Blending Human Relationship Skills with AI Skills with Larry Durham

Wendy: This is Talent in the Age of AI, the podcast helping leaders navigate what AI means for their people, their culture and their future. We talk with the thinkers and practitioners shaping how we work, learn and lead and what it takes to keep talent growing in a world that's constantly changing. We create, curate and connect the insights and the community that helps leaders build AI confidence in themselves and in their teams. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to the Talent in the Age of AI podcast where we seek to bring you current and relevant usable information in this great era of change brought about by the onslaught of AI. We're positive adopters. We believe it's going to be good, but we know that change is hard and going through transition of adopting it in your organization for the betterment of your organization because it's better. Better for your people is the right thing to do. I'm so excited about our guest today. His name is Larry Durham. He's the president of the St. Charles Consulting Group and what he and his partners are doing there is so extraordinary. Visionary. You are not going to want to miss this. Part three of a three part series with Larry. He's so full of information, I, I begged him to please give us three, three, uh, podcasts of his time. And that's such a generous gift for someone so busy working with huge corporations to bring about the change in the right way. Part one, we talk about the coming judgment void thanks to AI and it will come. Judgment might be the thing that AI cannot do anytime soon, but a crisis may be coming in two to three years if we don't start thinking about how do we deploy judgment among our real human talent. And part two was Larry's rephrasing of the term career ladder with career lattice. And such a fascinating thought if you think about putting the talent for your organization on a lattice track instead of a career track. Let's talk about the lattice track. What all should ah, they can, they know that AI can do but isn't really doing or AI can't do, but AI is doing that people should know about. They can't leap over every bit of knowledge to get where they want to go. And of course your motivation is to have people help you get the organization where it needs to go because we're all in business to make a living doing business. So I'm so pleased to introduce you to Larry. Larry, thank you so much for being with us for part three of this exciting, exciting series.

Larry Durham: Wendy, thanks for having me again. I appreciate it.

Wendy: Part three we're going to call Blending Human Relationship skills with AI skills. And this blend is kind of the new world will be created when we really work to draw strength from the combination. If I've worded that correctly, would you say that's what we're going to talk about today?

Larry Durham: That is right. And I speak with a lot of colleagues. And one thing I'll point out right up front is I've had people say, oh, AI will do the technical and people will do the relational. Uh, I think that's an oversimplification that we could talk a little bit about. But uh, yeah, I'm looking forward to getting into the topic today.

Wendy: Well, um, how do you propose that companies do that? How do they blend the human element with the AI element? And you're right, it's not like they're two silos of skills.

Larry Durham: Yeah, they are different. I think, um, as I've said in previous episodes, step one is, um, our goal is not to give everyone a second and a third job. Right where you need to do all these things and now you're going to do infinitely more. I think people get overwhelmed with that. Uh, what we focus on is we talked about in the first episode how some of the work, 30, 40, 50, maybe even more, that percentage of work is going towards AI. That may mean fewer workers. But what I imagine, what we've seen in the past, that the easiest way to have a parallel discussion is to look back to what's happened in the past. And rarely does all that time go away. So the good news is we believe, at least for the next number of years, a lot of the efficiency that AI is bringing won't immediately reduce, uh, the headcount. And so the relational element is going to become, I wouldn't say it's going to become more important. There's actually time that's going to be freed up to do it. In all my years of doing large scale transformation, uh, we used to make meaningful change in organizations and uh, we would take tactical work away from individuals and the organization would say, well, the good news is people can be more strategic. As if the absence of tactical work made me abundantly more strategic and miraculously that never happened. I always hoped that I was strategic.

Wendy: I think all the Excel spreadsheets in the world didn't inform my strategy.

Larry Durham: That's exactly right. And so I, you know, I think it's going to be deliberate. I think as we take the, the uh, some of the skills away, uh, the technical things that you had to do, you know, I'm still amazed, right. If I'm Going to draft an outline that I can do in 15 minutes or 10 minutes or 5 minutes. That used to take me an hour and a half. I have thought to myself recently, what am I doing with my efficiency? Am I reinvesting it into more technical? Am I dedicating more time to the relational aspect? In our last episode, when we talked about the Career Lattice, I suspect there's going to be a lot more time spent in career counseling and coaching, uh, engaging with other individuals, collaborating, uh, on what new ideas have come out of that, maybe ideating on how our business transforms and how we make it better. I think there's times that if I would have said those things in the past, they were like, we don't have time for that. We, we don't. There's no. I think what we're finding with AI is some reinvestment of the efficiency in a structured way could really lead to better personalized succession, better feedback, better collaboration, better ideation of new business ideas, better ideas of how AI, uh, could further. You know, we call AI a flywheel sometimes, right? Once it's going, it just accelerates and works off of itself to go faster and faster. You know, why not have agents of agents and swarms and other things that people talk about? Our goal should really be creating more space. And in reinvesting as much of that space as the organization will allow into the relational aspect, I think that will make for a far more desirable business, one where people will want to work. And that's going to be the interesting thing that we haven't talked about. We've spoken so much about AI. What's it going to mean to be a great place to work? You know, that you get to manage 100 agents versus 50, or that you're highly valued. You get a lot of exposure and experience. You have a high relational component. I think that's going to be really, really important, uh, in the future to be a good place to work.

Wendy: Oh, my gosh. I mean, Larry, think about the accolades from an INC Magazine. Best places to work. What a brilliant question. What's it going to mean to be a best place to work? And it used to be all about culture or free coffee or bring your bike or. I mean, I don't, um, mean to be so flip. There were other reasons you felt valued, et cetera. And you believed in the mission and leadership. Lived the mission, but what's the mission? What are the values? What are we going for here? That's a really insightful question. Uh, what do you have to say about that? What I just said, best places to, to work or anything. Larry.

Larry Durham: Well, again, if I step back and I say directionally, what do we think the future of work looks like? If I stop for a moment and there's going to be a higher proportion of agents doing work and a fewer number of people, I just, you know, if I go all the way back and I say, what's the purpose of a business? To create economic value. Okay? Economic value is going to be revenue and then profitability. So if there's an opportunity to use agents to be more profitable, it's going to happen. We can't bemoan that, lament that that's, you know, we're not going to redefine what the purpose of an organization is. However, one thing we do know, with AI, we are going to have more agents or much more productivity from agents. The GDP of agents will far outweigh the GDP of our people. It just based on how they work, the number, the cost, efficiency, et cetera, et cetera. So what's really interesting about that, in an earlier episode when we talked about that declarative knowledge and procedural task, which being in knowledge work, which a lot of our clients are, we spend an inordinate amount of time just moving knowledge around on spreadsheets and PowerPoints and emails and word documents and zoom calls and teams calls, right? It's just information flow, a lot of which AI can handle. All of a sudden, the other two dimensions of overseeing and providing good judgment and insight on top of what AI produces and the relational components of what we do, both with customers and clients and stakeholders and the marketplace and our employees. It reframes everything around those two. As I said in an earlier episode, about 80%, 85% of what l and D produces for training, declarative knowledge and procedural task. In the future, most of the time we spend for L &D&HR M& Talent will be inverted, right? Kind of like the Addie model I mentioned in an earlier episode. We'll spend most of our time on the judgment and the relational. Because the relational part is developmentally and judgment wise. I'll be getting what I need. The relational part, you know, going way back to my.com days. The stickiness of a website, right? The stickiness of an organization for a great place to work relational beings, right? And even for myself as an introvert, is still a relational being. And my relationships that I have is not going to come down to my hundred agents that I oversee. It's likely going to come down to the relationships that I have with my customers, my colleagues, my leadership, etc. Etc.

Wendy: Yeah, I want to talk about a couple things there. Um, with COVID came work from home. And, uh, at the very beginning, we couldn't figure out why we're so exhausted. Well, one study showed because the human being wants to survey faces to get the real story or to understand what's being said, etc. And you're on a call with ten faces, and you just. That was so much more, um, information to be taking in to our brains and also paying attention or paying. Being on camera or what's my cat doing? Or whatever. Um, but then also after that, it became this whole quietly quitting movement, which, as a business owner, I really resented that. That became a wave across the nation, you know, advising that generation to just quietly quit, phone it in, show up and leave. Um, and then all this work from home, which I was an advocate of that in my organization, I do allow that for a couple days a week. But I believe in being together as much as we can because I'm an idea person, we're a strategy company. And I think there's a lot of benefit in being with another human and with a, like, cause and mission. Um, but what do you think about that? I mean, can we get back to wanting to be together? I think there's a lot of people that just don't want to go into work. And I don't mean they don't want to work. I think they don't want to go into work because of habits. They've. I can do a load of laundry while I'm working and all this stuff. So what. How do we balance that? And if AI is going to do a lot of the tasks, how do I relate?

Larry Durham: Yeah.

Wendy: With the time I have.

Larry Durham: That's a great question and maybe a whole nother, uh, topic. But when I think about the, uh, When I think about the dynamic of return to work. Right. Return to work has gotten so much. A lot of it. A lot of it is the democratization who, uh, there's kind of a power shift back and forth. Right. So going into Covid, there wasn't a whole lot of conversation about it. It worked as it was, and then after Covid, it was a necessity. So for business to thrive, you had to work remote. There was no other way. And so no one really had control over it. Once that went away, it had been proven that work could be done remotely. And so the workers said, look, we've proven something, so you can't tell us that we can't do Work non remotely. And you had these digital natives who had grown up with this and they were comfortable working from home and they had a mixed lifestyle where they could go to the store, you know, 10am, then do something, work all times of day. I think there's big generational discussions around return to work and what that begins to look like. I think going forward, when I think about the economic value. So aside from the relational part, which I'll get back to the economic value that I can produce for an organization, if I can come in and I build 20 agents that do what 15 people in my group did before, and I work from home three days a week, I suspect someone's not going to be like, how do we get Larry in here five days a week? It's like, how do we make sure Larry never goes anywhere? Right. Like Larry is valuable, Wendy is valuable. So I think it's going to be productivity and the more we go along, but I think it's going to be predicated on people who use AI. All that being said, I think the relational component, it might be the crisis that we have in organizations after, you know, after judgment. The crisis may be no connectivity. I have no connectedness to my business at all. Right. If I operate a little mini independent business on um, this lattice and I'm just here for myself and I don't connect with other people. One, I don't think people will stay as long. Right. Two, you're at great risk of someone leaving because me sitting at home looks just the same. Working for company A versus company B, I'm just different. And if all my colleagues are my, uh, AI agents, it really feels no different. So I think there is, aside from a pandemic, aside from the onset of AI, I think return to work will start to normalize, but I think we'll be back to where we were before, which is there needs to be a healthy balance between people's desire for engagement and relationship and a desire for organizations to make meaningful time. The one thing I remember, and I've worked for a number of organizations where they had you come in certain arbitrary days, right. The challenge with that is people would come in and it didn't engender good feelings about being together. It engendered like half the people didn't show up. And the challenge is it was insult to injury. Like I had to pay for tolls and I had to spend an hour commuting and, and I'm getting no benefit and made me feel worse about my job than it made me about my job. And So a big part of Return to Work, I think is going to be dynamically different using agents. Um, but I think that relational piece is coming back into play that you called out earlier, which is if you let that relational piece go away, there's no stickiness to the job. I can move tomorrow and I can build the same agents, I can do the same things. And if I don't have relationships, there's nothing tethering me to the business.

Wendy: I love where we're going. Larry, when you talk about the stickiness of relationships and going, returning to work, and I have a couple comments on that, it's almost like the corporate version of nil.

Larry Durham: Yeah, well, if we go back, we go back to the, uh, synthetic work, like synthetic academies, right, where people get drafted, right? They get drafted for how good they work with AI. And maybe not only that, but you choose the people that you are like. I like their style and their personality. And I don't want the person that's standoffish. I want the person who seems very workable and collegial, those kind of things.

Wendy: So a dilemma for the HR talent development audience that we're talking to here is how do you create stickiness in this environment? How do you. It gets to culture, it gets to valuing the human. It gets to the lattice where you give opportunities to learn and grow and apply.

Larry Durham: Yeah, something I wrote about, I'd have to look six or seven years ago, it was a thought leadership piece and it was called the Talent Blockchain. And what it was is what are all the skills that Wendy has or Larry has? You know, and, and so it was the profile of everything you've ever that you do, the work you do, the skills you develop. The part that's not there even in that is we run the risk, and I think we're there with AI, we run the risk of commoditizing talent. You know, people are the sum total of their skill. That's. That's all we need. I think when we do that, that's when we take the human element out and we're not far from commoditizing the work, commoditizing the people. It's one thing to commoditize an agent because it's AI. And no matter whatever crazy sci fi movie may say, AI have a feeling, you know, someone will say that it does, but it doesn't. The human element of wanting to go to work, whether that be in your home office or in a location or to your client site, has to be innovation, collaboration, a sense of Belonging. And I'm hearing less and less about this. In the age of AI, most people are like, just be happy you have a job coming out of college. Right. It's not like, have you found your place? And is it a good fit? Uh, I don't hear as much of that anymore. And I think that's something that's going to come back around.

Wendy: Uh, you know, I don't know if it's true anymore. Corporations always used to say, our greatest asset is our people. Yeah, I hope they still mean that. It's the, ah, it's usually the number one item on a spreadsheet. And that's why C Suite's looking at it like, how can I eliminate some cost? But this human element is important.

Larry Durham: It's interesting that you say that, Wendy, because I was thinking about that statement. If I said our greatest asset is our AI, that may well be true in the future, but who's going to say it right? I suspect that we'll hear people are our greatest asset. Um, I actually think that judgment and innovation is super, super important. I mentioned it in our earlier conversations around the kaleidoscope of ideas. The human mind is a special and unique thing that AI can't replicate. It can do many things far better than I do, but the innovation and the ideation that you can come up with is far better than what AI can do, uh, especially for the foreseeable future. So judgment doesn't go away. Innovation and creativity in the relational aspects, I think that's where a lot of organizations, especially hr, need to step back and say, what would be the prototypical organization for a place where people can form judgment, come up with great ideas, execute through AI and feel, uh, a sense of belonging that probably is the, the prototype of the future that we need to think about.

Wendy: Listeners watchers of the Talent in the Age of AI podcast. I'm so pleased to tell you more about the St. Charles Consulting Group. Their mission is to help employees navigate change and experience success by delivering comprehensive talent development solutions that focus on preparing your people for your tomorrow. And you'll see from listening to our three part series series with President Larry Durham that this is exactly what they do. And they're not resting on laurels or doing what happened in the past. They are big visionary future thinkers. So they help mid to large size organizations maximize the value of their talent. And who doesn't want that? That's why we're all here together. Through strategic consulting, innovative learning solutions and managed services. The roots are in real world renowned Anderson Worldwide training and development center located in St. Charles, Illinois. So they come at this from 30 plus years of deep experience, real world boots on the ground, training, consulting, thinking about what's next and identifying the real problems to be solved through human talent intervention conventions. For our podcast report series is President Larry Durham. And I'm so pleased to have stopped for a pause to let you know more about this incredible company available@stccg.com stccg.com as in the St. Charles Consulting Group. And now we'll go back to our interview with President Larry Durham. Our first episode was entitled the Judgment Void. And one of the things you talked about early on in this part three was uh, really looking at you said you've been thinking about, well, I just saved about an hour preparing an agenda for this meeting. What am I going to do in that one hour I've saved that is productive and efficient? And you know, do I have the time to strategize and formulate ideas? And I'm going to say I think that will take some great training too because computers were supposed to make our lives easier and more efficient and productive. But all we did was get more and more emails to answer and more and more meetings we could have. Did we ever really take advantage of that time savings? I don't think we did. I know I didn't and I. Ideas are what CEOs value the most and want the most. Right? But they're problem solving all day long. They love the person that brings an idea. So how do we train our brains, how do we train our people to say, you know, it will be okay if you put down two hours of time ideating, it'll be okay? I mean, we want to show, we want you to tell what you did, what your ideas were. But how do we give people permission to not just be on that wheel all the time?

Larry Durham: That's a great question. I think step one is if you step back and you look at the business as a whole. As I mentioned before, organizations are looking to be competitive. Right now, the engagements of AI. And I'm not talking about for the AI businesses that are growing hand over fist. I'm, uh, talking about organizations that use AI to do what they do. Right now they're looking for ways to deploy AI within their traditional work that make them faster, better and more efficient. The economics of that so far have not made their way through to the clients. Clients aren't paying less to get more. They're probably paying the same to get something better for the time we probably have a year or Two, while that will continue until someone breaks ranks and says, okay, I'm going to charge you less because I'm using AI and I'm going to take part of it and I'm going to give part of it back to you as the client. Then the things really start to evolve quickly. Because the reason I bring that up, if, if two hours of time get taken away from me or I have two extra hours of time, it won't be long before the organization says, you know, you saved two hours, I'm going to give you one back, but you can't have two. Right. We're going to drop one hour to the bottom line, and we're. We don't need as many people to do as much work. That's just the nature work.

Wendy: Yeah, I don't need to pay it for 40 hours because obviously you're not using it.

Larry Durham: Yeah, uh, yeah, yeah.

Wendy: Instead of valuing. Okay, what have you learned? Your lattice has been amazing. You do have these agents. What should we do next? And just take some time to ruminate and value that and pay for it.

Larry Durham: I agree. And I think that will help. I know, I, I think that will happen. You know, we live in a world of knowledge work. When, um, you know, if we go back to the earlier. Not many people think about it this way, but we, when we go back to the earlier industrial revolutions, which we're kind of upon the precipice of the fourth one here, the, the work. And I say this, it probably relates, it resonates more with me. Fortunately, I didn't have to do the work, but I grew up on a farm, uh, that's no longer there. You didn't start at nine and finish at five. Right. You got up when the sun came up and you worked till the sun went down. Whatever the day length was, that was hard. Hard. It wasn't knowledge work. It was. It was manual labor. And as those things became mechanized and other things, all that came along. The work today, while it might be cognitively demanding, is a world away from where we've been. Right, right. Um, you know, from, from where we were. I, I think we always thought, well, cognitive work is special and it's uniquely human. Right. What? Nothing's going to take my knowledge worker job. And here, lo and behold, here comes AI doing what you can do faster and better. So then the question is, where are we going to spend our time? I do think the economics of AI, the organization will be more profitable, the client will get better value, and the employee will have some amount of time Freed up. The question is what do we do with it? I'd love to see ideation, innovation, collaboration, relational elements, you know, all sorts of things. Strangely enough, I think the jobs will be easier. Um, not many people would say that, but I actually think I'll have more free time to explore and do other things. The question you ask is how do we make sure that that time doesn't seep into non productive time? Um, it's a great question. I think we'll have to see how do we make sure people aren't on social media or doing something else aside from how do we maximize the efficiency of what we've gained as part of AI?

Wendy: Well that's a leading organization that would value that time and that would value it. You know, again, my corporate life, um, not everyone was given a voice and everybody has a good idea if they, especially if they're inspired or incented to bring it forward. But you know, because of the ladder in the corporation, you didn't go trounce into the senior vice president's office and go hey, I think we should do this or you didn't feel like you could. Yes, this way, you know, if you're rewarding some ideation time and in fact maybe you insist on it.

Larry Durham: Yeah.

Wendy: You know, organizations. Mhm.

Larry Durham: I was going to say, Wendy, I think one thing I mentioned the flywheel earlier, one thing that came to my, my mind early on with AI was we were thinking, you know, we used it as we always did, right? We would just take what we did in the past and then we had AI do it and it faster and then all of a sudden we were like, what if it could do this? Oh wow, it produced something, right? It generated something. One thing that struck me is as knowledge workers we work in structured data, we have spreadsheets, we have word documents, we have it's captured data. And the thing uh, uh, between teams meetings and zoom meetings and Google Meets and whatever your platform is, we started recording and we were like, well that's pretty neat, right? It will give you your to do items and things like that.

Wendy: Right, right, right.

Larry Durham: All of a sudden all this unstructured knowledge and information started to be captured and I was thinking about what you were just asking if you had an agent, right, that monitored your activity, your free time, your recommendations, ideas that others have had. You can use it as a flywheel. And this is a little far fetched, but you can use it to say Larry, you spend a lot of time talking about this. Have you thought about as a prompter to use AI in reverse. I think there's a lot of ways, or here's three other people working on things that you're working on relationally, it might actually make some better connections. So I think we'll see AI get into not just a, uh, a redundant or a displacement state. I think we'll see it as a more efficient state to do a lot of things that today we don't use it for.

Wendy: One of our guests prior is Sharon speaker, and she's a consultant. And she said that she spent four hours with AI, uh, on a new business idea and kept massaging the prompts and all this stuff. And she said, you know what? In four hours, I applaud her. You know, she was really working it. And she said what it helped me remember is strengths and skills that I have that I'd forgotten I have. And she'd uploaded her business plan, her resume, her history, and it helped her remember. And so maybe that's kind of akin to what you're saying, that it's going to say, hey, Larry, you know, you're talking about this, these other people are. You want me to tell you who is. So you can collaborate. And you'd be like, so thankful. I think, you know.

Larry Durham: Yeah, it's funny you say that. I had written a piece a while back, and I think I entitled it A Beautiful Mind, because if you remember that movie, you know, the guy was almost going crazy and he had mapped this thing out. And in the early days of AI, I would put in a prompt and then it would say, well, what about this? And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And I would get off track with where it was leading me. And I think the, the judgment and the relational part of keeping the course is super important because I got to a place sometimes in these prompts where I was like, I'm not even sure what I started out wanting to do with AI and so there's the inefficiency of that. And I think the opportunity on relational and judgment to have AI maybe be the curbs to stay on the road of where we're trying to go. It'll do whatever we ask it to do, because again, it's not thinking for itself, it's doing what we ask it to do. So I think it's really important that we can use that, that skill as a flywheel to keep us on track relationally, judgment wise, all those types of things. I think that's the next. That's the next wave. But we have a few hurdles that we have to get over. Where we might be dismantling, like we said in our first episode, dismantling some of the Judgment without even knowing it. And we're going to find ourselves in a precarious spot.

Wendy: I've just enjoyed our time together these three episodes. I can't thank you enough for the generosity of your time. And those of you who are listening and watching, stay tuned for a word of a webinar with Larry Durham from the St. Charles Consulting Group. I just think it would be time with you, Larry, for everyone to ask questions, to pose problems, or for you to ask them what they're experiencing. Boots on the ground from all kinds of industries that we have. I'll leave you with one more question, and we're not going to solve this, but say that I do build a, uh, agency of agents, and then I leave that company. Are they my agents to take with me?

Larry Durham: I think I know the answer to this one. You may not like it, but my guess is, uh, you know, the funny thing about AI is, uh, ownership, copyright, you know, has been a lot of discussion as of late, and I suspect, you know, um, a lot of that company, company's going to take, uh, take ownership of all that's produced. But the ironic thing is the ability to recreate the constraint to build these things is, Is quite low. Um, and so it's, it's. I don't know, it'll. It'll be an interesting time to see what we haven't seen. We haven't seen swarms of agents as of yet, and that's what they like to call them. Swarms sound like bees. Uh, I don't know that that sounds positive, but some of the things we're working on, I think really interesting is using autonomous business signals. So looking at how performance is working and then have AI agents actually producing personalized interventions through a coach and training to deliver it autonomously. So when you think about that, that is a radically different place than where we are today to get us to that very dynamic way of working.

Wendy: Yeah, that's a mind bend for me. I just, just. I could talk to you forever. And I'm so grateful that, uh, you found us and that we had this time with you. And all of you, don't forget to, to visit Larry's company's website. It'll be included in the liner notes and you can reach out to him gladly or to me to tell us your thoughts on what you're hearing and where you would take this. So again, Larry Durham, thank you very, very much.

Larry Durham: Wendy, thanks for the time really appreciate it.

Wendy: Thank you all for tuning in. Thanks for listening to Talent in the Age of AI. If this conversation gave you new ways to grow in your own work and to better support your people, follow the show and share it with others in your HR and Talent Network members get even more full episode, uh, transcripts, extended show notes, and companion resources to help you put these insights into action. Learn more and join us@talentintheageofai ah.com we're here to help leaders create, curate and connect what's needed to to build tomorrow's workforce today. See you next time.