Why AI Is Breaking Your Organization, Sira Laurel on Staying Human

Sira Laurel on AI in the Workplace and Staying Human, Give A Heck Podcast with Dwight Heck

🎧 Listen and Watch Give A Heck Podcast

AI is not simply a technology problem. It is a human problem. And organizations that ignore that truth are already paying the price in burnout, disengagement, and talent they will never get back.

🎧  New here? Start with Part 1 first.

Part 1 covers Sira’s origin story, what it actually means to be a highly sensitive person, why traditional leadership models are failing a significant portion of the workforce, and how that failure is costing organizations far more than they realize. Everything in this episode builds directly on that foundation. Listen to Part 1 here.

🎙️ Give A Heck Podcast

Real conversations and solo episodes about purpose, financial stewardship, mindset, leadership, and intentional living. This episode takes a hard look at what AI adoption is really doing to the people inside your organisation, and what it means to lead with humanity when everything is moving too fast.

 

🔍 Episode Overview

Picking up exactly where Part 1 ended, Dwight Heck and Sira Laurel return to a conversation that ran out of time at the most interesting moment. In Part 1, Sira opened the door to AI. In Part 2, they walk through it together.

 

Sira argues that organisations are over-indexing on AI as a shiny new tool without accounting for the second and third order effects on the human beings inside their systems. The result is stalled adoption, cultural fracture, survivor’s guilt among remaining staff, and a growing identity crisis for workers who no longer know what their role means in a world where machines handle what used to define them.

 

Dwight brings his own experience training AI tools daily, calling out the patterns that reveal when leaders are outsourcing their voice and judgment to a system that has no nervous system, no empathy, and no ability to read a room. He connects this to the broader collapse of organisations that treat their people as digits rather than as a living system.

 

Sira introduces her four-dimension diagnostic model, her Align process for identity-level change, and the concept of adaptive human systems built to sense, decide, and evolve under pressure. She closes with a message on self-trust that reframes what it means to lead from your own nervous system rather than someone else’s.

 

📚 What You Will Learn in This Episode

  • Why AI adoption is failing inside most organisations right now
  • How identity threat is the real barrier to change, not training
  • What psychological safety actually requires a leader to do
  • Why organisations are living systems, not machines
  • How the fractal pattern of individual burnout mirrors organisational collapse
  • What self-trust has to do with becoming the leader you are designed to be
  • Why staying human is the most strategic competitive advantage available

 

📑 Chapter Summaries

0:00  Welcome Back and Foundation Recap

Dwight sets up Part 2 and recaps the core themes from Part 1 so new listeners have enough context to follow the conversation.

2:00  On Building Intentional Business

Sira and Dwight reflect on what it means to build something driven by service rather than financial gravitational pull, and why that signal is rare and worth protecting.

6:28  How Organisations Are Over-Indexing on AI

Sira explains why the rush to adopt AI mirrors every over-index on a shiny new tool, and why the second and third order effects on people are being ignored entirely.

10:53  AI on the Heels of Unhealed Trauma

The conversation connects the psychological fallout of COVID-19 with the speed of AI adoption, arguing that an industrial revolution landing on unresolved trauma is creating conditions no training programme can fix.

16:07  What Clients Are Actually Afraid Of

Sira describes the full spectrum of fear she hears from clients, from job loss to identity collapse, and why AI must augment human judgment rather than replace it.

22:35  Confirmation Bias, Algorithms, and the Stakes of Delegation

Dwight and Sira examine how AI compounds the same confirmation bias problems that already plague social media algorithms, and what is lost when human discernment is handed over.

27:30  Sensitivity as the Competitive Advantage

Sira makes the case that deep processing, empathy, and nuance, the very traits traditional leadership punishes, are exactly what organisations need most in a world accelerating toward automation.

32:13  What Psychological Safety Really Looks Like

Sira walks through her four-dimension diagnostic model and explains how true psychological safety is built at the identity level, not through policy or training.

39:57  Mutant Capitalism and the Collaboration Advantage

Sira challenges the competitive-at-all-costs model, arguing that humans are the most prosocial species on the planet and that our cooperative advantage, not our competitive one, is what has carried us this far.

49:18  The Align Process and Leading Self

Sira introduces her Align framework for identity-level change, covering how to discover inherited beliefs, liberate unhelpful patterns, and integrate new ways of thinking without the brain reverting under pressure.

56:34  Who Is Ready for This Work

Sira describes the founders and executives she works with best, those building companies designed not to collapse under pressure, and why she is drawn to zero-to-one relationships over optimising broken systems.

1:01:47  Costco, Patagonia, and Proof That It Is Possible

Dwight and Sira examine organisations built for longevity and why intentional governance from the beginning creates cultures people never want to leave.

1:09:51  What Makes People Tick

Dwight reflects on decades of coaching and what always comes back to the origin story, and Sira connects self-awareness to the neuroplasticity that makes change possible at any stage of a career.

1:17:01  The Closing Question

Dwight asks his signature final question. Sira’s answer centres on self-trust as the most underrated and least discussed quality in leadership development today.

1:20:13  Final Words and Where to Find Sira

Sira closes with two words that sum up everything. Dwight wraps the episode and points listeners to leadnorthofnormal.com.

 

🎯 Key Takeaway

Organisations do not change. People do.

And people will not change at the speed leaders demand until their identity, beliefs, emotions, and sense of safety are addressed first. AI is not a technology implementation problem. It is a human transformation problem that most organisations are not equipped to manage. The leaders who understand that will define the next decade. The ones who do not are already losing the people they will eventually need back.

 

💬 Continue the Conversation

🎙️ Why Leadership Burns Out High Performers, Sira Laurel Explains

Start here. Part 1 of this conversation covers Sira’s origin story, what sensory processing sensitivity actually means, and why traditional leadership is failing the people organisations need most.

🎙️ Are You Drifting Through Life, Purpose and Direction

A solo episode from Dwight on what it costs to live without intention, and the first honest step toward changing it.

🎙️ Ken Kunken, Paralysed at 20 and Built a 40-Year Legal Career

A powerful conversation on identity, resilience, and what it means to rebuild your sense of self after everything changes.

🎙️ Why Most People Never Tell Their Story, Michele DeFilippo

An exploration of why clarity about who you are and what you have lived through is the foundation of everything meaningful you will build.

🎙️ Turning Grief Into Story, John DeDakis

On loss, recovery, and the act of transforming painful experience into something that serves others.

 

🔑 Key Themes Discussed

  • AI adoption and the human cost of moving too fast
  • Identity threat and resistance to change
  • Psychological safety in leadership
  • Organisations as living systems
  • Sensory processing sensitivity and neurodivergence at work
  • Self-trust and authentic leadership
  • Adaptive human systems and the theory of constraints
  • Survivor’s guilt and workforce disruption
  • Costco, Patagonia, and intentional organisational design

 

👤 About Sira Laurel

Sira Laurel is a leadership strategist, neuroscience-informed coach, and founder of North of Normal. She spent 15 years inside demanding corporate HR and organisational development roles, carrying a highly sensitive nervous system through environments that were never designed for it. In February 2025, she stepped away from her role as Director of Talent and Culture at a global firm to build something of her own.

 

At North of Normal, Sira works with founders and executives in growth mode who need a strategic partner to help them scale with clarity rather than chaos. Her approach draws on neuroscience, systems thinking, the Berkman Method, and Ken Wilber’s integral model to diagnose organisations across four dimensions and build adaptive human systems that can sense, decide, and evolve under pressure. She specialises in the early-stage leadership foundation, helping zero-to-one founders make high-impact decisions that serve not just the near term but the next decade.

 

🌐 Connect with Sira Laurel

Connect with Sira Laurel (click below to access)

 

🤝 Connect with Dwight Heck

Connect with Dwight Heck (click below to access)

 

💭 Final Thoughts

Sira ended this conversation with two words: stay human. It is easy to dismiss that as a bumper sticker. It is harder to recognise that for most organisations right now, it is the most disruptive strategic decision available.

 

Across both parts of this conversation, Sira has not been asking people to become something they are not. She has been asking them to stop pretending to be something they were never designed to be in the first place. That is a fundamentally different conversation than most leadership development offers, and it is one that is long overdue.

 

📣 Call to Action

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Full transcript of Episode:

Sira Laurel Part 2…

[00:00:00] Dwight: Welcome back to the Give a Heck podcast. I’m your host, Dwight Heck, here to help you live life on purpose and not by accident. If you haven’t listened to part one of my conversation with Sira Laurel yet, I want you to encourage you to start there first. What we built in that episode is the foundation for everything we’re about to get into.

But if you’re joining us today for the first time, here is what you need to know. Sira is the founder of North of Normal. She spent 15 years inside demanding corporate HR leadership roles, carrying a highly sensitive nervous system through environments that were never designed for it before. Finally stepping away to build something of her own.

In part one, we covered her origin story, what it actually means to be a highly sensitive person, why the traditional leadership model is failing a huge portion of the workforce, and how that failure is costing organisations far more than they realise. At the very end of part one, Sierra started opening up the conversation about ai, and we ran outta time right at the moment.

It was getting most interesting. So today we’re picking up exactly there and going somewhere. I think the audience has genuinely been waiting for what all this actually means in practise. How does sensitivity become a strategic advantage? What does psychological safety really look like when a leader builds it for real?

What does AI have to do with any of this? And what is the honest step for someone ready to stop working against their own brain? Sira, welcome back to the Give a Heck podcast. Thanks for agreeing to come on and share with us more of your knowledge and understanding. Uh, I appreciate it a lot.

[00:01:53] Sira: Thank you so much.

It’s good to be back.

[00:01:55] Dwight: Yeah, good to be back. Um, our first episode when I was going through and, and producing it and listening to it again, it was just like, wow. It, it, there, there’s, it’s just, I I wanna say I’m, I’m impressed and proud of you to step outside of your comfort zone, especially with, um, you know, the, the emotional and mental challenges that some of us go through.

Some people would just cower, they were, would hide. They wouldn’t want to put themselves out there, especially, you know, when we’re up for judgement criticism, uh, you know, that, all that, when people say to us, what do you know? Like, so what? So you had a tough time. You know, all the negative, uh, keyboard warriors that are out there.

So thank you. For willing, be willing to put yourself out there and help so many other individuals so that they can too, can live a purposeful life. There’s not a lot of us out there, so I like to be appreciative and, and show gratitude for those that are willing to step out on faith and take a chance for others.

So thank you very much.

[00:03:01] Sira: Thank you.

Yeah, you’re right. It’s, it is, I was talking with somebody earlier today about that, uh, who’s, who’s, um, he is stepping outside of corporate America to take on his fractional, uh, uh, solopreneur journey. And he had said the same thing. It’s like, it’s hard to find people who aren’t motivated by, you know, financial gravitational pull and actually wanna serve humans.

So yeah, building an intentional business, uh, it can be hard, uh, ’cause the signals are few and far between, but when you meet somebody who is on that same frequency, ugh, it feels good.

[00:03:36] Dwight: Oh, you can feel the vibration. I, I call it don’t I get people that laugh at me though, especially with my co some of my coaching clients and tell ’em, I call it the warm and fuzzy.

Yeah. Right. I get, when I connect with a, I can connect with a person, feel that warm and fuzzy. I can connect with a topic created by individuals or a group and get the same thing. But when I have a conversation with somebody where you truly resonate with them, it’s, it’s such a joy. You go away, you’re feeling tapped in some ways, emotionally and mentally, but in other ways you feel so satisfied.

Right? Absolutely. So those listening and watching one doesn’t have to be false for the other to be true or ver vice versa. So, you know, it’s, it’s been great. Um, being an entrepreneur though is, is it’s not an easy challenge, right? This is my, um, third kick at being an entrepreneur. The other two were successful as well.

Um, but this 1, 25 years in, I’m still constantly learning. So you’re just at the, at the start of your journey, helping people. I can’t imagine where you’ll be 20 years in, because me, throughout my journey did not have the same tools that somebody has today. Right? So, I, I’m excited. I think you’ll be able to collapse timeframes, um, in a very quick fashion.

And I, I honestly believe if, if you haven’t thought about it. Or have done it. I think you’ll be somebody that looks at speaking on national stages because there’s so many organisations that need to hear just, they need to hear more than just having a book or a document or a PowerPoint. They need somebody that’s gonna go up there because their words mean one thing, or emotions and feelings with those words are really what’s gonna resonate and make people have that warm and fuzzy like we’re talking about with our conversation and connection.

So I’m excited to continue to follow your journey, even after our conversations and throughout your growth, we can have you back on again and keep on, you know, feeding, feeding the masses, the information they deserve to hear, not the information that sells. Right. Exactly. Makes money. Right. So at the end of our last conversation, he started opening up about something we wanna make sure we get proper room for today.

So we will get into the AI stuff, but I’ve, I’ve kind of want to develop it into a process and a flow that makes it so that people, uh, you know, really grasp this and, and understand what’s going on. So as you mentioned, you talked to, with one of your friends about, you know, their practical journey, right?

So you talk about fractal patterns, the idea of what happens at the individual level, mirrors what happens at the team and the organisational level. And you connected that to what’s going wrong as organisations rush to adopt ai. Take us into that. What are you actually seeing?

[00:06:28] Sira: Well, we’re, we’re doing, you know, what we kind of tend to do and historically have done, which is over-indexing on a new tool right on, on something exciting.

And even, you know, on a personal level, we can see that, where you find something new and you’re like, oh my gosh, I gotta learn everything about this thing. And you just become super into whatever that thing is and maybe it consumes you and you don’t think about, you know, the consequences of, uh, kind of hyper focus on a thing and, and, uh, the imbalance that comes from, uh, overindexing and getting like too involved in a thing without thinking about second, third order effects.

Um, but yeah, you extrapolate that onto this, this global scale and AI is that shiny new thing that we’re over-indexing on without thought of consequence. Uh, that we are only, I I think that there’s a lot of, um, distrust in, in the market right now, and I’m seeing at least more conversations now that we’ve been playing with AI for a few years around ethics and governance and, you know, putting guardrails on, on the thing and like controlling the beast.

Um, like we can do this a right way. Uh, but there are lots of gravitational forces, you know, financial and, and hyper competitive forces that when we see, oh, other organisation is doing it and they’re leaping into AI and they’re adopting it, and people are posting things about how it’s doing all this stuff for their organisation, which again, as I talked to like people who are actually in those systems going like, we’re not actually realising the gains of, of this tool yet, that we are forgetting just how taxing that is, uh, to push something, uh, before we fully understand it, before we, uh, have accounted for the identity beliefs.

Um, and, you know, emotions, perception in every single individual that’s having to, uh, deal with this change, uh, that is, that will, that will come to bear on all of us. Uh, and, and it is, uh, that we are foreseeing the layoffs that are happening from companies that have invested heavily in a tool that they thought was gonna be more or less just a really simple, uh, uh, you know, tech change, right?

An implementation of a tool. And it’s so much more than that. Uh, right? The state of threat that everyone’s brain, I imagine is in, has gotta be just incredibly high, uh, not just because of layoffs, although that’s a very real threat, right? Is that I could lose my job over this. Uh, but there’s this sometimes maybe more subtle, but just as real threat of like, I’m losing my identity.

Like, yes, I have my job. Who am I if I’m not executing on these types of tasks? If I, you know, I used to work in this way and now I have to work in this way. I’ve always been a, and then enter, you know, title here and now I’m being asked to be enter title there. That is an identity change that we don’t really take into consideration and we’re not taking into consideration in particular with ai.

And it’s on the heels also of a global crisis and trauma, which is the COVID-19 pandemic that yes, that is over. Uh, and, and we’re past, right? The height of that thing. Um, but the trauma, the psychological trauma, the, I mean the loneliness that we’re still experiencing, like how are we supposed to get back to work?

The social network that we used to have that we still haven’t rebuilt, uh, the, the literal loss, right, of family members and friends through that thing that we’re still grappling with. It’s just we are then putting this industrial revolution on top of unhealed trauma. Uh, and if this isn’t. Uh, you know, electrification, which took 40 years to get across the country.

And so you had time if you wanted to, to maybe like figure out a new trade right. As an apprentice under something else. Uh, we, the internet took 15 years to get across this country, you know, more or less. And so we had time to more time to adapt to that. This is just a few years, right? Like three, four years that we’ve been playing around with this thing.

So it is extremely fast when you compare it to other industrial revolutions.

[00:10:53] Dwight: That’s it. It is so volatile though. And you look at so many things we can talk about when it comes to ai because that very, a lot of conversation with, with people and corporations and individuals, like you said, they’re utilising these new tools and they’re finding out that these tools, in many cases, there’s a, there’s a steep learning curve.

People don’t realise that it’s no different than take away ai. Just Google. You could ask Google something and you could ask it another way, changing a few words and get a different answer, and you could ask it another way. And I used to always tell people it’s the questions you ask individuals and how you’re gonna get the response you need, right?

It’s not always what, what you know, it’s how you say things. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Well, it’s the same thing when there are people are utilising Google in the past, and now ai I was utilising it yesterday myself. I utilise it every day. But I’ve noticed a lot of patterns in the last year and a bit with ai.

I can tell somebody’s, I can tell a video, I can tell a post, I can tell immediately people that don’t train their ai. And what I mean by that is that, that the AIS will put subtle little hyphens in instead of using proper punctuation. They all do it. ’cause I have them. I, I’ve, I’ve sampled and utilised and had subscriptions for three of the biggest ones, and I find I can see which ones are continually getting better.

They’re willing to grow. But I, I find AI itself has, has added time in my life, not saved time, depending on the, on the avenue of how I’m utilising it. It’s made mistakes. And how many people that are listening or watching have you used ai and you don’t even review what you tell it you want and you just copy and paste and it’s gotten you into trouble or you, you’ve offended somebody and all of a sudden they’re not communicating with you and you don’t know why.

Right? Because of you’ve used it to respond to whatever, not even emails or whatever. I’m not saying it’s not a good tool. I’m saying we still have to have us as the fail safe for a technology. That really in many aspects is driven by financial gains and corruption. And I talk about that because of what’s gone on with, um, Sam and Chat, GBT, like with open AI versus, uh, Phil, I can’t remember the name now, the ones that own Claude.

Um, and you got yes, Andro, thank you so much. And then you got gro, you got all these different AI systems and I’ve literally put the same, copied and paste in the same, a ai, like same thing. And all these A ais and some of these ais get cheeky too. Will, will literally insult you. Or they’ll say, well, you know, I had, I had, yesterday I had a response from C Claude that said, well, it’s obvious.

Like literally. And I was just like, excuse me, don’t you talk to me like that. And people will say, well, why would you do that? Because if you don’t train AI to what you want, it’s not gonna write like you, it’s not gonna respond like you, if you tell it to analyse an email and give you a summary or, or a a, a huge document, you want it to respond to you to where you’re gonna interpret the data and be able to read it in your, in your head, you’re reading this document and it makes sense.

And it’s not just mechanical, it’s not right. It’s people listening. AI isn’t that simple. It’s got a long way to grow, but just like Sira said, it’s only been two, three years and look where it’s already at. Right? Taking over everything. How many chat bots right now or, or just sending out information around the world today in regards to health or, or politics or whatever, and causing dissension and causing more problems.

And they get to sit behind their little keyboard, never to be caught or found, right? But yet the damage of what they’re utilising is stemmed from ai. AI’s got no personality. People just like money doesn’t have personality. It’s the people that are wielding that tool and utilising their power to use it for good or evil.

Right? No different than any written word of a journalist. Can a journal article be powerful or can it be, can it destroy people right when they’re, they’re writing, um, a newspaper article or a a, a news anchor or whatever. We need to really become more open thinkers. And, and the way I see this as being an issue is back to that sensitive brain that you talk about.

I get people tell me all the time, it’s so overwhelming, I don’t know how to deal with this in my business. Should I use a DI Dwight or shouldn’t I? And then you have those get down in the rabbit hole conversations, right? So I don’t know what you’ve seen in regards to ai, but you know, I obviously you’ve shared a lot, but what have your clients themselves been saying to you?

Like, is it something that. Keeps ’em awake at night. Are they afraid it’s gonna crush their career or their organisation or their, even their business?

[00:16:07] Sira: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That’s, yeah, great question. And there are every, every fear concern that you can think of, right? Is, is mentioned, how do I keep up with it? What, like, I’m at this point in my career, do I need to learn this thing?

Right? Like, it’s just a state of threat for everyone, and it’s individual, right? What their concern is, what they’re afraid of. And AI has been positioned as something that’s gonna make jobs or take jobs and bring efficiency or actually, uh, reduce efficiency. It’s, it’s both things. It’s everything is, and, uh, people are understandably very confused.

Um, and you know, I, I also use ai, uh, every day. I think it is a, and can be a very powerful tool for efficiency, for, and kind of first level superficial data processing. But I, I strongly believe that it should augment, uh, rather than replace human judgement and intuition. And that is unfortunately what we are delegating and off, like offloading to the tool is our human judgement

When we’re not training it properly, when we’re not double checking its responses and we’re letting it make decisions for us in some, like horrific, um, uh, uh, outcomes have occurred from that people have actually killed themselves, right? Because of what AI has told them about their life and what, what they should do.

It’s horrible. Um, the worst case scenarios like half occurred. Um, and so what are we, what are we doing about that, right? How, what are the guardrails? And that is on the, that is the responsibility of these organisations, and it’s the responsibility of those who are in, uh, positions of power governance, governances.

Yep. Right? Who are like, Nope, we, we went through a social media ai, uh, uh, lack of governance already with Instagram and Twitter and et cetera. Like we’ve already done that, where an algorithm has gotten us all addicted to a thing and, and we just zone out and stop thinking for ourselves like we’ve been here before.

We don’t have to do it again or as poorly. Um, so I think that the, you know, but how do you change

[00:18:11] Dwight: that though? We have the AI is so confirmation biassed, right? It, it, it just like Instagram and you talk about they didn’t do anything about the social media platforms and how they exploded. They’re always chasing, they still haven’t fixed that issue either because those algorithms are very unhealthy in how they and, and how they place information and they stoke descent and anger and frustration and then you add a eye into that algorithm, giving fake videos with somebody sitting there that you think that’s real sharing so-called real information that is not even sometimes 5% true.

It, it’s just a, it’s really scary. I, I hear it again from my clients, my family. But I’m here to tell people, ai, like Sira was saying, can be really helpful tool, but at the end of the day, it’s no different than if you hire an assistant. Maybe you have a va, maybe you have an assistant that actually works with you, right?

And they do work for you and they give you information. Do you trust that information that human’s giving you all the time? Or do you actually read through what that person’s written for you? Because you’re a busy executive and they wrote a speech for you, or they, or they did a presentation for you? Are you putting in that energy and time?

Well, most likely, if you’re a good corporate ex, you are, you are going through it because this is your, this is you that you’re representing. You go up there and go and something’s wrong or whatever. You, you can’t point it to your assistant. Well, it was his or her fault. It’s your fault. AI is just like that.

I had it generated a document. Um, I give it all the information and stuff I’ve been doing for, for a specific product in our country that I use in financial services stuff. I had been working on doing myself, copywriting, and I wanted to see what it could do. Oh my gosh, it made it all look fancy and pretty, but it had so much wrong information in there that it so-called, pulled from the internet.

And I started challenging it. And it apologises to me, it’s not human, but yet I’m sorry, right? I should have put more effort in. You’re right. That information’s incorrect. Here’s the right information. It took me three prompts to get it to find the right information. You know how it finally found it? I went and I give it to it, right?

Mm-hmm. But supposedly people are trusting their businesses, their personal lives. I know people that use it. As a counsellor, I’m here to tell you don’t right you. It’s, it’s going to give you what it thinks you want so that you don’t leave just like social media. And now you put the two together and we have a real problem on our hands.

One of the things I wanted to lead into this was, you know, you’ve used a phrase that organisations are still operating from an industrial era metaphor, treating themselves as a machines when they’re actually living systems. So if an organisation is a living system, you throw in, um, social media, which most businesses have and their staff are utilising during the day.

Don’t kid yourself, whether it’s on a break or lunch, or they’re turning, you know, nobody’s watching them. They’re quickly checking their social posts. I see it from clients that post stuff. They’re at work right now. They’re utilising AI on top of that to try to help secure their job because they’re fearful that it’ll replace their job.

Like, you know, for every positive that AI’s brought to our, our world, nobody’s training people on how to utilise it correctly. And where are the warnings from the government, where, why are they not regulating it? Because they’re feeding off of it. Look what happened between Claude and Chat GBT and the US government.

Right. Look at all the stuff that happened in the last few months. I’m not picking on anybody. I’m just saying this is gonna, if you don’t play their game organisations, you’re, if that AI doesn’t give ’em what they want, they’ll just go to another one. There’s so many of ’em out there. It’s like going into a grocery store and you see 10 different types of cereal.

What, you know, they’re all look like Cheerios, but some’s knock, knockoff, some’s name brand. Right. What are you gonna buy? What are you gonna utilise? Just be cautious those that are watching and listening when you utilise ui. ’cause a business is a living system. It doesn’t need to be corrupt more by something that grabs information from millions of databases.

[00:22:35] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm. So,

[00:22:38] Sira: yeah, that be, go ahead. Just, uh, on that philanthropics decision, right. Too, I think that’s important is that, what’s interesting about that is that, um, yeah, yeah. The government could like, choose between one and another. Uh, but we do have, as an example, I think in philanthropic where they, the Department of Defence demanded unrestricted AI use and Philanthropics said no.

Right? And they lost a $200 million contract. Uh, but that actually significantly bolstered its reputation as a safety first AI leader. Um, while of course simultaneously creating some short-term commercial and operational risks, but by, you know, refusing to allow its model to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance, it really solidified its brand identity as an ethical alternative to competitors.

So there are that. I think that is, to me, something, it’s a positive, it’s a hopeful example of organisations that could, could do wrong, go wrong. And despite that gravitational poll have chosen an intentional ethical path.

[00:23:46] Dwight: Yeah. And what’s the long, long-term effects of this? So you talked about how companies are getting rid of people, or ais replacing individuals or companies had such massive, um, they, they thought that it was gonna be so much for them, so they got rid of all this staff.

I can see this affecting companies, not even a year out, two years out, that have done this. How do you get that talented staff back now all of a sudden as your numbers drop off? Because AI wasn’t everything you thought it would be. You’ve replaced a living organism of your organisation with human beings, with thoughts, with feelings, with the ability to be articulate, to be able to, you know, empathise.

AI can’t do that. People, it’s all crap that it gives you, if it’s trying to empathise with you, if it apologises, if it says this, how’s your day? It doesn’t care. It’s just giving you a robotic response that human individuals want from others. It’s not human. And I see the organisations hurting from this more and more so, and you had brought that up.

So tell us. What are some of the specific failures that you see besides the fact of loss of talent and, and obviously potential income or growth for companies?

[00:25:02] Sira: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean that, you’ve mentioned it around judgement is that that abdication, right, is where we then just voluntarily hand over discernment to artificial intelligence, which as you said, like it’s not, it doesn’t feel, it will not be able to, it may at some point claim that it can, uh, but it, but that’s not true.

It just isn’t. The only thing that can is a human being. Um, and it lacks in that context and empathy, right? It can process patterns, it can optimise a workflow. It cannot read the room, as we say, right? And feel the shift in emotional energy in a team. It will never be able to understand like the why, right?

That emotional why behind a decision, because it has none, it cannot feel right, that energetic transfer has no, it has no ability to do that. Um, it doesn’t have a nervous system like a human being. Um, so I encourage leaders to use AI to handle, you know, the heavy lifting of repetitive tasks, data ana, data analysis, uh, but you’ve got to keep human judgement firmly in control, especially during critical moments where morale and retention and engagement are most vulnerable.

And you mentioned sensitivity, um, a little bit ago, and relevance there, as I talk about, it’s that I’m, I am a proponent for highly sensitive leaders and those who are wired naturally for that. But we can all nurture what doesn’t come naturally. So having that sensitive, emotional, intelligent leadership is that traits like deep processing, empathy, noticing nuances, they are more important than ever before because they allow for human judgement and ethical reasoning, uh, that AI cannot mimic.

So we, the winning model is, is, is staying human. It’s certainly become a, a buzzword like human-centered leadership or human-centered design. Uh, and I think we’re gonna see now and experience like how true that actually is. That those are not just buzzwords that HR has been saying and talking about, uh, we, we have to stay human.

The future of work isn’t just about speed. It’s about holding a moral line and using AI to strengthen personal clarity rather than replacing it.

[00:27:30] Dwight: Yeah, it’s, I like that. Right. We are human. It is not give, use it, use it as a tool, a clarity, an assistant. But I, I see so many people, I get sent stuff all the time.

They’re using ai and it’s so noticeable. My point for that is I don’t necessarily educate people. I will tell people that are really close to me. Did you send that? Did you do use AI for it? Oh yeah, I was too busy. How do you know it was ai? And I’ll tell them exactly how I know it’s ai, number one, I know how you communicate.

I’ve read your stuff. When we read things, we read it based on our six inches between our ears, people that are listening or watching, but we develop a pro, we develop that connection to that person without even really realising it until we do realise, like, I have, that’s not you that wrote that. I know that that newsletter, that was not you.

Well, I was a rush. Well, if you’re gonna use ai, review what it writes. Use it as a tool for data, like you mentioned Sierra, and, and then make sure it’s your voice. You are create, you are a brand in yourself. Whether you own a business or you’re personal work in corporate, you as an individual have a brand, a personal brand of how you represent and show up to people.

And you can destroy that overnight with ai. You really can. So quit thinking it can create you more, utilise that as a tool to enhance what you’re doing and just continue on. If it ain’t broke, like they say, don’t fix it. Right. And that doesn’t mean you can’t add new tools. Like I, I’ve found AI to be very powerful, but I’ve also found so much wrong with it too.

Do you think that hr, like you talked about HR departments, do you think that these big companies, are they utilising the conversation in a boardroom? Are they educating their staff about it? Or is it just, here’s a memo, here’s this ai, this is what it can, here’s the bullet points of what it can do with it.

Have fun. Right. Are they, how are, how are companies dealing with ai?

[00:29:37] Sira: I don’t, I don’t think anyone in human resources is happy about the case of change. Uh, and how, and the push to, to do things faster despite long-term consequences. Uh, right. That, that is the department typically, uh, right. Who is on the side of the people and saying, I am getting right either in my inbox or in my office, or I am feeling it as I’m out in an all staff meeting or in the conversation, et cetera.

Like, people are exhausted. Uh, you know, they’re seeing it show up in performance reviews and ratings and what managers are being taxed with. Like, I already couldn’t do my job. I was being already asked to do more with less. And now you’ve just thrown this AI tool leadership team, uh, right. Ultimate decision makers, uh, have said, do this now, uh, and do it fast.

And having not realised the gains for an inattention to the reality of change, right? We are typically, I mean, unless you’ve gone through change management training, education, like that’s your expertise, I can understand, you know, why you’re like, this could be easy. It’s a tool, it’s great. It’s gonna be awesome, right?

And just like go do it. Uh, but when you, when you’ve studied human behaviour, team dynamics, change management, you know, things always take longer than you think they’re gonna take. And we are only gonna go as fast as our slowest team member, and we need literally every single person on board for us to get even close to the outcomes that we’ve said that we want to achieve.

And organisations don’t change. People do, and yet the solutions are applied as if it’s some separate entity, right? Something that, well, we just add this layer to our organisation and the organisation will adopt ai. No people adopt AI or not. And the reasons are far more complex than what we are addressing.

It’s training, right? We can throw training as a solution that is super easy. Uh, and that’s not to me really what’s at stake again, right? It’s the identity of that person shifting, being born apart, uh, the perception of what their future will look like, uh, and that I thought I was going to, you know, do this and that for the next 20 years or so in my career, and now I have no idea what it’s gonna look like.

Uh, and the beliefs, right? And again, emotions that all are then churning, right? As, as a result of those things, um, being threatened.

[00:32:13] Dwight: Well, we as human beings have gut feelings. We have the ability to be in. So, again, I don’t care who’s listening, you can be at a job. You could be in management. You could have your own business.

When we are seen as somebody that is a thought leader or somebody that it can help in an organisation, and all of a sudden we can look at a circumstance and go, Hey, I can remember this in the past. Let’s dial this back. I’m gonna go look at some documents. I’m gonna remember this. And let’s, let’s put this into perspective.

This looks similar. There’s similarities. And, and why I say that is AI doesn’t have that ability. Yes, you can utilise it, you can save processes, create templates so that it, it can remember the next conversation or it does remember certain things, but it can’t remember history. Right, because guess what, it’s only been around two, three years.

What happens if you’re in your job 15 years like Sira’s talking about? And all of a sudden you’re told you can’t be you. This is the new you, this is the new norm. Right? And I can’t even imagine the mental health issues that AI is creating, as you mentioned, for so many individuals, especially with highly sensitive natures.

Right? With brains. Um, I know myself, I’ve had to really ask myself, what is the use of this tool? How is it going to affect people? You know, has it helped me? Has it saved me time? In some regards, it’s cost me more time because the learning curve of what I want to utilise it for and my ability to wanna make sure I protect the end user makes it longer.

But not everybody’s like me. They’re just gonna slu put it in what they want, copy, paste, and walk away. Right? And that really bothers me. ’cause you also talk about, I was just reading in my notes here, you know, you, you make the case that the traits and you talked about it, you know, all of a sudden now our deep processing, our empathy, our sensitivity, all this stuff is being, which, which is a strength, especially in management in organisations that, that, that have supervisors, managers, that is a strength.

It’s not a weakness. Now it’s being said that, hey, we can get rid of all that. Now these decisions will be unemotional. Are you kidding me? We need emotion. We need that gut punch. We need that gut check to make sure that we stay on track. Wouldn’t you agree?

[00:34:40] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:34:40] Sira: Yeah. And I, it’s, there’s, I think there’s kind of a, maybe clarification I wanna make or just a comment on, you know Sure.

Folks with sensory processing sensitivity, those who consider themselves neuro divergent and any of the neuro conditions that, you know, are under that header. Um, the, we are absolutely being taxed by the speed of change. Uh, right. In a way that somebody maybe on the lower end of that sensory processing scale, like may not be as much in part because we are so sensitive to what is happening, not just inside of us, uh, but also around us and how it’s impacting others.

We are, you know, seeing friends and family getting laid off. We’re seeing the disruption on a team. We’re feeling that too. And it’s, it can be hard to distinguish between like my experience and your experience because my, uh, you know, this, this, um, organism right, has a, has a semi-permeable layer, but it’s, it’s actually quite permeable right?

Relative to, to others. But the, what I’m experiencing is that it’s not just this group because of how fast it is happening, because it’s on the heels of this, of a global and right. This pandemic, uh, which is traumatic for everybody that ev everybody, right? No matter their neurological wiring is experiencing.

The intensity of this change. Uh, ’cause even if you can’t pick up on the subtleties in your environment, you’re still ultimately suffering when 10% of the workforce or 20% of the workforce gets laid off, and now you’re managing Right, a team of 20 before you were managing a team of five. Uh, and that’s, so that’s across the spectrum of neurological function.

Like everyone’s suffering. It’s just relative. Um, yeah.

[00:36:27] Dwight: Makes sense.

[00:36:28] Sira: Right?

[00:36:29] Dwight: Yeah. Well, you know, and, and you’re right, everybody is suffering back to what we ta we were talking about in regards to social media and how it, how you have outside influences from other, other countries, both in the US and Canada using AI to cause dissension.

And even the person that as a normal is just somebody that’s employed or at a job, or they’re somebody like my parents that are both 85 that are retired, and they’ll bring up stuff because they get, get into the rabbit hole of watching videos on, you know, Facebook or whatever, and all of a sudden that’s their new standard of knowledge or they don’t even verify it.

Not because they’re bad individuals, my parents or anybody else out there. They start regurgitating information that there’s no basis of verification and, and outside enforce forces are hoping for that. So if, if they’re doing it on a government level, I can imagine corporations are doing it against one another as well.

Have you seen that, uh, as, as a basis where it’s being utilised to hurt companies?

[00:37:38] Speaker 3: Not that, yeah, I that not that I, not that I have seen.

[00:37:43] Dwight: Well, that’s, that’s good because it’s something that I had an individual bring up to me here recently and ask me, you know, how is AI gonna make it so that, you know, my competitors can take me out or can utilise and do things that I can’t do because I’m not really into the technology, I’m just into, this is how I’ve done business.

[00:38:03] Sira: Well, you know, in that way, yes. I mean, competitive advantage, right? Companies are absolutely gonna use whatever tool they possibly can to beat out the competition. Uh, it’s unfortunate that we have this like, really, I call it mutant capitalism’s, kind of aggressive individualism, especially here in the United States, uh, in with our, you know, corporate infrastructure and our, our culture broadly just in America.

It’s like, it’s very individual and it’s very competitive and, and it’s. You need to compete, you need to crush your enemies, right? In order to succeed. And that’s just not the case with the species. Um, actually, we, we, and we know that that’s why we have antitrust laws is because monopolies actually don’t work right?

For the ecosystem of, of industry. We, we need diversity in every location, uh, right. In an ecological system and also in, uh, an economy. Um, but that is the message that people receive. And it is the financial kind of, again, pull that, that, uh, founders organisations have, is that they need to move fast and faster than anybody else.

Um, and, you know, crush, crush your enemies is kind of the, the, uh, the, the messaging that, that, that gets instilled in folks and as opposed to collaboration and partnership and, um, you know, doing, solving problems from, from different angles, from, and even joining forces, right? That, uh, as an organisation instead of squashing somebody else, maybe you could start to merge, right?

And do this thing together. Um, it’s, it’s fascinating the way that that is shaped up here. Uh, you know, given, again, just the biology of humans, we’re the most prosocial species on the planet. We have survived because of our collaborative and cooperative advantage, uh, less so than our competitive advantage.

We’ve got it backwards.

[00:39:57] Dwight: Yeah. I, I appreciate your response. You know, how does this tie into though, because being an HR leader yourself, um, prior, right? Right. Obviously you have a lot of inside knowledge and you’ve, this, I I’ve read stuff that you’ve talked about with, in regards to psychological safety and leadership.

So what does that look like when you go into an organisation and you’re talking to somebody and you, you might hear people about how they’re fearful. How does an HR person, or how does somebody in, in authority give that psychological safety to people when they utilise or introduce AI into the, into the equation?

[00:40:40] Sira: Sure. Yeah. I mean, the first really conversation that I have to have with, uh, leaders is that there is a layer, right? Where the issue, uh, say in your transformation, uh, lives. And it could very well be on that interior level that you’re not identifying, uh, that we are not addressing this. We are addressing this as a, as a technology change only.

And we are addressing the what could be and selling this as this incredible thing that’s gonna do all sorts of great stuff for us. And just like with a merger, uh, or, you know, an acquisition, um, with even a funding ground, uh, things that are good, you still have to address. That somebody is thinking about job security, what does this mean for me?

Right? And job security is the first thing that comes up for like any change ever. I went through, uh, an m and a with a, uh, an organisation in the past and the leadership team executive group is together and there’s like, people are gonna get to travel to another countries. We’re gonna have so many more resources, we’re gonna blah, blah, blah, blah.

And it was like, nobody cares about that. Absolutely. Nobody cares about that. They wanna know if they still have a job and how long they’re gonna have that job, and is their manager gonna change, and what the role and responsibility is gonna look like with this, with this change. Uh, so that can definitely be in there as like the reason why you ultimately made this decision to, uh, right.

Group your, sell yourself to this other entity. But don’t pretend like people haven’t seen, you know, the news with all the mergers and acquisitions that fail and all the slicing and Dyson that happens. Like people are, people are smart. Uh, right. People, people read and there’s a legitimate concern for themselves that we do not pay attention to enough.

Uh, they just assume that like they’re here working for the company. It’s about the company. And this collective thinking is just assumed. And that’s not, some companies have built a really great, uh, you know, container of psychological safety and this reciprocity that yes, I, I give you a wage, but I also know that like, you are here because you have a family to take care of.

And like, that’s actually your priority. Um, you know, there’s, there, there are degrees of, you know, organisational citizenship, uh, right, where somebody actually is willing to do, you know, like whatever it takes for an organisation. And the degree to which that exists in a, in a company is, is directly correlated with how much you’ve given an employee, right?

And how much you, alright, are giving back to them and understand, treating them as a, as a human being that has their own priorities, they have their own values, and they’re going to live and work and lead in accordance with their values, not yours. It’s good to have your values because then you’re gonna hire people that their values align with your values, right?

That is the goal, not that they hold your values. So in any case, that’s, that’s usually the first, uh, to kind of like, actually, um, we need to think about it this way. Conversation that I have with folks because we’ll talk about it initially from a transition tech, you know, tech transition, kind of, you know, tactical prioritisation of change management strategy.

And we get a little deeper, pretty quick and find out that it’s, it’s not that simple.

[00:44:02] Dwight: Yeah. It’s, wow. Yeah. It isn’t that simple. It’s just like I go into companies or I deal with people that, you know. They’ll go in and they’ll, I look at their culture ’cause I walk in and I’m not necessarily there on the level that you would be, but I’m in there just as an individual walking into their business.

And I look around and you see on the wall a, a poster or a frame picture. This is our core values, this is what our company deals with. This is what I, we attest, and I’m looking at it and going, well, about half of those are bs, right? Just because of the company and how, and the people I know within it, and I’m finally experiencing it past the visual or the video calls and I’m attending their organisation and I’m, and I’m hearing things and seeing things that aren’t really true.

So people give lip service all the time on the corporate front. It happens consistently. So with this, you know, what are you seeing? Like, are, are there p are they, they’re giving too much lip service and just expecting the employees to figure it out. What’s the solution to this in regards to communication?

Like we can say this is what should happen, but what are you seeing or what would you adopt in a corporation to say to them, like, listen, this is the how we have to, you have to openly communicate about what’s happening so that your people feel psychologically, you know, safe. Their, their priorities of their family, as you mentioned, are always gonna be first and foremost.

That’s something you’re gonna be concerned about, right? You don’t want to create more tension within your staff. They’re gonna be less productive. Mm-hmm.

[00:45:44] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:45] Sira: Yeah. So the, the goal that I always have in working with a leadership team and an organisation broadly is that it needs to become adaptive. So whether it’s AI change, although that is absolutely right, the focus right now and it’s the hot topic and for good reason, any kind of transformation requires diagnosing across multiple dimensions, leading across multiple levels in order to drive change that lasts.

And my thesis right in my business is that organisations are living systems and they form a collective nervous system. And leadership determines whether the system functions or fractures under pressure. And AI is that, you know, massive pressure that, you know, a lot of organisations are experiencing right now.

And so the outcome of that endeavour is adaptive human systems that can sense, decide and evolve so that people aren’t fighting change, right? That they could perhaps even flourish right in it so long as the conditions right are created for that to happen. And when I say dimensions, uh, every issue lives somewhere across.

Four dimensions. And I look at the whole system. I diagnose the whole system, not just maybe the obvious part. Our AI adoption isn’t working. We’re still in experimentation mode. Like let’s assign training that may not be the answer. Training isn’t always the answer. Um, the dimensions are based on can wilbur’s, uh, uh, integral model.

So there’s an interior, uh, uh, layer, uh, and an individual layer. And that’s where identity perception, beliefs and emotions exist. There’s an interior LA and that’s all subjective, right? That’s, that’s individual. Each of us is gonna have slightly different view, right? And sense of like what’s going on. Um, and then there’s an interior but collective level, which is the culture and trust and meaning and relationships.

And that’s where psychological safety right exists and how you’re, how you’re building that. And the exterior layer is, you know, behave and exterior, uh, individual that is, is behaviour. Uh, and the skills that you have and habits and workload, that’s where that stuff lives. And then finally, exterior, uh, collective, which is systems and structure and processes and resources.

So all four of those dimensions are something that we look at and we find where, where the biggest constraint is. That’s another kind of backend, um, feature of my work is that I, uh, employ the theory of constraints, which is there’s always one constraint and we need to focus the entire system right around eliminating that highest priority constraint before moving on to a next one.

’cause usually that constraint will solve a lot or a lot of related and smaller, uh, constraints. Um, the, the levels that I mentioned is, is, uh, the leadership levels leading self, leading others leading leaders, which is cross-functional leadership and then leading the enterprise and self-leadership. That leading self layer is the foundation across all levels of leadership, right?

We are all leading ourselves. Whether we ever have a formal leadership role, we are, we must lead ourselves. Uh, and every breakdown at a higher level has a self-leadership component. So how are we getting in our own way? What haven’t we addressed internally either on this interior individual level or this interior collective, uh, level.

[00:49:18] Dwight: Yeah. And all our personal stuff comes into play, all our learned behaviours through right from back to our origin to where we are, to, if you’ve been in more than one organisation and even given lip service and not really protected on a psychological level, just made to feel like you’re a digit or a number, go and do your job leave.

We don’t need anything more from you. And then you top off that, all that. Now with ai, um, I can imagine. I don’t know the statistics, but the mental health and emotional health of people around North America, not just like Canada, the US but Europe, et cetera. It, it’s super fragile right now and it kind of makes me extremely nervous as to the health implications.

Like as you mentioned way past in the conversation about people com, you know, killing themselves over some of this stuff. I can see this, ’cause you, you brought, you segued perfectly COVID-19 may be over, but is it really over on the emotional and mental stress of what has caused an organisations, people working from home now being told they they can’t work at home anymore, when really a lot of people that I deal with are more efficient working, they were more efficient, they got more work done because they didn’t have all the false wall jungle, all the communication from other people chattering or, you know, knocking on their, if they have an actual office disrupting them.

Right. So it, it is a very big concern for me and I don’t believe that people are gonna be able to adapt quick enough to keep up to it. Right. So the, so you being a person that specialises and understanding an organisation is a living entity. Your talents and your, I I can see it in a very short period of time.

You are, if you already aren’t, you’re gonna be so busy because people are just gonna, bosses are, you know, are gonna throw up their arms and go, I don’t know what’s going on. Our numbers are down this quarter, our numbers are down this half. We didn’t do much. Well yeah, you did, you threw some, you threw a monkey wrench called AI into your system and you didn’t understand how it was gonna affect the emotional and psychological factors of your staff.

So, you know, I’m not trying to make this a doom and gloom for those watching, listening. I want you to wake up and realise that it is a tool. It is. And, and that where you’re at, maybe some of the things Sira and I have been talking about will actually wake you up to realise that an organisation, because I never really thought about it until you and I met this last time and recorded and I did all the research about you.

What you say is so true. We don’t look at an organisation as being a living organism and we should, we should. Because every single person within that organisation, from the top of the house of cards all the way to the bottom as a human being, they want to know that they’re appreciated. They want to know that their, their work is valued.

Oh, you, you’re cut back. You can go do this other task for us now we’re gonna let AI take care of that. Right. We’re, we’re, we’re gonna so-called promote you. People don’t take it that way, do they?

[00:52:30] Sira: Mm mm And survivor’s guilt is a very real phenomenon that folks who remain in an organisation feel are like, why?

Why am I here? Why wasn’t, why isn’t my boss here anymore? Like, I thought they were great. I really helped. Like they helped me. Um, right. They were all, all the things. Um, so, and you, um, were wondering, or you mentioned about the stats. Uh, I have a stat on my website from, from recent research that the, the burnout industry is $322 billion.

[00:53:01] Dwight: Goodness, I missed that one. Thank you.

[00:53:04] Sira: Yeah. Wow. It’s, yeah, it’s, it’s an industry itself, right? I mean, that’s, that’s an, yeah. Uh, so, and yet those stats exist. It’s, it reminds me of, I mean, just any stats that existed on diversity and how important it was to have, you know, a, to have gender parody and a leadership team, uh, to have, uh, diversity in any, any layer, any flavour right inside of your organisation for creativity and innovative thinking, for critical thinking, for viewing different perspectives, right?

For empathy, emotional intelligence, for, for creating products that actually serve, right. Your diverse clientele and the best way possible. And yet, we don’t act on those things, and yet we, we squash that. Right Now we’re in this, you know, multiple steps back on DEI and ESG and leadership matters, right? We can see in the United States like what that is doing, right?

We get set back when we don’t have leaders who prioritise, uh, what matters.

[00:54:06] Dwight: Yeah. And they’re prioritising, um, their own singular ’cause really, it’s not, it’s not in depth their own singular thought process and projecting it on everybody else. So you add all of that up, um, and then you look at the local leaders of companies.

We are at a, a point in history where it literally, we can define ourselves as a generation or generations that can continue to adapt based on the human condition that we wanna work with one another. We want to have stronger relationships who wanna understand what’s going on with that person at home, right?

Instead of looking at, oh, their production’s kind of off, we’re just gonna replace them, or we’re gonna move them to another department. Then, like you said, you know, people feel sabotaged. They feel like they’ve, they’re not worthy, they’re not appreciated. So, we’ll, we’ll continue on with the last part of our conversation, but.

Those listening are watching, reach out to Sira, like if you have any com, you know, comments that you want to share with, um, her and ask her questions. This is a real problem that’s going on. And we have very few people, at least from what I, there’s probably more than I realised, but that are open enough to put their themselves out there because I guarantee this can be taxing on, on Sira.

Um, you know, but at the end of the day, she’s willing to put her her emotions or hard on her sleeve. She’s willing to put herself out there to criticism, realising that we have an, an, I’m gonna call it what it is, all Boys club that has been running our countries, our corporations, for far too long. And it’s all based on numbers of what they, what’s what do we produce this quarter?

Not looking at what caused us not to produce enough this quarter, blaming everybody but themselves for not really staying in contact with the human condition and the people that they work with. So where do you see, from this point in your career moving forward, how is the best way for, are you just, are you going to, is this a marketing thing that you’re gonna have to do to reach out to companies, or is it just naturally happening that companies are looking for solutions for their, for their lack of production or employee burnout?

[00:56:33] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:34] Speaker 3: Yeah,

[00:56:34] Sira: there’ve been, uh, some, some helpful, interesting, like white papers produced by like McKinsey, uh, you know, like the state of organisations, uh, just at the top of 2026. So, um, that have articulated that, you know, the, the companies, the leaders that focus on the human side of change are gonna dominate the next decade.

I think this is like one of the, you know, titles or subtitles of one of these papers, and they’re all essentially saying the same thing. And what I had to laugh a little bit about that is that like even these organisations who in the rush to, to adopt this thing are, are leading other, other organisations at, at very high prices through change, still fell into the same traps, right.

That everyone else was, and just like doing it way too fast and just throwing it into people’s hands and figure, like, wanting them to figure it out are not realising the gains. Right? Lots of, uh, now data, uh, being reported that companies are not on, on the whole, right. Like the majority of grand majority of organisations not realising the gains of their AI implementations for the lack of attention to the human side of change, that ultimately the pain, right, of you can lay people off, right, when you don’t realise the gains.

Or you think you are, you’re doing this preemptively, but you’ve invested in a thing. You’re like, oh, well I think it’s gonna, you know, allow us to like, reduce 10% of our staff, so let’s just go ahead and do that. Or Right. You’re not realising the gains and you’re starting to panic and you’re going like, you know, finance is saying like, we gotta make a call here.

Uh, and then you dump some of your, your teammates for that reason, that at, at some point you don’t have the people to actually do the thing. They don’t know how to do the thing. The pain will be so great that your, your back is against a wall and you’re like, okay, I guess we’ll pay attention to the people.

Right? I guess, I guess we’ll, uh, we’ll, we’ll hire someone to, to help us with this

[00:58:28] Speaker 4: and

[00:58:29] Sira: maybe we’ll hire some of those people back that we let go. Uh, but at, at some point, yeah, the call comes around, uh, that we don’t have the answers. We over-indexed on this thing, and we need help riding the ship. People aren’t happy, people aren’t just unhappy, they are actively disengaged.

And we’re starting to see that in our numbers in a way that we can’t solve for. We need help. So there’s, that’s a part of human nature, right? To tie degrees. Like we’re, we’re really good at, um, you know, making, we’re really good at, at solving problems or making decisions when our back’s against a wall. So unfortunately, there’s gonna be a lot of pain before finally, right?

Leaders say, okay, my back’s against a wall. I dunno how to solve this problem. No one around me knows how to solve this problem. I gotta bring somebody in and I’m brought in, in those cases. Um, right to, to solve that.

[00:59:23] Dwight: Hopefully it’s not too late.

[00:59:25] Sira: Oh, and hopefully it’s not too late. Uh, and in other cases, uh, there are people who, who like me, you know, have track records inside organisations trying to optimise existing systems, and were literally sick and tired, right?

From doing that and of doing that and of suffering, just chronic institutional betrayal that we’ve chosen to do something differently. And we’re looking forward, you know, the signal of the noise and finding other people like us and using, I, I use a, um, uh, I use different tools to, to find more aligned people.

Um, but I just have been reaching out, of course, to, to people in my network, right? The people who I worked with extensively, the service providers and vendors and, and just collaboration partners and saying, this is what I’m doing now. Do you know someone who is not trying to optimise an existing system, but is actually paradigm shifting, right?

That they’re, they’re building companies or trying to build companies that don’t collapse under pressure by strengthening how they think, decide and lead. Uh, and, uh, I’m interested and, and have been talking more with like the zero to one founder. I like strengthening that early leadership foundation. So those early, you know, decisions are high impact, not just near term, but long term.

Uh, right. So zero to one founders or, or small teams who want that expert guidance early without, you know, the full-time commitment of a strategic advisory partnership. But that’s then kinda my typical model is like founders or executives in growth mode who need a strategic partner to help them scale with clarity, not chaos, and who isn’t motivated by the financial payout.

I talked with a founder who’s on his second startup, and that was a part of our initial conversation. It’s like, I have a really hard time, I’m having a really hard time finding a strategic partner who isn’t motivated by the money. I was like, yeah, like, let’s keep talking about what I’ve done and how I think and what, how I’ve made decisions, you know, until the point that you feel comfortable right with me.

And that we’ve, we’ve found enough alignment, right, to say like yes to each other. Like, we can take as much time as as you want. Uh, but that was clear, right? That there are people who wanna build things differently and there are vampires all around us who would just wanna suck out. Yeah. All our energy.

[01:01:47] Dwight: Yeah, all our energy and resources. Kind of scary though, when I think about what you talked about earlier, about COVID-19, and we’ve talked about how it’s over in some regards, but how is it really, and I look at all the companies that are now, that have been around f for years, even after the, the pandemic’s ended that are starting to collapse, that are pointing right back at the pandemic.

Um, and, and I see that timeline. The reason for this question is, is that timeline gonna be even shorter when it comes to the implementation of AI and what it does. You talked about the zero to one person. That person I could see if they started structuring it correctly and utilise your services, they will take over their competitors.

They may start out initially nervous and oh my gosh, but if they can stay ahead of the curve and not be rolled over by the wave, they’re, that zero to one person is gonna be so much stronger, are they not?

[01:02:49] Sira: Yes. And that is the, you know, the fed marked, uh, model, uh, who, um, really served as like this, the example of what organisation, uh, a CEO founder right, can do to protect the company from, uh, again, like the financial gravitational pull and how Costco then came to be when that board for that CEO founder eventually did just cut him off.

Uh, and then the company was gone in like 18 months. Um, but that CEO founder and I think a senior leader of that Fed Mart, um, uh, executive team then founded Costco. And we know how amazing Costco is, right? Like it’s governance is for longevity and for corporate responsibility. And we’ve got Patagonia too that has even transcended the like for-profit, non-profit nonprofit spheres.

Like as if, you know, they’re not mutually exclusive, right? You, you can do good and still make money, um, or the benefit corporations, right, that have it built into their taxonomy, uh, that they have a responsibility not just to shareholders, but to their employees and their, their customers and the environment.

So it absolutely is possible. There are examples, uh, of organisations that have done this and they are living right to like the 50 and even a hundred year mark because they’ve been designed right that way intentionally from the beginning.

[01:04:08] Dwight: And this was before ai, like you brought up Costco. I wouldn’t have thought of that, but I have read up a lot on Costco and I know a lot of people that have, I know one lady that I’ve known for 30 some years and she’s worked at Costco.

She started as just, you know, stock stalking and then worked at tills. Now she’s in one of the management supervisors and she brags about how great they teach or per me the culture is and how they treat them properly and they get paid accordingly. And they don’t feel, because I’ve asked some of them like you, you never thought of going anywhere else because I have clients that work for him as well.

No. Why would we, to go to somewhere to make a little bit more money to have what we don’t know the culture or we get told what it’s gonna be like. But here I know what it’s like. I’ve been living it and I, and I didn’t realise that, you know, even yourself would, would think of Costco as somebody that is very forward thinking.

I know, like I said, just conversations and stuff I’ve read, I thought, my goodness, I didn’t realise how forward thinking this company is. So really AI isn’t going to hurt them on a service basis. They probably will enhance some of their, their analytics of data, but they’re, why aren’t more companies like Costco?

Like, I just, I don’t know if you have the answer, but why? I look at people that work for Walmart and complain about it constantly in Canada, right? I look at people that work for other organisations and we’ll get into all their names, but they’ll, they’ll tell me, and a lot of it has to do with the fact it wasn’t set up correctly as you mentioned.

[01:05:46] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:47] Sira: Yeah. My, and there’s, I, I do have an opinion on this, and it’s, it’s part of my sure of research, you know, in, in neuroscience and human behaviour and systems thinking and, you know, philosophy and just a whole lot of disciplines that, you know, if we understand that, you know, the container, right? The environment has so much to do with the choices that we make, that we entered this world with, you know, part of our personality, because that’s genetic.

And then, and that’s about 50%, that’s like right chance that you’ve got half and half, uh, is what we know to date about how personality forms. And so our, our earliest messages, right? Like what did our parents do for a living and where were they working and what were the messages they were sending us to our educational system, and then our friends and those early social networks and, and their parents, and then our communities, and then our countries, and what, what that, uh, you know, um, environment is, is reinforcing and depending on all of those factors, uh, right, the, the pressure to go a certain way, the predefined path is so strong.

And the financial, I call ’em the financial, like gravitational pulses to like move fast and break things and to prioritise self over other, as opposed to an integrative negotiation with both that you can have both, right? Like that is not being taught, uh, broadly, right? Widely, uh, you know, in mainstream, uh, again, esp especially where I am, right?

In, in the United States in particular and, and not in Silicon Valley with the VCs and the PEs. And in that, that monetary model of you need to move as fast as you can to make as much as you can so you can make money for me, right? This, so that environment is, is difficult for any individual to break from when that’s all that you are receiving all day long since forever.

But we also have neuroplasticity and we also do have the freedom of choice, and we, we can choose to do something differently. Um, I take people through the, to, to be able to do that and not become completely ungrounded, right? And then just revert back, right, to something that’s known or feel safer. Um, I, I take them through a process called Align, where we go through and those dimensions too, right?

And we discover like, what, what messages did you receive and how did that form your identity? Right? And what are these different parts of you that are telling you that you have to do it this way or what, or like, what is the fear? What is underneath that? And to get at those perceptions and those beliefs to then be able to look at it plainly without judgement

Without initially trying to change anything. Like, we just want to assess completely, right, this internal operating system and why we might be, uh, you know, inclined to make certain decisions and why we have, uh, to then move to, well, how do we liberate, right? How do we let go, um, think again, the framework, al uh, how do we, how do we let go of some of these beliefs, some of these perceptions, some part of our identity.

And then integrate is how do we then bring something new in? ’cause the brain does not like to just let go of something without replacing. It tends to freak out. So how, what are we replacing it with, right? Whether it’s a habit, right? Let’s replace it with a, with a better coping mechanism or, uh, a new way of thinking about this thing or about ourselves.

And then what are our self-regulation techniques and ground, right? How are we staying connected, right to these decisions that we’ve made for ourself and the practises we have that when that vampire comes around or when that the environment that you’re in the context right, tells you that thing that you don’t wanna do anymore.

Right? How are you staying connected? And that is all about navigating in alignment with your purpose, right? Your mission, your values, uh, and that we repeat that, right? We, you align all throughout the day and all throughout your life. So that’s the process that I work through for folks too, to help protect.

I I love

[01:09:51] Dwight: that. I love that because you talk about our purpose and, and the alignment principles and practises that you’ve created to help people. And to me, like you want to figure out what makes people tick. And it goes back for me and my, my industry and my career coaching people always goes back to, okay, you told me all your problems, your numbers and all this issues.

Let’s talk about your other monsters in your life. What do you mean? What about your life monsters? What happened when you were growing up? What happened at this last job you were at for eight years? What made you decide to leave? Trying to get down to the core of what is holding them there? What is holding them back?

What’s holding, you know, from leaving or to change their company if they’re one of the main key holders? And I just find there’s a lot of commonality between what you and I are talking about. People don’t give enough attention to their past, right? And that past could be a month ago, it doesn’t even have to be a lifetime ago, right?

People listening. It can be a month ago that you had something that is affecting you today and you didn’t give it enough attention back then because you were never wired to understand. Right. The living organism of an organisation or, or, or where you fit within it. Right? And then as you mentioned, you got the leaders that are just talking about money.

They don’t care as a house of cards that they have of a few of the cards fall down at the bottom. They’re just pushing somebody else in there to hold it up. They’re right, and they lose good talent because now they’re still getting good numbers. But eventually, I, I see a lot of companies that are gonna collapse.

Big name companies, right? Look at the fall of, and this isn’t necessarily AI related, but look at the fall of Sears, right? Look at the fall of, of all these different businesses that have gone to the wayside. Look in Canada, one of the oldest corporations in the world as a running business, the Hudson Bay Company is no longer why they kept their culture the same, right?

Trickle down effect. Just enough to keep the house of cards from collapsing, but not enough to really care or to humanise their business as a living organism. So what you’re talking about, I think, my gosh, if some of these companies could have had somebody like you teaching them, or even if it had even existed back then, but thank goodness there’s people like you out there, there’s gonna be enough zero to one people and enough current organisations that will be saved because you’re able to make them think outside the box.

[01:12:34] Sira: That is the goal. Yeah. Is that it’s also why I’ve always really liked working with emerging leaders in internally in my internal roles, is that I really loved developing the up and comers because the plasticity right, is greater, uh, for all of us. As we get older. We tend to get, you know, a little solidified in our, in our ways and we’re more resistant to, to influence.

Um, and we, this is, there’s also data on this that, uh, the, the more we ascend in, in, in role formal leadership roles, the less, uh, um, empathetic we become. We start to think that we got here because of just us, right? Just ourselves and our own hard work and what we sacrificed, et cetera, to get there. And we forget like how many other people contributed to our success.

Um, but you can, even though that is a tendency, uh, it’s self-awareness, right? Is is the crux of the matter. Like you can develop, uh, self-awareness around these things and educate yourself. Like you can absolutely protect yourself from these contextual environmental headwinds that are gonna challenge you to do something differently than the default path.

And it’s possible

[01:13:48] Dwight: Absolutely. Self-awareness is something I coach and talk about all the time. And those that talk, hopefully you’re doing the walk, right. If you’re telling people do all this stuff, hopefully you can prove through your actions, not just your words, because the, the form of leadership where people say, do what I say, not what I do.

That’s dead. That’s like raising our children that way. That doesn’t work. That didn’t work either. And it backfires on you. So if you raise a culture of your, your human living organism that way, and then you throw in even more things, like, my gosh, I can, I can’t even imagine how the psychological, um, industry with psychologists and psychiatrists, how the burden is on them and how there’s not enough people out there that are helping with mental health challenges that are stemmed right from their, their learned behaviours from their life, which they took into their organisations.

They feel like a place card they don’t really feel like they’re wanted or listened to. And I just, I literally, I pray for people that you have that self-awareness. Where are you at in your career? Where are you at in your job? If you’re a boss, do you look around? Do you notice human behaviour? Do you look at the psychological, what people are talking about?

Do you look how they walk? Are they slumped over? And people say, well, why do you worry about that? Because the human condition is something we should all strive to understand because the more we understand Sira and how she’s reacting, her response is her body language. Is she leaning forward? Is she crossing her arms?

The better relationship we have, the, the stronger the organisational chemistry and the structure is, and, you know, work on that. Being self-aware, now that you have that AI portion that we’ve been talking about in a self-aware, be self-aware of that. How is it affecting you? Are you courageous enough to go talk to your boss above you?

Hey, this is what I’m seeing. Don’t be kneejerk about it. Use self-awareness on yourself and then start being self-aware about those around you. What have you done that’s created some of that? What could you do better? Who can you communicate with? You have nobody. Well, guess what? Sira has a website that you can go to, right?

Lead north of normal.com. Go check it out, right? I highly recommend it. This has been, it may seem like it’s all over the place, but you know, there’s even more things that we could discuss. But thank you again for coming on. I’m gonna ask you one last question, and the value that you’ve given me from first episode to this episode, just getting to know you for me, is really invaluable because it’ll help me communicate better with the corporations, with the companies, with individuals that I deal with, that work within these companies.

It, it, I constantly am self-aware that I, I need to grow, I need to continue to learn. I need to stay ahead of that wave instead of getting crushed by it. And people like you. I’m grateful for. Thank you so much.

[01:17:01] Sira: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

[01:17:03] Dwight: So the last question, we never did this in the first episode because we just, the timing and everything was just so abrupt.

So I apologise for that. But I ask everybody this question in my episodes. If you could leave one message with a leader listening right now who is quietly doubting whether they’re built for this, who keeps trying to lead like everyone else and wondering why it is costing them so much, what would you want them to hear?

[01:17:33] Sira: I would want, I would want everyone to trust themselves more. I think self-trust is highly underrated. Uh, not talked about enough, not understood, uh, that you do have a kind of knowing, uh, inside of you. ’cause there’s so much information from our experience that’s just automatically sent to the subconscious.

So we’re working really with this much information, with our like, logical mind, but your nervous system is just picking up on so much more that that’s where that intuition, gut feeling, right? Like I just sense something else. And like, you may not be able to have a logical explanation for that yet, but to trust that instinct and follow it right?

By asking questions like of yourself doing research, like just exploring that more. That’s part of the process for developing self-trust, which is necessary for valuing yourself enough to know that you can make decisions that are different from the default path, whatever you’ve been taught, uh, that that is something that I’ve learned.

I’ve, I’ve developed it, I’ve certainly fallen flat on my face and then picked myself back up again. Right? It’s, it’s a process. It never ends. Um, but, uh, that’s what I would leave leaders with is that self-trust cultivating that. And, uh, that is what then increases your consciousness, uh, and your ability to wield the natural gifts that you have within everything you learn throughout your life as, as the best leader you could be.

[01:19:12] Dwight: Wow. What a great final message. Thank you for sharing that. Um, so across both of these conversations, what strikes me the most is that you’ve not been asking people to become something. They are not. You have been asking them to stop pretending to be something they were never designed to be in the first place.

That has fundamentally different conversation that most leadership development offers, and I think it is one that is well long overdue for people to hear. And again, I thank you for these two, uh, fabulous episodes and all the knowledge you’ve shared. It’s only, it’s, it’s only a scraping the surface of obviously what you can help people with.

And hopefully it’s enough to create that self-awareness that. Questioning. Right. Don’t question, question yourself, but do something. Don’t, don’t stew in it. Take some action. Is there any last words that you’d like to share or, you know, to wrap up the show before I wrap? Say my last stuff?

[01:20:13] Sira: Yeah. I mean, in short, stay human.

[01:20:17] Dwight: Love it, love it. Uh, you know, we should all have that as as little stickers or, or posters, right? Right on the wall. Right? And, and I tell people all the time when if you do stuff like that, you know you’re worthy. Some people’ll have it and after a while they’re visually blind, they don’t see it anymore on their door going out to their garage or whatever, or their outside door to their backyard.

Move stuff around, right? Utilise little things like that. It may seem cheesy, but hey, if cheesy works, cheesy works, do it. Right. Call it, whatever people can call it. Whatever you want, I call it, on keeping that self-awareness switch turned on and never shutting it off, right? So do those little things. Again, thank you so much for coming on.

I really appreciate your time. I look forward to further conversations in the future.

[01:21:09] Sira: Absolutely. Thank you.

[01:21:11] Dwight: So for everyone listening across both parts, if any of this felt like it was describing you, that recognition is worth paying attention to, the way your brain works is not a problem to fix. It may be exactly what people around you need most.

Once you understand how to utilise it, Sierra, officer Free Chemistry, call through her website, which I mentioned earlier, lead north of normal.com, no pressure, no obligation, just a real conversation about where you are and how she might help. That is a worthwhile step, right? Take that first baby step, never sit back and think, I can’t change, right?

I believe we can change to the day we take our last breath, and that is how I’m living my life and I believe Sira is as well. So, you know, is there any other way people should reach out to you besides your website that I’ve given? I should ask that one last question,

[01:22:07] Sira: um, on a number of other channels.

YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, north of Normal by Sierra Laurel

[01:22:14] Dwight: and are for those new to the Give a Heck podcast, go to give a heck.com. Go to the top HIT podcast. You will see very detailed show notes that I do, um, for my guess, which will show all their social media and literally one stop shop. So you don’t have to pull over and be writing stuff down.

Just go check. Just go check out the website. And, uh, if you’re that type of person that’s nervous because I don’t do no leaders like that, and you’re nervous about wanting to reach out to here, reach out to me. I’ll help you make a connection. Right? Don’t sit and wonder anymore if there’s. If there’s a possibility of change in your life, in your organization’s life, right?

It is out there. So to our listeners and viewers, thank you. We did not take your time lightly. We appreciate your investment to want to change and grow. If this two part conversation resonated with you, please share it. When you share an episode, it helps this message reach more people so they too can give a heck and live with purpose and intention.

Please subscribe to the Give a Heck Podcast and your favourite platform, and leave a comment or review. Again, it helps with the algorithms, make it so that more people see it, especially this great information that Sierra has given us. Until next time, live life on purpose, and not by accident. Accident.

And remember, it’s never too late to give a heck.