like I'm not going to
necessarily create, uh, futureproof spaces in my home, like
that's, like that's not.
That's not how that works,unless there's some sort of
vortex of, you know, timeresistant experience, I don't
know.
But no, it makes much moresense to me to think about being
(23:51):
more ready for the future,being future ready rather than
future proof.
And one of the ways to do that,I think, is it sort of speaks
to one of the things you justsaid, which is, you know, you
said we think we're only goingto get like one chance to do it
right.
I think one of the reframesthat we have the opportunity to
do is to think more often aboutfutures, not future, because the
(24:12):
future isn't just one set path.
It sort of I like to think ofit as almost more like a prism
From this moment.
There's this kind of radiatingrealm of possibility, like many,
many different possibleoutcomes from the moment we're
in, and that sort of feels moreliberating, I think, and more
(24:32):
empowering, because it shows howwe have the opportunity to
shape those futures and tonarrow the realm of what is
possible through the actions anddecisions we take.
I'd also suggest that one of themost valuable questions that I
ask my clients is to think aboutwhen they think about the
(24:53):
future from this moment, andthat the most likely thing
that's going to happen in thefuture and the most preferred
thing for them that they'd liketo see happen.
So, out of the possible futures, from this consideration in the
current moment, what's the mostprobable, what's the most
preferred?
And then, if you do the mathand subtract one from the other,
(25:15):
what?
What's the Delta between those,and how can you actively move
them closer together?
What are the decisions andactions you need to take today
and every day going forward toclose the gap between the most
probable outcome and the mostpreferred outcome?
And truly that's a million plusdollar question, like every
(25:38):
organization can benefit fromthinking that way.
Jim Hertzfeld (25:41):
Well, and I think you know we like to take things
to sort of the digital realmhere I think one of the ways
that we have to also think aboutit is think about
future-proofing is givingyourself options.
You know and I every sort ofproduct strategy or digital
strategy that I've come up withor been involved in I can reduce
to either a party or picnicplanning metaphor.
(26:01):
So, because they're fun,everyone can get behind those
metaphors, but you know we'regoing to do this.
If the weather's good, we'regoing to go here.
If it's bad, we're going to goinside.
Right, so you know, keepingyour options open.
So you know, like more flexiblearchitectures and headless
commerce and APIs and fluidity,all these kind of technical
(26:22):
things.
They kind of exist to give youoptions, because you don't you
don't know what's going tohappen.
We may have to refactorsomething, we may have to alter
that journey, or we may have togive different things to
different personas ifpreferences change.
So you know, I think that'sanother philosophy that kind of
goes into that.
Kate O'Neill (26:40):
Yeah, and I think it's sort of an interesting
opportunity to bring up one ofthe themes, one of the
observations that I make in thebook, because I think it applies
to some of what you're talkingabout there.
That too often, I think, whenwe talk about digital
transformation and we talk aboutinnovation, we talk about them
as if they're synonymous withone another, and they're really,
(27:01):
really not.
In my experience in decades ofdoing this work what I find is
digital transformation is thework of catching up to what the
market already expects and whatinnovation is is the work of
looking ahead to what is trulynovel and what is going to move
you into one of those likelyfutures or the future where
(27:23):
you'd like to be.
Those are very different tasks.
They are not.
One is not better than theother, and it's not like you
choose to do one but not theother.
You've got to do the work ofcatching up, and every
organization has both of thesetasks right.
Every organization has areas inwhich they're still catching up
to.
You know the way that workflowsare happening in other
(27:44):
organizations.
You know kind of internally,operationally, whatever, and
that's digital transformation.
And there is also everyorganization is trying to think
about how can we be the onesthat set the tone for what is
going to happen in this industryand in our market and so on.
So it's both of those arehappening, and I think it's a
really important aspect of whenyou talk about the various
(28:06):
pieces of technology that affordus more fluidity and
flexibility.
I think we also need this othersort of different dimension of
consideration that we need tounderstand, that that needs to
happen across both a catching upto the present moment digital
transformation perspective andan innovation moving us forward
into the future perspective.
Jim Hertzfeld (28:26):
I really like that distinction because, you're
right, they do get conflated.
I think everybody's looking forthe easy button right or the
pixie dust, so like well, if Idigitize it, it'll be innovative
.
Well, maybe not.
Not to mention, by the way, itmay be innovative, but nobody
cares Not solving a customerproblem.
Well, if I digitize it, it'llbe innovative.
Well, maybe not.
Not to mention by the way itmay be innovative, but nobody
cares If you're not solving acustomer problem, then you know
what's the point.
(28:53):
Right.
What problem are we solvingbefore you know?
How do they?
How do we sort of yin and yangand have checks and balances
between you know what we knowintuitively, right or through
experience, which is full of itsown biases and pitfalls and and
risks, and machine intelligence, which is seemingly faster and
(29:14):
smarter and knows more, thanhave some more facts than I do,
but is also sort of flawed andbiased and hallucinating.
And how do these concerns worktogether?
Kate O'Neill (29:25):
Well, it's funny, I think we all spend a lot of
sort of existential angst cycleson this question the difference
between human intelligence andmachine intelligence where do
humans thrive, versus where AIis going to take our jobs or,
you know, supplant us orwhatever.
And I think one of the ways inwhich it's overwrought is that
(29:45):
machine intelligence has beenheavily influenced by human
intelligence.
Right, I mean, obviously it'sbuilt out of human intelligence,
but it's also been modeledafter human intelligence,
modeled after human intelligence.
So many of the metaphors ofartificial intelligence draw
directly from concepts of howour brain works.
So what we've really done isuse human intelligence to build
(30:10):
faster, more connected versionsof the human brain, like what
would happen if the brain wereable to do more cycles and
process faster.
It shouldn't feel sothreatening, I think, and it
also shouldn't feel so alien tous.
It's definitely a familiarmodel.
That said, it is inherentlyartificial in the sense that
(30:35):
it's synthetic.
Right, the ways in whichmachine intelligence knows what
it knows is by training itself,in some cases, like unsupervised
learning on a lot of randominformation and looking for
connections, which, incidentally, is often how we learn as well.
But what we do in the world asembodied beings is move through
(31:00):
the world with a very distinctlyhuman, embodied sense of the
world.
We are constantly sense making,and sense making is about
meaning.
Meaning is the fundamentalattribute of human experience,
and it is something thatmachines don't have the ability
(31:21):
to be in touch with in the sameway and maybe never will, at
least not until meaning formachines is made from, whatever
components they will makemeaning from, like when, once
some kind of generalintelligence is achieved and
they're drawing a sense of, youknow, their own existence in the
(31:43):
world, a sort ofself-consciousness from the
world, then maybe, but that'snot even relevant to our
understanding today.
Our understanding today has tobe about how do we have the most
meaningful experiences ashumans, and how does technology,
and even advanced technology,fit into that?
So I think the question reallywe ought to be asking is how
(32:05):
should we be using AI to betterfulfill meaningfulness in human
experiences?
How should we be using AI tosupplement meaning in the world
around us?
How can we be automatingexperiences in such a way that
we don't lose a sense of meaning?
You know I alluded earlier tothe idea of loneliness when
(32:26):
people are in grocery stores,and you know this whole Amazon
Go thing of taking away that onelittle interaction that
somebody may look forward to.
Well, what are the opportunitieselsewhere?
You know, when it comes tobanking transactions, when it
comes to wayfinding, when itcomes to any everyday type of
thing that we have in the world,there are just numerous
(32:48):
opportunities for us to thinkwhat ways could we infuse just
that nuance, that subtle senseof being seen and being
understood and being connectedwith others?
What are the ways in which wecan do that?
And that, I think, is aquestion that's well worth every
organization asking themselves.
Jim Hertzfeld (33:06):
I agree, I'm glad you're leaning into that.
I think that's really beenmotivating me in a lot of my
interactions with purpose,purpose and meaning.
They're not going away.
I think we need to incorporatethose more in our planning, our
design, you know, in oureveryday work, because I it's
kind of like I'm really going tothrow it back to like culture
(33:26):
eats strategy for breakfast.
Kate O'Neill (33:29):
Love Drucker.
Jim Hertzfeld (33:30):
Yeah, it's Peter Drucker.
The the, the older I get, themore meaning that has to me.
You know, I get it.
It's like watching an old movieyou didn't, you know.
You're like you see all theadult humor you know today that
you didn't see as a kid.
You're like, oh my gosh, howdid they make this movie?
So you know, some of thesethings are coming back.
But, yeah, culture purposemeaning it's not going away and
(33:52):
it's it's.
It's gotta be sort of embeddedin the way we do things.
We're kind of out of time here,kate.
I'd love to close on.
There's so many other things Iwant to ask you, but I want to
maybe you could leave one thing.
What if you could give theaudience some advice on
something they could take away?
Because I think you've given usa lot of contradictions and
provocations and I think whatpeople are looking for is to
(34:16):
take some of this conventionalwisdom just of the last five to
10 years and advance it.
But if there's one thing youcould tell folks, what would you
ask them to do?
What would you give them thatthey could do today?
Kate O'Neill (34:26):
I think you know you hit it with.
You said that meaning andpurpose are not going away.
But I want to be even crisperabout that.
That meaning, as I said, is thefundamental human experience,
but it's also at every level weconsider meaning.
It is about what matters.
Meaning is always about whatmatters and purpose is the shape
that meaning takes in business.
So when we try to think abouthow those facets of
(34:50):
understanding, how that wisdom,how that human insight can serve
us as we consider technologydecisions, those are the
questions to come back to.
What matters in this and whatis likely to matter going
forward?
That's the question whatmatters?
Next in the title of my book isreally draws from this insight
that what matters to us now andwhat's likely to matter in the
future are the big questions weneed to be asking ourselves as
(35:14):
we deploy technology that shapeshuman experience and as we
build businesses and go aboutour lives.
What matters and what is goingto matter?
Jim Hertzfeld (35:22):
And that's whether you're a CEO or a
business analyst, or you'recontemplating your career move
or what you're going to do next.
So, kate, thanks so much forsharing your wisdom.
Kate O'Neill (35:32):
Thank you, jim, this has been great.
Jim Hertzfeld (35:33):
And we'll love to talk to you next time You've
been listening to what, If sowhat.
Joe (35:35):
We'll love to talk to you next time.
You've been listening to what,If so what A digital strategy
podcast from Proficient with JimHertzfeld.
We want to thank our Proficientcolleagues JD Norman and Rick
Bauer for our music.
Subscribe to the podcast anddon't miss a single episode.
You can find this season, alongwith show notes, at
Proficientcom.
(35:56):
Thanks for listening.
What are the decisions and actions you need
to take today and every daygoing forward to close the gap
between the most probableoutcome and the most preferred
outcome?
And truly that's a million plusdollar question, Like every
organization can benefit fromthinking that way.
Jim Hertzfeld (00:25):
Welcome to what If so what, the podcast where we
explore what's possible withdigital and discover how to make
it real in your business.
I'm your host, jim Hertzfeld,and we get shit done by asking
digital leaders the rightquestions what, if so what?
And, most importantly now, what?
Hey everybody, welcome to thepodcast.
I'm really excited for a greatguest.
She's a lot of fun.
(00:45):
I would call you a futuristpart-time provocateur, kate
O'Neill.
Kate O'Neill (00:49):
Kate, welcome to the show.
Jim Hertzfeld (00:51):
Thank you, Kate.
You've got a great background.
You've done a few things.
What got you here today?
What's your story?
Kate O'Neill (01:02):
30 years in tech in one form or another, and it's
across a wide variety of fieldsand disciplines.
But you know, some of thehighlights include, you know,
having been at Netflix as one ofthe first hundred employees,
their first content manager, sothat was a really fun and
interesting and formative sortof experience for me.
I also built the first intranetat Toshiba.
(01:23):
I built the first departmentalwebsite at the University of
Illinois at Chicago when I wasmanaging the language laboratory
there.
So I've had this career thatwas shaped by a bunch of
pioneering firsts in a way, overthe next couple of decades,
(01:47):
some work around trying to helppeople understand how to build
good products, how to make gooddecisions, how to, you know,
balance this need to beinnovative and chase the next
new thing with being responsibleand creating good things for
humans.
Jim Hertzfeld (02:00):
Awesome and in fact I kind of called you kind
of building off of one of thebooks.
Kate O'Neill (02:25):
Awesome and in fact I kind of called you, kind
of building off of one of thebooks.
You are a tech contradictionsor apparent contradictions, and
tech humanist sort of embodiesthat apparent contradiction.
But I don't think that it is orshould be a contradiction.
I think that what we often feelis that tech is at odds with
humanity or that humanity is atodds with tech.
And then there's this thirdkind of hidden piece to that
(02:47):
equation, which is business.
Because most of the time thattech meets humanity it is
through the rollout of business,like business has determined
some need that will be met atscale through the use of
technology and that takes shapein the form of some human
experience.
And it is not usually that wellthought out, it's not often
(03:10):
thought through of how that'sgoing to reshape society or
humanity in some way.
So that's what I have tried todo for the last decade and a
half or so has really been toask those fundamental questions,
be, you know, just a little bitof a provocateur, but mostly to
(03:30):
be, I hope, a force for good.
You know someone who's askingpeople to just like slow down
just a second, just you know,just enough to step back and
think about what's going tohappen when we make this
decision?
Jim Hertzfeld (03:44):
I have a meeting today and I always challenge
meetings that I get invited towith no agenda, like okay.
So my favorite question Ilearned this from a customer
years ago was to ask whatproblem are we solving?
It's a bit of a provocateurquestion, but you just triggered
that memory, because when we'recombining technology and
humankind and business, kind ofwading through this question of
(04:06):
like how do we make money withit?
How does it make money Likethis is a great idea?
How do we make more profit outof it?
So there's more to it than that, obviously.
Kate O'Neill (04:13):
Yeah, and the profit question is going to be
the sort of it's the drivingquestion in the business
operating system.
So we don't even have to askthat question.
There's no world in which we'renot going to be trying to
answer that question.
So I think it's the secondaryquestions that often go unspoken
.
What purpose of the company arewe fulfilling in some greater
(04:35):
way by building this function?
We could make money or make aprofit in any number of ways.
When I was at Maganesecom weused to joke that we could sell
pizzas out the back door if wewere just trying to make a buck.
You know that that's not reallywhat the company is about.
So I think that the opportunityto bring things back to a sense
(04:56):
of purpose and values, you know, but but purpose not in this
kind of fuzzy headed, you know,soft sort of way, but in a, in a
distillation of what thecompany exists to do and is
trying to do at scale.
So, really, getting back toyour, what problem are we trying
to solve?
Jim Hertzfeld (05:14):
Right, Questions and decision-making.
I love that.
Well, we're going to get intomore of these, these tugs of war
right, these seeminglycontradictions that we have to
get through.
So I love where you're andyou've kind of built how you've
kind of built that into yourwork.
Speaking of your work, you havea book coming out and I want to
know kind of there's a lot ofchange going on in the world.
(05:34):
For sure, we're recording thisin January of 2025.
And you know we've been under afast pace of change on a number
of levels for the last severalyears.
But what has sort of changed inthe world for you, or what sort
of motivated you to write thislatest book?
Kate O'Neill (05:52):
Yeah, I think the big thing is that I hear
consistently from leaders howmuch is changing, how fast the
world is changing, technology ischanging and how hard it is to
keep up with, and I feel likewe're at a point where the
decisions that leaders makeabout the deployment of
technology is having vastimpacts on human experience as
(06:15):
well as on the potential futuresthat we have the opportunity to
have.
So I think that leaders feelthat too.
I think that leaders feeldaunted by the scale and scope
of the decisions that they haveto make.
So what I think is lacking is Imean, there's just there's
plenty of tech trends andpredictions and lots of people
(06:36):
who are willing to be a futuristif it means being a provocateur
, right Like I'm willing to sayI predict this thing is going to
happen.
But what there is a dearth of,I think, is meaningful,
actionable frameworks andtoolkits that actually help
leaders make sensible decisionsthat balance a need for
(06:58):
innovation and competitiveadvantage with making
responsible choices, with kindof figuring out what the impact
on humanity, on human experience, on communities that are
affected downstream of thesedecisions, how those kind of
play together and how we canmake those decisions more
responsibly.
Jim Hertzfeld (07:15):
So I have a theory we can, you and I can,
workshop at some point, becauseI think if people are listening
to this and thinking that thosekinds of decisions are for the
board or they're for the CEO,they're really for everyone.
And I think that my theorybehind that that we can workshop
later is that the sort of themass or the gravity of decisions
(07:38):
that people have to make, thescope of what people have to
make, is bigger and bigger andbigger, because we're working
with more complex systems.
You know, I have a friend whois a product owner at a large
retail chain and is responsiblefor this.
It sounds like a really smallpart which is how you fulfill
the order when you're doingcurbside pickup.
(08:00):
In a nutshell, it's a lot morecomplicated than it sounds.
They have to think ofeverything, for every product
category, they have to think ofevery situation, they have to
think of every region, they haveto think of the weather and
they have to.
So even at seemingly smalldecisions you're going to, you
know you're going to impactpeople's lives or customers'
lives, the colleagues, the teammembers' lives.
(08:20):
So my theory is that even atsmaller let's say lower you know
, quote unquote lower levels ofthe organization, the size, the
magnitude of the decisions arebigger than ever, sort of like a
Moore's law of decision-making,because what you're getting at
is again maybe a CEO 10, 15years ago, maybe not even that
long ago the magnitude of thosedecisions when you just had to
(08:44):
get some product to a store andget it out the door.
You know it's a lot morecomplicated these days.
Kate O'Neill (08:49):
So yeah, there's two things that you brilliantly
said, brilliantly observed, buttwo things that you made me
think of.
One is that CEOs are making alot of those kinds of decisions
and they're often ascending tothose roles not out of
technology backgrounds.
Right, you probably know aswell as I do in the world that
(09:10):
we move in and interact with alot of executives.
Very few CEOs ascend to thatrole out of a technology
background.
It's usually more marketing orsales, or operations, or finance
.
You know, in some cases,finance rarely too.
The money guys, yeah, yeah,right, not often the money guy
makes it to the CEO seat.
So that's one factor is thatyou do find people who are in
(09:33):
that top executive role, who aremaking these decisions and
don't come from a technologybackground.
But even more important is thatobservation you made, which is
so many decisions are madedownstream of that top executive
role, and they're some of themost vivid examples that we can
think of too.
Like, the one of my favoritestories to tell over the last
(09:55):
few years has been that ofAmazon Go, and most people by
now are familiar with it thejust walk out grocery concept,
and they have hundreds of themrolled out and they're
integrating that technology intoWhole Foods stores, so hundreds
more of those across thecontinent.
But the interesting thing to meabout Amazon Go is that when you
(10:19):
first open that app because youhave to do it you come in
through the gates, you scan theapp on your phone, you gather up
your groceries and then youscan the app again as you just
walk out and it tallies up allof your groceries and you never
have to go through a cashregister or cashier in a
traditional sense, but it'scameras and sensors and a
(10:40):
constellation of surveillancetechnology that's making that
possible.
But what I thought was sointeresting is that when you
first open that Amazon Go app,you get this kind of onboarding
wizard that walks you throughhow it's going to work, and one
of the things it says is thatbecause you're charged for
everything you take off theshelf, don't take anything off
(11:00):
the shelf for anyone else, andI've used that for so many years
in audiences and in keynotes.
I would ask the audience just apoll question raise your hand
if you have ever taken somethingoff the shelf for anybody else,
or if somebody has ever takensomething off the shelf for you,
and, like 100%, people in theroom will raise their hands.
So this is not an unusual, thisis not an edge case kind of
(11:24):
thing that some Amazon engineerwas like, hmm, how do we solve
for this problem?
Well, hardly anybody ever doesthis.
Joe (11:30):
Let's just make it an impossibility in the system,
right.
Kate O'Neill (11:34):
So what happens there is that now, within an
Amazon Go store, we're notallowed to help each other, but,
as we just talked about,there's hundreds of these
instances.
They're rolling out partnershipswith Starbucks, mobile pickup
they're using it too.
So you've got, this platform isgoing to become one of the
dominant paradigms of retail andof how we interact with one
(11:56):
another.
So you're telling me thatthat's not going to impact how
we actually help one another,how we show up for one another.
As time goes on, overgenerations of how this, you
know, maybe it gets fixed, butthe point is still there that
someone, somewhere, had anopportunity to say this is a
challenge.
I don't know how to solve this,and so the way I'm going to
(12:16):
solve it is to simply make it,you know, forbidden within the
confines of the system, and it'snot natural to human experience
that that is the way that thatplayed out.
So, yes, many, many, many veryconsequential decisions are
happening at quote unquote lowlevels, just operational levels,
all throughout organizations,and it's critically important
(12:39):
that people are thinking aboutthat long range impact of the
decisions that they make.
Jim Hertzfeld (12:45):
The consequences right and the maybe sometimes
unintended consequences.
Joe (12:49):
Right.
Jim Hertzfeld (12:50):
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
You kind of set up maybe thefirst gosh.
I don't know what to call thesenow, kate, are these
contradictions, provocations?
But they're really, I think,just I like provocations,
provocations, modern wisdom.
We'll go with that.
So I want to run a few thingspast you, because these are,
these are provocations that youbrought up.
(13:12):
I collected a few of them and Ithink it'd be great for the
audience to hear.
Hear them because one we needto evolve our mindset First of
all, which I think you'rehelping us do, okay, honestly,
and I think people are lookingfor the next tactic, they're
looking for the next move, likethat's again the genesis of this
show is how do we make thesethings real.
So I'm going to run a few ofthese things past you and I want
(13:35):
your kind of the Kate O'Neillexplanation, like what are you
talking about?
And let's talk about how we canopen a mind or provide kind of
a new tactic, and I'll set upsort of the conventional wisdom
and then I'll hand it off to youto sort of describe what I
think is your provocation.
So for years, you know, for gosh15 years, I think Forrester
(13:56):
came out and said in 2010,.
You know, this is the age ofthe customer.
I think that was more or lesswhen this sort of Web 2.0
digital transformation era sortof took off At least that's how
I saw it.
So we started to think aboutcustomer centricity.
Let's think about the customer,and the customer is at the
center of everything.
And we started doing reallygetting into personas and
(14:18):
journey mapping and all thatstuff to call it, which is great
, right, which is great, but yousort of, I think are are
telling us like we need to thinkabout the human experience.
So explain to us what's thedifference between just a
customer and a human experience?
Kate O'Neill (14:34):
yeah, it.
It's so true that that there'sa there's this terminology and
it seems like they should beconsistent or that they're in
contradiction with one another.
But the customer is just a rolethat humans operate within, and
so there absolutely is a timeand place when customer
experience design or customerjourney mapping and that sort of
thing is relevant, because whenyou're thinking about humans in
(14:55):
the role of customer, we wantthem to have the ideal journey
or experience or whatever.
But we also need to thinkbeyond that customer role into,
you know, how does this impactpeople in their lives that go
beyond that, that interaction,the transactional nature of a
fixed relationship as customer.
(15:16):
How is this going to, you know,for example, with that Amazon
go thing like?
How does this impact beyond thecustomer?
Experience is perhaps fine ofbeing able to purchase your
groceries and not have to, youknow, help anybody else.
You know, maybe that makes youin and out of the store faster.
If you're indifferent to otherpeople, that might be good.
(15:38):
But how does it affect thelives of people who are there
and they, you know, maybe havesome kind of physical limitation
and can't reach the top shelfor something like that?
How does this affect the livesof people who rely on a sense of
connectedness at the grocerystore with other people, Because
maybe some people who are olderor infirm or lonely in some way
(16:02):
, like these little moments ofconnection are really all that
sometimes people have whenthey're out and doing their,
their errands.
So I think these these littlemoments that give us glimpses
into how to think about what itreally means to be human and how
our decisions that seem sodisconnected, so many steps
removed from from those kinds ofof realities, how those
(16:25):
actually play out in people'slives.
Jim Hertzfeld (16:28):
That's great and I often think of, like
healthcare journeys where I'm acaregiver right and I'm taking
care of my father and I'mpicking up his prescription.
These are real stories we canget into.
So I love that.
I love that advancement.
So another one is when we thinkabout customers.
I have a lot of clients who say, okay, I get it, I buy into the
(16:49):
customer experience.
Now I got to go figure out whatthey want.
So, wait, who is my customer?
And wait, what do they reallywant?
What problems are they tryingto solve?
Going back to one of myfavorite questions, and so we
launched these research projects.
I have a lot of customers whowill say, okay, timeout, I want
to get it right.
We'll come back to predictingin a bit.
So I launched this hugeresearch project where I look
(17:13):
back at the last two, threeyears of sales history and
customer complaints to get toknow my customer.
But I think you're suggestingkind of a new adoption of
foresight.
So insight's great, but isforesight better?
Kate O'Neill (17:28):
Yeah.
So I come from a backgroundthat is heavily invested in
analytics and I definitely amnot negative on analytics.
I think it's really importantto be able to find the data you
need to validate decisions youknow, get some confidence in
investments you're going to makeand so on.
But that's not insight, as muchas analysts would love to use
(17:52):
that word, conflate those terms.
Insight is so much more to dowith wisdom, so much more to do
with finding seeminglyconflicting patterns and
understanding the tension inthose seemingly conflicting
truths, and something that'stimeless, something that reveals
something to us in a human way.
(18:12):
Again and again and again,insight is just, it's a nugget,
that is, it's a lens that we canlook through, and that's what
insights do.
Foresight is an opportunity, tosay, as we try to understand
the complexity of the terrainwe're, we're assessing, like, as
we ask meaningful questions andwe find that there are multiple
(18:33):
conflicting answers in thosequestions and we arrive at these
, you know, beautiful insightlenses.
We might be able to thendistill that down to a timely
approach, like we need to make adecision today, so we can't,
you know, spend two months justdeliberating like a philosopher
in a cave.
You know what are, what is thedecision we need to make?
(18:53):
We need to make a decision now,so that's a timely approach.
But what also happens in thedistillation to that timely
approach is that we have sort ofexhaust that comes off, and I
call that exhaust bankableforesight.
I like to think that there's,with really good consideration,
with, you know, really goodinsight, analysis, you know,
(19:13):
really thinking things through,asking good questions, really
listening, pondering humanexperience, what we come to is
this sense that there are thingsthat are going to be true, most
likely in the future, thataren't necessarily true now,
like priorities we can tellwe're going to have to face up
to that, aren't necessarilyrequiring us to adapt to them
(19:35):
today, but what we can do istriangulate our decisions with
those foresights.
We can begin to lay in placetimely approaches, day by day by
day, quarter by quarter, thatstart to move us incrementally
in the direction that foresightis pulling us.
And I think that that itdoesn't necessarily contradict,
(19:56):
like you said, the, theunderstanding of the user
experience or the you know, theanalytics about a person, or
looking at the all of thedifferent data that we can
gather about human performanceor behavior into this better,
more well-rounded way ofreframing our thinking and our
(20:21):
decision-making so that it ismore human-informed.
And, by the way, you can use AItools generative AI in this
processing.
I think it just requires that westay awake at the wheel using
these tools to review theresults that we get back from
the sort of crunching of thisdata and what's suggested back
(20:43):
to us.
If something comes back fromgenerative AI, that's that has
the ring of truth.
Well, wonderful, you know, likethat's a, that's a great use of
the tool, but we have torecognize it as the ring of
truth and then figure out how itapplies and how we're going to
distill timely approaches andwhat kind of bankable foresights
come from those humanintelligence on which we'll come
(21:06):
, we'll come back to.
Jim Hertzfeld (21:07):
So you know, I love, I love research projects
there's.
Sometimes they're frustratingbecause even even kind of small
incremental research, becauseyou know, sometimes it's it's
satisfying you, you do thatquery or you the survey comes
back, and it's satisfying.
When you do that query or thesurvey comes back and it's like,
wow, it didn't really tell meanything, so it's satisfying.
Okay, we're on the right track.
That's sort of validating.
But then you get excited whenthere's something you didn't see
(21:30):
coming, like, oh my gosh, nowthere's something we didn't know
about, there's something thatchallenges us, right.
But then the human intelligencekicks in again.
Kate O'Neill (21:42):
You're like, well, wait a minute, is that real,
right, right, exactly.
That's what the best is whenyou have two different sources,
like an internal and external,and they validate one another,
and then you can just feel like,all right, cool, we're good
here, we're done, we did ourresearch.
Jim Hertzfeld (21:53):
That is nice, but let's, let's, let's agree.
It's way more fun when theycontradict Like well, you
thought this, but you didn'tknow.
This is what they were thinking.
I love that.
Kate O'Neill (22:03):
Yeah, but I always tell my clients you don't pay a
consultant to come in and tellyou something you don't know.
You pay a consultant to come inand tell you.
You are very smart, you arethinking the exact right thing.
Jim Hertzfeld (22:13):
You're very smart for hiring us.
So I think that you know,behind what you're saying and
some of this sort of with thisforesight, is the ability and we
talked about sort of predictingthe future and future proofing
and I think what's behind thatis because we feel like Mike,
you know, we, we, we get oneshot like we get this, one shot
(22:33):
that making the best productever and it's either going to
we're either going to be winnersor losers, and if it doesn't
pan out, we'll never get achance to do this again.
So we have to know everything,we have to predict every
possible outcome, every possiblefuture, so that we don't paint
ourselves in the corner or getstuck or have technical debt or
(22:55):
whatever thing we're worriedabout and scared about.
So you talk about not justpredicting but preparing for the
future or maybe being futureready.
So what's behind that, kate?
Kate O'Neill (23:04):
Yeah, there's this term, future proof.
I've always had a problem withit just strikes me as such a
silly articulation of thisconcept, because you can never
be future proof.
That's not a thing that reallyhappens, like the.
The idea it makes me think ofwhen you know you're, you're, uh
, bringing a kid over.
I don't have kids, so it's whena kid would be coming over to
(23:27):
my house and I have to kid proofmy living room or my kitchen
right yeah so that doesn't makeany sense, like I'm not going to
necessarily create, uh, futureproof spaces in my home, like
that's, like that's not.
That's not how that works,unless there's some sort of
vortex of, you know, timeresistant experience, I don't
know.
But no, it makes much moresense to me to think about being
(23:51):
more ready for the future,being future ready rather than
future proof.
And one of the ways to do that,I think, is it sort of speaks
to one of the things you justsaid, which is, you know, you
said we think we're only goingto get like one chance to do it
right.
I think one of the reframesthat we have the opportunity to
do is to think more often aboutfutures, not future, because the
(24:12):
future isn't just one set path.
It sort of I like to think ofit as almost more like a prism
From this moment.
There's this kind of radiatingrealm of possibility, like many,
many different possibleoutcomes from the moment we're
in, and that sort of feels moreliberating, I think, and more
(24:32):
empowering, because it shows howwe have the opportunity to
shape those futures and tonarrow the realm of what is
possible through the actions anddecisions we take.
I'd also suggest that one of themost valuable questions that I
ask my clients is to think aboutwhen they think about the
(24:53):
future from this moment, andthat the most likely thing
that's going to happen in thefuture and the most preferred
thing for them that they'd liketo see happen.
So, out of the possible futures, from this consideration in the
current moment, what's the mostprobable, what's the most
preferred?
And then, if you do the mathand subtract one from the other,
(25:15):
what?
What's the Delta between those,and how can you actively move
them closer together?
What are the decisions andactions you need to take today
and every day going forward toclose the gap between the most
probable outcome and the mostpreferred outcome?
And truly that's a million plusdollar question, like every
(25:38):
organization can benefit fromthinking that way.
Jim Hertzfeld (25:41):
Well, and I think you know we like to take things
to sort of the digital realmhere I think one of the ways
that we have to also think aboutit is think about
future-proofing is givingyourself options.
You know and I every sort ofproduct strategy or digital
strategy that I've come up withor been involved in I can reduce
to either a party or picnicplanning metaphor.
(26:01):
So, because they're fun,everyone can get behind those
metaphors, but you know we'regoing to do this.
If the weather's good, we'regoing to go here.
If it's bad, we're going to goinside.
Right, so you know, keepingyour options open.
So you know, like more flexiblearchitectures and headless
commerce and APIs and fluidity,all these kind of technical
(26:22):
things.
They kind of exist to give youoptions, because you don't you
don't know what's going tohappen.
We may have to refactorsomething, we may have to alter
that journey, or we may have togive different things to
different personas ifpreferences change.
So you know, I think that'sanother philosophy that kind of
goes into that.
Kate O'Neill (26:40):
Yeah, and I think it's sort of an interesting
opportunity to bring up one ofthe themes, one of the
observations that I make in thebook, because I think it applies
to some of what you're talkingabout there.
That too often, I think, whenwe talk about digital
transformation and we talk aboutinnovation, we talk about them
as if they're synonymous withone another, and they're really,
(27:01):
really not.
In my experience in decades ofdoing this work what I find is
digital transformation is thework of catching up to what the
market already expects and whatinnovation is is the work of
looking ahead to what is trulynovel and what is going to move
you into one of those likelyfutures or the future where
(27:23):
you'd like to be.
Those are very different tasks.
They are not.
One is not better than theother, and it's not like you
choose to do one but not theother.
You've got to do the work ofcatching up, and every
organization has both of thesetasks right.
Every organization has areas inwhich they're still catching up
to.
You know the way that workflowsare happening in other
(27:44):
organizations.
You know kind of internally,operationally, whatever, and
that's digital transformation.
And there is also everyorganization is trying to think
about how can we be the onesthat set the tone for what is
going to happen in this industryand in our market and so on.
So it's both of those arehappening, and I think it's a
really important aspect of whenyou talk about the various
(28:06):
pieces of technology that affordus more fluidity and
flexibility.
I think we also need this othersort of different dimension of
consideration that we need tounderstand, that that needs to
happen across both a catching upto the present moment digital
transformation perspective andan innovation moving us forward
into the future perspective.
Jim Hertzfeld (28:26):
I really like that distinction because, you're
right, they do get conflated.
I think everybody's looking forthe easy button right or the
pixie dust, so like well, if Idigitize it, it'll be innovative
.
Well, maybe not.
Not to mention, by the way, itmay be innovative, but nobody
cares Not solving a customerproblem.
Well, if I digitize it, it'llbe innovative.
Well, maybe not.
Not to mention by the way itmay be innovative, but nobody
cares If you're not solving acustomer problem, then you know
what's the point.
(28:53):
Right.
What problem are we solvingbefore you know?
How do they?
How do we sort of yin and yangand have checks and balances
between you know what we knowintuitively, right or through
experience, which is full of itsown biases and pitfalls and and
risks, and machine intelligence, which is seemingly faster and
(29:14):
smarter and knows more, thanhave some more facts than I do,
but is also sort of flawed andbiased and hallucinating.
And how do these concerns worktogether?
Kate O'Neill (29:25):
Well, it's funny, I think we all spend a lot of
sort of existential angst cycleson this question the difference
between human intelligence andmachine intelligence where do
humans thrive, versus where AIis going to take our jobs or,
you know, supplant us orwhatever.
And I think one of the ways inwhich it's overwrought is that
(29:45):
machine intelligence has beenheavily influenced by human
intelligence.
Right, I mean, obviously it'sbuilt out of human intelligence,
but it's also been modeledafter human intelligence,
modeled after human intelligence.
So many of the metaphors ofartificial intelligence draw
directly from concepts of howour brain works.
So what we've really done isuse human intelligence to build
(30:10):
faster, more connected versionsof the human brain, like what
would happen if the brain wereable to do more cycles and
process faster.
It shouldn't feel sothreatening, I think, and it
also shouldn't feel so alien tous.
It's definitely a familiarmodel.
That said, it is inherentlyartificial in the sense that
(30:35):
it's synthetic.
Right, the ways in whichmachine intelligence knows what
it knows is by training itself,in some cases, like unsupervised
learning on a lot of randominformation and looking for
connections, which, incidentally, is often how we learn as well.
But what we do in the world asembodied beings is move through
(31:00):
the world with a very distinctlyhuman, embodied sense of the
world.
We are constantly sense making,and sense making is about
meaning.
Meaning is the fundamentalattribute of human experience,
and it is something thatmachines don't have the ability
(31:21):
to be in touch with in the sameway and maybe never will, at
least not until meaning formachines is made from, whatever
components they will makemeaning from, like when, once
some kind of generalintelligence is achieved and
they're drawing a sense of, youknow, their own existence in the
(31:43):
world, a sort ofself-consciousness from the
world, then maybe, but that'snot even relevant to our
understanding today.
Our understanding today has tobe about how do we have the most
meaningful experiences ashumans, and how does technology,
and even advanced technology,fit into that?
So I think the question reallywe ought to be asking is how
(32:05):
should we be using AI to betterfulfill meaningfulness in human
experiences?
How should we be using AI tosupplement meaning in the world
around us?
How can we be automatingexperiences in such a way that
we don't lose a sense of meaning?
You know I alluded earlier tothe idea of loneliness when
(32:26):
people are in grocery stores,and you know this whole Amazon
Go thing of taking away that onelittle interaction that
somebody may look forward to.
Well, what are the opportunitieselsewhere?
You know, when it comes tobanking transactions, when it
comes to wayfinding, when itcomes to any everyday type of
thing that we have in the world,there are just numerous
(32:48):
opportunities for us to thinkwhat ways could we infuse just
that nuance, that subtle senseof being seen and being
understood and being connectedwith others?
What are the ways in which wecan do that?
And that, I think, is aquestion that's well worth every
organization asking themselves.
Jim Hertzfeld (33:06):
I agree, I'm glad you're leaning into that.
I think that's really beenmotivating me in a lot of my
interactions with purpose,purpose and meaning.
They're not going away.
I think we need to incorporatethose more in our planning, our
design, you know, in oureveryday work, because I it's
kind of like I'm really going tothrow it back to like culture
(33:26):
eats strategy for breakfast.
Kate O'Neill (33:29):
Love Drucker.
Jim Hertzfeld (33:30):
Yeah, it's Peter Drucker.
The the, the older I get, themore meaning that has to me.
You know, I get it.
It's like watching an old movieyou didn't, you know.
You're like you see all theadult humor you know today that
you didn't see as a kid.
You're like, oh my gosh, howdid they make this movie?
So you know, some of thesethings are coming back.
But, yeah, culture purposemeaning it's not going away and
(33:52):
it's it's.
It's gotta be sort of embeddedin the way we do things.
We're kind of out of time here,kate.
I'd love to close on.
There's so many other things Iwant to ask you, but I want to
maybe you could leave one thing.
What if you could give theaudience some advice on
something they could take away?
Because I think you've given usa lot of contradictions and
provocations and I think whatpeople are looking for is to
(34:16):
take some of this conventionalwisdom just of the last five to
10 years and advance it.
But if there's one thing youcould tell folks, what would you
ask them to do?
What would you give them thatthey could do today?
Kate O'Neill (34:26):
I think you know you hit it with.
You said that meaning andpurpose are not going away.
But I want to be even crisperabout that.
That meaning, as I said, is thefundamental human experience,
but it's also at every level weconsider meaning.
It is about what matters.
Meaning is always about whatmatters and purpose is the shape
that meaning takes in business.
So when we try to think abouthow those facets of
(34:50):
understanding, how that wisdom,how that human insight can serve
us as we consider technologydecisions, those are the
questions to come back to.
What matters in this and whatis likely to matter going
forward?
That's the question whatmatters?
Next in the title of my book isreally draws from this insight
that what matters to us now andwhat's likely to matter in the
future are the big questions weneed to be asking ourselves as
(35:14):
we deploy technology that shapeshuman experience and as we
build businesses and go aboutour lives.
What matters and what is goingto matter?
Jim Hertzfeld (35:22):
And that's whether you're a CEO or a
business analyst, or you'recontemplating your career move
or what you're going to do next.
So, kate, thanks so much forsharing your wisdom.
Kate O'Neill (35:32):
Thank you, jim, this has been great.
Jim Hertzfeld (35:33):
And we'll love to talk to you next time You've
been listening to what, If sowhat.
Joe (35:35):
We'll love to talk to you next time.
You've been listening to what,If so what A digital strategy
podcast from Proficient with JimHertzfeld.
We want to thank our Proficientcolleagues JD Norman and Rick
Bauer for our music.
Subscribe to the podcast anddon't miss a single episode.
You can find this season, alongwith show notes, at
Proficientcom.
(35:56):
Thanks for listening.
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