Christa Hill, Building an AI-First Team Culture

Hello and a warm collisions, YYC. Welcome to Ms. Krista Hill. How you doing Krista? Fantastic, Tyler. Thanks for having me. It is absolutely my pleasure. I was, I was, I got, I can't, I can't lie. I've been looking forward to this. We had a, we had a beautiful run in a run in a bump in during a stampede, a stampede event and we conspired to do this podcast. We power chatted. We kind of zeroed in on each other. Everyone else at the party disappeared. My wife was there. We had a flabby conversation. So this has been like months into making. Yes, absolutely. The three of us had a lovely conversation for anyone who hasn't had the opportunity to meet you, to work with you or more importantly, the privilege to talk with you. You are the CEO at tacit edge. You are the co-founder at AI North. And I feel that's an understatement unto itself and all the things that you're involved in. So let us into the tech. Let's take a couple of minutes and just set the stage of like, what is, what is tacit edge? What is AI North? And let's have a conversation. Yes, everyone who's listening, it's going to be a deep dive on AI from many different perspectives. So hold on and brace yourself. It's going to be great. All right. Well, yes, I'm the CEO of tacit edge along with Renee Matzala. We created an organization that tackled what we saw to be industry's biggest problem, which was there's no product problems. There's only people problems. So we went out and we got executive coaching, education, then we started writing curriculum to go after a lot of the, what we thought were systemic issues around not hiring folks that were, that was merit based in our work and what we do is which is called product management, which we can define that in another segment. I think it's really important for us to unpack that there was not a lot of diversity in voices and in perspectives. And when you are building products and let's just say AI is a product, okay? So a product can be anything on a store shelf to a team of people, anything you want to increase in value. And this core competency you would see in every CEO. So think of the CEO as being the first product manager in every organization. And if you take the activities that they do and talking to customers trying to figure out what the market wants and needs, how to build a combination of technology, people and services to get at that value. And you take that person and you drop them inside of an organization, they become an entrepreneur and this is product management. We wrote curriculum to teach people how to do this. And so that was the core of the business at tacit edge. And then we started expanding that into post-secondaries, UCR courses across Canada. We still teach them ourselves because it gets us a bird's eye view into what's happening in the real world, the business across all industries. And then we hit a wall with AI around implementations. So we went and got the skills to be AI builders. We started writing curriculum around that and we partnered with some folks to create our ideal accelerator, which meant that if we come into your organization, if you meet us through training with your people going out and getting that education on your own or through corporate training, because you're trying to upskill or take your business to the next place, we could come in with technical expertise to help enable those teams because the opportunity in AI is that all teams can be tech teams. You don't just need your IT department or your developers, you can be those people, but sometimes those people need to get unlocked. So we collaborate under the concept of AI North to teach organizations to be their own dev teams. And so as you can imagine the amount of products and people and problems I get to see on my desk every week, it's an exciting life that I've got. And that's why I do it with such joy because I really see the impact of bringing all those perspectives together, not just from an industry lens, but from a teaching lens, from a coaching lens, all of it lives under tacit edge. I love it. That was a fantastic description. And you can hear in your voice that it fills your cup right to the top, which I love. It absolutely does. I jump out of bed every morning to do this. And I think that's a rare thing in the world, but we built it that way. When we started the company, that was the goal to build a lifestyle, not an empire. But the trick with that is when you do it around lifestyle as an entrepreneur, we don't follow that mold of being super burnt out, like leaving it all on the table, sacrificing our families, our health, everything. No, we don't. We started with a very clear mission that we wanted a lifestyle first. And like I said, if you can do that and you can stay committed to that, you get the empire. That's the trick. And then when you get there, you have everything you always wanted instead of thinking that it arrives when the empire arrives. It doesn't come together. If then, if this, then that, right? If I do this and sacrifice those, then one day I'll be happy. And then you wake up. Yes. That's a kick. Nobody's here. 100%. It's lonely and kind of lame. So paint me a picture. I love you. You talked about startup founders. You talked about entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, CEOs, leaders. Who is it? Like if I walked into one of your classrooms, which is probably virtual, I'm guessing, but I walk into a classroom online and I look at the cohort of people that are there. And I think this is relevant as we start to unpack the different ways we're all looking at hearing about experiencing AI in our organizations. Is it everybody in the room? Is it a real mixed bag? It depends on the course. So of course, just like every great product person, we've got an ideal customer profile and ICP for everything on the ladder of value that makes up our organization. So at the very beginning of your journey, you might find us because you're struggling to find your path in your career. So you would go for, you'd go to SAIT and they would give you a little bit of analysis about what you're really good at. And if any of those skills around being a CEO or a business owner is in that wheelhouse, they're sending you to our product management course. And so that's a 10-week experience or 12-week experience where you get to meet a real company in the city and you build a product with them for the first time with a developer or with a user experience person or a product marketing person. So you get that experience of working with a cross-functional team that you can't always get on your own when you're trying to build your resume on your own. So that is what that is for. So in that room, you will see people who are mid-career that are trying to pivot towards technology or trying to challenge themselves in some way. And you also get a lot of folks that are just graduating from early advanced education that are just, again, trying to find how to speak the business language to relate their skills out into the real job market. And that is the power of that course as it gets you interviewing really well because you understand the business value and the business motivation behind the work that needs to get done versus just me as an individual, my individual skills. You get to see and be able to paint yourself into a business picture that you couldn't have done before without that course. So that's the core of that. And also to get you a product management job, which if I'm being honest with you, pays really well. If you land a good one, your starting salary is north of 100k. It's very challenging work because it's not always in an environment that allows you to do it the way that I do it. I do it with extreme joy, but I'm also very particular about the environments that I work in because of how my brain works. I know where I do my best work. Early days in your career, you might not know what that looks like. So there may be a lot of challenges along the way. Which is arguably sometimes part of the journey, right? Absolutely. But we're here to help you with that, of course, with the next course that you could take, which would allow you to advance your skills. And as you can see, in the next showcase, we have right here. We are product people, right? Who know how to run a business. So yes, like from a professional, then it would be a little bit more executive coaching. So you're doing the same reps, deepening your skills, getting real feedback from people like me and Renee as executive coaches, plus our product vacuuming, helping you to really tune your skillset. And then of course, when you're ready to lead with AI because you want to start your own business, you want to get your side hustle going or you want to bring AI into your organization and you don't know where to get started. We've got an experience for that. So it doesn't matter where you are in your career, who you will see in a room is based on a function of the problem that that course solves. Either I'm entering into the career workforce and or I'm pivoting. I'm deepening my expertise. And now I want to really lift and shift my organization leveraging technology that is just now possible. Then of course, our certifying body with the International Product Foundation that we created allows us to micro credential individuals so that you can have the proof that you've done the work and that walks into the room before you. And then when you need a little bit of help, we've got AI North that can come in and partner with you if you're taking your next steps in your MVP and you want to get your business off the ground. We teach you the business around the tech. And I think, you know, when we have such a huge failure rate in startups, a lot of that can be avoided with product management acumen. So if you want us to build your MVP, guess what? You also get me teaching you how to be a product manager so that we can learn how to reduce risk together. And then we take a look at not just the tech we're building for you, but actually I'm teaching you how to support a business around that technology leveraging AI so that you can if you want to live my life, you can have access to it, right? I'm not going to teach you the entrepreneurship that's going to leave you lonely, wicked, like very well off, but have not much to show for it outside of that if you want to do it. Nobody wants to be successful on the beach by themselves, right? Yeah, if how I've done it is attractive to you, you will find all of that recipe at AI North. Wow, that was if you your ability to articulate this so clearly is such a gift and it's a pleasure for as an interviewer to have this type of quality and answers. So taking that a little bit step further, when you say technology, is it synonymous with AI now? And that maybe feels like a silly question, but I hate I hate lost language. I always want to go, well, wait a second, when you say this and you say that, are you meaning the same thing? Yeah, I think that I'm in the business of solving problems using technology that is just now possible. So that might mean AI that fits. It may not mean AI that doesn't fit, right? So I think when you think of the product management mindset and how powerful it is, you can push a problem to a team and they will decide what technology works instead of pushing a solution for them to build with a prescribed customer centricity jobs to be done problem centric solving. Yeah, so when we in a room and people sometimes will say, oh, Krista, who's our project manager? I'm like, well, stop right there. You're not pushing a solution to me. That's project management. You want me to execute on building the thing you've already given me the recipe for, but when you push a problem to me and I am with the team, we'll leverage our strengths to come up with a solution and test in very small ways so we can get failure at a discount before building out the whole thing. That is the line of work that I'm in. I love it. How balanced or what's the nuance between sometimes, which I believe my point of view is a human tendency to jump to solution. Like, oh, problem, I have a solution. I didn't talk to anybody. I didn't even really go speak to the customer. I didn't see it from their point of view or to their journey. How do you balance out that sometimes need to jump to the end, which I, in my experience, and I say I quit a bit, have had a tendency to do that in the past and not sitting with something long enough to go, oh, if I hadn't stuck with this exploration, I would have never got to the insight that actually made the difference. How do you tune the psychology of that, especially with a group of people where we've been rewarded for jumping to the end really quick sometimes? 100% is what got the majority of us. If you're a Gen Xer, that's how you got to senior leadership. Let's just be honest with each other. We solutioned live in a room whoever had the best one won, and that person also got promoted in a few weeks, right? So we rode that train and I'm not even going to lie. Like I cut my teeth on that thinking. And so the massive amount of unlearning in that area to understand that that also introduces a level of risk we can't afford. So when I position that in a room and I hear that happening, I let it happen. And then I just pause the room and then I say, okay, we got all the energy out now, right? We all know what the risk is. If we move on Tyler's thing right now, what we risk is we have made an assumption. It sounds really good to us, but we have to figure out why it feels really good to us. Is it because it's familiar? Because it worked last time? Or it's a brand new thing we never considered and we're really excited about it? Like what is the thing that feels good to us about it? Then what can we do this afternoon for free to validate that that idea is the next right step in the process? So I think it's just having the skills to not be punitive in a room when we hear that because again, I know it when I see it and I'm also this person. Okay, so I fight that instinct in me and it is horrendously painful to not step in. You know, but the coaching education really taught me how to slow down the pace of a conversation and to know that at the end of the 30 minute time is not the indicator of success is not if we made a decision. It's did we learn more than we knew before that 30 minutes started. So my marker for what a successful meeting is that that marker is shifted. And so I hold the room to that and I give them permission to also see it that way too. And then our action item is again, what can I do this afternoon for free to learn more about Tyler's idea? How might we test it? How could we prototype it? How could we leverage an AI tool to build like a version of that so we don't have to spend a dollar like what could $5 with the credits on open AI, you know, discover on that right instead of it being a green light. So it's the concept of like greenhouse full of ideas don't lead to green lights, we're building, it's just let's stay in the greenhouse, let's discover more when it feels right, we move it forward. And then is it getting us the value in the business that we're going after? How might we tell again, in a very short space of time, time box it to see whether or not we get at that value? I appreciate that. So it's such a different model from I use Gen X as a framework so I can relate to that. Oh, yeah. In there, you and I are quick talkers, we're quick thinkers, we're good in our feet. So you ended up being the person who got their ideas traction in a room and you got rewarded for it. And when it failed, maybe it was down the road and oh, you maybe took responsibility, maybe you deflected. But what I'm hearing is so much of, you know, and as you know, I'm a big proponent of curiosity and that call to reflect versus react is something I know I've wrestled with for years and a lot of the leaders I work with are in our cohort, they've now moved their way up, they've either started and run companies that are now medium, they're trying to scale, but we're still using the playbook we used to use. Oh, yeah. Do you see the cohort in the room fraction where, you know, and we're being stereotypical for the fun of it, but it's just not right. Gen X acting a certain way that you've got different generations going, whoa, like, hey, Mr. Jump to the end or Mrs. Jump to the end. Can we maybe explore this a little bit more? Can my voice be heard? Do you see it break around lines that way? Or is it still more about the personas of who these people are not necessarily what you're they were born? You know, that's a really hard question because I could generalize on Gen Xers all day long. There's what I do is I create activities where I know each one of them can play to their strengths so that every part of where you come from can be contributed in the way that feels good to you. So here's what I know. Gen Xers in a room, I mean, we need diversity of perspective when we're in the room because we feel like we could solution. We grew up with MacGyver. Don't tell us that we cannot find our way forward and we can't fix this thing. I stick a gum and some fertilizer and I can blow up this dam if I need to see what this bridge is. And the fact that we just said MacGyver, half of the audience doesn't even know what we're talking about. So you can, you want to Google it, you'll figure it out. You're like, I still don't know what they're talking about. And I know exactly what you're talking about. And I hope it's on some streaming service somewhere because it is. Yeah, it's got to be buried somewhere for sure. You have to understand that we grew up with a grit, which makes us really resilient. So that is a, that is, that's the nugget I pull on. Yes, is the resilience. Now, do I need to slow down the call to action? You're already making me uncomfortable looking at words slow down. I know. And then can I call to them in the room to hold back, to hold space for other people to come through that have a softer, perhaps maybe don't want to contribute right away. Like what's more offensive to this, you know, let's just keep picking on Gen X because I know they can take it. They're tough. You know, people not responding to your question. Same with boomers. If you give somebody a question and they want to hear an answer and you say, I need to think about that. Can I get back to you? Sends a ripple. And it's like, there's this knee jerk reaction. Well, this person might not know what they're talking about, because we valued somebody's solution and quickly with a higher form of intelligence and to be able to articulate that quickly too as well. That is not true of other humans that have come after. Well, the myth that responding quickly is a higher form of intelligence. It's just responding quickly. Like we have to call what it is. You just also described myself and my wife in our early days. Someone asked me, how did, how's emotional intelligence shown up in your life? I'm like, when my wife says she needs some time to think about it, I believed her and let it sit. And we talked about it the next day. And over time, that period of time closed. But until I started respecting her processing time versus mine and the same thing in my work environment, I was just throwing more oil, more gasoline on a fire that I lit off. Again, it's about surfacing risks. So if you don't actually ask people what great contribution looks like, you don't know how to tap into that top 1% of their brain power. So I'm just going to give you an example. I was operating with the e-brake on in a lot of my career because I was working in very noisy open space environments, you know, the tech world where we had all of our deaths together, fluorescent lighting, tons of noise, people walking up to you, distracting you all the time. Like it was, it was what I know now was an absolute nightmare for how my brain works. I discovered a new gear in COVID. It was the best thing that ever happened to me because I could control my working environment. And I found a whole new train of thought, a whole new way to see problems. And I could do in 20 minutes, what used to take me a week, two weeks. So I look at that. And I think to myself, when I look around the room, is this meeting the right environment where I'm going to tap into that person's best work? And then at the end of every meeting, I can ask them, did I hold space for you to discover that for yourself? Is there like on a scale of one to 10, how confident are we right now that we're making the right decision based on how we like to operate so that we are giving our best work? A lot of people will just punch the time card and just say, yeah, that's good enough. They've got a lot going on. But a lot of teams don't get asked that very often. So when you pose that in a room, it does shift the gear a little bit to get people to think about like, did I just phone it in? And did I just agree with Tyler? Because that seemed like a really great idea. And I'm freaking exhausted because I was up with my kid last night and you know, my wife got mad at me or you know, like a million other things are going on, like 100%, right? Or could I benefit from circling back on this tomorrow? And I don't mean circling back like in the way that we make fun of it. And I know we make fun of it as Gen Xers because we see that as an excuse, like you didn't do your best thinking in the hours of nine to 930. How dare you? I want to get the version of what Christ is thinking about that after she's taken a walk or after she was tinkering around in her van. It could be totally different than the thing I contributed in that meeting. It could be a difference maker in the business and then the direction of the product. So I try to ask questions in the room to see if I can surface. And then when my gut tells me we're at a seven out of 10, I move us forward. But if my gut is telling me we're not there, we're at a four or five, six, seven, I go into hold and I take people one on one and I try to surface those things. So it's a different, yes, I think intergenerationally there are the stereotypes. Yes, that's everywhere, but it's also a call to go a little deeper and how might you create an environment where people can still do the things that make them feel really good. So they feel like they're doing their best work and then also pull on the threads to make that room more inclusive so that everybody's contributing the way that they really want to. Creating space and taking time is so obvious when you say it out loud, but so difficult in a world where we always feel we don't have enough time. And there's always like the amplification of tasks, the do more with less like the crushing nature of where things seem to be moving. And I've done a couple episodes lately around the working, the working leader, like 90% of leaders also have their own deliverables while also supposed to take some time in the ivory tower. That's a really, it's almost, it's almost impossible because they completely eat each other alive. My experience and my viewpoint talking to other leaders out there, when they take, when you catch them in that moment of like, "Yeah, shit, I am drowning over here." That seems to be a common theme. And then we throw AI in with the promise of more and just access to a tool that we had a couple years ago was sci-fi, which is amazing. I love it. It's so new in our world. Part of that journey that you're on to educate and expose people to it, how do you also balance out, "Oh, god damn, it's just another thing." Like so many of our clients, people like, "How's AI affecting your business? We're spending a lot of time on it." But when I talk to most of our clients, they're so overwhelmed. They're just excited that we are even thinking about it and they're not even there yet because they're drowning in their own worlds. And that's probably a theme I've really started to notice. Like, "Oh, where is the pulse check with our clients?" Most of them are just swamped and they haven't had time to think about it beyond the media, making them a little bit scared maybe sometimes. And a few of them are a little bit excited. Where's that sliver down the middle as we continue on this path forward? And you're in the eye of the storm. That was a lot. I told everybody, "Oh, no, it's actually is the perfect setup to how I would explain this to folks." If we closed our eyes and we went back pre-COVID and we thought about how we managed our workday and how we had a little bit more agency, a little bit more confidence, a little less fear around our day-to-day and the pace of our days were different than where they are now. Then the world went to shit through COVID. We saw, all of a sudden, we lost relationships because we were looking at our friends and neighbors with opinions we'd never heard before. And this is like, so there was a lot of destabilization on the work side. It brought us together for a hot moment and then it blew us apart. A hundred percent did. And it taught us a lesson of the fragility of that sweet spot that we were in and I think a lot of us didn't appreciate it at the time, what we had. And then you look at where we are now, where I watch the news only once a week. Every Sunday, I will watch a national broadcast to be brought up to speed on how everything is exactly the same except five points worse on every topic. And so I think about what would it take for me to leverage tools and technology that is just now possible to get me back to that sweet spot because we've been functionally burnt out as adults since COVID. And then we normalized that we never got back to a pre COVID mindset. We just normalized that functional burnout, these relationships, how we were managing our lives. We just kept on going. And I think the result of that is the reaction you're seeing in many groups around AI, not one more thing. Krista, I can't take it. I can't take any more change. And so how, when I enter groups, especially in more legacy industries that really feel it the most, this is not a tech organization. They've already been adopting this. This is not who I'm talking to, right? Their, their, their whole mantra is change and innovation. When we're talking with industries that have been highly innovative below ground, but not above ground. Okay, so we can stand, change and innovation as long as it's below us, like in our mining activities or how we're doing production and in our plants, et cetera. But the second it comes into my office, that's one step too far. That's a great way to frame that up actually. Yeah. And then, you know, when I'm in these conversations, they're like, well, you're not an industry expert in oil and gas. What makes you an expert in, in helping us with this? And I would say, well, respectfully, you've had experts in innovation below ground for very long time, and they've not even touched your above ground problems. I think you need an above ground person to take you through this next leg. So when I speak in those terms, and I say like, it's going to be a journey, but we're going to make your own life better first, you're going to put your own mask on. And we're going to go one by one through this group, because capacity building for training is the biggest hurdle in corporate training. You have, when was the last time it was easy to get seven executives in a room for even an hour and a half with somebody like me, the amount of objections, like the theory they love. But then the second we go to scheduling, they're like, well, we don't have time for that. I was like, well, you can't have it both ways. I can't teach you through osmosis. You're going to have to get into a room with me. That's a bit of a showstopper. You know, so there's a lot of things that we need to do in week one. And usually in week one, when you're working with me, we look at your unique context that you're working in. And we find how you get three hours back using just very basic AI applications that anyone has access to. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. But I just take you from zero to one, so you can put your own mask on. The second you get that buzz. It's a buzz and it's palpable in a room. The level of excitement kicks off creativity and critical thinking that I don't think I've seen in rooms since pre-COVID. So when I reignite that in people and they get excited, all of a sudden they see potential because they're coming out from being in the weeds to looking above the tree line. Now we can take those gains that they learned for themselves and now they're not afraid of it because I understand the core of the technology. Well, and you also made it relevant and you made it personal, which is so powerful. Yeah. And we bought them back some of their time and just a little, a little slice of joy back in their work day for the first time in a really long time. And I can't tell you what that means to people. Like that's all they need is that early delighter. They just need to have a delightful first experience that wasn't through fear, through shame, like somebody showing them something and then they felt bad that they didn't know how to do that. It was just very tailored to their context. And then again, when they're in the room and you suggest something for the business, the level of defensiveness goes way down because now they're excited and they think they can make a contribution and that's AI literacy. So if we as a nation could get 21 million folks that represents our professional workforce, literate to say a grade seven or grade nine level with AI, we would see a huge mindset shift about where we're going with our future, but that's going to be a huge hill to climb. I think for a lot of folks, but I'm here for it one person at time. Like this is the mission, Tyler. Our future is a nation depends on it. I don't want to be that person in the room, but we are ranked 43rd out of 47 nations for AI literacy and that is not something we should be proud of. No, it definitely should be not. Let's make this really tangible. What would be some of the things that would show up in that first little surprise and delight journey for these leaders and executives that three hours, where's that coming from? I just take them right into, we talk about the different large language models, chat, GBT, Claude, Proplexity. We figure out which one kind of maps best to your personality. We make it fun. Like it's a little bit of matchmaking. Who do you want to hang out with? Yeah, who's going to be your work bestie? Like you get some choice here and let me tell you what the feedback has been on each of these based on my own experience, based on just what, you know, other people are saying. And it's just the first one you try. You don't, you're not, we're not getting married. It's just not a show. It's just like we're blind dating. So we go in there. It's a very promissuous world out there when it comes to tools. Yeah, like zero risk situation. And you know, we get them in there and then I give them their first set of prompts and we write them together. And the ability to ask a really great question that gets to an answer instead of treating it like Google is the first muscle we need to build. Right now we go to Google and we have to be very generic. We know how it works. We're all trying to figure out keywords and terms that are going to give us the right results. So that's a search skill. But what I need to train them is how to get an answer skill, which is different than what we get from Google right now. So when we talk about how our businesses are going to show up in chat, GPT or in clode or in Proplexity, this is a whole new level of like SEO, which is called AGO. So answer. It's called about three different things right now. Which is kind of annoying. You know, the GEO is the other one, which is generative. Some tech person came up with that. That's not going to stick. I think if we say it three times, it should be AEO. I know it still doesn't roll off the tongue yet. I'm still struggling with that. It's new. It's like a new pronoun. What's so amazing about what you just described is once you get used to conversing or get a little more familiar, a little more comfortable conversing with an LLM, then you go back to Google. Google sucks. Well, because you're like, I want to dialogue. You're not the only one. I want to riff and I can't. You're giving me, even when you punch out some Gemini AI based, it's still, I have to go back and change my search query. I can't dialogue in a way that has become very natural very quickly for some of us who just dove in, right? Yeah. And so just teaching them the first to lighter. So giving them the most annoying tasks, they would rather die than do on the job ever again. We plunk that in and we ask that large language model, how do I get out of ever having to do this ever again? And then teach me like I'm five, even if I'm not technical, how I might in an afternoon for free, make that problem go away. And we do that. And then I take them to take the results of that, throw it into another delighter AI app, which is Gamma, which gets rid of, it makes you break up with PowerPoint and really gets you thinking about how many hours you spent on presentations of your life. You will never get back. If you want to talk about some regret in my career, that is the biggest category and how to go in and within 30 seconds, they could create a presentation that matches their, their company iconography and everything make them look so pro without a single grammatical error issue, problem with images and they could go teach someone else. So how I do it is we put our own mask on and then the masks start dropping across the team and then we use AI to help us teach the next person coming in so that no one else ever has to feel like they don't know their first next step because it all starts there. You need to have a positive experience with something before you will continue down the path. The, the longer we keep trying to force it on people without making it contextual to their lives, it's not going to, that's why we're 43 out of 47. I think we just haven't unlocked that way to introduce it to people in a way that they're not afraid because we, we have a fear-based, mongering world right now that is like one more thing to be afraid of and it's like, but what if this is the thing that unlocked something? Well, and also when you've been prize in your career, if you're a mid to senior level leader and you're of a certain age to resist the tip, the Tennessee to disay Gen X again, you've also been prized by having the answers, knowing everything, not knowing something was like a death stroke, right? It was a death mark on you like, oh, so and so didn't know the answer. So then I'll just protect myself by staying away for something that I don't want to feel dumb. I don't want to look dumb and all the things that show up where I love that you create a safe space because that's psychological safety that, and creating a little space and a little time to actually save you some time. You're kind of, you're, you're kind of feeding us as the junkies that we are, the performance junkies we all are, you're feeding us a little bit of that in a bite-sized way. Who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want that? I know who doesn't want to have that win. And then they go home, they show their kids, you know, we, there's a lot of data. I know mom, I've been telling you already. Oh, I know, but I mean, even with me and my daughter, so, you know, just for perspective, I, I see, I've got a 13 year old. So she's going to enter a job market that is a whole new world that didn't exist. Like even the job market that I entered for my parents is wildly different. There's no advice I could give her other than the one that I know to be true as a business owner is that her network is her net worth. So start building your network now at 13. If she is mindful of really putting herself out there to meet new people and really experience life and not try and shy away from that experience. And even if you just have a job and it's only part time, try to still meet other people in other organizations, like don't silo yourself in a place where you have to start from zero every time you need something. Because I will tell you, and you know this to be true, your network delivers for you nine times out of 10. The second you put out a call that you are seeking something, they show up. So the bigger that pool is the more opportunity you're going to have. And you know, my daughter's world, this, this shows up in ring yet in sport, right? She plays between two leagues and between those two leagues, she has doubled the opportunity than other girls her age who are goalies because two leagues know who she is. They love her. And so when an opportunity comes up, everybody needs the goalie. She chose goalie. And also there's that, right? She is in demand. She's in demand. And as able to correlate that to how that would work in the business world for her, and she got it, right? And she understood. And I think, you know, when I'm introducing AI toolster, I took her to a zero to one class that I do. Again, these two lighters, I did them down a platform this summer. She came with me because it's summertime and she didn't have a camp. So I told her to come along. She built an app on site with everyone else, all the adults on how to choose the right goalie just in case Edmonton makes it to the Stanley Cup finals again next year. It helps them choose between Pickard and Skinner based on the scenario. So it was like a tool for the coaches so that they would make a better decision next time, you know? And so this is how empowering whether, whether you're a leader getting empowered by, wow, I built that. Like that little kid in us is still very alive and very well. And even you feed it a little bit and that empowerment that a 13 will have of like, I built something. I built something. I, the confidence building. I think that parlays all the way up to any level of leader or any age or any cohort of generational, you know, categorization. Yeah. And that behavior, Tyler. Oh, go ahead. No, go ahead. I just want to say one more thing on this. I have so many questions. I have so many questions. I know, but just so that we don't get the train away from the station around like intergenerationally, if you feel like you're pretending like you know what's going on and you think that that train has left the station and you have no idea how to find your way back, please, please, please just do yourself a favor, confine me on LinkedIn. I do the lives zero to one in AI and I will give you this to lighter and I do it for free like every couple of weeks depending on my schedule. So don't think you can't get at this. It is not too late. Just start. The best time was two years ago and the next best time is right fucking now. Like it was the best time to plan a tree 20 years ago. If not, then how about today? I love that. And I love manipulating that. Yeah. But how critical though, you made the comment earlier in the conversation around this isn't a barrier to only tech teams. You don't have to be technically savvy or technically proficient or have 20 years experience as a coder to get involved in these tools. And as leaders, how critical is it? I'm kind of asking a question. I think I already know the answer to that when your team brings you something, you got that comfort, that familiarity, but you don't have to be an expert in it to understand because if you come at it problem and client centric and if you happen to have a long history of time working in a certain sector, no one better to be involved in those innovations than somebody who really understands the problems, the jobs to be done by the customer. You don't have to be an expert to be at that table. And I've seen somebody, well, that's not my thing. So therefore I'm not going to get involved. I'm like, yeah, but you're kind of sidelining all of this expertise that you do have that brought into a group of mixed leaders or mixed experts or mixed perspectives is to me critical, but they self-select in a way that I think really hurts the organization. And these are learned behaviors. We all got our wrists slapped at some stage in our career, very publicly, by the way, there would have been a shame bomb around this. And I could tell you a story over drinks. I mean, I cut my teeth on this in many organizations. This was their method of keeping us in line, not too stray outside your lane. How many times have we heard this? Stay in your lane, Krista, stay in your lane. So if I, I come then to the conversation with that, and that is something that is top of mind for me, right? Sorry, I just got a distraction on my phone there. I thought it was my kids apologies. That's okay. No problem. If I'm being told to stay in my lane, I'm going to stay in my lane. And if I've heard that message for more than 15 years, then I'm, it's going to be hardwired. So what we need to do is create an activity to unlock and give those people permission to veer outside their lane into the 600 lanes of the AI superhighway. And that is again, another delightful experience where nobody got hurt. Nobody's data was leaked. All the fears that we bring into the room. So we built our anxiety, all that's gone. If I can show them by being an AI builder or myself presenting as non-technical that I can do this too, let me show you the way we do it together. We solve a problem that the team has in an afternoon, again with a $20 budget, all we did was spend three hours on zoom and we created a product together that buys us back as a team. Say I'm a finance operations person. Maybe we build a chatbot that answers some frequently asked questions around month end or how to chase down invoices, all the annoying stuff that is very low value work for us. If we prioritize that as a team, I can show you in 20 minutes how to set up a bot and chat base or inside of, you know, Claude or power automate any one of these tools that you have access to. And you can do that as a team activity. If you did that once a month, you would completely transform the capacity of that team to dream bigger. And that's the message really for businesses. Your business, your future of your business isn't in what you're doing right now. It is around collecting data around your people, getting them to a place where they can see opportunities they can't see right now because they're too busy. You give them access to data that they've never had time to look at. That will be where the next opportunity is in your business. And that will be the thing that five years from now will be at the core of your business. So get to giving your folks those tools and those capabilities so that you can get to that quicker. Because right now you're in industry operating AI last, everyone coming into your industry is now operating AI first, to compete and stay relevant. You need to get to that activity again about putting your masks on your people, getting them really comfortable and confident that AI is not replacing them. That is not the intent I'm seeing with our folks, especially coming through our accelerator. It's around getting to that having a bubble of AI around every individual person surfacing data that we've never had access to before. So that I can look at your bubble, you can look at my bubble, I can see 30 bubbles across the organization, I can see how my activities impact the outcomes and the success of the business across the business. Then I'm making higher quality decisions with higher quality information. That's the place we need to get to. So if we could drop the fear about our jobs and embrace the what's next so that we all have jobs because our company is around five years from now, that is what I think we should be more afraid of. Yeah, it's the old joke. It's not AI that's taking your job. It's someone who's, it's an AI-enabled organization that's going to take your opportunities away more or less. Yeah, and they're seeing the problems you're solving. When you think about the hierarchy, the lanes, the stay in your lane, I watched a couple webinars last week of like, who's the designer? It's like, now everybody's a designer. It's not just the talking, it was a Figma presentation they really talked about, like stop with the lanes, stop with the restriction, stop with that. You can't have an idea over here because you're not, you're not part of this clan or this cohort. When you talk about companies that have worked below the ground, maybe, and now you're talking to them above the ground, there's so much structure and so much governments and so much hierarchy. That's not going to change overnight. Talk to me a little bit about like the philosophy that's got to change internally to allow some of those barriers to come down when they literally have been the bedrock for some, how these organizations like, if you're a geologist, you do geology stuff. If you're a tech, you do tech. If you're an engineer, if you're a facilities engineer, you do that. And especially when you're dealing with large organizations, how do you then create enough of a higher level mandate that everybody knows where kind of that commander's intent is? Like, here's the big goal and we all need to figure out how to get there. But we're allowed to step out of our lanes, but we've never been before. It's easy to say, and I love it and I agree, just how do you do it philosophically or it's a Tuesday and your leadership team has now opened the door and chaos ensues. It feels like it's be so scary for so many people hearing what you just said. There needs to be an environment to which there's no retribution if you step on someone's toes. And that comes from the top. I don't want to step on someone's toes. I hate that saying so much. I know. But again, it's so limiting. Stay in your lane. I don't want to step on your toes. Like we do this passive aggressive dance around, that's not my job. What is your job? Well, the answer is getting to the business value and reaching the goals of the business is the job. So we remove the layers of who's responsible for what. And instead, we give them a framework of the goal for the team is we're going to get at this number, this value, this thing that we decide on. And then we self select together, self forming how we're going to solve that problem. Right. So it means that we don't necessarily have access to technology teams. You remember this technology, I could be broke at home. I could dream up a startup. I can be in business this afternoon. I could be absolutely broke. All I need access to is an internet connection. So if we sit with teams and make sure that there's a zero consequence zone for me being a designer, albeit knowing that I could go into lovable.dev and I can make it look really convincing that I'm a designer, right? But what I also know is that I'm not an expert in heuristics, but when I bring a lovable design to a team, the designers know what my priority is. So the way I reframe this is, I don't use these tools to give people less focused work to do. I allow people to go out into different competencies and to experiment with things so that we can get to a more focused backlog quicker. That goes across like all teams. It doesn't matter what kind of work you do. If you had less coming in, and we stopped using priorities and plural because it was not designed for that. It is not even a word, but we found a way to make it happen. If I can enable folks, and I don't like using the word empower, by the way, I think it's just so overdone, but it's an enabler, right? Overcooked. If I can just enable folks to just experiment with new tools and then to understand that we all have a subject matter expertise. And if you're later in your career, it's highly tuned, highly valued. So I want to make sure I'm giving you a high quality, highly focused material to work with to make your job easier. So when we talk about the blend of roles in the future, your ability to wear many hats, we're going back into a little bit of a generalist phase of the flexibility around tools and your ability to find new tools to get you to that outcome. But what's going to make your skills that highly valuable is the specialty and the context and that domain expertise that no one else has. Your ability to prompt the AI based on that knowledge will be unlike anyone else's. So if you want to find a way right now, Gen Xers, I'm talking to you, you've been in the game a long time. Your domain of expertise is highly tuned. If you can focus that to a specific context, then get really great at prompting AI tools to provide high value deliverables based on that domain of expertise. You will be the most valuable leader in every organization in that industry. Full stop. It's a license to print money right now. But you got to learn how to do the prompting. I love the example you used about. I have an idea. I'm not sure quite how to express it, but I'm going to go in lovable or I'm going to go in one of the tools and I'm going to I'm going to fool around with it and dump all my thinking into it. Then I'm going to have something like an effective way to communicate my thinking to someone who goes, Oh, Oh, that's what you mean. Okay, give it to me. I'm going to go do my thing. Like I did that last summer. We needed a new website and my team was busy. My team was busy and and one of my team walked me through a relu. And I was like, Oh, this is magical. So I scrolled away and went out to my farm in my trailer and just sat there with my generator running to make sure my computer to run at power. And I built our whole website and relu. Was that our website? Hell no. But when I rolled it out to the team, they're like, Oh, okay, now we see what you're thinking. I don't think we would have got the new website in the period. But that week, it took me that was kind of uncomfortable. But all of a sudden I just unlocked this permission of like, Oh, I'm a non-technical leader. But shit, this seems pretty low code, no code. I can get access. And all of a sudden it gave my team a jumping off point. There was about seven levels higher than if I just would have gone, I want a new website and I wanted to do stuff and things. And it was such an interesting journey to watch them go. At first they felt a little bit threatened like, Oh, why is Tyler doing this? But they're like, Oh, wait a second. We, it looks nothing like it, the end product. But that starting point was so powerful for me. We shaved 20. We shaved not starting to starting, right? Is what really happened. Yes. Yeah. And all of a sudden I had to give myself permission as a non-technical leader to go in there. And it was really fun and it was pretty rewarding. Actually, I felt like I felt like I rockstarred something. It was so good. And even though it was, it was half, it was half-assed compared to my design team or my UX team, but I had it as the owner, the founder inside my head, what I wanted. And I finally got a white board, quote unquote, that allowed me to express myself in a way that was super usable. So I just, I've resonated, I'm like, Hi, I did that last summer. Not even realizing it, but just getting excited that I have access to something that six months before I didn't know existed. Six minutes before I got shown that I didn't know existed. And nothing's worse than working with a founder who doesn't know their own message. So I implore. Which is a common phenomenon, is it not? That, yes. And sorry, they didn't even know it, but they struggled to articulate it. They struggled. Yes. And these tools. Yeah, let's be supportive of that. Tap into the brain trust of all those that came before you and can help you refine. And so the clearer your messages around what your business represents, who you are in the world, the more successful you're going to be because we are in the clarity is kindness era, the more clear you are, the more focused you are. Clear as kind, unclear as unkind. That is so awful. Yes. The more valuable you will be that that is going to reign. So the quicker we can all get to that. Back to your point with your daughter, your quality of your relationships and the amount of them and the diversity of them. And then your ability to articulate a vision idea or a thought clearly, sometimes using visual means, sometimes using whatever medium that might resonate back to that person that allows them to live in their genius. That's how you fork partnerships and get co-founders and like, Oh my God, let me go do my piece of what I see you creating. Like that's the magic of the of the human relationship that I don't think's getting replaced anytime soon. It should be amplified. I agree. So I'm feeling very rose-colored glasses right now. But I mean, this is this is really what I do. I think we are surrounded by so much negative messaging as a baseline. And I want to be this beacon. I'm really struggling with this. Yeah, I just I don't have time for it in my life. I don't practice it. I don't live it. What's the long frequency, right? It's the frequency that turns you down, not turns you up, right? Yeah. And that's not how we rally people towards a mission. And if you want to move your employees towards something, if you get them going off and doing it on their own, the only person who wins is that individual employee. The business doesn't win. They just get those individual gains and they're not shared. So if you're in an organization where they're like, we don't use AI, it's not safe, blah, blah, blah, that fear mongering, what you have underneath you is an entire army of people who are doing it and they're doing it just for themselves. And it's not mapping to a business goal. So you are leaving 40% of the capabilities of what could happen to your business on the table because your head's in the sand. Yeah, they're not not doing it. They're just doing it in the closet, right? 100%. I was at a conference three months ago sitting with a major telecommunications company. And I'm not going to tell you which one, but they had a policy around not using chat GPT. And then I watched over this person's shoulder as they were exporting into chat GPT and then importing in as like, that's very interesting. And this person worked in HR in that organization. And I said, now, do you think your behavior here? I said, I don't want to be that person, but I just watched you do a thing. And that was a highly risky thing that you just did there. Here's all the reasons. Do you think you're alone in your organization in doing this? And she looked at me and it's like, no. And I said, okay, well, here's my card. If you want to find a better way, I'm here to serve. That is also what creates those opportunities for disruption, right? Some of those old, older models are older ways. I don't even call it a limited way of thinking a limited set of beliefs will be disrupted by there's no barrier anymore. Like you said earlier, somebody on in an afternoon with an internet connection can disrupt your industry. And then you're on your back and you're back on your heels. Oh, I love it. And just the whole idea of like, what I love about our conversations is there's a high degree of these are realities. These are tools. This is technology and this is the world we live in. But so much of it is the human experience and the philosophies and the beliefs limited or opportunistic that we bring to things. And to be able to dev those, to meld those two together is where the magic exists. And often where that you got to get really my philosophy, you got to read real curious about what's holding you back, then the people around you and then your organization. And don't start with the technology, start with the humans. Yes. And human natural language. Okay, the world, this is the direction that everyone needs to know this is going. The ability to have to know code, Python, all the languages, eventually in just a few years, we're going to be working with tools to which we can use natural language to interact with them. So it's never going to be harder than it is today to build an agent. It's not impossible. I do it. It's, it's fun. There's a lot of challenges. You hit walls. And I think the new stamina we have to build, especially in our generation is that we're used to using software that just works. And if it doesn't work, we're doing something wrong. Like remember when we learned how to use Excel, 100% the binary, right? You know, we fought it, right? And that didn't feel good. And so it made us feel stupid and that we weren't getting it. And so there's a lot of that that shows up in AI tools because it is built to fail. So it's not going to be smooth. There's a new muscle that we have to learn and as an endurance to be able to break through. And that, that's a skill. And that's a human skill. But you said before, we have lots of grit. So we just need to apply it in different ways. Like I think that grid is really key. And not, and not perceiving learning and failure and really understanding the difference of the black and white binary that we all grew up in, you know, pass, fail. Oh, no, it wasn't, it wasn't as good as I, you wake up the next day and you're like, Oh, I thought of a new way to ask this prompt or the new way to engage this dialogue, I should say. And then you get a different outcome. And that's fun when your brain starts doing that. When I was writing my book, I would use GPT in the early days. And it was such a great thinking partner until finally was like, okay, enough, okay, I've done enough thinking, I'm going to go and kind of put my output now and specifically wrote. But in that early days of riffing, Oh my goodness, I started really like it became my, my thinking partners so quickly. And the way I spoke to it and with it and the way it interacted with me when I built my my GPTs and all that, man, it's so not it is so organic that you with a little bit of time on type, boom, it becomes natural really like the barrier is quite low to, to, to forging a relationship of how to get the most out of it. And see yourself as being technical, right? We again, these lanes and these buckets, we put ourselves in, I'm not a technical person. I'm not an engineer labels, labels. So it's so healthy. Yeah. But the reality is, when you ask a question in the room, one of my favorite ones, when you're feeling overwhelmed with technical language around you, and I do believe that we've weaponized technical language to get people on the sidelines to back off so that we can get the conversation moving in the direction we want it to move. AI is the ultimate antidote to that because I can sit live with a patient software and I can figure out what we would have that we didn't have before, thanks to your technology. And then we can decide as a group, whether or not that's the thing we really want, is that going to get us a business outcome, what we want. So see yourself as being a technical version of yourself and look at options to get a little bit of bridge education, just to top yourself up. So if you got five years or more left in your career, it's time for a top up. And if you can understand the core of what powers AI, your conversation around it will completely change in a room, literally within two weeks, how you show up in those conversations will be less of a place of how's this going to hurt me, how's this going to screw up how I get in trouble to or what do we have on the line, what are the risks to I see that and can we look at this other version of AI that might be better suited to where we're going to become the person that's enabling your team instead of the person that is the ankle weight. And I think when you get that top up, you know what that feels like. And within even within one of our AI leader program, by week three, everyone is coming in saying, I had an amazing conversation with a developer that I never knew I could have before. And I felt like we went toe to toe, we both learned something and it has never happened to me. I never thought I could be this person. And I see to them you've been this person all along. You just needed to be, yes, to just step into something. I love what you said about weaponizing. A good friend of mine was in IT for years and he always used to make the joke, career security through obscurity. You can't fire me because you really don't know, but you know, if something could go wrong, if I would, and you know, I think a lot of us, and I bought into that non-technical leader kind of moniker and chat to BT really helped me kind of shed that and like, okay, enough, get out of your own way, get curious and just go and start playing around. And you know what? Nothing bad happened. I would say the opposite actually. A lot of really good stuff. Right? Yeah, because it helps you unlock potential that you can't see in your closed field of view. Giving yourself permission. Yeah, I love it. Oh, Chris, I have so many more things I want to talk about. And at the same time, I think we can just part three this, because this is our second episode. And I always enjoy the energy, the clarity, and you have such a unique position. We talked about this a little bit more offline. You're dealing with founders, you're dealing with enterprise, you're in the trenches with people that are actually the builders that are doing things, getting to see that it's not even a triangle. It's probably an octagon at this point with all the different players. But how that all interrelates and where it's headed, I think is a really interesting viewpoint that you have and certainly a passion that I love, that you bring to the table around this subject. Thank you. And if there's one thing that people take away from this, there is an urgency. And I know we have a lot going on in our... What are we, 42 out of 47 or 46 out of 47? Yes, please, please, please. I say that's very urgent. Don't wait another three months. Yeah, if you feel like you're one of those people that you said you feel like the train has left the station, don't wait another three months before you do something about it. I beg of you, right? We need to understand in this country that the world is not going to wait for us. There are other parts of the world that have already experimented with an AI first form of formative education in elementary schools and they're already five repetitions in. We haven't even gotten started. So don't... It is about doing the reps too, right? You've got it. You've got to do your reps. We're not going to get it right. It is not perfect. It is not perfect technology because guess what? Humans made it and we're not perfect either. Okay, so just don't think that this is about perfection and you're getting it right because it is about getting failure, cheap, free and just learning. So it's built to fail. Just know you're in it for the reps. It's not going to feel great in the beginning and that's how you know you're doing it right. Just start and then come find people like me if you feel like you've hit a wall and you just need somebody to just give you a hand and get you over the next hurdle. There's a lot of us out there like this and this is... I said this is urgent. We cannot be waiting because the global stage won't wait for us for much longer. I love it. tacit-edge.com. I'm assuming you have courses running all the time. You have access. If someone's excited, the best thing I can hope for is when someone listens to these episodes, they go, "I'm curious. I want to learn more." So go check out your way. Your website's great by the way. I really like your website. Oh, thank you. It's very clear and it's easy to follow. There's some great videos. You kind of checked a few of them like, "Did that right? Looking good? I like that." So I can't help it. My brain filters it immediately. I'm like, "If I didn't know anything about you, how long would it take me to go? I want to go a little deeper." The website does a very good job at that. So nice to do it. Thank you. Or come find me on LinkedIn. Just send me a DM. We're very accessible. Like I said, we're humans first, frameworks and technology second and then like I said, just let us help you find your next right step because it's right in front of you. You just need a hand to see it. Mic drop. Christopher, thank you so much for coming on. It was absolutely amazing. I could talk to you all day. We might once we get off air here, but thank you so much. Congratulations on the work you're doing and even from when we chatted last time till now, the evolution, the passion, the drive, the commitment and the focus that you have. It's kudos. High fives all around for me. Thank you, friend. I appreciate that. Cheers.