CPO of Mozilla on Cognitive Diversity & the Future of AI at Work
WethosAI — https://wethos.ai/resources/videos/mozilla-cpo-on-cognitive-diversity
Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOuAbJGJnuI

Hello everybody. Welcome. We'll just get started here uh within a minute or so. Just want to let everybody in and you can say hello to Danny as well. Hey Danny, how are you?

I'm great. Stu, how are you?

Oh, good. Good to see you. And um thank you so much for participating. Um so we'll just let people roll in here and uh we'll get it we'll get this party started. Um thanks everybody for joining. My name is Stuart McClure. I'm founder and CEO of WethosAI and I'm a 5342. Uh my good friend Danny Chak is a chief people officer at Mozilla and is just a tremendous senior executive I've worked with uh in the past for many years and love to see you here.

Danny, um please give a quick little background on yourself. I can never do it justice and um and then we'll get things kicked off.

Yeah, thanks D. Um Danny Chihack here. I am a 4543 on the WethosAI scale. Uh happy to be here with all of you this morning. A little bit about my background and and who I am is uh I started my early career as a recruiter um and transitioned to being a talent partner at Apple and that was the early way we described what a PBP or a people business partner is.

I was embedded in the marketing and developer relations group. Um really deeply in integrated with their strategies and their team and what they were doing. And I got this curiosity around we hire these great people. We spend all of this time, energy, and resources on finding wonderful people. And what are we doing with those folks once they're on board?

how do we navigate leveraging their strengths, understanding where they're going to thrive, and really that platform sus for success. And so over the years I transitioned into a broader uh people functions um and spent uh a good part of my career in venture-backed companies um but then in private equity where I worked for Berkshire Partners and Francisco Partners and we really understood that talent was um our success factor.

We were going to um really be able to produce the outcomes that we wanted um through the talented people we had on board. Um later on I went on to establish the people function at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and over the last couple of years have been the chief people officer at Mozilla.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks Danny. Appreciate that. I I love that background too. Starting with recruitment. I mean you know talent and people very very well and you know the challenges of bringing people on and getting them productive and and highly functioning sort of really quickly. Well, we've got an action-packed uh about 40 minutes or so and then we'll have a Q&A uh certainly at the end.

So, we'll just get it kicked off. I have a quick question just to start the party off quick. I really want to hear your thoughts on, you know, cognitive diversity. You know, we hear a lot about the new generation of workers. We hear a lot about uh AI obviously in the workplace and where do you apply it?

you know stu I think about it not only in the workforce but in my personal life so many of us um spend our time and and energy uh in different areas in life whether it's mentor mentorship or volunteerism or interacting with even our families and neighbors and friends. And so I think as we embrace the opportunity to really understand each other um and think about ways we call it insight to action and action to outcomes, the way we interact with other folks um and the way we we leverage the strengths in each and every one of us and and that acceptance and that inclusion of folks who have that diversity of thoughts and styles and approaches.

And so um for me I think there is a belongingness to it everywhere. Well, I I certainly see it. You know, we I've built many companies, many startups, and um some bigger than others. Um some have exited quickly, some have uh been acquired. Um and I've stayed on with larger companies, you know, bigger multinational companies. And what I've always seen a gap in to be honest is the appreciation for cognitive diversity and the it's the natural tendency to find people like you and group

and collect together rather than manage the inevitable conflict or the uh discomfort that comes from thinking and talking and working with people that don't think like you and valuing those those inputs as is not a threat to your survival but simply good you know visual auditory inputs that you might not think about and you might not see.

You know, we talk about perception being so much of our understanding and there's countless examples of how we all see the world in our own little way and that the truth is something entirely different than what we see. And I think cognitive diversity and that that metric, if you will, and we measure that in WethosAI and we're getting really really great feedback and use cases in and around um how people are applying some of that.

To me, it's going to be really exciting because I do see we're starting to see people engage with that metric, understand it properly, and then start to actually pursue the outliers in any team and and sort of uplift those outliers into a more highly valued state within the team dynamics that you you'll listen to them more because they do have an alternative view that you might not think.

So, you know, really trying to move away from that group think model, you know, that, you know, we've all had to deal with our, you know, throughout our careers.

Well, okay, let me pivot to where I think a lot of this begins and ends and that is around communication. Now,

we all know how hard it is to I mean, just to begin with, communication starts with coming up with an idea and then verbalizing it. This part is actually incredibly challenging. Well, we have great ideas, beautiful, infinite ideas, but being able to put it into words in a way that number one articulates your thought accurately and then number two actually gets it received by the receiver in the way that you're wanting to articulate it.

Those are two, you know, tremendous challenges. So, I I have a couple of quotes which I like to share here. So the first is the more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.

That was by uh Dr. Erik Erikson who's a German child psychoanalyst and he coined the phrase identity crisis. So I thought a really really cool quote. The second is most pe and this is a current one. I love this one. I just saw this. Most people are so used to fluffy indirect sugarcoated speech that direct adult communication feels like an attack.

I'll just take that in for a moment. Right. And that's by Dr. Sirut uh Chala, a British psychotherapist. So, a couple of great places to anchor for us in talking about communication. Now, one of the primary thrusts as you know of WethosAI is to be able to know yourself, your team, and your company and then to grow yourself, your team, and your company.

So, what we're going to do is kick off with a poll. Uh, first of three audience polls. We're going to have um Jenny send that out in and around workplace friction. Please go ahead and respond, but Danny, I I'll walk through this and I'd love your thoughts as as they sort of answer, but what do you think is the biggest source of workplace friction?

The first one is miscommunication. Second, internal conflict. Third, misalignment of roles and responsibilities. fourth unclear expectations or fifth to just something completely different that we didn't consider. Just real quick, what are your initial thoughts and and we'll we'll get back to the results. So, yeah, Danny, I mean, what is your thoughts on conflict and where it arises?

I mean, I I see it constantly. Um, I certainly see it inside of MI m miscommunication. It's probably one of the number one. Um, you know, there's a lot of different ways that conflict can come up. I mean, certainly for me, it could be just misunderstanding what's happening, what somebody's saying or doing. It's not listening to people what they're saying and what they're doing.

It certainly can be uh incompetence, but I it's rarely that case. It's It's usually just simple misunderstandings. What's your experience with this?

Yeah. Well, I'll confess I tried to vote and it wouldn't allow me because uh I have quite quite a thought here.

I think you're a panelist so I I think it doesn't I tried to vote too. Yeah.

Like I want to vote.

Yeah. I want to vote.

You know, I I spend a lot of my time navigating internal conflict. Uh whether it's one in a broader team setting, whether it's my own team, whether it's myself and someone. And I think so much of it comes down to the differences in how we maybe naturally navigate things, right? It could be how we naturally communicate or or how we think about um a project and how we digest the information and we process it.

Um I can tell you it's as simple as what I see is I'll have someone who very much um looks at someone and said says I'm going to get straight to the point. I have someone else who says, 'Well, you know, that kind of felt difficult for me and maybe I took it as a personal attack or an attack on my subject matter expertise. And the person's like, well, I was just questioning, right?

I had one of these years ago uh a couple of years ago too as I was beginning to use WethosAI where a member of my team very highly skilled domain expert in an area that I have some decent knowledge but uh you know it's it's one of those specialties of the people function and we'd show up to meet and I would say hey can you give me the details of this project can you give me a run through she took this as I didn't trust her

or I didn't think her domain expertise was deep enough I took it as and my WethosAI style told me if I know something's on track I will exit that conversation and go put my attention and time on something else and so it could have been this friction of mistrust I'd put that in the you know miscommunication as well and once she figured out and we used our WethosAI to kind of say how do we work together she went aha I'm going to send you an update

we don't even have to talk about it you'll be like do you want your time back or how can I unblock things for you right and so suddenly we took this moment into clearly a strength of both of us.

And you know, I wouldn't have known that without the insights. I would have had to work harder to find that out and so would have she. And boy, um, once we did, we gave us a little summary of us together as a team and they said, "You're a dynamic duo."

And so we felt really good about ourselves after that. Right. It it was awesome.

Get each other.

I I love to hear that. Yeah, I agreed. I mean the four scores plus, you know, we're adding in more and more traits and cognitive biases inside of the WethosAI platform to truly understand you in a 360 holistic way. But the four core scores really do a great job of quantifying and putting sort of a you on a on a graph in effect so that you and someone else can understand each other.

Mhm.

And you know, communication comes through in all of these areas with, you know, obviously the first one being ideas and how you come up with ideas or how you want to see ideas being created and crafted. Um, and then of course relational. I mean, I can tell you countless stories uh at work, but but also I'll give you a funny story at home.

I mean, you know, my wife and I are um beautiful compliments to each other. Like so if you were to look at our graph, right, Danny? You know the graph. and you were to look at my wife's, it was exactly the opposite the whole way through like this. It just goes like that. It's and it is it and I I really do. In fact, I change her name in my contact list so that it's, you know, it's Tuesday and then her score, right?

So that every time a call comes up or every time an email comes in, I'm reminded constantly like, "Wait a second. You got to slow down. You've got to explain a lot. the pre, the post, and the problem before she will really engage and understand what I'm trying to say. Whereas, I'm quick and dirty. I I want to say one sentence and move on.

Like, that's that's me. And it can be taken, received so dramatically different than what I'm trying to present the information as. And without that knowledge, um, you end up just floundering. You know, you end up just getting frustrated. You you get short. you're not quite sure how to really uh communicate effectively and get your point across.

So, so here's some of the results of the poll. So, the first one came out. 45% was miscommunication. Uh 19 internal conflict, which that's a um you know, that's a very dyn or a very complex and nuanced sort of option, right? Could mean a lot of different things. misalignment of roles responsibilities only 3% and then unclear expectations at 29 which really goes and feeds back into miscommunication anyway, right?

It's sort of like a double bubble in that if you don't clearly articulate in the words and the tone and tenor and volume of the receiver, they're not going to hear you. They're not going to hear your expectations what you're looking for from them and what will measure as successful. Like, well, what is success in this request? you know, so all of that I think comes together in that communication.

So I love I love that that poll. That's a great one. So tell me, I really am curious to to share your thoughts. You know, you've been using WethosAI for quite some time and successfully deployed there at Mozilla. I know um your senior execs certainly and and many others have been brought on platform to try to help. you know what have you seen are some of the biggest challenges either there or before in your career in bringing sort of people diverse teams together and align them to a project.

question

y

thoughts

I'm glad you pointed that out um we are 100% virtual we have been remote for as long as uh Mozilla has been around um so we've got some very tenured folks who are uh very skilled at being virtual and remote and working async and all of those wonderful things and then we've been growing tremendously over the last couple of years and folks who are are still in the learning cycle of doing that.

Then you put in the global aspect and you put in all of the complexities of that and you know we think for us what's been very helpful is to start with the understanding that WethosAI provides us. My natural tendencies as a 4543 when they're understood by both me and by others and in a in a much deeper way gives us the option to kind of work through things in a way that you understand my intentions.

You understand my natural way. I can then also understand yours and adapt to it. And so our async work, the way that we can comment in a document and really do it across time zones, I think is is broader and deeper uh now that we have WethosAI and have that insight into each other. Um I think we are able to cut down on screen time, right? I think there's a certain Zoom fatigue we've all experienced.

Um and we find ways to to leverage each other for our strengths. And so we may bring someone into a project, especially an async project, who looks at it differently than we do, right? Um some of us who are big ideators, I spike there on ideation, um we'll look to someone to say, you know, how would this work here and is it ready to work here?

And someone may use the language that we've created around to say, hey, Danny, you're back in ideation again, right? We're further along the spectrum of actual execution. Um, and then we start to understand that a tendency might go to but that has the impact it needs. We don't need to finish it. Where someone may may spike more on the we need to finish it because I, you know, see and we outlined it that way that the impact actually does need it.

And so there's this understanding that prevents us from really passing these judgments of other folks' behaviors when they're not like ours. week

and it and you're new and you're trying to navigate this and figure this out and you bring with you all of your learned rewarded behaviors from your past employers.

Yes.

And you're saying, "How does this fit in here? How do I fit in? how do I thrive? And so, you know, we really leverage WethosAI at a team level as we onboard folks. And in the first 90 days, um I have a new VP of people who's been with me uh probably about five six months now. And in the first 90 days, we went back pretty frequently to our wethos and our shared styles.

And um you know, I really appreciate um reviewing that so I can remind myself um again, obsessed with talent. So now that we've we found the talent, how do we make them successful?

Well, that's that's so true. I mean, here at WethosAI, I had set a policy recently of what I call uh engagement, like meeting engagement. So, and and that was two parts. So, yes, we are quite virtual. Uh although I'm bringing a lot of people back in that are locally um living here down in Orange County into the office more often. Um, but when it comes to being virtual, I I've asked for two things.

One is always be on video. I mean, unless you're driving and it's unsafe or unless you know you're you're heading to the bathroom, I don't you know, whatever bio brakes, be a visual at least add to the visual elements of kinetic learning and communication. Um, and then second is leaning in. like I I can't tell you how many videos, you know, people that they're like like this or doing something else, right?

And it tells me that they're not really synced in. They're not connected. And and so where where that manifests is as somebody is talking about a project or status of something, they're not acknowledging like, "Yep, oh, okay, I see that now. Yeah, I get where you're at." Or, "Wait a second. Why are you there? And why is this a problem?" and engaging in that way.

Do you guys do anything similar? I mean, sort of set that create that tone.

Yeah. Um, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about um the purpose of a meeting. What is it we're trying to achieve, right? Again, it's that insights to action to outcome that we talk about.

moment

to fully understand what it is we're solving for, which I think Stu, you know, There is such a thing as Zoom fatigue. Being here and trying to read the body language and trying to understand someone else's intent or approach or those things we spend a lot of our energy in that moment in these conversations which takes away from our ability to genuinely digest.

Yes.

And so so we go in with very clear intentions.

We go in with this is the purpose, this is why we're here and then just really good language, right? And I think for us, WethosAI has created a great language.

Um, you know, I tend to also spike on the relational, right? things,

which does take a bit of a load as well. And so other folks, you know, when I'm with someone lower on that scale or um a little bit more in the logical end of it, I recognize that they may not be emoting in a way that I can read and want to be into. And it's okay. And it's that understanding that they'd like to just get to the point.

I'm going to ask how the weekend was and how we can together. And they're thinking like, can we skip the first 10 minutes of this meeting?

Exactly. Yeah.

Right. And so there's this way in which you know we think about the tax and the toll of being together whether it's in person or remotely and what that means because they they both have benefits pros and cons of each but how can we go into it with purpose and and meaning that allows us to navigate those times even better and so I use WethosAI as a way to do that with my team.

Yeah. No, that's great. And you know, one of the elements that we're um we'll be releasing soon in WethosAI uh will be calendar integration. And as part of that, it will allow for and this is one of the things that used to drive me absolutely bananas. And I actually from Foundstone years, which was 99 to 2004, uh I really implemented this sort of mandate which was you are not obligated to attend a meeting if the meeting does not have an agenda in it.

So in other words, you could just have a meeting all by yourself if you want, but if you want other people to be a part of it, you got to have an agenda and it's got to have enough meat on there to know, okay, this is how this meeting is supposed to flow. And so as part of what we're doing with WethosAI is providing that integration and then that coaching for each individual on what to remember and think about as you engage on this topic and in this subtopic inside the agenda.

So really really bringing people forward and getting them to lean in and engage and understand each other much much better based on the WethosAI scoring obviously. So that's cool. Well I have I have a follow-up question. You know we talked about communication from the very beginning. It seems to be such a critical aspect of everything that we do at work.

Have you ever seen anybody with perfect communication or or close to it? because I I have a story there, but I want I wanted to get your thoughts on it.

Oh, I don't think so.

Yeah.

Right. different,

right? And you know, there's the old phrases out there and adages that you've got to say it is it 30 times, you've got to do it a thousand hours, whatever it may be. go

and so when you think about the spectrum of how people process information and communication I don't I don't think there is anything as perfect other than a commitment to to transparency.

Yeah. or

that's a great way to put it actually. Yeah. Commitment to transparency. I like that.

Yeah. And if you um if you're tracking on where we're going with AI and and we for all of you out there as an audience, you'll start to realize that we are taking all of this intelligence, this information about who you are and how best you receive communication, but also how you engage with ideas, relational, action, order, attention, detail, communication, all these things.

And we're going to be in a place very soon that customizes that communication to what you need to hear specifically to be able to engage you, get you to lean in, get you to hear the right elements so that the pure signal gets through. We all know there's tons of noise especially in communication. But the story I wanted to tell you, get your thoughts on this.

So I was on the board at Foundstone and and helping to run that company. We had a board member there that I got to tell you was darn near perfect in his communication. Now uh he was a CEO at the time uh in a cyber security company and this is what he did and he was a magician and from that day forward I have tried to infuse that in my brain mostly unsuccessfully of course uh failing a lot of my communication but this is how he he managed through he would be the last person to talk at the board.

He would listen to everybody. And you thought, mate, well, is he is he like disengaged? Is he not really listening? Like, what's going on? Once everybody had had a say on a topic, he would jump in and he's like, I've got a thought here. He would recap each person and what they just said, right? Got everybody to nod like, Stuart, you had a great idea about XYZ.

Danny, wonderful thought. I didn't think about that on ABC. Blah blah blah. And then he would portray his idea and it was usually a confluence or you know maybe slight conflict but mostly confluence element of an idea. Well of course all of us were sort of like okay we were acknowledged. We we we were felt in sort of a way and so whatever idea he was coming up with man that sounded even better than my idea.

And I honestly thought, you know, even back then, that was one of the most brilliant ways to communicate I've ever seen. Now, it takes time.

Uh, you can't just, you know, jump in and say, "Okay, you know, I've been told, I don't know, but, you know, Jensen over at Nvidia like, uh, this is this is how it is. Shut up. You're an idiot. This is how we're doing it." kind of thing. And you can survive and thrive in cultures like that. No doubt about it. Um, Bridgewater's famous, right?

Candor,

right? you can do that. Um, but it takes a full commitment of everybody, every executive leader, every individual. Without it, you you get a lot of, I think, conflict and dissension. So,

you know, that was a great experience for me. I got to say, in my development as a leader and CEO and and I can't say that I do that every day, but I I really do try.

Yeah, I think that's interesting too. I um I think about the person uh that I have really gravitated towards as a great communicator and for me it was the approach of the 360 of something. M

something

and then allowing that their idea may have not been the best one.

As you get and you push on something as a group and collectively as a group of people, it becomes pretty clear the harder you push on it that that there is a really good answer.

Yeah. And so, you know, I I love that we both have these role models and, you know, I I try to try to do that frequently.

I I I gotta say it's like I think it's human nature that you see people that conflict with you as a physical threat. You know, it's like unconscious to you, but you your body physically, you know, the cell the cells in your brain literally connect the dots of this person is going to threaten me physically and my survival is being questioned.

Um, and that's just not the case. And the more that we can help everybody sort of understand that, reframe constantly those interactions that we have, I think the better off we are. And and obviously WethosAI, I think, goes a long way to do that. Now, I'd like to kick off our second poll if we can, Jenny. Uh, what unconscious cognitive biases are most common in the workplace?

Now, a big topic of conversation in and around WethosAI and um you know where we're going and what makes up a human mind and how a human mind and the neural networks work really is around these um what we call cognitive biases and they're unconscious largely. They are the things that create these shortcuts in our brain because our brains can't possibly take in all the input uh visually, auditorially, sensorally, all these elements to make decisions as an objective decision-making tool.

So, we have to take these shortcuts and then the question, the real question is well, what shortcuts have each of us built out and how does that get in infused into our engagements in the workplace, into projects, into working, communicating with people. So we have here are the options right confirmation bias group think anchoring effect availability heuristic sunk cost fallacy and another one now some of you most of you will probably have to go look these up real quick so we're going to go slow okay

many people are not aware of the cognitive biases that drive them unconsciously every single day and I I often say and I don't mean this pejoratively or negatively at all it's like most people are sleepwalking when it comes to knowing themselves and the unconscious cognitive biases to me is almost 51% of it.

You might say the traits, the behavioral traits that we manifest are the 49%. But it's the 51 that's unconsciously driving us every single day to make a decision. And sometimes for the best, like if you're making a decision to turn left or right in a car at a critical moment, man, use all those unconscious cognitive biases that you want to to save yourself and to be safe.

But in the workplace that doesn't really translate. So, so how do you take some of these biases, acknowledge them in yourself, and then discover the manifestation of these things as you're interacting and engaging? So, for example, confirmation bias, one of the most common biases. It basically says, "Hey, I have an idea. I like my idea. I want my idea to be most successful.

So, I'm I'm going to be looking for any sort of confirmation by anybody or any data out there in the internet. You know, you'll often search for whatever your idea is. You're going to search for somebody that's proven that your idea is correct. And you're going to weight that proof far greater than the other 20 proofs that conflict with your idea.

Uh, group think common. Everybody's in sees this in the workplace. If you bring a whole bunch of people that talk and think and act alike, guess what's going to happen? You're going to have the same ideas and the same thoughts and same actions. Anchoring effect, availability heuristic. This is a great one. Um, we all do this. Probably number two, I think or maybe number three behind group think.

It's what when you go into an interaction, whatever the most frequent information that you have as you go into it, that is what influences you in your engagement. So, a great example for me, I was at lunch yesterday with a candidate um that I wanted I'm considering to hire. And of course, I had just been talking to other people about him.

They've worked with him. And the last bit of information that I had was very, very positive. So, as I go into this lunch, I naturally bring that forward and I think that, oh, this guy's rockstar. I mean, you know, we got to we got to get this guy in here. But I actually called it out in the middle of the meeting and I said,"You know what?

I bring, you know, a lot of my most recent and most available information into this event." And so I want to I want to stop doing that. I want to pull that out. So I'm going to be more objective. I'm going to ask you more objective questions if I as if I really don't have the answer. So great questions. I would love your thoughts, uh, Danny, on all of these.

Yeah. you know, I um to have bias is to be human, to do something about it, is to be, you know, a great leader and a great peer and and and citizen. Um so I think it's how we manage them. I remember in the early days of us, most of us being remote and we'd be in a Zoom channel and you'd see someone thumbs up an idea and you'd quickly have this bias that said, "Well, if Stu did that, I better do it, too."

That's right. And there it would go.

Yeah. all

right and attributing to Stu his maybe position of power andor how brilliant I think you are so you must get it better than me and here we go. So I think um you know as we do things to manage these um biases that we naturally have um it's it's really important again that we're aware of them that we have action plans behind acknowledging when they're when they're coming up as you said you did and then really understanding kind of how to move past them um and to get to a really good place and a really good answer.

Um, for me it's it's often how I leverage folks again using the insights I now know about uh the team I'm on, the team I'm with, so that we don't have group think, so that we can with each other um really start to push on an item or a subject and really get to a good answer. Um, and seeking out those people. It's so easy when I have a great idea to go to the people I know will like it as well.

Exactly. Oh, it's it's wonderful.

Love it. Right.

Feels so important and so smart and just all the warm fuzzy feels. Yeah. Exactly.

No. And then you're like, "And there's four of you."

Yeah. Whoa. Um, you know, nailing it today. No, you know, I think it's I think it's when we go to someone to say, "What what's the polar opposite of this?" Like, "What is my challenge?" I worked with a chief of staff and I remember I said to her, I said, "Would you just tell me you agree with me?" this,

right?

thought

we work hard on it.

Yeah.

But I remember please because gosh to have that person in my confirmation bias would have been awesome.

Yeah.

more

not,

you know, succumb to the confirmation bias of something.

Yeah. No, exactly. And so the results are pretty clear. So confirmation bias at 68% group think at 16 and then sunk cost fallacy at 12 and it is that confirmation bias I think is probably the number one bias you see in every single interaction in team. So, as you know, Danny, in the new team dynamics, you can actually map to um I think it's 40 different biases that we're tracking on and we add uh more and more every single week that we are getting to understand who you are and who you are inside of the teams.

And so, you can start to be aware of all of this and really have it make an effect on how you engage and and and lean in. So, I love that we're doing um all of that with with the traits and biases. So, let's let's really quickly just talk about maybe how you're implementing WethosAI or maybe your plans for it down the road and and what you're thinking about um in terms of where we need to go in terms of like the future of work.

So, let me tee this up just a little bit. AI

greater than AI alone. I mean at the end of the day that's the tagline right? So human plus AI is far more productive, efficient, valuable, important than just AI alone. And I I genuinely believe this. I genuinely believe that once we get past this hype uh into AGI and around AI, which we will we're starting to if you if you read the tea leaves, we're starting to you're start you're going to start to see the confluence of bringing together the both the human and the AI together.

And so how will that synergy come together? And then how will we as humans leverage AI to create a much more automated, much more uh productive and efficient system of work? And I think that's that is really where we're going with Wethos. Um, being able to understand who you are and all your traits and all your biases, but also understanding your experiences in life and your memories in life to build that um, not just self inside the platform, but the AI self that can you can augment that self with AI and and then also act on uh, the functions of your job.

So, so that's where we're going and that and that to me is super super exciting. I'd love to get your thoughts though on all of that.

Yeah. Well, um I think you are on the frontier. You're a founder of the movement. Um you're out there exploring things that I can't even imagine.

I'm an ideas five. You you see it right there. Right. Right there.

Right.

And I think AI is is really the next big wave. Right. It it is going to change the way we work.

Um will you find a software developer who's writing a line of code or or will they be writing prompts?

Right.

Right. Will I be sitting down um and and writing a prompt that says, you know, um help me perform this communication or this task or any of those things in the future. Absolutely. I do it today leveraging ChatGPT. Um so I think AI will be embedded in all of our work and in all of our lives. And um you know what we care about so tremendously and we work towards here at Mozilla is that it's done for good, right?

And that's always a part of this wave that we're going through. Um, and so, you know, I believe in the potential of all of us, right? It's that obsession again I have with talent. Um, but I also believe in the tools that we give people, right? Um, and so what we've seen in on our employee population, it was so cool. um we've seen bringing together both their potential and AI to streamline to understand um to accelerate to provide the insights um to do planning um to do all of the things that we would have we would have really spent a lot of time and energy and except that accelerant for all of us.

Um, I saw in one of our Slack channels this morning that someone built an AI tool uh to take our expenses and accelerate how quickly you could um could do those after a big companywide uh work week in Dublin, Ireland. way,

whether you're someone who gravitates towards the idea of it or the making it operational.

But I think you're going to see work forces really um drive towards, as you said, right, the human plus the AI. Mhm.

Um, and you know, I I sat and I was a little stuck late last night on something and I had to write. It's probably way too late in the evening. I gave it a few prompts and I came back and I said, "Oh, now isn't that interesting?" And it really was this way in which I could um translate my ideas into something um that was usable and that that had some impact this morning.

Um, and so I think I think you're on to something. I'm looking forward to where you go with it as I think someone out on the frontier of it all.

I'm excited to share it, especially with you, Danny, and and our early adopters. Um there's some really amazing capabilities that we're going to be able to show very soon. Um that will um will leave things like ChatGPT in the dust. Let me put it to you that way. Y

um we we are really creating almost a soul of you and a soul of everyone else that you need to communicate with. So one of the use cases that you can use today with obviously on this part to give you a little bit of a taste of where we're going is of course with WethosAI co-pilot. So if you engage with co-pilot, you can obviously ask it. Let's say I need to send out an email, right, to this entire group and I need to be able to cover these three topics, but I need it to be customized per person for them to be able to receive my message pristinely.

It it can do that easily, right? You can sort of prompt it, get that feedback. Um you can obviously ask for advice in around engaging others. Um, so that it's a big part of, you know, that co-pilot solution and then the working together capabilities are really sort of just the literally the toenail in the water of where we're going and you can sort of get a sense of what's happening with all of that.

Um, not just from a content creation, but soon in an action architecture as well. So you'll be able to actually act on those those uh, you know, sort of subtasks of any sort of given project. All right, our last uh poll I want to jump into make sure we we've talked a lot about conflict management. Um we're going to ask this question of those that are on uh which conflict management approach do you find most effective?

Um so please go ahead and um respond as you will. I'll I'll bring a couple of quotes into this mix that I actually love. The first one is the Buddha himself um quoted in the Udana which is you shouldn't hurt others if you love yourself. Now what that means to me and others I think you can interpret a little differently but basically if you really do understand yourself your limitations your um your cognitive biases right um the things that you think incorrectly if you really do understand yourself properly you can't possibly find fault in others now you can go you can identify and help them uh develop more for sure but you're not going to be hating on anybody body.

I mean, you're you're just not if you understand yourself properly. So, that's the first one. Second one, creativity comes from a conflict of ideas. Now, that's Donatella Versace. And I will say that's my favorite in searching here. So, creativity comes from a conflict of ideas. If we all just sit around the table and all just think that our idea is the greatest idea ever known to man that's or woman and that we've got to go execute on this I highly doubt that's going to be the best idea.

That's just echo chamber. Um, so the more that we encourage and embrace conflict of ideas, I think the greater our propulsion of productivity and and I don't know what what's your thoughts, Jim, quickly on that while we're waiting for Paul.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah,

absolutely. us

and they have you know diverse styles and and lived experiences and backgrounds and all these things their WethosAI style may be opposite of ours but in those moments they become complimentary that that we look at that as an advantage not as a distance between us.

Yeah. Yeah. And but it does take work. It does, you know, because like I said, we are all so prone to the comfortable. We're prone to simplicity and in many ways that's a good thing. But in these moments of ideation, execution, I think it's a huge challenge. It's one of our our greatest Achilles heels in my book.

I think that's right.

Yeah. Well, let me ask you my last question and then we'll open it up for some Q&A if we've got um got some folks that have some questions. Um and this is about WethosAI itself. Okay. Well, here first of all here's the results. So, which conflict management approach do you find most effective? Uh number one by far 67% direct communication with involved parties and it's direct open communication.

you know, listening is more than you're talking to really make sure that you're being um that everybody knows that you're hearing what's being said and you're feeding that into the system. Second is collaborative problem solving. I love this one because my management style and again I have a bias to my management style but it is very much collaborative.

In other words, I want to take everybody's ideas. Uh it could be a first-time intern and they just showed up last week. like I don't care like think about this problem and I want your thoughts. It could be literally I have no thoughts that's fine but something you know engage and just sort of give me your thoughts. So this is really um to me one of the most important ways of managing conflict is involving everybody.

So let me go back now to uh the WethosAI styles and I and I know you've engaged a lot um with WethosAI and those styles within your teams. Can you give me an example of maybe a time where um I mean you t you've talked about it a little bit but is there a time you wish you had like before WethosAI was around you know what did you do to sort of understand and you know what was the end result vis-à-vis what you're doing today I mean a lot of it was guesswork for me you know a lot of it was well you take these DiSC or you take these you know Big Five or Enneagrams as sort of like uh almost a poor man's way of understanding an individual, but you'd never have it deployed in the entire team.

It would be sort of oneoffs and and and honestly it would never talk about anything like cognitive biases or professionality traits. Um if if you have examples of where you've put WethosAI into place in lieu of all of that and then shown some sort of like measurable, you know, improvements in productivity or creativity, I' I'd love to hear it.

Yeah. Um, you know, Stu, to answer the first question is I just worked really, really hard.

Yeah,

I worked really hard to understand. Um, and I think I probably got a lot of things wrong as we all probably did, right? With best intentions. You were trying to bridge that chasm.

Um, and you were trying to figure it out on your own.

Um, so, you know, I think there are tools out there of insight. It can tell you something about yourself. It can tell you something about someone else. But it's when you take that insight to action. again

outcome,

right? Um, but it it's all of a sudden it's like all of that hard work and that energy you spent and probably, you know, I'll tell you personally, some lost sleep and, you know, some some heartache over again five on the relational side. Um, some heartache. Oh gosh, did I did I cause this person some distress or something? And now I can just say, hey, we may approach this differently.

How can I get through to this person? How can they get through to me? because you know there was also the frustration of when when you're on the sending side of the communication that the receiver um can flex and adapt as well. And so you know for us it's really been um we use it in team meetings. We just got back from our 2025 strategic planning as a people function and a three-year roadmap exercise.

ideators

and then moments you're in but how would we make it work and I'm thinking oo I have a better idea now like as you're you know and so it's ways in which we understood ourselves and we landed and we navigated the complexity of starting really big and then narrowing it down to here's a set of nine things you can expect from us next year.

Here's how we scope those into a road map for a longer period of time. today,

right? that we're at this moment that in all the tools I've seen over my career, in all of the resources and the different ways in which we've evolved, I think this is a real important moment for so many folks and and you know, for the next generation of um technologists and leaders and managers and employees and, you know, dreamers and entrepreneurs and all of those things.

um that if we can really leverage the resources we have in understanding ourselves and others, we can we can take away a lot of that frustration. I remember when I used to commute and I'd drive home at night and I, you know, hands on the steering wheel and I would say out loud to myself, it didn't have to be so hard. And I think that moment I don't say that very often.

I in fact can can flip that issue and say, "Oh wow, when Stu pushed on that today with me, we got through the heart of the problem, not the heart of each other or the heart of our miscommunication." And so, um, you know, I I think we're on to something here. Well, I I don't know if you've heard this story, but you know, we get probably every week uh we get stories from customers and how they use Wethos.

Um, and one of the best stories I've heard in the in the last couple weeks is uh from a customer that uh claimed she would literally cry for 5 to 10 minutes in her car before she would go into the office because of how difficult conversations were with her boss. Yeah.

And she didn't know how to engage, how to understand, how to communicate what she needed to get done. And once we came into be in her life, it empowered her. So all of those crying fits just stopped completely because now she knew exactly how to communicate, to engage, to challenge, to ask for things, to use her words. And to me, I mean, I I'll never forget that um that story.

And I I we hear a lot of that every single day.

Yeah, that's right.

Beautiful stuff. So, all right. Well, look, thank you again so much. You know, we talked a lot about um uh well, we I guess in general, but far beyond communication, conflict, uh resolution, conflict management, um even cognitive diversity, you know, the future of AI in the workplace. I think a lot of what we are doing is is very much on that leading edge and trying to disrupt this space because we know AI and humans have to come together and let's do it for good.

Let's not do it for bad. Um that's been my mantra for 35 plus years in my career. So I I love that model. So with that we've got u about five six minutes. If there are some questions uh from the audience for Danny or myself, I mean, please um please get those teed up and we're we're happy to to go and answer best we can. Let me look here.

Okay, so let's answer this first one live. So, how do you see human leadership evolving as AI becomes more prevalent in workplace dynamics? I think it's a great question. Um, I want to get your thoughts and then I want to share one of mine, Danny. I don't know if you or you want me to go first.

Yeah, go first, Stu. I'll

get some thoughts here.

Well, all right. So, a couple of things. So one is there's been a lot of scuttlebutt in the industry that there will be a billion-dollar one-person company at some point. So what does that mean? I don't know what that means, right? But the idea is at least of course this is all the confirmation bias AI guys, but they they believe that every function in a company can be uh taken over uh by AI and and perform better.

But you need one orchestrator, right? One person that can orchestrate all of this. And that might be possible. Is it probable my lifetime? Probably not. Um but anyway, an interesting concept and thought that I think we should all start to think about. Um and and certainly we accommodate for that here at Wethos. Uh but still without removing the human from the equation.

Um but there is a big push for example, I don't know if you heard about the Bayer um uh CEO um change that occurred. So basically, new CEO comes in couple years in after the whistle stop listening tour. He says, "We're getting rid of all middle management. That's it. It's too difficult to make decisions. Uh there's too many people to say no to things.

So we're just going to remove all of middle management and we're going to allow all the individual contributors to have direct access into the senior leadership." And now that's an experiment by and large. and the technology that they're using hasn't been at least I haven't kept up with it but it hasn't been really discussed or shared. I do believe though the only way they could possibly do that is with AI and so where would that that role for them be?

It would be in managing individuals on a onetoone basis using AI. So you would you would have to give your argument or discussion or your point of concern into the a the manager AI that would then help make decisions around what can and cannot be done and what should and should not be done. And it might be start out simply as a guide like hey this is your manager guide.

They're not an HR person. and they're just going to help you guide you through a project. So, you don't feel so shameful about, well, I don't know how to get started and I don't know, you know, I have this little problem, but I can't seem to get around it. And you're so embarrassed or you're ashamed and you think that it's going to impact your performance review.

And and whereas an AI, it's sort of almost anonymous in a way. And so, I think there's a there is a real role for AI to be infused in leadership. And the question is where exactly it'll be. I do think it'll probably be in middle management, but I could be wrong.

Yeah, I think this is the future that we have a chance to shape.

I do think the human element is an important element. I would hate to see that we get to a place um where we miss that ability to read the moment, to coach in the moment, to understand each other in ways to find compromise and middle ground and all of the great things that happens through our interactions. Um but I think it's really ours to shape.

of

right

um of reaction to both.

Yeah. I think that's not fully formed yet, but you're out there doing things that helps us find that line because at the end of the day, I think you and I both share this commonality of human potential. Our our company is as good as our people and how we position them and all of the things that happen um through through the talented individuals we work with every day, right?

From that intern to you as a CEO, like within that is such opportunity and potential for companies. I think it's so untapped and I I really believe the AI will untap the full capacity of the human mind. I mean, that's really where I believe it's it's going. Um, all right, last question. I know we're we're short on time. Uh, do you anticipate discussing the idea scale and the five segments on that scale that inform communication?

Danny, I'd love to hear like when you bring somebody on and you sort of help explain WethosAI, you know, take that idea scale and and maybe explain the five levels and then of course I can fill in whatever you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so the five levels, I think at the top of the level is abstract thinkers. I set up there in a very abstract way of everything's a possibility.

You're going to find someone at the middle of the scale who who also has the ability to look at both sides, the abstract and then a one on the scale. There's no number that's better than the other is your very concrete thinker. And so you go from what could work here me to how would it work here and to you know are we ready to make it work?

Can I operationalize it?

And so within that scale we really look at you know um I'm subject to a little scope creep because I think it's all possible and I know I have all the most amazing people on the planet who can make things happen.

That's right.

And then I have someone she's probably on this webinar right now. interesting

navigate

there

and it takes away some of that friction of maybe um language that can hurt into language that's so like yep that's me and here I go. So um a little bit more about the scale. Hopefully that helped.

I think that's perfect. A great way to describe it. All right. Well, we're up on the hour. I just want to say again, thank you so much, Danny, for sharing all your thoughts, all your experiences. Um and I'm just thrilled to have you on this stuff and I I can't wait to show you some of the new cool innovative stuff we're we got going as well.

So thanks again um and really enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Thanks everybody for joining.

Until next time.