How Tech Increases Thought Load with Liane Davey

Welcome to the Tech Humanist Show, a multimedia format program exploring how data and technology shapes the human experience. I'm your host, Cade O'Neill. It's the workload that's hurting our productivity and our innovation and our collaboration. It's the thought load. And so thought load, this term I coined to capture this parallel to workload that's sort of everything else. Today I'm joined by Leanne Davy, an organizational psychologist and author of the new book Thought Load. Leanne's work focuses on how leaders can reduce the hidden cognitive and emotional burdens that make modern organizations feel overwhelming even when people are working hard. We talk about the thought load equation. The difference between outputs and outcomes, why always on tools can raise the load and what it looks like to redesign work so teams can focus, recover energy and have the hard conversations that actually move things forward. Well, Leanne Davy, what a delight to have you with us on the Tech Humanist Show. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm so, I have been looking forward to this conversation since we just got started on it and a ditter in Boston a few months ago. That's right. You and I just kind of coincidentally found ourselves speaking at the same event, had dinner and ended up talking about your new book, among other things. And I was so excited. I was like, this is it. This is the time when we can bring you on the show because this directly connects to so many of the at scale impacts of technology. So can't wait to unpack this with you. So tell us about the book Thought Load. What tell us about what Thought Load is? Yeah. So it came from, so I do a lot of work with CEOs and their teams. So I'm right in there in the muck with everyone. And I started realizing that work isn't working. It's not working for businesses. Productivity is sort of plateauing and, you know, I see so many projects get no ROI. But it's not working for humans either. So the, the scientists and me, the academic and me started trying to figure out why is work not working? And everybody kept giving me this story about, well, the workload's too high. The workload's too high. And I was like, I don't see people getting much work done. I think it's the workload that's hurting our productivity and our innovation and our collaboration. So it's three things. The rising cognitive demands, the increasing emotional burdens and then the declining energy reserves. So those three things together, which you actually express as an equation, right? And the early part of the book. Once a nerd. Yeah, because it's cognitive demands plus emotional burdens over energy reserves, right? Yeah. So just think about it. Now we need to think about the load as not just intellectual. It's funny. When I talk to people about this, they immediately default to talking about cognitive load. I'm like, that's lovely. Cognitive load is a big piece of the puzzle. But why do we keep pretending that emotional burdens are not a huge part of that? So we need to understand in fact, doing both. But now think of the day when you are doing incredibly complex work. I'm thinking about your weak signals notion database. You're bringing in information from everywhere. But you're also having maybe some emotional things to worry about. I don't know. You didn't land a gig you really wanted. So there's a lot going on. Now some days, your energy reserves are high. And you're like, I got this onto the next one. Other fish in the sea. Right? It's no problem. And then the day is where you didn't sleep while you're jet lagged or whatever. You're just. It's like you see inside my empire. Where you read the news and something existential just has just zapped your energy. And then that same load feels so much heavier. So thought load is both the thought of the top, but also how much of a load that is based on energy. So we need it all three. And then we can talk about this. But my husband who's a neuroscientist, as he starts to look at the three pieces, he's like, from a neuroscience perspective, this is a treacherous triad because each one of these problems amplifies and exacerbates the others. And I was like, oh, OK. So that's really interesting. I was just going to ask you like, what evidence convinced you that this is the right model? But that sounds like a really great corroborating piece. But what would you say to a skeptical listener who thinks this is like a rebrand of workload or stress? Yeah. So I think it's very different from workload, right? Because-- and actually, AI-- I'm sure we're going to talk about AI-- AI is the perfect example for why we need thought load as a concept. So if we think about the early research coming out about use of either a chatbot or a agentec AI, what we're finding is the agents. You may set up five agents to run off and do your work. But the early research is suggesting that it has a negative impact on your thought load. So it's coming back. You're having to change the prompts. You're having to validate things. Look for hallucination. Check the code. And scary stories like coming out of Amazon saying one of their big outages was because vibe coding that didn't get validated. So when we understand something else or someone else can be doing a whole bunch of our work. And it doesn't just-- not only does it not lower our thought load, it probably increases our thought load. So the agents are coming back at a much higher rate. I just read a study last night about how using the chatbot, the ideas are coming back very poorly filtered, poorly organized. And then as the human interacts with it, they're maintaining that lack of structure and lack of clarity. So things are getting busier. And if we only talk about workload, we might be thrilled that, whoo, AI or old days, it was just the summer intern. It's going to take a whole bunch of my workload off. But with the summer intern or with AI, it could actually raise your thought load. So that's why I think we need both concepts. And we need to be really paying attention to how is this affecting our cognitive demands? How is it affecting our emotional demands? So some of the brain-friest studies are talking about emotional impact of use of AI, not just cognitive impact. So I think we need this new word, not to say we get rid of-- so here's the parallel that maybe is helpful. I'm an organizational psychologist. When I was trained, everything was about IQ. IQ, just measure their IQ and you'll know how great they'll be until we understood EQ. Once we understood EQ, we could say, sure, we still want to know about IQ, but we better understand EQ. And I think about workload and thought load exactly the same way. Understanding, appreciating thought load doesn't make workload unimportant, but it says, it's not the whole picture. So I think one of the things that you point out early in your commentary there was about productivity is actually flat or declining and the data doesn't back up the idea that we're getting more done. But when-- what do you think that mainstream productivity metrics are missing about modern knowledge work? And it sounds like you mentioned earlier, like, why aren't we talking about emotional burdens as part of this equation? Is that the main thing that you would consider missing from the discussion or are there other considerations that you would encourage people to factor in? I would go one step back. I would say productivity is a trap. So I'm not a big fan of productivity. So I think you can think about three different things and pay attention to three things. You can pay attention to activity, what you're doing, how hard you're working, how many hours, how many slack messages you're responding. You can pay attention to output, the code you ship or what you deliver or the marketing campaign you launch, or you can pay attention to outcomes. Did you create the change in the world you were trying to create? If you pay attention to activity, you get busy people. If you pay attention to outputs, you get productive people. And most managers, as soon as I say that, they're like, "Whoa!" And I'm like, "No, no, no, that's a trap." "Wait, you missed the plot. That's a trap." Because we are producing an incredible amount that is not moving the needle on the outcomes that matter. So I would say the book encourages us to first, if we're going to manage thought load, the first thing we need to do is get out of the productivity trap and start paying attention to what is changing, what is creating the outcomes. And people don't like outcomes because you can't control them. And so I really got to this with some key noting I'm doing about accountability. And people really wanted to understand accountability better. And I said, "Okay, well, accountability isn't tied to outputs. Accountability is tied to outcomes." And that's why people don't like it. Because I need to be accountable. I need to take ownership for accomplishing something I can't control. And that's scary. So I think the first conversation is, "Why are we so obsessed with productivity?" We're in a productivity trap. And if we could better understand the key outcomes, maybe then we'd realize a huge amount of our productivity is in service of nothing and a huge amount of our activity. is getting us nowhere, then we got a hope of getting focused, getting the thought load, leaves are focused on what matters. - I think it's so brilliant. And one of the things that I do talk about in what matters next is this idea that productivity is something that you should be thinking about for whole systems and for tools and systems, technology is not for people. So I love the way you articulate that. I also feel like outcomes are something that I am always on about, trying to align the outcomes of the business with the human outcomes and the impacts on humans. So I love that articulation as well. Clearly, though tech is a huge consideration in this and a big part of what's multiplying our cognitive demand like what's kind of creating that situation where, first of all, it's why managers are obsessed with productivity because it makes it so easy to assume that you pair human and tech. And now all of a sudden, we gotta think about productivity. And it's obviously a major factor in diminishing cognitive demand because of attention and eruptions, switching costs and so on. So you talked in the early part of the book, you talk about research, researchy numbers about interruptions like every 11 minutes, right? And this long return to task time. So when you translate that into practice, what's the mechanism, attention residue, working memory, depletion, whatever it is? And what's the most important thing leaders misunderstand about quick pings to different, right? - Oh, quick, quick. - It does the quick note, right? Just a quick word. - Yeah, so one of the traps I talk about in the book is managers reward responsiveness. And that's a huge trap because if you are rewarding the person who gets back to you fastest, it means you're rewarding the person who was most distracted and who was not in focus and flow on creating the outcomes that you care about. But instead was monitoring, vigilant about their email or their slack and that's why they could respond to you first. So responsiveness, that's the trap I think we need to get out of. So I really encourage, just super practically, I really encourage people to make this subject line of the email. Everything a person needs to triage that email without opening it. So it literally says, you know, what is the verb, like action required, decision, whatever, what's the subject, the ACME proposal, and what's the due date, like by end of day, by Friday, so that we can actually, without clicking into the email, scan and triage more quickly. So just little tactical things like that. But the mindset shift is a manager rewarding responsiveness is just rewarding distraction. A manager rewarding responsiveness is saying, my priorities are more important than this value you're being paid to create. So we haven't done a good job of having communication and triage systems that help us understand the difference between, I sent this because it works for me now, but I need you to respond to this till Friday, versus pick up the freaking phone, because, you know, the whatever, the power production facilities on fire. And so we haven't done a very good job of that. - I have a, you may have seen, I have a note in my signature on my email that says I work across time zones. So if I respond to this at a time that is not conducive to, like take your time, respond to it when you can and get back to me, because I feel like that's, that had to happen because I was emailing with France a lot, and France, you know, has like labor laws about the access to email after hours. So I put it there initially because of France, but I think it's a really sane kind of prescriptive policy to have around your tools. I will say though that as you're talking about this, it causes me to want to put filters in place. So I start responding to this overload with more tooling, which I think is probably a pretty normal response from people who are tech oriented. So from a tech humanist lens, when does tech genuinely reduce cognitive demands and when does it quietly add drag? And what are the telltale signs of that? - So I love the idea of using the right tech for the right sense of urgency. So I was giving a keynote to a big power producing company, that's why I was making the joke about the power production plant. And I was recommending that we have email blackout time or Slack channel or Teams notification blackout time. So give yourself 90 minutes where you turn everything off. And one of the people in the audience, he kind of put up his hand, he had lots of swagger. And he's like, well, that might be fine for all these other plebs in the room. (laughing) But I'm in charge of all of our power production facilities. So like I can't do that. And I'm trying to just stay in a good place, stay empathetic. And I just said, so if a power plant explodes, they're gonna tell you that by email. - Right. - And he's like, oh, right, no. So if we understand that email or Slack are best used as asynchronous poll tools, right? When I'm stopping to communicate, I'm gonna go into my email or go into my Slack. - Perfect. - If we need a push communication tool, do we have one level of push at a text or some other DM instant messaging kind of tool? And then do we have an urgency tool, which is, oh, maybe even a good old telephone or get up and walk over to their desk if that's an option? So I think using technology and the right tech that's fit for purpose between async tools that allow me to go and get the information when it suits me. So I think of it a little bit more like a pay phone. Like I could walk up to a pay phone and use it when it works for me versus this nasty thing now that's with me all the time. - Right. - So yeah, tech can really facilitate that. I'm a big fan of asynchronous tools. I think they are wonderful all the way from whatever Google Drive to big Asana. Well, like big things that are more sophisticated. But we need to give back people some control over their time and their attention and having all of the notifications on. And the 11 minute interruption is, you know, when I started writing the book, that's a problem of putting anything in print. It's down to five minutes. - Oh my gosh, that's a huge drop from 11 to five. - Only 18 months later. And notifications are now sitting in approximately two minutes. - Wow. - Yeah. So if you have those notifications on, yeah, two minutes. And two minutes, there is focus and flow has not happened for you in a decade if you go back going on. (laughing) Well, do you talk to also about tech as an emotional burden amplifier in a sense? Like you were talking about how we've unleashed a torrent of judgment via constant feedback loops, like 360s, anonymous feedback tools, always on commentary. So where is the line between useful feedback and, you know, corrosive judgment? And what do leaders need to do to change structurally? So feedback increases learning rather than fear. - Yeah, great example, 'cause I was working with a huge global bank that uses one of the big HR platforms. And it has this feedback mechanism in it. So you can ask for feedback. You can just randomly give feedback. So it's being used by millions of people. And interestingly, the way the questions are worded, it's not feedback that it's inviting, it's judgment. I'm like, oh my goodness. And to one of the most prevalent tech platforms in the world, they don't even know what feedback is. So let's take a sec to just talk about what feedback is. Feedback is sharing novel information about how someone's choices impacted you. The novel information in feedback is about the giver, not the receiver. So what we should be describing in feedback is you made this choice or you behaved in this way, something that the person receiving it goes like, yeah, I did, that's true. And the novel information is you might not realize that the impact that had on me is this is what it made me think or this is what it made me feel. And that is psychologically safer to give someone information about how they're feeling or thinking than to judge them as either that was good or bad or worthy or not worthy. Which when we do that, so the book talks a lot about the new understanding of the science of social pain. And so it turns out that when we get information that we don't belong or we're not worthy or our work wasn't good enough, our brains process that exactly the same way as they process physical pain. And we know now that that's the case because we know that even Tylenol works to reduce social pain. So what we've done is we've created tech platforms that unleashed judgment on millions of people every day. This person who you don't have much of a relationship with, who interacted with you in one cross functional meeting gets free reign to send a message that goes to your manager judging you. No wonder we're freaking out, nervous all the time, emotionally triggered. So I think our technology, it's so easy to ask that question. Do you have feedback for this person? I'm like, how do we make sure the prompts in the technology actually set up to provide something valuable, something the person can learn from. And being clumsy with feedback, to me is really, really inhumane. It's where we've lost the humanist and tech humanist. And you know, it's really upsetting to me that these giant platforms don't understand better what they've done inadvertently with how they've set up these systems. It's terrifying. So it's interesting to listening to you describe this. It seems like it really sets up a very interesting explanation for why sick a fancy in large language models is such an alluring counterbalance to, you know, this kind of corrosive judgment that's everywhere throughout tech tools. Well, and we see that as people are being interviewed about their relationship with AI's, they're like, they get me, like, it gets me, right? And yes, because, you know, and of course, it's completely fake and ultimately your relationship with that AI is built on nothing substantive. And if all you're getting is sick a fancy, that doesn't go well in a real relationship, either at some point. But you can see why they're retreating to these AIs that at least are nice to them, right? When we are in a barrage all the way from, you know, your colleagues who, you know, may have some vendetta against you or competing with you for a promotion or somebody in some other department who had a bad day or your customers on Yelp or wherever else are just able to just throw some, you know, throw some shade on you without understanding that that could derail your whole day, your week. If someone has judged you in a way that is, you know, hurts yourself a steam, you know, we're damaging people and not thinking about how now we can damage people at scale before these platforms, if you had to actually go up to somebody and judge them, you know, not many people did that. Now we can, it's like Drone Warfare, we can judge both at scale and at a safe distance, terrifying. Yeah, that's a really compelling explanation. And I also, I really like this distinction between feedback and judgment because I think it really, it does two things for me. One thing is that feedback has very eye-centered, very, you know, kind of like I'm giving the experience, you know, the experiential feedback. It's about my phenomenology, not about, you know, what you did performatively. And I also think that it's a really interesting kind of parallel to these terms of like calling in versus calling out in sort of in social justice of the idea of like I'm calling you in because you're a worthy person and I want you to know, you know, what you did that harmed me so that you can amend and you can, you know, you can consider making changes to your behavior or whatever versus calling out as this kind of cancel culture tactic, right, of this whole idea of like I'm naming and shaming, I'm putting you out there on, on notice as, as publicly as I possibly can. And that, that distinction seems really relevant and really profound. And certainly not one that most people think takes place within the confines of corporate life, but this distinction of feedback and judgment makes it clear that that does play out at some level. Yeah, I would say that test, if you're about to give somebody feedback, I would use this test is their candor in this feedback. And I just created my own definition of candor, which is my willingness to be uncomfortable for your benefit. So if there's nothing uncomfortable, so I may be saying that, you know, when I listened to your draft pitch presentation, about 10 minutes in when there had been no visuals, it was all text-based slides, I realized I'd checked out. So there's some candor in that because I'm saying I can't pay attention. Right, right. So ask yourself, test yourself, is this thing I want to share? Does it have discomfort in it for me? Does it have candor in it for me? Because if it does, it's highly likely to be valuable for them, but also that it's a calling in. It's let's share this vulnerability and grow and learn together versus there's nothing candid or vulnerable about me in this feedback. It's probably judgment. Yeah, let's get into the human embodied piece of this because one of the things that's so interesting is that in this triad, energy reserves are the denominator and that when they drop everything else spikes, right? So what is the evidence that leaders should treat energy as an operational constraint like budget or headcount and not just a personal wellness issue? Like you're having a low energy day, so like call in sick or something. Yeah, exactly. So Craig, my husband, the the neuroscience geek, talked to me about two really, really important ones. So the first one is he's a frontal lobe scientist. That's where he came from and the frontal lobe is pretty freaking important in everything we want to do to add value at work. So the first thing, the first finding is that your frontal lobe kind of, you know, winds down after not very long, both because of how much glucose it needs to drive, but also because we now understand there's a there's a waste product called glutamate. And as it builds in your brain, it's a signal that like, oh, frontal lobe needs to rest for a bit, right? We're going to take out the trash. And so as your frontal lobe is going offline, one of the first things to go is your ability to calibrate what to pay attention to and what to ignore. So immediately you realize like an hour in 90 minutes into that meeting, you're not paying attention to the right stuff anymore. You're being distracted by something that's trivial. You're missing an unknown unknown that's essential. So that's one example of the the access between energy reserves and cognitive demands, but we can do the other one on the emotion side. So as you, as your frontal lobe tires as your energy goes down, your cognitive energy, mental energy, your physical energy. One of the other things is you become less effective at perceiving threat. So deciding like, is she giving me the side eye? Is it like, was that sarcastic or it's much more likely to tell ourselves a story that's a threat-based story and a fear-based story? And as soon as we're into a threat or fear-based story, we're not thinking at all, right? We're protecting, we're defending. So if you're not paying attention to people's physical energy, yes, but also their cognitive, mental energy, their emotional energy, then you are not in a position to have them manage that thought load and be able to innovate, be creative. And of course, as soon as we're triggered, we go to default responses. Well, this is how we did it two years ago. Like, as if an answer from two years ago is going to be up for a problem today. Right. No way, right? And we go back to Ron Heifetz's work about the difference between technical challenges and adaptive challenges. If our thought load is high, I think we're more likely to treat things as technical challenges, go back to expertise, go back to what we know, go back to default and have it. Only when we can manage our thought load, keep our energy up. Can we look at the adaptive challenges, his metaphor of being on the dance floor and in the balcony? You ain't in the balcony when your thought load is high or you're you're flopped on the floor. So energy, physical, mental, emotional energy has a huge, huge impact on your thought load and your thought load has a huge impact on how innovative, how creative. And we haven't mentioned this one yet, but here's a big problem. When your thought load gets really high, your presence goes down. You just aren't even in the room. You're in your head trying to cope. You're triggered. You're worrying. You're fronting. And then, you know, dealing with your own challenges is more than you can handle. So you're not listening to your colleagues. You're not spotting a risk in their plan. You're not adding to their ideas in this way that innovation kind of blooms. You're just like, I can't because I'm just trying to cope. So there's so many negative consequences of high thought load, but they all come from, you know, if we're not paying attention to energy, the load gets higher, both cognitively and emotionally. And when that thought load gets too high, no innovative thinking, no connection, no collaboration. And just we get into that threat mode and protect mode. So then, I guess, a one big sort of million dollar question is in practice, what are the highest leverage energy reserve interventions that you've seen and can recommend that are organizational, not just individual, you know, whether it's a meeting architecture, is it, you know, staffing, is it decision rights? Like, how does it, how does it look? There are so many and I would love it folks, you know, let me know when you're listening, shoot me, you know, let me know. I think of things like, because I do so much work in the software world in Silicon Valley, agile methodology, right, makes so much sense. Two weeks sprints and rests and stop and reflect. And we are in most of the corporate world sprinting marathons, right? And that we know does not work. So how do we, how do we experiment? How do we try things? How do we, I was listening to a Michael Bunga senior podcast recently about, talking about strategy and he thinks we should nuke strategy in favor of experimentation. What can you do as a two week experiment? That's a good energy practice. So, so that idea of our work having sprint and rest, sprint and reflect and learn, and then challenge again, just like high performance athletes, right? Think of what I love about high performance athletes as an analogy is they are ruthlessly obsessed with lowering their thought load, right? Nothing gets into their cognitive demands. It isn't the absolute prime stuff. They have sports psychologists constantly helping them process all the emotional stuff going on for them. And they have a whole team of trainers to make sure that their rest is as effective for them as their training or their performance, right? So agile methodologies, things like that. Meeting structure, absolutely. So we have a really bad thought load implication of what most of our meetings look like, just we, especially leadership teams, we have the two hour weekly meeting where we throw in soup to nuts from the most like operational, we're doing the office move, you know, all the way to, you know, how is AI working with a professional services firm right now that's trying to figure out how does a gentick AI, you know, completely disrupt a time in materials business model, right? The answer is it does, but we don't know how. We're putting all that in one meeting. You're bringing the cognitive switching costs of going from one to the other and the reality is as soon as you have the conversation about the office move, you're not getting out of that mode. So meeting structures big. I was in a meeting not that long ago that was scheduled for four hours and at the two hour mark, they hadn't been facilitating it effectively. So somebody had gone over by about 20 minutes and the person sharing the meeting just said, well, we'll skip the break, breaks are for losers and we'll keep. Breaks are for losers, like in a four hour meeting. Wow. This person watched Glen Gary Glen Ross and believed it. Yeah. We're up in a law firm and all those things, but, but it just made it clear to me that we do not understand the science of energy. We do not understand the science of thought load and we do not understand how our business takes much greater risks if we are allowing decision making on a brain that hasn't, you know, hasn't had a break in four hours. So, you know, everything is a chance to build our organizations in a way. But let's pick on another one. My doctoral research was on cross-functional teams and how they affect innovation. For 30 years, I've been a fan of cross-functional teams. They've jumped the shark. And cross, I think it would, what a cross-functional teaming and matrix environment does to your thought load. So now work used to be done in small teams of five or six people and you'd have a task and you do the job. In that case, you knew what your priority was and you just paid attention to your small team manageable. Plus, you didn't have email. You had inter-office memos, which was a much nicer way to keep you in mind. But two, the five people, you knew them. You knew their families. You knew their idiosyncrasies. You knew they trusted you. You knew how to read their body language. And so the emotional triggers were less. And we had a chance to rest. Now take a typical matrix organization. So you are in your own team and you have your seven priorities. But you're matrixed into the account team for this big client or the community of practice or the employee resource group. And so you have Slack channels for every one of those as well. All of that's hitting your attention. And instead of five people that you're interacting with in a weekly basis and who can give you feedback in judge or whatever, it's 40 people. And you don't really know them. They don't really know you. You don't know their motives. And you don't rate. So the emotional triggers, much, much, much higher. And therefore, energy is burning out faster. So I would say that's another thing we haven't grappled with. Is we haven't grappled with how our matrix structures and our cross-functional teams have run amok. They aren't scaling at a human level. And we haven't fixed that. I love that you knocked out one of my questions that I was going to ask you. No, it's perfect. You're like, let's just leave you to talk and then you'll hit it all. I do want to bring us to a merger of the Good Fight and this. Because in the Good Fight, you popularized this idea of conflict debt, right? And the cost of deferring hard conversations and decisions. And I'm wondering in thought-load terms, where does conflict debt sit in the equation? Is it cognitive demand? Is it emotional burden? Is it both? And then based on that, let me just leave that question first. Which one of those is it, or is it both? I'm actually going to put it in a different spot. Because I just was writing a LinkedIn post about this yesterday and I just had this epiphany. I think it's the outcome. I think conflict debt is the outcome of high thought. Because I have too much to pay attention to. Maybe I didn't have a chance to read that primer document. So I'm not fully informed. I don't feel I know enough, so I don't want to disagree. Because maybe I haven't paid attention to all the things I don't know. If I'm already managing this threat response and social pain, I'm like, well, I don't want you to hate me. Or I can't take the flack that comes back at me if I say that. I don't have, and then the energy, right? Who has the energy for conflict right now? Just let me get through this day and get home. So I think conflict, and it's only new to me. I love when these things sort of emerge. The conflict debt is a primary outcome of high thought load. It's in that category. I can't. I just can't. Like, I may know that I should be putting this tension on this deliberation. I may know that I should be pointing out this issue or giving this feedback. But if my thought load is really high, I'm like, I'm conserving thought load and I'm conserving energy and I'm minimizing emotionally triggering experiences just like not today. So I think conflict debt is actually an outcome. So then how can we design discomfort, safe environments so that conflict becomes more productive, more safe, not more draining or like what's the difference between healthy conflict and constant activation in a tech mediated workplace? Yeah. I would say all the thought load things become really important. So we need to narrow the aperture. So if we can focus and we can talk about a narrow thing and keep it more issue related, this is what we're solving for. This is the outcome we're trying to create. And then to deal with the social pain, what we want to do is as humans were wired to believe conflict with our in group is bad. Right? If you put somebody in an FMI and give them even fake information that their colleagues disagreed with them, we get that social pain finding. So we need to rewire that, change what fires together and wires together by really encouraging and rewarding dissent. So the second thing we're going to do is focus so that it's a bearable, reasonable, narrow topic. And then we're going to say, I need your help. I need you to think through what resistance you might face, what's missing from this, what mistake are we making here? So you're inviting conflict. You're inviting disagreement. If you've got folks who are reticent, we're going to do specific things like share someone's value and invite them in calling in. So we're going to call them in by saying, you're the only person in the room who works in the field team. It's really essential that we understand how you're thinking about the impact of this proposal. So we're inviting someone in instead of like saying, you're not saying much here, we're inviting them into it. And then we're rewarding the heck out of people who do go into that uncomfortable. So in the moment, if we can, like, wow, you know, I hadn't thought about that. That's alarming. Thank you. In the moment being real, if we have to, you might go literally, you could just go like, wow, that's really hard to hear. I was really hoping this was done. But thank you. Or if you can't muster that in the moment, then an email the next day that just says, you know, I've been thinking about what you said the whole time. And while my face probably didn't make me look grateful, you know, my brain is grateful. Thank you. And what about two weeks later, when you say, I've just been reflecting on how you take these opportunities to say the thing, no one else is saying. And I don't always like them. And I think that's why they're so valuable. Thank you for me being able to count on you to say the thing I need to hear or that we need to hear. So there are things we need to do to create enough focus, make it discreet enough that we can get our minds around it and then encourage the discomfort and then understand with the energy side of things, we can't do 10 of those in a meeting. Like, right? Like, what's the one most important conflict we need to have? And then let's reset on, all right, let's get back to something, you know, a little more tactical or yeah. It also seems like we can be prompting our LLMs to be more conflict ready with us, right? And healthy comfort, like discomfort, but safely, discomfort, way, uncomfortable ways. Yeah, so, you know, whether it's a human or you're AI, I always say you want hard things to come from allies, not adversaries. So if I tell my AI, I'm going to be a part of it. I need you to be my best ally by being the first one to point out things I'm missing to challenge me on things that maybe polyanna that you know that sort of thing and I've done that with mine and it's so much better. I get the ick from the sick of you're so right. I'm like genius. Yeah. You're giving me the ick. So yes, I uploaded the good fight into the AI that I use. I'm like, okay, be this for me, right? Yeah. Surface, you know, one of the things in the good fight is that we put way, way, way too much emphasis on facts and information and way too little on what's the treasure beneath it that I'm protecting. So, you know, actually asking it, you know, what, what seems like my treasure based on all that I'm writing about lately, you know, what am I missing? Why is that biased? So, yeah, I think we can absolutely do that and ask that of your human colleagues too. Yeah, of course. Of course, yeah, I know I think that's such a great call out though that it works in both directions just with different kind of approaches and different kinds of outcomes. I do have, I know we're almost at time, but I do have two last questions for you. One of them is, you know, as we look forward, what, what could a tech humanist oriented organization optimize for if it were to take thought load seriously? What would be measurably different about its tools, its rhythms, its information flows and its norms? Yeah. So, the one that's got all my attention at the moment of course is Agentic AI, right? Because that's the first one that's, that is coming in like a tsunami with so little effective management and so, so that's the one where I want people thinking about, okay, great. If I'm going to partner with agents, you know, how can we start to map out what the thought load implications of agents are and that's yes, that is partly the cognitive demands and we're on to that one now, I think, in understanding what, what are the cognitive demands of the prompt changes of the validation of all that, but also, you know, how are these things affecting our emotional triggering? I'm writing an article with Megan Burns, a customer experience expert and we're writing the article about how SAS companies and B2B companies need to understand that their user experience is somebody's employee experience. So we've been using an example, I'm using one of the massive databases that everyone would know and multiple times a day when I'm using it, I feel stupid. I feel like, why can't I find this? Why, like, I feel like an idiot, I'm smart. Like why is this so hard? So, you know, thinking about the emotional piece as well is really, really important. And I think if we can, if we can have conversations about, yep, we are going to leverage agent to AI. Wonderful. What's it going to do for us for our workload? But how do we be more planful about managing the thought load implications? If we could get a brain trust, a think tank together to work on that, that's a conversation that we need post-taste. Okay, and last question is what are you hopeful about? When you think about this space and how things are changing and you just gave us so much great kind of cautionary information and some really great tools in your book, what makes you hopeful? I, because I've been working on my thought load while I've been writing this book and I know what life looks and feels like when you get your thought load down, I have such tremendous hope for how much more innovative we're going to be. Instead of how much more productive, how much more effective we're going to be, how much more present we're going to be, not only in our meetings, but at the dinner table. When we get to the point of, you know, what I really want people to walk away from this book with is this word. If they start just paying attention, I got to pay attention to my thought load, not just my workload, then I think they're going to accomplish incredible things and have gas in the tank at the end of the day to go home and be present for their lives. I am so hopeful about that because I've experienced it and it's so gratifying. So that's what I'm really hopeful about. That sounds amazing. I look forward to that world and I'm grateful to you for bringing this term into existence and teaching us all how to be aware of our thought load. Leon, Davey, when does this book come out? May 19th and fine book stores near you. Excellent. Be on the lookout. Where can people find out more about your work, your book? Yeah. The easiest way right now is just thoughtload.com. Great. That's easy. That's very low thought load. Yeah, well, I was trying. Excellent. Leon, Davey, thank you so much for joining us on the Tech Humanist Show. What a delight. It's been. Thank you so much, Kate. Thank you for listening to the Tech Humanist Show. This episode was produced and edited by Thrive Loud Productions, with research by Ashley Robinson and Aaron Doctrie of Interrebang. You can find more information about the show's guests and links to their projects at TheTechHumanist.com, where you can also find more episodes or you can subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to all of our guests for lending their voices to help make the future a brighter place. I'm Kate O'Neill. You've been listening to The Tech Humanist Show from Pale Insights.