The Remarkable Leadership Podcast

00;00;00;04 - 00;00;40;12
Kevin Eikenberry
Hi, I'm your host, Kevin Eikenberry, and usually these episodes are about me sharing a short piece of information with you or bringing on a guest. But for the next six weeks, as a part of this very special series called The Evolving Workplace, I'll be handing the mic over to Wayne Trammell. Wayne's been my coauthor of the long distance leader, twice the long distance teammate in the long distance team, and he's been the host of an ongoing podcast called Long Distance Work Life Podcast, which has just come to a close, although all those episodes are worth your time, go to Long Distance worklife.com to learn more.

00;00;40;14 - 00;01;13;10
Kevin Eikenberry
In this series, Wayne will give new context and new ideas for us as leaders to understand the evolving workplace and how we can lead our organizations and teams through it. I hope you will enjoy all of these episodes in the series, and I hope you'll continue to enjoy everything else we bring you on the Remarkable Leadership Podcast, and now here's Wayne.

00;01;13;12 - 00;01;40;03
Wayne Turmel
Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All Star six part special podcast series on what the heck is going on out there? My name is Wayne Trammell. I am with Kevin Eikenberry Group. I am a master trainer and the subject matter expert on the evolving workplace, and this is the third episode in our series. We've already talked about how did we get here?

00;01;40;08 - 00;02;22;02
Wayne Turmel
And we talked about some basic trends where things might be going in the next five years. But today I want to focus on technology and I don't want you to freak out. We are suffering, I think a great degree of technology fatigue. And if you are of a certain age, this is nothing new. Those of us who survived Betamax and CD-ROMs and laser discs and this constant onslaught of technology that was going to change everything and then didn't.

00;02;22;04 - 00;02;50;14
Wayne Turmel
It's exhausting. And I get it. And there are two things that I want you to take away from today. The first is this is nothing new. And I take great solace in history. And I introduce you to my boy Sextus Julius. Front. Venus. You don't know who he is, but he matters. He was the Roman commander of Britain at one point.

00;02;50;19 - 00;03;20;08
Wayne Turmel
More importantly, he was an engineer. He designed a lot of the aqueduct at the height of the Roman Empire. So he understood technology and science and all that stuff. But he said this. And I want you to listen up. I also lay aside all my ideas of any new works or engines of war. The invention of which has reached its limit, and in which I see no hope for future improvement.

00;03;20;11 - 00;03;50;06
Wayne Turmel
He said it in Latin, but the point is, there he was done. He's like, stop bringing me new weapons. If we can't beat these little naked blue guys with what we've got, we're not doing it right. And that happens, right? There's this kind of onslaught of technology and what's zoom and why did they replace Skype for business with Microsoft Teams and what the heck is going on?

00;03;50;09 - 00;04;16;14
Wayne Turmel
And it all becomes a bit much. But if you listen to our first episode on How Did We Get Here, you'll realize that there are periods of time where there was rapid change, rapid change, rapid change, new stuff happening, and then there's a period of settling and kind of gradual improvement. You know, the invention of the internet and the introduction of AOL.

00;04;16;17 - 00;04;44;02
Wayne Turmel
It was about eight more years before the next quantum leap. But things change steadily through that time. But it was more gradual and it was more tweaking and improving then these kind of giant steps forward, with one exception. And we're going to talk about five trends that I think are happening in technology. Only one is like a quantum leap thing, and it's not to be ignored.

00;04;44;07 - 00;05;15;26
Wayne Turmel
The others are going to be largely changes behind the scenes. So let's start with the one that is the big granddaddy of them all. And I know we're exhausted. I'm exhausted thinking about it. I'm exhausted talking about it. But we can't ignore it. Which is AI, artificial intelligence. This is going to be something that we can't ignore because it's going to change pretty much everything.

00;05;15;27 - 00;05;44;19
Wayne Turmel
It's already becoming a common part of our workflow. It's part of our interactions. If you have ever used a chat bot for customer service, the odds of that being a live person on the other end are reduced every single day. You're probably interacting with a chat bot and it's amazing the things that can happen. You can get AI summaries in tools like zoom in teams that transcribes meetings.

00;05;44;20 - 00;06;09;05
Wayne Turmel
You can, get instant translation in foreign languages. It increases the overall effectiveness and retention of meetings. And it's not a perfect tool. It's not perfect for a lot of reasons. First of all, I think and this is the grumpy old man. I mean, makes people lazy. And you need to watch it. I'll give you a couple of examples.

00;06;09;08 - 00;07;08;28
Wayne Turmel
First of all, I and I love this hallucinates. And what that means is, if there is a gap in the knowledge base that it's searching through, it will just kind of guess and make a stab at given this. This should be what fills the void. And my favorite example of this is I asked, I, and I asked a couple of different tools this, give me a one paragraph bio on author Wayne Trimble and it ChatGPT in particular returned a very lovely glowing kind of description of me that included a college degree I do not have from a university I did not attend, and credited me with a book I did not write.

00;07;09;01 - 00;07;45;14
Wayne Turmel
So what this means is we're going to talk about this in future episodes. But we can't simply rely on AI. It's going to be part of what we do. It's an invaluable tool. It can certainly make life easier or faster for us, but we have to be vigilant about it. And part of organizations and leaders role is going to be making sure people know how to use the darn thing, particularly around writing queries and how you seek the information.

00;07;45;17 - 00;08;11;01
Wayne Turmel
It will give you exactly what you ask for. Now, AI is also going to play a role because it is going to reduce headcount in a lot of jobs. It is going to take the place of people. And it's interesting because last week when we talked about trends, one of the reasons people were insisting we go back to the office and they were tired of paying for office space that people weren't in.

00;08;11;04 - 00;08;36;17
Wayne Turmel
Right. I'm paying for this space. I want my people there. Well that's great. I renew my lease, I have an office full of people, and now I reduce headcount. And I've still got the same amount of square footage. So, dealing with remote work, back to office, what does the office look like in the future? We can't ignore the impact of AI.

00;08;36;19 - 00;09;10;18
Wayne Turmel
Now, I mentioned that the rest of these were kind of behind the scenes settling, gradual improvement kind of situations, and one of them is virtual and augmented reality. We've all seen the headsets, Oculus and the like. We have held our phone up to something and seen, enhanced. Information. We see it with meta goggles. We saw it with Google Glass for about a week and a half.

00;09;10;20 - 00;09;40;09
Wayne Turmel
Virtual, virtual and augmented reality is absolutely going to be part of the work scene, but it's going to take a while to figure out where does it add value and where does it not. And there's a part of me that believes, especially the big it's that kind of thing is going to go the way of the CD-Rom. Meta glasses is much more likely technology that will continue to fill in.

00;09;40;12 - 00;10;00;29
Wayne Turmel
But here's the thing you can't ignore it because virtual and augmented reality is an amazing training tool for a lot of jobs. Not so much for sales, but if I'm learning how to repair a piece of equipment, if I am selling, a piece of equipment, I need to understand what it looks like and what the various parts do.

00;10;01;01 - 00;10;16;22
Wayne Turmel
VR and AR play a wonderful role in that stuff. So? So the technical AG is going to improve and it's going to change, and it's going to impact certain jobs more than others.

00;10;16;24 - 00;10;44;10
Wayne Turmel
One of the things, and this certainly is a driver for returning to the office is cybersecurity. We are seeing all kinds of change. Just some are from bad actors. Some of the things going on from, that, you know, not only are there major security threats, but anybody with an access code can pretty much get in and do anything they want.

00;10;44;11 - 00;11;15;12
Wayne Turmel
How that's going to shake out, we don't know. But organizations are rightly concerned about the security of their customer data, their intellectual property. And so cyber security is going to matter. And the way that if you are working away from the office, the interfaces, the things that you use are going to undergo a fair amount of changes. Blockchain is probably going to be a part of that.

00;11;15;15 - 00;11;43;23
Wayne Turmel
But it's largely going to be invisible to most of us. We are going to have to change passwords, and there's going to be little things. There are huge changes going on behind the scenes, but most of us won't deal with that, as is cloud infrastructure. The days of the giant onsite data warehouses, rooms full of servers is largely going away.

00;11;43;23 - 00;12;19;01
Wayne Turmel
You can wonder if that's a good thing. And this ultimately ties to blockchain and cybersecurity. But cloud infrastructure is going to make information easier to access. It is going to mean that you can, in fact, work almost anywhere and get the same data and the same information as you can get in the office, but it's absolutely hand in glove with security.

00;12;19;04 - 00;12;53;28
Wayne Turmel
And finally, we're on the subject of the kind of gradual improvement things at the beginning of Covid. We got this onslaught of technology. Zoom went from what zoom to a verb, right? We're going to zoom about this to a syndrome. People were suffering zoom fatigue in a very short time. Microsoft Teams and there's a three year conversation about whether it was introduced to early or not.

00;12;54;00 - 00;13;22;07
Wayne Turmel
But it's in our lives, and it's improving and it's changing, but it is basically there, and it is going to be the tool that the majority of people use if they are in a Microsoft word environment. What we're going to see over the next three years is improvement. Sometimes big changes, sometimes little changes. But basically the tool is going to exist.

00;13;22;14 - 00;13;53;16
Wayne Turmel
We just need to get better using it. And then about the time we figure that out to add some more features in another version. But I think we're in this period where we have the tools we're going to use for the moment. They're going to get better, we're going to get better using them, but there's going to be a change, except for AI in the kind of quantum leaps, the things that our boy Sextus Julius front in us were worried about.

00;13;53;19 - 00;14;23;24
Wayne Turmel
But so what? Right. We've got these things enhanced AI, virtual and augmented reality, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and customize viable hybrid work platforms. But what does this mean? Well, for leaders, it's going to mean a couple of things. First and foremost, we need to upskill ourselves and our teams. AI is useless if you don't ask the right questions.

00;14;23;26 - 00;14;55;04
Wayne Turmel
It's almost as useless if you just take the answers you're given. And don't apply your human intellect context, and creativity to it. How do we maximize its importance? Right? You can't assume everybody on your team is going to use the same tools in the same way. Unless we take an organized approach to upskilling and utilization at a higher level of leadership.

00;14;55;06 - 00;15;25;07
Wayne Turmel
Changes in technology are going to mean changes in the office. It's not just headcount, although that's going to be part of it. But if access to information is the thing, do we want everybody on their own individual device? What's going to happen to personal devices versus company devices? If you're truly a for a hybrid organization, how do you think about using the space that you have?

00;15;25;08 - 00;15;53;27
Wayne Turmel
Does everybody need their own desk? How do you create an environment where people who need quiet work can get that done, while people who need to interact have the opportunity and the best possible resources and options to do that. So the physical workspace workspace is absolutely going to be tied to the future of technology.

00;15;54;00 - 00;16;17;01
Wayne Turmel
In the next few episodes. We're going to take a look at what this means. Next episode is what does it mean to the organization. Then we're going to look at what all of this means to individuals. And finally, what all of this means to leaders. I urge you to check all of this out for yourself. If I've said anything that kind of triggers a question.

00;16;17;01 - 00;16;51;27
Wayne Turmel
Go down the rabbit hole. I don't expect you to take my word for any of this. Certainly at the Kevin Eikenberry Group, we can help organizations do this. We have organization team assessments. We have certainly books like the long distance leader, long distance teammate, Long Distance Team, and Kevin and Barry's new book, Flexible Leadership, which offers a really, really good way to stop, breathe, and think about all this stuff in the meantime.

00;16;52;00 - 00;17;16;27
Wayne Turmel
I want you to not panic. I want you to take a deep breath. We're going to be back in a week to talk about what some of the implications are on an organizational level, and what senior leaders are going to have to think about, as well as entrepreneurs and people just starting businesses. So for now, that is episode three of The Evolving Workplace.

00;17;17;02 - 00;17;37;06
Wayne Turmel
My name is Wayne Trammell. You can reach me on LinkedIn. Wayne Trammell, Wayne and Kevin Eikenberry. Com or visit Kevin eikenberry.com to learn about all the ways in which we're helping organizations succeed. For now, thank you so much for being with us. And we'll talk to you on episode four.