Leading Through AI: Clarity Over Chaos with Dessalen Wood

You're listening to One Sharp Sword, cutting through to what matters most with Outfluencer, Dr. Wayne Pernell. Welcome to One Sharp Sword, cutting through to what matters most. I'm Dr. P, Dr. Wayne Pernell, your host, guide, and coach on this journey to Today I'm delighted to welcome Desilene Wood. Desilene has over 25 years of leadership experience in HR, talent development, and organizational culture. She's held executive roles in some major organizations and name brands I'm certain you'd recognize. Today she'll give us her rare blend of clarity, candor, and real-world leadership insight, especially in a time when technology is evolving faster than most leaders can comfortably track. She has a way of cutting through noise, grounding big ideas into practical truth, and helping leaders ask the only question that really matters: What does this mean for me right now? That's the question any of us could ask at any point. Let's dive in. Deslin, Welcome to One Sharp Sword.

That sounds like the best introduction I've ever had, and I'm really excited to have this conversation, especially the part about being full of candor around what's happening today.

Oh, that's awesome. Well, that's why I have you here. You speak the truth, you speak it clearly, and you speak it in a way that I think people can receive it. You know, you push in a way that says Over this way. It's really great. It really actually, it defines cutting through to what matters most. It's great. Let's start this. You've said that leaders need to constantly ask, what does this mean for me right now? I love that question. My world is, as you know, background in clinical psych and overlaid with coaching and consulting. And I love questions that dive into values and sort of the existential dilemma. What does it mean for me right now? How should leaders answer this question when the answers keep changing?

That's, you know, I think that's the whole point of why we try to look at what is being asked of me today when it comes to leading my team. All we read about is the future. And the futures that were being presented right now are pretty dire. I'm going to say, I mean, I think that that's unfortunately whether it's your weather app or whether it's articles about the future of work, articles about everything that's going on in the world. It looks like everything is about to blow up and that nothing that we believe that happens today will be happening tomorrow. And for leaders, that's tough because we're supposed to be grounding our teams in a kind of, in a vision and a purpose and a direction. And if we're questioning the value of the work we're doing or whether it will even be relevant in the next few months or few years. We're going to bring that to the workplace. And what I often think about is what do I know to be true today? And in fact, what I know to be true today doesn't actually reflect what I read about in the media at all. There is so much work going on. There are tons of open roles. The search for talent is, I would say, remarkably similar to what it's been in the past years. So in fact, the present currently doesn't look like what we're talking about but we're acting like we're living in it already. And I find that can be pretty challenging to have as a reality. The world that we're in right now doesn't look like the world we're talking about, but we're acting like we're living there already.

It's very fear-based, right? It's the— there's so much uncertainty and we don't know what's coming. And turnovers, you know, somewhere like regrettable turnover is at 65%. Is it right? And, and it has been, or it hasn't been. And is that something you planned for or not? And, and so what you're saying, what do I know to be true today, is very grounding. Um, and, and I think what goes with that is how do you communicate that? How do you communicate kind of where you are versus where you're going? And where have you seen that go great, and where have you seen that sort of blow up on the leaders?

Well, you know, I think this idea that, you know, we're questioning what roles are going to be relevant and what skills people are going to need. And what you really see here is that with automation, you know, you'll see two different camps. One will say that it's tasks that are being automated and therefore roles will start to transform to no longer have those tasks and likely have other ones. And then you have another camp that says entire jobs and fields will be decimated because we're going to be replaced by AI. So, if you think those are two very different narratives. One is you need to be keeping up with the technology and understanding how you're going to add value differently when certain tasks go away. And the other one is like, get ready for a fixed income because you're going to be unemployed and that's the future. So, you know, you're going to prepare for those two realities very differently. One, you're just going to crawl away and feel depressed and fearful. And the other one is you're going to want to adopt the newest technology quickly and be really proactive as to what else you're going to be doing with your time. And I really look at that A as the one that we're supposed to be thinking of, I would say, in place of having a lot of discussions of what are we going to do with our workforce when we no longer need them. And the effort in thinking of the post-work era when we don't need anybody versus the effort in how do we reinvent a role when these tasks go away take two different kinds of energies and two different kinds of perspectives. And those are the competing perspectives right now. So, what I'm looking at when I'm talking to leaders is the perspective that I'm taking now is what tasks do we see changing and what other work will be done in place of those tasks so we add more value. And I'm not even really visiting the other side of it because to me, that's an imagined emergency that has not occurred.

I love that. I'm a big one for the appropriate slash correct use of imagination. Imagination, and that is energy. And when you put your imagination to use, it could be to step into this sense of, wow, it's going to be amazing, or it could be to step in this— into this sense of the world is imploding and we're all gonna die and Somewhere between the two is the likely reality. Eventually, we're all going to die, but in our own time. AI is not going to do that to us. We do need to be looking at, as with any tech, I think, right? When we take on any new tech, you know, the horse and buggy was replaced by automobiles. Oh no, you know, and typewriters were replaced by computers. Oh no, what happened to the steno pool? And, you know, so now we're looking at how does AI enhance the work we do? And I think that that's a really important question. And so I just, I love that you're you're going to what do we know and what roles will we create, right? That's a big one. Yeah. Where do you see in AI adoption, there is resistance, there's a reluctance to take it on by some people, other people are like, no, you know, I've done, I'm doing all the studies I can, I still feel behind. We're all going to feel behind because, you know, it's growing faster than we can keep up. That's fine. That's what we know. The other side of that is there's resistance. And I'm wondering, one, if you feel it, and two, what you think is behind that resistance.

You know, I think resistance, you know, whenever something is new, it's not going to be adopted universally. If you think of anything that's happened or changed in the world, there's the early adopters who are willing to work with something that's imperfect. There are the people who go along in the middle, which is when everyone's doing it, I guess I'll do it. Then, there are people who are nostalgic and tend to hold on to old paradigms. And just think of anything in the world and that's what you're going to find. And so, I don't think AI is that different in that the early adopters have more patience and I think more perspective that just because it's not working perfectly doesn't mean that it's never going to work. And those are the people who tend to test and try. And then, they teach people like me, you know, here's the best way to use it. What I find is interesting with AI and maybe why you're hearing a lot of people resist is we're asking everybody to be an early adopter. Meaning, everyone needs to learn it before we've actually figured out the best way to use it. And therefore, you have a lot more noise that this is not relevant. It doesn't work. It's broken. And I think it creates more of a sense of resistance because my experiences haven't been positive. And if there's one thing, I'm a huge fan of situational leadership. When something's hard, we tend to quit it. We're like, you know what? I don't need that. Why? Because we like things to be easy. And so, I do think some of the noise we hear about AI resistance is because we're pushing a technology that still is buggy to everyone and saying, use it. And they're pushing back and saying it doesn't. I'd say that's group 1. Then, we have group 2 that's reading and hearing that I'm teaching it to take my job so it'll eventually replace me. Now, this is not actually a new thing to think about. I don't know if you remember times where you would hire somebody on on a team of one expert and you'd say, 'Train that person.' And they would say, 'Well, I don't want to train them to do my job because then what's going to happen to me?' And that's the scarcity mentality. And we've had that around as long as we've been human, which is we can either think of an extra tool or an extra person meaning, 'Great, more is going to get done,' or we can see that extra person or extra tool as, 'It's going to take what's mine.' And so, that narrative isn't a new narrative. The problem is the media is feeding that narrative really hard right now. Which is every time you interact with your AI tool, you're making yourself not needed. Imagine if you hired a team and you told the leader every time you work with that team, you're less needed. And some leaders actually still function like that. They hold on information to stay relevant. So, I do think that it's an interesting thing that we're acting as if people resisting giving their learning to something else that could replace it is new. It's actually not. It's the scale that it's happening. And I think the media feeds that piece. You could challenge me that it's true that what we are teaching it will replace us. It will replace the thing that we've taught it to do, just like when you delegate anything to somebody, they eventually take it over. The question is what happens next? And I think leaders need to really focus with their teams on what happens after you no longer have to do that thing that either a new team member's doing or technology's doing. What are you doing next?

Nice. Um, that's really great. That's really great. I'm, I'm making notes and, and, um, that's really interesting. The— we could go into a situational leadership kind of teaching module at this point. We, we don't need to. What you've talked about is level 2, where people lose their, uh, their sense of competence and their sense of confidence as a result of running into this wall, which is really interesting. I too am a fan of the Situational Leadership Model, among other things, right? So it fits into all the consulting.

It works every time.

It's really interesting, you know, and it works in parenting and it works in pretty much any engagement. The piece about while it might take over what you're currently doing, you ask a really good question, which is, if that's true, then what's next for me? Versus, oh my gosh, that's true, and, and since I don't have anything else to do, that's the only part of my world. My world is being taken over. That part is not true. And right, like, our worlds are so much bigger as humans than, uh, you know. And, and I, I love what you said about the media. You basically said the media feeds our fear. That's how they get eyeballs, right? That's how they get us to watch and watch more. And that's what sucks us into social media as well, is, you know, fear or outrage. So I think we need to be attuned to that. I think culturally, also internally in any organization, we need to be attuned to that. I loved how you took the idea of AI and said, look, if any team felt like you were teaching them something and they would take it over, you would stop teaching them. And so you hoard information. That was— I'm reiterating it because I, I really want our audience to be thinking about this, that it's, it's like you wouldn't hoard information from somebody you wanted to help you grow. And that's what this tool does. So I love that. How do you help people feel like, or what can a leader do to design a change that feels winnable? Because I think that part of what keeps people resisting AI adoption is this sense of, I can never master it, therefore, right? That, yeah. So, so how do you, how do you help a leader feel like they can actually lead a charge that feels winnable And there's a part 2 to this, which is, and you can challenge this because my belief is that the leader doesn't actually have to be the one with mastery in AI. The leader has to be the one with the kind of strategic vision. And while they need some competence, they don't need full-on just like knowing it at a situational leadership level 4. They don't need that, right?

So, well, you know, Wayne, you'll find this interesting. I was doing a talk, I think started last year, around AI enablement. And, you know, why is it, why is it seeming so hard for organizations to wrap their head around upskilling, this famous word we're using right now, or reskilling, or whatever skilling word you want to use? And the issue was that we're talking to people about how do you become a person who can rethink your own productivity, who can redo your own workflows and create your own agents. And if you were to really define that level of skill, it would be closer to the— I wouldn't say necessarily expert, but like a high intermediate, low expert. And if you look at any other kind of technology, whether it be like even Outlook, Excel, Salesforce, any of these, and you look at what percent of users are super users versus average users versus very basic users and you have about 30-35%, 40% basic users, about maybe 50% average, and only about 10% are experts. So, you know, right now I would tell you if you opened up my Outlook, you probably see I have 1,000 unread messages. I know that's terrible. I don't— there's no folders. I have no logic to it. But that doesn't mean that I might be made irrelevant. So, we have technologies now as leaders that we're aware of and we all have a super user on our team, the super admin. Of your HRIS or your systems. You're not that person. You're completely right. In fact, you shouldn't be the only person who can fix the photocopier. I'm using a very old analogy from my youth. You know, the CEO shouldn't be changing the color printer, right? But they should know that we need a color printer and they should know that we need somebody who can service it. And so, when I think of technology in our team, we definitely need a certain number of super users. But generally, it's always been only a small number. Now, AI has this problem right now that we're talking about successful AI use at a very high level of use. So, the barrier to entry seems quite high because everyone's supposed to know how to use it in this optimal way already. And I think that turns people off and scares people. And it can even make a leader more obsessed with their own AI knowledge and less focused on what the AI roadmap should be for their team. So to me, again, these are competing priorities. I can say myself, I'm not the best person with AI on my team. In fact, part of my enablement strategy was for every team to name the champion, the expert, and to ensure that that person had that level and not to try to focus the entire department on becoming experts, more have them focus on that intermediate level use.

That's amazing. That's really well said. I think there is an expectation, at least I feel it, that, you know, I should already know how to do this. AI has been out, AI has been around. And oh, you're using ChatGPT wrong. Oh, you're still using ChatGPT. Why aren't you using, you know, these other 6 things? And it's like, oh, oh, oh, right? And there is this sense of, am I being judged for using something that's old and older? Or, I mean, it still works for me. Or who cares if I'm being judged? Or wow, what else is out there? And there's all these questions. So in terms of doing AI right, is there like a metric? Is there a way of saying Yeah, yeah. You know what? Either I as an individual or my super champion as an individual or my organization, we're doing AI right. Is there any way of saying, yay us, yay me?

Well, I think the definition of that changes depending on where we are in our— in the AI journey for different organizations and people. And you know that the measure that the ultimate measure that an organization looks at is if it's impacting the bottom line. And impacting the bottom line is something from an HR perspective. I've always been in learning and development. We were always terrified about somebody saying, 'Can you find a way to take what you just taught us all on leadership and show me the bottom line result from it?' And so, it's an interesting one because this is something that's challenging to do, which is how do you measure it? And generally, I think in a productivity tool, which I'm using AI as a role transformation productivity tool, you should be able to measure how much less time something's taking you. And then be able to show where that benefit is in your bottom line. Is it that I don't need to hire another person even though our business is growing at 10% because that productivity gain? Or am I able to show a new service that I'm giving as a result of that productivity gain? To me, that would be like the most clean and classic way to measure success. Now, not everybody's there yet. So, some people's way of measuring success is the rate of adoption of a tool. How many people are using it? How often are they using it? And how reliably are they using it? So, if you're at a maybe not as mature a stage to measure the bottom line, you just might be measuring activity, right? And then, back to your resistance thing, you might be using different kinds of sentiment. How open are people to the tool I'm about to introduce? So, you know, depending on where you are in your journey, you probably have different measurements for whether you are at the level of impact you want. But I would say the ultimate impact from any new technology is that it's either bringing you new services or it's reducing the cost of your current one. Like, that's just plain old economics.

It's a great way to be thinking about it, right? Is it less time? Fewer people need to be hired? New services? Positively impacting the bottom line? Or are you just measuring activity?

I love that. That's the same for any kind of training. I used to say, do you just measure how many people went? Do you measure how happy they were? Or do you measure an actual behavior change? The third one's hard. Activity is a much easier one. Happiness is a much easier one. Impact is a harder one. And I think that that's the same for any tool. Any tool that you're looking to purchase, they always show you all the ways it's going to benefit your bottom line. But many times organizations have trouble doing that math afterwards.

And it's only correlational. There's no way to make it absolutely causal. This happened, therefore this happened. It's sort of, you know, for me, the big correlation that I use to explain correlation is that people get really bad sunburns when they eat ice cream.

Yeah, right.

It's like, no, ice cream consumption goes up in the summer and people are outdoors more in the summer, therefore sunburns happen from being outdoors. But people look at, you know, this happens, therefore this happens. And so, you know, the training happened and then this team had a really bad issue, or this team suddenly took off, was either of those expressions, did either of those happen as a result of the training or were things brewing anyway, right?

Yes.

We won't know. That's— it really is hard to measure.

It's hard to measure how any one thing can show its pure impact on its own. And I think when we're talking about AI adoption specifically, you know, leaders— and you said, what should leaders be thinking of right now is What am I expecting my team to be doing on a consistent basis that will over time, as we get better and better at it, result in us no longer having to spend this much time on something that I never really thought was that important but had to happen. And now, we're spending time differently. And I think if you can articulate that, then you probably have a pretty good use case. And instead of thinking I have multiple, you could say, alright, these are 3 things that we no longer do as a result of the way we've chosen to go with automation. And we're doing this instead. What's happening in most is, I would say, more like the machine gun approach where everybody's just doing everything everywhere. We have no idea what's going on. And that's harder to measure because we're looking for great ideas to come from everything. But in there, that becomes harder to measure and harder to see a consistent gain. I'll just bring one example. When I came to Syntax, we had many companies from a lot of different integrations and we had multiple systems, HCM systems. And therefore, you could maybe because we're a global company, have to enter a new hire 12 places because we had 12 systems.

They didn't—

they weren't all integrated. We went down to one integrated system. So in that, you could say, okay, now we just onboard people into one system. That reduces all the errors and duplicates because if you spell their name slightly differently or change their email, they exist in 3 different places. This is obviously a big problem. So now you could say, well, as a result of that, and I think of this kind of like tooth pain, so go with me here. When you have a toothache, it's that you can't think of anything else because it's so painful every day. You're wrong, but you don't wake up on a regular day and say, my teeth feel great this morning. It's great, right? So we don't feel— no, we don't notice absence of pain. We just notice pain. So if you were to say to me now, 3 or 4 years later, how is your HCM doing? I'd be like, I never thought about it. I don't have to think about it because I no longer am going into 12 places and making duplicate of everybody and having the wrong email in 3 spots. So, I think AI over time will be eliminating some of these habits we have, these pains that we just suffer through. And they just won't be here anymore and we'll be doing something else. And it won't be something we're talking about because it'll just be integrated into our systems. But right now, we're talking about it as if it itself is the project, not the outcome of the reduction of all those activities that result in better use of time. If that makes sense.

It makes total sense. You know, the, the absence of pain is what we consider normal.

Yeah.

Right. And, and so when we can get back to whatever feels normal next.

Yeah.

Great. This, for example, just doing a, uh, a Zoom conference that was, that was reasonable. Prior to— reasonable— prior to COVID. When COVID locked us all in, this was the only way of connecting, was online through whatever platform. And, um, and now it's the way. It's just—

I could give you even a funnier one. Not funnier, actually. I shouldn't— it's not funny at all. Okay, so like, anybody who's listening to that, just know that I did not mean to say funny. I remember watching Funny, odd, ironic, ironic. For me, irony is funny. I'm sorry, it's just because I love to tell stories and I love the fundamental silliness of humanity. But it's a funny thing. So prior to COVID, there was the movie, I think it was Up in the Air with George Clooney. And his place is he's a consultant and he fires people. And anyway, anyone who flies for work a lot like I do and also has those conversations really related to that movie.

Did that almost bring you to tears?

So great.

How many flight miles do I have? Oh no.

Yeah, your whole life is points. I totally relate. But here's what I would say. There's a scene towards the end of the movie which is actually quite dark where a company is cutting funds and doesn't fly him to a location, and he terminates somebody via Zoom, and that person does subsequently commit suicide. I don't know if you know this in the movie. Right. And it's actually awful and it's terrible and it shows how the inhumanity of things. So, fast forward to COVID when everything's online now. And I would challenge you, Wayne, to ask somebody today if they work from home or they work in a hybrid situation, how would they feel about being called into the office to be terminated versus being terminated on Zoom? I would challenge you to say what would they actually think is more humane now.

Right. That's a— that is a great example.

They would say, why would you humiliate me? Bring me all the way here, put me in a room, shut the door. Why didn't you just do it for me on Zoom so I could just get off and be home and like, and process this alone? So this thing that we imagined in the future was the terrible way life was going to be when nobody cared about people, we're going to be terminated on Zoom, is now the actual desired way to be terminated.

It's a beautiful example because that's how we'll measure growth as well. You know, the flip side of that.

We're often wrong about what the future is. That's why I don't like to pretend I know it. We're often wrong. And I love that example because like I said before, I don't think about the 12 systems I used to have and all the problems I used to hear and the endless reports that had the wrong headcount because it's just not part of my reality today. I'm doing other things. And I think once our fully automated people and culture team is fully automated, I'll just be doing something else. And I won't be nostalgic about what it was like today. It's just right now I'm being told by automating, I'm going to be eliminated. This is the message that I think is stopping us from realizing the full benefits of automation.

I don't miss dot matrix printers with green bar graphs, right? I used to read that for my financials. Like, here's your printout. Zzz, zzz, zzz, zzz.

You miss faxing?

I don't miss faxing either. So, so this is interesting, right? You've led across retail, entertainment, now tech. Yeah. What do you think are the enduring traits, the ones that are consistent for leaders that matter now maybe more than any anytime else?

You know, the enduring traits and I remember again hearing this earlier and I'm always cautious when somebody predicts the future because I think it's generally a recipe to have it repeated later in a joke of some kind. And that was people were saying, the most important thing is going to be empathy. And I was like, I don't think that's what's going to be the most important thing. What I'm seeing now is for leaders, what's always mattered and will always matter is there's an interconnection for how decisions are made. Right? There's a part of who the relationships you have, navigating the decision-making process, understanding how to get something from A to B. And I teach a class called Business Influence. And one of the sections is called political intelligence. And I can tell you, you can ask people who here doesn't like politics. And people say, I don't do politics. And my answer is always, it's just you're bad at it. Because politics is how decisions are made. That's how things get done. And this is a very human skill is understanding how to navigate a very complex org structure to get something from A to Z. And this skill is something that leaders need to be able to teach people that given the environment we're in, this is how you're going to get a business case to yes. And that's always been an enduring skill that humans have to teach other humans. And when you onboard someone into an organization, what's the biggest thing they need to find out? How do I get things done here? They have the actual basic skill of the technical skill. They brought that with them. That's what they interviewed for. But how to be successful in this environment, that's an entirely human skill.

I think that's great. We shy away from certain words because, oh, what they carry. And Uh, you know, if you've survived adolescence, you know politics. It's just that easy. It's like, if you've, if you've come through your childhood and have become an adult, you understand politics, right?

It's— you're so right. Like, I'm thinking, you said, what's endured? If you have a child and they're struggling in a class and they're not doing well, the first thing you should tell them to do is to to stay after class and talk to the teacher. Why? Because you'll develop a relationship with the teacher. They'll say, why does that matter? Well, in the end, the teacher's a human being. And when they're grading you and they know that you're a great person and they think they'll be softer on you, just so you know, they'll give you extra help. They'll give you a heads up. And someone will say, well, that's not fair. And I'll say, but everybody has access to build a relationship even in that power dynamic that will actually help them. And so for me, if there's a challenging person or a challenging a technology. That's where I go and I build my relationship with it so that I have some leverage there and they have some buy-in to see me successful. And that's where I'll ensure that I basically help myself move forward. And this is something again that's around your lived experience. It's around the kind of connections you make. And there isn't a technology that can replace that skill. So, if people think that just because I'm the best at something, I'm going to go the farthest in my life, they haven't actually learned the real school of life, which is that you have to be good enough to get to a certain level. And then it's your relationships and your ability to navigate structures that's going to be your winning edge.

Yeah. You've said that you don't think it's empathy. For me, I believe that empathy is one of the durable skills, one of these that— right, this durable as in enduring, you know, will these are the quote-unquote soft skills. They're the relational skills. How do you relate to others? And I think those are the pieces. Empathy is but one, you know, it's not the thing, it's a thing.

Well, if you think that right now information is commoditized, right? It's everywhere. It's actually overwhelming and it's starting to cause panic because our brains are only designed for so much information and so much retention. You know, they haven't undergone any kind of software update in 70,000 years. So they're not going to take in. So the more PDFs people send me and all sorts of stuff, my brain just hurts, you know. And I think that's the reaction you get. You're like, ugh, I can't even read that. You open up an email, it's this long. You're just like, ugh. You actually have a physical feeling of revulsion when you see a lot of text. And I think that's so interesting because what AI is doing is it's just creating a lot, a lot of content, but we're not necessarily designed to ingest content. We're designed to ingest storytelling business cases or emotional examples. You know, people are far more compelled to stop using a plastic straw after they saw the plastic straw up the turtle's nose than they saw a report on the waste of plastic that straws cause. You know, we are really convinced to do things by a very emotional system in our brain. And we have to understand that the content that we're being fed Lacks that emotion, which means that it lacks a sense of urgency to be acted upon. So really, when you're saying the enduring human skills is really understanding what needs to be said at what time to get something done and to be able to take the information you're getting from AI and craft it into something that's emotionally compelling and then get your relationships to be on side so that you can push your initiative forward. And I think this has been that way since I started in the workforce at 23 and I'm in my 50s now. The same.

It's excellent. It's amazing. Um, all right, so to kind of put a bow on this conversation a little bit, I'm gonna ask a couple of questions. Um, this week, you know, if as, as a leader, or really as any of us are listening to this, what is the what I call the best next step, not the, you know, like, what's the next thing? What's the best next step that any leader or any of us should take on or should be thinking about this week?

What I think is something that is real is this idea that automation should lead us to get places that we said we were going to go faster. And so when I'm looking at my team and our initiatives and our strategy for the year, What I'm really thinking of is how can we get this work done quality at scale a little faster because we're more efficient. And I think the next step is to really say, if we have a certain level of efficiency that we've gotten used to with this kind of technology, what is the extra thing that will be delivered by me or by my organization as a result of it? Because there's a thing about Productivity, that, you know, clutter expands to fill the space available. So just because you became more productive doesn't mean other valuable things are happening. So I do think as a leader, you know, working with your team to narrow down what are the big things we're going to deliver, and if it feels like it's a bit too much pressure, how do we get automation to get in there to get rid of some of those things and really have the discussion be on the big deliverable or the speed, whatever you on the side and then have automation be the thing that's going to help you get to that goal and not have the automation itself as the center of what you're doing. Because rallying around automating, it's a tough sell to a lot of people who want to do purposeful work or meaningful work. So for me, it's like, what is the big meaningful project we're going to do? And if somebody says, 'Whoa, that's a lot,' I'll say, 'It's not too much because we're going to automate down over here.' To me, that's the exciting way we can bring in this new wave. Of work.

I am so glad you said all of that, right? That it's— that it is about purpose. It is about meaningful work. What do we want as humans? We want to believe that what we do is meaningful, and at some level, we'd like to be acknowledged for that. And, and we would like to believe there's hope. And, and there have been multiple articles written about that, and those three elements are what make up psychological safety. So in an organization, in an organization's culture, is the work meaningful? Are you recognized for it? And is there hope for the future for yourself personally? And so when you say— I just love how you said it— and it's that we've been focusing on AI and not the the— where I start, values, and then therefore the vision. When we focus on the vision, we have hope for the future. We have a meaningful path because where we're going, we either believe in that vision or we don't. If we don't, you're in the wrong place, right? So, um, so focus on the vision, where you're going, not focus on the tool. It's sort of like we want, uh, we want running water, I'm not going to focus on the wrench, right? It's— I, I just really love that. I love that. Um, Jocelyn, is there anything that you were thinking we would cover we haven't covered? Is there something you would love to bring up? And the third part of that is, um, if people want to reach out to you, how could they reach you?

All right, so I'll do the first one so I don't forget, because I often do. I'm the only Dessalin Wood on LinkedIn. So if you want to find me, I'm pretty easy to find because I'm the only one. So that's what you get when you have a very unique name.

D-E-S-S-A-L-E-N. Yeah, thanks.

Dessalin Wood. So if you look me up, you'll find me. What I would say I want to leave people with, and you know, you've mentioned, you know, all of these, these different skills, is that I'm a very optimistic person. I believe that good things come from what we do. And I fundamentally have to believe that because I'm in some pretty difficult situations professionally. And if I lose the ability to see the potential good of what's going to come of all of our decisions, then I'm going to lose a lot of people around me. And when I think of my team, we did a hackathon a couple of years ago at Syntax for automating roles. And my team actually submitted the most, I think one of the most, like 22 ideas. And the reason why they were so excited to automate themselves is we were so focused as a team on how amazing it will be when we no longer have to do X. I'm always talking about this dream vision of our future when we're delivering this amazing quality to our employees. And because everyone's excited about that, when someone said, 'Hey, there's a hackathon to automate,' they were like, 'Take everything we do.' And this is the opposite of scarcity. This is people who are bought into a vision and a dream and see what they're currently doing as what's limiting them from their dream. 'Not I have to hold on to what I'm doing because somebody else is going to take it and get rid of me.' And in my group, we're always excited about reducing one part of our job because there's always something more exciting that we're talking about. And I think that that's hard for leaders to do right now because the narrative is so incredibly dark. And so, I would challenge you to think of what you aspire to be as a leader, as an organization in your department, and what's keeping you from doing that. And focus your automation discussion on that. And I fundamentally believe that if that's how you're automating and you're creating value at the same rate or a higher rate than your automation is going, then you're going to find yourself in a really good place. And that's what I tell my team, and I think that's why they're excited about AI.

I love that. Thank you. This is really great. It's really great. It's been great to get to know you prior to this call. It's been great to have you on this podcast. For our listeners and viewers, find Dessalyn Wood, D-E-S-S-A-L-E-N Wood, W-O-O-D, on LinkedIn. She's amazing. She's a great contact and obviously full of brilliance. I've loved having you. Thanks, Dessalyn. Thanks for being here.

Thanks. That's a— thank you so much. I had a great time. This is really fun. It was fun to talk about things in a non-traditional, nonlinear way. I think that's where the most creative ideas come out. So thank you, Wayne. This was really fun.

It was great. All right. Desalyn Wood has been my guest. This is One Sharp Sword, cutting through to what matters most. I am your host, Dr. P, Dr. Wayne Pernell. Again, your host, your guide, your coach on this journey. We will see you again next time. Please like and share this episode. Thank you. Thanks for listening to One Sharp Sword, cutting through to what matters most with Outfluencer Dr. Wayne Pernell. For more information, please go to onesharpsword.com.