309: Wayfinding and Developing Identity Agency with Ciela Hartanov

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Welcome back, everybody. I am so excited to be here today with Ciela Hartunov. Ciela was part of the founding team of the Google School for Leaders and head of Next Practice, Innovation and Strategy at Google, where she developed projects designed to shape the future of leadership and work. She currently runs Hum Collective, a boutique strategy and innovation firm that helps companies, executives and teams make sense of the forces shaping the future and prepare strategically. She also co hosts a podcast called Questioning Work. Ciela, welcome to the show.

Jenny, thanks for having me and Happy New Year.

What I didn't mention is that you also have a book in progress. So you're navigating the thickets, hacking through the bramble of ideas and trying to wrangle these topics. Or let's say, surrender. As we were saying before we hit record, how has it been trying to synthesize your career so far throughout this process?

Yeah, thank you for asking. It's been quite a journey thinking I don't do a lot of social media, but I had this moment where I thought I should post a reel about the process of book writing as sort of as a theatrical comedy, because that's how it is felt to me is there's a lot that goes into writing a book in the first instance is where you have to pour out your ideas and your thoughts and you have to have so much conviction about what you believe and understand about your topic and what you're trying to share. And I'm writing about leadership, but also more about what does it feel like to be at work and how do we understand this idea of vocation and take back agency and become more sensitive to ourselves as we approach this new world of work that's informed by AI, but also informed by a new social contract that we see emerging so it took me six months to write the original manuscript, and now I'm a year into refreshing and redoing.

One of the things you said is that the sensitive leader is a wayfinder, not a truth teller. What do you mean by that?

So I think there's this idea that leaders should know the truth and know the answer. And what we're finding more and more, of course, is that that is impossible in the age of uncertainty. Covid, of course, gives us the front row seat to the fact that in emerging conditions, we need to actually be more responsive rather than thinking about what is rational and what is right and what the truth is. So I talk about this idea of wayfinding almost as if it was back when the explorers were out in the world and looking for new land. It's about what do you see and how do you adapt? And then how do you bring other people along and help them make sense of what's happening, but also take their input and their thinking because they see something different than you see. And then collectively we create more perception about what is happening and then we have more responsiveness. So it's a different way of thinking about adaptability.

I love what you said about sense making. There are some questions you provided. I forget where I read them in your body of work, but what's interesting here, what's going on here? And then even entering a more playful state, not how do we solve this, as you said, but even what are you scared about? What are you sensing? And just that whole idea of sense making and wayfinding rather than. And this applies to pivoting too. Not just leadership and building businesses, but pivoting in general. It seems like often people feel pressure to have the answer about their next career move, when in fact it's so much more of a sensing, wayfinding, sense making process.

Yes. And that's what the book is all about, is how do we do that as individuals? And what I always have been interested in is what is the human part of work? And so there's a whole body of work that's emerging from neuroscientists and people who study human behavior, as well as biologists who study the body about how do we actually make sense. And we have this amazing human toolkit that we're built in with. We have emotions, we have our somatic responses, of course, we have our cognition. But interestingly, our cognition is often very much driven by, by our emotional body and the other parts of where we're making sense inside this human capacity that we have. So on the cutting edge of this research around wayfinding and around sense making is the fact that we have this toolkit that's already built in. And if we just start using it, we're able to attune to different environments, to ourselves, in new ways, to other people. And when we do that, we are able to see more about the situation. And this is essential when we are dealing with uncertainty and complexity, because there is actually no one right answer per se. There's choices, there's options, there's experiments we have to run. And so this human toolkit, if we can just go back to it and cultivate it, is really our answer to building more resilience and more capacity in these times that are really challenging.

You worked at Google for a little over eight years and you left just over two years ago in March 2021. How do you apply some of these principles and practices in a culture like that? So I know when I work at Google it's so fast paced and everybody is so smart and so driven, so motivated. And you and I know the quality of Googliness is that people are generally really warm and friendly too. So none of that culture that I've described is ill intentioned, but I found it very hard to tune into my intuition and have any sort of sense making or way finding practice. I just found that much more challenging when I was part of a large organization. And I'm wondering what you would advise because now you've been on the other side as well. And it's just so much quieter when you're working by yourself or for yourself. What was your experience of trying to develop some of these tools for yourself and then sharing them with others in leadership training in an environment like Google?

In some ways there was a real openness to it because the work that I was doing was an innovation. So I ran an innovation practice using a set of foresight tools and sense making tools that looked at how leadership was evolving in the future of leadership. And this is the same process that I bring to my clients now. So organizations who are really interested on being on the cutting edge gravitate towards this type of work. Because of course, this is how Google became what it is. It's because it was on the edge of something. So there was an appetite in that way to say, you know, what, what can we do? Only here at Google, because we have the resources, because we have the mind share to think about what's next and integrate it. So in that way there was a real openness and interest in it. But that collided oftentimes, and I see this with my clients too, collided with we need to prioritize the bottom line, stakeholder engagement. So there was always a tension between the two. And here's what I've learned about the tension. At first, I used to find this very frustrating, but the tension is actually essential in the innovative process. So what started to happen is I would bring ideas to the table and ideas that were pretty novel for the time. In 2016, I came to the table and I said, you know, we should really be focusing on leadership mindset, not skill set. And this was very provocative in leadership development at the time. I know mindset is very out there now. It's discussed a lot. I think it's widely misunderstood, honestly, but at least the concept and the language is sort of starting to be talked about more and more. But at the time, this was a very sort of novel concept and it went against everything we understood about leadership development and what we should be doing. So I brought that to the table and there was a lot of pushback, but I had one very senior stakeholder who was much more interested in being on the edge and also had a lot of political savvy. And so what we were able to do is work with the resistance that we were seeing in the organization to pivot the ideas in a way that they became much more palatable. It was almost like we were in Trojan Horse mode and we were able to shift over time what the Google School for Leaders was really about. To be much more in alignment between mindset and skillset. And that I'm really proud of because we were able to produce a different way of thinking about leadership long before this became mainstream. But it was because in that tension, we worked with the tension rather than just letting the ideas die.

I love that Trojan Horse mode. I've done that with most of my books is like, even with Pivot, there was a lot of spiritual underpinnings to the book and yet I made sure that it was career and business and that it would be on the career and business shelves. And then I felt that my Trojan horse as well was introducing paradoxes and meditation. And just as you like mindset piece. I remember encountering the Google School for Leaders when I was external. I had come in to do an event, a manager training in Miami and I think you were going on right after me and I saw this gorgeous information packet and the marketing materials were so beautiful of the resources you were handing out and the presentation was fascinating and I just thought what is this? And so I know you were part of the founding team for the Google School for Leaders. It just sounded like the coolest project. And I remember even then, you know, wondering what is this and how did you become part of that team? Because I think a lot of people in companies are also wondering how do I get those juicy roles or projects. And so I'm wondering how it came about and why you formed it. I mean, because Google had L and D resources at that time, but this seemed like its own unique entity.

Yeah, it's a good question around how do you put yourself in the right position to get an opportunity? I think from my perspective there's so much serendipity involved and what I've learned over time in my career is that I need to follow my passion, align with people who are interested and can bolster my work and we work better together. And so I had been doing that already for probably like three years before the Google School for Leaders was formed. And I did that because I made bold pitch to my then at the time boss to do something completely different. I said I want to go study the future of leadership. I had no idea where this project would land. I just said I need six months away from facilitating leadership off sites and doing team dynamics work because I was starting to see cracks in the work that we were doing. And I had this very visceral moment where I was facilitating a team of leaders who were cross functional and it was a three day in person event. About the second day I had this moment where I realized none of these tried and true tactics that I have learned and through all my years working as well as in graduate school, all this theory, it wasn't working. Instead of ignoring that, I had this moment where I thought there has to be a better way and it's my responsibility in this organization to find the better way and who Better than me. I've always been someone who's been on the edge, on the cusp, very interested in what's emerging, but also how that happens inside human behavior and more so like the human side of the business. And how do we make our tools and practices more aligned with how uncertain and dynamic the organization is now? So I pitched this idea to study the future of leadership. I won't go into all the details, but I have to say that I pitched this like three years before the Google School for Leaders became a thing. And because I was already researching this, I had already had this idea that we needed more innovation, we needed to build a foresight practice. I was uniquely positioned already to contribute as the strategy lead for the Google School for Leaders. So some of it was serendipity, but some of it was years before following this instinct that I had.

I just love how you lean on these aspects of serendipity, instinct, intuition. Now just pitching something like this does not guarantee any sort of approval or budget. So how do you think you actually got the powers that be to say yes and even allocate full time roles to do this?

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I wonder that myself. Here's the thing about that is I think sometimes you feel in yourself complete conviction. And you know, and I felt that way about this work and I felt so strongly about it, I don't know if my old boss even knows this, that I was willing to sort of quit my job because I thought, you know what, I'm so inclined by this and I know that this work needs to be done, that if I can't do it here, I will do it elsewhere.

Wow.

So that was a visceral feeling for me. And I think I got to the point and I think sometimes we do in our careers where we realize this is what I'm meant to be contributing and it'll be here or it'll be elsewhere. And because I had gotten to that point, I didn't actually feel like I had much to lose. I only had upside and much to gain. So I built a pitch deck. And that pitch deck was met with some sort of skepticism. And then what I realized was, okay, it's being met with skepticism, but it's not being met with rejection. So then what do I need to do to get it accepted? And then I started right sizing. Okay, let's just time box it. What if I go do a research report? I just need a small amount of money, I need no headcount. And I will produce something for you in six months if it doesn't meet the bar. It's not interesting. We'll reconsider. I'll go back to my day job which I really wasn't ever going to do. But you know, just trying to right size. And this is where when I work with organizations, especially learning organizations which are strapped for resources, money, especially right now, I always work to say how do we right size getting to a big idea because otherwise you're going to be on the back foot. But I also recognize there's pressures and things that are real in this moment that have to be overcome.

I always say something similar. Make your proposal small enough that it's easy for someone to say yes. That if you try to go from zero to launching some global company wide initiative, most likely it's going to be a no. Just people get too jittery.

That's right.

But if you start with your team, you launch something, you show that it does well, it makes an impact. Okay. Then it grows a little bit over time and I've seen people create full time roles.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I also love hearing your conviction of knowing in your heart and soul that this is the work I'm meant to do and if I don't do it here, I'll do it somewhere else. And almost being so unattached to what Google was going to say because in a way the energetic power was in your hands of this is happening. You could either get on board or I'll take it somewhere else. I don't even mean to say like win, win. That's kind of not the right language here, but you were going to bring it to life no matter what. And the question is, do you want to be part of this? And thankfully they said yes.

And thankfully they said yes. I would say I think that's a unique part of Google culture, at least at the time. I'm sure it shifted now, but there was this real sort of yes and possibility culture when I was at Google and that I really appreciated. And one of the things I think about right now around work and organizations is we need more yes cultures that are not looking for the linear A to B answer and the prioritization that rips and strips out all innovation and possibility. That is a recipe for disaster. To have no slack in the system. We saw that during COVID with supply chains. The reason why we had supply chains issues, that there was absolutely no slack. The reason why we have tons of burnout happening right now is we have no slack in the system. So when we think about what is the benefit of having slack in the system, it's absolutely for individuals like me to have an opportunity to build something that gains a lot of traction and then ultimately it does influence a company ride initiative like the Google School for Leaders. But it's also a really important and valuable organizational tactic for resilience and vitality.

When it comes to trusting your intuition. After working on this project and launching it so successfully, you know, a couple years later, it was your time to go in 2021. How did you know that it was time to. To leave and go out on your own?

Oh, I knew probably a year and a half before I went out on my own that I needed to go.

Isn't it always that way if I'm not too. Yeah, the really big decisions, they start settling in.

They start settling in. And there was nigglings of it. And interestingly, I actually took another job offer. And then I went back on it. I took another job offer and I thought like two years before, I was like, okay, maybe I need to leave Google now. And I took another job offer, another company, and then I backed out, Which I'm not proud to have done that, but it just was like, this isn't exactly right. I think I need to stay at Google just a little bit longer. Like something was going on. But I could definitely feel that there was something happening inside me that was saying, what is it that you're supposed to be offering to the world? Where are you best suited? And then as happens, I ended up getting a huge nudge from what was happening inside the organization. And there was new leadership coming in and I Started feeling this complete disalignment and started realizing very acutely that I couldn't be my full self and I couldn't bring my full capabilities and my gifts to the table anymore. And I spent three months working through what does it mean to leave? And how do I have a sense of agency to do that? Google can be very compelling. As many companies that have a strong external brand, you start to understand yourself in the context of that organization. I'm a Googler, or whatever it may be. So I spent three months trying to disassociate my identity and myself, and then I was able to take the leap and leave.

How did you know when things started to shift? And I actually felt that way too at one point. I felt it was no one's fault again, but I was in so many meetings and emails that I just wasn't fully expressing what I knew I had in me to express and create. And I think it can be hard sometimes for people to know, is this a phase? Is this just a product of this current reorg or this current manager? Do I wait it out? Do I try to improve the situation? And then how do you know when it's pretty clear? Like, how did it fully become clear that the answer is no, capital N, that I can fully express my gifts here? Now, as it has evolved to this.

Point, I think to your point, it's subtle at first until it just gets louder. So for me, I ended up in a meeting where it became very clear, a very senior person, no one's fault, Everyone was just trying to get the work done. But if I was trying to present a bold strategy idea because I was running an innovation and research lab, and that research lab, basically quarterly, would produce a report out that said, here's big bets we can make, here's small shifts we can make to continue to be on the cutting edge. Now, consumer products have these types of organizations all the time, so this is not uncommon or unheard of. It's just that in the learning HR space, it's actually something quite different, I think very, very useful. And hopefully my clients do as well, because it helps you remain on the edge and keep pace with employee experience. So I was presenting something to a very senior stakeholder and she sort of stopped me halfway in and said to me, she said, I'm just trying to get stuff done and prioritize here. I don't have time for this. And I knew it wasn't about me, I knew it was about her stress level. But at that point I realized if this is the mentality I can do the most insightful work and it won't be received by the system. And this was sort of the penultimate experience and I was of course experiencing a lot of other nudges around it and I was assessing, okay, is it just that this is a moment in time, like you said, what else can I do? What pivot can I make? And I had already made a lot of those and guided my team through a lot of that. And, and then in this moment, sometimes you have those moments in life, right, where the fog just clears and it's so obvious and it's like, okay, we're in a new organization now.

Yes.

And it was the best, even though it was really hard. And I put a lot of love into that work. I put a lot of love into all my work. But I realized, okay, there's something else.

For me now, when that clarity arrives, it's just the best feeling of it's clear now. It might still be a really tough decision or tough series of conversations or a nerve wracking set of uncertain pieces that have to fall into place for what's next. But, oh, just to have clarity, like you said.

One thing I wonder about though, right now too, in terms of pivots and careers, and I know we're all thinking about what is our work in the world and it doesn't even have to be that big, like, what is my work now? What I wonder about though is how can we tap more acutely into ourselves so that we don't have to get to such a big breaking point? Because that's where burnout lives, I think. So one thing I'm really wondering about is how do we take back more agency, more understanding of ourselves more often? This is a quandary to me though, because I think when you're in the organization, you're moving so fast, there's a lot of competing commitments and so you sometimes lose sight of that. But how do you take moments to really reconnect so it doesn't have to be some sort of big affair that tells you now's the time.

You mentioned this identity agency piece of pivoting, which I find fascinating because when I was a Googler, and I mean even still having an association and being Google alumni, whatever it does open doors. And I will say so many doors swung wide open when I was working at Google because authors I admired, I could give them something interesting, which was bring them in for a Google talk. And so I found that so many more people were saying yes to me and wanting to meet me or wanting to connect or wanting to come to lunch. And so it's so hard in terms of identity agency or just identity in general, it's like there are real doors opening. And it was a leap of faith for me to think that I could somehow generate that on my own, even under, I call it the shade of the fancy Google tree, which is like. Because it really did open doors. So what do you mean when you say this term identity agency? I mean, you've said it a little bit, but I think it's such a powerful concept that you're right. It's very hard sometimes to have that be independent when you're swept up in a larger organization. Or even if somebody's independent, let's say they become an influencer, they might have a hard time separating their identity from what's presented publicly.

This is a whole area of the future of work that I'm fascinated by. And mostly I'm fascinated by it because it's been my own learning and in some ways existential crisis about leaving Google same leaving the shade of the Google tree and being like, who am I without this, without this brand, without people seeing me as capable simply because I have Google behind my name. And one of the things that I think about a lot is I think organizations do a disservice to us by building these employee engagement models that are basically saying, you come here and then you are this. Now, it's not meant to be bad. It's part of the human experience to be swept into a community and then start to self identify. So this is actually part of why we can build community and connection. And it can be beautiful. But in organization, sometimes it's used in a way that can be hard when people leave and are trying to figure out who am I standing on my own. So from the psychology research, what we go back to is this idea of locus of control. And where does my locus of control, which basically means what is my bubble? Where do you stop and I begin? And then where is that Venn diagram of where we are together? When I think about agency, locus of control, our identities.

It would do us all a lot of good even if we're inside an organization, to spend time reflecting and thinking about who am I in context of this organization, but who am I outside of this organization? And what I'll say is the good news is that because of the, whatever you want to call it, great resignation, quiet quitting, et cetera, I don't believe in any of those terms. I think people are just taking back agency and saying this is where the organization ends. This is where I begin. And what we need to do more and more is find our own sacred spaces that are outside of the organization. We used to have these. We used to have, you know, religious institutions which we were a part of, et cetera. I'm not advocating necessarily for that, but what I am advocating for is where can we find our spaces that help us understand who we are outside of the organization? And then we start getting shades like a kaleidoscope of these are all the things that I am. I'm not just one thing. I'm not just a Googler. And then you can start getting back your agency around the wholeness of yourself. And I really believe that this remote work, disrupting the contract between organizations and employees, all this stuff ultimately will deliver hopefully on the ability for us to take back some of this agency and decide who we want to be.

Beautifully said. I love that and I love thinking of the Venn diagram. Here's you, here's me, here's where we meet in the middle.

Yeah.

And there's three pieces of that, you know, and just your suggestion to pause that part of preventing burnout might also be pausing to feed our part of the Venn diagram. You know, who am I outside of this job, this relationship, whatever, identity? Because there's so much talk about having a personal brand and a platform, you know, now as an author, oh, my gosh, it's exhausting of all the places we're supposed to be and what we're supposed to do and just reconnecting with that inner authentic piece.

Right. And I wonder, you know, how can we ever be whole in the world if we don't find that inside of ourselves? And that part is not to be commoditized. Branding is simply a sales effort. Right. And I have a lot of opinions around personal branding and whether we should be pursuing that or not. I have a real. And disdain is a strong word, love.

A good disdain for something that seems like a status quo. Give me your rant. What's your personal brand? Ran?

I was told often when I went out and I read a lot of books when I went out on my own. All good books for business. But there is this hyper personal branding, who are you? Hustle culture. And this feels at least for me and for my identity and for my authentic self, the absolute opposite of how I want to be in the world. And it's like there's no other choice. So if that is for you and that aligns with what you've come to understand, about yourself, then that is fine. But my rant is, can there not be another way? Because certainly that is not how everyone wants to be in the world and there has to be another way to do business. And I'm really trying to uncover this for myself. I don't know the answer yet, but I want to be in business in a different way that doesn't require me to hustle myself right to the powers that be and create this brand that has to be sort of fed.

We'll be right back just after this.

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It's interesting because I did an episode I'll link to it in the show Notes on how I run my business without social media. And I have a few friends I know who do this, but that episode had people coming out of the woodwork to just ask almost mouth agape what that's possible. Just looking for permission that they could possibly have a business without it. And I think it's a quieter group by definition, those who don't want to do all these shenanigans and rigmarole. Again, nothing wrong with it for anybody that enjoys it and it works for your personality type. But I do think there's something about maybe being a highly sensitive person and empathic or deeply empathic almost where it hurts. It's hard to engage with the noise of social media and even just the quantity of communication. Like I find that very taxing on my energetic system. And so the group is quiet but they're there. You know, people are out there who want to run their Business a different way. And I was even saying yesterday I had a rant because with podcasting, I joke that I have a personality for podcasting, as in no video, no social media. It's just a nice, deep conversation where we get to hit record. But now so many podcasters who interview me want to keep the video on because they say, oh, we don't post the full video, but we need clips for social media. So now it's kind of taking so much joy out of something that I have loved because they feel the pressure to have clips up on social media. That means now I gotta be video ready, have the right background, stare into the little pinhole for an hour. And again, that's just when I'm the guest. But it has changed the nature of half of what's on my schedule.

Right.

You know, still getting swallowed whole by this social media tsunami.

So, Jenny, then how do you say no? Or I guess a better question is, how do you keep yourself in integrity? If that's the ask I know.

Well, now every time I book an interview, I ask, is it video or can we do audio only? Or some are a hybrid. Like we turn on video to say hi, which I never mind. And if they don't require video, I ask to turn it off. And what it might mean is that the more people who say yes, I'd like to keep video on, I might be only saying yes to fewer a week. You know, now I might need to just only say yes to one interview a week. And if it's video, put it on a day where I have another video commitment and not.

Not spread it out.

I can't do it every day of the week. It's a good question you asked. I'd love to know your answer. But I guess I'm clarifying up front the format and especially when it's catching up with friends or colleagues. I'm always asking if we can switch to phone, if by default they've created a zoom link, for example.

That's nice. So you have found ways. I'm still learning because I'm early in my business where there's this thing that happens when you go out on your own where you feel like you must say yes and you must follow the rules.

At least for me, totally. What I have found in the first year of being out on my own, I said yes to a lot of pieces of work as well as a lot of this pressure to be on social media, to have a presence in a certain way. And I did it. And then I reached this point where about eight months in, I realized I was so far out of my integrity. But it took me eight months to realize that because I had been told the right way to do business is to say yes, elevate your profile. So I was following because I didn't know, of course I was learning. I mean, everything about writing a book for me, about making this whole pivot in my career has been okay. I have a beginner's mind. I don't know. So where can I seek to know?

So what I've realized is over that sort of period where I was doing and following the playbook per se, and then that moment where I realized this is so draining and I'm out of integrity, that I also have inner knowing that needs to be part of the playbook, that, that needs to come as part of something that's valuable. It's not like I'm fresh out of college. Like, I've had experiences, I've had a good career so far. So I also have knowing that can be brought to the table too. And when at that eight month mark, I started saying no. So I was doing a lot of team dynamics work, I had a really great client of good income for my business, and I started saying no and saying, I don't do that anymore. That, of course, came with risk. Right. It felt like a very similar moment to when I said at Google, I need to do something else. And here's what I can offer. Yeah, I could not not do it.

And I don't know about you, I feel that way too. Where once my inner compass shifts or becomes clear, I cannot do the work.

Yeah.

Sometimes I feel that I must sound really entitled when I say that there are people who are doing all kinds of grueling jobs and grinding it out to do it and. But I can't. Like, I mean, I know I could if push really came to shove, but it's like I get completely blocked.

The flow isn't there anymore.

Yeah.

It doesn't come.

Yes.

And I think this is also part of you tapping into your identity and agency and getting very clear with yourself. So that can be a very disruptive process. It's not for everyone, I would say, although I think all of us at some point are going to have to have this moment with ourselves where we start to think about that. Because if we're not in integrity with ourselves, if our identity is being subjugated, then you start to see the things that happens around unhappiness and depression and your wellness suffers.

Yeah, absolutely. And then your body starts giving the louder and louder signals.

The signals.

Before we wrap up, I want to ask you about innovation and futurism. So these are terms that can have many different meanings, but I've always been interested by people who are kind of trendspotting. They're looking at what's here and they're looking at what's next, and they're helping other people understand what's coming. You mentioned tools like AI and ChatGPT. I just have to tell you a funny story I'm interviewing tonight at a bookstore in Brooklyn. David Sachs, who's a former guest of the pod. He wrote a book called Revenge of Analog and the Future Is Analog. And I asked him, are there any topics since the book came out that you'd love to discuss tonight? And he said, how about AI? So I went to ChatGPT and I said, please provide 20 prompts to interview questions for David Sacks, author of the Future Is Analog. And in under 60 seconds, it gave me 20 questions that I could ask him tonight when I interview him. And then I did it for his other two books. So I got 60 interview questions in three minutes. It was fascinating. Now, of course, they're not as personal, they're not as funny, they don't pull pull quotes from the book like I'm going to do. And I like how I just called myself personal and funny. I'm not saying I am. I'm just saying that the AI itself is not that nuanced or entertaining. But the questions weren't bad. Let me say that. And to have 60 starting prompts in three minutes was pretty impressive. So what I want to zoom out after sharing that anecdote is how can we all build the skill of having a little bit of futurist in us? What have you learned along the way and what might be a. An experiment that listeners can try to get better at this, of course, Chat.

GPT is all over the news and I've also used it actually for some pieces around some of this revision in my book that I'm doing. Like, tell me the top researchers on X. Oh, cool. Super helpful.

Wow.

I love that it's accelerated the time that it takes me often to do research. So I think a tool for that, it's excellent. What it doesn't give you is depth of understanding and pattern recognition. So this is our unique human gift. The one thing I would say about as the AI revolution takes place, we have to get deeper, deeper into our own humanness, our. Into our own creative gifts, like I said, into our emotional understanding, into our intuition. So it's going to push us into the depths of getting more conscious. I hope how that relates to futurism is that futurism is all about being in this wide open space of the unknown. So yes, trends are actually easy. You can go and ask ChatGPT what are the latest trends on the future of work? For example, I haven't done this. I probably should. It'll come back with probably some excellent trend top 10, whatever it may be. What that doesn't tell us is why it matters. It doesn't tell us how they intersect together. It doesn't tell us how that might necessarily impact in the context of your own work. So that is the work of futurist or an innovation team is to answer those questions around what does this mean and why does it matter?

And what could be one experiment that we give to listeners other than trying their own chatgpt prompts.

So the one that I absolutely love is it's not even an experiment. It's just a little thing that you can do to take a walk, take out your headphones and just go on a walk in your neighborhood that you're usually on. You know, the walk that you usually do. And the whole task of the walk is to notice what are the things that you haven't been seeing. So this is a perception and noticing exercise. So you start to notice the things that you haven't been seeing and then come back and journal about what is out in your ecosystem that you haven't even noticed before. And what does that tell you about where you live, about the state of the climate, about your neighbors? Give yourself a chance in your own environment to investigate and build a new perception around your own context. That's just a small experiment that can then translate into when you're doing your work and perhaps you're reading something for a project that you're on, then you start asking yourself, okay, if I'm continuously going to the same news sources, what am I not seeing? Where else might I need to be looking to expand my perception of this issue?

I love that experiment and talk about the future is analog just going for a walk and seeing what we noticed? I love that. Thank you, Ciela. This is so fun to hear your take and I love how you're educating for all of these skills, like, I don't know another word for it, but these sensitivities as part of leadership and innovation, of wayfinding and inner knowing, serendipity, all of it. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

So on my website humcollective Co. You can get in touch with me and see my latest insights. And I do have an Instagram which I'm an occasional Instagrammer, so Cielarose, you can find me there as well.

Great. I'll put those in the show Notes. Thank you so much for being here Ciela. And big thanks to everybody who's here listening.

Thanks Jenny.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com.

And connect with me on Twitter Ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always?

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