Scott Levy, Building Peak Performance with Neuroscience and AI 'Lego' Bricks - Innova.buzz 691

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to the innovabuzz podcast where our job is to help you build visibility, professional credibility and connection with your ideal client by putting the human at the center of innovative marketing so you can build and strengthen an engaging, enduring relationship with your ideal clients. I'm Jurgen Strauss from InovaBiz and I'm honoured that you're here with me. If you haven't yet joined our wonderful Flywheel Nation community, go to flywheelnation.com and join in the podcast conversations. Do subscribe to the show and also leave a review because it helps others find us. Let's get into today's masterclass on this Innovabuzz podcast. Foreign. Hi, I'm your host, Jurgen Strauss from innovabiz and I'm really excited to welcome to the innovabuzz podcast today from Dallas in Texas, Scott Levy, who's the founder and CEO, uh, of Results Maps. Result Maps. Yes.

Speaker A: There's another company with the SEO. Uh, I'm glad you.

Speaker B: Result Singular Maps. Plural. Uh, Result Maps architect logical systems and performance platforms that help CEOs and their teams analyze their strategy, accelerate their results and achieve their inspired best, as it says on their website. So, welcome to the Innova Buzz podcast, Scott, It's a great privilege to have you as my guest.

Speaker A: It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker B: Now I've been looking forward to this conversation, especially after our uh, pre call listening to the logical frameworks you've designed and particularly the way you approach coaching the AIs, which I find fascinating. Now before we dive in, just a quick note for our, uh, listeners, particularly if you're a first time listener to the Innova Buzz podcast. On each episode, we like to have a candid and practical conversation with an amazing guest like Scott and to find out how they create impact, how they build human connection in their work. And I like to unpack their knowledge, their attitudes, their values and how those translate into action. So we kind of start with the big picture, dig into some stories and go wherever the conversation takes us. At the end, I wrap up with our signature buzz round, the same three questions that I ask every guest. And uh, I like to think of this as you having a seat at the table together with me and Scott and we're all learning together and as always, all the resources and highlights will be in the show notes of the episode so you can revisit them at any time. Scott, I'm really looking forward to our conversation. As I said now, your mission to help the world be its inspired best is a really powerful goal and Pretty all encompassing. I'm particularly interested in the logical, uh, connection you've made between neuroscience and high performance systems and how you then achieve that mission. Can you share more about what drives you in the mission and the impact you make in the world today, or you aim to make.

Speaker A: Very happy to. So it is, as you said, it's a big, high and mighty kind of sounding mission, but it's one that inspires us. And we believe the best way to make that impact on the world is to help teams and people work together more effectively in teams. We think that the best things that happen happen because groups of people team up, they come together, we get amazing things done as humans. And the best place to have impact on teams of humans is in business, because that's where the incentives are. That's where just about every human spends their time. And when we can positively impact that work environment for everyone, we get to live out our mission. And that includes using technology to give humans all kinds of superpowers, including technologies like AI.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, um, I mentioned you have a bit of a background in neuroscience and you're deep into AI these days. Um, talk to us a little bit more about that, how you kind of integrate that, enhancing the teamwork between teams in a business and the philosophy or the science of neuroscience and how that plays into those interactions and communication. And then where does AI fit into that scenario?

Speaker A: Yeah, for us, we're not a team of neuroscience researchers, but we have to apply neuroscience if we're going to be successful in our business. We use software, we use coaching. And what I've noticed is there are so many things about the way our brain works that we're unaware of. So in the normal office environment, the normal work environment, the frictions that we see come up are because people aren't aware of, of how their brains work, how we like to process information in our brains. And so it can feel like you're constantly swimming upstream. There's all these different things coming at you. Uh, people are feeling exhausted. Four out of five people experience burnout. The average office worker is interrupted every 11 minutes, which means it can mean as much as 20 minutes to reset. And when you start tallying that stuff up, it's just the math is overwhelming. So the neuroscience and tying into neuroscience and reading and researching and seeing how we can apply these concepts in our software, in our support and coaching, it allows us to help people stop fighting those currents and be more like the surfer that's using, you know, the riptide is also the current that can get you out into the best part of the break without paddling so much. I can't believe I'm an Australian. A, uh, kid from Texas is on an Australian podcast talking, surfing what will happen next. But you know, it's about knowing

Speaker B: what

Speaker A: we need to be effective and setting ourselves up for success and actually engineering an environment around each individual that allows our brains to do what they do really well and get, getting rid of all the friction points that slow us down. I mean, I gave that example of, uh, the every 11 minutes interruptions. Most companies today have Slack or teams or Discord or some derivation of instant messaging and everybody's got the, you know, got the little version of the knock or whatever notification noise you have. Plus you have email, plus you have text from family. Although more and more people are using text for business, when you interrupt that much, you never really get into a flow state. And we really do a lot of work and trial and error and refinement to find ways to help people get into context and flow as quickly as they can to lock in to make better decisions so they can be their inspired best. Because it just plain sucks to be overwhelmed and overworked, which is what happens to most people. I can go on about this for the entire podcast, so I'm going to pause and see if you want me to go in any particular direction.

Speaker B: Yeah, it just reminds me of, um, the early days of mobile phones. And I remember in the corporate world, in my corporate role, all the sales team in our company got, um, blackberries. And the big complaint all the time was I keep getting beeped or I keep getting pinged with a new email coming in on the BlackBerry. And I remember saying, just turn off the notifications and you decide when you look at your email. There's no rules.

Speaker A: That is the easy thing, right? I think a lot of people are afraid, especially in distributed environments where people are geographically distributed. Even if they're in the same city, people are working from home. So they want to make sure they're managing the perception of being available. But at the same time you have to get work done. You've got to take time to protect your focus and get things done. And unfortunately, uh, the way our brains work, we have a peak time where we can really get things done. And that tends to be about 90 minutes after you wake up, according to the research I've seen. Um, and you get about three to four hours of peak state cognitive, um, creative, all the different cool buzzwords about the great things our brain is great at. You've got about Three to four hours of that. And after that time is up, you get into kind of the afternoon doldrums or siesta time or whatever you like to call it. Our brains literally shift gears. I say literally, It's. It's the metaphor that a lot of researchers use. You shift gears into a different state and you're not able to push. You're not able to push your brain back into that peak state. You just can't. So what people do is they end up pushing through that, staying up late, pushing harder, which further depletes the brain, makes it more and more difficult for your brain to recover. And, um, people just get in these vicious cycles.

Speaker B: M. Yeah. And, uh, again, it reminds me of times back in my corporate career where, particularly on big conferences and that we'd have like, the keynote address would be first thing of the morning, and then there'd be a bunch of lectures and then there'd be a lunch break. And often it'd be a big lunch with heavy pasta so that all the blood would be rushing to the stomach for digestive purposes in the afternoon. And the first afternoon session would either be another lecture, which would be deadly, or it would be, okay, now have a breakout session. Now, we want you to contribute to what, all the things that you've heard in those presentations of the morning. And this is where we're going to develop the strategy and, and where everybody's going to come m together and have cool ideas and share cool ideas. And.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's why when I speak, I always try to get the first time available fast. People are awake, they're paying attention. Um, their brains are. Our brains are just more receptive and there's things you have to do during that. But yeah, those, those slogs are. It's why they feel so tiring and it's why, you know, everybody does so many crazy things to try to, um, in a lot of cases, just balance that out. You feel fried, uh, mentally, because you are.

Speaker B: All right, well, um, I mean, one of the big contributors to that, I guess, is technology. And in a sense, you mentioned Slack and teams and so on, where we're constantly on chat. And that's where I see that as really important, particularly for distributed teams, that, um, it's easy to have those things. But I've also seen, um. Well, first of all, that is a risk. You talked about the constant interruptions. Um, I've also seen it used in other ways. So, uh, talk to us a little bit about ways where that can be turned around and used in A way that actually enhances that teamwork, minimizes those interruptions and makes use, um, of those peak times.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And you know, if it's not clear and obvious to, to your listeners and viewers. I run a software company. I'm all about technology. I've got two different computers here at my desk, four monitors between them. So I'm a big fan of technology. It's how you use the technology that makes a difference. And those human choices are what make the difference. Slack, um, is great. It's a great place to organize, or teams can be a great place to organize your internal communications. But there are certain things it's lousy at. And um, what we do in our software is we help everyone. I'll take a step back. The challenge. I've seen, um, decades of this and I've been around sounds like pretty close to as long as you have. Um, I've seen the evolution. You know, my corporate, corporate career started right as the Internet was coming online. And I've seen not a lot of change in the choices and decision criteria for like, how you develop plans and execute. What I have seen change is the speed at which the information's coming at people. And the problem is most of the ways that we work in project planning and productivity all are rooted in 1920s manufacturing right there. How do you engineer, uh, a better industrial production line? Edward Deming and all the different writers that have written and even all of our methodologies harken back to physical production, which goes at a different pace, has a different pace of change. Certainly it's not like you're building a car and, oh, wait, we just realized we need to change the design of the car midway through. Right. Which can happen in, um, projects that aren't in just the physical world. A marketing project, uh, technology of any form. But even if you look at things like agile. Agile is rooted in manufacturing scrum. That scrum comes from a paper that was, uh, research done on a bunch of manufacturing companies. Everything's pretty well rooted in manufacturing and we don't live in the world. That meant that industrial manufacturing as the end all technology was designed for. So we have to be able to change. We have to be able to adapt. We have to realize that information comes at us much more quickly than it did a, uh, 1920s or even 1950s or 60s production line. Changes are coming quickly. There's disruptions, there's geopolitical unrest. There's, uh, now and then a Covid, um, shutdown and things of that nature. Those are the big ones. But the Small ones are all those little interrupts through teams and slack. So what we do through our software is we say, look, the problem isn't automating, more shiitake coming at you. The problem is clarity about what you're trying to get done that's most impactful. How you're going to make decisions about what you'll say no to and what the sequence of things you need to work on will be. And then how you deal with the different changes and challenges that come up amongst your team. And that sounds very abstract, but they're very specific things we do in our software. We've got tools that help people get an overview of everything they've got going on. Very simply. They can sort and filter that using, um, an area in what we call their personal command center where they're prioritizing, sequencing, staying on top of things. And then we have a, uh, suite of tools that help eliminate meetings. Meetings are another time stack. So that you've just got a couple of very highly focused meetings that we've got automated dashboards for and people rate. So you've got the tools you need to make decisions quickly and go get back into flow as quickly as you can. Now sometimes you're going to have days where you have to be in communication mode. But again, we can help focus that communication in a way that people can take in and focus how you're thinking about your business in a way that's easy to take in. So a lot of what we do is helping people kind of chisel away at the rock so they can see the sculpture more effectively, taking out the things they don't need and making sure that the shape of what they're looking at fits the way our brain works. And I can unpack that even more. But that's the high level.

Speaker B: Yeah. I'm curious, um, because I guess thinking back before we had AI and maybe 10 years back, um, there were high performance individuals around that had the ability to do most of those things and they generally ended up, or perhaps still are pretty well.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Well, they're achieving a lot of things. Right. Um, I'm guessing that your software is making tools available for everybody to get to that level. It's not just for those few individuals that have the ability, the talent to do that really well.

Speaker A: That's exactly it. Ah. And I think the name of the individual that's coming up for me is Roger Bannister. I think he was the first runner

Speaker B: to break the 4 minute mile.

Speaker A: 4 minute mile? Is that what it was? And then once he did like before, that was an outlier thing. M. Now bunches of people have done it because they understand what was behind it. What we're doing and the way we see our role is we're uncovering the principles that can help you be successful, but also do it in a way that doesn't require what some of those individuals had to do because they were figuring it all out for themselves. So you can, you can live a happy life. You can, you know, your, your family can know your name and hang out with you and all those things that I think, um, certainly when I was younger, it was just thought, well, you know, if you're gonna, if you're gonna have any interest outside of work, you're not gonna be successful. And I don't think that's true. I don't think, I don't think that everybody can live just the absolute chilled out lifestyle necessarily and still get things done. But if we're being, if we're just avoiding the, um, for lack of a better word, the kind of dumb or avoidable mistakes, that's what I'll call them, the avoidable mistakes that slow us down, we can certainly be happier and have more free time. And if you look at what causes stress and the way our brains react to stress, uh, stress is a continuum. So I can digress here if you want to talk a little bit of neuroscience from the guy that's a software guy, not a neuroscientist. But the way to think about stress, um, that I got from David Rock, you've got two poles. And let's say over here you've got fight, flight or freeze is one extreme, and the other extreme is, uh, complete euphoria, like, everything's good. I'm just gonna sit here on the couch eating bonbons, watching my favorite sci fi or whatever you know, you like to do when you're chilling, reading a book, whatever. Well, at either end of the spectrum, there's no peak performance, right? Because if you're totally satisfied, you're not really stretching or achieving much. But by the same token, if you're in fight, flight or freeze, the blood literally is routed away from your prefrontal cortex, which is where you do all the cool stuff in our brain, the thinking, the creativity, the problem solving. It's routed toward the fight, flight or freeze stuff, in particular the fight or flight. So it's going to your muscles and your brain is, um, making sure that those are the parts of your body that are your whole limbic system, that those are the parts of Your body that are getting the resources. So when we're working really hard and those old ideologies of just work, work, work, you tend to go toward that fight, flight or freeze. But actual peak state, all the research says, is when you're not quite in the middle of those two extremes, but just to the optimistic side of stressed, that's where you get into, uh, what researchers call eustress or good stress. And that's where you're going to find peak state. So the more we can do to engineer that and not, not do things that are going to push us into stress, the more successful we'll be.

Speaker B: Yeah, it reminds me, this is kind of a bit, uh, tenuous, this, uh, example. But, um, it's the fight or flight thing. We were in Japan recently and we were hiking and one of the things we were very cognizant of in the area, we were hiking and they've had lots of bear attacks, um, this year though they seem to be increasing, uh, a lot. And there were bears in this area. So we were very cognizant of doing all the right things to make sure that the bears were aware of our presence and hopefully, um, doing what bears are supposed to do, which is avoid human contact there.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, but, uh, so, so there was sort of that sense of fight or flight. But completely out of the blue, um, right in front of us, a snake, a big snake crossed our path. And we stood there looking at it thinking, oh, look at that snake. It's beautiful. You know, it sort of was yellow and black stripes and very, very attractive. Yeah, yeah, ah, very attractive looking snake. And sort of slithered away across the path. Didn't take much notice of us. But we were sort of standing there thinking, this is fantastic. Now my wife is absolutely petrified of snakes, but unusually uncoact, characteristically, she was standing there saying, look at that, look at all the colors. Isn't that fascinating? And then when we arrived at our destination that evening, I kind of got on the Internet and said, what snakes are there in Japan? And we found this snake and it's highly poisonous. I said, if we had known that, our response would have been completely different.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, avoiding the bad things is always, always good. But I think that's also, you know, that's where technology can help. Um, you know, for us we find that helping people get and provide more clarity. I mean, the number of times you're going to have seen, uh, good people that want to do right by each other just have complete meltdowns or the companies going in the wrong direction. It's because the communication is terrible. And then as the effects of that bad communication ratchet up, you get more and more stress, it gets even more difficult. So if we can give people tools that make it much simpler to communicate just on a day to day basis and give them the tools they need just to check in weekly, how are we doing individually and as a team? Are we on track to uh, our plans? How are we tracking that? That's where we can make a real difference because that information is what allows you to go, you know, I need a couple hours this Tuesday to turn off slack or teams and just focus on this thing. And by the way, since I know that I need peak time, I'll do this first thing in the morning because it's most important. And then there's so many other little things. Um, we came across something today where um, we found a little bug in a new feature release which happens, but the old way of doing it would have been, dang it, you know, my brain goes, this is going to derail this other thing we're working on because somebody's got to pick that up and they could be working on this other cool AI driven feature. Well, we could give the bug now to some AI tools. Not um, that the AI just take, takes it yet and runs with it, but it allows the person driving the, the task to just go very quickly between um, four or five different agents that, for lack of a better word, that are taking care of what needs to be taken care of and then say, yeah, okay, let's go ahead and try this that you've recommended. We've set up our contacts and it's a lot of the same things we use to communicate with humans. Interesting. Interestingly enough, you know, what's the context, what's the background? Let's make sure we have the right information now. Let's form some ideas about how we're going to move forward. But my point with this is, you know, it could have been a stressor on another day. Instead it was like, yay team. You know, we, we once again showed that if we'll invest in learning to use these technologies the right way, it's a massive lift.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, there's, there's one thing you said there that I think is really fascinating and I don't hear a lot of people talking about this in terms of using AI and that's um, Well, I hear a lot of people talking about, hey, it's um, the output you get depends on the quality of the input you give. So, um, there's frameworks to prompt it and context is a big one in the framework and being really specific about out what it is you want and giving it some historical context, giving it examples. Here's the output. Here's an example output I want, but I want it for this other question. Um, the thing I don't hear a lot of people talking about is it can actually, you can actually view it as a training ground for being a better communicator, uh, with other people. Because a lot of those things I know I, I often ask something very quickly, I'll ask, I'll ask one of the AIs that. And I type it in. I think that's total garbage. What's come back. And then I look at what I asked and I go, well, uh, yeah, it wasn't really very clear.

Speaker A: I didn't really give one of our development leads. Loves that about it because he's continually telling me, like, you know, when you give me clear info, it's so easy. And he's not the only one. Like several people on our team, like, sometimes you gloss over it, you don't unpack. And I'm aware of that. And then. But now what we're able to do is we're also able to use the AIs to help us unpack more, more effectively. Um, and yes, it makes you a better communicator because you're getting in the habit of it. You're developing the patience versus the I want it now. And just kicking, which I can do. I can, I can kick and scream like a little kid. Just like, why aren't you just doing what I want you to do? Which is a little easier to, you know, kind of learn and get tired of with an AI than it is with another human.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny. I did, um, actually recently I got frustrated with an AI and I went back and I said, uh, come on, why, why do you keep going in circles here? And, uh, wasn't I clear enough? When it sort of always comes back and says, I understand your frustration.

Speaker A: And that's, it's fascinating, um, how much work is done seemingly in their responses and just them trying to appease the human at the other end. I mean, that's one of the more, um, interesting things to examine. But I do find it's my tip, if you haven't figured this out already, if one model is giving you in a circle, going in a circle like that, um, step one for us is always cut that conversation off. Get it, Get a prompt to restart it differently. You can also go back and, you know, as you probably know, try again, like, to a different point in the convo. But a lot of times if we're seeing the same result or, or too similar of a result, we pass it to one of the other LLMs.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I'll switch fast.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, I've got a system that connects to all of them and it. You can actually just click a button to say, regenerate with another M. Oh, nice.

Speaker A: I find I. That may be the way, you know, for me to go. What I'm finding is I learned so much personally. If I'm the one interacting with it, I learn a lot from how what I say, uh, comes back to me. And it was always the same. So in the early 2000s, I was already doing work, actually before that with distributed teams, like, very, very early in the game, back when Skype was its own company. And, um, we had all kinds of crazy ways to try to connect, but it was the same thing then. Like, you can get really good, or you could get really good at delegating and writing specs because you had to send it kind of over the waves in the ether, over your interwebs, and somebody would get it and you're sleeping and they can't ask you questions. So then in the morning you see, like, what they got. So this just accelerates that cycle. I find it so interesting most of the time. Sometimes I curse at it too.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's. I think the, the other good thing is because we're not dealing with another person. So if I ask you, hey, Scott, can you do this for me? And here's what I want you do to do, and here's what I'm looking for. Um, and you might come back and say, oh, uh, can you explain that a little bit more? I didn't quite get that. Or what do you mean by this? So we might have that conversation, but then you go away and you do something, um, with, uh, the AI, I find it much easier to give the instruction, but then say, is any part of that unclear? Or have I missed some information that you actually need to complete this task? Um, which in a way is kind of showing more vulnerability than perhaps most people, certainly that I might show to another person. And in that sense, you kind of get some input back before you actually have finalized the query that says, well, actually I need these bits of information as well to complete what you've asked me.

Speaker A: Nice. Yeah, we, um, in our. In both our delegation to humans and delegation to AI, when we do documents. We like a section for issues and questions. Because one of the challenges with AI, they can ask some questions, man. They can just keep the questions coming at you, you know, on, on alternate Tuesdays and leap years. How will you handle this if somebody uses their left pinky Right. I don't know. Log that in the issues and let's move on. We'll come back to it if we have time.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, but I find that um, Yeah, I, I want to, I want to be able to say I've been fortunate to have great team members that have really pushed me at times to unpack information more. Um, and that's true. But I've still gone through some frustrations with the AIs at different times where you're just like, you just did this amazing thing over here. Why are you doing this dumb thing there? That's like so much more basic. But, but at this point now my, my questions are always okay, what do we, how can we build on this? Because it, if, if you can unpack everything you're doing with AI now, like this is an incredible time every. And we all want the. I'll use the uh, Star Wars. You've ever seen those Death Star sets in legos for Star Wars? Right. They're like a gajillion pieces and they take four years to put together. Whatever it is, we all want that Death Star. Like that's where we want AI to be. And some forms of AI are there self driving cars and things like that. But for the things that we're doing in our daily work, a lot of times we're just figuring out the shapes of the legos.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And if we will embrace it with that type of mindset, you start to be able to put together some pretty cool LEGO sets. M. And I date myself because I love me some lego. Um, but the idea of Lego, for anybody that doesn't know, great story there, mission driven company. Um, but they've got the brick, like one brick, uh, that you can plug in to create these systems of play is what the original family, uh, member called it when they came up with it. And I think that if we'll embrace AI the same way, just like good software developers do this you build up a base of functions. With AI, you can build up your agents. I just think the scope of those agents has to be much, much tighter than most people realize. You will do this one thing because what happens, and I'm sure you've experienced this is as the conversation, that window of information, that context window, as it Gets bigger, there's more things to confuse. The AI has more information to sift through and there's a point at which they've done studies. It just starts to tank in terms of its quality. It unravels, which happens to humans too if you overwhelm us with information. Um, but um, it's fascinating.

Speaker B: M. All right, yeah, it's, I, I like the LEGO analogy. I often use that in um, in various things. I often use it in project management. I say, well it's what's the LEGO brick we need to build? And then we'll, we'll build the next one and start to put that on top of one. On the next one. Yeah. I don't know what, what it's like these days, whether today's generation is on lego, but I know I grew up with Lego and my kids grew up with Lego and I think, I think the next generation grew up with LEGO as well. But I'm not sure where we're at now.

Speaker A: Oh, I think, I think Legos will always. Well, I say always but I mean like we, we got these hand me downs from uh, my sister in law. Hey Lauren. Shout out Lauren. Like these buckets. And the boys are still like uh, if we should give those up yet. And they're in their 20s.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure we've got buckets in the cupboards here as well.

Speaker A: But this, that's the amazing thing about rolling up your sleeves and starting to work with you know, the command line tools and the different tools are coming out in the web interfaces is you can build these purpose built, wonderful, wonderful little helpers. I mean I've even, I've gotten so frustrated with the state of CRM, uh, with customer relationship management. I actually have a um, ah, project uh, in Grok and its whole job is to, on a weekly basis one helps me track our pipeline and the other helps me track my business development activities. Because I just got tired of trying to learn everybody's form interface. So I just, it understands the rules, I tell it what I did, it tallies it tracks it with the right person. Just fascinating.

Speaker B: M. Yeah, there's, there's so much there and I wonder how many of these um, legacy systems start to become redundant. Although a lot of them are incorporating AI into their system. Right. But uh, CRM is a classic one. I've always had a love hate relationship because I always wondered how much time you spend inputting the information and whether the return you're getting from that time spent on the inputs.

Speaker A: Right. I've Never heard one person say I love this part of the job. Now when you have the data and you can run the analytics. Yes, but I think we're going to see that I'm already, I mean I talk the LLM that I find best able. And before I jump into this, let me just say the common theme here is use technology to remove friction, not create it. That's I think as I, as I'm reflecting on our conversation, that's the theme. But one place where um, I found there to be friction sometimes on car rides I, you know I listen to books, sure. But in my age I've listened to a lot of books and read a lot. So if I don't have five other things going on in my brain, what do I do with it? Well now I talk to Grok. Grok is great at conversing just enough to capture ideas. Then you can go pull out the transcript and hand that to your custom built transcript organizer that can pull out the right information and pass that off to the next agent or person. And uh, it's fantastic. You know my father used to buy these little bitty cassette recorders. Uh, uh, you know you would you talk into them. But the problem with that because I've used it on my phone as well. What do you do with. Used to be you had to pull the transcript out and what am I going to do with the transcript? Well now maybe AI can help me. You can just skip it now, just talk to Grok, you got the whole thing. And I'm sure that Claude and, and um, I would think ChatGPT will get there as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a, that's a really fascinating application I think. I mean I know I've got an application that uh, where I can record and it transcribes and then I can tell it, you know, um, give this back to me in various different formats. So I can ask it to write it in a, ah, social media post or I can ask it to write it in a report with bullet point list of the key points and the actions. So depending on what it is I've recorded, I can ask it to um, revamp the information in various things which is an AI tool based. But to um, to connect different bits is, is another level.

Speaker A: Yeah, 100% and find um, you know I mentioned like neuroscience is, is the cool sounding collegiate term but I mean a lot of what we do is we just, we build software, we watch people use it and then we try to make it easier to use. And one thing that I've seen again and again is when you can put things into a conversation versus uh, these forms that you have to learn how to fill out. Right. It's easier. Now some people go like so overblown on the conversation that the conversation's free form and there's too much for an LLM or the AI to figure out. But what we found is if we keep the context tight, we can help people through the kinds of things that often frustrate everybody. Um, clarity on our vision in concrete terms, how do we tie that vision directly, you know, from, from the high level like we talked about, like we have a mission. Well, that ties to our beliefs and why we do what we do. But it also ties to a three year vision which is concrete and has revenue targets and, and a lot of detail. Sixteen different dimensions. Well that ties to a one year plan and that ties to a quarterly plan and that's what we use to make our decisions week in and week out. That process sounds really daunting. And people used to go to, you know, day long consulting sessions and pay tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with it. We've got a set of AI tools where you just, it asks you some questions, you confirm a couple things and okay, we got that step, let's get the next one. And it becomes fun because you're seeing your ideas unpacked, you're seeing what was in your head that you might have overthought ways to communicate or got distracted by all the 50 other things in your mind. You're worried about other people thinking we can pull that when the software, we can bring that out in a way that everybody can lean into and that's really powerful.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: That's where I think these tools in using these different ways to interact with AI just gets really interesting really fast.

Speaker B: Yeah, fascinating. Well, I'm just aware of the time we could go on talking, um, software, AI and tools and neuroscience for ages. But um, yeah, I think it's a good point now though to move on to the buzz, which is our innovation round. And it is focused on AI, but it's focused on AI from the point of view of what are the human aspects of it and how do we um, how do we maximize it in human terms? So I'm sure that you'll have some really interesting insights for us. So you all set?

Speaker A: I m think.

Speaker B: All right, first one is on in innovation, what's the most innovative way you've seen AI used to strengthen human relationships?

Speaker A: The most innovative way. I mean there's Gosh, there's so many. I mean, the simplest is, like, we use it just to help us structure context so that people aren't getting these, like, clipped messages of, you know, do this thing now. No, here's some background, here's some context. Here's the success criteria we have. You can go figure it out on your own so you have autonomy and agency. Like, that's been super helpful. The one I still love, though, I mentioned already, I can be in my car and Grok and I can do whatever. I mean, I've had Grok research things for me. I've had Grok just be a scribe and suddenly time where you think it's not productive. Time I look forward to now there's some time in the car where I'm just like, this is really going to help me. I'm going to be prepped for that meeting that our team is having on this subject. Um, prepped for my neuroscience talk. We did some extra research on that. I, um, think so for the listeners. I did a workshop leveraging neuroscience to accelerate your ability to get things done. But I was able to research that and come up with different ways to communicate those ideas to people. So those are my favorite because they affected me personally.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, um. They're always powerful ones that you've experienced yourself. Excellent. All right. Um, well, the next one is about your own experience, the best thing you've done, and maybe that second part of the answer there is the answer to this one. The best thing you've done to integrate AI in a way that enhances human experience.

Speaker A: We began taking all of our forms and we've got some cool interactive forms and just putting them in, um, not just a pure. It doesn't look exactly like, say, a chat GPT or, um, one of the other LLMs, but within a certain framework, when it has that feel, it feels much more magical. And we can use the amount of coding grunt work that the AI is taking off the plate as we do it. I mean, it's helping our engineering team, it's helping our users, it's helping everybody come together more effectively. Because what we're doing is we're creating these dialogues and not always directly with each other, but everybody's involved in this and it's pretty neat.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's. I sometimes think. I wish. I mean, I've played around with. We've got a big intake form that you probably remember from further podcast information, and I've played around with trying to get that into a conversation. Um, but at the moment, I haven't quite got it right yet, so it's not ready for prime time. But, yeah, I think taking forms and turning them into conversations is. I mean, it's consistent with my whole philosophy that, you know, the podcast itself is about having a conversation with somebody.

Speaker A: Ah. When you look at just for a person to learn a new software platform, which in this current age we're in, it's one more thing to learn. M. And nobody's going, okay, I want one more thing to learn. That may not enrich me. It's just basically somebody else's arbitrary rules. But so much actually goes into teaching people how to use software, Even if it's the most intuitive software ever, when you can replace that with a relatively smart interface, um, that's told what its boundaries are and has the clear guidelines, it's mind blowing. Like, how much work and how much cognitive load that takes off the table.

Speaker B: Yeah, excellent. All right, well, the final question is one that I puzzle over quite a bit, and that's in this day and age of, um, AI, and you mentioned, you know, nobody wants to learn software simply for the sake of learning software and for questionable return. Um, what is it that people should be developing as skills in this age of AI that kind of differentiates them?

Speaker A: Hey, I mean, I heard Mark Cuban say this. He's like, if I was. If I was starting out now, I'd be listening to every podcast, reading every book, trying to do everything I could to get to know it. And I think that while that sounds a bit obsessive, wherever it is that you're interested in working, if you can find ways to apply AI and just start to develop the skill to interact with it, now it's incredibly powerful. The way that I got into technology, I didn't initially get a CS degree, but I had been programming since I was, you know, preteen. Um, and so I just raised my hand to go through and take over, like, these massive code bases that nobody wanted. Like, it was the bottom of the barrel because other people's code is all, nobody likes other people's code. And I was like, this is great. I'll learn how it works. And that was a big part of how I was able to accelerate my career quickly. Well, now you can do that even faster because you can bring the AI in with you and start to learn what questions to ask it. Um, if you're, um, I mean, you can just pick the application. There's. There's very few areas I can see it not touching because worst case, it can go help you do research. Worst case, it can help you take your ideas and think about them from different angles and pick them apart. Um, I even saw, um, Dharmesh Shah, who's great. For anyone who wants to follow his CTO and co founder of HubSpot, he was marveling because his son is an aspiring science fiction writer. So his son is feeding information about the world he's creating to an AI and then querying it like, well, what would happen if this and that happened? Like, using it to create these dialogues. And we've done that with creative, uh, I've done that a lot with creative writing as well. There's. There's almost no way you can't use it. So wherever. I'd say wherever there's a friction point you have getting from where you are today to the reality you want to manifest in the world, if you'll pick kind of the heaviest friction point, the bottleneck, there's going to be a way to double click there and just pick apart one aspect of it. One tiny thing that AI can help you with. And when you get that done, you'll find the next thing. When you get that done, you'll find the next thing. And it's that LEGO approach I mentioned. Now's a great time to understand it because it's going to get to a point where people who are born years from now won't have seen it come together and you don't get the same understanding. Like, I got to see Windows and Mac come together. I've got a deeper understanding. This is an incredible time we're living in. Such an incredible time to develop your understanding of these things.

Speaker B: M. Yeah, I think that's a really important point. And I think the. The idea of, um, trying it out and I mean, even something simple. And I did this in the very early days, I said, well, here's all the things I do. Um, where can I use you? And it came back with about a dozen ideas, of which maybe half I'd thought of beforehand based on what I knew it could do, but the other half was, oh, you can do that. That's really interesting. And then I started exploring those things as well. And, um, as you say, that then opened up other ideas that I hadn't thought thought of up until then.

Speaker A: It's, I mean, fantastic for all these uses. I. We might, we might talk about it after the podcast. I'm thinking to myself, there's a couple of tools I want to make sure that you're aware of. For a couple of the things you mentioned that may be helpful. But I think even, you know, even what you just said, right, the dialogue, the self reflection, it's not that the AI is making decisions for you. It becomes a tool to reflect and to run. Einstein's famous for doing these thought experiments. And we have even more, we have help. You know, you can, you can do so much with it.

Speaker B: M. Yes, that's right. The, the reflection part, I think, I think that's one of the most powerful bits and a lot of people talk about. You can do various things. You can get information, you can uh, write blog posts, generate images, generate videos. But I think the really powerful one is if I give you some information, can you tell me where the gaps are in my thinking? Can you reflect back to me? You know, what am I assuming that perhaps I'm not aware of? Um, or if here's an article I've written, can you tell me, um, this uh, about my writing style here and can you tell me if this is going to appeal to a mass audience or, or do I need to adjust the writing style and those kind of things? That self reflection type thing, almost like a coach in. Skilled in all kinds of different areas.

Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. I mean you're making, reminding me that I'm, I'm uh, seeing so many incredible uses like this. I mean so many well developed, purpose built for like just one purpose to take in your voice for example, or where we're recording this into script. Like we've got, we've got some uh, avatars that we just love into script and they're just amazing things that's happening. But with us using the avatars, our team has realized we don't have to be the sole source. It's not like you have to go script something and read it and figure out everything else. You can just give it the script, choose an avatar and just become the editor. M. You don't have to be the editor, the writer, the camera person. You know, all those things you, the AI can actually help you do more by doing less.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. All right, well thanks Scott. This has been a fabulous conversation. Now where can people find out more about result maps, about you, about the work you do and maybe even reach out and say thanks for what you've shared with us today.

Speaker A: Yeah. So resultmaps.com that's one result. Many maps. R E S U L T M m a p s dot com. We're there. Um, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. You can find us on LinkedIn as well. Um, Scott Levy on LinkedIn look for the one that's connected to result maps because there's apparently a lot of Scott Levy's in the world. Um, yeah, and if, if any of your listeners want to check out our neuroscience workshop, we've got a special offer that they're welcome to. And you can always get a free trial of our software.

Speaker B: Excellent. Great. And we'll have all those links in the show notes, as I mentioned earlier. Now, as we wrap things up, Scott, what specific actions would you like our listener to take out of our, uh, conversation today?

Speaker A: I would list one area that is a sore spot for you in your day to day. Um, it could be at home, it could be at work. And go either to perplexity or Grok or somebody that can do deep research on the web and ask it for possible ways to solve. Because I've gotten answers for everything from movies to watch with my wife, to meals to make. I don't cook. Um, you know, to figuring out in this brand new world where software is exploding, what software tool to use or even how can I unpack what, what is an MCP server? You know, just to pick a technical term, M. Whatever that, whatever that friction point is, go double click on that. And then the other thing I'd encourage you to do, do I get two or is it just one?

Speaker B: Yeah, go for two.

Speaker A: I'm gonna go for two. Like when you wake up, tweak your routine, and find a way to block timeout in that first three to four hours of your day just to get your most important things done. And yeah, if you've got kids, you've gotta navigate around that. And if you've got work meetings, maybe you have to wake up a little earlier. But I promise you, if you'll do that, you will see massive impact. Far greater than you will staying up late.

Speaker B: Excellent. Well, there's a couple of really great, great, I won't say easy to implement, but very clear actions that, um, yeah, simple.

Speaker A: Not easy, but simple.

Speaker B: Simple, yeah, that, um, all we have to do is start. So thanks so much for sharing your time and your insights with us so generously today, Scott. I've really enjoyed our conversation, really learned a lot, and I'm looking forward to some of those tips you've got for me after we stop the recording. And, um, all the best for the future and please do stay in touch.

Speaker A: It's a pleasure. Look forward to it.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening. We'd love you to leave a review on this episode. It will help us to make the podcast better for you. Simply go to lovethepodcast.com innovabuzz and pick your preferred platform. Remember to visit Innovabiz co Flyworld and secure your membership to the exclusive Flywhirl Nation community where you'll enjoy direct access to our incredible podcast guests, engaging, meaningful conversations and participate in connection events designed and to elevate your business journey. Don't miss out. Join Flywheel Nation today. Tune in again to the next episodes of the Innova Buzz podcast, where we've got yet more fantastic guests lined up. Until next time, um, I'm Jurgen Strauss from innovabiz. Remember, be awesome and keep Innov.