Gary Lloyd has led organizational change initiatives for nearly thirty years. Over the last decade, he has also helped professionals make personal and career changes as co-chair of the Warwick Business School mentoring programme and as a steering committee member for its mentoring program. He spent most of his career in banking and financial markets. However, through his consulting and coaching work, he has also worked with clients in manufacturing, construction, logistics, food processing, and IT services. He's a volunteer steward at Shakesspeare's Globe Theatre in London and a volunteer coach for staff at St. Christopher's Hospice in London.
Gary has developed Leadership Skills Lab, a prototype interactive platform powered by ChatGPT to help you practice and refine your leadership skills through engaging role-playing scenarios.
A Quote
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
About The Boler College of Business at John Carroll University
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
Gary Lloyd has led organizational change initiatives for nearly thirty years. Over the last decade, he has also helped professionals make personal and career changes as co-chair of the Warwick Business School mentoring programme and as a steering committee member for its mentoring program. He spent most of his career in banking and financial markets. However, through his consulting and coaching work, he has also worked with clients in manufacturing, construction, logistics, food processing, and IT services. He's a volunteer steward at Shakesspeare's Globe Theatre in London and a volunteer coach for staff at St. Christopher's Hospice in London.
Gary has developed Leadership Skills Lab, a prototype interactive platform powered by ChatGPT to help you practice and refine your leadership skills through engaging role-playing scenarios.
A Quote
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
About The Boler College of Business at John Carroll University
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today, I am very, very excited for this conversation. I have a returning guest, Gary Lloyd, who has led organizational change initiatives for nearly 30 years. Over the last decade, he has also helped professionals make personal and career changes in his role as a member of the Warwick Business School's executive coaching panel. He is a steering committee member for its mentoring program. He spent most of his career in banking and financial markets. However, through his consulting and coaching work, he also worked with clients in manufacturing, construction, logistics, food processing, and IT services. He is the author of 'Gardeners Not Mechanics: How to cultivate change at work’. If you have not listened to our first conversation, please feel free to pause and check in with that. And there's a couple of other things, recently, Gary is now the co-chair of the Warwick Business School’s mentoring program. He's a volunteer steward at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. So, in post-pandemic, he's returning as one of the volunteer coaches for staff at St. Christopher's Hospice in London. Now, Gary, we've never spoken about this, but it's kind of interesting. I have a colleague that I see at the International Leadership Association often, and his mother had passed away. At one of the conferences, we were kind of talking about this, it had recently occurred at the time. And we were talking about hospice. And, for a while, we went back and forth about this potential paper of kind of ‘the last leader,’ because those individuals who work in hospice, they are guiding families, they are guiding the patient towards this ultimate kind of point in time. And it's just God's work. Whatever that means for them, I’m not putting any version of God on anyone, but they're earning karma points. (Laughs)
Gary Loyd 1:50
Yeah, it's amazing. It’s not great for audio, but I was nodding vigorously while you were saying that. The people there are incredible and the hospice is a really light, airy place. I think, people, when they think about hospice, they're quite surprised when they arrive. Particularly in London, they think of an old Victorian building where people go to die, and everybody's going around with long faces. But the hospice is attempting to put life in the time that people have left. They don't do it because it's the best-paid job in the world, they do it because of a sense of purpose. We've got beautiful gardens there, the staff are fantastic. There's a lot to be learned about leading because there's a lot to be learned about listening. I think that listening, for me, is the key skill of leadership.
Scott Allen 2:42
Wow. I was just listening this morning to a book, ‘The Art of the Impossible.’ I don't know if you've come across this.
Gary Loyd 2:49
No, I haven’t.
Scott Allen 2:50
Steven Kotler. And it's in the vein of ‘Range’ by Epstein, which was another interesting book, but it's all about how some of these individuals who were working at the highest levels, some of these extreme athletes, potentially, like an Alex Honnold, a climber, or some of these big wave surfers. There's been this avalanche of records, and what we previously thought was impossible now is possible. And so, it's a really, really interesting book. Gary, I have no clue why I got on this.
(Laughter)
Gary Loyd 3:24
That's fine. That's fine. Like the last time that you and I spoke - I enjoy these conversations. And I'm already relaxed, even though I'm speaking, potentially, to your millions of viewers, you've already put me at ease. It's a great skill.
Scott Allen 3:42
How did I get on ‘The Art of the Impossible’? How did I get there?
Gary Loyd 3:45
I don’t know. We got there from hospice, and leading, and listening.
Scott Allen 3:48
And yes, there's this really interesting component in that book about listening. And the importance of active listening is foundational. And you said something a couple of moments ago, that is, when I think of you, I think of the word ‘curiosity.’ My sense of you is that you are curious by nature. And where I'm excited to take this conversation today is really around your curiosity around AI, and some of these large language models like ChatGPT. In my universe, it's so interesting to observe, Gary, it's so interesting to observe. It's, oh my gosh, ChatGPT is kind of the underbelly, and how it's going to ruin education, it's going to ruin writing, and it's going to ruin… And, of course, it's a tool. Of course, it's the internet. It's not perfect, just like human beings. So, you have to understand all of those things. But it's fascinating.
I was with an organization the other day, and we were brainstorming, and I said, “Well, let's see what ChatGPT says. It's an organization that's trying to move from 90% grants and 10% funding by gifts, how do we make a shift to 85% grant funding to two major gifts being 15%? What are 50 things we could try, one sentence each?” And ChatGPT just produced 50 ideas in probably… It may have been 20 seconds. It was just incredible. So, this tool has a purpose, this tool has benefits. And, as I've followed you on LinkedIn, you've been experimenting in a really, really nice way with this tool. So, tell me about how you've experienced some of these innovations and the opportunities that you see because you're seeing some really cool things.
Gary Loyd 5:35
Let me talk about some things that I've created using it first because that might stop the audience from wandering off while I go through the journey. “How did I get there?” And start yawning and going, “Oh, when is this guy going to get to the point?” So, I will tee it up by saying that I started off as a skeptic because there was so much talk about AI and people saying, “AI…” And, in my head, I'm going, “This is just simple automation.” We've been doing this for 30 years, and, in fact, I've got the latest copy of Harvard Business Review here. And they're talking in there about how people respond when they know a decision has been made by AI, when that's positive, and when that's negative. And they're talking about loans, bank loans. Hey, we were doing credit scoring on bank loans 30 years ago, and I'm sure all the other banks were. So, one of the problems that comes with this, so you get skeptical about it, is that everything that already exists in the world gets badged as AI. Any automation, anything. And then there were other things like massive datasets and analyzing massive datasets. Well, big data. We had that, we've done that. Was that AI? I don't know if it was AI. So, I'm still sitting there on audio, I'm leaning back, maybe I can make myself faint. I'm leaning back, going, “No, come on. What is this?” And then there was machine learning. Now, it starts to get really, really interesting, but why outside our pockets in terms of resources that we've got access to. The universities, big companies like IBM and Google, mammograms, things like that. Really interesting, but not something we could access. November last year, end of November last year, ChatGPT drops. And at first, I ignored it and then I thought, “Oh, okay, I better go and have a look.” And I was helped in this by one of your guests. My journey is based on three of your guests. Specifically, Cal Al-Dhubaib (I hope I pronounced his name vaguely right), Tom Kolditz, and Theo Dawson. All have influenced what I've done. So, I went off, and I started playing around with ChatGPT. Now, I'll come back to what I found because it might be helpful for other people who are also playing around. What I ended up doing was creating an app using what's called a no-code platform. So, essentially, it's fancy flowcharts, so you don't write any programming. And I found that you could plug into the API, the API is the plumbing beten IT systems, you could plug into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or GPT, which is the engine that sits behind ChatGPT really easily. And it took me a week to knock something up to create a chatbot. And what this chatbot does is, if you will, a coaching flight simulator. So, if you're a coach, like one of the things I think is quite difficult about coaching is asking good questions. You get to a point, and you go, “Oh, what am I going to say next? How on earth am I going to add some value to this conversation?” I'm sure it doesn't happen to you, Scott.
Scott Allen 9:03
Never. No, no. I'm never sitting here saying, “What should I do now?” (Laughs)
Gary Loyd 9:07
So, it doesn't happen to you, it happens to me and some of the lower-grade guys, and girls and everything. So, I created a coaching simulator. So essentially, you go on there, and you have a conversation with a coachee. And it's ended up that there are three levels of difficulty because people said, initially, it was too easy. The coachee was too insightful because this coachee was ChatGPT, he knows everything. “Oh, yeah. Well, maybe I'm stressed out because of that problem, and maybe that's caused by this thing over here, and that's linked systemically to this other thing here.” And then the coach is left going “What do I ask now?” So, they said, “Can you make it more difficult?” So I have three levels of difficulty in the coaching simulator now. And the top level one, but again, I'm going to fold my arms, imagine I'm sitting here folding my arms, and the top level one introduces itself and the coach says, “Hi, nice to meet you.” And it says something like, “I don't believe in coaching. I don't know why I'm here. I'm only here because I've been sent.” And then it's up to the coach to try and work through that level of difficulty. The one at the junior one, enthusiastic about coaching, much easier to do. So, that's the coaching function that's there at the moment. So, we'll come back to how I did this. The next one is about giving feedback. So, that's the roleplay about where you have to give feedback. So, it's a little bit of teeing up with a case study. And if people are not familiar with this, it’s a chatbot, you see them on lots of websites. You sit there, you type, it types back. It’d be very easy to hook speech into that, by the way, just haven't bothered to do it so far. But at the moment, it's just text which has its benefits because you get some thinking time, right? If you're trying to learn. So, that's learning how to give feedback. The third one is presentations, where it does something different. And there, in presentations, it acts like a tutor. Now, it's not presentations in the sense of knocking up PowerPoint slides. That’s one of the things that people are doing with AI, which I think is less than impactful, which is they’re automating stuff that already exists rather than rethinking how you do it.
Scott Allen 11:18
Yes.
Gary Loyd 11:19
So, people are not necessarily… Some are, but if you go back to when the internet came along, Amazon were rethinking the business model. A lot of people were using it to automate what they already do. And there are loads of AI's, quotes, “AIs” out there at the moment that will automate slide production. Can you think of a greater place in hell than something that produces even more flashier PowerPoint slides? This is a terrible thing. People say, “What's the downside of AI?” I say the downside of AI, apart from bioweapons and general risk to humanity, is PowerPoint slides and lots of them.
Scott Allen 11:57
(Laughs) The greatest threat.
Gary Loyd 12:03
So, what this does is, it takes… The said person goes on there and says, “I want to do a presentation.” And the AI will say, “Well, tell me about the audience.” And if the audience is too general, the AI will say, “No, come on, let's be a bit more specific because then we can really focus in.” And then, what's the key point for me about presentations? And the key point about our conversation today, actually, I'll come back to it, which is what's the outcome you want? What do you want people to do? Don't say, “I want you to understand how X works.” What do you want them to do with that understanding? When they walk out of the room, when they walk away from the screen… And I hope that today we can give some people some to-dos at the end of this. We have to remember, Scott, though.
Scott Allen 12:49
Yes, yes, I'm writing it down.
Gary Loyd 12:49
I put it written down, so you write down as well. What do we want people to do at the end? So, what do we want people to do? It takes them through that step. And then, it says, “Well, what works really well is story, so let's come up with a narrative for your presentation. Would you like me to suggest some narrative models?”
Scott Allen 13:07
Wow.
Gary Loyd 13:09
Generally, the user says yes. And it generally gives it a choice of about three that I've pre-loaded it with, which is inevitably the hero's journey. Summer Nancy Duarte stuff, Barbara Minto; Pyramid principle.
Scott Allen 13:22
Great. Yes.
Gary Loyd 13:24
So then, so it's okay. I hope you did do that. And because it knows lots of stuff, it’s not just completely passive, it can make suggestions. And it can be asked for suggestions. And then, it says, “Well, now let's think about…” The AI says to the user, “Let's talk about the language,” because the language you use is quite important.
Scott Allen 13:42
I love it, Gary, I love it.
Gary Loyd 13:45
“Would you like me to make some suggestions?” And so, then, of course, you and I were talking pretty sure about you were in Greece, right?
Scott Allen 13:51
Yes.
Gary Loyd 13:52
Yeah. So, where did it go with language, and rhetoric? Oh, yeah, this is fantastic. So, let's bring in some classical rhetoric. It works. Go read Robert Cialdini's rhetoric works. It's absolutely brilliant. So, then it gets to that point. And this is just this little app I built. Do you know how long this took me? It took me two days to build this thing, I’ll explain why later on. And then it says, “Would you like me to tell you the tricky questions you might get when you do this presentation?”
Scott Allen 14:21
Wow. It scenario plans potential questions?
Gary Loyd 14:25
And gives you the answers. So now, here's a to-do for anybody that's listening. We'll come back to this again. This is something that I did... I was listening to the last podcast, I'm sorry, I can't remember the name. I listened to it today when you were talking about improv.
Scott Allen 14:40
Yes, yes. Chris Esparza.
Gary Loyd 14:43
Yeah, that's right. And he was talking about play. So, this, for me, is play, it's not a commercial venture. This is up on the web. If people want to go and play with this, we'll put it in the show notes, and I'll read out the URL at the end. But if you want to go and try out any of those three things, listeners, I'd be really grateful for the feedback because I can improve it because it's very easy. One of the things that I've learned from doing this, from getting my hands dirty with it rather than pontificating from up in the gallery, is that you can iterate really fast. You can do things really fast. And dare I say, the way to do this is like a gardener; you cultivate, you try, you see if it works, you adjust, you plant it there. Maybe you have to stake some of it, what I mean by staking is, like, for it to climb up, you have to put in some guardrails and stuff like that. So, that's what I've built so far. Now, as I've just hinted, I have a book, as you know, Scott, which I talked about last time, called ‘Gardeners Not Mechanics: How to Cultivate Change at Work,’ which I think is ever more relevant now in the age of AI because it's unpredictable, it doesn't do the same thing twice. You won't go on. That thing of going through the steps, it'll take you through the same steps every time. But it won't use the same language, it won't say the same thing every time, it will say slightly different things. So, at the moment, I'm working on a course based on the book. So, the way the course is probably going to work is that there'll be a video that introduces a topic. And then, the AI will turn up as a tutor and will have a conversation with the person about what they've watched. If there's a skill involved, there will be some skills practice. This is where Theo Dawson comes in. Ever since Theo… Do you remember, you repeated this, Scott? I'll never forget this when you said skill is something you can practice. And a micro-skill is something you can practice in the moment. Wow. Fantastic. And she's got"V-Col" that learning cycle. Do you remember?
Scott Allen 16:50
Oh, yes.
Gary Loyd 16:52
So, I've been obsessing all the time about how do I use AI… Think about dentists being lectured on dentistry, and stuff like that. But being lectured at that doesn't make you a good dentist, that was that's your point, you have to get out there and practice. So, it'll be some skills practice. And then, the AI will lead the user through some quizzes, short discussions, some micro-learning, some reflections, and stuff like that. So, what I'm trying to do is to do an AI-first training course. But the more I think about it, the more I think the role that the AI can play is that of a tutor. So, you're not in a lecture theater, it's one-to-one. You sit down with somebody close by and say, “Hey, listen, we're going to talk about change leadership,” or, “We're going to talk about leadership.” Well, change leadership, leadership. What is leadership if it's not 'change' leadership? The world's turning a thousand miles an hour on the equator, nothing stands still. Even you and I are not sitting still as we’re going.
Scott Allen 17:56
We’re flying right now.
Gary Loyd 17:57
We are. We are moving.
Scott Allen 18:01
I think it’s 56,000 kilometers per hour around the sun. So yes.
Gary Loyd 18:04
There was some divergence from what I said I was going to do, which was to stick to what I've produced. But I think it's interesting if it whets people's appetite about the sorts of things you can do. And here's an offer to your listeners. So, this is me playing, it's not a commercial venture. If somebody finds this interesting, I've built a framework, if you want to come along and use what's already there, that's fine. But if you'd like to collaborate with me and build something for your students, or your company, I'm not going to charge you money - the feedback is what I need, then anybody listening, any of the millions listening to this now, just hit me up and see if we can produce something that's interesting. So, that's where I've got to.
Scott Allen 18:48
Well, Gary, I love it. I absolutely love it. I think it's such an interesting… Okay, so this notion of a simulator. I had a wonderful conversation with Jonathan Reams and David Day a few episodes back. So, listeners, please have a listen to that because we were kind of pontificating, well, how could AI help develop leadership? How could AI support leader education? And you're creating, in some ways, on one end, kind of a simulator, or a coach, or a tutor, which I think is just absolutely wonderful. We're potentially creating a course that, again, we're not going to replace the educator, but for certain components, it's a much more active experience for the user than simply watching a video and maybe answering a couple of questions. I can see so many potential opportunities and so many different topics. During the pandemic, I had started a venture with a friend called Captovation where we were trying to provide presenters… So think about this, take a presentation on Zoom. Someone's looking at the eye of the camera a certain percentage of the time and using hand gestures a certain percentage of the time. People are speaking in a certain speed. People are using words that communicate enthusiasm, or energy, or sadness, or disgust. People are engaging in all of these behaviors, and we can track that with artificial intelligence, we can track that with computers and provide people with feedback to say, “Hey, you said, ‘um’ 77 times, and you looked at the eye of the camera 10% of the time.” There are some opportunities here. So, I see this kind of convergence of, even in that space of presentation skills, where now you're adding on this component of, “Hey, let's help you build and think through how do we design a presentation?” And I love the fact that you have the hero's journey, you have the Minto Method, you have all of those different kinds of approaches or structures baked in. But think about the possibilities here because we could not only help someone build the structure, we could use that other AI to help design the slides.
(Laughter)
Scott Allen 20:56
And then, we can help people practice. And now, all of a sudden, you have this really interesting suite of resources or interventions. What I always loved about the Captivation system was that I could say to students, after looking at their outline and looking at their slide deck, I could say, “Go practice it ten times. And when you hit these benchmarks, when you're only at an average of two space fillers per minute, you're speaking at this pace, you're on time, I'll watch it live.” So, it became this practice field, Gary, in a very beautiful way so that I'm not watching their first presentation. I'm watching the eighth version, not the first. So, not only can we potentially use our time better, but we can potentially accelerate learning. I love how you're thinking about it. And my mind is in so many different places. Think of negotiation. We can go to so many different topics - difficult conversations, as you said.
Gary Loyd 21:54
Delegation.
Scott Allen 21:56
Yes.
Gary Loyd 21:56
Just do a mind map of management skills. I've got one, and you pick up those skills… There are some things that are difficult to do, active listening, because pausing is so important. It's very, very difficult to simulate pausing, but things like delegation, you can do a certain amount of listening, but a lot of leadership skills, you can practice in that environment. By the way, the functionality already exists within open AI’s GPT to interpret pictures, it's just not released yet, it's been demoed. So, going back to your thing about slide presentation, the functionality is already there, though not publicly released, to go through that slide presentation and read it.
Scott Allen 22:40
Wow. I was coaching an individual in my community the other day, a physician who’s writing a presentation, and this individual sent me their initial deck. And I said, “Okay, the first task, cut the number of words in half.” We could automate that, potentially, and build the structure and the incredible structure from the beginning. I love it. I love how you're thinking about this, and I love that you have, well, a couple of things: spent the time to explore, learn, build, and tinker. And then I also love that offer to listeners that I see an opportunity. There's an MBA, and this is an interesting development in the education space, Gary, there's an MBA, and it's an organization called quantic.edu. $9,600 MBA, mobile-first.
Gary Loyd 23:30
Oh, okay.
Scott Allen 23:31
They create the class, the class is the class, and it's a mobile-first. I think their average students’ ages are 35 to 44. So, these are individuals who have kids, and many of them have STEM backgrounds so they didn't have a business background, but now they want an MBA because they want to move into an administrative or leadership role in their organization, but they don't necessarily want to go somewhere two nights a week for two years. It makes sense, perfect sense. So, I see, at least as you're speaking, how could a tool like you're building and developing be incorporated into an experience like that? It would make it so much more active in certain ways, so much more beneficial than just passively consuming videos and podcasts. And it makes it much more active. So, I see the potential, I really do.
Gary Loyd 24:21
We know that tutoring works. The top two universities in the UK are Oxford and Cambridge. And one of the reasons that they're so successful with their students is to have a tutorial system. A lot of that teaching is in very small groups, effectively, one-to-one. And one of the reasons I wanted to get my hands dirty doing this, and I just… All I did was I went on to YouTube, I went to the University of YouTube. What happened was, actually, I was on ChatGPT, and I said to ChatGPT, “Is there an API?” And it said, “Yeah, here's how you do it.” And that directed me towards YouTube, and I went on YouTube. And I said, “How can you create something without writing much code?” Do you know, to write the coaching one, to write the first iteration of the coaching one, I should say, took me a week in between walking the dogs, meditating, going to the gym, playing chess very, very badly. It took me about a week, and 70% of that time was spent learning the platform. The rest of the time is messing around with the instructions you give to the AI. Now, here's a really key thing that I found out from doing this, well, two key things. The first key thing was that ChatGPT is just a wrapper around GPT. So, GPT is the engine, and ChatGPT is just a nice interface on it. So, I've plugged into the engine. And what I found when you plug into the engine is that it has three roles, you communicate it with three roles. You send it messages, which are the system. It sends messages back, which it calls the assistant. And then there's the user. Now, the way it works is what the system expects you to do is to tell it what its role is. Roleplay is not something that's shoehorned into it. You know how sometimes you get a gadget and you trick it into doing something else? But you use a screwdriver as a chisel, not that I've ever done that, obviously. But you don't have to trick it, it's baked in. Roleplaying is baked in. If one reads stuff from people doing stuff around prompt engineering, it’s a lot of nonsense talked around this, but if you talk about things around prompt engineering, then one of the first things you do is tell it what its role is and people can experiment with this in ChatGPT now. So, here's the second really important thing for the listeners. $20. What is $20 to a listener? It might be a lot. I apologize if it's a lot for you, but, to a lot of listeners, I don't think it's going to be that much. $20. The difference between GPT 3.5 and 4 is the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle. GPT 4 is so much better. So, if people were sitting there using the free version of ChatGPT, if you want to use GPT 4, you have to sign up for GPT Plus. It’s $20 a month; just take it for $1 and play with it. Now, when I did the thing with the presentations about the steps, so telling it to go through the steps, it was like an early-stage teenager on GPT 3.5. It would only remember the last thing. So, “Go to the shops,” and it would only come back with like the Coke, or something like that. Now, GPT4, if you ask it to follow the series of steps, it will do it. I was absolutely amazed when I said to it in the third step, “Ask the user whether they want some advice.” And it did it. GPT4, which emerges as ChatGPT plus, is known for being more creative with its answers, and that's true. But where it really excels in my experiments has been when you ask it to do a series of steps. And one of the things that has been found with it is people call it a train of thought, and you get a much better result out of ChatGPT if you tell it the steps you want it to do. Because, here's a funny thing, Scott, what I said just then, I didn't know what I was going to say until I said it. Well, ChatGPT is just the same, and people criticize it for it. And so, it has no concept of what it's going to say, well, guess what? Neither do we. So, you get dividends when you ask it to do something, and then reflect on it, and then do the next step. You get a much better result.
Scott Allen 28:46
Well, it's interesting because, yes, as I've spoken with some individuals about this topic, they cite the attorney who used it poorly and made a mistake, and got in trouble for using ChatGPT, or the citations that were totally wrong, or the fact that it hallucinates. Well, humans hallucinate. Humans get things wrong. And humans make dumb mistakes like trusting the internet implicitly with their answers.
Gary Loyd 29:14
This is right. And I did go off into the rabbit hole to find out how it all worked. But I think my advice to people using it is to treat it like a person. Don’t worry about how it works; treat it like a person, and you will be amazed by the results. That's not to say there aren't risks. There's a risk to democracy, there's a risk of terrorism. But what we wanted to do here today, I think, Scott, was not to talk about risks, there are other people more informed than I can talk about those. I'm here to talk about the excitement of improving people's learning experiences, particularly around leadership. And, of course, it's very democratic because, as you said, with the mobile MBA thing, you can access it from anywhere in the world with a computer. And it's just a fantastic opportunity to put into practice learning through practice and learning through play.
Scott Allen 30:15
Yes. And another thing we forget as humans is that every tool that we have ever invented, I would argue, has been used as a weapon. Whether that's the stick, or that fire, or the wheel, the wheel has been used as a weapon at some point, the 'like' button (on social media). So, I think, yes, that's a grave concern that something… We have to have our eyes on the ethics of all of this. That is a very, very, yes, important part of the conversation. Get it. And how can we leverage this tool for good? How can we leverage this tool to serve as a co-pilot? How can we leverage this tool to serve as a tutor? How can we leverage this tool? What are the possibilities? And I think there's so many possibilities, and I just love the fact that you've been experimenting with it. I would encourage users…Gary, would you go ahead and provide users with the address that they can go to? And I will put this in the show notes as well for listeners.
Gary Loyd 31:15
Yeah. So this is all one word, and it's leadershipskillslab.ai.
Scott Allen 31:22
Leadershipskillslab.ai. Everyone, go check it out. Gary has offered to explore with you, by all means, please take him up on that and explore. It's something that I definitely want to prioritize because I think there's a lot of opportunity here. And again, I think that exploration is critical. And as we think about how to do leader development better, I imagine we could get into some really cool places where we evaluate the results of how people have interacted with the system, we could get into learning objectives learning outcomes. Everyone, think about some of how we could automate and start to, literally, show and display competency. We could show and display that someone is working at a certain level that we want them to be able to do, at least in the simulator. Again, that's not the world world, and we're not in the actual airplane, but in this simulated space, I see so many opportunities.
Gary Loyd 32:19
If you're going to come and use it, don't come and use it and then go, “Ha, that wasn't so good,” or, “That wasn't so clever.” Give me the feedback and say, “It didn't work for me because of this.” It takes me seconds to go in and change the instructions. It gets improved through feedback. Sorry, I just wanted to add that in.
Scott Allen 32:37
Please. I think that's wonderful. I have GPT 4. I've used it for different things, though. It's fascinating. I can say to it, “These are the foods I like, give me a seven-day meal plan with 250 calories and a shopping list. And I want to have a glass of wine two times this week.” Literally, “I like olives as well.” Boom. Or, “Could you shift this so we add in some Italian and some Indian food.” Boom. What's so interesting is I sometimes feel bad because I ask it to run again. It's like, “Yes, of course.” And I'm kind of nice to it, I say, “Thank you so much. This is a wonderful list.” (Laughs)
Gary Loyd 33:16
We're really hackable, human beings are really hackable. And if you don't believe this, then think about the last time you watched the film, and you were rooting for somebody/. They’re actors. It's Tom Cruise up there. You know it’s Tom Cruise. He’s a very rich man, he's fantastically good-looking, and you're urging him on because those mirror neurons... To your point there, Scott. The first time I sat down with ChatGPT, and said, “I want to build an app to allow people to practice coaching.” And it said, “That's a brilliant idea.” And I was like, “Oh.”
Scott Allen 33:52
(Laughs)
Gary Loyd 33:52
I was like, “Oh, good. Oh.” David Eagleman says brains run simulations, that’s what we’re doing. I've seen conversations with ChatGPT or with what I've built, it gets quite intimate sometimes.
Scott Allen 34:08
Okay. As we wind down our conversation today, what's caught your attention recently? What have you been consuming? Other than kind of this world of ChatGPT, what's been on your radar? And that could be something you've been listening to, watching, or reading, just what's caught your eye.
Gary Loyd 34:24
Well, David Eagleman's podcast ‘The Inner Cosmos,’ or cosmos as David calls it, is fantastic. I think he's up to about 20 episodes now. If you've read David's books, and you've read a decent amount of psychology, you're just going to get reminded of a lot of stuff, but it's a lot of stuff that he's tested in his lab. And that is just a fantastic podcast. I'm reading, at the moment, a book, it’s called ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,’ by the late David Graver, who was an anthropologist, and David Wingrove, who's an archaeologist. And that's a great book. It's much easier to read than it sounds, even though the writing is small and it's 600 pages.
Scott Allen 35:08
Well, I'd like ‘The Dawn of Everything,’ so that's a lot of stuff, right?
Gary Loyd 35:12
It's called ‘The Dawn of Everything.’ It will take us a long time to go into what the book’s about. I was in Italy, fortunate to be in Italy a lot recently. And while I was there, I read George Saunders' book, ‘Lincoln in the Bardo.’ A very unusual book, but absolutely brilliant. And one more, if I may, Scott, and that's a book that’s called ‘Real-Time Leadership,’ by David Noble and Carol Kauffman. I think Carol is at Harvard Medical School.
Scott Allen 35:40
Okay. I have not read any of these resources, so that's great.
Gary Loyd 35:43
I think, with no disrespect to David Noble and Carol Kaufman, I think the first third of the book is absolutely fantastic. The second two-thirds or so, well, okay, I'm not sure there's anything here. The first third of the book I really liked because it was kind of touching on…you know the Viktor Frankl thing about creating space between something happening, reaction, and interactions?
Scott Allen 36:05
Yes.
Gary Loyd 36:05
So, we're talking about that space. And two of the questions they suggested that leaders ask themselves in that space is, who do I want to be? That was one question. And it's a great question to ask yourself. So, they're talking about leadership in a time of high stress. And you say, “Who do I want to be in this moment?” Because we often think about, “What do we want to do? What outcome do we want?” Who do I want to be? And then, if you're in a leadership position, “What do others need from me?” I think that's a really good question. That was worth the price of the book for me.
Scott Allen 36:42
Wow. Isn’t it so beautiful when people… There's been some phrases that people have used on the podcast over the three years now that just encapsulate something. Doug Lindsey told me the Bob Hogan quote, “Who you are is how you lead,” or Jonathan Reams oftentimes will say, “Leaders create the weather.” But this is another example of these two questions. Would you say them one more time?
Gary Loyd 37:05
Actually, they say there are three questions. I didn't do the first one because they say, “What do you want to do?” Actually, I prefer, “What outcome do you want?” “What do you want to do?” The second one was, I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember, but it shows the power of the words, which is, ‘Who do you want to be in this moment?” Because, well, you understand, we're not always who we want to be. And the third one is, “What do others need from me at this point?”
Scott Allen 37:34
That’s wonderful.
Gary Loyd 37:34
The hospice has been having a campaign recently, there's something, it's a nationwide saying. This is another great one of those that's used in medical practice, In the hospice, they’re advised to ask patients, “What matters most to you?” That's a great question for any context.
Scott Allen 37:50
It is. “What matters most to you?” Well, you just sparked… This last little segment it has sparked kind of a thought of mine. I used ChatGPT recently. I was brainstorming, and now I'm giving the idea away to the millions of listeners. (Laughs) And I think this is part of the beauty of this tool. I think it's how do we creatively use the tool in ways that bring something new. It's no different than the convergence of technology of an app. And, all of a sudden, you have a new business platform, a platform business model where we have Airbnb or Uber, because now we can have an app that has the power to, all of a sudden, facilitate. And these technologies converge in a way, and now, new opportunities exist. But I'd said to it, “I want to have incredible conversations with my family. It's Thanksgiving time, what are 25 conversation starters?” And it came up with some really cool options. And so, again, you could turn this into a little cottage industry where you say, “Hey, it's Christmas time, and grandparents are with you, what are the questions you should ask your grandparents at dinner?” And just spark a beautiful, wonderful conversation. But I think how we use the technology and the creative ways we think about pinging the technology… Because it really did come up with some wonderful questions, and very quickly, in 20 seconds. It would have taken me hours.
(Laughter)
Scott Allen 39:29
Gary, I am so thankful for our time today. Rumor has it I may see you next summer, so I'm looking forward to that. And you know what? As always, thank you so much for joining me. I really, really appreciate your time. Listeners, there's an offer on the table, take him up on it. Be well, everyone. Take care. Bye bye.
Gary Loyd 39:45
Thanks, Scott. Bye now.
[End Of Audio]