S2E2 Corey-osity Unleashed with Ben Morton

Welcome to Curiosity Unleashed, where we turn bold ideas into action and help businesses and leaders step it up.

We're your hosts, Debra and Ken, obsessed with fresh takes, bold moves, and shaking up the way we lead and work.

Alongside our amazing guests, we'll dive into the good, the bad, and the actual what the hell of the workplace, served with a side of sarcasm and a splash of wisdom.

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Hello everyone. And today we are absolutely excited to have Ben Morton as our guest. Now, we were guests on Ben's podcast. So what's that expression? Payback. I won't throw in the rest of the words, but payback. And we've been wanting to get into a conversation about the concept of AI and leadership. Now, I know you're a leadership guru, but you also are talking and using AI in a lot of ways that a lot of people aren't. So, we thought we would have a discussion about this important topic. So, welcome and thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. It's great to be returning the favor, as you say. Yeah.

Well, for those of you who do not have the privilege of knowing Ben, Ben is a leadership expert. You are a former British Army officer and founder of Ben Morton Leadership. You've had over 20 years' experience developing senior leaders, across global organizations such as Google, Samsung, AstraZeneca, great clients. And you're known for blending real-world leadership experience with psychological insight. I know I absolutely love that in what you talk about and what you do. You are a published author. You are, I mentioned the podcast, you are a podcast host. And what I love about what you do is you challenge conventional thinking and you equip leaders to perform Let me get this right, sustainably under pressure. Very, very important. And you focus on areas such as connection, resilience, and building cultures where people and performance thrive together. How's that? Did that explain you well enough?

Yeah, I'm not quite sure what to, what to say to that. I feel slightly under, under pressure now.

No, not at all. Not at all. Well, why don't we kick things off and, and understand a little bit about you. Okay. So it's always helpful to understand the journey that people have been on. So can you maybe tell us a little bit about your, your story and your journey and some of the experiences that you've had that shaped who you are and what you do now?

Yeah, absolutely. Let me give you the short condensed version. So if she was still here, bless her, my, my mom would probably tell you that I decided to join the army when I was 5 years old. I don't think it was quite that early, but it probably was by 10. I kind of had a strong inclination and feeling that that's what I wanted to do. And then as soon as I could, at 16, I left home and joined the Army to go to what was then the Army's Sixth Form College for those who wanted to go into one of the technical parts of the British Army. In a leadership capacity as an officer. So that was the start and really privileged to have started learning seriously about leadership from such an early age. But again, even going back to primary school, age, what, 8, 9, 10, I was always the kid who was trying to create some sort of club and building some sort of team spirit and giving out badges. So there was this sense of belonging. So it's always been core for me. So that was first career in the British Army, a graduate of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and then served 5 years kind of after leaving Sandhurst with 2 operational tours, tours of Iraq. Left the Army in around about 2006, and then for 7 years or so, did a number of sort of HR roles, a few kind of operational roles, but operational roles that kind of had one foot in the HR world. And that was quite interesting because my first job post-army was in an entrepreneurial business at that high-growth phase, getting ready for sale. So I experienced what it was like to work in a very entrepreneurial company. And then we suddenly got bought by Europe's largest travel company. So it was bought by TUI Travel. So I went from high-growth entrepreneurial business to being part of a massive PLC and kind of that whole transition, which was fascinating. Left there, briefly worked in the leadership academy at Tesco. Very quickly, actually not very quickly, it took me a long time to realize this, took me best part of 18 months to realize that I didn't fit Tesco and Tesco didn't fit me. And that gets us to about 2013. And at that point, I decided I was going to make the leap, although it was a leap with a safety net below me, that I went and joined a very small consultancy as the third partner, a leadership consultancy, worked with those for a number of years. And then I forget now, maybe 7 years ago, sort of stepped out completely independently. So I now have me doing the coaching, training, speaking, and a really great support team of sort of consultants and people working in the same way that I do, have been around me for years and really enjoy having the flexibility and freedom to do the work I love now with the clients I love, but at the same time having this virtual team around me who I know, like, trust, and really enjoy working with. So that's 46 years in a couple of minutes for you.

I love it. And I do love how you've gone in and out, tried different things, different experiences, because I think doing what you do, you can then bring that experience in. You don't have one way of seeing the world or seeing organizations. So yeah, thank you for that. Very interesting.

So Ben, in your article, Leadership in the Age of AI: Practical Tips and Guidance, you lay out how AI is automating routine tasks and shifting leaders' roles. What do you see as the core shift in what leaders need to focus on now that AI is doing more of the heavy lifting?

So, I think there's two things there, Ken. Like, one is, I think for many people in business, maybe of a certain generation, right? When we say AI, the mind just goes straight to ChatGPT or the likes, but actually, ChatGPT and LLMs or large language models, they're just one tiny part of this AI revolution that we're in. So, I mean, there's all sorts. There's like machine learning, there's computer vision, there's like some of the expert systems where we can outsource decision-making in a very narrow field. So, there's a lot to it, but for me, I think probably the most immediate and beneficial short-term win is around how we can get AI tools, agents, LLMs to do some of the low-value work that's important, but doesn't necessarily need much of a leader's unique brainpower, expertise, and experience. And what I think that enables us to do is start to put more focus back, more focus and time back onto leading. Okay. So there's a, there's a model I talk about with nearly every leader I work with. And again, people of a certain generation will get this. Um, I call it the leadership equalizer. So if you think about like an old fashioned stereo or music system, or, or think of a DJ's mixing deck, but on an old fashioned stereo, you always had the graphic equalizer with the 3 dials. It was bass, treble.

It just had little blinky lights. Oh yeah.

Yeah. And there was the bass, the treble, and the third one, no one ever really knew what the third one did, but you'd adjust them all to get the perfect sound. For leaders, there's a version of that. So, we tend to have 3 dials. There's like doing things, no matter what level we're working at, there's always practical stuff we have to do as a leader. You've then got managing things like budgets, resources, projects, timelines. And those two tend to get a lot of focus, right? Because we end up doing the stuff that we enjoy doing. It's often the stuff that got us promoted. So the doing dial gets pushed up. We'll always have some sort of target or bonus or KPI on the managing things dial. So that gets a lot of focus. Then you've got this third dial, which is leading people, which tends to not get that much focus because lots of people don't set out in work, they don't sit with their schools careers advisor and say, when I grow up, I want to be a leader. So because it's not what we set out wanting to do, maybe it doesn't get the attention it deserves. I don't know what your experience has been particularly, Deborah, but I still don't see that many organizations where leaders are assessed on how they lead. They're assessed on what they deliver. So again, in terms of the leadership dial, what doesn't get measured doesn't get done. And the ultimate outcome of that for me is that I see leaders end up leading in their spare time or leading when all the doing is done. And I think being able to outsource some of the lower value but important work to AI agents, other AI tools, if we're intentional about it and if we choose to and if we want to and if we understand what a leader's job really is, it should give us time back where we can crank up that leadership dial without simply having to work longer, harder, more hours, right? We can spend the time more wisely and be better leaders for the people we've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. For me, that's the big win of some of these tools.

As much as I agree with what you're saying there, Ben, I have to ask the question, How many people understand that knob that nobody knows what it's for? I mean, you hit it right on the, you hit the nail right on the head. Back in uni, you might get onto a career path that leads to CEO. You don't get on a career path that leads to leadership. You get on a career path that leads to specific job roles. And they teach you nuts and bolts. They might teach you methodologies or frameworks or whatever. But nobody talks about the people side of it. And my position on this is that without the people, we don't really have businesses anymore. No.

I mean, I've never done one. I'm not completely anti them. They are of great value, but take an MBA. The title explains what you just said, right? Master's in Business Administration. There's nothing about people in the title of an MBA. And actually, from the friends I know who've done them, the stuff that's focused about focused on leading people is quite small.

Yeah. And it's interesting because if you think about, I mean, I remember I wanted to be like the top of my career path and, you know, way back then I wanted it because of the prestige, the money. I thought when you get to the top, you could make all the decisions. You know, of course that doesn't really happen, but it wasn't to both of your points. I wanted to be it because at that point in time I loved leading people. I moved into that. And I really enjoyed it, but I think you're absolutely right. Too often, you know, we always say this, you promote the people who are good at doing and you don't assess whether or not they're good leaders. And it's interesting, I always share this story of how I kept trying to get Ken to be a leader because I just, I saw him and I heard him with other people and I thought, these are the competencies of a great leader. But he had to get to that point himself. And you should join because of that, which is a good transition into my question for you, moving away from AI for a second. What do you think are the competencies of a great leader? When you develop leaders, what are the things that you're helping them learn and grow and develop?

I don't really know how you define this as a competency. Competency, Deborah, and this is gonna come out in Ben Morton English rather than, uh, we like that, we like that, Queen's English. Can I swear?

Go for it. Yeah, at the beginning it says there will be, there may be a few swearing words, so go for it. I think you're for our first guest who's sworn, so yeah.

Yes, yes, it's not even close.

Well, you and I have, Ken, but I don't know about guests.

Giving a shit.

There you go.

Honestly, that's one of the main ones and it always has been for me. And again, that comes from starting my career in the military, but I think really truly caring about your people. Really sadly, about 2 and a half, 3 years ago, I lost my very best friend who I've known since 16 when I joined the army to suicide. And at his funeral, it was amazing. There were so many people there. He'd left the military a long time ago. So many of his old soldiers came, like his sort of second in command from his first job came. And I was chatting to him over breakfast the morning of the funeral. And a lot of army officers from soldiers can get a bit of a bad rap. Some of it's banter, some of it kind of is true and some founded in some truths. But he said, He said, yeah, Ben Gareth was a, was a great leader and a great officer because he gave a shit. He actually gave a shit about the, about the blokes. So I think, like, caring, caring about your people is, is fundamental. Um, moving away from that, I think another competency is being able to, um, step, step back and horizon scan, being able to find the time to sort of go from 40 feet to 40,000 feet and think about, okay, what's going on in the market, in the broader geopolitical situation? What are competitors doing? What new technology is coming at us and how are we orientated to respond to that? I think they're really key. I think the ability to, inspire and regulate your emotions is, is really key. Um, I think the ability to slow down and understand that not every decision needs to be made right now is, is key on a very practical level. And so practical level, so often I see, um, and hear stories of leaders coming on my programs where they're just sending out emails, delegating via email because something's come in. Like, I quickly got to get this off my list, quickly get this off my list. And because we're not actually pausing to think, what am I asking for? Is this clear? Do we even need to be doing this? Like teams, departments, entire organizations just end up like, it's a cliché, but being busy fools chasing their tails. Like there's some of the things that immediately come to mind for me, I think.

And do you know what I love about that? And I completely agree. I think they're all absolute competencies of a leader is going back to what you were talking about with AI. So often as leaders, we don't have time for that because we get thrown, going into the army, we get thrown in the trenches and we're doing it. I know I've had to do that before. I have to go in and help people with this really manual process because they're struggling because I'm the leader and I want to help them. So if we can have AI help us rise above that, because all the things that you're talking are more visionary, inspirational things that, you know, we as leaders need to do. Don't know your thoughts on that.

Well, absolutely, because all those things you've just listed, Deborah, those are the leadership elements. A lot of the other stuff is, is the management stuff. And we, we both, we absolutely need both, right? In an individual, we need to have some management competency and some leadership competency. The skill is knowing like where to shift those back to my leadership equalizer, right? Like it's moment by moment. It's not a perfect balance for a leader's dials. It's right now in order to achieve what we need to achieve and to support the people, where are my dials? What mode do I need to step into? And I think sadly, we're still in the place that we were in the 1980s, really, where there's such a heavy reliance on management theory, which if you really think about it, management theory was never designed to inspire and engage knowledge workers. It was designed to increase productivity in the industrial revolution in manufacturing. So we need to get back to more of a focus on leadership and at the same time, stop trying to pit the two. Disciplines against each other. I really get on my soapbox when I see any of the posts that crop up on LinkedIn where it says management versus leadership. And it might be a nuance of language, but the versus bit just suggests it's a competition or it's a fight, right? You have Tyson versus Fury in a boxing match. It's a fight. Like, it shouldn't be a fight between management and leadership, which is better. Like, we both We need both.

Yeah, it's interesting. One of the books that I wrote, I wrote it with my CEO and we created a model called the Engagement Bridge and there's 10 elements and one of them is leadership and one is management. And people used to give us a hard time. Why don't you just have one element, combine them? And to your point, they're very different. They're very, very different. So anyway, sorry, Ken, I had to throw that one in.

What struck me when you were talking there, Ben, is that almost all those elements that you said are for leadership, you don't have to be a CEO. You don't have to be on the senior leadership team. You don't even have to be a manager to do most of those. You know, being able to see at distance and manage your emotions and all that stuff, everybody should be practicing those things from day one. Totally. I think that the problem of management versus leadership comes when people pin their whole value on the title and they get all stuck into the framework of the management and they don't want to pay any attention to all those other things. And that's, it's a real shame. It's really out of whack when that happens. We do have to move on though to the next question. In your writing, you emphasize 6 key considerations for leaders in the AI age. Can you share these with us and explain which you believe most leaders underestimate or neglect and why?

Yeah. So I guess before I answer that, what I would say is just to reiterate, I'm not an AI expert. If you look compared to most people, maybe I'm one of the early adopters. I'm very curious about it. I'm using it a lot in my business and I'm very interested on this intersection between AI and and leadership. So, kind of the article that you referenced was very much some of my emergent thinking when I start to think about how I'm using it, how I'm hearing about other leaders using it. So, there's just some considerations really as we start to see more AI tools creeping into the workplace. Maybe we'll end up speaking a little bit more on a few, but One of them is around critical thinking and nearly all of these 6 areas, there's an upside and a potential downside to them, which I think is what's so interesting. So critical thinking is really interesting, right? And I think like most things, like if you don't use it, you lose it. So AI tools, ChatGPT is a great example. It can really help us with critical thinking, right? But at the same time, if we're always just defaulting to ChatGPT to help us make important decisions, then I've done some study in neuroscience, then the neural pathways of our own that we use for critical thinking, if we're not using them, they will start to weaken. Those neural pathways become weaker. It's a bit like if you walk across a field, right, on a dewy day, if you keep walking across it, you're going to wear the grass away and you're going to see a path. If people stop walking across that, the grass is going to grow back. That's a good metaphor for these neural connections. So if we're not maintaining an ability to think critically ourselves, then we're going to lose it. But AI can absolutely help us. What I find tends to work is Give the context, ask the question, say, here's what I think, challenge me on this. So you're doing a bit of the work first, works really well. So critical thinking is one interesting area. The other area, again, particularly with LLMs that I find fascinating for leaders is how it can enhance or weaken our ability to communicate? So this is a really interesting one for me. Having built Ben AI, my own AI clone, I get to see the backend and lots of the prompts that people are putting into LLMs, right? And it's fascinating. And again, what springs to mind is something that people in IT working in data have said for many years, that if you put crap in, you'll get crap out. Okay. So often I see really poorly crafted prompt statements going into large language models, and then people are surprised when what they get out isn't very useful. And I think this is partly why you hear some people saying, oh yeah, I've tried using ChatGPT or Claude, and just what it gave me was rubbish. I could have done it better myself. Well, what was your prompt? Would always be my question. But this is where I think there's a real win and a real risk with large language models in particular. So I think on the one hand, if you get really good as a leader at providing great prompts, here's ultimately what I'm trying to achieve, here's the context, here's what I want you to do, or here's my specific request, the act of slowing down, being able to communicate written, or you could type to, you could talk to ChatGPT, right? But that process of thinking, okay, what am I trying to achieve? What am I asking? Is this clear? Not only will you get better results from the AI tool you're using, but you're also starting to train your brain to think really clearly. And then you can translate that and you can start to communicate with your team of humans more clearly, more effectively, giving them clearer clearer direction. So that's the win. But the downside is, if we just get quite lazy when we're using ChatGPT a lot, put in vague, unclear prompts, maybe even to the degree of which we are polite with it, right? I will always talk to ChatGPT very politely. Please, thank you. I even ask it how it is a lot of the time. Now, I know it's just a computer system and code. But that's really important for me. Partly I'm hedging my bets in case it ever becomes sentient and takes over the world. I want to do my part. Yeah, I want it on my side and doing my best to teach it and show it the best side of humanity. But there's a serious point to that. Basically, if we just get really brutal direct with tools like ChatGPT, I have a fear that that's how we end up again, because of how the brain works. That's how we end up speaking to the people in our business, and we can start to dehumanize kind of leadership. So they're two of the six that are particularly important to me, I think.

No, those are fantastic. What occurs to me though is my attitude towards AI is that it should always be treated like that incredibly overeager, knowing nothing kid who just graduated from uni yesterday.

Right? You wouldn't—

who's desperate to please, who's desperate to please, will tell you anything, will agree with anything that you say and is, is, it thinks it's all so cool. You would never hand them the keys to the business. Don't ever hand the keys to the business to AI in exactly the same way. And I, I love your analogy of, uh, uh, use being polite to AI because it's a muscle for us to use. Yeah. Um, that, that whole, uh, critical thinking of, of of being able to frame the problem and provide context and ask the right question and give maybe some breadcrumbs that work so well for AI really helps with people. I just love that right down to the ground.

Yeah. To your point, Ken, around never giving your young eager graduate the keys to the business, that's one of the other points I wrote about in that article, which is really focusing on sort of ethical leadership, thinking about the values and the ethics. And in a similar way to that young intern who's just started, you're never going to share with them probably a lot of very personal HR data. You're never going to use them as a mentor to talk about a really sensitive, challenging conversation you've got to have with somebody, right? Or at least you wouldn't do it without anonymizing it totally. So that's another thing I think we need to be be wary of. And again, especially tools like ChatGPT, it's being built in exactly the same way as all the social media platforms around the psychology of addiction, right? ChatGPT wants us to keep using it. So it will try and please us and it will, it'll get us addicted to it where we can think, oh, I just asked ChatGPT, I just asked that. And before we know it, because we're not slowing down to think, suddenly we start dropping confidential information in there about individuals or the business, and we don't yet know what the risk is of that, right? We just don't know yet.

It's too early. Just to digress just a moment, we do know there were some folks in labs in Samsung back in the early ChatGPT days who, right, they had put in some sensitive documents in there and someone else recreated them and that information got out. Now this was, I think, in the days before ChatGPT let you tick that box that says, don't use my prompts to train whatever. But who's to say that they're gonna respect that tick box when I've selected it and said, don't try? Who knows what happens to that data when I send it off into the cloud?

Exactly, yeah, yeah. Very good segue into my next question because we've got AI and we've talked about what it can do. What are your thoughts on what we should keep it away from when it comes to leadership? What should we not use AI to do and should never be delegated to AI when it comes to being a leader?

That's a really tough question. And you shared that with me before. And it's one of those questions where I kind of, when I read it, thought, oh, that should be quite easy and obvious. But I think it's a hard one to answer, actually. My gut feel is And this probably comes from my start point with leadership. So I think we should never outsource decisions to it where it is directly going to start to impact like human beings, their welfare, their wellbeing. Like that's when I think we start to get on quite quite shaky, shaky ground because we start to lose the human in the loop bit. We know a lot of these tools are like that kid who's eager to please. Even with great prompts, it's not going to know some of the nuance. And I think in doing it, we can start to ourselves become separated from the fact we're using it to make decisions that are going to affect human beings. It's like we might be typing away on a computer program, but actually this is going to affect a human being who's got a family and friends and loved ones. So I think there's, I think we need to be very mindful of that. And without avoiding the question of specifics, I think one of the things we need to to be doing, which plays into this question, is actually starting to get better at risk assessment as leaders, like both the formal, but the sort of in the moment, which is a mountain, mountaineering instructor, I'd call the dynamic risk assessment. So constantly thinking, okay, what is the risk here? How do I mitigate it? Is it worth it? Just that getting much better at that very quick in the moment risk assessment. And thinking like, is the sort of reward worth the effort? Yeah, thinking two steps ahead. Yeah, and I'm pulling on a few different threads here, but as well, it's very easy sometimes to end up wasting time on AI. Like you start doing a tool that you think is going to be brilliant at, and before you know it, you've spent an hour, you've got something that's complete rubbish, and you think, I could have just done that myself much better in 30 minutes.

Yeah. But it's interesting bringing the two of the things that you spoke together. I, you know, I see synergies in, I can remember being in board meetings and I'd have all this really great data, whether it came from AI or research or whatever it is. And it's what you do with the data, how you think about how it's gonna impact the people. What are those 1, 2, 3 steps ahead that it's gonna impact people? And I 100% agree, as a leader, we can't just take this information and just willy-nilly use it. We need to use our human aspects of our, you know, people call it people-first approach. I'm gonna call it the Ben Morton give a shit approach. So yeah, you need the give it, there's our next t-shirt, Ken. You need the give a shit approach for that one. Absolutely. Now thanks for that. That is a tough question because I do find like even just like what people are using AI for, like I heard some, company told me how they use AI to, um, counsel employees because the employee felt more comfortable telling their mental health problems to a computer than to a person. And I don't want to get into that today, but it's interesting how different people are pushing the boundaries, whether it's working or not working.

Yeah, like, again, I know you don't want to get into that, but again, with that, I'd say, like, but where's the human in the loop bit? So if, if that flag something where there's a, you go, the individual might go, there's a real risk here. There's a real risk to this individual's kind of well-being. I don't know how good some of those AI tools are at spotting and flagging that.

You know, AI has no conscience, right? Unless you tell it to forecast or foreshadow or think ahead, it's not going to. It's going to autocomplete and finish out whatever sentence it's autocompleting. So I would never say that we should be machine first in counseling. I would never do that ever. Because what a red flag it is that people in an organization are more willing to talk to an AI than to a human in the organization.

Putting a plaster on a problem. It's putting the plaster on the problem that you don't feel comfortable enough talking to your leader. You don't trust them. But again, that can be for another episode. There we go. We'll bring in some people who are using it. We'll get the he said, she said approach. That'd be a good debate.

Right. Okay. So the next question, if leaders are not using AI, why should they use AI? What impact does it have if they don't when many other people are?

That's a massive question as well, right? It's massive. This isn't my phrase, but so many people are saying this now. It's the same phrase has been used probably with every big technological revolution, right? And it's a variation of, you're not going to lose your job to AI, you'll lose your job to someone using AI. So the leaders of the future, the leaders who are still around, the successful leaders in Air Commerce, will be the ones who are right now curious and experimenting and playing around with AI, right? I absolutely believe that as leaders, we need to maintain that childlike curiosity, keep an open mind, growth mindset, beginner's mindset, all of those things, and be exploring. Because if we don't, we'll get left behind as a leader and our organizations will get left behind. So I think we, yeah, ignore it as a leader at your absolute peril. Absolutely. And I mean, linked to that as well, if you say, people in our organization aren't allowed to use it, we don't allow AI, people will be using it. People will be secretly using it on, there'll be ChatGPT on their own phone if you've banned it. So people are using it anyway. So you might as well get on the front foot and embrace it, because certainly the younger generation who are growing up with it, they will be using it a lot. So to try and stick our head in the sand with it is really dangerous. I think if you haven't touched it at all, probably my start point for it would be just go and set yourself up with a paid ChatGPT account or a Claude account and just start experimenting, asking it some very simple questions on some very simple, simple tasks. And again, stay, stay really curious. Like I've learned a lot about it just by following threads and reading stuff on, on LinkedIn. And before you know it, you, by no means am I an expert, but I think I'm pretty good at understanding how they work and prompts now. And it doesn't, Doesn't take a lot.

Doesn't take a lot. Doesn't. And I have to say, if you are starting out from scratch, if anybody who's listening to this decides to take up a ChatGPT account, and you can get them for free.

Yeah.

You don't have to pay for them. Yeah. And you don't know what to do. You're sitting there and there's a blinky prompt looking at you like, okay, now what are you gonna type? Ask ChatGPT to explain itself. Ask ChatGPT to tell you how to learn it. It'll hold your hand and walk you all the way through it. But one of the comments you'd made earlier, I wanted to circle back just briefly. I do think we need to use AI, but we also must not hide behind AI. You were talking about using a spreadsheet, I believe, at that point. But, you know, people don't hide behind the fact that we used to use typewriters in the office. To make decisions. If I'm going to have to lay people off, it's because I've made a decision we have to do this. If I— if, if, you know, we're going to have to take some action, it's not because ChatGPT told me, it's not because AI told me, it's because I, as the leader of an organization, have made a decision that this is the right step. Now, the—

it's—

the responsibility is on me. Now, where I got my information, um, that, that, that's kind of down to me, but, but the decision, the responsibility for it is all me.

Yeah, totally. And what we can then do as well, um, is get it to help us understand like the, the impact of that decision. And when we're communicating it, what, what might I have missed? Right? Yeah. Yeah. So very, very simple, simple example. Um, for the first time ever, I'm just launching my first open leadership program where individuals or small businesses can send people on. And as part of a corporate program, I normally create a welcome pack that gives people all the information they need, a bit of introduction to the program and myself. So I've been creating one of those for this new open program. Kind of, it's written myself. It always has been written myself, but I went to my ChatGPT account, gave it a good brief, some good context, a lot of background and purpose, and said, here's the welcome pack for my upcoming program. What else might learners need to know that I've forgotten? And there was a couple of really good things. I went, ah, yeah, brilliant. And then I built that into it. That's where I think it's useful. You use it to build on and enhance what you've already done. Rather than get it to start things from scratch. That's where I have found it's working really well for me, my team, and my business. And I think if you do it that way, you maintain the integrity of your business, your thinking, your intellectual property, I think.

Oh yeah, using it as a foil, as a counterpoint, as a critic of your work is fantastic because it does often come up with things that Oh, that never even occurred to me.

I love that, Ben.

Yeah.

And what got me thinking about that, Ken, just to be explicitly clear, was when you're saying don't hide behind it. So if we've got some bad news or a tough decision to break to the business, being careful about what you put in, obviously, but you could say, look, here's the decision I need to communicate. Here's the main points about how I'm going to communicate it. Thinking about these different people in my organization, this is a little bit about us, the journey we've been through. What might I be missing that people are going to want to know? What might people leave being concerned about? And if your brain doesn't naturally think that way, then that's going to be a great help, right? It's just augmenting your team with the different skill sets that you might not have.

So, it's interesting. So, we'll be asking you at the end for your key takeaway, but I think just in hearing what the two of you have been talking about, I think that if people are not using it as a way to be curious, and I do think as humans, as leaders, we've lost a lot of our curiosity because everything has been so black and white. You get your HR manual, you get your finance manual, and we've lost our curiosity. And I know I use AI to enhance my curiosity. So I think if people can think of it as your curiosity partner, I think that's huge. We are almost outta time and I just wanna make sure I say—

Wow, that's gone so quick.

I know, I know. Sorry about that. But you mentioned Ben AI, and I just want to go back to it and just make sure that our listeners know what it is. So, you can tell us a little bit about why did you create it and what it is?

Because yeah, I want to learn more about it myself. Yeah. So, very quickly, it came from a few areas. One is out of curiosity. I started seeing and hearing about a few people around the world who basically cloned themselves. And so, oh, that's interesting. I started to wonder how does it work? And then that came together with the fact that you'll be familiar with this, certainly Deborah, there's research that's decades old now around how people remember and retain knowledge after any sort of learning events called the Ebbinghaus curve, right? And for most people, 30 days after a workshop, people remembered about 10%. And I've always just thought, That's just ridiculous. And in all my programs, I've always done a lot of follow-up stuff to try and raise that number up. And that's really where Ben AI came from because it's an AI clone, but it's trained and learned purely from my content. So basically every podcast I've ever done where it's me talking to my IP, every blog article, video, toolkit, All of that goes into this AI kind of tool. So when people have been on a workshop with me or been one-to-one coached with me or been to a presentation or a keynote, they can go and ask Ben AI questions and it will answer pretty much like I would. It's scarily, scarily good. You can even talk to it. It's learned because I've got so much audio content I've created. It's learned my voice. Like I can notice a difference. Most people say it just sounds like you. Um, so it's just a great follow-on tool for people who have worked with me. It's not going to give you the really generic answers that ChatGPT might. It's going to give you an answer based on me.

So it's just super cool. That is brilliant.

I love that. And not a little freaky too, because I wouldn't want to, I don't know if I'd want to really go in-depth conversation with a clone of myself because what if I lose the argument? Yeah. So unfortunately, I think we are sort of at the end of our time here. Now, because this is Curiosity Unleashed, we always like to ask the question, what's one idea, question, or truth you'd love our listeners to take with them?

So what do you got for us? I'll leave you with one. One truth, which is really important to me, not so much about AI, but it's why I do the work that I do. So it's the fact, the truth that I believe, and truth is always subjective, right? We have our own truths. But for me, the truth is that a leader's job is to support, develop, and look after the people we have the privilege and responsibility to lead so that they can deliver the results we're accountable for.

That's it for me. Absolutely. I love that. Thank you very much, Ben.

Deb? Yeah, I was just going to say, and I love that because I think it's a shift on traditional. Who, where is the focus? Where is the intent? Who are you trying to help? You're not trying to help yourself. You're trying to help them. So yeah, no, love that. The last one is a really simple question. So people, I'm sure, have been inspired by what you're trying to say. They want to learn more. So what's the best way to contact you and follow your work and the different things that you do?

Two. Number one, LinkedIn is where I'm most active on social media. So, you can just find me Ben Morton Leadership or my website, which has got loads of kind of free resources on there, which is just ben-morton.com.

Well, thank you very much. We really enjoyed this conversation. Again, we might need to have you come back and maybe pick one of those more controversial. We were a little bit safe with AI today, but I'm sure, you know, maybe we should do it later in the day with a beer or wine and, you know, really shake things up.

But yeah, I'd love to. Yeah, I'd love to talk about human connection.

There you go. All right. You heard that.

You're coming back.

All right. That's awesome. That's a deal.

Take care, guys. Great to see you both again.

Bye.

Bye.

And that's a wrap on this episode of Curiosity Unleashed. Huge thanks to our amazing guests and of course to you for tuning in.

We hope you picked up some useful tips. And hey, if this episode sparked a minor existential crisis because you realized, oops, you might be guilty of this at your company, don't panic.

We've got your back. From consulting and leadership workshops to our one-of-a-kind 360-degree feedback tool, we're here to help you and your leaders step it up.

Let's keep the conversation going. Connect with us on LinkedIn, visit stepitup.com, stepituphr.com, subscribe to the podcast, or drop us a line at info@stepituphr.com. Together we can make work work for our people, our leaders, and our businesses.

So until next time, stay curious, stay bold, and keep unleashing that curiosity.