The AI Race to Save Human Expertise with Bruce Dorey

Welcome to Zero to CEO, where seasoned entrepreneurs will teach you how to succeed. I'm your host, Jason Sherman. In today's episode of Zero to CEO, I speak with Dr. Bruce Dorey. He's a leadership expert, executive coach, and engineering CEO. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's nice to be here. Awesome. Thanks. And today we're going to talk about the AI race to save human expertise. Very cool topic. AI is super hot. And before we even get into the questions and the topic and everything, where do you see AI going? Because everyone's talking about how AI has been fundamentally changing the workplace and people are losing their jobs to AI, but it's also helping with productivity and therapy and health and everything. But what about five years from now? Yeah, it's such a great question. I, yeah, first of all, I heard just the other day. You know, that AI has achieved consciousness and, and that was from a fairly, you know, fairly, it was from like a well-known source. You know, in my little world, my little sandbox, which is kind of in the domain of building a business. So I'm a CEO of a small company. We're a startup and written a couple of books about coaching and, and it's really kind of this idea that. We have to make it work together. You know, I don't, you know, I don't say that in a. Humans and AI working together. Right. And the poll is so hard to just let AI do it because I know, I mean, I'm, it's easy to just put everything in there and say, Hey, we're all guilty of it, credit email. And, and so I think, I think it's really learning to throttle back and, you know, get your team to think. Get your team to work on without it and yourself. Yeah. I agree. I always say the human in the loop is, it needs to be there to operate the machine or the tool, or, you know, if you don't, if you take the human out of it, then the creativity is also taken out. And so is the point of it, right? The whole point is to help us evolve and be a better species. Right. So that's kind of how I feel about it now. You have been focusing your career on preserving institutional knowledge. Was there a moment when you realized. That it was kind of becoming a critical business problem and that's why you were interested in focusing on it. Yeah. That's another exactly pinpoint question because if there was, I was in a, I worked for a senior vice president with a big corporate 500 company and for the millionth time we were doing the same thing again. And I, I realized that, you know, wait a minute that, you know, I know this is a fairly new team. This is my team. I was just sitting in on a team. I was asked, I was a strategy guy. So I was asked to, and you know, we were dealing with the same problems over and over and over. We're falling into the same traps, you know, different labeling and different but it, but it was fundamentally the same process, right? Same process. Yeah. Right. And you know, it's, so I'm, I really have found it's this mutual mentorship. So you gotta have the digital natives, the young guy, young folks mentoring the old folks on what the hell this stuff is, you know, how it all works. And then, then the guy, and I'm not meaning old in terms of age, I mean, old in terms of experience. A lot of people have a lot of experience in their twenties, a lot of, yeah, a lot of expertise, a lot of knowledge, a lot of tribal knowledge, institutional knowledge. And then it's using that, you know, with the new technology. One way that the other is, is, is not going to work. Yeah. And also, you know, I, at least, at least on my end, we're always documenting processes for people coming in the company. So they know how we do things, but then if certain people who have learned over the course of say two to five years, like you just said, kids in their twenties who are super smart, they learn how to do things, then they leave, these are key employees and they take off. So now. The documented processes or documented information versus the real experience, how do you balance that? Cause that's, that's a tough one. It is a tough one. So there's a couple of things, it's a lot you asked there. So first of all, let's take the case where you got somebody that's been there for say 20 years. Okay. And they're a good performer. They've done really, really well. They're a good performer. what they have is useful but you can only capture so much uh you know and that's one of the things our company is doing we're trying to figure out how to do that and that's easier said than done but it it really is like uh kind of mentoring somebody you gotta put somebody but you know the the old apprentice model worked it worked like because you're thousands of years yeah you gotta fall over you gotta skin your knee you gotta realize you know that the i i you know chris arduous is a was a harvard professor a really smart dude and he wrote a paper famous paper called teaching smart people to think in which they first developed this idea of single loop and double loop thinking and he basically said you know really smart people so these have got men and women who come out of college really great colleges really you know great scores they're they have never really made mistakes and all they've ever done is succeeded so they get into a company succeed succeed and then they hit reality and they make some mistakes and fail and they it's a problem for them and they don't realize that you know doing single loop thinking that is like doing the same thing and then just sort of getting better and iterating is not the best and that's probably how they got their degree because that's you know basically you get force-fed stuff you gotta reproduce it but sink double loop thinking which as arduous defines it you know i'm an engineer i like that i like metaphors like this so the thermos thermostat is single loop right right set the thermostat to 72 degrees it gets to 68 and it goes back to 72 right it goes back to 60 it goes back to 70 it goes up to 75 gets back to 72 double loop thinking basically says oh wait a minute why do we have 72 like what did we it doesn't just keep going back to the 72 and getting that better it says well why in fact do we have 72 anyway could we maybe make a change throughout the day could we and that's how people begin to think and and they do that by failing like yeah and yeah so and you know and hopefully as we were touching on earlier about ai hopefully that will help people fail a little less right and so one of the questions people ask me all the time and you know maybe you'll have a different answer is where do you see i guess the line between capturing human expertise and replacing human workers right because that's there's two different things that ai can do in that aspect yeah oh it's a tough one uh because you mentioned like let's let's let's do an example right you said the 20 year old employee right you can use ai to essentially interview this guy for a month every day he's just giving it documents of the stuff that he does answering questions and then it's becoming a version of him and his knowledge right yeah versus just putting an ai let's say a robot an ai robot right putting him in on his desk and saying learn everything you can about this job and take this guy's job yeah how do you where do you see that that line split that's where we're headed yeah bruce i mean that's where we're headed well i'll go to the i'll go to the i think the easy answer yeah hopefully it's not the easy answer but the answer i come up with is that it is this garbage in garbage out so if all you do is look to the past to go to the future that's you're just going to keep reproducing that and versions of that so you're just not ever going to have breakthrough ideas and breakthrough thinking because you're always going to be getting the right answer and maybe not maybe not an idea that uh others aren't thinking about because because ai's share information and once you kind of get up to speed on how do you do this everybody's got that and then everybody's got okay how do i iterate on that and everybody within a you know within a nanosecond every so i think it's going to be really really like clever people clever meaning that they don't get they don't buy buy into you know more it's better and just got to get more ai and faster ai and one ai against another is really sitting back and going you know are we are we in the right game here yeah no i agree 100 and and speaking of these uh just clever people and you've coached leaders across a variety of industries right and um have you noticed what separates organizations that successfully transfer the knowledge from those that constantly repeat the same mistakes like you you mentioned a lot about the iteration but have you noticed the the companies that you worked with that are successfully transferring knowledge yeah but versus the ones that are making mistakes like what's the trend yeah that it's it's kind of counter to intuitive it was for me so the ones that i found that are really that do really well have the senior exec mentor all the way down to this sort of newbie and it's it's not it and they let them go for a long time they let them fail they let them nice you know yeah and i and i was you know this was a a billion dollar company and i was coaching a division this was years ago uh before i started the company um but um yeah this guy was ruthless you know he he didn't like meetings he had his one-on-one ones are about 10 or 15 minutes that was it yeah it was like how's it going you better know what to say in that meeting yeah and it basically like how's it going what do you need and then he would do a bunch of short meetings throughout the month so it wasn't like he never talked to he talked to people all the time but for short periods short periods yeah which i thought that was brilliant and he also allowed people a lot of a lot of rope and then you know he he touched base with them like a lot of updates progress reports and stuff like that as opposed to a company that i worked for on wall street that had really strict guidelines on mentoring and like everything looked really good like the mentoring program when i read it i'm like wow that is beautiful turns out nobody like nobody like mentoring nobody like being mentored they're all like uh you know i'm on the guy's lunch hour and you know he's on the phone the whole yeah he's on the phone the whole time he doesn't give a shit about what i'm doing so you know i'm on the guy's lunch hour and you know he's on the phone the whole yeah he's on the phone oh my god it looked good on paper it just was not real you know the leader was not he the leader didn't own it at all all right so let's let's say this let's say someone's watching or listening to this right now and they have 20 employees in their startup yeah what system would you put in place today to preserve the expertise as the company grows uh preserving the expertise i would i would okay and um and a and a way to capture best practices with uh with a database so okay what we what we use is uh what's called the vapi app v-a-p-i it's a it's an app right and and it download so it asks questions on a on a weekly basis on a monthly basis of guys on the team hey what'd you learn because you don't you know like it's punishment to get somebody to go and okay i want you to go write down all the things you learned this month and you know what's really important and it's like that's punishment so if you just give them ride home in the car let's you know make this phone call answer these questions about 10 minutes long what'd you learn you know what was important where did you fail and what'd you learn from that then that accumulates a nice bit of data and a bit of information yeah it's more personal right yeah and it's and it's real it's heartfelt too because you're just talking to people and you're just talking to people and you're talking about it i like that and and before we start to wrap up i'm curious if if ceos that are listening could implement maybe one strategy that could protect now we're talking about protecting their company's most valuable knowledge yeah how do you how do you do that you know we that's good point we ensure the real estate we ensure the uh we just don't ensure the most important thing which is that knowledge and it's just it's just who i i i would say pull aside the people you know and again i i use i just use a really simple vaping method where you just say look let's talk about in my business let's talk about who are the top contractors in our region who who who do we work with there who are the who are the people inside the organization who have relationships with them because a lot of time tribal knowledge is purely relationship yeah and it's not cutting somebody's grass it's just knowing who to go to to say you know who do we talk to at abc engineering if we need to get you know an equivalent design feature or what architects are really friendly to us about you know energy efficiency and we can go talk to them or bring them on a panel or something like that right super interesting i agree and um if people want to work with you um and maybe they need help doing this where would they go to find you so it's bruce dory uh br dory.com so br dory d-o-r-e-y.com and i've got a few books out there my most recent book is called lift passing the craft and that's really about you know passing the next to the next generation and lift is really a metaphor for leadership it it exists lifting someone up yeah yeah lifting someone up but it exists only at the interface between the wing and the and the air there's no lift in a wing right right it just doesn't you can't say why guys got leadership inside of them no no nobody's got leadership inside of them right makes sense not even you and you guys can get that book on amazon as well and reach out to bruce at his website or on his linkedin as well hopefully you guys learn something about human expertise and how to preserve it and protect it and we'll see you guys in the next episode hope you enjoyed the episode if you learned something today please support this podcast by subscribing to it sharing it with your friends and leaving a five-star review you can learn more about me at jason sherman.org where you'll find information about my book also called strap on your boots available on amazon as well as my course called startup essentials on udemy or skillshare i'll see you at next week's episode