Leading Through Uncertainty with Dom Price

The nature of work has always evolved, from pen and paper to typewriters, from Vax machines to the internet, but this moment we're living through now feels different, faster, messier, and far more demanding on humans. AI's reached into zones where people didn't think computers would ever reach, they're freaking out. Like new technology comes new risks. Only one percent of CEOs have a fully formed AI strategy. Technology is accelerating at a pace most of us can barely absorb. Employees want different things from work, and the rules about how we work keep shifting under our feet. The results? Work forces that feel anxious, and leaders who feel overwhelmed and sometimes even paralyzed. I see this every day in my own role. Leaders asking, how do I lead when everything is changing at once? And employees asking, where do I fit in all of this? So today I've brought in someone who's been making sense of this chaos all along before it hit the mainstream. Dom Price is a futurist, a thinker, a provocateur, and someone who has a remarkable ability to cut through the noise and help leaders move from talking about change to actually doing something about it. And it's not about having the fastest toys or the fastest tools, right, it's the old average of full with a tool, it's still a fool you just made them faster, right? Yeah. So instead of creating faster idiots, how do you upgrade your human operating system? Together, we're unpacking what's really happening in the modern world of work, the speed of change, the widening disconnect between leaders and teams, the promise and the tension of AI and what it takes to not just survive disruption, but thrive in the middle of it. Hey, Dom. Hello there. Great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining. This is a focus on leadership in particular. And one of the things I've been thinking about Dom is that, you know, every generation before us has face shifts. Like, that's what true is in right. But the challenges that we're seeing or leaders are facing today, I have to say it does feel heavier. It feels almost existential. I'm wondering, do you think it is different and if so, why does it feel that much harder right now? I'm with you on the truth is about that. I don't know. I like it. I became a parent a few years ago, right? And I think like, before as a parent, I had an idea of what a parent would be like and then you become one. You're like, oh, I wish I had known earlier, right? And I think it's the same on leadership. Like, from the outside and you're like, why don't they do X? Why don't they do Y? Why don't you? You get into that seat and you're like, oh, my God, there's a lot, right? So if you think right now as a leader, you've got still headaches, post pandemic, right? Supply chain stuff, work from home, work from office, a whole of the challenges in the workforce. You've got technical challenges like AI and whatever comes next, 6G coming out of China, quantum computing, like, however paranoid you are about AI, it's not the thing. There's plenty of other things coming down the pipe. You've got this conflation of generations in a workforce that have very different offerings. You've got a pace of change in tech, in business. The fact that most businesses now are borderless, but we used to be able to carve out a protection zone now you can't, competition from everywhere. And in the midst of that, the expectations of everyone has lifted. You've got to have amazing customer service. Your reviews are all online. There's things viral like if you hate it, you hate it an instant. If you're popular, you're popular in a millisecond and then forgotten about again. So this is like these moments are suddenly condensed and you've got leaders sat there going, how on earth am I meant to navigate this? And for a lot of them, the rhetoric that they were raised on is no longer true. So I don't know about you, but there's a whole lot of, let's say later in life leaders that I work with. There was one I worked with last year and they were like, but you know, Dom, I started as a graduate in this company. And here with my experience, why can't I just do that now for these graduate? It worked for me. And I'm now CEO and I'm like, yeah, that world 35 years ago is fundamentally different to the one today. So I understand your nostalgia. It's not going to pay you a dividend if you try and deliver on that now because the entire environment's changed. So I think when I was growing up, certainly younger in business, it felt like there was so many reference points of best practice. And now that doesn't exist. There's practices, but there's no best anymore because you have to create your own best. Right. So the expectation of the breadth of that leadership role just seems a lot bigger than it used to be. Yeah. Because I think there's a couple of things in there. There's probably a truth that you just talked to that anyone who steps into the leadership role for the first time is like, whoa, it's actually a hell of a lot harder than I thought. This is the first time saying it. But even of those who are seasoned leaders, this is not stepping into a space. This is the space feels different. And I've been a leader for a long time. I've been a leader for a long time. And it feels different for me too. So I think there's something in that, which is, I'm sure you've seen in neuroscience. The longer you've lived, the harder it is to unlearn the things that you know and learn new things. And so when you talk about all that ambiguity and change and we're like, that also sounds superficial. You're like, Hey, if you've got 20, 25, 30 years experience of doing something and that thing is no longer relevant, let's go with that really hard. I've had to learn more in the last year than the previous three. Yeah. In the previous three than the previous 30. You're like, my learning curve is going up. And I don't think we've necessarily set up our system for that. I agree with you. And actually, it's a nice bridge to the next question I was going to ask you, which is, I do feel like there's this sense of, you know, people waiting for things to settle down. These are all up in the air, but like I said, it was the worst case we're saying, go back to normal. I'm not sure if normal was ever a thing, but I'm wondering if normal doesn't exist. And as you say, this pace keeps changing. What are the anchor points that our leaders can really, and employees can really hold on to? I love that phrase. Anchor points. There isn't a normal and we accept there isn't by normal, I mean, constant, right? And I think me and you've been around enough businesses to go, okay, even if you get elements that feel more stable, it's not constant, right? Anchor points, I think, I've like a jigsaw, right? You need a piece to slot in, right? And once that piece is in, you can start to put pieces around it. The weird thing is right now is picking that piece. Is it my business model? Maybe. I might change that. Oh, my customers. I've got loyal customers. I've had them for how many years? Yeah, there's a lot of competition coming out like your customers have got so much choice right now. Oh, my staff. Now they're really traversable if in a world of work from anywhere that they're universally employable. Oh, right. So what is my anchor point? And I think what it comes down to is that the best businesses or leaders that I'm working with right now will land on either a product or a space, right, a belief, right? A product is a moment in time that I think this has value today and I can evolve it. And so they're very product led and if you think about the most famous people that have done that, Steve Jobs, right? Yes. Even Elon Musk to some extent, Tesla, they're like, if I can get the product right, the rest of it will work itself out. The others are going, I'm going to, I'm going to write a wave. I think the wave is AI or I think the wave is people or I think the wave is humanity and society, right? Or wellness. There's a whole of waves out there. Waves for me feel like gambling, right? You just like, do you pick the horse base on the name or its form or the jockey? I'm like, that that feels dangerous, but doable. I think the leaders that work with it land on a product or a service, they're like, they're understanding the demand that's out there, the reality of demand, they're understanding their capability and they're understanding their ability to connect the two. I can make something that other people want to buy, but that anchor point requires belief that you have to some level of product market fit in a world that's changing quite fast. So your product market fit has to change. If I'm just to push on your analogy of the jigsaw and the way I feel a jigsawian actually is, I get the edges, I figure out the edges. You're a boundless person. Once you got the boundless, you pay with the boundless. That's right. Maybe I have a vision of the, I can say what in the box, what I'm just going to build here. But if you put it in leadership parlance and the kinds of values, behaviors, are there some jigsaw pieces on the outside that will be truths and during truths for us, no matter how much of this is changing. I think, I think yes, and it depends. I think it depends on what time horizon you are cover. So when you go over a really long time horizon, I think there's so much inherent uncertainty. It's hard to find those edges. I think if you go short to medium term, the vast majority businesses I'm working with in Australia and globally are heavily people focused still. Their biggest asset, their biggest IP, their biggest investment often as well as their asset is their people. It might not be the one they invest the most in. But I think there's a truism in there that actually, whatever you spent on technology, if you want to match that dollar for dollar and say, I'm going to build a human system of how I work that's fit for purpose in 2025 and I'm going to refresh it so it's fit for purpose in 2026. It's not about having the fastest toys or the fastest tools, right? It's the old knowledge of full of the tool. It's still a fool. You've just made them faster, right? Yeah. Creating faster idiots, how do you upgrade your human operating system? Your leadership styles, the way you communicate, the way you manage your culture, the way you make decisions, your ways of working and how you build rhythm and cadence and flow across an organization. I can sense that the minute I walk into an organization, I'm like, when you see that and you see it's not static, it's evolving. Whatever challenge comes your way, you got it. What does it feel like? You sense it. It feels like it's a weird level of humility. I should not reinvent every time, nor should I always follow the 10 steps. It's these guard rails and saying to people, when you have a complex problem to solve, get a diverse group together and play with it. Like solve it together. It's not that the senior most leaders should have the answer. The senior most leaders should be curating and choreographing the moves that the people in the room, but not demanding those moves. There are organizations that have that fluidity. They tend to actually have one thing that I spot really early on. They don't care so much for the org charm. Okay. They work horizontally and I've been in so many organizations that externally look amazing, but when I get in there are very functionally based, the marketing, we're doing amazingly well with marketing. Cool. The sales know. We're doing amazingly well. Okay. Are you two working together on the same thing in harmony with alignment? Is there a product of size, though, is it achievable in massive organizations? I think size gets blamed when actually it's an inadvertent craving for efficiency. Functional leaders should be very efficient. I've got my lane, I've got my budget, I've got my skirt, my goals. I'm in control of that. Did I achieve a customer outcome? Doesn't matter. I did my project. They're relevant. They're relevant. Yeah. So I think what happens is, I think sometimes size is maybe not a determinant. It's probably a coefficient. It's an influence factor. I think what's interesting is organizations that have a strong sense outside and they look outside and work in, they for me tend to be more relevant because they've got that eye on where's the market going, where's the customer going, where's the evolution there? The ones that look in and go, I need to make this monolithic beast more efficient. They will make a very efficient thing and me and you would walk in there and ask them, are you still doing the right thing? And they're like, we managed to get 6% cost reduction and whatever more efficient to you. No, I get that. You're going fast there. But have you stopped to check, are you doing the right thing, rather than just doing the thing fast? And we flip the rules. We've now said it's not about efficiency. It's about being effective, relevant to your customer and evolving fast. I think you might be touching on one of the things that I think it does feel differently. In fact, an Oxford professor said this, when I asked him a question, why does it feel different? He said, there's something about the need to, you know, you're talking about looking outside much more. If you're connecting, there's so much change happening outside. So because of that pace of change happening outside, we need to be up and out. But these things are happening to us in our organization at the same time. And I think the analogy uses, it's like shooting at a target when you're in a fast-moving car yourself. You know, it feels so different. That high level of connectivity and orchestration is happening. But also this belief that we need a high fidelity shot, like there is one shot and I've got to hit the target, bulls-eye versus going, actually, as a leader, I think you've got a few shots and I think you need to be close. I don't think you have to get 100% of the target. So I think one of the killer profiles I've seen, a lot of the leads I'm working with right now, is still this need for perfection. Right? And it comes out in many different forms. Sometimes it's, I must be right. Or if I'm in this workshop, I'm the sitting-most person. I must be running this. And it's like, no, you don't. Like, you're just a participant. That need to be right or perfect is right now is an absolute killer for progress in a world that we've just accepted is inherently uncertain. Don, we at AY recently did a survey, quite extensive service, 15,000 people we interviewed. It's called our Work Reimagine Survey. But one of the findings from that survey was that 88% of employees now use AI. Great adoption. The depth of that adoption is very shallow. But whether or not it's deep or shallow use cases, what we're seeing is that employees are telling us that AI is making them more productive and more stressed. Yeah. So workloads are going up. Yeah. I've been thinking about this one. Are you unintentionally using technology to accelerate the treadmill? Probably. We've been around so much to change long enough to know. When you take a new phenomena at an old organization, you jam it in and you go, why did nothing change? Because you didn't change the overall system of your organization, right? And so that those stats for me, even if I didn't know them, I'd say, given where we're at in the hype cycle and the adoption curve, those stats feel like my right, right? Because what we said to people is carry on doing your job, we're adding this thing in it will save time. Yeah. We're not being that prescriptive on what to do with your free time. Yeah. Most of the articles and the celebration I see is the celebration of the time saving. It's not the celebration of the time invested. If I'm an organization, I go, I saved an average of eight hours a week across all my employees and I invested that. So of the eight hours, two went into mental wellness, health and wellness. Two went into new projects and innovation, four went into another. And so here's the dividend that I've got, which is a portfolio dividend. I think what we're in now is this the equations changing. So we're adding an AI, we're saving time. We don't quite know what to do with the time. We feel awkward. Yeah. We've had about losing our job, self-preservation kicks in, we take on something else and we're creating this whack-a-mole, it's just like, and it's trep, it's not even treadmill. I think it's just like, you know, we're just thrashing, right? This is going pause. What needs to change to the system and how do we do that systematically? How do we do that methodically so that the system now matches the new demands of the work and the new demands of the technology? It's really interesting because we think about this one a lot and in fact, we talk about the, we don't have any user words of the dividend that we pay out, but we sort of redirect time saved into the thrive time. You can choose to put it into your study, into wellbeing, to community impacts, which is great. One of the things that I have seen, even if you put the words out there, it's not quite taking off as much as I would have thought or imagined. And one of the things I've observed as well is we can get locked into ways of thinking. So you talked about smart pasta radios, faster inefficiencies, that's the way I think about it as well. And I'm wondering about, what does that look like to unlock imagination? I didn't excise with a few senior leaders the other week. And so once you had a story, it was pertained to this, which was our job is to throw a ball a meter. We do that every single day. We can use AI to do that faster and more efficiently or we could use AI to go, instead of it going a meter to record, we could make it go a thousand meters. And then the next question was, what would need to be true for that to happen? And suddenly the thing that happened was creativity, imagination and play without ever using those words, right? So you're like, wow, a thousand, that feels unachievable, that's never been done before. Here's what we'd need to do. And the constraints lifted there, the mojo in the room completely changed, because the new target was a new target. This is going, how do we do the old thing faster? So I've got a very simple framework I've been using, which is, we can use AI or any form of technology to do minus one things, zero things and plus one things, right? The minus one things are the things we do right now are broken, let's do them a little bit better, right? The zero things, risking compliance, right? We still want to do them. How can we use our activities more broadly, higher coverage, higher fidelity, better than the same price? We can get a better product for the same investment. And the plus one is net new business, brand new opportunities. I don't know if it's the sales cycle or the hype cycle or just sentiment in markets right now and a little bit of short term thinking, but most people are doing minus one, a tiny bit of zero and the very few are doing the plus one. I genuinely believe everyone still has that fire in the belly. I feel like we set up environments where we've put that fire out. And therefore, as our job is lead, this is just to reignite that. There's probably a sprinkling of psychological safety, there's a sprinkling of reward and recognition, right? You've got to incentivize it. There's a sprinkling of storytelling, right? As we do these things, how do we tell the stories about innovation, creativity, imagination? How do we train people on it, right? If they don't feel like they have that skill and capability, how do we tap into it? And how do we make it part of our operating model, right? And I think when you do that and you normalize it, it will become seamless. What, what I fear, you can do the theater of this really easily. We're innovative. If we do a hackday or a real estate, if we've got mouse, mouse, we're like, we can do the power of finalia really easily. But the building into the core of what you do, that takes at a different level of stewardship and I think a longer term mindset, which always brings me back to tenure with inadvertently created short term incentives. If you think about the platform play, we as a society need to make right now the investment we need to make for the generation coming through the ranks for the generation. There's this frozen middle that I'm petrified about between probably 30 and my 47, 37 years old, who have still got a career where they're expected to work pay taxes earn, but they might become irrelevant. So retraining of that middle bit, the next generation, how do we build a platform where there's enough time to invest and get that payback? When instead of planting seeds, I mean, a lot of the CEO is like, I just need to chop down more trees. I need to make more money. I'm going to chop down trees. Yeah, the trees came from seeds, but sometimes we need to plant a seed and nurture a seed. I think that's your job as a leader, if we don't give them that tenure, will we ever get the investment and the longer term payback? One thing that keeps coming up in conversations with leaders and employees is employees in various guys that are saying they don't feel seen and leaders in various guys are saying they're listening harder than ever. And not going to lie, but both those things do actually feel true to me. Where do you think that disconnect is coming from and how do we bridge it? If I could give you a factual answer to that, I think I could probably bottle it and retire. It's like, I've become abundantly aware of that truth with a few customers that we're going to right now with that exact statement, staff going, I don't feel seen. I don't feel valued. I don't feel heard. Yeah. And leaders going, how many more lives, right? There is one where actually we just sat them all around and had an honest conversation. We're like, you know what, let's not do any more surveys, not a focus group. It's not anything other than honest, human, human conversation. And the question to the employees was, you tell us, what would it take for you to feel seen, right? Or feel heard? Because we've tried and we've clearly not got it right. And then those employees then ask back saying, what have you done and what haven't you tried that you'd be willing to try? And it was very honest conversation now, it'd be lovely to say they ended up with a joint plan, roadmap equally, they didn't. But they left with far more empathy for each other's position, right? So essentially what's happening before that was the leaders were like, God, there's a lot of needy. What a pain. We just need to get rid of it. Fear these needy people entitled. They're entitled. That's why lots of finger wagging, right? And the people that are going, I'm working my ass, I'm at the call face, I'm doing this one. I never get anything. Yeah, I get a paycheck, but I never get any recognition. And thank you. One of the things this company used to have was an informal recognition system where people said, well done, and thank you. Can you ask me and they roll up and in a monthly newsletter, your name's on a list, I feel seen. Wow. Okay. So it's weird. It is big things and little things like that. This is what blows my mind every time. So people are like, do we need to buy some new recognition software, we need this tool, we need to monetize it and gamify it. And then you're like, or when Janelle does something good, just say, well done. Yeah. I'm just in the moment, live, right, it's like feedback, like every time I go to the airport and someone else has brought a book out on feedback, it's not changed, we've just got really bad at it. Right. So I don't think we need a new book on value exchanging recognition. I think we just need to go back to those human basics. And again, I want to call out something that happened in the pandemic. There's a whole of the leaders that I've been working with recently, they've mistaken broad cuts for communication because in the pandemic, they couldn't physically reach people in person. So they did broadcast, I'll record a video, I'll send it out to the entire organization. So these leaders are like, no, no, we had a change, I've communicated it done. But no one's listening to, yeah, no one's listening. I agree. So why are you sending it out again? Right. Literally definition of insanity. Yeah. And so what happened with them was they had a metric problem. They measured the number of broadcasts and the reach, they didn't measure who listened and what they did differently. So when we sat down, I was like, which of those, I know which data points, easier to measure, you did it. It went out live. It was available to 5,000 people. So that metric, easy, gold star, go through off, no impact. How many people listen to it and what changes happen because of that way harder to measure. But that's what you care about is the affect that you had from that communication. Did they get the message? Have they changed their behaviour? And so I think again, there's this like back to basics memory of going, what behaviour changes will make your organisation thrive? And how do you reward and recognise those? And how do you role model in yourself? So I was going to ask you, what does it look like to be a thriving leader in this, today in this environment? I think you've touched on a bunch of things there. But how would you kind of distill, threatening leadership in this modern world? There's, there's two core aspects that I'm seeing as a red thread, and I'm not. This isn't research based. I've not got stats on this. One is they are looking ahead at future signals, they're looking around the corner at future signals that may or may not affect them in their business and they're trying to get an insight from that signal early and adapt early. So the alternative to that is, I've built a plan on delivering this plan regardless. Right. So they've gone from, I've got a plan and all I need to do is deliver to, I've got a rough plan. But what I really need to do is look around that corner. The second part is they have balance, they have balance in life. They have hobbies, loved ones, children, travel, whatever it is. They have something that gives them an identity other than their job. And that for me, why does that matter? Because that is the human anchor point. We talked about anchor points in a work context. If all you've got is a work anchor point, I don't know if that's what, I mean, for some people that might be worth it for me, that's not enough, right? My idea of hell is my greatest, I'm going like, was productive, dumb, like, I just was efficient on Thursday. Like, that's not anything to live for a live by. So those thriving leaders have this way of going, I like it to, if you ever like to see an elite athletes, how much they recharge and relax. Yes. And you're like, but you're the top, like, 0.1%, why aren't you playing more? And they're like, because more playing isn't going to get me to my goal, being rounded. It's going to get me to my goal. And I'm like, like, if we could take a little bit of that roundedness from sport and put it into business and go, actually, your thrive moment, reinvest in thriving, when we give people spare time and we get them to invest in them, they become better employees. We know this because there's plenty of books about it, but it almost feels counterintuitive. The flip of it is the number of leaders right now. And this is really bad in the US, not so bad here with this hustle culture. It's a beauty, you know, who can burn themselves out the fastest moment, but I actually think they're more rounded leaders. And there's a hand-flung working with right now, I look at them and I go, I admire you. They've got lots of things in abundance, but it's those two that shine out for me, the ability to look around corners with humility and the ability to have a balanced life. Love, love, love that. You talked about one of the challenges of leaders who have been established leaders in the game change is there's much more to unlearn, I'm going to get it personal now, what about you? You've been a leader in the game for a long time. What's something that you've had to unlearn? I would say the hardest unlearning, maybe if I flick the question for me, is my dominant style in workshops. So I thrive in a workshop moment, but I would say the mistake I've made in the past and I've had to unlearn this. I thought my role was to get the workshop to a specific outcome and I would normally arrive with that outcome in mind. That's otherwise known as manipulation. This is going, my job here is to facilitate, I'm a choreographer, I'm a curator and I need to navigate these people, but they own the problem, they own the solution, it's my job to help them get there, but I almost need to abstract myself out from having an opinion on what the solution is. But dominance in meetings, that dominance got me places fast, but it got me places fast through not hearing other people. So on my, I have two posted notes on my machine at home, one is argue like you're right, listen like you're wrong. I like that. And the other one is less furious, more curious, because I need reminders of both. That's a really interesting one, because I was reflecting on my, I've got similar sorts of things there and how might I hear counter views as data, it's data, like that's a really interesting thing, it's telling me something, in my reaction to that data, it's instructive about me, the data itself is instructive about situation. And just let, like, so the phrase a friend gave me is like every now and then you're going to get something you don't like, let it marinate. There's a power of pause, it's not all power of pause, it's not, not easy for extraverts. One thing that I'm going back to this survey that we did, and there's a whole lot of rich data in there. One of the things that talked about, we talked about, well, we saw in the data that, is this real need to properly invest in training to upskill on a significant amounts training, in fact, 81 hours is the magic number that came through of AI learning a year, huge, to unlock meaningful productivity gains. But what we also saw that's super interesting to me is that employees with the most AI training are 55% more likely to quit. It's a bit of a bummer, isn't it? There's some. Not surprised, yeah. That, right? Because I feel like you've probably unlocked something. Is this a retention risk that becomes a turning off point for organizations? Is it a healthy talent mobility? Is it a call to action to do things? Do you think this is the first time we've heard that data point? What's your reaction to that? I've got a guess. Okay. It is a guess. You know, if you're like, you take someone for an offside, and you talk to them about psychological safety, and you're merely training them on all these things, and then you return them to the office and nothing's changed. Yes. Yes. They're angrier. Your engagement scores don't go up, they go down. Because you've shown them the light, and then gone, I'm not giving you the light, I'm just letting you know the light. Right? The training lens on AI might be the same. I'm going to equip you to be a superhuman, I'm going to equip you to be amazing, and they're going to put you in a really mediocre environment where you get frustrated every day. Because we're investing in the learning, we're not investing in the system change. I think if we could get those three things in congruence, and go, human operating system of how we work, how we make decisions, how we operate ways of working on that jazz, I'm going to train you and make you more capable, I'm going to give you a chance to practice it, and tools that amplify that behavior. You've got me. I am staying. I'm loyal. I'm growing. I'm learning. I'm over the moon. You take any of those three out, and you're like, this is weird. You've given me the technology, but you're not trying me. One hour feels stupid. Right? Or we've got the operating system. We've got the tech, but I've not learned anything. Yeah. The three have to be in harmony, and I think right now, communities are grappling at one or two of them, and not doing the three in concert. Brilliant. You know, you've talked about the criticality of, you know, at the end of the day, everything we do is about people. It's about creativity. It's about their energy. It's about their growth. And we're operating an environment that's increasingly digital, creasingly remote, increasingly transactional. And I'm thinking about how leaders need, what are ways in which leaders can really build that connection, that human connection, given the changes of the environment they've operating in. What comes to mind for you? And I talk about rituals. Yeah. There's a few, so I'm a firm believer that the most important relationships I have to this day, work, personal, whatever, were formed in person. A lot of them I maintain in a virtual world, they're a mode distributed world, but that moment of connection, of trust, of rapport, of all the things was in person. The first time we met was in person. Yeah. And so there's a whole of those around like, there's some kind of like a value exchange in that moment where you're like, we're similar enough where there's something here. I don't know what it is, but there's something here. And you don't need to name it or codify it as just something there. And that happens in person. I feel trusted. I feel seen. I feel safe. I feel like I could speak up, right? If you feel those things, then they're true. So I get that in person. I can then maintain that online. One of their practices I've been using to, I've been using with leaders recently. What is the my user manual? Every single person I've ever hired in my career does not come with a user manual. So I don't know how you work. So I'm going to guess, which is just silly. Instead of guessing how to know works, I'm like, General, draw me right me up a user manual. How do you like feedback? How do you operate? What are your values? What are your behaviors? What are your triggers that make you angry? What are the things that make you sad? What grants are like, and now I know a little bit about you, I understand a little bit more about how you operate and how you're motivated and how to work best with you. So that works is like a setup. The second part is the reflection. So there's the next size I've been doing for eight years now called the 5Ls. I do it every 90 days. I look back at the previous 90 days, me as a leader, not the project, all the teams not out. It's it's in what if I loved what if I loved what if I longed for what if I learned and what if I loved say, what have I loved? Loved. Loved. Yeah. Longed for. Yeah. Lafted. Lafted and learned. And learned. Perfect. Reflect project. And then I've got a cohort of two or three really trusted advisors that I share. My 5Ls with when I do them to hold me a cat book. Wow. I want to be honest with you listeners, if they're not doing some exercise to reflect on their leadership style and changing it, they are the anchor slowing everything down. So I think we need a moment of intellectual humility where we admit if we're not changing, we're not allowed to expect the world around us to change. Start with us. You can help yourself and you evolve how you work, you lead with humility. If you do those things, good things will happen around you. Dom, thank you so much in the spirit of offering up those little moments. I would like to give you feedback. Oh, that was excellent. Thank you so much for giving so much richness and so much of yourself to this conversation. You know, whether it's the 5Ls, the creation of the human user manual and really taking time to understand, recognizing the criticality of those human connection moments, the power of the thank you to where people feel seen and heard and understood. I really liked the letting go of the need for perfection. We will get catatonic in a world that's moving too fast, celebrate time invested over time saved. I love that. I think that makes a massive difference here and really being thoughtful about a human operating system. And unless we are able to unlock that plus one thinking, you know, the psych safety, the storytelling, the training, the incentives, it's all been so powerful. And actually also, they're reminded to pay attention to the signals. I said, never before have we needed to look up and out much more to inform what we do within. And a reminder about the power of balance, a critical human anchor point for us all. Dom, thank you so much for your time. The Change Happens podcast from EY, insights from leaders in a changing world. Discover more where you get your podcasts.