The Failure Gap

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Failure Gap, where we talk with leaders about closing the space between agreement and alignment. We love talking with interesting people and today we're joined by Matt Leta. Matt is a founding partner and CEO of Future Works. Matt is a digital leader with over 20 years of experience, having built his first game at 10 and launched his first startup at 19. Today he's helping unlock the value of AI with his unique approach to upgrading the entire business logic.

I read his first book, Leap, and I got so much out of it and the framework it provides. I'd recommend it. We'll put a link to it as well as to his new book that he just published this year in our show notes. So you can check it out there. Leap stands for locate, evaluate, action plan and progress. Four straightforward steps that any business can take to unlock is an innovation engine. Matt, I'm so looking forward to having this conversation with you about how leaders can start to close the gap between agreeing that

AI and innovation are good things for their business and getting aligned and getting it done together. So thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the Failure Gap.

Matt Leta (01:03)
Excited to be here, Julie. Thanks for having me.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (01:06)
Yeah. So Matt, it would be great if you could just share with our listeners a little bit about your journey to leadership. How did you come to be the founder and CEO of Future Works?

Matt Leta (01:16)
Well, it's a bit of a windy journey, to leadership. I started my, you know, I was kind of, you know, very, I think maybe very individualistic at some point in my life early on. And I just thought that I can do things by myself much better. And so I started my first company when I was 19. I actually had dropped out from school, from university.

And I founded an art platform at the time. I was doing a lot of multimedia art, so installations that would react to people and so on. And I noticed that my peers didn't have a place to share digital art like that. And so we created a platform and then the platform has grown and became one of the bigger ones online. And eventually I ended up, that was in Wales actually.

in the UK, then I ended up in London, and then I moved to California, the Bay Area, and then ended up living, exiting, and traveling the world, which I didn't know at the time, but it ended up being three years. Eventually, and in that process, I started an agency, professional services company that would help Silicon Valley companies build their digital products and innovate.

So we were kind of like a plug-in team that would help do everything around the product. And that has grown. I was kind of traveling. It was a bit of a lifestyle business at first, but then it has grown to exponentially. Every year for seven years it doubled. And so it became big-ish for me at the time. And eventually I started feeling very comfortable and...

chasing shiny objects as it happens, I guess. And so I started the Venture Studio at Burning Man Camp, like a future-oriented community, started Angel Investing and Climate Impact Project. I started those events that we started organizing called Future Horizon, you know, the community that would, you know, kind of thought leaders and investors, entrepreneurs together.

we're going to solve issues of the future. And I started a Web3 based fund for bioeconomy systems. And so on. So I think I did too many things at once. I completely stopped because my team was operationalized, organized, and the agency was just running. And suddenly markets changed, came, usable AI came, and that company really started struggling.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (03:42)
Yeah.

Matt Leta (03:56)
you know, making good millions to suddenly, you know, being three months from bankruptcy. And so I decided to go back and take a look at it and see if, you know, are we saving this or is it going away? and as I did look, I noticed that there's a new exciting opportunity for me. Previously, I started when I left the valley, I went traveling and my whole thing in 2015 was like, how will we try and build like a fully functioning

Excellent, but only remote. We'll never have enough of this professional services company. Not an easy thing, but it took us some time and then it worked. It worked very well. And then now my thought was like, what if we connect that with a lot of AI? Would that not be better? Are we not going to be faster, cheaper, and better at the same time, which is the impossible thing in services? And so I did an experiment.

About two years ago, just as ChatGPT4 came out, I did this experiment where I challenged myself to create a new company as a solopreneur with AI as my partner in 30 days. And then I would share the findings every day on Twitter back then, XNow. And I would, yeah, just to see what happened. Like the idea was like,

at the very least, I'm going to get some new connections and contacts and at least see what it is like. At the time, think the other company had like 70 something people. It already down on size, but still had. And so it was kind of interesting to work by myself and use AI as my thinking partner deeply and execution partner. so, know, Vibe coding became a thing much

kind of later, year later. at the time, everything was vibe coded, everything was done using AI and always documented. And I ended up making a business that works. We got like a pipeline of about $1.4 million. We even delivered $20,000 worth of business in that one month, right? Or 30 days. And yeah.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (05:58)
Wow.

Matt Leta (06:12)
You know, we run this on the side of the other company. I think few months later, we realized that running two things is too much of the time. We need to think about reorganizing things and to see where I want to focus. And so I focused on future works. I ended up closing the other company and yeah, that's how it happened.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (06:32)
Yeah,

it seems like you're a serial entrepreneur, for one thing, and you like seeing like this idea of experimentation and having a place to play and build things and then seeing those things that you build come to fruition and really come to life and start to have an impact.

Matt Leta (06:49)
Yeah, I think there's like two level serial entrepreneurship, because on one end I founded all sorts of companies over time. the second one is I somehow am attracted to the professional services model, which is you kind of have new projects inside all the time. And so it's quite interesting to me to have new challenges, to be able to kind of go deep with new people on new problems and solve them.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (07:02)
Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah, I would agree as someone who's been in management consultant for 30 years, one of the great things is that every few months you're learning a new business, a new industry, meeting new people, seeing new problems and getting to put your brain on that. So I can certainly appreciate that. You mentioned something that I just want to make sure our listeners have an opportunity to understand vibe coding. I don't know that everybody is familiar with that term. Do you want to just take a minute and maybe share?

Matt Leta (07:39)
Yes, good point.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (07:42)
what that is and how you use that.

Matt Leta (07:44)
Yeah,

it's basically using AI for software engineering in the modality where you do not entirely or at all write the code by hand as it has been ever since software was invented. But you ask AI to do it and you sort of give feedback, curate, but you don't actually write it. Very popular now, causing a massive shift in the industry.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (08:06)
Yeah.

Matt Leta (08:10)
And now there's no going back.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (08:12)
Yeah. I think the key with things like this, and maybe what people who are more business oriented and less technical oriented can take away is that this idea of how you interact with AI can really help you overcome technical barriers. I know for me, I have a background in software development, so I know a little bit about it, but I mean, Matt, between you and me, I started with COBOL, so that dates me, right? COBOL is pretty simple language, right? Like it's pretty straightforward, but I have that kind of construct.

Matt Leta (08:27)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (08:40)
And when I think about playing around with vibe coding, which I've done a little bit in, it's a whole different way of thinking about describing the outcome that you want and then getting help with the coding along the way.

Matt Leta (08:55)
Yeah, there's a strong correlation between good delegators and those who can prompt AI to get the results they want of high quality. And the common denominator, I think, is just communication. So worth now practicing communication. If we can define our ask in a way that it minimizes margin for error, that's good with people and it's good with AI and it's kind of just the same.

In our businesses, it's so worth looking for strong communicators now who can now develop things and design things and build things, you know, just by prompting.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (09:33)
Yeah, you know, was listening in on an AI podcast not long ago and the host was saying that one of the best degrees for an AI world is philosophy because you learn to ask great questions. I thought that was so funny.

Matt Leta (09:44)
Yeah, so true. Yeah, I think that's actually,

yeah, I wonder what's the actual correlation. Some of them do a study at some point. But yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, anyone who's being able to word their ask very well and actually, you know, spends time over, necessarily spend too much time, but just think about their ask before it goes out, it's much better result.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (09:52)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, talk to us a little bit about this space between agreeing that AI is a good idea and we should have a lot of innovation in our organizations and getting as a business, getting aligned to bringing that to life in interesting ways. I know you've written a lot about the cultural aspects, the people aspects, the need for retooling, not just throwing a lot of money into R &D and innovation, but

really looking at the whole system and how you bring that forward. What do you see as some of the places maybe where businesses get stuck?

Matt Leta (10:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think for one and unless you're in like really hardcore deep tech or maybe help throwing a lot of money into R &D and innovation is going away. Because you just research, you know, and testing things and coming up with ideas and building prototypes and testing things is the cost of it is going towards zero. And so what is most important

really is being able to actually advance with getting ROI on AI. you know, just, you know, not do some experiments on the side or get everyone to try to charge GPT, but like have AI, come deliver value, right? Like, you know, I don't know, cut the cost of one department by half or double, you know, deal flow or whatever is the target, right? And that is not easy.

That is actually very hard. As many who have tried in the last three years have learned. And why is it hard? It's not actually AI itself that is not ready or hallucinates. So there are some issues, but actually if you measure current AI, that's today and better is coming next week, right? But if you measure performance between the workforce and AI, then workforce hallucinates more.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (12:03)
Hmm.

Matt Leta (12:04)
You know, I think, yeah,

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (12:04)
That's interesting. Yeah.

Matt Leta (12:06)
I think at Salesforce, there is like a metric that if you get people to record, like, you know, salespeople to recall, and information work with it, the accuracy rate is something like 70%. And AI is 99. And we still argue about that 1%, because it is a hallucination. But really, it's already much better, right? And so the question is, where is the gap, right?

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (12:20)
Right.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Matt Leta (12:32)
And the gap

is really in the fabric that connects that AI to how we work and what we do, which is data and software, kind of like the middle layer. And then the third part, which is incredibly important in our companies and makes our companies and make companies interact, which is people, our people. And the thing with people is that they need to be both in

They need to agree and align. And they need to be able to move, actually advance using AI, right? And ideally in a distributed manner. It's moving too fast to have training programs and stuff like that. I mean, they help, but ideally they are experimenting, they are trying. And to do that, they need to be excited. They actually need to like the idea of AI. But most of our workforce today do not like the idea.

And it's hard to be surprised because that sounds to them like they're going to get replaced. Okay, so they're going to their employer at the vans with this, which objectively is always good for business to have more AI because you automate and optimize more, you have higher margins, higher competitiveness and lower chance that you get disrupted. So it's essentially essential for the leadership. But then for people who are doing the job, you know...

The feelings are that they are scared. I don't trust it. They don't have to have this comfort. And so we've come to realize over the years implementing those systems that AI adoption really only happens at the speed of comfort, human comfort within a business. And so what's very important is to make everyone

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (14:12)
Hmm.

Matt Leta (14:15)
comfortable and then I think they go from yeah sounds like a potentially good idea often you can observe it internally people will say that it's like of course we should have AI yes but they don't actually feel they don't want it they will sabotage the initiative subconsciously yeah yeah

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (14:29)
Yeah. They're in the failure gap. Right? Yeah.

You wrote a blog post about psychological safety and that it's not about being comfortable, but it's about being capable, if I remember correctly. And I think that's such an interesting idea that

It's actually unique for people to get comfortable with the idea of AI, but they also need to become capable with the tools and resources. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Matt Leta (14:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, making everyone believe that they're capable of, you know, using advanced A being the part that stays. Let's say that there is, you know, generally just a belief that some people will get fired because of AI and some will stay, you know, it's in anyone's interest to stay. And it's also in anyone leading a company in their interest for to keep people who have the knowledge of how things work and not let them go.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (15:16)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Leta (15:27)
And so, the way to get them to become comfortable and so increase the velocity of change that can happen is to make them feel like they are capable, they are part of the solution. It's theirs too. It's not pushed down, doesn't come from some lab. And this is where R &D labs and innovation labs fail. It's not invented here. It's like ideally solutions for

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (15:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Matt Leta (15:52)
workflows, whatever, come from those people. And there are ways to invite them all really even to share those ideas, right? And to contribute and so on. And the way things are going, like we will need less people. So at any business, there are sort of two paths. One is like we grow, but we don't hire or hire less or different people, or we don't grow and then we advance with AI and let go of people.

This is also a way for us to find out who is really advancing, has agency, very important, who is actually willing to contribute to the business and learn for the business and so on. And those are, there are many nuances to it, far more than we can cover in this conversation, but taking care of the people's comfort and ability to use one that's kind of goes with the other.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (16:25)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Leta (16:45)
to use this technology, trust this technology very importantly, then that essentially increases our ability to transform.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (16:53)
Yeah. If you were talking with somebody, and I think you probably do this on a regular basis, if you're talking with business people and they're, you know, they're kind of all in with their agreement, yes, we should be doing something with AI, and you don't see them actually being willing to experiment with it, what would you encourage them to do as a first step? If they're thinking that, yeah, it sounds great.

but I have to take care of my business. I gotta deliver my numbers, I've got clients beating on my door, like somebody else needs to take care of this for me. What would you suggest to them?

Matt Leta (17:19)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Three steps, I always repeat the same three steps. We've distorted over years to like what is it really that stops those initiatives. And there are three three steps that need to be kind of taken into account. First is have a leader for this. Someone who has the mandate, the ability to move forward. It cannot be like a chief innovation officer or some.

VP of digital or some who does not have the power to move things within the company. It needs to be someone like a CIO, COO sometimes, but they don't have time usually. Someone who is maybe lower ranked, but is given the mandate to talk to everyone, to change things and get the support from the top team. And as we say, usually without that person at the company, it doesn't matter what size.

10 people or 250,000 people we work with, you know, the entire spectrum. The chances of success are 0.0. It's not like maybe it will work out. There is no chance. There is no chance of success if you don't have ownership and a leader who can drive it forward. So that's the first step. The second step is for them to start. And now the starting, many companies like to...

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (18:32)
Yeah.

Matt Leta (18:46)
build it up in their heads. It's going to be millions of dollars and years of work and a gigantic transformation project. And then they delay things. And the delay is very dangerous. And it's not because they won't be able to catch up on technology. If they start in two years, they can still implement AI and AI will be faster. But they will lose two years of culture change among people on their team. And that you cannot really catch up with. You can compress that five years to three years maybe.

but still it's years of work to get our people adjusted to AI. And so we build that comfort to make them feel like they're collaborating with those systems. And so you cannot really make up for this time. And especially that the velocity compounds, therefore anyone who started earlier is starting to see faster movement. And so...

A competitor who started a year earlier and continues might never be caught, right? Like you can never, you might not ever be able to catch up with them because they have, they're on an exponential improvement curve. And then there's this third step, which is not stop. So they need to start and not stop. And the not stopping part is actually harder by far. So ideally, you know, they start,

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (19:48)
Yeah.

Hahaha

Yeah.

Matt Leta (20:07)
with something small, they start immediately. They build it up from there. They compound value. They keep going. Right. But the not stopping is where it gets difficult because those initiatives get, you know, defunded. They don't show results sometimes for a few months, leadership changes, strategy changes, and so on. There are so many companies like CIM who started, made progress, and then something happened and they stopped and they're like basically back to zero. And so the very important

role of that person is not to stop and to give them the power to not to stop. But also what really helps is if the practice is so lean and so cheap, let's say low on resources within the company, that it is hard to stop by finance. So no matter if things are well or things are not well, we can carry on. And that's why we created the leap.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (20:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Matt Leta (20:59)
and refined it over the years because it really makes it extremely lean, provides all the tools that enable us to keep going. And simply the going becomes an exponential change agent within the company.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (21:08)
Yeah.

At a Carrickans group, we like to say that small things done consistently over time change the world. And I think that's part of it. Like just don't stop doing small things. They don't have to be big. You can just take these small steps.

Matt Leta (21:19)
Yeah, it's true.

Yeah.

Yeah, there is a lot of

voices against incrementalism, right? But those come from people like Peter Thiel used to investing in wild, fast moving ideas. When it comes to transforming our own company, you know, all we need is, you know, to see things and to improve them on repeat. And eventually we will outcompete, right? We don't need, you know, the leap is essentially a kind of like a meta joke on itself.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (21:29)
Yeah.

Matt Leta (21:52)
It's not a large leap, it's some of the small leaps that you do on repeat that create the large difference.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (21:56)
Yep. Absolutely.

Yeah. You you talked about having make sure making sure that there's a leader, someone who's clearly identified that this is their responsibility. You talked about getting started. Just start and then keep going. Don't stop. Don't stop. And one of the things that I think is so interesting in what you were talking about is the fact that some people are, I think, dragging their feet. Some of the leaders that I talk to on a regular basis because

They feel like the technology isn't settled yet. And so they're confident that they can catch up on the technology roadmap when the time comes, I'll say. But you make the point, which I think is very, very interesting, that you are going to be so far behind culturally that you may not be able to catch up. And I don't know that business leaders are thinking about that and taking that as seriously as they need to because they're so fixated on the technology.

And they're waiting for the dust to settle on the technology. And they're probably right. They can catch up on the technology roadmap at some point, but they are going to be so far behind culturally that they will struggle to keep pace with the competitors who are out of the gate ahead of them and are willing to experiment and try and fail and learn and grow.

Matt Leta (22:52)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I think my second book, 100x sort of opens, I think it's in the first chapter anyway, but maybe a bit towards the end. When I say, know, how not to start and how to start. And how not to start, I literally say do not start with technology, right? It sounds like an AI, like AI is a tech thing.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (23:17)
Thank

Mm.

Matt Leta (23:30)
like we would have AI team, sorry, tech team before do our digital transformation and introduce Salesforce or so. That is not the case. It's actually a whole company transformation that needs to be done in sort of holistically looking at how people are advancing and how technology is advancing at the same time. So in the same book, this is actually kind of like a layer cake where I swap.

chapters. One chapter is about people, one is about tech, one chapter is people and one tech. And this is how we should advance those initiatives.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (24:02)
You know, I think one of the most striking things to me is I've been coming up my own learning curve when it comes to AI, because let's face it, we're all beginners in a lot of the space. Some people are further ahead, but it's so emergent right now that we're learning as we go. And one of the things that has really struck me is that I have had to change how I orient towards technology.

start to think about it differently and interact with it differently. And once that connection got made in my brain, which I'm happy to say took a while to work at it. But once I made that shift, then suddenly the power of AI really opened up to me. And when I stopped trying to put it in the box of, I don't know, Google search or the

Matt Leta (24:41)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (24:55)
It needs to do things for me, like just make me faster or whatever. Then I started to really interact with it in a different way and was able to unlock a lot of value very, very quickly. But it took me a minute to get there. Do you see other business, am I alone or do you see other business leaders struggling with that as well?

Matt Leta (25:08)
Yeah.

No, everyone's struggling. mean, it's even, it's, it's, you know, everyone's struggling and not just, not just, you know, existing businesses with workforce who are not, you know,

digital native, that's still a thing, The digital native divide of companies, right? I had the pleasure of spending some time again at Harvard Business School recently, and it's a big subject, like how do we deal with our digital native workforce? We don't understand that, right? And now we have the new AI, which is AI native, and that's departure even far deeper, far further, right? So there is a lot of misunderstanding still, and...

and not so much good use, but not just at those older companies, frankly at our own company, right? Like which has been, we've been implementing AI for nine years, like the previous company was also implementing AI, but it was not AI native in the sense that we use AI to do it, right? We didn't have like our own systems. And so the new company is built on top of those systems. That's why it's different. But otherwise we've been doing AI for a long time. And we are...

We ourselves had problems with this, despite we understand the technology and despite switching the mindset of our own engineers who people who implement the AI, who are at the forefront, who are kept up to date with everything all the time, literally called future works.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (26:37)
Yeah.

Matt Leta (26:39)
we had problems and still will have problems. so everyone else, whether they say they do or they don't, has a problem getting their people to get value out of AI. And so it needs to be an ongoing practice. But that practice compounds and so worth investing in just simple activities like sharing, connecting people in little groups and sharing what they accomplished regularly and what they can now do.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (26:50)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Matt Leta (27:04)
and so on, and showing others, and inspiring others to do things. then, like it is in our case, there are things that would take us a month of work for a person that take us like 30 minutes now. It's really insane once you've got the hybrid setup of people, software that connects it all, and AI. It's kind of crazy what you can do, right? But to get there,

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (27:19)
Yeah. It is.

Matt Leta (27:32)
It's a battle. Yeah, it's not that easy.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (27:35)
Yeah.

And I think it's interesting you also talk about sharing what you're learning and what you're trying and what you're doing. And I feel like another blocker that I see in with some of our clients is that, well, two, maybe one is that the business leaders might be the kind of people who want to go learn everything in private and then show up as someone who knows. I actually think it's hard to learn in private about AI. It's easier to do in community or like.

Matt Leta (27:57)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (28:04)
easier to do with other people. two, they want it to be, we'll go back to that difference between big leaps and small steps. They want it to be like big and splashy. And I'm like, I don't know. I just shared with my team that, you know, I, I don't know, made a dinner menu using AI and it was really helpful. Like it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to change the world, right? It can be, this is how I'm, this is how I'm experimenting. This is how I'm learning. This is how I'm growing. And that's

Matt Leta (28:13)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (28:30)
When you talk about just get started, to me, that's if people could just wrap their heads around that to get started, like it doesn't have to change the world. It can just be something small that you're sharing with other people. To me, that would really help unlock some of the cultural impacts that are needed.

Matt Leta (28:42)
Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a lot like fitness. If you want to be fit, you need to start and keep doing it. You need to keep working out. And that's that. That's that. And it's the same. I really avoided that metaphor in my book because it's sort of played and I didn't want to use it. But it is really...

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (28:53)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Leta (29:15)
I like fitness, know, if you want to be in a good shape, you kind of need to work out, you know, that is, you know, sometimes every week and keep doing it. And it's the same with, you know, embracing those, yeah, it just needs to be done. Just on your leadership point, it is much better than when we look at companies, work with companies and see how they're adopting, it moves much better when the leaders are also using. And in some cases, the leaders are incredible.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (29:17)
Mm.

Mm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Matt Leta (29:44)
because they are good communicators and delegators, right? And so they actually are so inspiring to us. We see like a CEO or chief innovation or such at some company who's flying with AI. They're doing so many incredible things and very fast to adopt it, very fast to understand it, very fast to get value out of it. And in some cases, in many cases, I would say the sort of old worldview is like, this is not my problem.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (29:47)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Leta (30:08)
I like my ways, I'm gonna get my tech team to solve this for us. And this will not work, right? So just to get fit as an organization, I feel like the leaders also need to go to the gym.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (30:13)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I think there is a degree of tenure around that impacts that people who are further along in their careers feel like their job is to lead and it's other people's jobs to do and they are more focused on things that are impacting the business at a strategic level, but this is impacting the business at a strategic level. And so they have to understand it in a way that helps them to make better decisions.

Matt Leta (30:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, it absolutely is.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I how much time do we spend running businesses sitting in board meetings or advisory board meetings and such, or talking to our advisors, coaches and whatnot. You you can have all of that very, very well done if you just set up a bit of infrastructure, teach the AI about, you know, what's needed and so on. Like I have my ongoing co-CEO and I know all sorts of ideas through that model and I get, you know,

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (30:54)
Yeah.

Matt Leta (31:16)
sometimes terrible ideas I don't like and often really good ones that I end up actioning on. But it's good to have this ongoing sparring partner and I cannot imagine my work differently now. And I think anyone can benefit. I mean, that's such a time saver. I don't know if I even know anyone who's excited for a board meeting. And I think it's very necessary because of structures of our businesses.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (31:19)
Hahaha.

Yeah.

I think that's true.

Matt Leta (31:39)
But

it's just so much more value and so much faster. if the systems are connected, you get advice that is immediately transferable into actionable documentation and tasks and delegates and so on that all can be automated. So you don't even need to have to then look and discuss and so on. can convert the really like pulling ideas out of someone's brain and putting them into action.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (32:07)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, we always like to wrap up these episodes talking about what are a couple of things like two or three things that you would recommend to leaders to just, you know, kind of get going around some of this. And you've given us, I think, just even in this last conversation, the inspiration to say, first of all, get started, don't delegate that part of it as a leader, right? Like take ownership for yourself.

Matt Leta (32:31)
Yeah.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (32:34)
of learning and growing and expanding your own understanding of what it can do for you, not what it can do for other people. Is that a fair summary there?

Matt Leta (32:37)
Yeah.

Yeah, thank you. And I have to ask, is Align, like you mentioned, you mentioned Agree and Align, that's an ongoing theme in FailureGap, right? Yeah? interesting. So basically, yeah, go ahead.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (32:50)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I...

No, go ahead.

Matt Leta (32:58)
So the entire first chapter of the Leap Guide is titled Align. The chapters are grouped into sections, so that's like a section. I think the first four chapters are titled, or five, are titled Align. It's so important to align. So I think beyond what I already mentioned, another thing to really stress is to align on what things mean.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (33:06)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Matt Leta (33:23)
So for example define for the team what does innovation mean? Or what does transformation mean? What does AI mean? Like as silly as it sounds what does an AI agent mean and then I'm sure that You know, will take time takes, you know, sometimes a year of repetition That everyone starts speaking the same language then you're just on the interpersonal level You're starting to save so much time and conflict and misunderstanding

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (33:24)
Yep.

Matt Leta (33:52)
Just the word innovation has a lot of meanings. And I deconstructed in the book just to make sure that we arrive at the meaning we can align on. And what I arrived to as my best definition is simply the ability to see what is and to improve on it. And if that's done, starts small and keep going in cycles, then you can really move mountains. You can change an entire organization.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (33:55)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I love that idea of seeing what is and then working to improve it because so often we don't wait to see we don't stop to make sure that everybody agrees on what is and what is improvement look like. And I think when we at Kerikin's group talk about alignment, we're talking about getting to shared meaning on things. So our work is deeply human and it's deeply involved in communication and dialogue. And how do we create that shared meaning?

Matt Leta (34:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (34:45)
so that we are working towards shared goals.

Matt Leta (34:48)
Yeah, yeah, so important to align there. Today, everyone's bombarded by 10,000 different startups and bigger companies who are selling some kind of agents that are not really agents and some kind of AI technology to them. all of those are solutions looking for a problem, incentivized by their necessity to increase their ARR. And it's not really the way to start at all.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (34:50)
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Leta (35:14)
And just the way to start is to find this ability to have signals from within the organization, from the people in the trenches, from communication between departments and understand what is not working or what hopes and wishes those people have. And finding that is like an incredible motor for change. Plus, so for like ideas for essentially sourcing opportunities for innovation and use of AI that actually create ROI. But importantly, like I mentioned at the beginning,

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (35:14)
Yeah.

Matt Leta (35:43)
that also creates this culture change because people are feeling heard and part of it.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (35:48)
Yeah, yeah, I think a key takeaway from this conversation is don't worry as much about losing ground on the tech as you do about losing ground on the culture. Because if you fall too far behind in that space, then you will never catch up.

Matt Leta (36:03)
Yeah, I don't know what would it take. We would need to swap your people and then the talent shortage for people who are great at AI is always going to be there for very long time.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (36:04)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. If you could give two or three pieces of encouragement to a leader who does agree on the fact that it's a good idea to get going on AI, but is having trouble getting into action on it, what would be the two or three things that you would say to them as first steps?

Matt Leta (36:29)
The person, the biggest analog, someone who will drive it within your organization does not need to be a new hire. Ideally, it's not. You can find someone who's a high potential, high energy person who's kind of middle of the company, but you need to give them the mandate. Like, you promote them to some makeup, some role for them. They're now the head of AI or whatever.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (36:40)
Mm.

Mm.

Matt Leta (36:56)
or inter company alignment on automation router and they then will help you unlock the path and move forward. And now to two, that's not so selfish, but we've studied it for years and I've talked to 200 plus different leaders in the field to even start shaping the thinking. I would say give them the book.

Because that really is a mechanism for, know, open source this and a lot of other activity we do. And that comes with a of tools that just make it leaner. They don't have to make all the mistakes as well. can just follow that and get going.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (37:19)
Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and it is a great reference. So again, we'll put the link to it in the show notes and I would encourage people to to check it out. Matt, if there was something in the world that you could get people aligned to be doing together, is there anything that you have your nonprofit, I think it's called Future Horizons? Is there anything that you want to mention as we close out here that you would just love to see people kind of rally behind and put some put some community effort towards?

Matt Leta (37:50)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, consider what if after Anthropocene, which is our current era where humanity shapes the surface of the planet and we kind of run the show, what if the next stage would be symbiosis when we are symbiotic as humanity with our environment and with thinking machines because those are coming. Consider what would the world look like and how good would this be for you?

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (38:28)
Yeah, I love that as a vision of the future. Matt, thank you so much for taking some time to talk with us here on the Failure Gap. This has been a great conversation about an area that I know a lot of business leaders are trying to wrap their heads around right now. I think you've given us some really practical ways to think about it. I love your idea of get a find a leader, find a champion, make sure they have what they need, make sure that you get started and that you keep going, that you don't stop. And I can't

emphasize enough how important I think that is for leaders today, and that it's not something that you just as a senior leader delegate down in the organization, you also need to be thinking about for yourself. How, by the way, for any senior leaders out there, how could you make your board meetings better? Think about how AI could help you. Because I, exactly, if you want a place to go, you could start there. And I think Matt, you're right, nobody has ever really looked forward to that very much. So we might be able to change.

Matt Leta (39:12)
Yeah, yeah, I was just sparring on ideas. Yeah.

Hahaha.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (39:25)
change the world in that way. But I think there's lots of opportunity and it's a really exciting frontier. If you feel like you don't understand it, rest assured you're in good company. A lot of people don't understand right now, but there are people who are starting to learn and grow and experiment and they are the ones that are going to lead the future. hopefully this conversation inspires some people to do that. Check out Matt's book, check out Future Works as well. They're great partners in all of this. And Matt, thanks again for joining us on the Failure Gap.

Matt Leta (39:26)
Okay.

Thanks so much for having me, Julie. This was a pleasure.

Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (39:55)
Yeah,

yeah to all of our listeners don't forget to like, subscribe and pass it along and we'll see you next time.

Perfect.

Matt Leta (40:03)
Excellent.