Navigating change with empathy: With Nimesh Mehta

rather than surprising people, you have to have them be a part of the change. You have to land with the people then rather than land on them. Hey everybody, welcome to Catalyst, the Launched by NTT Data Podcast. I'm your host, Tammy Soares. At launch, we get to work with some of the most incredible companies and organizations to create digital products that improve lives and solve problems and hopefully make a difference. But our show isn't about what we do, it's about people, the leaders, the change makers who make it all happen and shape the future. And we have an amazing guest joining us today who has over 25 years of experience crafting the art of the possible and challenging perceptions in the corporate world. I'm really excited to have Namesh Metta on with me today. He's currently the chief information and strategy officer at National Life Group and has previously had lead teams at companies like Civitas Capital and Lincoln Financial. But one thing that sticks out to me about Namesh when I met him is how he doesn't shy away from initiating change by challenging existing ideas or cultural barriers. And he actually embraces discomfort and encourages teams to step out of their comfort zones, which we'll definitely get to later on. But thank you so much and welcome to the show. Tammy, thank you so much for having me. Well, after that description, I'm not sure I can live up to the expectations, but I'm going to give it a shot. So let's tell us, let's just start with you telling us a little bit about like just your journey, how you got to where you are today, what stands out for you when you're talking about your story. Well, you know, I still remember the day I told my parents I was going to pack my bags and leave the country when I was 17 years old and say, I want to go be a computer engineer and specialize in something called robotics and chip design. They looked at me like I had horns on my head, but I did leave. And I did it. I did what I was going out to do. And I thought that I would be an engineer. And about two jobs into being an engineer, I said, I don't want to be an engineer, how typical, right? And I tell our kids, don't change your mind, but I did it too. And I decided to move into the financial services world. And it happened, you know, as they say, accident or luck or karma, not sure which one. And I stepped into this world. And then I came over to national life where I am today. And I remember one day my CEO, today's the CEO of the president at that point, he came to me and he said, Hey, by the way, but I need you to transform the mail and print department. And I looked at him, said, I don't know anything about mail or print. And he goes, that you'll figure it out. And I did. I went in and figured that out. The next thing was, well, we bought this company in Dallas a while back. And we need to think about unifying our organization because what happens is any company go to where acquisitions take place, they either run it separately, or their silos. And it's very hard to unify it. So came around unification. And then I actually left the organization and I decided to pursue something else. And I said, look, I have to run a PNL to really grow and get something out of my career. And so I left and I went to another company. And a few months later, I called back and he says, you know, the thing you wanted to do to run something, how about you run all of operations? And I looked at him, said, I've never run operations that day in my life. Why would you want me to do this? Said, I think you have the wrong number. And he goes, no, no, you'll figure it out. And I figured it out. And I ran operations. And then I ran strategy. And then I came back to IT. So I've had a, I would say circular conversation, circular career. And the best thing I can tell people about opportunities is don't say no, no matter how uncomfortable it may make you feel. Because most of my opportunities came from a complete level of discomfort. And here I am. Like, what do you think it is in you that makes you like, we have that willingness to step into your discomfort and take on something that like you said, you didn't know anything about the male and print and room. And now you're transforming it. Like, what is it about you? Do you think that's in your DNA that's like, yeah, I got it. I'll go take that on. You know, I'll say something which I think is controversial. Is there two schools of thought? And one school of thought is strategic thinking can be taught. And another school of thought is you have it in you or you don't, right? You can be a good person who fills out strategic templates and can make it happen. But strategic thinking is something that you have. I can be a good tennis player, but I'll never win Rimmel. And I think what I have is I like it and I really enjoy being able to see through the fog. Being and being able to see that vision out there without other people necessarily not understanding where it is and getting people only two feet through the fog every single time and making it out on the other side really gives me the energy to make it happen. And all of these things I talked about was I didn't know what the end was and figuring it out and solving those puzzles is really gives me the passion of getting done. I think that makes me sort of unique because most people don't like fog. They like clarity in their life. And I guess I like fog. What do you do when you're under the people that don't like the fog? Like do they follow you like behind you knowing you're going to get through the fog or how does that work towards your leadership? It is an interesting one because I don't think everybody wants to or can see through the fog. And it's not worth trying to explain to everybody. There are people that if you explain the vision and through it they will understand it. And there are others that only need to see as far as the headlights can see. And it's okay to show them just as much. And when they get those quarter mile hundred yards ahead you show them another hundred yards and another hundred yards. But it takes you to morph a leadership style that's very different. I learned sometimes you have to lead from the front. If you say charge and you look behind and there's nobody there, you're not going to go anywhere. So you have to know when you can lead and take charge from the front when you're going into something that is difficult where people don't want to go. Yeah. There are other times when you have to leave from the back where there's an entire army and you have to look at everywhere everybody's going. And the third one is you got to be able to be right beside the team doing the things that they do and lead from the side. And I think traversing through the fog is figuring out where you need to be with whom. The description you gave me to sort of along these the journey points. Take one of them and just give me an example of how you put this into practice. When I was asked to take over operations, I said okay. And I walked in and it was a huge team. It's probably 50 or 60% of the population of national life at that point. And I walked into the leadership meeting and I looked at them and I said look, I'm here not to help you and change and do all those things. Yes, we'll do that, but I'm here to learn first because I can tell you I don't know anything about what you do. But those fresh eyes will bring a different perspective and we'll figure out what the future needs to be because I have no confirmation bias here. So sometimes I had to sit with a call center and learn what the call center did other times I had to sit with new business and three times I had to sit back and strategy and think what does operations of the future look like? What do our customers want? What are they looking? So each time with a different position and a different piece in the chess board that you have to move in order to make progress. It's not always playing checkers and moving the pawn forward. Yeah, and it's also like being open to taking a step back and recognizing even that's not something you know and so you're going to learn. And that's going to build so much followership with the folks on the ground. I was just taking that time and instead of assuming that you know everything that you need to know by I don't know doing some research, but really sitting with people like that's going to keep a connection that's easier for the change management in the future. I would just I would guess because they would feel like they were a part of that transformation journey and a key part of that with you versus just somebody coming in with more of a command and control approach. Like I have all the answers and I'm going to tell you what to do. What you just described is quite a bit different than than what I've seen. When you want to have disruption, I think Tammy, you have to land with people not on them. So you really need to understand where they are and empathy is meeting people where they are. And I'll give you an example, right? Am I going to work in a contact center in my career? Probably not, but understanding exactly what they do and what they deal with is super important. So one day I was sitting there and I had this lady had a really quizzical look on her face and I walked out to her and said, "What's going on?" And she said, "You want to listen in?" I said, "Sure." And I put on my lovely headsets that I don't like to wear and I was listening and she said, "What are you here?" So I heard this somebody talking about taking a loan out on a policy. I finally, she looked at me and she said, "Person's name on the screen is an Asian name and the voice sounds Eastern European." Something's wrong. And having that gut feel of what they do, that really led me to believe that we've got to figure out better biometrics and other ways of fraud detection because we're completely relying on human intellect to make it happen and sometimes humans will slip up and not everybody's going to do the same thing. So you got the experts, if this lady hadn't recognized it, they passed all the authentication measures. It would have gone right through. Wow. One of the things I've said, I've had a pretty eclectic career and helped a lot of different kinds of positions as well and it's really funny the ones that I lean on in certain times. But I was a retail associate way back in the day. I worked in the mall at Miller's Outpost and was like a frontline retail person. And there's so much of that that I'm using right now when I think about the future of retail, for example, and I'm thinking about it through the lens of generative AI and conversational AI and agentic AI and really thinking about and reimagining what that retail experienced. The future could be like having that first hand even though it's pretty old, right? It's I think I was 18 when I had that. So that was a long time ago, but it hasn't changed all that much on the ground in the store, right? I draw on that as I'm thinking about how to imagine the future, because if you don't know the starting point, then it's really hard to think about how everything around it is going to be able to be changed and what a good outcome would be. And applying change even in an organization is difficult. I mean, think about your organization. It's huge, right? And trying to drive change from an organization and I tell my teams, look, I think there's a level that I have learned. I joke around because I'm the only person in my family that has a job. Right? Everybody else has a business. So we come from a very entrepreneurial family. So you've got to be able to think like an entrepreneur. So you have that entrepreneurial mindset, but you have to have an enterprise headset when you execute. Because otherwise, they're just going to have sloppy at the end. So how do you balance these two things out of entrepreneurial thinking and enterprise execution when it comes to really driving change? Because when you're driving moving change in across an aircraft carrier, it's very different than when you're doing it on a jet ski. You move an aircraft carrier to degrees. Nobody will notice, but you'll be 50 miles off course. Thinking about that change, it is interesting because I think that we're sort of getting into this new inflection, another inflection point with technology, where we're going to be able to completely reinvent industries. I believe with with where things are going. And it's like when you're a startup in that space, like that's where the disruption usually would come from as a startup saying, it's easier to start from the ground up. It's not easy to get it to go enterprise, but it's easier to start with nothing and build this future thing than it is to take something that exists with thousands of employees with all these processes and things like you've got to actually transform it to get it to like that next level. So like how do you are you seeing that as well, like just in the overall landscape, like with generative AI and AI and everything coming onto the scene? I think you know, you can't have a conversation and technology without talking about AI right now. It is just one of the things, whether you're in a board meeting and executive meeting, a team meeting, there's always a topic on AI and where is it going and what is it going to do? I look at AI as people are still worried about the technology, rather than worrying about how they're going to deploy the technology in their lives. I think startups don't have that baggage so they could start deploying the technology and large enterprises have to figure out that baggage of what the technology is to deploy it. However, I equated to that with the internet of the early 90s. People will worried about packet transfer and jitter and everything under the sun when it came to actual internet protocols. I mean, today, how many people actually know how the internet works? Yeah, if I shut it off, I think people will be pretty unhappy. Yeah, absolutely. But I think AI is in the same space right now, which is figuring out how to deploy AI. And I think I've been saying this for probably my god, if you look back, I think I did an interview with maybe five or six years ago, maybe more, where I think digital is sort of become passe and AI will become passe. It is more about humanizing using AI than it is about digitizing using AI. Because at some point, you've got to be not creating digital experiences. You have to be creating human experiences using AI. And I think the people that can harness that humanity in AI. And I know it's an oxymoron when I say that. That's the people that will really be able to change the landscape of not just the industry, but probably more than that. I mean, I have goosebumps because I have been trying to say that less eloquently than you just did. So thank you. I'm going to steal your words for for later usage. But I just agree with you so much on that. I think that, you know, looking at what we did with digital and digital transformation, it sort of removed humanity. I think a little bit away from the equation, right? So when you go online, instead of calling used to call 800 numbers to make purchases or do the things you need to do, we sort of distilled that into new user interfaces where you click and you have to search the right way, or you have to click your preferences, the right way, or use your filters, the right way to do the things you want to do. And I just see AI being able to come in and bring back that humanity, being able to use natural language, being able to explain intent and context, and in ways that we do when we relate to each other as human, like we're just going to bring back, I hate to even say bring back. It's just more bring humanity into digital. I think is the opportunity. And then to your point, it's like all of it. It's all the space between IoT and edge computing and private 5G and AI. And then you think about the experiences you can create around that are pretty incredible. Yeah. And I think the compute is there today. Let's, if we talk a little bit tech for a second, you know, we go back 10 years, the compute wasn't available to do the things that AI can do. So if you launched OpenAI or LAM, or any one of these models back in the 80s, even though AI has been around since the 50s, it hasn't really caught up because there wasn't any compute or memory to support it. I remember, you know, my young days of the program are wondering around 16K of memory. I don't know, my fingernails have more than 16K of memory right now. The technology and the hardware behind it has really stepped up where AI has become a reality to be able to do what you just talked about, which is creating that human impact. On frictionless interaction, I would say, with a machine, which we always had friction. You had to pick a preference, so you had to do something, you had to know something, you had to learn something, all that is gone. It's almost magic. But yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty incredible to kind of see it go from where NLP and NLG was and conversation design and just with like a flick of a switch to be able to see like the true potential come forward. Yeah. And especially when you're doing international business now, I remember we were working with an individual who had all their medical records in Portuguese. And this would have taken, you know, a few months of official translations and boom, you know, five minutes later, it's translated, not just translated everything, but in context of what's going on. So the pros are, it can do a lot of stuff. On the other side, there's very little explainability, so I can't repeat it. If you want repeatability, it becomes really hard to use AI. So how are you, I mean, if you can talk about it, how are you thinking about it, just in the context of the work that you're doing today? Is that something you can talk about? I believe right now. And I don't know by the time, you know, this gets published, things might change because it's worth changing so fast in the world. But I think there's a need for human in the loop. I think we're at a point where assembling information, getting really complex things summarized, being able to get things in context, ask questions and make people's lives easy is a part of all the focus of where AI is going, whether it be summarizing, you know, attending physician statements documents, which are hundreds of pages long for an underwriter to just be able to question, looking for diseases within the thing, being able to anticipate based on what the conversation is going, where the person's going to head in a cloud in a contact center, those are the places, you know, it's doing really well to be able to scale organizations, because otherwise you just be throwing bodies at the problem. So yes, it's efficiency in a way, but I look at it more in terms of effectiveness. It's filling the white space of efficiency, but there still needs to be a human in the loop as far as decision making is concerned. I don't think we're at a spot yet where we can leave the decision making to an AI to an agent. And then the next one will be agents talking to other agents, right? It's all going to come, but I think there's a level of comfort that both leadership customers and regulators have to get really close to and get comfortable with before that happens. Yeah. Does that stop you from thinking about? I mean, like I said, the beginning of the show, like just the way that you think about wanting to disrupt an industry, wanting to come in and like really shake things up, like how do you think about that? Like how are you one of those leaders? Because there's so many leaders that aren't that way that we'll sit back and wait and see what out what somebody else says. So just from your own DNA, like what makes that? How does that happen for you? Yeah, I guess it's it is, it is my DNA, but you know, it's one of those where if I tell you what we're doing, then I have to kill you James Bond show. So well, I'll give you a little peek into my world. Okay, just a little peek. Just a little peek. I don't want to be on anybody's hit list. So just give me just give me a taste. I'll give you a sneak peek. Okay. But let me tell you about me first. It is more for style and the style is about having courage and encouraging people, right? So you've got to be able to have courage to be able to do disruption. Disruption is not going to come if you live on the boundary of fear. So let me give you an example, right? There's the best way I can describe it is if I ask you, if I put a 50 foot plank or 20 foot plank on the ground and I tell you walk the plank, walk this plank and I'll give you a thousand dollars. Most people walk it and they'll be very happy to take the thousand dollars. I take that and put it 50 feet above the ground. Now suddenly, you're fearful. It's the same skill that you had. There's nothing different. You could walk it there, but the game just got amped up, which means people need courage to be able to do something that's amped up. And that means they need to have a psychological safe space to be able to do it. And if you want to disrupt, you've got to be able to have what I call healthy intellectual debates. When I say healthy intellectual debates, we strongly believe this in our organization. It doesn't matter who you are, you leave your stripes at the door. And when you're in the room, you have to be able to put your perspective forward. Not not every perspective is going to get its way. Neither are we going to be able to do everything. However, what is your perspective? Why did you get there? And we're doing this to get at the right decision for the organization. And that requires sometimes a little bit of arm-wrestling to take place in that room, regardless of who you are. And to have that safety and psychological safety to be able to do it without any consequences, I think that's like taking the plank and putting it 50 feet up in the air. And it becomes a messal memory to walk that plank. And I think that's a different style that I've seen. Not a lot of people can do it. A lot of people who have done it are successful at doing it. And they're the people that can actually drive change in organizations. So doing that disruption, whether it be the AI and AI is not the end all of disruption. There's so many other things going on. To really disrupt an industry, you have to change it at its core. Which is really understand how the business runs and how do you change and visualize a future business model before you apply any technology to it. Tech will plum, but if you can't change the business model at its core, especially for a really old organization, then you're just going to nibble around the edges with technology. You're not going to be a technology powerhouse that stems from within. And I think that's what drives me is changing it right from the core. So you play to win. So psychological safety, you don't know this about me. It's near and dear to my heart. It's something I actually talk a lot about just outside in my corporate world that I'm in, but on the show as well. So hearing you say that just now, I know why I just immediately gravitated towards you. Because I think it's unusual to find leaders who will talk about psychological safety as like a key contributing factor to success. You know, and I think maybe they don't use those words anyway. They kind of go around the around the idea. But I think the idea of being able to create a space for people to feel so comfortable to bring their full selves, but also they're all their ideas. And to your point, it may not be the idea, but they're going to contribute to the idea. And I think it makes a stronger as an organization or as a product when you've got so many different world views looking at a similar problem. And it's being able to capture all that that I think psychological safety is required for us. I absolutely love that. And you're taking the risk out, right? Like what you describe on that plank is there's a little very little risk to me if I walk that plank and it's three inches off the ground. But the risk is when it goes up to 50 feet, I fall off like I'm going to get hurt. And like psychological safety is sort of like the net almost like I'm going to go charge at it because you know, I feel like I've got me at a harness on or I've got things around me that are going to keep me safe in doing that. And I think there's another thing that's really important to teams is you can't protect your teams. You've got to be able to support your teams, right? And you have to be psychological safety, I think, is important because it comes with intentionality. If it's unintentional, it's not going to work, right? And it comes, it's finding a balance between strength, but not being invincible. It's a balance between knowledge, but not know it all. It's a balance between impact versus outcome. And it's a balance between giving advice versus driving with influence because you can just give advice and walk away. You know, tech people are known to do that. Well, I'll tell you a break and then they're gone. Sorry, consultants. But now you've got an influence and you know, becoming an advisor is easy, but becoming an influencer is a lot harder because there's a fear of people not coming with you, right? And that psychological safety, you have to have it in order to drive that intentionality in purpose. Intentionality. Talk to me a little bit about that. That's really important. What does intentionality mean to you? It's doing it purposefully, right? And it's intentionality of, well, everybody says, well, you know, you need earned trust. But how do you intentionally earn somebody's trust? You've got to understand what violates trust. And you got to understand that trust is built on banks, right? Trust banks. You put deposits in. And as a human, you are going to take withdrawals up. And you got to have a positive net balance. So you've got to be able to continuously deposit those trusts. So what is that? And I think Frances Frey, she's a Harvard professor and she really says it very well. Is there a trust triangle? People don't trust you if they don't believe you're credible. They don't believe you're authentic or they don't believe that you have what's the third one she says empathetic. So if you don't have these three things in you, you start to wobble people's trust. And I think that's the difference is, is being able to not just say you have to earn trust, but having a way that's very purposeful in being able to do it. And whatever you're doing, being purposeful around it. There's a book called the trusted advisor and there's one other component that gets added to that, which is sort of like, how much do you focus on yourself? So you can have all these things around credibility, empathy, and authenticity. If you're self-involved and only are thinking about how this relationship is going to improve you, you're thinking about yourself, then that really reduces that trust pretty considerably. And you can put all the work into the other three things. But if you're not focused on the other person more than you're focused on yourself, then it can definitely undermine that. Look, if it's always what's in it for me, people can see through that pretty easily. Yeah. And that intentionality is, are you driving change for yourself? Are you driving change for the right reason? Intentionality also has a little bit to do with passion and how passionate you are about making change or doing things. And there was a point in time I looked this up. And passion actually comes from Latin word, which is P-A-T-I-Patty. I think loosely, I'll do the loose translation actually means suffer. And I thought about that, and I'm going like, what does that really mean? But when you think about passion is, what are you willing to suffer through? What are you willing to give up to get it right? And to do something, what is the sacrifice you're going to make? And that is the passion that you have. And when you talk about innovation and disruption, and I think I love the word catalyst because catalyst accelerates things. They don't bond in the chemical reaction. I think passion to me is the same thing is, you actually have to give up something in order to be passionate. And until you figure out what that is, you're always going to be nibbling on the edges again. So you have to be willing to give up a part of yourself, and that means that you're so passionate. You're like, find the thing that drives you so much that you're willing to make compromises or sacrifice things in other ways in order to be working on that or achieve that, right? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, absolutely. And that's, you know, that is a very different tone to passion because usually passion and like ability go like, what do I like? Or what are my passion about fill in the blank? But I think there's a little more to passion because I think it is if you equate it the word suffer, it gives a whole new meaning to it. Absolutely. And I think that the more passionate you are about something, the more resiliency you have, the more you're willing to take setbacks, the more willing you are to like do all the things that's required to get it done. And then maybe that goes where the suffering comes from, right? Like I I set my my intentionality this year, I set an intention for this year, a new year started and it was to just to be more like for grit and resiliency to be at the heart of my intention for the year because there's just so much happening out in the world. There's so much volatility in every part of our lives in corporate America everywhere. And you can get so sucked into all the things that are happening around you without and lose focus of like that long term plan that you have. So how do you be intentional about letting all that noise happen, but being really focused on like the long term objective or the long term goal? I think persistency is always hard when they're shining you objects around you. It's one of those things where again, if you go back to fear, I said, you're never trust your fears because they don't know your strengths. So you've got to be able to be that and it's hard to say purposeful because that feels a little light soft in its sense. But I think when you say I'm being intentional about being that it's it's the use of the word focus, right? Getting really into that depths and knowing, okay, I'm not going to get distracted by the other things that I've got to get out of this in this way and not letting other things shift you because they will be people and sometimes high powered people that will try to focus you away from where you need to be and just having that, you know, almost pitful like attitude to get through it. You know, somebody said there's this morning to me and I really I'm going to use his words. It's it's better to fall when you're going up the stairs and trip over than when fall when you're coming down the stairs because that hurts a lot more. That's true. I always don't mind climbing like up something but coming down as always my phobia. So that that really resonates with it. Yeah, but intentionality has a lot to do with it, right? If you're intentionally climbing the steps and you fall, you can hold yourself and you can you can recover when you're coming down fast and you fall, you're going down hell. You talked about courage a lot and I heard the word courage a lot. Like not everybody has that, not everyone has courage and confidence. So how do you can you coach someone to be courageous or is that just go back to your your best you can do is like the psychological safety to create space for there to be them to be courageous or how do you think about courage? I think that's a really interesting question because I think courage comes in dimensions, right? And again, courage is the ability to ignore the pain and get through it. Again, I love examples that you may have noticed. I'll give you another one. If I hurt my foot and I'm limping, I'm probably going to limp and it's going to be hard for me to walk. But you throw a line into the room and suddenly my limp will disappear and I'll be able to run because there's something that gives me that ability to overcome that lint. That's in my way because there's something worse. It's a courage is really getting people to understand what is the risk they're taking. Tell my team's all this is all these years we've played not to lose. It's like going to the casino with two dollars and basically betting on red and green on the roulette wheel. We'll never win. We'll never lose, but we can play all night. And we keep doing that on and on. But how do you place a calculated bet? And the courage to take a calculated bet. But I think courage most people think is about taking that calculated bet, taking the risk that requires courage. But I think what you coach people, at least that's what I try to do, is not about taking the calculated bet. It's knowing when to exit. Wow. Are you fluffed me a little bit speechless on that? That was pretty that was pretty awesome. So when to when to bail out of it, no one to leave like it and just even having that knowing or that knowledge remove some of the risk right? Like to know that you can't have an exit pass. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, right? I mean think about Tammy as technologist. We don't like to let it go. We keep like okay if I do just that little more I'll get it over just do that little more I'll get it over those that little more I'll get it over. But at some point let it go. And I think let's get this back to AI. I think this is the perfect place to really talk about AI as well is with AI you're going to have to try 10 things and probably two will work. But you've got to let the other eight go. It's okay. It's all about learning from it applying the learnings and turning those learnings into performance because just learning is not good enough. If you can't apply those learnings into the next thing you did which is knowing when to exit. I think having the courage to exit is something you can coach. You know taking it back to what you said at the beginning as well as like keeping the human in the loop. I think that there's a lot of experiments that I'm seeing being run where they're not thinking about that human. They're not thinking about it from that human perspective. And so to me that's another component and it makes sense just given my background and what I care about. I do think that there's a deep humanity associated with this that something tends to get left behind when you're dealing with technology and this technology for sure is really I just see a lot of testing and experimentation happening on how to take the human out of the loop without that human being part of that testing experimentation, right? But we're all worried about AI taking people's jobs away. People always have come to me and they've asked, well will I lose my job to AI? I think my answer is a pretty simple one. It may sound even silly. I don't think people will lose their jobs to AI personally. But I do think that you won't have a job if you don't know how to use AI. No, that's right. That's absolutely right. You're manifesting your destiny if you ignore AI because you're afraid AI is going to take your job because it'll take your job because you don't know it. That's exactly right. I completely agree with that. I've actually heard stories about the humans that are training the AI or the tool that's going to potentially replace them and like the resistance that comes with that. So back to your point around transforming organizations, how do you make space? What is the intentionality? What are you doing with that person who you can go from having 10 people do a job to five? What are you doing with those five? And being intentional on the upfront about what happens to those five people? Are they going to be displaced? Are they going to be moved somewhere else in the organization? And I think sort of being upfront around that is the key to it. And I think as a leader, you have to be able to be empathetic to people. Honestly, you have a lot of their future's livelihood at stake and that's a pretty high-stakes game that all of us are in right now and it comes to the future of humans and work and others. So it's our role is not just to deploy it and change and do technology but it's really the best job that we can do is change people because I think if we can change people, they'll be able to use the technology and it'll happen. All those things will just happen over time. But if we can't change the people, then all of this technology that we put in place will be so much resistance that adoption will take a course that is probably not intentional. You'll have unintended consequences to intentional change. Do you think about how you do that as part of the change management associated? How do you put that into practice? Because I think it's easier to say as a philosophy or we were talking about consultants, it's easy to put that on a slide and say this is how you do it. But then how does that happen in practice? How would you think about putting something like that into practice? So when you're putting a large scale transformation in place, usually technology, business processes, all those things, my biggest failure is learning early on in my career that there's a very important component to making transformation successful, which is business readiness. And business readiness is a part of actually sitting down with lots and lots of people and telling them how this is going to impact their role, impact their job and what they need to learn to do differently and teaching them how to do it over time. And people have called it readiness, people have called it adoption of technology, but I think it's going a step beyond and staying in front of it. Rather than surprising people, you have to have them be a part of the change, right? And I think I said this earlier is you have to land with the people then rather than land on them. And I think as technologists or even transformation people in an IT sector, we have a tendency of landing on people. Here's this amazing technology plop. I don't care where it does to you. Right. Right. But you've got to get the other way around. So everything that we do and we're running some pretty large scale transformation efforts right now is a big component of it is business readiness and making sure people are ready for that change. And not everybody is going to be and it's okay to shake hands and say this is not for you then you have to find something else. Right. But there's a plan for that and there's a knowledge that that's happening and it's intentional. And that's the transparency, right? You have to be transparent, but not to the level where you make people nervous. Right. Because I have found that with transparency, there's like a responsibility almost the recipient around transparency, you know. And and sometimes as a leader, I think I've I've sort of been caught in like there's there's no right way to do something. Sometimes if you give information too early without having the answer, then people are terrified. But if you wait too long and have the answer, then they feel like they've been surprised. So there is a really interesting line that you have to walk as a leader to to know when to share. Yeah, and that's sometimes people call it you don't have to find the right timing, the right balance to be able to be what's the balance between transparency and scaring people. I mean, and I've found it that if I if I think about the word balance that there's always imbalance, right, then they could be a wrong timing, a right timing, there's wrong and right and in two sides of coin, so on and so forth. And I've tried to move away from the word balance to the world rhythm. Because rhythm is doing it continuously, having a sense of energy and having momentum. When I look at transparency, it's about having that rhythm of continuously deploying that transparency as change is happening and doing it with the sense of energy and momentum. So people are part of that change and they're excited about the change versus here's a balance. I didn't tell you anything last week. Now suddenly I'm going to tell you something this week and it's going to be something very different than what I told you last week. And then then people start to think you're hiding something, right? Or you're telling them something that may not be true. And I think having that rhythm and people earning their trust to say, hey, you know, he'll come to me when he knows versus trying to pry it out of him when he doesn't know. Well, you did not disappoint me. This has been an amazing conversation. I've had so much fun chatting with you and getting to know you a bit better. I really appreciate you joining me today on Catalyst anytime. Thank you so much. It was a privilege and, you know, talking about life journeys and leadership and topics that are not technical don't happen often. So I really, really appreciate how you gave me to talk more about styles than I've talked in a very long time. So it's been a privilege and thank you. Thank you. You're amazing. All right, to our listeners, thank you so much. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. We'll see you back here next week. But until then, be bold, take risks and shine bright.