Abstract and Concrete Thinking for Better Development with Kailey Euceda | Acorders | Ep 234

Speaker A: Humanity is growing and connecting. Tomorrow's world needs more energy from more places. But to find our net zero future we must overcome the natural constraints of many new energy sources. This is the Energy Transition Solutions podcast where we look at the energy challenges of modern life and the innovators finding solutions. Join us for a low carbon high energy conversation with your host Joe Battir. This views of the host are zone and should not be viewed as those of any business, corporation or government entity.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Energy Transition Solutions Podcast. I'm m your host Joe Batir. This is a show where we bring you low carbon, high energy stories from the people solving the energy challenges of modern life such as our partners at ABB who are enabling companies to rapidly improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon emission with a range of products and solutions tailored for multiple industries. I am here today with Kayleigh Oceda, Founder of Ecordis. So I've mispronounced everything and now we'll have you pronounce it correctly and then we'll just start talking. So Kayleigh, please introduce me and the audience to your, uh, company and the correct pronunciation and what you do.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks. My name is Kaylee Alsetta and by trade and training I'm a product service line developer. I left my corporate role at the end of last year and I launched at Cordairs. It is an art and innovation company. I like to talk about art because I found that a lot of people don't really fully understand the craft part of product service line development. So when I did a self inventory of all my skills and all my talents, one common thread that I kept on seeing coming up was the techniques and the tactics I used to enact plasticity in the mind. Essentially my programming is about working with individuals or with teams to go through that thought exercise that engages both abstract and concrete thinking simultaneously to get through the frameworks that are guiding principles in innovation. So when we think about business development, technology development program, product development, service line development, all of those use the same exact frameworks. And I come in with very specific skill sets that are enacting the higher level cognitive thinking that you need in order to successfully get through those frameworks with a tangible outcome.

Speaker B: Very interesting. And it's interesting thinking about art and the combination of product development for the audience. Because we normally focus on the technology and the fundamentals of the technology, we don't actually talk about going from a cool conceptual idea all the way through fruition and hardware installed for the audience who may not be thinking about this all the Time, can you give us a 30,000 foot view? What is product line development? And then let's kind of walk through what that process actually is.

Speaker C: Sure. So I'm going to make this very relatable. Back to the topic of your show, energy Transition. Okay, so let's think through the economics, the investment thesis behind any kind of technology development and energy transition. Okay. A few years ago we were working on a paradigm in which a lot of the leaders in the global economy were in agreement that we were moving in one direction. And that one direction was going to mean that peak oil had to be behind us and energy transition, new low carbon or completely renewable energy had to be our future. There was this, I would say put and take in an investment thesis around parity of economies of scale. But now fast forward to where we are right now at this particular moment, with geopolitical tensions popping off around the globe and our economy being in the destabilized situation that it is. As a result, we're seeing paradigms breaking within this investment thesis for energy transition. Now, someone like myself works with teams in that process of going through problem discovery, solution analysis and business model canvassing. And when I say paradigms are breaking, what does that mean? That means the teams that are doing that work must be in a position where they can enact their higher level cognitive skills to be thinking conceptually, abstractly, alongside concrete analysis and data. And if you can't flex between those different cognitive processes, what ends up happening is you get stalls and absolute like valley of death syndromes that take place in innovation. Everything in my craft is about steering a team as like, uh, a wayfinder or guide away from those pitfalls that lead to that valley of death.

Speaker B: Yeah, interesting. The valley of death. I'm glad you brought that up because that is common vernacular in all energy transition space, really all new technology or innovation space where you come up with this idea and you want to bring it to market. There's always that period where you're like, you've developed a cool widget, you've got the prototype, now you actually have to create something that can be sold. And usually that is where a lot of companies go to die. When you've got companies that you're bringing in this abstract idea versus the concrete and moving forward with product development. I guess the challenges I see are usually, uh, they usually are concrete ideas in the sense of there's no easy way to, uh, take your thing and scale it down five times to what the market really needs, or you've developed something really cool. But you need every one piece costs $50,000, whereas the nearest market competitor costs five.

Speaker C: You said something. I'm going to lean in on there for a moment on the word scaling. Okay. There's been a lot of research into what goes wrong when we attempt to scale, and it has everything to do with what I was commenting on a moment ago regarding paradigms. Innovation work really engages a lot of paradigms, and people who do the work that I do really well understand how to shake up or completely disrupt a paradigm without having economic pain be the fallout. Okay, so what do I mean by that? I'm going to unpack that some. When I think back around energy transition again for a moment. We used to be thinking through the financial architecture of a single molecule of oil and gas hydrocarbon. Okay. And then reverse engineering that. We're scaling that in one direction. Uh, how can we then have parity between the cost of renewable and the cost of the conventional energy? Right. Well, the problem with scaling is that it accepts a paradigm that already exists, and then it replicates whatever momentum exists within the economy of scale of that paradigm and then just sort of cascades that out like a vibrating Richter scale, if you will. Okay. That's the problem with scaling is that we don't ever take into consideration do we want to accept this paradigm to begin with before we try to scale it, or do we need to reverse engineer the situation more and really understand the X and Y analysis there to find out, okay, what's really the causal factors to why this situation exists in the industry? Why is everybody willing to accept this? How can we influence and change people's way of thinking? Getting back to that paradigm.

Speaker B: Yeah, that is an interesting way to frame, uh, it, because as you point out, the paradigm and the status quo. And I think that's what I like to highlight on my podcast usually is the. Whenever there's a new technology or new company or something being done that's trying to push forward with this new idea, they are trying to, uh, improve the current status quo. I think that's kind of what you're saying, is that is the status quo the best we can do, or is there a better way to do it? Or is the status quo actually completely measuring the wrong metric and maybe we need to completely rewrite it?

Speaker C: So that's why my work begins, and you were asking me earlier to talk about process. Right. That's why the work that I do begins with problem discovery. And, uh, people ask me, why would I invest time and resources and people's attention on discovering a problem when it's already just so obvious, like why wouldn't anybody want to pay money to solve this problem right here? Well, the misnomer there is that problem discovery is not necessarily looking at the big industry problem from the 30,000 mile flyover view. It's actually getting and distilling that problem down to the job to be done. Who experiences that pain point and are they willing to pay to solve it? Because not all pain that exists in a process or an industry sector has an actual economic business case behind it. Some of it is just the reality of doing business and everybody accepts it and nobody's willing to actually invest in solving it. So you have to always be willing to invest in that problem discovery up front. That way you don't set your team out on a course to solve a problem there's no market for.

Speaker B: Yeah, I like that. That is one of those things that is maybe even before the valley of death, new technologies and new companies will say, oh, we've developed this really great solution.

Speaker C: It worked over here.

Speaker B: Yeah. And maybe, yeah, it works there. But maybe that's not actually a problem that people really have. It is one of these things that they just accept. Kind of like we all accept that these chairs are chairs and this is how we sit. And somebody can go and invent a new chair, but that doesn't mean it's

Speaker C: going to sell because we've all accepted the paradigm that you sit in the chair that looks like what we're sitting in.

Speaker B: Yes, yes, exactly. The energy transition to more renewable and sustainable sources is not as difficult, time consuming or costly as you might imagine. Whether you're exploring the retrofit of your outdated, inefficient and carbon intensive mechanical machinery, or looking to expand your facilities using the latest in proven electrical technologies, ABB variable speed drives embedded with the latest digital capabilities can help your operations run leaner and cleaner for for decades to come. Explore the full portfolio of ABB variable speed drives by visiting abb.com drives I'm curious about this problem discovery phase. I want to touch on that for a little bit more because there are these macro level, industry level problems in all industries and uh, I'm thinking about like my back pain versus my posture. The back pain is a symptom of my bad posture. When we think about a large industry versus an individual company saying oh well, I want to reduce uh, this time by 5%, is that something that is an industry problem or is it a problem or is it a symptom? And I guess going back to the problem Discovery. Which one are you trying to solve? Or is it all of the above?

Speaker C: The best way I can answer that comes from my background in project management. So I got my PMP back in 2014 time period. I was coming right out of grad school from University uh of Houston with Supply uh, Chain M Logistics technology, right? And with that I was able to go into ge. At the time I was also a transitioning military veteran. They had a leadership program. Everything in my career was going in the right direction at that point. Both from military decision making protocol and from PMP curriculum. I was really adept at taking a full problem set that a project was going to deliver on and being able to take that project plan and that work breakdown structure down to the package level. Okay, so the rule of thumb with project management is that to create what's called a definable work package, you have to have this three legged stool that can result from that analysis. And what that three legged stool says is that you have to be able to identify a concrete resource like a named individual or if it's going to be outsourced, a very specific amount of money that it's going to cost to outsource, it has to be time bound. So you need to know the exact unit of time in which it must be executed in. And then in terms of the scope, it has to be able to be defined as a work package, right? Having a beginning and an end conception to whatever work process step has to be done within that package. If you can't do that, it's not a work package and you have to do more work in what's called the deconstructing of the overall work to be done for the project schedule. Right? Same thing when you're doing problem discovery and innovation. If you can't dissect a big industry problem down to a very specific job to be done where there's an individual with a job title title working in a specific industry sector and then you can then qualify and quantify the work that he needs done a different way. Right? If you can't have those really basic tangible definitions applied there, then you're not meeting the first principles of the innovation protocol and programming and you really can't move on at that point. You have to really get to that point or you're going to end up in that scenario where you're steering a, uh, team to the valley of death.

Speaker B: And I think that's great to highlight that because many times you feel like you've got a workflow or a process in your company. Or a specific piece of equipment and you just say, okay, this is how it's done. And somebody says oh no, it can be done better. But without that tangible, concrete defined, this is how it can be done better and this is what we're going to do to make it better. Then you're just spinning your wheel saying oh no, we can be better, we can be better, we can be better.

Speaker C: Yes. And I'd like to add especially uh, whenever we're talking about energy transition, right, Because a lot of what you saw in the early days of energy transition was taking existing mature technology from oil and gas and just repurposing it for fit to uh, the energy transition sector. That was the gameplay that was happening up until about five years ago, I would say. Now the problem with that I'll go back to the scaling principle is that without having that real true problem discovery phase invested in, then when it comes to the uh, solution analysis, you don't really have any guardrails on what's an acceptable solution according to the actual person doing the job. And then this is the trend that I find happens. You find deep technology is some of the most expensive technology in the world to develop, to qualify, to test and get a pilot PO4 with a customer. And immediately we start cannibalizing the value out of that entire program because what we haven't done the actual user journey analysis, so we don't really have a sophisticated understanding of pricing dynamics. So what do we do? We commercialize this new technology that's taken a decade to develop and millions or even billions of dollars and we immediately start going to market with a cost plus pricing strategy. So we're just immediately commoditizing something that we've spent a decade developing.

Speaker B: Coming from a personal standpoint, I feel like that is counterintuitive for new technology and new innovation design. Really the idea and the focus should be let's completely shift the working model, let's completely shift the current paradigm and create something that makes a tangible shift in the industry, something that truly does change the game. And uh, if you're just trying to build a new uh, widget that's a little bit more efficient, that you can charge a little bit extra for. I guess a question for you. Would you consider that innovation?

Speaker C: That's a great question. Technically speaking, I've worked in enterprise technology development programs. There are certain parameters to meet what's called a technology program versus a product program. Sometimes you do need to make those anchor product improvements. You wouldn't necessarily call that innovation. It's more like structuring and rationalizing your portfolio for better output, better pricing, you can be able to gain from the value of that product. But in a technology program, that's where you're actually developing a brand new technology. And maybe that technology won't just live inside of one product. Maybe it's something that you can rationalize and structure across your entire portfolio. That's why I like focusing on technology programs, because they're able to effectively restructure an entire portfolio and business model.

Speaker B: Big picture again. I feel like we've talked about this for a while and it makes sense now. The idea of problem discovery and where and why and how this is important. One more kind of pointed question. What are some of the main challenges that you see time and time again where the uh, products either fall into the valley of death or end up going the opposite way? Where you've got a company that can spend, spend, spend and you end up with a uh, $10 billion widget that doesn't have a market.

Speaker C: Some of the best things I've seen are when really mature enterprise companies with mature technology can in fact find that ability to sell in a different manner, they can change the narrative around their product and technology. Stack, stack. And that comes down to, well, we've always been offshore drilling in this specific way and our product is a commoditized product. We're always racing to the bottom in terms of value, of cost leadership. But oh, but wait a second now. We've effectively completely changed the paradigm on how many days it takes to drill an offshore well. And if we now know that we can reliably cut five days, but even more than that in most instances from a drilling program, that means that that company now can consider entirely different structures for their performance within a contract. So that's where you start getting the opportunity to upsell to contract performance based type of, you know, considerations, right? Hey, if I give you that five days of savings, that's $5 million that you've now hair clipped out of your drilling program and that's going to get passed on from that exploration and appraisal period to the cap table of your drilling and production field, how are you going to incentivize me to where I'm willing to do that? That's the same technology I sold you 20 years ago, but now I've improved it and now I know that you can get five day savings out of your program. Are you willing to put the terms and conditions in front of me to sign me up to do it? That's what I really enjoy are stories like that and um, when they can take place within our field and energy where you're seeing something that has always been delivered a certain kind of way in oil and gas. But now there's this integrated play with new energy coming to the table and now there's integrated performance models coming across those different types of energy. We're in a really exciting time.

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Speaker B: And to double down on that, areas like geothermal, natural hydrogen exploration and production, ccs, these are all those areas that you're alluding to. But anybody who watches the show and keeps up with geothermal knows that Fervo is one of those companies that has taken existing oil and gas technology and they have created what estimates in the billions for their upcoming ipo. It is truly taking that technology, looking at it in a new, different way, and being able to selling it in a different way into a new market.

Speaker C: That's right, yeah. One thing I like to talk about also is what AI is doing in my field. Okay. A lot of folks are thinking, well, with AI at the table, do we even need somebody like yourself guiding us through the framework and the principles to get the outcome that we're looking for? Uh, and my take on it is this AI is great for a lot of use cases. I use it for a ton of different things in my day to day. But when it comes to me doing higher level cognitive work, especially when there's a lot of money at stake, I find that when you start engaging with AI for that level, for that kind of outcome, what you get is a, uh, sort of like circular kind of logic because all it can ever do is is feed you feedback based on the reason and logic that's built already into the LLM. And if you're truly trying to think about paradigms in a different way, you can understand that kind of statistical outcome really doesn't work in those scenarios. So what I like to tell people is it's not that you need me to work through a framework. You need me to help your team work through that framework in a way where they don't end up in the good idea of fairyland, which is, by the way, a cemetery. You don't want your team to end up there. You don't want your team to end up in the valley of death. You have to be able to navigate through this concrete and conceptual thinking. It's like a dovetail. And someone like me is trained with the expertise on how to lead a team through that in a way that engages everybody on board being able to bring their higher level cognitive thinking to the table.

Speaker B: Yeah, I really like that. That's one of the things that I say about AI and I think to frame what you've just said, can you have AI ask the questions that you're going to ask? I think we can all agree that the answer's no. AI is not generating new ideas and new questions and being able to shift that angle of how do you actually look at this product differently?

Speaker C: I'm going to come back with a little bit of nuance on that because it can ask the basic questions, it can lead you through a good workflow, but when it comes to understanding the actual situation that you're then going to answer to that prompt, that's where it gets incredibly limited from there. Because at that point, anybody that is doing my kind of work with my background is going to be taking you through an elaborative and a deconstructive process. They're going to take your thinking out and then they're going to bring it back. And they do this a couple times. And after they've done that, you get to this beautiful problem that you can identify all those different variables that I was describing. The principles have to be met and you can go forward. Right. I would say I use AI to get the workflow started. If I'm doing meetings with teams, I'll pull up, everybody pull up their favorite AI chatbot. You're going to be dialoguing with it during this exercise, but it's not the guidepost, it's not the one actually navigating and pushing everybody forward.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I feel like we've covered a lot here and I'm sure there's so many more questions that I could ask you, but instead of going through more of those, I just want you to give like another one of those big picture views of if somebody were to, uh, be engaging with you or what is this kind of walk through or workflow that anybody should be thinking about as they're doing product line development or service line development. Like, are there five bullet points? What are those five bullet points that AI would feed us?

Speaker C: Let me go back to why I talk about art when I'm talking about innovation for a moment. One thing I like to critique a little bit about the commercialization model for art is that it doesn't ever require artists to really be creating from a product mindset. Okay. So the result of that is that there's a lot of artists out there that are quite comfortable with creating for themselves by themselves. It's like a dialogue they're having with themselves, and they just know they have already the sponsor backing them, so it's going to end up in a gallery somewhere. And they're not usually trying to focus so much on the dialogue that they're trying to strike with that target audience. Okay. So being someone that has that product background, like I do when I'm making art, I'm being very intentional about the very specific target audience that I am, um, pointing my artistic effort to. It happens to be engineers and energy technology. I love you guys. You know, y' all are my people. So I create art for you all, uh, to help you with ideation, to help you get through mental blocks and burnout. And the same exact creative process I put into making that art is the same kind of framework programming that I'm putting into my innovation work. So to get back to your question on, like, that big level view, right. I think that on that, that art side of things, it's that piece right there. When you can provide that little piece that stimulates. It's the human element, really, that you're being able to stimulate into the work.

Speaker B: Yeah, I like it. Well, with that, I want to transition into my final questions. These are the questions I ask all my guests. The first question being, what is a favorite book of yours that you would recommend?

Speaker C: Ooh, that's an excellent question. I think the Black Swan. It's got to be one of my favorite books that I've read in quite a while.

Speaker B: All right, the Black Swan. Got it written down. Now the next question. How do we get to Net zero and beyond?

Speaker C: Ooh, see, I don't know that we will. If I'm being honest with you. I think that's a really hard question for a lot of people right now.

Speaker B: Hard in, uh, accepting an answer like we won't, or hard in actually thinking about it? Both.

Speaker C: I mean, I was at a really great event a couple weeks back, and we had a mix of industry people, business people, academic people, people. And we did have an, uh, academic PhD student come up and ask about the 1.5% or degree Celsius threshold. And everybody in the room, you could just feel the cringe kind of reaction from everybody in the room. Because at the end of the day, especially when we think about AI and the demand for energy that's coming on with that, or we think about the fact that in most instances, a lot of people would agree that the geopolitical tensions that were observing in the world right now, this moment are probably going to continue to ratchet up or, you know, I don't know that we're going to wake up tomorrow and everybody's just in agreement that let's work on this together. So unfortunately, because we are where we are right now, I have a lot of doubt that we're going to be able to get to that net zero goal.

Speaker B: Okay, Pragmatic and fair answer. So now the last question, you actually get to ask me a question.

Speaker C: Okay, so my question back to you is, given that updated situation, how has that affected the way you talk about energy? Are we or are we not really in a transition?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good question. We are still in a transition. And I say that because right now from, from ic, which is a very focused seat, but we are seeing growth in the geothermal market. That's something I'm actively working in geothermal. Every day we see growth occurring in the geothermal market. That is a, uh, focused expansion from the oil and gas industry marrying in, uh, the uh, geothermal industry that's been around since 1904. In La Derello, we've had this, that is a growth transition mindset. And uh, from the side of it, of the current geopolitics, the idea of local, resilient, secure energy is more important. So the carbon footprint has become less of the talking, uh, point. But having having a secure source of energy, that is all the more important.

Speaker C: That's an excellent way of framing that. Yeah.

Speaker B: And with having secure energy, what's the best way to have it, except if not for on your house or within your fence line or somewhere where you actively control it?

Speaker C: Yeah. And I'd like to come back to your question that you asked me that was so difficult. Right. In terms of that net zero goal, because will we or will we not get there? I don't know is the answer. But the thing that I'm most optimistic about is what you were just describing there. That regionalized, hyper regionalized focus on resiliency. Because at the end of the day, that's where I'm the most optimistic about new energy in the world is in integrated systems, delivering more energy to the grid and updating the grid across the globe. And how we're going to bring countries that have had a standard of maybe two hours of power in any given day, bring them out of that paradigm into a world where every working person can have reliable energy that they can do their job with. I mean, that's going to be incredible in the future.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Kailey, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. Before we sign off, is there anything else you'd like to say now?

Speaker C: I just want to thank you for your time and I hope that viewers that are interested in this topic will also be wanting to follow me more on topics related to innovation.

Speaker B: Yes. All right, well, thank you everyone. Thank you again. Kailey. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Energy Transition Solutions podcast. If you're enjoying this show, share with a friend and leave a review telling me what you're enjoying most or what you'd like to hear more of. If you want more news and energy related stories, we have all sorts of energy related podcasts on OGGN and and more coming soon. You can find them by connecting with us on LinkedIn or visiting the website. Finally, if you have any questions, comments, corrections or have a story you want to share, find me on LinkedIn. Until next time, remember to keep it low carbon and high energy.

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