Navigating Uncertainty: Human Connection in an AI-Driven World with Andy DeShong

[INTRODUCTION]

"Andy DeShong: If you can work on the mission aspect or the why, that aspect, that seems to drive it better than clarity." 

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human, where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives. 

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that's with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves. 

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni. 

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore. Let’s dive in.

Cristina Amigoni: Let’s dive in. 

“Authenticity means freedom.”

“Authenticity means going with your gut.”

“Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself, not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.”

“Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.”

“It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.”

“Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.”

“It's transparency, relatability. No frills, no makeup, just being.”

[INTERVIEW]

Alex Cullimore: Hello, Cristina. 

Cristina Amigoni: Hello. Happy Friday. 

Alex Cullimore: Happy Friday. Yeah, I mean, it's probably Wednesday for people who are really hot off the press on this one. But for us, it's Friday. 

Cristina Amigoni: As we've talked about many times, time is relative. 

Alex Cullimore: Time is relative, time is nonsense. Time is whatever you want it to be. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. 

Alex Cullimore: We just had a great conversation with Andy DeShong, somebody who we've worked with for a few years. And we got to talk about AI, uncertainty, and what you do with humans. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. And I don't think we solved much, but we did philosophize a lot. And there's some solutions. There's some good tips and things to look at, and shifts in mindsets from the education, and how our kids are going to have to face education, and how education needs to change quite fast. But also, what happens in the workplace and what you do with individuals and teams. And how do you move through this world of uncertainty that it's going to about to explode and not get certain anytime soon? 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Think about things like how you anchor on the things that you can keep certain. What do you do to have relationships so that you can count on people and you feel that safety, which is a kind of a nice inbuilt feature of humanity? We feel safe when we can feel a sense of belonging. What can we do to do that for each other so we can have some amount of certainty as we all drift into the AI sphere? 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, yeah. It was interesting because we started with talking about trust and we ended with talking about trust. It really is about building trust. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Go figure. It's kind of an important part of human life. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. If only we're that easy. Yeah, enjoy. 

Alex Cullimore: Enjoy the conversation. 

Cristina Amigoni: And thanks for listening. 

[INTERVIEW]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to this episode of Uncover the Human. Today, Cristina and I are joined by our guest, Andy DeShong. Welcome to the podcast, Andy. 

Andy DeShong: Hey, thanks. Nice to be here. 

Cristina Amigoni: Thanks for being on. 

Alex Cullimore: Good to see you. Andy, tell us a little bit about your background. 

Andy DeShong: You ask. I could guess. 

Alex Cullimore: What brought you here? What got you to us other than us asking? 

Andy DeShong: Well, I've been working with you all for a while as part of our organizational work. I really love what you do, so I decided to lend what I know around to other people and see if we can find some fun stuff to talk about. 

Alex Cullimore: Excellent. That's the hope. 

Cristina Amigoni: There will be some. 

Alex Cullimore: We know that one of the big things that's obviously going on both within your company and in general is the AI advents and the fact that we're all going to have every bit of our lives upended a little bit by AI. And I know that you've done a lot of investigating into this space. You have a lot of excitement in that. How's that going for you personally and at work? 

Andy DeShong: Ironically, I was just talking to my wife about this at breakfast as we are trying to figure out what we're going to do with our kids and what jobs are going to be here or not be here. We're doing a lot of work in that space, again, from a work perspective. I've been in technology forever, ever since I was in high school. And I'm an old man at this point. I've seen different waves of things come and go and this is by far the most impactful thing that I've ever seen. And I think this is going to cause the most both opportunities as well as rethinking how people think about things going forward. 

For me, it's really exciting because of what's possible, but it's going to be a bigger disruption than I think anybody even imagines. And I think what would hit me as I was seeing any of the big companies that are out there playing in that space, and I think you have to look at it as like – obviously, you have OpenAI with ChatGPT. You've got Google going after this. You've got Meta going after this. You've got Microsoft going after this. That's just here in the US. And then you start to think about the international companies that are going after it as well. And they're spending billions and billions of dollars. 

And I think it was most evident for me a couple of weeks ago where I just saw the progress year over year from OpenAI as an example and the amount of progress that they've made in that year, that would have taken 15 years, dog years, if not more the progress that they're making on all kinds of different things. It both wowed me from an excitement perspective but also scared me at the human level a little bit around like, "Okay, what is going to happen?" 

And so I think I shared with you all, I came out of there going – part of my job is we build software inside for our organization. And I'm thinking it's going to reinvent the entire way that software is built across the world. What does that mean to how we do that today? What does that mean to all the jobs, the impact? What skills are going to be needed going forward? It was a really short question you asked there, Alex, but you can tell that I'm firing off a multiple agent trying to figure it out, but it's wildly impactful. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Even as a casual user of AI, I've done a few things with ChatGPT here and there, and a couple of image generations, whatever. Just in the few months that I've worked with it on and off, it's incredible how much has changed, how much has already improved. The image generation used to be particularly frustrating. Now it can do a great job of identifying parts of a picture that you didn't want and changing that. It's fairly impressive. Not only two months ago, we couldn't get it to generate text without it being all blurry, misspelled, whatever, and now it's got perfect text recognition. 

Andy DeShong: Yeah, and the next phase of that is actually – if you've played there at all, it's not just the image, but the animation. And they showed an example, or I've seen an example of you take an old movie that you may have of whomever. And old can be relative. You have a movie [inaudible 0:06:55], or from the 1950s, or whatever. And you can take that first eight seconds of that movie or whatever stops or starts, and you can then ask AI to, "Okay, carry this forward." 

Imagine I have a picture of my mom and dad or a photo of my mom and dad going from the car to their front door, and I can then say, "Okay, have them continue on into the kitchen and make breakfast," and it will take that same sort of background and the characteristics and then just carry it forward and create a whole dimension. That's the word I use. I don't know if that's right. But you can just carry the movie forward. 

And so the animation, I think we're going to get into a state where we're like on a video game, for example. Well, I think – here, let me do it this way. If you have children, and your kids sometimes say, "Hey, read me a bedtime story," I think it's going to get into create me a bedtime movie. And you – fly, create a story with a movie. The creative content that's going to come out is going to be amazing. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. The ability is incredible. And like you said, it fills us with both some excitement. There's a lot of possibilities on the horizon. And of course, the general fear of what does this mean for not only humans, I mean, employment’s sake, but humans in general. What does this mean for us in our future? I'm curious what your thoughts are on things that maybe cause you a little hesitation. 

Andy DeShong: Yeah. It's faster than I think it's going to be. I think this is going to come a lot faster. I think about – I see it coming in waves. I mean, we will all still have – at the beginning, I think it's all going to be – you're going to need to have more orchestration capabilities. You're going to need to have more critical thinking that is going to come back in vogue. I think you're going to need those skills. 

Again, in the coding space, where it's headed from a coding perspective, is you're going to be at the master control. And we had this notion of copilot, right? Or Microsoft Copilot, or one of those where you've got one sort of helper, if you will, that's helping you along. I don't think it's one anymore. I think you've got a team. 

Imagine one software developer having 10 different agents that he or she is controlling, doing different tasks and firing them off, and then them sort of checking back in. And that person who's at the control panel is going, "Okay, yeah, when that one looks good," and then sort of putting them all together and then firing off more work. I think that's going to how it's gonna start. 

And so the job will shift from you individually doing that work into people orchestrating 10 times you, if you will. And then you're going to get into a situation where it's going to be, "Okay, maybe there's not as many of –" I'm going to clone me, and then I can run those orchestrations. And then it's going to get into – the clone's going to talk – the agent's going to talk to the other agent. Alex, you will have an agent out there that is you interacting with a bunch of other people. I'll have one. And so that sort of stuff is going to be happening. 

And then it becomes like, "Okay, well, if that's all happening, what the hell is real physical and you got to one day? What's he going to be doing?" And do I get to license my likeness and cloneness for use by a company? Could my clone be of service to somebody? So I get virtual salaries from a hundred different companies for my clone? I don't know. That's just a random thought. What are we going to do? 

On the bright side of things, I think if you can look at, "Okay, if we're doing all of this stuff, then the amount of – I think food insecurity goes away because I think the technology will be able to reduce more food for everybody. I think some of the constraints that are currently worry a number of people out there, some of that stuff goes away. I think that becomes – we'll be able to support everybody. So you won't need the same amount of – maybe food's free, right? Because if you can produce enough – 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. That will be nice. 

Andy DeShong: You know, you can go into these cycles where different things happen. I think, though, how are we going to occupy our time? And what are we going to do? That's the piece that I certainly haven't figured out yet. But I think that's – and like I said, I'm old. I don't know how that's coming. Is this coming along? But that's what I think about for my kids. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. There's a lot there. 

Andy DeShong: I don't know if I've sent you guys down a death spiral or a happiness path. 

Cristina Amigoni: It's a little bit of both. 

Alex Cullimore: How is one different from the other, really? 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, exactly. There's definitely the thought of – well, as we all know, especially in this particular room, humans adopt change really fast and very easily. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes, famously well. 

Andy DeShong: Let's be real. As soon as I did this, I came back and I talked to both of you two, and I said, "Okay, how do we get people to absorb change faster?" Because it's going to come in waves. And you all just smiled at me like you're kind of doing now. And I'm like, "Yeah, that's what –" as we all know, change is the limiting factor inside organizations, inside everything, the willingness to adopt a change. And I think I don't know if we evolutionarily grow differently because of this. I don't know. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, I would hope we do. 

Alex Cullimore: That's the challenge of basically the last 30 years has been technology changing so fast and the landscape changing so fast. And now AI is definitely even faster on top of that. We're not adjusting our social norms as quickly as that. I mean, social media came along, and it's taken us a little while to – I read some article that called it, I think, inoculating yourself, essentially. Eventually, you understand the patterns of it. You start to realize, "Okay, this works, this doesn't work." But in the first couple of iterations, everything kind of is on overload. And of course, AI has so many iterations that we were just talking about once happening within the last couple of months. Social media, that would happen over the course of, even though that was very fast, years. And now we have months to do so. And so one thing that occurs to me is that everybody's going to have to get into some amount of uncertainty and start to understand the idea of being uncomfortable in uncertainty. And that's not an easy thing to train, but we are all about to be in immersion therapy for it. 

Andy DeShong: If you think about education, again, if you've got all of these things at your fingertips, you still need to figure out how to learn. You still need to figure out how – like I said, critical thinking. I'll make a plug back for the liberal arts degrees around understanding your surroundings, understanding your environment around you. I think that's going to become really important. 

Again, math and science will never get old. But we're going to have to figure out how to train, if you will, I mean, the uncertainty in the gray area. You think about how kids are trained – not trained, educated today, on this is the outcome, or this is the right answer, or this is – or everybody gets a trophy. I think that's going to have to evolve as well. 

What I'm seeing most interestingly, I think, is, in my mind, what are complete businesses that just are getting wiped out with some of the technology. And so I could argue that tutoring is one of those things. But again, it's the human component that we're going to have to figure out. 

Cristina Amigoni: Speaking of the human component. As a leader, it's not just about adopting and understanding, but it's also about having hundreds and thousands of people that are going to have to change their identity, change what they do, how they do it, think about themselves. What are some thoughts you have? 

Andy DeShong: It's all I think about. For the people on – I didn't really talk about what I do. I lead software organizations. We've got probably 500 people across multiple disciplines of all engineering, et cetera, and data center-type stuff. And I had a round table this week with – I do sort of skip level meetings where you just talking to anybody in the team. And one of the things that they were all craving was more certainty and more stability. 

The need is real from the employee side or from the people side. People love – they get their comfort in that. And when that is established, they can go do the other. I mean, fight or flight, or however you want to sort of think about it. And I hear that need. I want that for them. But the amount of change that's going to happen, I feel like I know what's around the door. And I'm trying to help them be comfortable with what's in the room now. I know there's something that they're not going to like around the corner. I need them to go into that corner with me. 

I think that for me, the trust element is going to become even more valuable around, "Do they trust us? Do you trust each other?" Because in those things, if you're going in it together with good intent, that's the only comfort that you're going to have. We will work through this together. 

And I hadn't really thought about it until I started talking to you guys right now about that trust component becomes even more valuable, because that's the only thing that's going to get you through it. Otherwise, you're just going to live in this uncomfortableness forever. And people who – I can live in the gray myself. Other people, not so much, right? And that's okay, too. But they're going to need that. 

Alex Cullimore: You bring up a good point. Definitely, there is the desire for stability, but we all know that's not realistic. Even if we desire it, there's just – even if you don't have AI revolutionizing everything that's happening to us, you have a lot of instability and unknown. It does bring that trust point. I think there's something interesting there and highlighting what are the things that you can count on to be stable. And in this case, it's going to be the relationships around you, building that trust that, "Hey, there's some good intentions here. We're going to walk this together." 

If you can start to count on – we don't know where we're walking. Maybe we don't know what we're walking into, but that we are walking together, or that I can count on this person to do this. Those are the things that you can. Then what else can you rely on, I suppose, is the question that becomes more important? In a world that's otherwise unstable, what are the things that will be stable that we can think about? 

Andy DeShong: And are those things that are stable enough for you to take that step around the corner or wherever it maybe? Yeah, I don't have that answer. 

Alex Cullimore: It's an interesting thought. Exercising on it. 

Andy DeShong: No, I know. I think I would love to be – as I left sort of my latest AI findings, I knew a couple of things. I knew I wanted to – I want to be in the AI transformation business, right? I mean, I want to adopt that. I mean, the reason why I'm in technology is I love – I think tech can do anything. Now, whether it should or shouldn't, or is it cost-efficient, that's another story. But I want to be in this business. And so it's just what I like. 

Now, if I had a different passion and vocation, the love of – I look at both of you and sort of what you do. And I'm like, "What a great time to be – what a great opportunity, what a great time, and what a great set of ingredients." It would be fun. As I toss out these ideas of like the trust idea or whatever – and somebody listening to this who's in that like, "Okay, yeah, that one's good. I'll write that one down." And like, "Oh, yeah, I can build my whole next career path on how do I do that with organizations, or individuals, or, hell, even families." 

I mean, not like parenting comes with a rule book, an instruction manual anyway. To be a parent in this, holy crud to navigate the education system. You thought just giving your kid a cell phone was good, or bad, or whatever. Glad I'm older, I think. 

Cristina Amigoni: We're definitely past that. 

Andy DeShong: I guess I'm definitely past the year – I've got different kid problems, but I'm definitely past the educational stage and the formations, the foundational formation where they get shaped. It's going to be you guys, though. 

Cristina Amigoni: It is fun. It's funny because I actually was a philosophy major. I did go at liberal arts right before it became one of those things like, "Why would you get a philosophy degree?" And the fun part is that I'm doing a lot more philosophizing now than I ever did before. Because now it is all about like let's understand humans and how they work. And what's the next step? And all the non-tangible things. As opposed to I know how to type this thing in the keyboard, and then I get a result. 

Andy DeShong: Yeah, I think sociology majors are one of the highest sought-after majors from a technology perspective, because you're trying to get the human aspect of how to work with the machine. I think, yeah, the humans are still going to be here. What we're doing with them matters. 

Alex Cullimore: That does give the idea that maybe we have some chance and opportunity in doing some of the exercises that people would be going through in liberal arts education. What are the things that they do to help reinforce critical thinking? What are the things that we do so that you can evaluate what's coming out of some things? That's going to be a huge part of the AI thing, is it's going to generate a bunch of stuff for you. How do you evaluate whether this is what you want it to say? 

A lot of the work that, definitely, when I was going through school, that was – at the time, like you were saying, Cristina, where it was like, "Oh, who cares about that? That's not important. Go back into STEM. Go back into science and technology." It doesn't matter how you interpret a piece of literature. And now it's very important. It's going to be very important to think about what is the intention here? Does this beat what I want this to? And so maybe there's some opportunity to start introducing some of those exercises in smaller scales and larger scales to people to start to retrain that thinking, retrain the ability to do what we would do in a philosophy class, what we would do in an English class. 

Andy DeShong: I agree. Again, I think maybe I think how to play well with others in team sports, that continue to be highly valuable no matter. It's funny to me. I have four boys. You know that. But the people who are listening don't know that. I have four boys. They're all – three of them are out of college. One of them is in college. And collectively, the least cherished assignment that any of them ever get is the team project. They all hate the team projects. For some reason that you hate them in the work world, it's because not everybody does their part and all that stuff. But that's the stuff that really matters. 

I said, well, unfortunately for you, that is life. Because the team project becomes life, unless you do totally different work. But again, the teamwork, the human dynamic aspect really is – again, Alex, I think you said it. Despite all of the AI whiz bangerie and all of that kind of stuff, it's still going to come down to how you interact with people. 

Cristina Amigoni: For sure. Yeah, it's interesting because I had a thought that I shared with Alex yesterday. And we've used the soccer analogy quite a bit into this is a team. You're all in the same field. You have to see what everybody else is doing. You have your own role in a way, but you also have to be aware enough of what everybody else is and where the connection points are. 

And that's when I had the thought, was, "Wait. We're moving from specific clarity of this is my role and this is my resume," to what's more important is the connection points, not what each person does. And so getting an organization and a group of employees to get out of. I need the prescribed. This is my job description, and that's what I do. And think beyond that, it's not about what I do, it's how I connect with everybody else. 

Andy DeShong: What you've said struck two different thoughts with me. I always use the analogy when you're a startup or you've got four, five, six people in a startup, nobody really cares about roles and responsibilities. You're all there on it with a common mission, and a common goal, and a common – and you'll do whatever it takes in order to hit that goal. Where that becomes challenging is once you scale that out amongst multiple employees. I think that's still the why behind what people are doing is still going to be very important. I mean, why do I do that? 

But then the second piece you talked about is the connectivity and sort of the team aspect. And again, it's around the goal, mission. Not just also mission – why you work for a given company. I think a lot of that is mission-driven today. I mean, a lot of people with talents can take their talents everywhere, in a lot of different places. But choosing to work in a particular organization about what they're trying to do is a driver. But then your driver around, "Why are we trying to do X, Y, or Z? We build software. Why are we trying to do this particular piece of software?" 

And as a leader, that's one of the hardest things to connect is to satisfy everybody's why, because their whys are – a lot of them are different. But I'd like to figure out how the connection and the why. If I could do anything probably today, we get a lot of stuff around – you notice I'm even using air quotes. Role clarity. Roles are clear. They are defined. They are in writing. There's a grid. There's a chart. There's a picture. We've defined roles. That is many ways as we can define a role. Either two things, people don't like the role, or they don't see people acting in the role. 

And so I think if you can work on the mission aspect or the why, that aspect, that seems to drive it better than the clarity. Or something else with that clarity piece that there's still some uncomfortableness, or there's some things not right when they say it's role clarity. I'm curious your thoughts on that. 

Alex Cullimore: I agree 100%. There's definitely just the resistance towards that. There's some idea that like, "Oh, I don't have a clear enough role." That's usually, "Oh, I'm seeing a gap that's not being covered." I think this is what somebody should do, but they're not doing it. Or I thought I was doing my job, and I'm being told I'm not doing it right. And so now I'm going to – there's like this – all of these impulses to go hit the role clarity button. And say, "Okay, it's role clarity, it's role clarity." 

And it reminds me of the kind of Ted Lasso total football. The whole last season, they spent working on total football. And the idea is like, "We're going to go cover the whole field." Everybody has a role. But really, you should know where everybody is at all times. And some of it is just their responsibilities. And the incentives seem to be individually aligned. Whereas the collective goal gets lost in that. 

Andy DeShong: Yeah. How do you get that? Because that is – I mean, that's it in a nutshell. How have you seen that being effectively – managed differently or the level of communication with people? Have you guys seen that work differently? Because, again, that's something we struggle with a lot. And I don't know if it's our incentive. I don't know if it's the incentive alignment. I don't know what we're doing wrong on that arena, but that always comes up. 

Alex Cullimore: I have a minor soapbox on this one, but the idea that I kind of fall back to is that we have a mindset issue that is hard to challenge. Especially in American culture, there's a lot of the idea of individualism. You want to succeed individually. You want to do really well in your job individually. And the goal, it's not a bad thing necessarily, but it can sometimes then ignore that we collectively succeed or fail when we get into businesses. 

We have this idea that we can all solve these problems individually, which that one's a much harder mindset to change. But within an organization, I think the incentives then need to be more realigned towards what are we all doing? How do we measure things that are collaboration? How do we say that your part of your score in your performance review is how well others are seeing you in a collaborator? And there's so many difficulties in approaching that, but we do have so many individual rewards on performance that don't apply to the collective goal and the collaboration. 

Andy DeShong: Two thoughts spring to mind. Maybe three years ago, one of everybody's goals were, "What are you doing to make someone else's life better?" I put that goal into place. So people wouldn't think – I probably have to ask my leadership team how they thought that goal was, because it could be a good time next year to bring that one back. That's sort of one thought I have. 

And then the other thing for me – again, curious to see how you all have seen other people do this. But fortunately, or unfortunately for me, I've never asked for more responsibility in my life. That's not how I'm wired. I don't speak like, "Oh, give me that." It's all just happened either by the work product that I've demonstrated or what somebody saw in me, one way or the other. And so I really have a hard time when people are like, "What do I need to do to get promoted? Or what do I need to do to get X, Y, or Z?" And I'm like, "I'll start with doing your job." And there's not a tangible – you guys got any advice there? 

Alex Cullimore: I think that I think there's a great acknowledgement, honestly, that it was something that I struggled with when I first got into the career world. It's something I think people struggle with when they get performance reviews. We do performance reviews to try and help people in some kind of guidance and give some kind of number to it. But then it makes it feel like – and then people demand things like role clarity or career ladders where there's like, "Oh, I want this framework. I want to be able to point to the tangible things that will move me up this ladder." Especially in like an era of AI, it doesn't really matter. It's going to change. What is needed is what is needed. And figuring that out is what is going to make you valuable. 

Andy DeShong: Cristina, any thoughts for me? 

Cristina Amigoni: Well, I struggle with a couple. I am the same way. I've never asked to be promoted, or I've never worked to be promoted. I guess I'll talk about it that way. I've always kind of been given more work, been given promotions. And the joke that – and Alex knows about this because he's witnessed it. The joke is that a lot of times when I've gotten promoted is when I walk into a conversation knowing that I'm going to reveal something that's broken somewhere. And I'll start with, "Okay," to whoever my boss is, like, "you're going to want to fire me after I say this, but I have to say it." And then that's usually when I get a promotion. 

Andy DeShong: And then they go, "Congratulations. You're now –" 

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. Now you have to go fix it.

Alex Cullimore: You're not in charge of that. 

Cristina Amigoni: And for role, I've been one of those people where – in every single job I've ever had, even my first one, I think I lasted three days before they added more responsibility to it, was, "Oh, this is my role. Great. I'm going to do everything I can to get out of that." In a way of, if I see something, even if it's not on my list of things to fix, or be responsible for, or help with, I'm going to go do it, because it needs to be done. 

I don't know that I have an insight on how to change that, but there is something about getting out of, "My job is what I was told it is." And really moving from that to thinking, "My job is to make somebody else's life better. My job is to help the team get to here." And so sometimes it will be exactly what it was written, my job descriptions, and sometimes it won't look like that at all. But how do I think about it outside of me? 

Andy DeShong: I wonder about is this how we've conditioned people to be – again, I go back to the education system. I mean, you've got to pass this test. I mean, it's this sort of – even the way I listen to my children. And again, I sound like an old man. I guess I am old. I just listen to them describe how their professors – or they're, "Tell me exactly what I need to do in order to get the A." Versus, you take the test, you get the grade. That piece is missing. 

And admittedly, this is from a completely American, Western sort of based frame. I mean, that's me. But obviously, when you work in software engineering, the beautiful thing about it is you have folks from all over the world. We've got resources from every continent, almost everywhere. And obviously, cultures, education, et cetera, is different. And so that mix is also – blending those cultures inside of a team is also a very interesting dynamic. 

Quite honestly, we probably don't spend enough time in my organization trying to figure out the team – we work in teams, right? We're a development team. We have 60, 70 of them. And each one of them is its own little universe. I tell this story, but I'll share it with your listeners. When I first took this job, one of the biggest mistakes that I made is that I thought I could apply the same rules and logic across all teams and everybody would be great. 

What I realized is I have 60 different fish tanks. When I first started, I just fed them all food, gave them all the right – things. And they would all – right. I failed to recognize that the fish inside the tank are all different. They've got a different ecosystem. They have a different dynamic. They have a different way of working. And so simply applying the same fish food across was a stupid fricking idea, and I learned so much from that. 

But in retrospect, I know that I can't treat them all the same. But I think we also don't take enough time to figure out the actual team dynamic. And you all do a great exercise, either WIDGET, trying to – and people on the phone or on the call are like, "What?" Just understanding the different personality – of a team is really important. That helps you at least understand where people are coming from. It doesn't help you actually move the ball forward if you need to, but you can understand why stuff may or may not be happening. 

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, I was thinking, that is the challenge. Because it doesn't help understand. But then in a lot of cases, it's like, "Okay, I get it. And I still want that from this person." But that person is never going to give you that. Meet them where they are, and they can give you all these other things. That because they're stuck into this box that other people expect them to be in, they're not actually providing what they can provide. And so there's a lot of mindset shift. 

And maybe when we think about what do people focus on in that trust and in those skills from now on, it's shifting mindset, really. It's trusting, like, "If I can't count on – if I type this or create this deliverable, then I'm successful." Because that's going to continuously going to change. And also, AI is going to do it for me. It's like, "What can I then trust? I can trust how I adapt to that uncertainty." Because the uncertainty is going to be there. What can I bring to the uncertainty? What do I bring that's mine and is unique to the uncertainty? 

Alex Cullimore: I think the other flip side of that is that the uncertainty is unique to people, too. I think that what people feel uncertain about gets that. I love the fish tank metaphor because you end up with – the one thing that we see time and again is try to understand people. But not just understanding their strengths, understanding the things that will trigger them. Understanding the things that are fears. This is something we do a lot in coaching work is figuring out, "Okay, what is the real blocker?" We usually call it. What is the real thing that's kind of in the way. And it's different for everybody because it's whatever is informed by your personal experience. But those are the things that tend to get people back into defensive modes. They tend to get back into like, "What am I going to do for a promotion?" Because now I'm just like, "Well, I'll just sort out this. Here's something that maybe I can grasp, maybe I can define. Maybe if I just have role clarity, if I just have something to reach for, that will be the thing that I'll just do that for a bit. And then I'll go back into doing the things that I find interesting or the things that I can really excel at." And so that discovery and understanding of individual fears is time-consuming, but incredibly valuable work to get people to adjust. 

Andy DeShong: Yeah. It absolutely – I mean, it's like continuing with the sports metaphor, the sports. One of the things they do now in professional sports, obviously, is if you've got an athlete, you spend a lot of time trying to understand that athlete. From his or her diet, to their exercise, to what they're really good at, to what will make them perform the best on the field. We don't do any of that. I mean, that's not fair. 

We absolutely one-on-one sessions. But we're asking people to contribute to a team – I mean, it just caused me to think about are we doing enough to understand the individual employee? I'll take it to the next step. And even if we did understand it, how would we apply that understanding in a more impactful way? 

Where I was really starting off with this was, all of this becomes really important for the first-line manager level, right? That's where they, he or she, lives, and breathes, and thrives, and survives. Again, the challenge with most first-line managers, especially in technology, is they tend to get promoted. At least give them the first shot based on their merit at the job that they did before. We try to make sure that we're not promoting just based on pure technical ability or something else. But you tend to get that first shot based on you were good at something that you did before. And how do we arm them with not just normal managerial – but in-depth, like, "Congratulations. You now own this fish tank. You've never worked with food. You know what the rocks are at the bottom. You know the little diver that has the old school mask. You got a bubbler in the corner, but you don't really know what your fish eat." Anyway, clearly, I've got mental here. 

Alex Cullimore: It's a great metaphor. 

Cristina Amigoni: It's a good metaphor. 

Alex Cullimore: You're a fish guy. You're taking care of fish. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. And they're all different.

Andy DeShong: And they're all different. Look, even if you've got two goldfish that are – there's still different goldfish within the tank. Not all goldfish are equal. People, they make working fun. 

Cristina Amigoni: They do make working fun, yeah.

Andy DeShong: I always say software is not hard. It's the people that make it hard. I mean, software is code. It's a zero or one. It does it or it doesn't do it. It's the people that either the person who says they want something or the team that wants to fight about how to build it. That's what makes it fun. 

Cristina Amigoni: Well, there's probably a billion other tangents we could take, but we would be here for a long time. On that thought, we end our calls, usually our podcast, with asking your definition of authenticity is, which could go back to the fish tanks. 

Andy DeShong: I guess, being yourself. Authenticity, I think you would – again, this has never been a – this has both been to my success and detriment all at the same time. I am me. I am very proud of myself. I was not authentic on this call because there was no profanity used. That would be – 

Cristina Amigoni: You're welcome to use it. 

Andy DeShong: But that would be authentic – authenticity is me being who I am at home with my family, my friends, as I am at work. And so when I say to my – what you see is sort of what you get with me from an authenticity perspective. And I think that's what I expect of my leaders or my team is that they're honest, that they're trying to do the right things, that they want to be – and they are their genuine selves. 

Look, we're all wildly unique. And that's what makes it fun, or cool, or to be part of a team. If I had a bunch of people trying to be the same person, we would get worse ideas, we would get, "That's not what makes any of this stuff better." So you have to be yourself, and you have to sort of just be genuine.

And when I say that's both served me and harmed me, I think that people who work with me appreciate that they know where they stand and/or they know that I'm always going to deliver news, good, bad, indifferent. When I screw up, I do it a lot. I think that's authenticity to me. The bad side is I tend to say things that other people will get offended by. Or not offended. That's the wrong word. They're just either not used to having that in a business culture, or we weren't ready to share that information yet. I mean, there's this – information is not power. Some people use it that way. And I would just say I am a – I want to diffuse information so that you can't hold it against somebody or something. That's how I think about authenticity. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, yeah. Information is not power. That's key. That's one of my biggest pet peeves is hoarding information and using it as power. 

Andy DeShong: Yeah. There you go. That's me. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. And that's what's – authenticity is foundation for trust. It's hard to trust somebody that is clearly not genuine and authentic. 

Andy DeShong: Yeah. I mean, the speed of trust, if you are subscribed to that, I mean, that is the number one – trust is the number one thing that I can do. And I could go on it for more tangents here, but I will tell you one more quick story, even though that's the last question I know. A number of years ago, I had a person working for me. Our interactions were strained, and I needed to tell him something. And I spent the night before, "Okay, how am I going to frame this conversation with him?" How am I going to – like, "Okay, if he says this, I'm going to say this." And da-da-da-da-da. I was game-theorying out this conversation. And it really wasn't of anything of terrible significance. It was important, but I didn't want to make him mad. But I was thinking about it. 

 Now, I had been thinking about it, and I was going to meet with him later in the afternoon. Now, about 11 o'clock in the morning, I had an email exchange or a phone call exchange. It was a phone exchange. We were on a call, and somebody that was a direct report of mine who have a great relationship, she said something that really was wrong, not cool, didn't like it, et cetera. After we got off that call, I went down to her office, and I'm like, "What the –" you know? And she's like – 

Alex Cullimore: You could say it. 

Andy DeShong: Yeah. I'm like, "What the fuck? What are you doing?" And she's like, "What?" And I'm like, "X, Y, Z." She's like, "Oh, crap. I didn't even think about that. Yeah, you're right. My bad." And I'm like, "Okay." And I'm like, "You get it?" And she's like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Okay, cool." And I said, I've spent seven hours in my head trying to have this conversation with this guy. I was able to resolve something with her in 30 seconds. And it's because she trusted me, I trust her. We're not trying to do anything other than get stuff done. And like done and dusted. 

And it's at that point that I realized that if I can't – if there's not trust where we can't have that kind of dialogue and I may not use WTF, I may do it some – but if we can't have that kind of interaction, I've either got to work with that person to get that interaction or they can't be part of my team. Because that speed that we have that come up, you need that in order to move forward. 

And so from that moment forward, I've made it a point where I have to be able to have those kind of conversations with as many people as I can, and develop that trust so that they know that I'm just there either trying to help them, I'm expressing my frustration in a coaching opportunity, or they're making me smarter, because I've got it all wrong. But I have to be able to have that, because I can't spend time thinking about how I'm going to phrase something to somebody. 

Alex Cullimore: I Like that as a measure of relationship. Just your speed to what the fuck conversation. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, that is a great measure. 

Andy DeShong: Maybe I'll write that book, Speed to WTF. That would be good. 

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. There's our team solution. If a team can work together at that speed, we're good. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. 

Cristina Amigoni: Uncertainty doesn't matter. 

Andy DeShong: Yeah. Hey, we've solved it. 

Cristina Amigoni: We solved it. Exactly. 45 minutes or less. 

Andy DeShong: Speed to WTF equals team goodness. Okay. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, exactly. Now we just have to implement it. 

Andy DeShong: Give him that assignment. Okay. All right, I'll shut up now. 

Cristina Amigoni: All right. Where can people find you if you want to be found? If you want to find yourself? 

Andy DeShong: Yeah. For some reason, someone who wants to find me, you can email me at adeshong. My first name. My first initial and my last name is printed there on the screen, at gmail.com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. My name, it'll pop up. I work at a company called Vizient, and you can see me there. Either one of those two. I'm happy to have conversations, or chat, or whatever. 

Cristina Amigoni: Well, thank you. 

Andy DeShong: All right. Okay. 

Alex Cullimore: Thanks. 

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you, Andy. 

Andy DeShong: All right. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Cristina. 

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you. 

[OUTRO]

Alex Cullimore: Thanks so much for listening to Uncover the Human. We are Siamo. That is the company that sponsors and created this podcast. And if you would like to reach out to us further, reach out with any questions or to be on the podcast, please reach out to podcast@wearesiamo.com. Or you can find us on Instagram. Our handle is @wearesiamo. Or you can go to wearesiamo.com and check us out there. Or, I suppose, Cristina you and I have LinkedIn as well. People could find us anywhere. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, we do have LinkedIn. Yes. Yeah. And we'd like to thank Abbay Robinson for producing our podcast and making sure that they actually reach all of you. And Rachel Sherwood for the wonderful score. 

Alex Cullimore: Thank you, guys, so much for listening. Tune in next time. 

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you. 

[END]