S6 E3 - Carol Houle – Inspired Leadership Brings Digital Transformation
In this episode, I have an insightful and wide-ranging conversation with Carol Houle, CEO of Inspire Digital Consulting. We explore her career journey across software development, lean supply chain transformation, cloud, and DevOps, and how these experiences led her to a central conviction: leadership is the primary bottleneck in digital transformation.
Carol traces her roots back to early exposure to TQM and W. Edwards Deming during her undergraduate studies and her work at Pricewaterhouse Consulting in the 1990s, where lean principles were applied to supply chains. As Carol moved into larger leadership roles, a consistent pattern emerged: transformation efforts stalled not because of teams or tools, but because leaders themselves were the constraint. Yet leadership is rarely examined.
Carol introduces her book and the Inspired Leadership Framework, which grew organically over a decade of observation, writing, and experimentation. Drawing from her experience spanning business, she distills leadership into measurable dimensions.
Looking forward, Carol connects leadership quality to the coming era of agentic AI. AI will amplify whatever already exists. Weak leadership, unclear purpose, or misaligned incentives will scale into systemic risk. She introduces the idea of “benevolent AI agents” that help detect bias, misalignment, and deviations from stated intent.
Show Notes:
You can learn more about Inspired Digital Consulting and take the Inspired Leadership Assessment here - https://inspiredigitalconsulting.com/
Carol Houle's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolhoule/
Transcript:
John Willis: [00:00:00] Computer.
Hey, this is John Willis. This is another profound podcast where we supposedly talk about profound stuff. Maybe ai, maybe Deming, maybe just whatever comes to mind. I got a interesting guest today as I always do because I'm lazy. Carol, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself.
Carol Houle: Yeah. Thanks so much, John.
Great to be on your show. Carol Houle I am the CEO of Inspire Digital Consulting. I, and I can start if you want, with just a little background on, on
John Willis: me. Yeah, that'd be great.
Carol Houle: Yeah. And and maybe how we met too because I was a big fan of yours before we, we actually started working together.
So I started right outta college with Pricewaterhouse Consulting. So I've been a developer tester, DVA pull cable through data center. You name it in technology, I've probably done it, not all well but I at least tried it. And in the mid nineties I was a part of the [00:01:00] supply chain reengineering practice where we were applying lean principles to client supply chains.
And that's where I really first started learning and applying lean principles. And actually my, one of my favorite classes in undergrad was about TQMI. And that's, where I first learned about Dr. Deming. So I was an early adopter of Lean Agile from, the year 2000. Pretty much from the very beginning.
Really just through trial and error running, software engagements using those principles and connecting with other people who were doing the same. And then in 2009 I was recruited to work for an infrastructure company. At the time it was EMC, which later became Dell Technologies.
And, eMC had at the time, they had already started up VMware, I believe they had just acquired Pivotal. And and so I was [00:02:00] really able to act as a solution aggregator between the world that I knew, which was software engineering and the world that was emerging, which was cloud. And so I did,
John Willis: It's interesting, Carol.
Is that there wasn't, there weren't a whole lot of people in 2008, 2009 that had a lean background that were being forced into modern, cloud native implementations, pre DevOps, DevOpsy, the term just getting ignited around that time. I think what's interesting too, we've talked about this before, is that there were a lot of us, myself included, who thought everything was new and shiny.
Carol Houle: Yeah,
John Willis: actually me, myself included backtracked into, oh, that's actually part of, really goes back to Toyota production systems. So it's just interesting that you connected with that background at the beginning of
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: Sort of DevOps movement, which is
Carol Houle: and. Yeah, no, that's so spot on.
And actually in the book I write about Providence and [00:03:00] synchronicity, because if you asked me back in 2009 why I was working for an infrastructure company, I and why in 2011 I did my first cloud strategy. Like really like looking at what I had done before. It just didn't connect.
But now, fast forward, I'm like, okay, I see how all these things connect. That's interesting.
Yeah.
John Willis: No, the leap was hard. I, Mary Poppendieck made it. She did she, the she made it, I mean she did lean software development, which was,
Carol Houle: yeah.
John Willis: But that would do a few and far between. And then that there was the religious agile. Who like almost was like this siloed version of Yeah. So no, it, and it is easy even for somebody to practice it. To live it and then have to reflect that you actually didn't see it as it was happening is fascinating.
Carol Houle: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Didn't see it. And in 2014 was actually the first time that I got [00:04:00] an entire team to continuous delivery as an operating model. And this was for a IG insurance, and I'm trying to remember when you wrote your book, but I definitely, I read the Phoenix project. I read the DevOps handbook.
Plus I had amazing guys that I was working with, like my friend Michael Wagner who honestly he taught me the core of everything I knew about DevOps and enabling continuous delivery. But this example with a IG insurance, it was. It was one of those once in a lifetime kinds of things.
Yeah. Because when I started working with Sue Hasira and the team at a IG insurance, they wanted to implement DevOps. And I said, listen, if we just focus on the technology implementation, this is not gonna go well. We have to find something that the business cares about. And so we talked to a bunch of different business leaders and we finally landed on cybersecurity insurance as a product.
It had been [00:05:00] nascent for them Yeah. For a few years. And they didn't really have a digital product for it. And so that's where we decided to start. And we got them from doing nine releases a year to doing 3,700 releases a year within one year. And today that is a $4 billion business for a IG insurance.
Wow. So that was like. One of those like lightning moments for me where I was like, damn, there's something here. Like we can create new digital business models in ways that like, we didn't even think possible. But the interesting phenomena was that there was this silo effect that was happening within most organizations where.
You had the infrastructure team running with cloud, you had the application development team running with xp. You had, the traditional program management people trying to operate and lean agile process and modern teams and culture. And then the data team was like trying to [00:06:00]come along as well.
Yeah. But the thing that I found is that you had to modernize across all of those dimensions. Somewhat in parallel for you actually to get to continuous delivery.
John Willis: Yeah, that's the sort of one of the biggest hit of DevOps as a word right now. It's really more, so as we look at it now over time, like the word is.
Reasonably meaningless except for its history. But that the, if there has been a failure in DevOps, which I wouldn't agree with, but for, reasons that were beyond this podcast session. But which is that we weren't as explicit about what you just said.
Which was, and it was part of this sort of dynamics anyway, you came in, you beachhead into a certain group and that was the only group that was interested. And you could spend all, the next three years trying to get all the other groups on board. Or you could create a continuous delivery or whatever you wanted to call it, into DevOps model and do that.
And so you were [00:07:00] forced into. This siloization of something that DevOps was supposed to antis silo. But you're right in retrospect, if the different groups that were all interdependent, which was obvious, or at least in re in in a postmortem, that if you weren't getting them all in same time, you would like, you would totally mis, impedance mismatch would be the way to describe it.
Yeah, no, I,
Carol Houle: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was it was suboptimization of, it was optimization of the part.
John Willis: Yeah,
Carol Houle: that's right. But suboptimization of the whole just classic
John Willis: go ready and stuff, right? Yeah.
Carol Houle: Exactly. So then, basically after that experience, I went on to create a team at Cognizant Technology Solutions that basically did that kind of work, and then I was recruited to a French tech firm.
To help them transform, in a similar manner. And in that I had a much bigger role 'cause I was responsible for a 2.3 million, $3 billion p and l [00:08:00] for banking, financial services and insurance, and had a really large team. And then I spent some time at ThoughtWorks. And then there I was responsible for banking, financial services and insurance globally.
And. The thing that I realized in those leadership roles and through all the transformations that either I led or my team led, is that, the leadership was the bottleneck and nobody wanted. To admit it or say it out loud, because leadership was the one signing the check.
John Willis: Yeah. And you can't say it out loud because they're leadership, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a catch 22 right. Definition, right? Yeah.
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: This is funny because I'm gonna, I'm gonna steal the thunder and tell how you, so we're going to go dive deeper into this, but what's the funny thing is and I'm not trying to act like I'm some high and mighty famous or whatever, but I get a lot of calls from people that wanna talk to me and I like to talk to everybody.
'cause what I figured is, oh, is diamonds in the rough? And if you don't take the call, you're gonna miss a diamond rough. You had apparently read my Deming [00:09:00] book and then you knew a little bit about that. I didn't know you and then, you, we had a mutual friend and who mentioned you and so I was like, yeah, no, it sounds like an interesting call, but really not thinking like at this point in my life, yeah, it would have to be cure cancer to get me to pivot into doing something right.
And, in my world. Your cure cancer was something that we fundamentally both agree, is that it leadership is the bottleneck and they never call themselves out or there's never a mechanism to call them out and, and then what resonated with me as you would describing this process that we're gonna get into a lot deep, more deeper, which is.
The and the sort of Deming overlay is just came in flowing hard. And I could see how you saw the connection long before I did. Which is, if we start with the idea that almost every engagement I've ever done in my career is some leader, usually a CIO. Or a chief of [00:10:00] staff who gets me to CIO to say, John, tell me why my organization isn't working.
And then we go look at the organization, but we never really concentrate on the leader themselves.
And and you you fall on the prey one, they're signing the check as you said. Two, they're asking you to do the work, and three, it's a feasible. Thing. I used to do qualitative analysis for digital transformation where I'd spent like three months, I, I did a large bank with a 3 trillion in asset management, where I spent a whole summer with 'em, and I could write a book about the I interviewed five, 600 people on everything from how they did authentication to crypto, to, trusted funds to everything.
And really at no point. Did I analyze the cio?
Who was paying me the check, and in fact the real bottleneck was the, about two weeks before I'm doing my readout, CIO gets fired and they [00:11:00] bring a new ccio and he threw everything away. Even another sort of example of so that oh my God, you're so right.
And then the sec, the second part of that is that's what Deming had been screaming about his whole career. Is that if Hey, lead the Red Bead game. The moral of the red bead game is like you're never gonna fix. The deficiencies of the red bees until the leaders make a decision to change the game.
Yeah. And so anyway, so that, that was like, okay let's
Carol Houle: dig
John Willis: on this.
Carol Houle: Yeah. Yeah. And you are definitely more of the Deming expert than I am. And I've learned so much from you in just the little time that, that we've. Been working together and I'm becoming even more of a fan of Deming than I was before because he was just so right.
When the system is broken, the people suffer. And I've always come at this from a heart perspective, right? The whole reason why I got into DevOps is because I wanted to eradicate release weekends for [00:12:00] as many people as possible so they could be at home with their family, right? And. And I see, with this, and I do believe that this will be an era of Ai agen generative ai.
John Willis: See the consequences are so much higher. The,
Carol Houle: so much higher,
John Willis: the, all the things that, you know, like the abstractions that we're gonna put on the way we deliver things the garbage in garbage out is gonna be, one other thing I wanted to mention about the same reason I got into DevOps, which was.
Prior to me, I got fortunate, I was invited by Patrick to go to the first DevOps state again. I was the only American.
Carol Houle: So Cool.
John Willis: Yeah.
Carol Houle: So
cool.
John Willis: And yeah, I talk about being in the right place, right time, right? And and I, at that point I was pretty frustrated.
About it technology, because I've been doing sort of first generation configuration management, IBM Tivoli stuff and
Carol Houle: Oh yeah.
John Willis: And it was just like we were just spinning our wheels. I would take gigs with companies where I knew we weren't gonna solve their problems, even though we were gonna [00:13:00] give it our hardest trial.
I had the best people, best Tivoli consultants on the planet, had 30 of the, we call our ourself the Reddit airs of Tivoli. But it was frustrating because this is not I'm not, this is not fulfilling. Yeah. And when I showed up at this little conference in GT and I saw these young people talking about a way, and I met Luke, said Puppet.
And I thought, my God, this could work. Yeah. We could actually have, promise of solving problems. We're not just taking people's money, yeah, no, it's very similar.
Carol Houle: And that's the beauty right there. Like I want to drive outcomes, not outputs, to your point it's not just, it's not about PowerPoints.
Like you wanna drive real change and I'm already seeing a huge amount of digital disruption. Constant change. And there's one truth that I think is unmistakably clear, is that technology doesn't transform organizations, leaders do.
John Willis: That's
Carol Houle: right. And that's why we need to [00:14:00] have this
John Willis: conversation.
And leaders destroy transformations, right? Or a
Carol Houle: hundred percent.
John Willis: Yeah. You're right. Again, it is the bottleneck, capital B bottleneck. And again, like if we're not addressing. That, like the head fake is that if if you're just not doing that and there's so many conditions that don't allow you to do that you're just not gonna solve the problem.
And, and Deming scream this out loud. So you've written a book. About your, like where this goes, but more importantly the way we got connected was about the book, but I was, and I'm definitely interested in your book. But, so I've got three books in the queue and, but I was fascinated about the process, so a little bit about the book, but I'm really interested the process and the thing I felt was really fascinating is.
It didn't seem like you set out to build this leadership assessment, and we'll get into the details around Deming principles.
Carol Houle: I didn't,
John Willis: but they bleed. [00:15:00] One-to-one matchings. Like I sent you an update to your book, right? I said, oh my God this sort of circle of analysis. This is Deming's principle here.
His is pr, and not just Deming, but like the Ccli acclimation of what we call we call DevOps. And it means a lot of things. When I say Deming, Senge, Goldratt, like it's all this stuff. And yeah, and I, and literally I could one to one map your stuff and say, oh, that that's an Ackoff principle right there.
And here's the principle. That's a Senge, that's the Deming and most the Demings. Map all that. So anyway, tell me about, tell us about the book.
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: But let's dive right into the real cool. What I think is the gonna be the really cool stuff for me.
Carol Houle: Yes.
John Willis: Like how do we, what is this assessment?
How does it work and
Carol Houle: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, the start of our conversation was really covering the why, right? And I think we, we've really nailed that. I'll give you a little bit of a history before I jump into the how and the what.
So probably about 10 years ago I [00:16:00] started.
I started writing just little pieces on LinkedIn way before generative AI and on a lot of the topics that we're talking about, right? And people started really responding and liking and sharing and saying, you should write a book. And I've never perceived myself as a writer. That's not, I in the way that I describe myself as a designer, I describe myself as a connector of people and concepts to solve business problems.
Writer was never one of my, my things but I started collecting these stories. I'm like, okay, people are responding to this. Like over the last 10 years I would write stuff when I had an observation or a perspective and. I just, had this big Word document that had all these stories over the years that I had written.
And it was my intention that, okay, at some point I'm gonna pull all this stuff together and I'm gonna actually write a book. So that has been going on over [00:17:00] 10 years, but if I'm honest, I couldn't, there wasn't like a connecting theme that went through all these stories that I could see. So completely separate from writing the book, I decided I want to create a, I wanna create a leadership, an inspired leadership framework. And many years ago, probably back in I wanna say 2014 ish timeframe, around the same time as the a IG example that I gave you, Uhhuh I met Nicole Forsgren and Jess Hummel and was working with them.
Now, this is before. Google bought Dora. Okay. This is like early days.
John Willis: Oh, so you brought them in for one of Dora
Carol Houle: said yeah, exactly. At aig.
John Willis: Okay.
Carol Houle: Yes. Oh, really? Okay.
John Willis: Okay.
Carol Houle: Yeah. Yeah. So I loved, because there's a big part of my mind that is very analytical. I am, there's definitely a scientific part of me maybe more human science related, right?
I loved the way [00:18:00] that they had this framework where you could have measures that mattered and it helped to drive change, right? And so I wanted to create this leadership framework and I said, okay, if I am, if I'm gonna create an inspired leadership framework. The basis of it needs to be partly my experience, but partly just, wisdom from timeless, wisdom from the ages.
And so I got my pastor. From my Presbyterian church I had a mentor, George R who is he's now in his late seventies. Just a wonderful human being and a good friend from church. I got a friend who was Muslim, like I had, oh yeah, I had a bunch of different people that I pulled together and we started brainstorming.
Okay. It was like pulling everything out of the pantry that you could imagine that was good. Just all these charact characteristics, all these characteristics of [00:19:00] people that we thought were just inspired leaders.
John Willis: Go ahead. So lemme ask this really two, a couple of questions are popping up.
One. So one of the things you saw in the original Dora assessments, which really aren't, I mean they may be done now, but not the way they were done early on, which was this sort of matrix of the sort of, it was I forget exactly, you probably remember better than me, but it had a way to say, here are the categories.
You light up the different colors, and so that inspired you that there could be a different abstraction.
Carol Houle: Yes. The
John Willis: second part was, let me figure out the people. Who would understand sort of universal prevalence about human behavior?
Carol Houle: Yes.
John Willis: What's interesting about this is I did a podcast a while back with demon Lepo and he wrote the, a canonical book on comparing Deming.
And so the, I forget what he called it if he listens to this, he's gonna be mad at me. But he took the Deming and Goldratt principles and wrote a book about it, right? And so in one of the podcasts, he knew Goldratt pretty well, and he says some of the most gore's, most profound writing. Was [00:20:00] near later in his life where he went back to Judaism and some of the, he literally started applying his theories of management theory to, the history of yes. To the how or whatever in other words. Yeah. So it's interesting that you went that route because it's very similar to apparently what what Gora did in his later years
Carol Houle: yeah.
Yeah. I think the older you get, the more you start. Yeah. There you go. Reflect, you start to reflect on,
John Willis: That one works for us pretty well for me. Sorry.
Carol Houle: Yeah. I just I didn't thematically see how these things connected until I got older and then I was like, okay, what else is connecting here?
Yeah. Yeah. So we got together and we were identify. Things like intuition and insight, right? Deep listening, compassion and empathy. Like these different characteristics of leaders, whether they were biblical or corporate leaders or, the dodi ching or that sure yeah, no, no doubt.
The Koran there's all these stories and we were able to pull out like the different [00:21:00]dimensions of. What does it mean to inspire people to greatness? What does it mean to inspire change?
John Willis: I'm gonna interrupt you crazy and enough.
Carol Houle: Yeah, you're
John Willis: good. But it's, the questions are just flowing.
Again. I like love having conversations with you for this reason, because I get real interested. One is how much of the sort of your lean background. Help you see the vision of what, because I think it's brilliant that you use, your pastor, your mentor Muslim, like that. That's a brilliant way to approach this unique, brilliant.
But how much was influenced by what you understood? Because at the core, lean is a human condition.
Carol Houle: It is
John Willis: methodology.
Carol Houle: Yes.
John Willis: And so how much of that do you think, is it naturally or were you clearly focused because of that or?
Carol Houle: I think it, I think because I am a connector.
John Willis: Okay.
Carol Houle: Of concepts, of people and concepts.
John Willis: Sure.
Carol Houle: I just naturally am wired to think that way. And so I'm always drawing connections to things [00:22:00] that, at face value, right? People have a really hard time making the connection and it's actually a blind spot for me. I once had a really amazing leader who I worked for.
This was when I was in my twenties, and she said, Carol, you are like a Sherpa. Okay? You can see ahead that if we keep going in this direction, there's a cliff and you can see it. You can figure out how to navigate around it, whereas other people will get right up to the cliff and they'd be like, uhoh.
Yeah. Gotta backtrack. So this ability to connect things it's my, part of, it's my natural wiring. But I think also part of it is through meditation. I'm also able to really connect things that might on the surface seem like they're not connected.
Yeah.
John Willis: Yeah, no, I think that, Gene calls me wanted a better, I sometimes he was great.
I think he's quoted saying Great boundary spanners, but boundary spanner is a really interesting, to be able to look at a [00:23:00] completely different silo, be uniquely interesting learning, learning. One of the themes you'll hear in any of my podcasts or the most of the people I'm interview are. Insatiable learners.
Carol Houle: Yes.
John Willis: And and the best po Yeah. Like almost every guilty great podcast I get. And so a boundary spanner would look at something. It would seem like, why would you even look at that? This stuff in there, and when you connect it. So you clearly are a boundary spanner so I'll stop you. No, it's good interruption.
Carol Houle: No, you're good. No, I know. I love these interactions.
John Willis: So you're thinking about with this sort of group to think about these
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: Categories of what.
Carol Houle: Yeah, what
John Willis: a leader.
Carol Houle: We started at an atomic level. And then, all these different like characteristicscapabilities of really strong leaders throughout history, people that we've worked with.
Then we started to group them into themes and the themes that started emerging was that. Inspired leaders are people who are [00:24:00] able to lead with wisdom and humility. They build high trust teams with unity of purpose, and they're able to communicate with people at a heart level on a much more deeper and meaningful level.
And so what we did is we basically put the, those capabilities up under those categories. So communicating like an inspired leader, leading with wisdom practicing humility, building high trust teams, and inspiring unity of purpose. And there really is a way to measure whether or not you're actually doing that.
And there are practic practical things that you can do to improve in each one of those. And so what I've done in the inspired leadership framework is to really break those down and in the book so the book now has that framework, but it also has the personal stories from years.
John Willis: Yeah. So at first it's your glossary for these categories, and there's like subcategories too, right?
So you'll have,
Carol Houle: yeah.
John Willis: Like [00:25:00] purpose, and then you'll have a wheel within that, or in inner
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: Within that. Yeah.
Carol Houle: Yeah. So it's a visual radar is what it's called. Yeah. So I've worked with agility insights for years and years. Sally Otta, who created this performance management framework, she actually created it for Lean Agile teams to help them transform.
Okay. And my team at Cognizant actually built their first. Radar for DevOps. And we used that for many years. So it made just logical sense that I would use that same framework for the inspired leadership assessment.
John Willis: Yeah. And then the thing, again, this is where it it gets it keeps getting me more interested when we first have conversations about this is.
One, you have to find a lead. So one of the purposes of this podcast is to get this out to people in leadership roles or influences of leaders to say, is this interesting? Would you like to have a deeper conversation about this? So one, don't even bother applying unless you have a [00:26:00] leader that is co.
Is willing to self assess. It
Carol Houle: is a seeker is
John Willis: a see. Yeah, that's right. It's because, like that just, and that knocks off probably, if I'm just being honest, 80% of the leaders that are out there right there and they're trained to be very focused. I've gotta, I don't have time to listen about any of this nonsense, John, I gotta fix this thing.
I lose most of my gigs there because, like even my qualitative analysis. So you gotta be willing even to express that your organization is broken.
Carol Houle: Yeah. Yeah, they're too busy to improve.
John Willis: Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, like we could go on and stuff.
Those kind of stories. The but the but the thing is okay, like even get past that, are too busy to improve, they're like not even gonna think at a level like it may be me or I can never see it speak. I got brought in as the CIO. That was paid to fix this because I did it somewhere else.
Carol Houle: Yeah. So we're
John Willis: even gonna have a conversation about what's wrong with me. So one, somebody who's willing to have a conversation that there might be something wrong. And then we've mentioned the phrase blind spots. [00:27:00] That's the thing that I think is intriguing about that. If you are willing to let your peers, your support, your bosses, your peers.
Review you, you might think, wait a minute. I, like it's easy to say, I create unity of purpose. You kidding me? But until you literally get to see, I told you the story when I was doing the burnout stuff, right there, there's something called the Maslach Burnout Inventory.
And I was talking about burnout and presenting. There's a long story behind that. Somebody in the DevOps community committed suicide, and I wanted to learn more about what this thing was, and I talk about these techniques and the canonical survey for burnout is called the Maslach, like after Christina Maslach burnout Inventory.
And I'd talk about it and I realized, you know what, I probably should take the independent version against myself so I could then in my presentation show what my MBI was. And one of the things that showed me, hear me be confident, like I'm gonna show you. It turns out [00:28:00] one of the indicators which was efficacy.
Carol Houle: Yeah,
John Willis: I was, it was like, it, not only did the report say I was like, fire engine red. It literally said, I probably should seek professional help in this report. They paid 35 for. Yeah, like I was like, that was crazy. And it made me reassess. I was a docker at the time. I don't want, I was a docker at the time.
I was a remote leader. I was the only remote leader and like it literally gave me this clarity that I would've never thought I was on a burnout path. I had no idea here. I'm the guy who's doing keynotes on what burnout is and how danger it is, and I'm in the middle of it. And so that's the beauty of your system is that when you see it, and you could say if one person said, ah, he's terrible at unity purpose, but if you are honestly allowing a bunch of people to assess you, and then all of a sudden you see it on paper, you gotta question yourself.
If you're a true [00:29:00] leader, you gotta question.
Carol Houle: Not only can we show you but the powerful thing is, especially with A CIO has, who has just been brought into a new organization.
John Willis: Yeah.
Carol Houle: We can actually do this for the entire leadership team, the new leadership team. See where people are today. Right?
So I think when you can actually do a roll up and look at it from a hierarchy standpoint and start to see, I, you can start to correlate, okay, this person is an inspired leader. And look, they're getting amazing results. This person, they think they're great, but their team is saying that they have trouble with authenticity or.
Or empowerment, or setting a clear vision and they're not doing so well, but, so instead of just not knowing where to start with that individual, 'cause it's not like you can like fire your whole team when you Oh yeah. You do that, right? You can have a really pragmatic way to say, okay.
These are things we can start [00:30:00] working on with this person. And by the way, there's probably other people, other leaders in the team who have similar challenges. What I find that's happened a lot and you'll read this in the stories that I tell in the book, is that, people get promoted 'cause they're really good at what they did, but then they don't know what they need to do now.
Yeah. Because they're still doing their old job. Yeah. I can't tell you how many chief product officers I've worked with who can't empower the team because they're still the innovator. They're still the one that wants to be like in the scrum, and I get it. It's hard.
John Willis: And so I think again, that the other thing too, that's, the aggregation is really cool, but the also is the idea that it's a continuum.
In other words, alright, so now I know I need to question. That the one of the categories, and I'll stick with unity and purpose right now, but okay, I guess the organization or the people that are in my sort of circle by 360 right? Is they think I'm low here. I probably should question, try to understand [00:31:00] and maybe, and again, it's the good part of the book is.
We put in some Deming, Senge, Ackoff, but also your world experiences. I think we build onto that in, in a delivery of a service offering network. Again, beyond in transparency. That's something that we're trying to think about of our sort of like historical background. Most people, I have a pretty strong historical background as you do of this stuff.
Now you can put in a plan in place. That's your job. Maybe we can give you some advice on here's the stories that help, but now come do it again. And did you approve?
Carol Houle: Exactly. We can re-baseline in six months a year. And really see okay, is this working? Is your, are you getting different results based?
John Willis: That's right. Are you proving you're getting to gamify your own approach to yourself? Yes. Are you accepted? Honestly, are, if I'm a truly leader, I'm gonna, I'm gonna deal with this.
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: Like this. I just like my red in efficacy. Oh. I'm red in I thought I was good. Yeah. But the other part, I think we talked about the impedance mismatch or the siloization, to your point, I used to do [00:32:00] these qualitative analysis, right? And the whole product management was just a fascinating, like a black hole of opportunity. And so I'd listen, I'd talked to four groups in a row, and they'd all talk about how FPM was terrible.
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: Yeah. And then you'd read a group and they're like, oh man. Alice is amazing. And I'm like, okay, we gotta dive in here. Yeah. In general, the consent, the aggregate consensus is product management. That Company X is terrible. Yeah. Except this one group. That has Alice, that is literally, whether it's producing or whatever that group is, harness, which we would both agree, probably has a better opportunity of producing value.
Okay. We gotta dig in and find out why.
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: He's a terrible, and maybe the answer is, we move Alice to a mentoring position. Leadership, again, so those things you just, you don't get to see.
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: Unless you throw some analytics on the leadership, which we [00:33:00] both agree is a bottleneck.
Carol Houle: Yeah, exactly.
And you don't have to have a bunch of direct reports to do this assessment because in many organizations you, you have leadership. That is really by influence, an influence model as opposed to having direct reports. You have a lot of people who, to your point, they're product managers, they're influence leadership positions.
They're not, direct report positions. But you're equally important. Yeah.
John Willis: No, I think that's a good, the you're, you're, like there are Topo Powell right, is an interesting character, right? Like he was the first fellow at Capital One.
Now he's at Fidelity. I talk about our president. He's a good friend of mine. He's a brilliant man. Is more than anybody I think affected cloud native and DevOps implementation at Capital One, who's considered one of Vanguard or has been considered one of Vanguard's a financial technology.
And
Carol Houle: absolutely.
John Willis: And now he's Fidelity but he is the reason that guys become fellows because they don't they don't really wanna go into [00:34:00] management, but they're so prominent and you're right, I didn't even think about it. Assessment, even though he's, I suspect he'd be green all the way across the board 'cause he is so amazing.
But if he is deficient in one thing. I can ramble. I'm in a rambling mode, but that was one part about burnout is like if you didn't address one piece, Christina Maslach called a pebble in the shoe.
Carol Houle: True.
John Willis: It starts off like Topo is, and again, Topo is great and I'm sure he'd be green on his assessment, but if your mind Topo is absolutely green.
Except for that one little red spot that just grows and grows and grows and next thing like all a sudden and I stopped using Topo 'cause this is not gonna happen with him, but person X all of a sudden they're not green anymore.
And so you never know the sort of the the sort of net effect
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: Of that sort of pebble in the shoe that Christina Maslach talks about for burnout. Yeah. So the idea of an influencer. Is a really brilliant idea too. Are there, there are people that are the, your topo pals in your organization who literally, [00:35:00] if they're 3% bad, their 3% bad is catastrophic, even though 97% of what they do is incredible for the organization.
Yeah.
Carol Houle: Yeah. And let me give you another example. Okay. Yeah. And this, and I'll connect this to something I've been talking a lot about lately. So enterprise architects.
John Willis: Don't, let's not even go. No.
Carol Houle: And it's in this next era, right? Yeah. Where you're gonna have AI agents that PE people are manning managing agents.
Your enterprise architecture is gonna become even more important than it is even today. And I've been talking a lot about this concept of benevolent AI agents, right? And initially I was thinking of a benevolent AI agent as a protect and serve, to scan and make sure that enterprise architecture principles are being followed as an example, right?
If your enterprise architect or your group of enterprise architects are not perceived as leaders. [00:36:00] And they're not actually inspiring the change what's gonna happen, right? Yeah.
John Willis: Yeah. The whole, we should do a second podcast on sort of agent and ai. But there, there's so many, like big, and again I think this is, I just had a conversation before this podcast with another good friend of mine, James Ercot, like the train has left the station folks.
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: But the question now is how do we correct the things that are that, like that pebbles in the shoe? Yeah. Of AI or agents and there's just so much there that just Yeah. Be explored.
Carol Houle: Yeah. Because it's gonna amplify. Yes. Whatever you have.
John Willis: That's right. Like your bad is gonna get amplified along with the good, but again,
like the 97% gonna become exponential. In behavior, but that 3% could cause catastrophic.
Carol Houle: Yeah.
John Willis: Especially now that it's amplified, right? Yes. And depending on the day and the time. Yeah. So there, there's so gimme one more one more layer of [00:37:00] benevolent ai.
'cause you, we've talked about this one and on the long list of stuff that I have where I have to, and I'm gonna save that one for tomorrow. Give me the elevator pitch on what you
Carol Houle: Yeah. I've been talking about this pretty much since I heard about agentic ai, and the fact that, or, leaders are thinking about how to basically reorganize their teams with the advent of a agentic ai.
And I could see a place where. If you were responsible for a particular, area of the business and you had people, and those people had AI agents, that they were responsible for driving outcomes. From a business standpoint, I felt that you'd need to have like helper agents, right?
You'd need to have AI agents that were looking at things like, your bias, seeking out bias that might be, in the system and not necessarily bias towards or against, male, female, et cetera. I'm even thinking if you look [00:38:00] at I think her name is Kathy Baxter.
From salesforce.com, she created these bias bounties to, help see, seek out bias within within the algorithms. And one of the things that they found is that and this was more of a business problem. The AI was, treating kind of small to medium sized businesses different and with less preferential treatment than enterprise and global businesses, which might not necessarily be the right, approach.
It was, it had that bias towards a particular business segment. You might have a benevolent. Agent that's trying to seek out bias. Looking at your business rules, like what are really your objectives and key results from a strategy and finding places where maybe decisions are being made that are not necessarily in line with what your intention is.
To go back to, David Marquette's book, turn the Ship around that philosophy of setting [00:39:00]organizational clarity and technical competence so that you could empower people and push decisions down to the people closest to the information. That same kind of thinking needs to be applied to AI agents.
So yeah, we could do, there's probably a whole book on benevolent ai.
John Willis: Yeah. No, and I think right now there's an interesting, I mean there's a lot of what people trying to look at this problem from like lots of different different. Versions like how, how do you implement compliance or policy or, even rollbacks space access for data aggregation. Or data. Yeah. It's beyond the scope of here. All right. So I got this elevator pitch, another podcast. Yeah. And then, we, you talked, we talked about the, the why, the we're doing, if you haven't picked up on, we're doing a little silence and necking here, but the how and then, so what's the what's the what of all this?
Carol Houle: Yeah. I think that the, what is that, people listening to this podcast have the opportunity now to have John Willis and [00:40:00] Carol Hool show up to do executive workshops and we're a
John Willis: pretty good combo there.
Carol Houle: We're good in our backer. We're
John Willis: all exactly. That's rude to me, but I know I can call myself.
I'm old enough and wise enough to be able to seen a lot of the angles. I won't call you all, but you've seen a lot of the angles.
Carol Houle: So I've seen a lot of the angles. But but the way that this would work is that, we would have either a single group of people around a leader or multiple, like a whole leadership team where we could have them baseline their capability, get feedback, 360 review, and then we can come in with very, a very targeted workshop based on what we see.
That team needs to work on. And can really help them with some practical, pragmatic Yeah. Things that they can do as a team to improve. Because, as I mentioned in the beginning of the conversation, leaders are going to drive either extreme success or chaos within, this next era of a agentic [00:41:00] ai. And we would like for them to drive. More human connection. We would like, organizations to move from people doing transactions to people having meaningful relationship with each other and with their end consumers. And those are the kinds of outcomes that we can drive.
If companies choose to work with us.
John Willis: Yeah. And I think the two points I think are interesting. One is if you didn't know this, I'm going to use a technique on the listeners called negative selling, which is if you if you know what that is, you would've known that I'm about to do it, which is need not apply.
If you don't have the confidence, if your leaders don't have the confidence in self-assessing themselves, right? Like just stay, in the early days of DevOps, really early days of DevOps, I'd walk into people and I'd try to pitch why DevOps and I'd say, Hey. You got two choices here. You could be in the 3% club, but a 97% club.
And back then it was the 3% club. So again I'm being honest, but at the same token they unless you're an organization that is willing, you're not an organization. That's John. I don't have time. [00:42:00] I don't have time to fix the broken things. Okay, great.
The second point, which is a very Deming que thing, but it's a we have this sort of opposing forces.
If we listen to Deming, we listen to system thinking. If we read Donella Meadows, whatever, even Senge's fifth if we read all that stuff, we know that it's gotta be a leadership change. Deming bleeds it, but Deming bleeds it from his, the input of his sources to the output of his sources.
That leadership has to change. And then whenever. I talk to somebody, I give a presentation, especially more in the early days of DevOps. They'd come up and they'd say, John, I agree with every thing you're gonna do here, but. I don't see how I get it to be implemented in my company. And I give them tips like, you just plays the long game.
Do the things. And hopefully there'll be a change in leadership of like, why aren't we doing DevOps? And then you're the DevOps person. But the truth of the matter is, if they came out to me, I said the honest answer I can [00:43:00] give you as much as I believe in these principles, if you can't get leadership, buy-in.
DevOps is useless. Yeah. And or, and really any change is useless. And so those are the sort of things like demonstrations from the top of his longs, all the system theory, all that stuff would tell you that it has to be a global thought process. Which again, if the leadership's not on board, it, it is silo.
It is. And at the same token, we know instinctively that technology changes or organizational behavior changes do not work unless leadership. Buys into it. So
Carol Houle: a hundred percent. A hundred percent. And I'll end this on this note, if you're a courageous leader and what we've said resonates with you
John Willis: Yeah.
There you go.
Carol Houle: Come along.
John Willis: Yeah. Let's let's experiment together.
I think, like I said, Carol has put a lot of thought into this process, even from the fascinating way that you developed it with the mentors. I think that's brilliant. I didn't even know that until this podcast.
I think that if you believe that things like Deming, [00:44:00] Senge, Danella Meadows a coff all of the above actually should work. And, and then if you confidence that, we have the ability, we, we think it works. We've got some, original early indicators that it is working and resonating.
But come experiment with us. Help us tweak it and see what, it falls out, but it makes sense. It makes sense to me. Like Carol said, if it makes sense to you, let's talk. Yeah.
Carol Houle: Awesome
John Willis: stuff. What else? So let's just end on a really cool note. So you're an avid skier, I've heard, right?
Carol Houle: I am. Yes.
John Willis: Yeah. That's pretty cool. So is you're getting good ski skiing in this winter,
Carol Houle: or? Oh, absolutely. We've got a crazy amount of snow. It's been fun. I'm an avid skier. But at at this point in my life, I'm not a risky skier, Uhhuh. I'm more of the very nice looking flowy skier that's car carving down the mountain.
John Willis: I gotta tell my skiing, sorry. And it's unfortunate, but,
Carol Houle: Oh.
John Willis: At about 15, I lived in Long Island [00:45:00] and back when I was growing up, you didn't go to exotic places. Just that's not even up. Me neither. Even upstate New York was exotic. Which you might have got some reasonable skiing. So we had one slope. That was a ski slope and and it would be, it was middle of Long Island and it would be like Disney, a Christmas wouldn't compare to how crowded this thing was. So I buy a pair of skis and the person who sets it up, the little grooves, we, I don't even still have this, where you have the sort of wire of the boot, they were upside down.
Carol Houle: Oh no.
John Willis: So I go down the hill and I get about 15 feet down the hill and I'm jammed in the ice. Oh
Carol Houle: no.
John Willis: People are ramming into me. People are tumbling over me and I'm like, not my sport. So I really have never skied since then. So there you go.
Carol Houle: That's,
John Willis: sorry. I know. Probably should have not let that one block me, but that's funny.
Carol Houle: [00:46:00] Awesome. All right,
John Willis:Yeah. So great stuff. All right.
