310 Unlearning Certainty: Leadership in an Age of Exponential Uncertainty, Mahan Tavakoli interviewed by Tim Windsor on the UNCOMMODiFiED Podcast

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm really excited this week to share with you a conversation I had with Tim Windsor on his Uncommodified podcast, where he interviewed me on some of the exponential changes we're experiencing and the impact they will have on our leadership norms and how we need to lead our teams and organizations.

You will hear some of my perspectives on why certainty and pattern recognition can get leaders into trouble and why curiosity and bold questioning can help unlock innovation and the necessity for that now more so than ever before. 

I also love hearing from you. Keep your comments coming, mahanatmahantavikuly. com. There's a microphone icon on partneringleadership.com. You can leave voice messages for me there. 

Don't forget to follow the podcast on your favorite platform, and when you get a chance, leave a rating and review that will help more people find and benefit from these conversations. 

Now, here is the conversation where Tim Windsor interviewed me on his Uncommodified Podcast on AI and Leadership. 

[00:01:36] Tim Windsor: Hey, my friends, welcome back to the Uncommodified podcast and to another Uncorked conversation, my favorite kind of conversations. Today my guest is someone I met on LinkedIn and we've connected over the last maybe year and a half on LinkedIn. I want to welcome to the show my virtual friend, maybe I'll get to beat you someday, but it's Mahan Tavakoli.

Mahan, thanks so much for joining me on the show today. 

[00:01:56] Mahan Tavakoli: Tim, I am thrilled to be with you, and I'm looking forward to meeting you in person as well.

[00:02:01] Tim Windsor: Yeah, it's going to happen one day, I guarantee it. So let me, let's, if you're listening in, I want to quickly get you into the theme, so you understand what we're going to talk about, and then I'll introduce Mahan to you.

Our theme today is going to be an interesting one. We're going to be talking about AI strategic and tactical application for leaders, for people in their organizations, and their teams, and also we're going to talk about aligning your leadership. Your leadership team for execution of a strategy that you're looking towards.

This is an area of expertise and experience that Mahan brings to this conversation today and it's going to be excited. So a bit about Mahan so you can understand who he is. You can hunt him down on social media. You can find him on his podcast. He's got a great podcast. I'll tell you about that in a second.

But Mahan is a globally recognized CEO advisor. executive coach, leadership consultant and he supports CEOs to unleash the potential of their teams through purpose driven leadership and organizational alignment and effective strategy execution. And that is a mouthful, my friends. So I can't wait to understand what that actually means.

But for over a quarter century, I love quarter century. It sounds better than 25 years over a quarter century, 25 years. Mahan's experience is been being is as in this leadership area is just really creating benefit in the companies you work for, but he also has a deep experiential background.

So not just a consultant who thinks he can do it. He's done it, and he has. He's held some senior roles with Dale Carnegie training chief strategy and diversity officer, the vice president of international operations. So deep bench strength knowledge and now applied in this consulting roles, experience in artificial intelligence, understanding that it's impact on organizations and its strategic impact on leadership.

He guides his clients through all the navigation of this difficult water. In addition to this, he plays a role in his local community where he lives just out of outside of Washington in the leadership sphere. And as I mentioned before, he's got an amazing podcast. And if you haven't listened to it yet, you need to listen to it.

It's called partnering leadership. And it's a top global podcast. And that's how we connected in the beginning. Mahan, thanks for everything you do to contribute to the bench strength of leaders throughout the world, where you connect with, I appreciate it. And I know they do as well. And so let's celebrate this with a drink as all conversations for me start.

Sometimes it's a bear, sometimes the wine, but today it's Thursday afternoon at three. So what are you having a drink of today, my friend? 

[00:04:21] Mahan Tavakoli: Coke Zero at this point in the afternoon. Tim, I'm on my third Coke Zero. And don't tell me it's not good for me. I know, but I love it.

[00:04:27] Tim Windsor: I love it too. And I'm going to get on to my coffee.

It's probably my seventh of the day, so I'm good with that. Awesome. Cheers, my friend. So listen, let's start off great. This great conversation has all do with a great question to explore. So here's my question. Why are the themes of leadership, strategy, execution and AI themes that you seem to talk into a lot these days?

Why are they so important for you? Why are you so passionate about it? And why should they? Or even maybe more provocatively, why must they be important to me and other leaders, 

[00:04:58] Mahan Tavakoli: Tim, on the leadership side, as you mentioned in your kind introduction, I have spent most of my career in leadership development and much of it traveling globally, working with some of the top organizations around the world.

And I've seen great people come together, come up with brilliant strategies. that weren't able to move the organization forward. And I have seen other teams that have been able to do really well. And a key differentiator has been leadership, which is why I believe leadership is essential. And at a time when change happens at a faster rate than ever before, in part because of AI.

That magnifies the need for leadership. So the way I look at it, it's a little bit like when you're driving. faster the car goes, the more focus you have to have, and the more skill and competence you need to have. So that's where I see the interplay between the importance of leadership, that execution, and the exponential technologies such as AI.

[00:05:57] Tim Windsor: This balance between creating a great strategy, knowing where you want to go at the end of the day, and then the practical plan, tactics and execution of a strategic direction and actions to get there. Where are the places that you see most leaders struggle? Because it seems like if they're really smart and great leaders, that should be easy to move from a strategic decision to a strategic direction of action.

But it's not so easy some days. So where do you see that sticky point for leaders? 

[00:06:27] Mahan Tavakoli: While a lot of them are not willing to admit it, our egos get in the way. And in most of the leadership teams that I have interacted with and I work with Tim, that is a big part of it. Getting alignments and aligned action on the part of the leadership team is one of the biggest challenges in and of itself.

So while talking about the strategy, there is typically alignment. Then when it comes to execution, resource allocation, ego that is associated with who gets the resources, those are the types of things that get in the way of then being able to effectively execute and follow through. So it's not just the brilliant ideas, strategy is important.

I don't want to dismiss. Peter Drucker's Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. I don't think culture eats strategy for breakfast. They are both absolutely important. I've seen organizations that have had great culture without a strategy, they have suffered. And organizations that have had great strategy without culture haven't been able to execute it.

So both are important, but a big part of the challenge comes in play in the collaboration. First of that leadership team and then the execution of their teams toward that strategy. 

[00:07:43] Tim Windsor: So it's interesting we're talking about that human side. So we're saying you could have the best strategy in the world, if I hear you saying, but it's our ego.

It's our persona of ourselves and maybe our needs to get our needs met over the needs of others that gets in the sticky point. But then there's this whole other part. of that you interact with, which is about AI, which sort of seems really unhuman to most people that think about AI.

So it's the human part of execution that makes it happen. The dialing down of ego from your experience. So when you look at the integration that of technology and all this, how does this all begin to interplay for leaders? 

[00:08:20] Mahan Tavakoli: I see AI as, at this point, an extremely powerful way of augmenting our thinking and our systems in organizations.

There is no need for it to replace the humanity, it can augment it. Whether it is in the collaboration of the leadership team or in being more data driven, AI can support those decisions. with the leadership team and in the organization. I see it as an accelerator for those that use it effectively to be able to make better decisions.

Because in essence, as A. J. Agrawal put it beautifully in one of the books that started me, Tim, on my AI journey back about five years ago, he wrote Prediction Machines. And He mentions in there that in essence, what AI does is that it reduces the cost of prediction and increases the accuracy of that prediction.

So what better for decision making of humans with the human judgment that AI doesn't have when they are able to increase the prediction abilities, prediction quality with a lower cost. So that's where I see the interplay between AI and the human judgment that goes into leadership. 

[00:09:40] Tim Windsor: That's really interesting. That's a really insightful way of looking at it.

So speeding up the ability to process data or data, depending on what country you're from and how you want to say it, it's like process and process. You got to figure out what country you're coming from on these things, but it's interesting because you're seeing this as an accelerant or an accelerator to be able to crunch complex data.

In an efficient and effective way, but it still needs the human heart to be pushed into it so that we don't become something we don't want to become in the process. 

[00:10:15] Mahan Tavakoli: Yeah, and to a great extent, Tim, the way I view it is, in addition to that acceleration, AI, the potential of it comes based on the questions that we are able to ask it.

And therefore, it changes the perspective on leadership for quite a few years. In part because of the Industrial Revolution, we have looked at leaders based on their competence, capabilities, knowledge, and experience. And we have looked to the leaders to have the answers. Now the answers can come through data, through the information that resides within the organization and outside, which can be accessed a lot more efficiently and effectively through AI.

Therefore, the most effective leaders are no longer the ones that have the answers. They're the ones that have the best questions. 

[00:11:09] Tim Windsor: Now that, so now you're speaking my language with that, because that's the world I love to live in. And I've not really thought about it. The way you just said, because I've gotten involved in some AI discussions with some of the leaders that I work with right now, and they're beginning just to touch and braille into this because of the industries they come from, which are a little bit, they're maybe older, a little bit antiquated in some of the ways that they look at things.

And they're just in the process, maybe a major system changes. So they're also just beginning to braille this out and touch it for the first time. But the nuance that you have there about the efficiency that answers can come, but they are predicated on the wise questions we ask.

So now all of a sudden the new trading commodity skill that you're telling me, the top predator skill that a leader needs to have is learning the ability to ask better questions of ourselves and of the technology we choose to partner with. Because at the end of the day, if we ask the wrong questions, we're going to get the right answer to the wrong question at the end of the day. So how do I improve my questioning skills? Then if we're, if we move in that direction, how do I work as a leader to become more curious, more perplexed, as opposed to thinking I get paid to have all the answers that actually probably assaults the ego.

[00:12:21] Mahan Tavakoli: It does. And that's where one of the things that I'm a big advocate for and I've seen in many of the most effective CEOs that I have worked with is a balance of humility and curiosity. So I love the title of Ryan Holiday's book, Ego is the Enemy, and what I have seen is in leadership that ego can definitely be the enemy.

So there is genuine humility knowing that we don't know that's powerful and the willingness to admit it takes tremendous confidence. So, that's why confident humility. It's not imposter syndrome. It's not putting on a show that some leaders have learned the right language to use, but their behaviors haven't reflected it.

But for the vast majority, it's having that confident humility that I don't know the answers. Learning to be curious. There are exercises you can go through, but more important than anything else is that when we admit to ourselves that we don't necessarily have the answers and just seek through asking questions that by itself can change our perspective and our approach both to our teams and to the data in the organization and outside through using AI

[00:13:42] Tim Windsor: I guess in a lot of ways Mahan, I don't know. I think you have some children I think I saw on social media you're doing some you were going away sometime. You have some how old are your kids? 

[00:13:51] Mahan Tavakoli: I have a 13 year old and a 16 year old.

[00:13:53] Tim Windsor: So I've got a 33 year old, the 30 year old son, and I've got two grandchildren, going to be eight and four.

And the one thing I've learned from having grandchildren, particularly because it's refreshed to me recently, man oh man, they ask a lot of questions. They are curious by nature. They are constantly seeking data, information. And they are able to ask even the most uncomfortable question. And maybe they have the secret.

Maybe they have a secret that you and I have to be reminded of. 

[00:14:21] Mahan Tavakoli: What we are moving toward is from a world that was a lot more certain. So if you move back, Tim, 200 years, there was a lot more certainty. If you were a farmer, you had certainty to a great extent that you would kids would do when they grew up.

There was certainty with respect to how the environments would evolve. And over time, a hundred years ago, there was less certainty. Fifty years ago, even less so, part of what's happening with exponential technologies AI contributing to it is that there is less and less certainty in our environment.

Our human brains seek that certainty, which is why we need to move away from it. That's where curiosity plays a role where there is no certainty, we are willing to have hypothesis, test the hypothesis, and use that as a way in maneuvering and moving through rather than a certainty of a path. 

[00:15:31] Tim Windsor: And as you say that, I'm reminded, I'm in the middle, we're in the middle of doing some training and some thinking with one of our customers and our business around Adam Grant's book, Think Again, and just the CEO of this group of companies has asked his leaders to read this book, and we're just having these conversations right now with their leaders about this.

And, it's the same, it's the same thing, and it's a well written, it's a brilliant book from my perspective, but this idea of thinking like a scientist, it, which is his really, the way he wants us to approach this idea, is a powerful idea, because it's hypothesis, it's testing, it's experimentation, it's not knowing quite how all this is going to mix together, which is a brilliant and wonderful skill, but it's also a challenge to our human psyche because as you said, we want to be certain we want to think we know it all and this all assaults this thing and that maybe that's why people are even more.

Threatened by the onset of AI because if the new skill isn't having all the answers, it's having better questions. Then part of the threat may be to leaders is they have to learn a different discipline and it will require the removal of ego. 

[00:16:41] Mahan Tavakoli: And as you mentioned, part of it is our evolution as humanity, part of it is also the training and education system that we've gone through.

We are very good with our industrial approach to education to take my girls, your kids, your grandchildren, and take their curiosity and Focus the more uncertainty. There is a right answer and there is a wrong answer. Ding ding. You got the right answer. You get the prize. You get the A.

You got the wrong answer. You fail. Even our systems are not built to reward curiosity. They are built to reward answers and certainty. Which is why this is going to be a hard shift for many of us. Most especially for us as leaders, because the more experience we have, the more success we have, we become even more confident in our certainty because our past decisions have contributed to our success.

So we are less willing to question our future thinking. And as you mentioned with Adam Grant, to have a scientist view rather than focused on certainty with the answers that we believe we have.

[00:17:58] Tim Windsor: Yeah, and Mahan, you make a really good point, and I never really thought of it that way. It's, and this is why I guess I love about these conversations is because they, they dive and dance as we have them together and we get to create things as we go.

And what I'm realizing, even as you said that, I don't think I've done a lot of great thinking about how Educational institutions have played a role in shaping the way we think or don't think how we question or don't question and how that's really looking. And so I think that this is something that you're just really reminding me of.

And probably, I'm an educator at some level as a trainer and I'm a contribute to this. But, we're indoctrinating in some ways our children into a methodology of thinking and the reward and punishment cycle. And I'm as you're thinking, I know as a child, I wasn't rewarded. I'm almost 60 now.

So I went to school a long time ago. I wasn't rewarded for asking questions. In fact, I was considered a little bit of a troublemaker. I was curious by nature as a child. I asked lots of questions, even into my high school years. And that didn't go well for me a lot of times because people saw that questions as actually challenging them.

Not just an idea. And people get threatened by that. And so I think there's a lot of power in what you're saying, and if you're listening in today, I just, maybe pause the podcast, but think about how are we indoctrinating our children or our grandchildren or other people into models that are really telling them that curiosity and questioning is wrong, it's bad, and that it is not acceptable.

That is really important to think about, Mahan. 

[00:19:38] Mahan Tavakoli: And the relevance to that, Tim, what I find is, I'll mention one more thing about the education system and then connect it to business leaders. In that, the education system, to a great extent, treats kids the way the industrial age machinery would have been treated, right?

We are training them, developing them with certainty for what they would end up doing in the future cubicles of work that existed maybe in 1940s and 50s. Now how does this relate to leadership? The way I look at it is there are elements that are ingrained in our human evolution and physiology, and then there are elements that we have been trained on for decades.

Decades that we need to untrain ourselves about in order to be able to do well in this new world. So the analogy I can give you is my brother and I. Saturday mornings go for our bike ride on Crescent Trail here in D. C. and every once in a while we see a big black snake. Now I will be the first person to tell you that black snakes are harmless, don't do anything.

I don't have it a snakes. But I have to tell you, I do all I can to avoid the snake because an element of my human physiology takes hold and an element of me not having focused specifically on how do I need to behave around these harmless black snakes. So as we are in our work environments, part of our evolutionary need for that certainty to be proven right takes hold part of all decades long training both in the education system and then at work where we have been rewarded for certainty takes hold. 

So our behaviors and our actions are aligned to the workplace of the past rather than the workplace of the president of the future.

[00:21:37] Tim Windsor: That's tremendous wisdom and really a great way to look at it. Again, if you're listening in, just, these are things that you need to contemplate, you need to consider because we all contribute to this. Look, whether you're a leader in your home or in your community or in business, or whether you don't even see yourself as a leader, we all contribute to this environment, this ecosystem, this ethos around people.

In regards to what's acceptable and what isn't and fighting against our nature, fighting against our genetic encoding is very difficult to do, but at the same time, our ability to transcend that may make us more resilient, will make us more resilient and more powerful into the future. So this is an awesome conversation.

Listen, I want to read you a quote, Mahan, and I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this. I recently, I have to, to my embarrassment, I had never read any Brené Brown over the years. My wife always wanted me to read Brené Brown, and I always thought, I'm not sure that's for me. That's, I'm not sure that's for me.

But I'm learning as I get older that I'm actually not that smart as I think I am. And so I'm reading lots of different things these days. And I just recently read Brené Brown's Dare to Lead book, an awesome book, excellent. But there's a quote in here that I wanted to bring into our conversation here because I think it's interesting.

On page 75 of this book, this is something that she writes: There are some things that machines and algorithms do better than us for the simple reason of computing power, quicker elimination of variables that humans either don't see or won't readily dismiss, and the fact that machines have no ego. They don't need to be right to protect their self worth so they don't defend or rationalize.

They simply recalculate and recalibrate in an instant. She goes on to say: The hopeful news is that there are some tasks that humans will always do, and be able to do better than machines. If we are willing to take off our armor and leverage our greatest and most unique asset, the human heart, those of us who are willing to rumble with vulnerability.

Live into our values, build trust, and learn to resist to reset, will not will not be threatened by the rise of machines because we will be part of the rise of daring leaders. Tell me what your thoughts are about that quote because I have a feeling it just really tucks into the heart of what we're talking about.

[00:24:01] Mahan Tavakoli: It does. And I love Brené Brown's work and that is a brilliant quote. And I want to emphasize the part where she says, if we are willing because there was a study a couple of months ago where people had interacted with unknowingly in some cases chatbot, in some cases with doctors who had given them medical advice to their questions.

And they had rated the chatbots as being more empathetic. Then the doctors had bit. So when you and I are talking and you mentioned Brene Brown, empathy is definitely one of those things that is part of us as humans, and we can tap into differentiate and to thrive in the age of machines, however. We really need to go there with our empathy.

The way we are currently doing things isn't there. In this case, the machines had more empathy than the humans did. 

[00:25:09] Tim Windsor: Wow. That is a terrible pronunciation of the human heart, is it not? 

[00:25:14] Mahan Tavakoli: It is, but also shows the potential in that if we, as humans, double up on our humanity, and I think that's relevant for doctors, it's relevant for leaders, we focus on that humanity, that cannot be duplicated. 

But if we look at it, I know the Canadian medical system and the American medical system are different. But at least in the States, doctors are primarily very focused on seeing the patient and moving them along. Every 15 minutes in order to be able to build insurance, so on and so forth.

So there's very little empathy. They are doing the work that in many instances a machine could do better. Now, what if we augment the doctor with a machine that does that work? The doctor can genuinely listen, can genuinely empathize. So that's why I'm hopeful with artificial intelligence. If we Double down on our humanity.

And connect to that empathy that Brene Brown talks about. So yes, I do see that potential, but I do want to warn that the machines have a lot of empathy. If we don't double up on our empathy, they can beat us. 

[00:26:29] Tim Windsor: That's a great challenge. Again, we got to double down in our. Desire. Again, if is a great word in there, if we are willing to become even more human and actually practice the thing that only maybe we could do at the end of the day, we continue to differentiate ourselves in relationship to man and machine, woman and machine and machine.

Keep other lines from being blurred. That is a really great provocation, Mahan. So that really tips into the arc of my podcast. And as we bring the conversation to an end, I have a question that I'd like you to consider. So you're talking about how we differentiate ourselves from machines and in the process with empathy and living really in that human way.

So for me, I've been exploring this idea. It's the title of my podcast. It's the title of a book that I have coming out . My whole sort of world has been around this idea of uncommodification. How do we take commodity markets, commodity experiences, and how do we uncommodify them?

And that to me is always about the human element if we choose to do things differently. So my. My question to you is based on your deep background with all the leaders you work with, based on your experience in the Carnegie organization, based on all of the things you've done as a person, the experiences you've had, when Mahan walks into a room, when you walk into a room and you're bringing The thing that only you in all your humanity can bring when you're bringing that unique expression of yourself.

What? What are you doing that? Is the special thing that you can bring in any situation. 

[00:27:59] Mahan Tavakoli: One of the things that I tried to do, Tim is see the beauty in the leaders. I interact with and call it out with candor. Both the beauty in terms of the strengths and the opportunities for improvement.

I don't know if you know the history of the Starbucks logo, how when they created it initially, the face and the eyes were perfectly symmetrical and people didn't like that logo. They couldn't say why, but they didn't like that logo. Eventually, Starbucks changed that to one of the eyes is a little bit off center because we like things that are not perfect.

They are close, but are not perfect. The leaders I interact with in many instances Are beautiful people who try to present themselves as being perfect. I am willing to see their beauty, call out, their beauty, their strengths, and also the opportunities for improvement in order for them to continually grow and in order then for them to be more authentic with their team members.

And enable their team members to grow as well. Because one final thought, I truly believe more than anything else, leadership is example. And without the leaders setting the right example, they can't enable their team members and therefore their organization to grow. So I, Bring that mirror to the leaders, a mirror that reflects their beauty, both their strengths and the beauty that is in their opportunities for improvement.

[00:29:47] Tim Windsor: That's powerful. And I love how you talked about example. That's a really interesting connection. We talk about enabling people a lot, empowering, but maybe the real energy is example. Example enables and energizes people towards becoming better people along the way. Mohan, it's a brilliant conversation today.

It's extremely inspiring. Again, if you're listening in, you're listening in for a reason. I'm not sure what that is, and you'll have to figure out how this applies in your world. And some of you who don't work in a business world, you might think this conversation is not for you. I think that's just absolutely not true.

It's for you. It's for all of us as we understand how technology changes our lives, how we interact with it, and how do we become and maintain this more human understanding? Because if not, we all become a mere shadow of the. people that we are intended to be along the way in life, and we don't need to do that.

We don't want to do that. So Mahan, if people wanted to hunt you down, if they wanted to connect with you, either at your podcast, listen to your podcast, or they want to connect with you and see what you do for a living and whether or not maybe you and your business can be a benefit to them. What's the best way for them to find you Mahan?

[00:30:55] Mahan Tavakoli: I am on LinkedIn. There's MahanTavikoli. com. Partnering Leadership is the podcast, PartneringLeadership. com. So one of the great things these days, Tim, is people are pretty easy to find if anyone wants to find me and it's been an absolute pleasure. One of the things I've really enjoyed is that. You also serve as an example through the stories you share because part of what the potential is with social media is that over a period of time, we get a chance to see what people are all about.

If there are about self promotion. Which many people are at or they are about helping elevate others. One of the things I have truly enjoyed in seeing your content is that you are about elevating others, which is why I really appreciate this conversation. 

[00:31:48] Tim Windsor: Mahan, I appreciate that. And thanks for your willingness to come on the show.

Just for you as you're listening in, I, Mahan and I have connected and, to be very frank, Mahan. Operates in a very different sphere than I do. Okay, when I look at the sphere you work in and the global world you work in and in the political realm that you connect with in Washington, Mahan and I don't work in the same sphere.

And Mahan, your graciousness as we've connected over social media and your encouragement to me and your messaging back and forth has been really powerful. It tells me a lot about the kind of person you are. And every time, every once in a while, I reach out to somebody and say, Hey, would you like to come on my podcast?

And frankly I get a little bit of I'm sorry, I'm a little too good to come on your podcast, Tim, but thanks for the offer. And I will say this, Mahan, I was I was so powerfully struck by when I reached out to you, your graciousness and immediate to say, Hey, I'd, I would love to do that, Tim.

And the fact that you have been so honoring to come on the show, it is tremendous benefit to me and I appreciate it. And I know my listeners will absolutely benefit from this conversation. Mahan, we'll get to meet each other in person someday, I'm sure. And if we don't, if we don't, we'll use virtual technology to continue to connect.

I wish you great success in your life. And again, if you're listening in today, how are you going to uncommodify your world with what you're hearing? How are you going to become more human? And less like machines. How are you going to challenge yourself to embrace curiosity, to encourage and others to reward it, not punish it when your children, your employees, your friends are curious and asking questions that may be even uncomfortable for you.

Please look Mahan up, check him out. Let's do his podcast, partnering leadership. Great podcast. And do me a favor as you unpack this in your real world, let me know how it's benefiting you and others. Email me at tim at the uncommodified. com or look me up on social media and let me know how you're uncorking this conversation and really pouring it out in your life.

Thanks for joining us and have an excellent day.