"Think about how stretchy you are and what you accept. Where are your breaking points?"

One particularly striking data point: 70% of people face obstacles asking questions at work.

This statistic underscores a core issue. Curiosity is often cited as a value, yet many environments make it unsafe to ask for clarification or challenge ideas. Fear of looking incompetent, challenging authority, or slowing down progress often silences valuable input.

Julie and I discuss how curiosity, respect, and self-awareness can transform organisational life. We explore practical strategies for leaders to foster psychological safety and inclusive collaboration, using Julie's own unique journey and the powerful “Seven Forms of Respect” framework for guidance.

We often talk about “soft skills” in organisations, but as teams become more global and complexity increases, these skills are anything but soft. They’re foundational. We discover a refreshing perspective to curiosity, respect, and self-awareness, showing us how to make these invisible dynamics tangible and actionable. This in turn allows leaders to shift from just “knowing” to truly “learning” — a real leadership superpower in our changing world.

Recognising your “rubber band” stretchiness - Understand personal boundaries and breaking points, and communicate them to others is also key as it prevents snapping and strengthens relationships. This episode offers key insights into navigating complex team dynamics and maintaining a learning mindset in high-pressure environments.

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

- Being a self-taught organisational development consultant taught the critical value of sharing resources and building communities in times of crisis; there is tension and friction in any community but making the invisible relational dynamics tangible helps to understand them.

- When it comes to learning from other people, curiosity and self-assessment are required for the shift from knowing to learning, and to decode the different dynamics; curiosity requires questions, but do people feel safe enough to ask questions?

- Internal narrative and cultural formatting influence communication - we are all members of multiple cultures, communities and identities simultaneously, and inward curiosity is a prerequisite: What matters to me?

- Our multiple identities mean that we must slow down and reflect to enable good decisions to be made from a place of curiosity; leadership rituals (e.g. meeting facilitator rotation) can help teams maintain curiosity when under pressure, create empathy and force listening.

- Using the seven forms of respect as a framework for collaboration helps understand how respect is relative, dynamic, subjective and contradictory: Procedure, Punctuality, Information, Candor, Consideration, Acknowledgement, Attention.

- A useful analogy here is with language: the organisational level represents the national language; departments represent dialects; and the individual is represented by their own language – we all need to be multilingual.

- Intercultural working results in unclear messages, which lead to perpetuated actions and unmet expectations that were never made explicit - a team must understand what respect means to them, not by guessing, but by asking others.

- Inward curiosity is about self-reflection and admitting what challenges us and what our expectations are – this can be difficult to acknowledge given that it can be perceived as a challenge to our identity.

- Curiosity in practice means approaching...

"it’s faster to implement a piece of technology than it is to get 10,000 people to stop doing what they’ve been doing for a decade and start to do new things and work in new ways"

Hilton and I unpack the hidden dynamics of organizational change, and the influence of informal power dynamics on transformation. Most change programs falter, not due to strategy, but because leaders often overlook the invisible power of trust and connection networks. Amidst the 'talent' lists and org charts, do you know where your powerful influencers are in your organisation ?

Hilton shares his powerful “people, not pixels” philosophy, explaining how technology investments frequently overshadow the critical human element. It is difficult to budget for, and prioritise, translating a ‘people not pixels’ approach into culture change; similar to what we are finding with AI today, digital transformation stands and falls with the people and the culture of an organisation, not the technology. We also dive into the “3% rule" from Innoviser, exploring how identifying and activating informal power networks can create significant momentum and surface untapped potential and highlight the 'key influencers' in your organisation. This conversation challenges traditional views of leadership and offers a fresh perspective on cultivating a resilient, adaptable culture.

Discover how to transform your approach to change by understanding the relational and emotional infrastructure that truly drives performance. Learn why acknowledging emotions and mapping your organisation’s real connections are non-negotiable for future success. Look at where and how you can unlock potential in your teams and organisations.

How can you use data differently to understand the potential of your organisation ?

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

o C-suite is under such immense pressure that people are overlooked and investment is made in technology, which becomes an efficiency tool that is quicker to implement and yield results than changing people’s habits.

o We ignore previous failures and neglect to learn lessons, yet without an enthusiastic commitment of the culture to change, strategy will flounder and adoption will slow – the vital balancing act is to engage humans proactively: tech + humans, not tech v humans.

o The invisible part of culture is where it has been made amorphous and ambiguous, so that it is seen as the ‘soft’, human-related aspect of change when it is actually the most challenging aspect – to motivate, entice and energise others.

o How humans behave and make decisions within an organisation is important because of how we interact with each other across ecosystems – the many decisions that are made (or not made) on a daily basis must align with the strategy.

o Culture can be defined as the worst behaviour tolerated by management - this is pivotal to sustainable transformation because of the importance of the relational and emotional infrastructure when building culture and performance.

o Functioning informal power networks and humanly - not digitally - connected organisations are built on the basic tenets of humanity, i.e. trust, advocacy, commitment and energy, which in turn are reliant on relationships as the currency of systems.

o In terms of influence, leadership impact involves many other parties on the edges who build communities, create momentum, and unlock hidden potential (cf. Innovisor’s rule that 3% of employees drive 90% of change in an organisation).

o The inherently human approach of organisational network analysis to define the connectors in the organisation enables leaders to unlock potential by engaging those people who provide the ideas and the energy and invite trust.

o Agency is diluted by a lack of clear accountability – a more...

"The future won’t belong to humans or machines, but to those who master the hybrid skill set combining AI literacy and human literacy."

The future of work is not about humans versus machines. Instead, it belongs to those who master a unique hybrid skill set. This blend combines AI literacy with essential human capabilities. Literacy in today's world lies in the ability to learn, unlearn and relearn - this has never been more true as it is in today's partnership with Agentic AI.

Andréa and I delve into the what these combined forces could look like, and how to build the framework for operational implementation. Digital transformation requires a hybrid skill set that fulfils the three different facets of transformation (cognitive, behavioural and emotional), which in turn align with the aspects of workplace culture (how we think, act and interact).

We discuss how to build a culture of trust in AI, essential for successful collaboration and highlight a critical distinction : humans interpret data semantically, giving it meaning and purpose, while AI processes it syntactically, based on patterns and probabilities. This difference impacts decision-making and ethical considerations.

Leaders of the future must be honest about and clearly see what tasks should be augmented using AI and how the time saved should be spent, i.e. what does AI do best now and, consequently, what should humans do better?

How are you ensuring that you, your teams & your organisation are developing the skills necessary to complement AI’s analytical power and drive results together.

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

- Democratising access to a hybrid skill set means defining how to navigate the ‘fear vs. opportunity’ narrative of human potential in a world of AI, harking back to ‘man vs. machine’ as opposed to embracing a ‘man with machine’ approach.

- Digital transformation requires a hybrid skill set that fulfils the three different facets of transformation (cognitive, behavioural and emotional), which in turn align with the aspects of workplace culture (how we think, act and interact).

- The cognitive transformation element, i.e. decision-making, is the most problematic for leaders as humans still believe in the old way of making decisions; leaders are most exposed to this risk due to their past successes.

- In the words of Rasmus Hougaard, “ego is the worst enemy of leadership” and hampers effective decision-making - AI makes new things possible and humans are taken aback by the exponential rate at which we must learn and unlearn.

- Prompting, data sense-making and re-perception mean that we need to craft better input for AI but also ask humans better questions - unexpected questions open our minds to novelty and creativity.

- Our inherited educational model rewards good answers, not good questions, yet this stifles creativity and re-perception; the latter goes against the human (and educational) grain, but AI tools represent a good sparring partner.

- Rather than a product-centric approach, we are now called upon to make sense of data, but AI and humans interpret data differently: humans interpret it semantically (adding their own perspective); AI interprets it syntactically (as tokens without understanding meaning).

- The problem inherent to AI is that it does not understand or give meaning to its decisions and has no conscience about the action taken - humans must have responsibility for giving data meaning and not outsource this to AI.

- AI learns on a binary basis without context; tasks that are too demanding...