How Behavioral Science and AI are Revolutionizing Team Collaboration

Welcome to The Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host, and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, changemakers, and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science-based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live, work, and lead with more joy, health, love, and meaning. Hey, my friend, it's so wonderful to have you on our Flourishing Edge podcast.

Thanks for having me, Ashish.

So Juan, I want to just start with a bold question for you, right? If every meeting on your calendar tomorrow was suddenly redesigned based on behavioral science and all the amazing AI-driven collaboration insights that you've been pioneering, how different would the team experience be from today?

Transformational. Conceptually, every meeting would be more effective. Every meeting would be more engaging for each person, more personalized. You'd have a higher vibration of energy and everything would be in tune and aligned with what motivates people and how they like to work, communicate, and engage. I'll give you an example. Imagine laying out your agenda differently based on what would be engaging to each person, the order of the topics, how you present, whether it's directive one-to-many or ensuring a group discussion or starting with brainstorming, presenting in a more conceptual versus detailed way depending on if the group is detailed or conceptual. Imagine knowing going in who's not going to speak up and who's going to have difficulty expressing themselves. So, so you can draw out those persons' insights and every meeting, making sure that everyone is seen. Today, that doesn't happen because people don't know who's speaking because they're aggressive versus who'd hold back because they don't, they're not very aggressive. You get rid of conflict. You'd know who's going to butt heads with you in advance and prepare for that. And you know how to better assign action items at the end instead of asking everybody who wants to take what, actually know who's the best person for every action item going into the meeting and even during the meeting.

Wow, that does sound wonderful and quite different than the reality today, right? Where majority of the people, when they ask, would say at least 30%, if not 50% of their time in meetings is complete waste. We don't get anywhere. There are lots of conflicts. Kwon Bettencourt, everyone, founder and CEO of Human Intelligence. And creator of AskAura. Juan, you and I met as part of a collective that Ian Ziskin had pulled together. And back then, that was the pre-AI age, but you were already doing some really amazing work around helping teams really get to know styles, communication styles of each other, right? Type that and really use that as insights to help them be able to communicate better. So I want to start with a little bit about the journey, your journey that got you to really focus your life's work on helping people communicate better. What was your journey through all the leadership roles through consumer brands, executive search that got you here?

Yeah, I'm going to pull out, I mean, there's been several, right? And every organization I've worked, I've learned different things, what to do, what not to do. I mean, every opportunity is an experience and a learning, but the 3 I'm going to call out are the following. Procter Gamble, my time at Wharton Business School, and doing executive search for Korn Ferry and Heidrick Struggles. I'll start with Procter Gamble. I'm 22 years old, just graduated Harvard University, and I think I'm hot. You know what. And I had my, you know what, handed to me because I worked my butt off for 2 years to go from an assistant brand manager to be promoted to a brand manager. And I'll never forget the day that my boss sat me in the seat to tell me, you're promoted. We're going to announce it next week. And he said the most important thing that I had ever learned up until that point, which I still carry today. He goes, but now that you're going to be a boss of these 5 assistant brand managers, Now it's going to be the hardest thing you've ever done. And that was contradictory to what I was thinking. I always just assumed being the boss is easy because you just tell people what to do. And he goes, it's not just any time. He literally was like reading my mind. He goes, it's not telling what people do. You will now have to adapt your style of communication. You will have to adapt how you lead, how you manage to each of the 5 people. So you have to become 5 different Juan Betancourt. And I just sat there for a minute and thought, wait a second, that goes against the face of what a boss is. But no, Procter Gamble actually figured out what a great boss is. It's someone who changes and can meet every subordinate where they're at and not be one way, but actually being very agile. Agile leadership was real and Procter Gamble had figured that out like 130 years ago. That's why they're one of the best-run companies in the world. Oh, and by the way, how ironic, they have more CEOs in the Fortune 500 than any other company in the world, right? Meg Whitman, eBay, Jeff Immelt, GE, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft, the 3Com guy, the Intuit founder, all these are P&Gers and several companies in technology today. And so that was the first time I learned about leadership, team effectiveness, and how understanding people's personalities and their communication styles and what motivates them that it's real. It's not fluff, right? And these are the business unit managers who believe this. This was not HR telling us to do this. The second example would be Wharton Business School, where we were assigned random teams in our section of 60 people to work with. Now, here you have arguably at the time, the number one business school in the world, and everyone had been top performer, right? Probably a top university and then the top performer for 5 years. So everyone has attitude, everyone's process and the way they did things always worked for them. And they were always successful. Now, you're putting people who do things differently together to work. And of course, I would come to a learning team, right? That's what we called it, meeting with the way I would solve a problem and so would somebody else. And also, you would have 6, in this case, in our group, 6 men all coming with their idea of how to do it, all different, yet we all have used that methodology and way of being successfully in the past. So, who's going to convince who when, "No, no, dude, I'm super successful. I know how to do this." and 6 people saying they know how to do it, the friction, the screaming, the frustration was, it was so immense working on those learning teams. It was miserable, but it was also the first time I realized that's the real world. We all come to problems with different ways of solving them. And on one hand, it's beautiful because then you can solve more complex problems. But if you don't know how to manage it from a managerial and a team effectiveness and a team dynamic standpoint, it will be a train wreck for everyone involved and no problem will be solved. And so, you know, those learning teams in business school and at Wharton was a huge learning. We even, I even took another course called team dynamics or social dynamics. So they put you in a room for like 10 hours with no instruction. That was more of a, you know what show. And then thirdly was executive search. Leadership and just how important people insights I got from that. Because here I was, 15 years, I interviewed over 5,000 C-suite executives. And it became very clear after like 500, there were like 3 people insights that every senior executive C-suite person had. And it was good judgment, right? It was an insight. If I could identify people with good judgment, right? If I had an insight that someone had good judgment, they would be great leaders. So, companies, if they don't have the insight about their employees on who has good judgment, they'd never be able to figure out who the good leaders are. But a lot of times in the lower-level roles, it's not about judgments, it's about execution. And skills-based. And so, the Peter Principle where you're just hiring people who succeed in the earlier roles often leads to a train wreck of a manager or a leader because how to find judgment in younger employees is tough. So, the insight around finding people with good judgment. Two, the insight that managing my influence as a leader is much more effective than managing by hierarchy. And And I saw that because almost every one of the 5,000 people I met was still married with children, no divorce. And I thought, hmm, well, they all have good judgment because what's the biggest decision you make with limited information? Just like in business, it's marriage. And if you're really good at picking someone that you see around corners and you're going to evolve with them and you can kind of see, like, then you'll probably be pretty good at strategy and judgment at work. But also, if you can manage a spouse and 2 or 3 children successfully over 20 years, that makes managing 40,000 people who are under you easy at work. So it's a harder challenge to manage a family that, because that's through influence, not through hierarchy, than it is to manage a company. So that was another people insight I gained from executive search. And then self-awareness. My favorite question in executive search was not what's your weakness? That's easy. Like everybody's going to have their pat answer, but How are you misperceived? And what do you think about you makes people misperceive you that way? Because if somebody can understand how they're misperceived, they're the highest level of self-awareness there is. Because people don't tell you how they're misperceiving it. You have to be aware of how they're misperceiving you. And with that, you can course adjust. So these are all insights around people and teams and leadership at these 3 locations that were foundational in how I think today.

Yeah, especially your last piece. So, I mean, all of those, what amazing journeys of like first recognizing, wait, I have to communicate in 5 different ways, right? To, oh my God, now I'm a peer and actually I have to really learn to communicate and influence. To your last piece, right, of really knowing how we are coming across. So in my book, Hardwired for Happiness, at the heart of the sunflower model, I talk about awareness because I had the same insight. Like the most important of any other practice is awareness. And awareness almost in 3 distinct ways, I talk about it in the book in 3 different ways. At the base of it, which is a really deep, deep question you can spend your lives exploring that question is, who am I? Who am I beyond my name, where I was born, the gender I identify with, where I went to school? Who am I? There's a second piece, which is somewhat easier for people to get to, right? The first one can take a lifetime and people are like, I don't actually know what are you talking about. But the second one, it's easier for people to get to, which is, What kind of a unique observer am I? Oh, interesting. If you and I see the same event happening, how would I experience it versus you experience it? We see it through our beliefs. We see it through our life experiences, beliefs on what's right, what's wrong, what's fair, what's unfair. Is it a threat or is it a friend? Will we be okay with this or not? So our lenses shape our reality. Anais Nin said, "We see the world as we are, not as the world is." Correct. So become aware of how you're seeing the world. And then the third, which is also extremely hard, I think only 15%, according to the research by Tasha Urich, shows only 15% of leaders are truly self-aware where they also know how the world is perceiving them, which is what you talked about.

Yes, that is— even I sometimes am shocked that I don't think I'm perceiving correctly how people perceive me. Or, yeah. And I've done a lot of work.

It's still not easy. And really, oftentimes people think about communication as how do you do things out there? But I think it all starts with knowing yourself at all of those three levels, right? Who you are, the stories you tell yourself, and the stories others tell about you. That might not actually— they tell you, but that's what's in the water. Yes. So, my friend, human intelligence really centers on behaviors, motivators, and work energizers, right? You've done a lot of research science around type, almost like Strength Finders. Everybody has a type. Yep. And you created that framework. So, I would love for you to go a little bit into that and how that is actually different from other psychometric frameworks like DISC and MBTI, and you know, there's so many out there, but talk a little bit about the framework you all use and the differentiation of that.

I'll try to keep it high level. So to be clear, myself and my co-founders did not come up with this psychometric instrument, this scientifically validated instrument. We bought it from a team of scientists who had developed it over 40 years. Okay. There are about 30 tools out there, instruments that have been validated. It's hard to actually come up with one that's about 90% accurate. And that's why you haven't seen new ones come up in 15 years. And so 90% of the tools in this world measure behaviors. Okay. So they're called behavioral science.

You have DISC. How you show up.

How you show up. Right. DISC, Predictive Index, Strength Finders, Caliper, CliftonStrengths, et cetera. They're easy. It takes 8, 10 minutes. And a lot of biopsychologists did this to show how someone shows up. However, to get under the iceberg, to get under the iceberg where you want to see what drives your behaviors, so your values or motivators, those words are used interchangeably often, values and motivators that drive behaviors. Those tests took a lot longer. And so scientists, many years, tried to get high accuracy of 96% or higher. And so tools like Hogan, Lomminger, SHL, there's about 7, measure those things at like a 95% level, but they take 1 hour and it's like a 40-page report. And they ask the same question 10 times, make sure they get the exact answer. And unfortunately they cost like $1,000. So unfortunately, Although there are a lot of tools for the masses and behaviors, motivators, those tools that I mentioned, are only really used for a couple executives, like 2% of executives, because it's just priced out. So no company and the masses aren't getting that aspect. Our scientists were able to say, or had the foresight to say 40 years ago, we're not doing this to say that we're perfect and we have 95%. Let's stop asking the same question 5 times for all the different variables. There's about 20 things you're trying to capture. So instead of 100 questions, let's just do 30. And maybe percent accuracy will go down a little. And they were able to get to 90% accuracy, but in 4 minutes versus 45. So one huge differentiator is we're the only tool in the world that you can get the values and motivators of all of your employees. Because it doesn't cost much and it's short time. And why is that important? What is culture at a company? Although people think it's the values they put on the website, it's actually the values and the way people work of all your company bottom-up aggregated. Well, we're the only tool that actually without spending millions of dollars, can you actually get that measurement of culture? And then the third piece, most psychologists stop at self-awareness. Behaviors and motivators or values. But our scientists always looked at these tools for the work environment, not just as scientists to understand psychology as an individual. So, they said people work in teams, they work in an environment. How does that environment, whether it's creative or structured, and there's like 8 things we measure within that, give someone energy or take it away? Because you could have 2 people with the same motivations, but one negative and not happy, one happy, because the environment, one likes structure, one likes creative. So, There are a few tools that do that, but they're very expensive and it's really just consultant-driven, but not like a mass product. So our tool really is the only tool in the world that gets behaviors, motivators, values, and work styles. We also, on top of that, get learning styles and communication styles. And nobody in the world can measure that in less than 1 hour. We do it in 10 minutes. That's the biggest difference. And because of that, we're the only tool that can measure culture of a company accurately, bottom up. Team by team, function by function, because no company has one culture. If you had your finance team having the same culture as your marketing team, one of those two functions would be terrible. If the culture of Coca-Cola in Brazil was the same as Coca-Cola Germany, you would have one of those two country offices fail miserably. Culture is as dynamic as the culture of ethnicity in the US. Miami culture is different than Boston culture, different Seattle culture, and our country is much better for it. Although there is generic directional culture of being U.S., there is subcultures within that and companies operate no differently. And we're the only company that can actually map out different cultures by function, by group, by division, by territory.

You know, we are so unified in that thinking. I say this all the time to people, like people talk about culture transformations. I'm like, there is no one culture. It's crazy. And that's how I've experienced Even within marketing, right, you'll have different teams. And culture is about how we show up and how we act. And you change one or two players, it changes.

It changes. Every team should be looking at their team as a team culture. And does this team culture align with our strategy this year?

Right. And it is not static. It is dynamic. It's always evolving. Always. Right? And yes, it's all in the context of a bigger environment, right? But that's a little bit like saying, You know, I almost think about there is a climate, but then there is the weather. And the weather can be actually very, very different, right? This is, but unfortunately, most people would say Colorado is a snowy, cold state. Well, depends where you are. You know, maybe at, in Breckenridge versus where we are in Boulder, different. And even within Boulder, I've been places where it was raining in downtown, 5 minutes later at home, we didn't have a drop of rain.

Is that where you are now, in Boulder? In Boulder. Oh, I was there 2 weeks ago. If I would have known, I would have met you for coffee.

Oh my God.

Next time around. I'd never been. It was the most charming, beautiful college town I've ever seen.

It was unbelievable. Well, 11 years ago, I came here. I was serving a client and in 6 weeks is all it took to fall in love. 6 more weeks later to buy a house and 3 months later to move and 3 months after that to open our McKinsey office., in Denver. So that's how fast that journey was. Head over heels.

Still, still head over heels. There's a, there's something special. Like I, I literally went online after 2 days on my phone at a coffee shop. What cities on ChatGPT, what cities are as beautiful and as charming as the college town Boulder, Colorado for any other college town in the country? And the only one it came up with was the one in Utah, uh, where the Mormon school is. It was the only one that's near. Salt Lake City. Yes. That was the only other campus they said is as charming, nestled within mountains where you can go skiing and it's, you know, the coffee shop. Well, they don't drink coffee there, but, you know, the whole, you know, Main Street type energy.

Yeah, no, it is amazing. So my friend, let's come back to your, you know, I really like this notion of 10 minutes, something that really gets to behaviors, really gets to motivators, which is what drives the behaviors. We call it mindsets. Mindsets and beliefs and all of that combined together. But what drives you is going to make you do one thing versus the other. It's so critical. And work energizers, right? Those three things that you combine together. Now, what I really loved about this is also not only do you do it because there's a lot of assessments, but you make it accessible where people actually know. So you actually have created something that allows people to use it. Correct. Not just know it, because many people know strengths. I've done this. I've seen it all over the place. People know their strengths. But then 3 months later, if I ask, hey, do you remember what Juan's strengths were? No. Of course I don't remember. I've got all this other stuff going on. How do I remember? Same is the story with DISC, right? People change, teams change, new things come in, all of that. So, Talk to us a little bit about how you've actually operationalized it, where insight is actually helping people take action differently.

I'm glad you asked. We copied something that already happened out there. So I'm not some brilliant guy. I saw another category of content that people don't remember that's actually like on everyone's desk. So remember the dictionary and the thesaurus? Yeah, we all took grammar. We all had a dictionary. We all had thesaurus. Every person had it on their physical desk and every person had all that information in Microsoft Word, right? You could do thesaurus, right? Then a little company called Grammarly came out about 6 years ago and said, let's actually make this information and insights actionable through a light layer of AI at the time. Actually, probably one of the first actionable AI tools. And we'll put it into workflow so that when you're in a document or in any application at your company, it'll suggest how to rewrite a sentence or rewrite a paragraph to be more grammatically correct. And within 2 years, Grammarly is worth $8 billion. So we said, oh wow, psychometric information, all these personality tests, millions have taken them. Millions of people know that they have a cemetery folder, physical or digital, of all the tests they've taken that they've never looked again after that workshop that cost $20,000. So we said, let's take those insights and put it into Teams, Outlook, Slack, email, meetings, virtual or in the calendar meeting, and provide insights to people and let them ask this coach called Aura, ask Aura any question you want. So now I can pull up an email and literally be like, rewrite, or can you rewrite this for Ashish the way he likes to communicate? Or I don't have to say all that. I can just say rewrite it for Ashish, right? I go into a meeting, calendar meeting, and it'll show me the dynamics of the meeting and tell me, one, everyone in the meeting is deliberate.

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Here's how you should run the meeting differently. Or I might ask, who's going to butt heads with me in this meeting? And they'll tell me, Mary, and here's why. Or I'm in a virtual meeting with people I've never met from 5 continents. And it'll tell me the dynamics of the meeting right there in the virtual meeting in the column, like just like you see share screen. It'll say share team dynamics and it'll pop up right there for me to see it. Or if someone's butting heads with me, I can click on that button. It'll tell me how to overcome that. And so, you know, new leader, pull my car over. I'm in Toronto. I run a Subway store, 5 new employees. I'm 25. I park my car. How do I motivate my team? Give me a motivational speech for this team. So, any question around a person, two people, a team conflict, what project should I give Ashish to keep him most engaged and fulfilled? Of these three, data analytics, a team project, a strategy project, which one would be more aligned to who he is, how he thinks, how he works? Forget about rewards and benefits and paying people to come to work. Like, if you find your purpose, as we were talking earlier, and find things that are aligned to who you are, how you think, and what motivates you, you don't have to do all the other gimmicky stuff. Askora and human intelligence is the only tool in the world that can answer these questions even better than a manager, because no manager in the first 3 months knows what drives behaviors of a subordinate. It takes months, if not years, to get to that level of understanding. And so we just built it into workflow.

Seamlessly with an AI coach that can answer any question 24/7. So Juan, how, first of all, that sounds fantastic, right? Just to anybody who's listening, I think that is panacea because oftentimes when people write, people don't communicate well. Part of the reason they don't communicate well is, you know, you don't know who you're communicating to. You might communicate it the way you want versus the way it's going to be received. So 2 or 3 questions come to mind for me. The first one is, how do you make sure— in the end, these tests are tests. How do you make sure that we don't typecast people and don't reduce them to here's who you are and hence that's how, right? Because I bet people are going to be different in terms of all of these scales. And there is a very real thing of I like people who are like me. Oh, correct. Right? I mean, there's a real clear affinity to we like those who are similar and we dislike those who are dissimilar. As much as that shouldn't be the case, homogeneity wins over heterogeneity, even though long-term heterogeneous environments are what win over homogeneous, but we try and be homogeneous. So how do you prevent typecasting?

And making sure that this information is not misused? So it's a great question. We get it often. I look at it, I look at the answer slightly differently than the question poses it. We can guarantee a better context and outcome. That's what's happening today, because what's happening today, everyone is typecasting everybody based on their perceptions, which are based on subjectivity. So, today, everyone's looking around on the team and saying, "Oh, Ashish is this way," even though it might not be true. "I'm going to address him that way, treat him that way." And so, conflict today is rampant because nobody really knows who anybody else is. No one understands anyone else and no one's coming to the middle and meeting where everyone else is at. Everyone is just being selfish and doing things the way they do it. Very low productivity, very low and very high friction. And we're saying, well, let's improve on that. Let's give a playbook for everyone you work with so you actually know who they are and how they work and what would engage them better and create less friction. And sure, it now will give you a blueprint for how everyone is. At least it's based on data and it's accurate. This is better than already coming to a conclusion subjectively. And so it's already 100 miles further ahead in terms of meeting people where they're at in a positive way than just on subjective profiling, because that's what everyone does. Now, will it show you that Juan is really decisive? Yes. Okay. And maybe someone deliberate can't stand how decisive I am, but they were going to see that anyways in just working with me. At least now, in this kind of language, in this kind of tool, instead of everyone thinking that it's their way and there is no other way, like I did at business school in those learning teams where I just, I'd always done things their way. Now I realize when it's all framed and shown this way that, hey, neither one nor that person's correct. And depending on context, either one being deliberate or decisive. And so it starts to show everyone their duality that everyone should be both. And that there is no right or wrong, and that a great team member is deliberate and should also be able to be decisive and vice versa. And so it kind of makes people more agile. And a tool like this allows, when you become more agile, to realize there's more than one way to the top of the mountain. Just like a basketball player or a team, right? They're trying to get results. The person who's only a right-handed jump shooter will not help that team if they've never developed their left-handed jump shot. Because one day, last-second shot, they might get the ball. In the left-handed jump shot position, well, if they can't make that shot, they'll never make it to the NBA. But all the NBA players who were right-handed when they grew up and couldn't shoot with their left, by the time they've gotten to the NBA, they've applied this idea of duality. And now they can do everything with their right and their left. Working together at companies and on teams and with others is all about being an athlete where you develop the other side of yourself. And the best leaders, the best team members, and the best employees are agile in their mindset and learn to be both things, to be conceptual, but also be detail-oriented, to be deliberate and be decisive, to be a self-starter, but also be belonging and a team player, right? And so our tool actually allows for this to happen, gives everyone the language and a process day-to-day to change behaviors around this. So it's not perfect. And someone could conclude, oh, his report says he's decisive, therefore he doesn't know how to do other things. But it's only in knowing your strength and where you need to develop that you actually have the potential to. So we're just giving the potentiality for everyone to be their best and every team to be their best.

Today, that is not happening. Yeah. And, you know, and it's— it is true. People have perceptions and you're bringing in data, right? You're giving an additional kind of grounded perspective. Let's just call it that. Right. Data is data. It's only one part of the truth.

It's the way we might show up. Here's a great example. That interview question I gave about when I was an executive recruiter, I always ask that question, how are you misperceived and why is that? And what is it about you that makes people misperceive you? I always ask at the end because I already knew as a check and balance to myself every time someone got in an interview with an executive, I'm a human being. I have perceptions. I'm going to project on that person a tick or this or hesitation or the way they speak that they're not good or they're this. And we all do it, right? Even evolved people like myself, right? And so, I'll never forget there were several times where someone would be very delicate and not be very aggressive. And I'm thinking, God, my private equity client, this is a turnaround. The CEO is a fire breather. They need a CFO woman who can really push back. And God, this woman, every answer, she's so polite. Like, she's not good for this. And the whole interview, she answers every question correctly on content, but in style, she's not a good fit. And I'm just concluding this, concluding this, concluding this. So at the end, I asked her to catch my own misperceptions and judgment because we all have it by default. I said, hey, how are you misperceived and what is it about you? And she goes, oh, well, I'm misperceived because I come across so sweet and gentle. People don't think I'm a fire breather. I can't handle tough people. But, you know, in my career, I work for this person, this person, and these things happen., and within 3 minutes she had me convinced that she was the best person for the job. If I hadn't had that data at the end because of that question, I would have never presented her to my client.

Wow. Now that is a very, very powerful story. And what it's, you know, we use a framework on flourishing, one, as you know, called PEARL, purpose, energy, adaptability, relationships, and life force, right? These 5 key attributes. That can help teams, individuals, and organizations be at their best, right? Imagine workplaces where people find meaning at work versus it's just a way to earn a paycheck. Imagine if the way we communicate energized us rather than drained us. Imagine if we could be adaptable. We could change like your conversation, like what we're talking about. We could adapt to the circumstances, to the people. We could learn. Imagine if we could create psychological safety and belonging, real inclusiveness. And imagine if we worked in ways that were neuro-friendly, right? We weren't in back-to-back meetings. The meetings that we had actually could be a lot more shorter so that we could get things done more productively. We recognized our biases. And I can see how human intelligence and the tool you've created helps on multiple dimensions. One, it allows us to communicate more positively but have better conflicts because we are really attuned to how we take information and really communicate in a more effective way. Right. So we can be having a conversation about the idea rather than about each other. And we are doing it from empathy. Clearly, I can see how it can help with adaptability because adapting is about you adapting to what? A situation, but you're also adapting to the person. And if I know that, then I can adjust my style. In fact, that's one of the key things. I've been reading this book called Super Communicators by Charles Duhigg and this concept of matching. I think really came up, which is really, really powerful. And super communities are able to adapt. They're able to match the emotion of the other. They're able to actually have the conversation that needs to be had. Is it a cognitive contextual conversation? Is it a decision-making conversation? Is it an emotional conversation? Or is it really a conversation about who am I or who are we?

Ashish, what is hilarious is there's one area in life that every human being does that. Without even thinking? Marriage. Yes. Because you understand your partner so well, you know if this should be an emotional conversation, a data-driven conversation. And before you come with a positioning or an argument, you already know how that person will react. So, you adapt. If what we've created at Human Intelligence and Askora is the ability, the tool, the playbook for everyone at work, to treat each other and work together as effectively as a husband and wife after 5 years?

Yeah, well, I think, and I would say those who do it, husband and wife, are those who stay together. But you know, Gottman's research, that's not the reality for most marriages.

But if they don't do it, yes, if they don't do it, they will be divorced.

Just like in work, if you don't do it, you will have massive conflict for the same reason. Yeah, and unfortunately, while, you know, what, 50% of marriages end in divorce, I think if we look at the realities of our workplaces, only 20% of people are thriving, right? 60% experience stress daily. 22% are burnt out. Our workplaces are fundamentally broken. So, I mean, you know, this— I love how this work and what you've created helps around energy, helps around adaptability. It can also help around relationships because belonging is about accepting Correct. The other, right? Creating an environment to accept the other, understand the other, make people feel— when people feel understood, they feel they belong. They don't belong because I am like everybody else. If I have space to be understood, I feel I belong. So I love that about what you've created, Juan. I can't wait to introduce it to more of my clients. And I— so let's talk a little bit about the impact and the benefits. So Tell us a little bit about clients where you've implemented this and what are the kind of improvements that you're actually seeing that are measurable with and over what period of time?

Yeah, so we launched the Askora tool, which really brings it to life. It gets used about 12 times per person per month. So almost every 2 days someone's asking a question about understanding someone or rewriting an email.

And so pretty, pretty huge results. And what percentage of the people in the population use it? Great.

So you make it voluntary because it is personal data, right? And so we get 92% of people take the assessment. And for every month, 40% of people use it. For every quarter, 68% of people use it.

So over a quarter, two-thirds of people are using it about 12 times a month.

And over a what period, Juan? We've done this now for 8 months. We've been tracking it since we launched the first couple companies. And the usage is consistently high. It keeps, it's maintaining at this level. Amazing. I mean, there's some super users, but the average is that 12 times per month and 68% of employees.

Amazing. And what are the results you're seeing as a result of it?

Yeah, so it's hard to go to and say, oh, well, there's an ROI of $6,000 or the productivity, but we do get meetings. We do surveys of people after every month asking them about Did you improve a meeting? Was it a meeting more improved because of this tool? Did it help you lead a meeting? Did it help you and your boss or subordinate work better together? So, we get about 90% yes on working better together with a boss or with a subordinate. We're getting about 90% of meetings when people use it for meetings, making the meetings more effective and productive. So, those are the qualitative results that we're getting in addition to the usage. It's hard to say that, you know, revenue or cost will go down. I mean, this is, it's around soft skills, right? And it's hard to point to things and measure them, right? Even the McKinsey study that showed that 40% of emails cause friction, it's hard for us to go in and then show, okay, well, we reduce friction through email by this. We just know people are using it for email rewriting, you know, 30% of the time now when they do use the tool for people they don't know. Obviously, you would not use the email rewriting if you already know the person. But if you don't know the person in a large organization, you better use some tool that helps the message get rewritten the way the audience likes to receive it.

When people— as you've been taking this work and taking it to companies, what are some of the biggest resistance or obstacles that you see to adoption?

What slows it and what accelerates it? So several things slow it. One is it's just new. And HR typically buy things that are already proven. Because, you know, you ask most employees at large Fortune 500 companies, who's the name? What's the name of your CEO? They all know the name. Who's the name of your CFO? They all know the name. When you ask employees of large companies, what's the name of your CHRO, your chief people officer? They have no idea. Chief people officers are not the ones who want to be a target on their back for all employees. Because this tool will be a CHRO, chief people officer initiative, they're very uncomfortable rolling out software or something that they're not typically known for software to all employees, right? That if it doesn't work out, people will associate a project with that, that person. And so it's not the most innovative group that likes to be seen. This is a platform that will bring transparency to everyone. And so that psychology of the buyer is just hard to overcome. They often don't have budgets in HR unless it's, you know, payroll. If you don't pay your employees, the company will halt. This is a tool that if you unplugged it, the company won't halt. It might not be as effective. Leaders might not be as good. Teams might not be, but no one's going to get fired. If you unplug it, whereas if you unplug an applicant tracking system, a payroll system, so the software that HR has been buying have been more mission-critical painkiller because there's pain if you don't use it versus a vitamin and a preemptive prescription like ours, right? So those have been other obstacles. And even just getting someone's time, their mindshare, right? Like, you know, getting a group of 10 people in HR to do a trial. It's hard to get people's time. Like everyone is already overwhelmed, too much on their list. It doesn't matter if a tool's transformational. Something new means more work and more than 40 hours a week. But by depth, they're not going to cut something out. They're already overwhelmed. So We can have the cure for cancer, but it would be more work. And so people, I think, just don't want more work and they prefer to just do well on what they have on their plate versus bring on new plates. So those are all kind of things that have constrained us. Now, what's in our favor is every company wants to move towards AI, but they don't know what to use. And ours is the first AI that makes work more human. That doesn't replace people. It enables people. It's the first AI that HR can work with IT and say, hey, together we're bringing AI to the company. And so HR has never really had a seat at the table for like 30 years. They now have a seat at the table, but they've never been the most innovative transformational driving group. Now HR can literally be the most innovative technologically transformational function which is unheard of. So it's a chance for those innovative HR leaders, those courageous HR leaders to take a product and really become the future of a company through, and the AI educator. So there's an opportunity as well. And that's the ones who are buying our products see that opportunity to leave their mark and have more impact on the company than just payroll and benefits.

So my friend, I can— we don't just describe worlds when we communicate. We generate worlds. Yeah, we manifest it. We manifest this. We create it. Right? We create it. Agree. And language is generative. And unfortunately, a lot of language today is wielded unconsciously, unconscious about the other person, unconscious about how we are perceived. And as a result, a lot of communication today is miscommunication. Even though we want together the same things, we are not able to communicate effectively. And in that is what often creates conflict. Through that is what often where we lose innovation, our ability to collaborate, where we feel energy drains. And so I appreciate the effort that you all are leading in the space of flourishing to be able to help people communicate more effectively. It's not about doing more, but it's about doing better. And through that, frankly, hopefully do less because now I don't need 3 times the number of meetings where we've had the same conversation. We've hopefully, you know, we only need one. And I think coming out of this, we're very clear on what needs to be done. So I want to close with a question. Of course, we are going to put all the links so they can explore the tool and get to know that, but that's a much longer kind of— a lot of other people are dependent whether they get to use the tool or not. What would be 2 or 3 pieces of advice even without the technology that you might adopt and might encourage people, leaders and individuals to do that will help them become more effective communicators?

So I'm going to give two examples or suggestions. One is that thing I learned at Procter Gamble where if you have the mindset and the framework that everyone on my team, and then expand that to everyone at the company that I work with, doesn't matter my level in the company, if I'm the boss, the VP, the CEO, I need to come to that meeting, to that collaboration moment with the mindset that I need to meet them where they're at. Because so many people just rely on their title and they get lazy. And if they can have the attitude that Procter Gamble taught me and every other great Procter Gamble leader or manager, that you have to have the mindset that you need to change for every person. The same mindset we all have when we get married to our spouse, that for certain things, I need to meet my spouse where they're at and communicate it the best way it's going to be for them. This will make the workplace a lot better. So that's one suggestion that it's not even a technology thing. Yeah, just the best way of getting the outcome with working with others. And then the other thing is, at this company, when it was small, I really wanted to connect with my employees because they were all in different cities. We didn't have any one headquarters. And so we started this thing called a mood meter where before any meeting, one, because I always have a one-on-one every week with every employee, right? At least direct reports. And so every layer of our company, The leader must, when they do a meeting with someone, before you get into like, what did you do this week? What are you going to do? Let's track it, right? Like all the typical, like, you know, you start with what's your mood meter? Like before we even talk about what you've achieved, what you're going to work on, objectives, deliverables, I just want to get a pulse of where you're at as a human being. Are you 7 out of 10, 8 out of 10? And why? And And it's not work-related only. It's what's your mood meter as a soul? What is your vibration? Like, and you'll be amazed. I never did this in any of my big companies and I should have because there'll be days where somebody will be like, yeah, my grandfather just died last week and it's really dragging me. And I was about to go in there and criticize or expect something. And I was like, you know what, take the rest of the day off. And that goes a long way. And when you don't ask the question or don't know what's going on, it's not the right framework or platform to start just talking business. And so asking what someone's mood meter is and why it's up or down versus what they usually answer is the best portal to really understanding someone even more than just their communication style, but understanding who they are and where are they on their journey that moment in life.

Really powerful. To get connection. I love those. It creates space for compassion. Yes. Right. When we know where the others are and when we share where we are, it creates space for compassion and empathy. And again, really being able to communicate the right messages the right way and be able to give people space if that's what they need.

Right. Or, you know, beautiful. Or change the agenda. I can't tell you how many times my agenda was like, you know, these 5 things. And when I heard that somebody was having difficulty with another employee, well, throw the agenda out. I need to fix that because that's a cancer if I don't spend the next hour figuring out why they're having conflict with somebody. And all the agenda items on my list didn't even matter because they'll never get those done if we can't fix this. So it just, it will reach it.

It's like the universe will then direct you to what's important that meeting. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you, Juan. So appreciate you being on our podcast. Next time you are in Boulder, please definitely ping me. Let's get together. I will. And I wish you well. And I think I definitely, with all the clients we talk to and to all our listeners, I would encourage them to check out Human Intelligence as a really, really powerful powerful, another tool in your flourishing toolbox that can help you leverage the power of communications to make flourishing your competitive edge. Thanks so much, Ashish. This was a wonderful podcast. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you for joining me on The Flourishing Edge. If today's conversation inspired you, share it with someone who's ready to flourish too. Subscribe, leave a review, and stay connected for more tools to achieve breakthrough performance through flourishing. Until next time, keep learning, practicing, and growing into your fullest potential.