From Psychometrics to AI: The Future of Work with Peter Dakin

Good morning everyone, welcome back to Mastering Cash Growth. And I'm saying good morning for a very, very real reason. It's literally 7 AM and I'm still looking like Rocky Balboa. For, you know, for whoever is watching, I'm just wake up. But we have a special guest today. So my dear friend Pete, he lives in New Zealand, so we needed to find a very difficult time to come together. So welcome, Peter.

Thank you, Mike. It's great to be here. I'm glad we could finally make this happen. It was pretty hilarious trying to synchronize our watches across 12 time zones, but we got there in the end.

We pushed the time as well. It was 11, now it's 12 hours, and I'm still sort of in my mind, I'm still in bed. But we're having a very awesome episode for everyone today. You know, Peter has a lifetime experience working with people and helping organizations to assess people, assess people's strength, and we'll go— the whole episode is effectively about people. So let us know who you are, Pete. Give us a little bit of your background and let's just get into it.

Cool. Okay, Mike. Well, I grew up in New Zealand inside a family business that was all about modeling and managing and mapping and understanding human and organizational behavior. That's the curse that I was given. And so that kind of rubbed off on me, but not to a huge extent. I was more interested in computers in those days. I guess I still am. So that was really like my angle. But what kind of happened was during my career, I kind of kept bouncing through the various roles, you know, that typically you would encounter in any career and ended up usually in some form or another working in a business that was in some way trying to capitalize off human behavior. For example, things like behavioral advertising. I was one of the evil people who helped to, you know, build a very early business in the behavioral advertising space before even Facebook existed and things like that. So after meeting you in the publishing world and then you exited that and I exited that, I went on to found a business with my wife Diane, who's a coach, which was all about, I guess, bringing back some of the ability to use what we know about behavior for our own advantage instead of for the advantage of big tech. So that's what drives us at Pramana.

Okay. So you mentioned your wife being a coach and you mentioned evil people. I'm not putting this together, by the way. But when you said, you know, I was watching— She's watching in the background. When you said, you know, I was one of the first evil people, you you know, with the behavioral advertising, what came to my mind is this article I read recently about the guy saying sorry who invented pop-up ads. So I was like, you're not that bad.

I actually know that person.

Are you like, like personally? I just know.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, because I work for him. So it was called the pop-under. So there was like when you would close your browser, there would be an ad behind it.

They—

these two brothers invented this with JavaScript, and that's how they founded their, their advertising business. And they blew up to become the largest privately held, um, behavioral advertising provider in the world behind Microsoft. I think at the time it was, um, Google hadn't even bought AdWords at that time. It was still DoubleClick, a separate company. This is how long ago it was. It was in the noughties basically. And so yeah, so yeah, I knew that guy. They ended up buying MySpace and you can look it up.

Yeah, it's a pretty interesting story.

But yeah, so it was behavioral advertising and then I went into kind of behavior-based, well, like how to get little kids in primary schools to do better at school by rewarding them. By understanding their behaviors, teachers giving them little points that they could then spend in the tuck shop or to buy a pencil for their pencil case or something like that. So it wasn't really about like programmatically understanding behavior like, like ads do. It's really funny because in the ad world, it's not really about it. It wasn't in those days, wasn't let's try to figure out a personality or something. It's just like user 123 clicked this ad, landed on this page, scrolled, hovered, you know, that kind of level of behavior. Facebook took it to, you know, the next level of down towards the gutter with, um, you know, actually building kind of psych profiles on people. Um, I never really felt great about how the industry went in that direction. The world went in that direction. I don't think many people would be, you know, too incredibly happy about the fact that they get followed around wherever they go with ads and that these big tech companies know more about them than, you know, their closest family, probably half the time. But it's just the way that, um, our world has evolved. You know, you and me, we met in the publishing world And, you know, I'd left that behavior type of, you know, behavior tech behind, and but still very interested in, in bringing what I knew about behavior to bear when, when we worked together, which was more on, you know, building a team, building a product, building a, you know, achieving a strategic goal for the business that, that hired us.

So a different angle on that.

Again, I love that. I mean, we all have our own ways of how we tick, and understanding that helps in many ways, you know, in leadership positions especially. And so, I mean, you gave us a flavor what you guys doing, but can we frame this in an actual, you know, business? Like, can you tell us what your current business is about and what you guys focusing on?

Yeah, I mean, Promana People is a platform, a digital platform, which brings together a whole battery of psychometric assessments that were created in the 1970s and '80s and '90s when my father was running his consultancy business. And he was a leading light in the industrial relations scene here in New Zealand during those decades. But when he went away from the— his— he retired basically. Um, that kind of all just went with him. His associates all went their separate ways, and that just all settled down and got put on the shelf, really, literally on floppy disks, until I came back in the early 2000s and said, do you mind if I tinker around with your stuff, uh, while I go through my tech life? And it just became kind of a hobby of mine. So we ended up, Diane and I, when COVID hit, kind of reevaluating everything. And we realized that there was a place for all of that psychometric capability to be brought to bear in a new way, in a digital way, fully online for the benefit of coaches to deploy for their clients, for for individuals to learn more about themselves and maybe to find a coach if they want to, but not, you know, not necessary. And also for organizations who are doing at scale, who need to understand, you know, organizational behavior with all of what that entails. Also people who are coaching internally inside organizations to help with things like selection, development of people, outplacement, all kinds of different levels of things. So it's kind of a three-pillared business that we have: individuals, people in the behavior change business like coaches, and organizations. We support all of them with a suite of tools, not just psychometrics.

So I know a lot of coaches, by the way. In UK, there's a, you know, it's a big, like, tech area.

We should talk after.

So that's leading to a question. Doesn't matter what type of coach I am, doesn't matter in what industry I am, like, or is it just, uh, like, if you're coaching people from local soccer team to, you know, being an ex-CTO, like, anything goes?

Yeah, I mean, probably if you're coaching the soccer team, we're not for you, but we are in the behavior change business because we want to support people who themselves support people who are going through some sort of journey, transformative journey. They're going from A to B somehow in their life or in their business. And so we don't really define— even the word coach is not necessarily appropriate. That's why we call our— the middle tier of what— who we provide our service to, people in the behavior change business rather than coaches.

I love coaches. I mean, you know, it's just easier. Behavior change sounds very scientific.

I'm like, you know, yeah, but you might be a management consultant, you could be a hypnotherapist, you could be, uh, you know, in kinesiology or anything where you're helping people to transform in some way.

Okay, I get it. Okay, so it's a much broader applicability. Then you mentioned organizations. So when you said that What came to my mind is something I got, and I just want to compare if I see if I understand the offering in the same way. So we had this within organization, we did these tests, which is just like a set of questions, right? And I think it was about like 150 questions. And then you have given these situations and you go like, you know, I'm leaning towards that, I'm not leaning towards that, I'm just like neutral in that space. So it's just like 3 sets selections, you did many of these questions and it just spat out this report where, you know, how you think strategically, you know, how well your analytical brain works. And these, you know, was like 5, uh, if I remember correctly, it was 5 categories or so. And all the leadership did that. And then we put everybody on the map and we were like, where are we overleveraged and where are we underleveraged when it comes to skills? And then looking who's actually good at what and then trying to map out initiatives towards these. Like if it requires influence, you know, we'll give to people who are actually very influential internally and externally. If it's very strategic, you know, we would give to people who have these assessments done strategically. Is that similar? Like, yes, it is.

It is, Mike. It's a good analogy. It's not even an analogy. It's sort of very much on point for what we are doing. There are different flavors of psychometric or behavioral assessment. We are in the behavior side of this industry. There is a personality side and there is a psych side, and we steer away from those because we don't— we've always been firmly of the opinion that you don't, you shouldn't have to be a psychologist and you shouldn't have to abdicate your ability to reason and observe behavior onto somebody who in the background created some sort of psychology-based system that makes decisions about what your personality is. We feel that the most authentic and valid way to bring psychometrics to a population is through observable behavior. So, you know, I know myself, I can see myself, I understand what I do, I can describe and I can see a description of my behavior and I can say, "This is more like me than this is." So observable behavior is super important because you can also use observable behavior to assess other groups and other individuals. So for example, in a 360 review of a CEO or something, you're not exactly going to be asking clever, tricky psychological questions about the CEO.

And if you are, the CEO probably won't buy that.

That system. But if it's about, you know, thinking about what you see and then saying what you see, and as simple as that, then really a well-crafted assessment system that's based on observable behavior is far more readily accepted by people because it's basically a survey that asks you or asks you to make decisions and pick things from it that you know to be true about yourself, and then it just tells you what you said. Um, it's, it's not, it's, it's not deceitful or deceptive in what it does, and it doesn't try to kind of make judgmental statements. Our systems are very— we're very careful to be non-judgmental in the way that our systems are built.

Okay, I really want to dig into that. Um, before we move on, um, you did mention wife, and, uh, what came to my mind is duo entrepreneurship, and this is solo. Yeah, but it sounds like you guys came together to launch this. Couple of questions: how does that work? I mean, in general, what's the difference between solo and duo entrepreneurship, if you would, you know, define it?

I guess duo entrepreneurship is simply two people who are like-minded who are going into a business together.

You could call it a partnership if you want to, and they're both entrepreneurial people.

Diane comes from a background of business ownership herself and has gone through a coaching journey that's been ongoing for, you know, nearly 10 years. So her kind of skill set, uh, and interests weren't necessarily perfectly aligned with mine because of, you know, we worked together in publishing technology. It wasn't really, uh, any opportunity there for us to work together. But when, uh, when I left the publishing world and Diane, um, was sort of building up her coaching practice in the UK, we kind of had this light bulb moment where we said, well, hang on a second, you know, If I was going to say build a system for you to use, why couldn't we build a system together for everyone who is like you to use so that as coaches and people in the behavior change business, to keep harping back to that, would be able to get the same advantage. So that's the kind of modeling that we started off with, like how can we build so that Diane is the first customer, but also, you know, people in that space who are like Diane could also become our customers, and we would then have something called a business.

Okay, so it's a simple approach. Instead of you trying to battle it alone, there's another head, another set of ideas, another requirement.

That's such a difference because, you know, I mean, I've— it's not my first sort of foray into having a business, and I've, I've had a sort of 3 prior periods in my life where I was self-employed, um, and I don't mean contracting, I mean with a business. And it's so, so difficult to make the leap from doing everything yourself, you know. One day you're selling and getting the next customer, and the next day you're architecting, and the day after that you're building.

And you're—

so you can't be selling or architecting, and you know, it's super, super hard for a a solo entrepreneur, like your quintessential one-man band, one-person band if you like, to do everything and grow beyond that one.

And obviously, there's so much been written now about how to, you know, scale up from zero to one. There's a book called Zero to One by Peter Thiel actually, which is literally about that, how to go from, you know, your product with no customers to your first customer, and that 0 to 1 leap is actually huge.

But there's a time before that, like the -1 to 0, like you start with nothing and less than nothing, really, it's just an idea, it's not worth anything. People have ideas all the time. How do you turn an idea into a product is like the -1 to 0. For me anyway, that's how I see it. And the zero to one step is the, the piece where you, you know, you're pushing your product to a market and you're trying to make the first dollar turn into the second and third and, and, you know, millionth dollar and that sort of thing. So having two people with different skills that are complementary working towards the same strategic objective is is more than— it's so much more than twice as valuable than having one person.

I really love that -1 to 0 and 0 to 1 space definition. It's— and it is one of the most difficult ones, and it might sound easy, but it's actually where majority of the energy will be, because anything after that one is actually quite— not quite, but in relevance comparing to that, this first step is actually a lot more difficult. Okay, so So definitely better find a partner if you can, you know, who's at least sharing the vision. You know, there's definitely help in that. That beginning is though quite challenging. How are you guys dealing with, um, with all these like resource challenges? Like, you know, it's just two people. I imagine, you know, you didn't hire people initially and it's just like, is this just a pure grind at this point or is there any tips you would give?

Well, something that I learned a long time ago was that stress is actually natural and normal. Everybody actually has something pushing, pulling, twisting, you know, exerting pressure or tension on them at all times. And so stress in itself isn't a negative thing. It's when you reach overwhelm, that's when it becomes a problem. And fortunately, because of, you know, the background that I've covered with you, I kind of had this understanding that a bit of stress is actually okay, and even overwhelm is okay, as long as you have the right strategy for coping with it and managing your way through the stress so that you can build up a kind of a an endurance level that is necessary to get you through the, the natural time span that it will take to, to get you going. And it's going to be different for everybody, so it's hard to be super specific. But, you know, in terms of first principles, really, um, what I'd say is if you, um, uh, going to be creating some kind of big endeavor that is really meaningful, it's probably not going to be something that you can just build in a few days.

Although there are stories about people who've done things like that, like the guy who fixed the Windows menu and became a millionaire in like 6 hours or something because it was so good.

But yeah, those are pretty rare. Even Bill Gates, you know, is known for saying, you know, people, um, overestimate what they can do in 1 year and underestimate what they can do in 10. And that sort of, however long that, that time, that arc of time is for any entrepreneur or any startup, you've got to have the kind of the, the, the internal resources available to cope with whatever the journey throws at you, you know. When people get put under a lot of pressure, it could be financial pressure, it could be time pressure, they could be being pressured by investors if they've gone in that direction. We didn't, so we immediately eliminated the investor stress part of the story from our particular endeavor. But whatever the pressure that you're under, there are kind of like 3, 2 or 3 typical reactions that people have when they're stressed out. You know, you have the fight or flight mechanism, right? So people will turn away from stress. They will maybe withdraw, find something to procrastinate on, you know, dither. They can turn, they can turn on fight mode and, you know, take on the wrong problems with the wrong level of energy in the wrong way. And really the most effective way to get through the frustrations and curveballs that will undoubtedly be thrown at anybody when they're in this phase is to muddle through. We have an assessment which depicts this in an objective way, and we call this strategy the containment strategy. So you have 4 reactions really to stress that can affect how you manage your way through anything. So we're talking here about the early stages of startup and, you know, you would have the sort of flee and fight, then there's the flow kind of reaction where people sort of just go along with events and get blown around by the winds of fate and that sort of thing.

That's never good, especially if you're trying to achieve something, you know, worthwhile with your startup.

And the strategy which we say is most, most effective, we call containment. So it's where you pick and choose whether to fight, whether to flow, or whether to turn away from stresses and tensions and pressures as they come along. Most people would who are effective would have a combination of all of the various responses to pressure and tension observable in how they deal with it, and it won't be always one way. And if you are not that effective at dealing with stress, you might only, say for example, withdraw.

That made me think about myself, and I was like, I want to get that test done, Pete. I'll send you a link. But you, when you were talking through things, and I was like, I definitely, choose to flow, where I just go like, look, I have like 17 things at any given point in time. I'm just gonna take what comes. Like, I'm, you know, I'm gonna try to go to the next page where, where I'm better. So I go with that flow. But strategically thinking, you know, I am trying to muddle towards that destination where I have more space to sort of take a breather, take a knee, and then, you know, be a lot more strategic and a lot more Purpose-driven for the next chapter.

Yeah, and that's how you have to be. You have to be prepared to, you know, fumble around, muddle through, contain things and, you know, fight fires one day.

And especially in startup mode because everything is naturally chaotic and it actually has to be because you have to be, you know, agile in the true sense of the word, not the not the methodology in the sense of the word, but you have to be able to, you know, flex and adapt and pivot, should we say. Use that. Yeah, lovely Americanism.

I like that. Um, is there a test where you can look at people and go like, you're going to be good at this grinding thing, or you're going to be very poor at that, so, so maybe that's not your strong side? You know, all this muddling, uh, I think you put it as a, as a, uh, I think it's flow, flow, yeah, fumble and containment. Yeah, because I feel like that's just a nice word to talk about the grind, which is, you know, how Market talks about it is just like you will need to grind through, through things to the next step. Like, is that what the test really assesses, is like your capabilities of doing that? And it just gives you this, like you said, non-judgmental assessment where it goes like, maybe it's not for you.

We don't call them tests, we call them assessments.

Sorry, that's because, uh, I love that, like a mentality, like you have to pass, isn't it?

Yeah, pass and fail. And you can't fail an assessment about yourself. It's just a, it's just a depiction of where you're at at a point in time, like a bank statement or something, snapshot.

But yeah, stress is one— using the stress assessment is one way of kind of seeing people's containment strategy if they have one, for sure. But there are certain other things that you can model to understand what gets people switched on and keeps them running, if you like. We call that activation. And, you know, people have, um, like these external rewards that they get motivated by, and they have these intrinsic sort of, um, reward, um, drivers that they, uh, sort of don't really think about consciously but drive them forward. Like, um, let me try and Think of one. So, so you've got, um, oh yeah, you, you, you like to be seen as a person, or you like to be seen as a producer. So going back to your question about who's going to be the one who, you know, can handle the grind, you're probably going to look for the producer behavior, this predisposition to look for recognition as a producer.

Some—

not like a movie producer, someone who produces something. And there are other behaviors. We, we have behaviors called implementer behaviors— people who like to get stuff done, you know, and that sort of thing. So there are a number of different factors that can be assessed. We have 12 separate assessments that cover 144 different behaviors, which are all to do with performance and, well, you know, the whole system, the psychometric side, was created for organizations and to, to help organizations to support people and to understand how teams interoperate together and to get the best out of everybody, and not in a, not in an exploitative way, should we say.

I actually love that. And when you were saying this, I, I remembered that I had in the assessment I did, my strongest side was being competitive. That's what I got. It was like at the top, you know, majority of the questions. For whatever reason, I chose, you know, that competing in, in any surrounding is, is how I thrive. And then I was like, okay, well and gave me these tips. It was like, try to put yourself in a situation where you can compare yourself and there's numbers, you know, there's results. And I got this app on my phone for myself where I can just put good habits and bad habits and, you know, just looking at myself in a table like you're doing better today than you did yesterday. That actually worked. And I was like, okay, well, that's cool. Yeah, that's good. So I'm now competing with myself, you know, just trying to be better today than I was yesterday. Things like, you know, taking a cold shower, going for a run, you know, eating well and things like that. But yeah, that came from that assessment and that really worked. And I never pieced that together that I need to be in the situation where, you know, I have these measurements and I took that to professional life as well. And I was like, look, this is how I tick. So I'm going to be capturing things. That's not to come out and go like hands in your face, you know, but that's just like, you know, how I tick, right? So that's a—

I'll tell you another one that you should really look for is what we call the catalyst or the disturber behavior. It's a preference to be recognized for making change happen and for coming up with, you know, the new thing, the thing that's going to disrupt the market, that sort of thing. If you're doing something entrepreneurial, and you don't have the predisposition to be recognized for disrupting something, then, you know, you might be great in some types of businesses, but if you're looking to, you know, create a tech startup that's going to scale, you're probably— you need to understand that you are disrupting something.

And if you're not disrupting something, then you know, you're entering into the hyper-competition sort of arena where there's other people doing the same thing. So that's something to look for.

That's very cool.

I mean, like Elon— Elon is a catalyst, right? He is looking to disrupt rocketry. He wants to go to Mars.

He's building a, you know, an electric car company, battery company, tunneling. The guy is just disrupting everywhere. He must have been a big troublemaker back in the day.

Likely, maybe. I don't know his background that much, but yeah, he's, uh, he's doing all things people not doing, isn't it? Um, so do we have an example where, where all that you guys do is, um, you know, had a huge impact for maybe team composition, uh, team dynamics, uh, and just change trajectory from, you know, from something which was either poor or you know, whatever the reason was, people doing this into something which, you know, became a lot better?

Well, I can't really talk about specific, like, cases, I guess, by naming names or anything.

Yeah, I don't— we don't need names, just maybe like, uh, you know, this is what we had, this is what we did, and this is what happened.

Well, there is this, uh, what we call it the Bill and Ben case, where we have you know, 2 managers in an organization, then you can't really throw a blanket over them in terms of anything really. But for some reason, one of them has a, you know, a higher-performing output team-wise and, you know, unit-wise than the other, all other things being equal. And it turns out that there's just one behavior where one of them has a higher preference for the behavior than the other. And it's the social behavior. So, you know, we have these behaviors in our assessment reports and they have one-word labels, but you can't really just look at the label. You have to understand what the factor is measuring and the whole kind of groups of behaviors that label represents. So this social behavior is kind of like the predisposition to you know, engage in conversation and, you know, be sociable, in a nutshell. And because this particular manager was ever so slightly more willing to be that sort of engaging person, the people that worked in that manager's team were far more, felt far more, you know, connected to the work. And so the output of that team was much greater. And by assessing the two people and sort of having a workshop where this became clear, the other manager was able to understand that if they would just be a little bit more engaged with their team and a little bit more real, then you know, that the outcomes could be more beneficial for everybody, and that did in fact turn out to be the case.

So can we expect, if we do assessments, that to be the outcome, which is, uh, almost like actionable tips the system gives to us? Or is it more like, um, unbiased assessment, like, here's what actually is happening with your behavior? Or do you try to marry this behavior with, like, If you want to improve this somehow, like, this is what we're offering, or, or that's like separate for the, uh, for the individual, uh, you get a report and the report has a text, uh, output and a graphical output.

So, um, and, and it ends with that. Um, where we turn it into a business is we have a whole bunch more behind the scenes which we ship for the coach. And that includes, you know, like 10,000 advisory notes which are delivered up contextually so that the coach has some things that they can kind of read up on. We don't advise coaches how to coach. It's not really our job. But we provide them with this objective information which they can, which their client creates and therefore their client owns, but their client shares it with the coach and they have this sort of middle ground, this sort of piece of objective information which is sitting on the table between them. It's a talking point, a place for conversation to start. And we ship to the coach a whole bunch of, you know, additional know-how to help them to perhaps, that might spark off things for them when they're in the conversation with their coachee about, that could facilitate, you know, exploration. But, you know, we don't, so we don't tell the coach how to coach.

Everyone has actually got a different style. And we actually have an assessment for that too.

Assess the assessment. Um, does that— is there a difference if I'm working on a big, mid, or large organization when it comes to these assessment capabilities? It's like, I imagine it's fractional, but maybe I'm just— question here's a— what I'm thinking as an answer. So let me put this in an open way. Is there a difference if, uh, you know, I'm a startup with 5 people, or I'm a team lead for 12, or am I a CTO and I have 100 people under management?

Yeah, I would say so. You know, if you take it to the extremes, if you're a solopreneur, you probably could get some value from understanding your behavioral, preferred behavioral roles that you play in a team. But if you're a team of one, you're not going to have all of the right mix of roles that every team ought to have. So you, you are going to be able to sort of gap analyze yourself. And you described, um, something that you did in, you know, in your past where you all did something and then, you know, put them all over the top of each other to see where the gaps and where the oversubscriptions were. And this is something that you can get from Assessing the parts people play in teams. So you have things like who's the initiator, who's the follower, who's the implementer. The implementer in a team is somebody who likes to get things done. And oftentimes in, you know, like a tech team or something, everybody just wants to get on and get stuff done. And if there isn't someone actually performing the functions of management in the team as well, or someone doing the administration or coordinating or ensuring that mediation can happen if there's you know, clashes or someone liaising with the outside world, then the team can become quite dysfunctional. And, um, so yeah, there are a number of different ways. I mean, gosh, we could, we could go over all of them, but there's 144 of them.

Yeah, it's okay.

We need 12 podcasts for that.

Yeah, that's fine. Let's just do the series. I was just looking to understand, it's, you know, that the module is effectively fractional, meaning that you can do for yourself and you can do for 100 people and it just works. And it's just, you know, you get the results. And while you were talking, I was like, I definitely want to try that because I was like, I wouldn't want to just understand myself. I want to throw it to my wife, you know, see how we match up for like, uh, you know, internal relationships within the family and things like that. So that's By the way, is that applicable? Like, can you do that as well? Not from coaching perspective, but I just want to understand her better and I want to—

yeah, I mean, everyone who joins our platform gets, um, like a team, like a team of— they can invite 4 people, uh, like you could do your family or something. We, we do it with ours, you know, our kids, uh, we have something you hardly ever look at, but it's fun to talk about it, you know, the first time and I think it somehow it goes in with people that, "Ah, do you know what? Now that I think about it, that is how we are different." And it's really quite enlightening to talk about, you know, behaviors that we all have that we can see. So it's not like some like dark secret from you. Like our surveys don't say, "You're a narcissist," or something like that, you know. But they would say something like, "Oh, you're interested interested in, you know, career and you're interested in material things because that's where you are in life. And sometimes people find it easier to kind of look at the output of a report and go, "Do you know what? That's true," than they do to actually just come out with the words. And I'll tell you a really good one is to think about, you know, regardless of what we do, is transactional analysis. It's a fascinating area of study which covers how people sort of make decisions and communicate, interact. TA, as it's known, Transactional Analysis, came about in the 1950s. There was a doctor, I can't remember his name now, who came up with it, and he's considered to be, you know, the father of this field of understanding about people. And it all revolves around things called ego states and blah, blah, blah.

So we won't go there.

But the key things that you need to understand is that there is a decision hierarchy that has an effective end and an ineffective end. And what that means is we all make decisions, right? All the time, and we don't even think about it.

Like, should I pick up this coffee cup? Should I drink now? Or will everybody hear me slurp?

You should. Sorry, Djanan.

I think I might have had too much already. But, you know, there's a decision hierarchy, and at the top, you've got reasoning and logic, just below reasoning, and at the bottom, you've got kind of magical thinking. And if the way that you make decisions is too much circling the drain at the magic end, you can be open to manipulation. Um, so for example, um, if everybody said to you—

I don't know, I'd say something controversial—

um, there's this, um, there's this drug that you can take that's gonna fix everything. We just came out with it. Just take it, it'll be fine. And if everybody just was too magically thinking about this, then that would— it would be easier for them to accept those assertions. So an assertion, apart from what it means in technology, is a mode of communicating something. So we have— no, it's not, it's a, it's another way of deciding. So get my ducks in a row here. So you've got reasoning, very effective. Logic, quite effective. Then you have intuition, which is actually quite effective as well. And below that, you have assertion— people who just kind of go, just do it, okay? It just has to get done, just, just do it, um, and don't argue. Um, now if people are thinking intuitively, then they're one level above that, and they're thinking things like Well, it just doesn't feel right, actually.

I don't really think I should do that.

And if they're using logic, they're going, well, if I do that, then this could happen. But if this other thing happens, then that other thing might happen. So they're using this if this then that kind of thinking. And if they're reasoning, then they're pulling together the threads of all of the, all of the below. They're pulling together everything and kind of at the highest order of decision processes, that's where we ought to operate. And when we communicate things after we've made a decision, we have some varying ways, which are described in Transactional Analysis as well, of communicating. And there can be effective communications and there can be ineffective communications depending on— that means between you, like you and me, right? Like we're having this discussion which is sort of we're on the same plane. So we're having a sort of an objective adult-to-adult conversation. But if I started like wagging my finger at you, then we would be having a cross-transactional conversation if you were feeling like you didn't really enjoy me kind of lecturing you about something. So transactions are very interesting and When you start investigating transactional analysis a little bit deeper, you come to understand that every single interaction between every single human, whether it's just a wink or a raised eyebrow or a Marge Simpson sort of hmm kind of whatever, they all carry some, they convey something to the other party and are taken in a certain way. And so it's important to be aware that how we transact with each other can influence the way that we interoperate together on a higher, like, more conscious level as well.

Transactions, very interesting.

Yeah, I love that. And you're absolutely right. I, I'm always— I, I wouldn't have put that in these words, uh, so it's good to know that science behind it exists, but I always think of what I say and how I say depending on who's receiving it. And that actually came from, from a book, um, I think it's called Cultural Map or Culture Map, something like that, where it was looking at 6 distinguished groups of people across the globe and how they actually perceive communication. So as an example, if people are middle to Central Europe, like, you know, Lithuania where I'm from, or Russia, Ukraine, or Latvia, we actually respond to direct communication. Go, go do this. I need that from you like that. And we accept that quite well. But then if you take cultures which are more laid back like Spain, Portugal, they don't like that direct communication. They actually feel threatened by it. And it just feels like, 'Who you are? Why are you telling me what to do?' So you need to actually deliver the same message in different words. So when you were talking about— I was like, yeah, you know, I do think about this. So that's quite cool. So there's another—

even things like making eye contact in some cultures is considered a threat, you know, so you shouldn't do it. Um, but if you don't know that and you just like make eye contact because, you know, that's how I was brought up, to make eye contact and be direct.

Yeah, just like, look at the bayan.

The other guy's gonna like, like, sock you in the jaw because he thinks you're sort of, you know, making a threatening statement or something just by staring.

And this is—

you do have to be aware.

This is so important now in the, in, um, in a remote culture because you're going to be exposed. Let's, let's take 10 years back. The likelihood of you getting exposed to a diverse culture was less likely, where now with the remote hiring, you know, you're getting these different cultures on the Zoom calls. Maybe you don't see them, but they still, you know, there's, um, there's still a verbal communication which is taking place with a lot more cultures, at least in what I do. If I compare myself to, you know, 5 years back to now, it's just, just so, so much more diverse individuals in the meetings. All right, so let's, um, let's maybe predict the future a little bit. Um, okay, that sounded very nice. Like, uh, do you, do you feel like this field you guys in— were you mentioned '70s, by the way, so it's already around us, and, uh, and it's just as much as there is of it, it's gonna stay, or do you think there's gonna be a real change of how people look at teams and leadership because of that?

Well, I think with how we approach it, um, things being about human behavior and, and, you know, say what you see, of yourself and of others, if you are, you know, surveying in that way.

I think, you know, we evolved pretty slowly as beings.

Cultures change.

There's a big cultural war going on at the moment, isn't there? But, you know, humans themselves aren't actually evolving, despite what, you know, some people would like to have us believe. We are not changing. That quickly.

I think the real, the real future trends are around AI, funnily enough, and to do with that decision hierarchy. So I'll give you an example. Um, you know, when you and me were working together, and I'm sure in the work that you're doing now, um, you deal a lot with logic, right? Computer type of logic. Where the human beings do the reasoning and they translate the reasoning into rules which are based around logic, and then the software basically does the work, right? But where we've entered into now is we have— we have—

it's called AI, and I really don't like it, but let's just call it AI for now.

Um, it's more like— it's more like AD, artificial decisions. Because it's not intelligence, but there are decisions being made. And what's happened with the, with the advent of, you know, large language models and the ability to have a, now, a conversation with a tool that actually makes sense, what's going on under the hood is that the, the machines have been able to level up from logic to reasoning, the highest order of decision process, which was exclusively the domain of humans until last week, you know. And this is the danger and the opportunity in one.

And that's why I think so, so many people are alarmed and other people are just like, yeah, let's just do blah blah blah, make all these amazing things.

And there are some pretty crazy amazing things happening, But I think there is, you know, a general, a genuine, um, like a valid concern, should we say, that the work that is happening unregulated in the fields of artificial decision-making, should we call it that, not intelligence, could lead to where— and some people might argue already has led to where machines are able to make their own reasoning bucket, if you like, do their own reasoning, come out with their own decisions, like 10 million times quicker than you or I could, and with access to vast— in terms of our capacity, vast, vast amounts of data at their disposal and to do it so much faster than what we can. And in a way, without too much concern about having to be alive while they do it. So they don't have that many problems to solve in this world of machine learning. Before we have an intelligent being that can operate at the highest order of reasoning that we used to have, which won't be able to be switched off. This is the only thing I think that's protecting us really from the dark future of AI at the moment, is that we can just unplug them. Uh, so yeah, so the, the doom— what do they call them, the Doomer? The Doomer in me, it says watch out, you know. Once they can live forever and can outthink us and out-decide us, then, um, you know, we need to really be careful about our own relevance in, in this, on this planet.

But on, on the positive side You know, AI can be incredibly useful, and we've used it ourselves in things like translation because large language models are very good at translating things. So whereas before it would have been like a hit-and-hope exercise—

translate this phrase into Spanish and you don't speak Spanish, excuse me, so, and you don't know whether that's a good translation— but now you can actually challenge the a tool and say, "Translate this into Spanish and then explain it back to me why you chose every word and what are the nuances and what are the alternatives," and you get this massively lucid explanation of why these words are the appropriate words and, you know, the meaning that they convey and the nuance and, you know, who might be offended and what culture they might come from. You can just go like, "Why does he like now these are, you know, scary interesting, potentially world-enhancing improvements that are also at our fingertips. So yeah, interesting, fun times ahead.

I do, I do agree. And we literally had an episode with Chris just before this one, Pete, where we went very deep into this. And do you— did, did you watch Iron Man? As a movie.

Come on.

Yeah. Well, you know, you never know. So, you know, the character which called Jarvis, which was AI effectively, where everyone was talking with this. So this is, this is, this is the, you know, like a notion or a consensus which we find is that the next step would be instead of, you know, typing to ChatGPT and asking the questions and then having conversation, you know, we take this to the next step where we just instead of typing, we actually having conversation. So you can think of like Siri we have right now, or, you know, Google Echo, but on another level where it's just not commands you're giving, but you actually having conversations, which feels like you're having a conversation because it, it is. But at the end of the day, like you said, it's just a machine, it's just a program. It is very scary times, and I think that's what's exciting. Because it's just like, you can go in so many different ways. But we're drifting now from our main topic. Let's—

if you're talking about— if you're talking about good shows to watch about AI, um, I don't know if you've seen Travelers on Netflix.

No.

It's like 6, 5 seasons or something.

Yeah.

But basically the, uh, the premise is that, um, at some point in the future, um, there's a crisis and, um, the AI is allowed to take over.

And, um, it figures out how to send people back in time to our time. But the, the whole point of the, the show is you don't even know that there's an AI involved until about like the end of season 1 or something, where the director is identified as an AI because they just keep referring to the director as the director like it's a human. But actually they come from a future where all of the decisions are being made by one central artificial intelligence which I think is a very insightful premise to build a show around.

Because, you know, where we are at the moment, people are saying, well, what can we use AI for?

And I think at the moment we're at the level of, if you're, you know, writing software, you might have an assistant that can, you know, maybe help you write a plugin or something. I tried that myself, by the way, and it was so goddamn frustrating, I gave up.

It was like 99% right, but that 1% that was just like a rabbit hole that you didn't want to go down with the tools because, you know, it was just like it got further and further away from the point, the more they used it.

No, no, that's not what I mean.

Do this.

No, no, no.

Anyway, it's very, very interesting. But I think we're, you know, on the cusp of like we are sort of literally on the event horizon now of going into either a black hole or a wormhole. And I don't think anybody really knows whether it's a black hole or a wormhole yet. To a better place or like a dark future. Because at the end of the day, you know, it's great to have an assistant, and that assistant will keep learning, and one day that assistant will be able to take over another function. And then maybe an AI will be employed to be a developer, and then maybe an AI will be employed to be a team lead, or maybe an AI will be the business analyst and the developer and the team lead, or maybe the whole business won't have a dev team It'll just have, you know, managers saying, having meetings and then going, yeah, let's make that happen. And then, you know, push the red button and have you got that, Jarvis?

And Jarvis would go away and just make it happen.

And, you know, so that could, you know, if you're selfish and you're a programmer and you don't want to lose your job, then you would think that's a terrible thing to have to happen. But maybe the dev teams will become just really good at prompt engineering, and maybe that's the future for the near future, and as we continue over the event horizon. But then what will happen after that? Well, the machines will only learn better and better. So eventually, you know, you'll get middle management, then you'll get senior management, portfolio owners, you know, but eventually, you know, will businesses even have people in them at all? Or will all the decisions and all of the processes and all of the tasks be robots, people, uh, not being necessary for anything? And this is something that we don't really know yet, and so we've got to, um, tread carefully. I think one of the key things for people to do in order to, you know, protect the future for humans is to constantly strive to be at the top of the decision process hierarchy themselves and not to allow themselves to get wooed into— towards magical thinking. And I'll tell you, I'll give you an example of why— how that has already been happening for a good 20 years. So when you went to school, did you have to do your arithmetic with a pencil and a pen and paper, or did you have calculators, or were you in that time?

No, pencil and a paper.

Calculators. You had to learn it the hard way, right?

Mm-hmm.

And then at some point, you know, like our kids, I don't know about your kids, but just use a calculator, right? So suddenly your brain doesn't need to do the arithmetic. Because you just need to know how to use calculator. And then Google came along, right? Before Google, you had to, um, you had to read books and stuff, and now you don't. You just, um, Google it. So we're constantly being allowed to fall down the ladder of decision processing towards the bottom end of the scale. We're not We all don't live at the magical end, although magical thinking, you could say, which is the least effective way to make decisions, you could say just Google it is a good example of magical thinking. Because if, if you're willing to just Google it and then you accept the results that, let's face it, Google decides what the results are that you see, then you are, you are open to being manipulated by parties who, who, um, control those systems. So I think one of the things that we have to do as humans is to realize that we need to be reasoning, we need to remain in the reasoning headspace and, um, be objective and, you know, be critical about things. Think critically about things and not let the machines just become our servants, because eventually I think they become our masters.

That's a nice saying. All right, let me ask this in the spirit of the show, Pete. We have this question, which is, what is the one factor— let me rephrase that— what is the most important and you can only choose one factor for any tech venture growth? You can only choose one.

I think you have to be the disruptor. Okay.

So you elaborate.

Well, um, in, in every aspect of, of tech growth, should we say, there is going to be an opportunity to improve something. To be that, um, that agent of change who, you know, identifies a gap, spots an opportunity, uh, maybe fixes something so it works better. And to— so if you want to feel the inner kind of glow that you were the one who made that happen, and I think a lot of people in tech actually do, they love building stuff and they engineering solutions. And it's not because they necessarily get a kick out of the fact that they, uh, like, like, in simple terms, just solved a problem. But it's like, I solved a problem that led to this other thing happening. I made— you know, it's like the difference between the guy who says his job is putting rivets in a bridge and another guy who says, I put these rivets in a bridge so that people can go from one side of the of the bay to the other.

That's actually a story from someone who interviewed people who worked on the Golden Gate Bridge when it was under construction.

It's like these two mindsets. So the catalyst mindset, the disturber, is the one who seeks, actively seeks recognition for having been a changemaker. And if you have that innate drive in you to be that changemaker, as long as you can rub along and, you know, not be—

it doesn't mean be disruptive like, like a naughty child or something.

It just means look for ways to, um, go, hang on a sec, why do we always do it that way?

It's not the best way.

There's another way. Let's do it this other way, guys. And, you know, agitate for that. And maybe, you know, everybody goes, no, you're an idiot for these reasons. And you go, oh, okay, you were right, I was wrong. But another time they might go, oh, I'm so glad you actually mentioned that because we've been doing it this way for years and 'You just saved us, you know, a million quid,' or something like that, for that, for that one small change.

And, and so I think the catalyst is a very, very important, um, very, very important factor.

Okay, so effectively, if I'm piecing this together, if you are a tech growth venture, you want to have a founder having the disruptor element with them, or at least someone in management, or maybe the whole management having that element. Otherwise it's unlikely that you will be constantly thinking about that next step, that next big thing, that, that next thing which takes you through the growth trajectory.

Yeah. And it's a delicate balance and there's so many other factors that come into play.

But you said I could only pick one. So, yep.

Okay. I get it. So, so effectively it's at the people level and at the behavior level of having people who are disruptors.

Yeah, you know, a lot of people say, um, it's all about the people.

And while that's true, I think it's a little bit reductive to say it's about the people. It's actually about what people do. That is the key thing to keep in mind here. It's about the behaviors. It's not— obviously you need people unless you have one of those AI businesses that doesn't need people.

We're not there yet. So, so of Of course you need people. In New Zealand, we have the Māori culture, and there's a saying which goes something like, what is the most important thing in the world? Well, let me tell you, it is people, it is people, it is people.

In Māori, they say, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

And actually, I think that we need to modernize that nowadays to say it's actually what people do, which is the most important thing in the world, not just about people, especially perhaps in terms of, you know, mastering tech growth, shall we say.

I, I very much love that. You're absolutely right. You know, putting, say, a team out of random 10 people and putting a team out another 10 random people, then comparing which team is better, it's still going to be what the people do. It's not about, you know, the names or genders or cultures or skills. It's really, I mean, it is about skills, but you have to write the behaviors.

There are certain things that just have to happen in terms of human behavior in order for things to work well together.

Yeah.

Okay. So you mentioned the first principle, which, you know, I took a note. Can you explain what that actually means? The first principle? Principle thinking?

Yeah, so, um, well, I guess thinking about something in the first principles—

let's take, for example, um, like project management or something, planning, that sort of thing. And, um, you might say, well, what should we do in order to, um, get from here to there in our business. And every business can ask that question because every business will be trying to get, you know, a product out the door or service built or something, right?

Um, and you know, you will need to make a plan for how to leave the room that you're in. Um, plans happen at every level, and you don't need a project management system in order to to succeed in, in the execution of a plan. And the first principles of, say, competitive success or succeeding in, in any endeavor would apply across any business type, any type of enterprise, or any interaction between two or more parties. So first principles are the, you know, the principles that apply to every situation. Um, like, I'll give you a concrete example, stop waffling around a bit. So, um, here we have—

oh, okay, here's a good example.

So you know that, uh, movie Sully? Where that guy lands the plane on the Hudson River? You familiar with that? So it took off and then instantly bird strike, I think it was.

Yep.

And he— and like the tower was like, dude, what's going on? He's like, bird strike. And they're like, land. Yeah, okay. And then like, land at the airport. He's like, uh, no, I don't want to land at the airport. Then they were like, no, land at the airport. And he was like, switch them off. And he said he just shut them down. Completely blocked out everything. He said, I'm landing down there on the river. And it was like, okay, Captain. And then, you know, everybody just kind of flowed into what they had to do to make that happen. And he landed the plane and everybody got out. And, you know, then they, they basically took him to court and said, you broke our airplane, you should have landed it, so it's your fault. And, you know, that's the subject of the the movie Sully, which is all about, you know, not just the crash but how they tried to actually like crush him as a human being for, for, you know, following the principles of how to get things done successfully in the way that mattered the most and was most appropriate for the situation he was in. There was no Jira, there was no Kanban board, you know, but he had to follow certain principled steps that, you know, if you're, if you're going into a war, or if you're going into business, or if you're, um, going, you know, to cross the road, you have to do certain things in, in order to succeed. We call them the principles of competitive success because it sounds cool in a business context and everything. But, you know, NATO and other military outfits around the world have appropriated these principles and they've called them the rules of war.

We don't call them the rules of war because it's not really about being in a war. You don't have to be in a war in order to succeed at something. So here are some of the principles, the first principles of succeeding in a competition.

You have to set your priorities. It makes sense when you say it like that, it's like, duh. But imagine if you're entering into some competitive arena and you haven't actually worked out what your priorities are. So it's easy to say you should do, but what would happen if you didn't? You have to pursue objectives. Whatever the objectives are that you've set, you then have to go after them. And when you're doing that, you have to either concentrate your force on a particular thing at a certain time. At other times, you have to economise your effort. If it's a team effort, There will be morale issues. You have to manage morale, keep everybody upbeat. You know, if everybody's all depressed and downtrodden, then, you know, your team isn't going to be as effective. So that's a factor. So there are a load actually of these principles to consider. And that's what I mean when I talk about first principles. So all of our psychometrics, there's 12 different domains that they cover, and each of them covers the first principles of the domain.

Which, with which they deal.

Okay, so when you were giving this, um, I was like, okay, strategy and tactics, right? So that's, that's, that, that's given. So the focus, the objectives. Another thing which came to mind is cost. So it's at the end of the day is business, right? So you're gonna be spending money, you're gonna be making money. Like, that's the first principle. Um, is there any I mean, I want to ask, is there any tips you would give around the cost? But it's like, it just don't spend more than you're making, right? As simple as that.

Um, yeah, that comes down to something called the action process.

So inside, um, organizational development world and OD and OB, the organizational behavior world, they have this term which is kind of like— that sounds a bit odd to the ear— called the action process.

But it's literally just the steps that— the action steps that have to happen in order for something to be done successfully. And one of those steps is the, the assessment of the cost-benefit and making sure that you're not over-solving or overspending. And it falls under the category in the action process of, of controlling behaviors. So you'll need somebody in the group who is predisposed or who understands that they need to be in control of the cost-benefit. And everybody on the team who's involved in producing anything should have some concept of the fact that there is a cost-benefit. So if you've, you know, got a dev team and, you know, you've, you've got a developer who said it'll take a day, but then it takes like 20 days because it was a bad estimate or something, then clearly that has cost implication because it's 20 dev days. And, um, you know, in the dev world you have ways of dealing with that, hopefully, so that it never arises.

But if it does arise and you have a cost overrun, then you've got someone maybe outside the dev team breathing down your neck saying, man, you said that was like a going to cost me this much, and it's cost me like 20 times, so I'm not happy.

You're going to have to deal with that. So the action steps, um, of the action process are important to, to understand what they are and to, to make sure that you have all of those, um, preferences, those behavioral preferences present in the group that's working on the, on the given on the given effort.

Yeah, okay, I love that. And, and that, that situation which you gave where, you know, you give an estimate and you overrun it by like 20 times, that's like, you know, story of my life. It just, just happens.

It happens.

It's like with every project. Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a nature of the beast in development, right? Um, another thing which came to my mind around the first principles is just time management. I feel like it's just applicable to everybody, you know. Are you developer? Are you a tech lead? Or are you, you know, head of engineering? Everybody needs to manage their time efficiently. Does that actually go to that first principle of having a focus and knowing your objective, or is it like a separate thing on its own in your view?

Well, I mean, clearly you, you need to be aware of time. Time's a really funny one. I was This thing popped up on my feed today, and it was this dude talking about Aristotle. And he's like, if you think about it, um, you've got the past, the present, and the future, right?

And I'm nodding along, going, yeah, that's true.

And it's like, well, what is the present? And how, how thick is the present? How wide is it? How deep is it?

It's like, well, it's just like the—

it's not the future and it's not the past. It's now. So it's It's like paper thin, right? It's just this tiny little moment in time. And then he's like, okay, so, well, what's the past? The past is stuff that's already happened, so it no longer exists. And what's the future?

Well, it's stuff that hasn't happened yet.

So basically, the past is not real, the future is not real, and the present is not real either. It's just a gap between the past and the present. So what is time? So if time doesn't exist, why do we care about it anyway? Digression. But, you know, time does have an influence on us, and it's because we actually count time.

We count time, um, you know, from a point in time, you know, like the Unix epoch, or from when, um, you know, from AD, that kind of time.

So we, we— time has a meaning for us because we started somewhere and we started measuring it.

So we have watches, we have clocks, we have scheduling.

If we didn't, maybe there wouldn't be any problems in the world because we wouldn't be too worried about things. But this is how our world works. Time has its influences. We have, we have in a group setting where, you know, there's a kind of a complex effort underway, there's things that we know we have to do and there's things that we want to do. And it goes for everyone in the team, right? So, um, you know, you have to set time aside to do stuff.

Then you have to put time into tasks. You have to put time into, you know, a process like, you know, move the issue from here to here or do some admin or something like that.

And then there's the stuff that people want to do, which is, you know, I wish that I could just gaze out the window, um, at that view for another 10 minutes because that's really 'You know, a really good view,' and, or, 'I can't stop thinking about windsurfing tonight,' or, you know, whatever. So there's like, people have like what they want to do, and it can clash with what they know they have to do. And if you're managing a group of people, it's always good to check in that you've got the right people with the right mental attitude to staying on task and doing what they know they need to be doing.

But also to respect the fact that people are all different and all have different wants and needs when it comes to how they use their time. You know, do they prefer to do activities? Do they— are they social? Do they do things out of habit?

Do they waste a lot of other people's time by playing stupid mind games? Do they withdraw?

By the way, withdrawal can be actually quite a productive thing because, you know, time to think. Do they like to spend time interacting, but that's not really that productive in the type of team environment that you want them to be working in? So, you need to do some coaching work around, hey, you know, we don't do that between, like, 9 and 12 or something. We do that between 12 and 2, that sort of thing.

That's a very real situation, though. Literally had a conversation 2 days ago. I don't want to give names, but it's, there's a you know, there's a lady within the team and she just talks all the time and everybody being polite, you know, responds to the conversations. But then it's very distracting. You know, people on one-to-ones go like, so distracting, but no one's going to, you know, effectively come out and just go like, hey, like, you're distracting me right now. And then—

and that's actually a really interesting point because if you're in that situation, you want to say something, but you know that it's like socially unacceptable to just point and accuse, right? Because then you end up getting someone's backup or you offend them, they go to HR or, you know, something is probably going to happen that's not great potentially from that. But when you get the whole team to workshop through this, you do the assessments and then, you know, everybody's sort of willing to, you know, buys into the idea that it's it's not, um, like, it's not mind control or something.

It's just a survey, and here's a report, and let's all share and talk about each other's, you know, preferences, basically. Um, then you find somebody going, do you know what, um, yeah, I do, I do find that I have— I do like to interact a lot more with others, or I do like to— I am very verbal. And that gives almost the permission to talk about the appropriateness of certain things in a setting that's kind of neutral and non-threatening and non-judgmental, if done right.

If done right. I mean, just seeing that behavior in general and understanding where it's come from, not maybe where it comes from, but understanding that that's a behavior And there's a, you know, there's a pattern to it. And as a leader of that team, you want to probably have a chat because people themselves in many situations and occasions will not have that chat. And even if they will, the person receiving the chat might go like, you're not the manager, you can't tell me to not have a chat, right? And it just, it just goes nowhere. And then just friction, you know, within the team. So another thing which I took as a notice, uh, I see a lot people calling themselves coaches, and then I see a lot on LinkedIn calling themselves mentors, and then I see a lot people calling themselves advisors. And there's a, there's a slight distinguish, you know, between them. And I need to accept, like, coach is more about, um, I'll try to help you to sort of find the answers by, by, you know, asking these open questions, but I'm not that good gonna give you, you know, give you the answers, right? That, that's coach for me. Mentoring is more like, you know what, it's coaching plus I, I will have this knowledge transfer of my skills and my understanding towards you. And an advisor is like, you know, here's what I'm thinking, you know, go with it if you want or not. So can I— can, can your systems and, you know, behavior analysis actually apply to all of them, or is it— or is it the coaching which is the best matchup?

No, actually, it's combinations. So, when it comes to— so, it's tricky, isn't it? Because coaching in the modern parlance has sort of come into this world and it's all about creating a safe space where people can, you know, explore and discuss and grow and develop, which is great. But there's more to progression than that in reality. And sometimes you do actually want advice, and sometimes you do need a mentor, and sometimes you are looking for a teacher. So coaching, when it comes to, you know, what we call leveling up— and leveling up isn't just about you know, getting a promotion or something.

It's not really about that at all. The way that we think of it, leveling up is about transferring knowledge, or it's about transforming yourself in some way so that you are in a better place because you want to be.

And when people level up, they have, they have strategies that they want to go through. That they want to use when it comes to, um, um, how they would help themselves to, to make a change.

So you would, you know, try to understand something, you would observe, then you would, um, you know, apply what you've learned, you would explore around a bit, and then you have these kind of methodological things that you actually do when you're helping somebody else through, through a leveling-up exercise. So if it's in a team situation and it's KT, it's knowledge transfer, so you might be somebody who prefers to show people, or you may be someone who prefers to explain. You may be somebody who wants to put things into practice or get people to, you know, polish a skill that they already have. And You know, these are not sort of mutually exclusive approaches either. They, they, they can be selected at will, but people will tend to have a way that they like to go about knowledge transfer. And it could be actually set by the organization as well, by the way.

And then you have like, well, what's your style?

If you're in a group setting and you want to be involved in somebody going through a transformation, whether it's learning new knowledge or self-development transformation of some sort, you're going to have a natural predisposition to operate in a certain style. So you might be naturally more of a mentor, you might be naturally more of a tutor, you might have a natural coaching style or a trained coaching style. Or you might be like an advisor type of.

And actually, it's when you start seeing the blends of those, like coach-advisor or coach-mentor, those are the more realistic.

No one's just 100% coaching style and zero mentoring and zero advising and zero tutoring. You know, there are mix and match strategies that, that get employed by people when, when it comes to the style that they, that, that they use to help people through a leveling up exercise.

And so, yeah, um, have I rambled?

No, that was good. I like that, you know, I like that. And I always thought about myself as, you know, I like to give advices. I don't know why, you know, again, that's my behavior, right? And I always enjoy listening to, uh, what people are having as a challenge, you know, as a struggle, as some type of definition of a problem space, and put myself into that and go like, you know what, that's what I would do. And that's just like how I advise. And I'm always leaning towards advising and mentoring rather than just having these, uh, open coaching questions such as like, well, what would you do yourself? So I needed to really spend time to understanding how the coaching is done. And, and you mentioned that.

I mean, coaching, coach is an interesting word, isn't it? Because it existed for a long time, um, without being anything to do with what we now consider to be the modern coaching industry that sprung up.

Um, and the word actually was appropriated, uh, by that industry. Because there wasn't— that's the problem with English, probably with every language, just aren't enough words to sort of describe everything. So you have to appropriate a word from somewhere.

So, you know, like 20 years ago, a bit more than that now, I was a judo coach. Well, I didn't make a safe space for anybody and help them to explore. You know, it was like, this is how you do a foot sweep and, you know, don't forget to do a breakfall. You know, here's how you strangle someone out. But You know, coaching is not that. Coaching now is, there's an entire industry about, you know, supporting people through transformation.

And that's the word that we've had chosen for us by that industry because there wasn't a better word.

I like the leveling up word as well. I don't know if that's you guys or just, you know, you chose a good word. I like the leveling up. We always as individuals should be looking, you know, come back to the time notion, should be looking back and going like, where we are today, are we leveled up? Like, do we know more skills? Are we venturing in the zones which doesn't feel comfortable? Are we taking these challenges on and are we actually growing as people? Which leads me to this concept of which you talked a little bit about the resilience and endurance of the whole exercise. Can you just sort of talk us through that, how you guys phrasing this, this part?

Well, actually, it's kind of like an ongoing debate. I don't think it's settled, but we— when Dad was in, in business and he, he developed the the particular assessment that I'm talking about, he called it the stress assessment. And that was what it was called because there was a stress industry and people needed to understand stress and wanted to understand stress. But what's happened over the decades is that this new word, this new word has entered the lexicon. It's not even a new word. It's just another word that's been appropriated for use. Instead of talking about stress, which has kind of negative connotations. And that word is resilience. And, you know, leave a comment if you think it's that kind of thing because, like, resilience has almost become a buzzword now in the stress industry, just like stress became a buzzword. This is my personal opinion. And this is why I say it's not settled because it's not Dianne's opinion. She has a different view about it. That's fine. I'm doing the podcast, right? But look, resilience for me is like, it's a concept that you would apply to maybe like, next time you were watching the news or listening to something that is happening in current affairs, listen out for this word resilience that when it doesn't apply to humans. And it will apply to things like like roads and bridges and buildings and fortifications and armor and things that aren't designed to move a lot of the time. We— I was watching a story here down here in New Zealand about widening a particular road out into the, into the sea and making sure that the seawall would be resilient and, you know, to, to the ravages of the ocean and the road surface would be resilient. And, you know, bridges get washed away, so we need to make more resilient bridges. And it's had me thinking for a while, really, that when we talk about being resilient, are we actually baking into someone's mind the idea that you need to be able to withstand an onslaught by becoming like more thick-skinned about it? And I know that isn't what is meant by the term. But I think there's a more positive term, and that is that to think about your endurance capabilities instead of your— how much resilience you have. Because endurance, for me, it's a transitive word. You know, you have endurance athletes, you don't have resilience athletes. Because endurance athletes are, you know, goal-directed. They're motivated to get somewhere. And they put themselves through hell and they have, you know, here I'm going to say they have resilience, but they have the endurance capabilities to get to their goal. Whereas if you're talking about, you know, a boxer being able to take, you know, a lot of punches, then maybe you could say, well, they need to have the resilience to take a battering, or they have the endurance to get through that because You kind of had this mental model of them being fixed in place and not moving. And so I— we called it— we called our— we renamed our stress assessment to— and we called it resilience. And then we kind of looked back at what it was designed to do. And we just sort of kind of thought, it's not really an assessment of your resilience. But when you look at the last 4 factors, the reactions to stress that people have, it is perhaps a little bit more about their ability to endure things, their endurance capabilities. So if you're running away or fighting or just flowing along and you're not muddling through, then that's how you're strategizing to get through something. That is transitive. It's taking time. It's going. It's not— you're not fixed in place. Time isn't fixed in place, despite what I said earlier about time.

And, you know, so endurance for me is a more kind of like productive, positive-sounding term. That's probably way over-explained there.

No, that was a good one. I really like how much attention to details you're putting into You know, the whole product and the whole offering is like, you know, we go so granular to, to really express what these assessments are doing. When you were giving this explanation, and I was like, that's what it comes from within you and how people will receive it when they read it is probably going to be coming from within them and how they understand the words. And I did like resilience because I felt like it's more empowering. In a sense that, you know, if someone calls me resilient, you know, that makes me feel better because I feel like, you know, I got stuff. But for someone else, you know, they might, they might have a lot more resonation with endurance, and they go like, yeah, you know, I love the fact that I can go, uh, for long sessions. And, uh, I wouldn't call myself probably an, uh, you know, a higher than an endurance. I actually like short bouts of intense, and then I wanna rest. So, yeah. I'm more like a—

It's funny because—

High-intensity training, right? Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. Because even with endurance, I mean, there isn't, like, and it's, it's not an easy word to get into a sentence.

Like, you can say that you have the resilience to do something or you're resilient, but you can't really say that you're endurant because it probably is a word, but we just don't say it. So then you have to say something like, you have the endurance capabilities to do something, which is a real big mouthful.

So yeah, I'm— yeah, I guess I was just trying to get across the idea that, you know, there, there are— that words do matter. And we, we don't really want to fall into patterns of using words just because they're buzzwords. We, we want to get across the idea that is underneath that.

I love that, I love that. So you sent me an email, Pete, and you put in an email, you said you have a better name for the show, and you said, you said you'll surprise me on this podcast. So give it to me, I'll take a note.

Well, look, I'm just glad that we've been able to have this serious tech talk together.

That's the name. I'm just— that's a long name. I can't put that. But yes, uh, serious conversation.

Come on. I, I reckon because you're, you're starting out with the podcast and you, you, your podcasts are great, um, but you haven't put yourself at the center of your brand. And because maybe because you don't want to and it's not about your ego or anything, but at the end of the day, you know, these, these are your podcasts and it's you, Mike Sirius, and You know, I just say, look, I say to Diane, he should be calling it Serious Conversations or something.

And she goes, oh, that's so good.

So, you know, I've got one vote for Serious Conversations.

All right, I'll, I'll take it because, because it sounds like my last name is serious, right? It's serious conversation.

Exactly. So, you know, it's not a serious conversation, it's a serious conversation, like your name.

Yeah.

So name, put, put your name into the brand.

I, I had thoughts about this, but You know, the podcast and the show is really not about me. It's about, it's about the guests.

So I, I know that Joe Rogan's aren't about Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman's aren't about Lex Fridman, but you know, yeah, but their name is, their brand is the, yeah, did you hear Lex Fridman podcast the other day?

There's some, there's, there's some definite truth to that, but these are good, you know, huge, huge people interviewing huge disruptors. In a market where, you know, maybe eventually that, that's the goal. Right now I just want to bring in people and give them the forum to really talk about great things they're doing, which, you know, you with the Paramana people. But thanks for this. I'll put it in the list, a serious conversations. I actually, I got a gift as well, um, which it might be too late now because, you know, my birthday is in like 3 days, uh, so my wife bought this, um, like a metal framing of Mastering Tech Growth, so I can put it on. Okay, I can put it on.

You're stuck there now. You have to—

yeah, here you go. So too much money to spend. It's, it's too late. Yeah. All right, so that was lovely, Pete. I mean, we covered so much, uh, from different angles, but overall everything's going to be in the show notes. So if people want to assess themselves for the sake of an argument, let's just see what behaviors you have. If you are a coach, a mentor, uh, you know, a teacher, uh, an advisor, that, that's so much value to get to the mentees you're dealing with for them doing that. If you are in any leadership position, a business owner, a CTO, tech leads, or whatever, just maybe putting that for your teams. So much value in understanding in general behavior assessments. And if you have any questions, everything's going to be in the show notes. Reach out to Promana people or Pete directly. Have that. It was lovely, Pete. Thank you for everything. Hopefully— well, hopefully it was lovely, but of course, thank you.

No, and thank you. We'll speak soon.