In-Ear Insights: Change Management and Generative Artificial intelligence

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss change management, generative artificial intelligence, and how to help your team embrace AI and what to do with team members who are resistant to AI adoption. Learn why the human element remains critical for successful AI implementation and how to best communicate the value of AI to your team. Discover why throwing AI at a problem isn’t the answer and how Katie uses AI to support, rather than replace, her work.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn – 00:00
In this week’s In Ear Insights, Katie, I have a question for you as a leader, as a CEO, as a change management expert because you are. How do you convince anti-AI people to not be? By this, I mean, we’ve had a lot of companies, a lot of people, ask us to say, “Hey, we really want to do a digital transformation with generative AI,” and some of the use cases are really good use cases. But then you start talking to people who are like staff and things and you get some very—some varied but very firm resistance to it. People saying, “It’s going to take my job, it’s going to create mass unemployment, it undermines my self-worth as a creative person. It can’t produce good results, it’s not creative, it’s built on stolen intellectual properties.”

Christopher Penn – 00:50
All these different things that people have as reasons for objections to AI. There is the tried and true and somewhat ineffective: You’ll either do it the way the CEO says, or you’ll get out. But I suspect that’s more my management style than yours. So I’d like to hear from someone who actually manages people: How do we help people overcome the anti-AI perspective? Can we, should we? And if so, how?

Katie Robbert – 01:24
So, there’s definitely a lot to unpack there. So first, I sort of want to start with why can’t I just tell people, “This is what we’re going to do?” So, you absolutely can. You can say, “This is what we’re going to do.” So Chris, you have kids, teenagers now, young adults now. When you say, “You’re going to do this now,” how well does it go over?

Christopher Penn – 01:51
It depends on the thing. But one of the things I’ve tried to do since they were little is to tell them why. It’s not just because I’m just saying something arbitrarily. It’s because, “Here’s why. Hey, clean your room of those food dishes. Here’s why: Here’s the mouse I just found in here.”

Katie Robbert – 02:08
And does that work?

Christopher Penn – 02:10
Resentfully, yes.

Katie Robbert – 02:13
We’ll see. So, there’s it. So yes, people will do it, but they will do it with resentment in their heart. They will do it because you’re not really giving them a lot of choices. You’re not giving them any sort of autonomy or ownership. You’re saying—you’re basically coming down and saying, “This is what you have to do. I decree this is what you have to do.” It’s the classic why parents and kids fight all the time. “Why do I have to do this?” “Because I said so.” And there’s a lot of times where that’s necessary, especially when there’s—

Christopher Penn – 02:50
Mouse click everywhere in their room.

Katie Robbert – 02:52
Well, sure. So there’s, like, the sanitary reasons, the—you know—personal hygiene, physical danger, all of those sorts of things. In a company, the expectations are different. So, depending on if it’s a privately held or publicly owned company, the expectation is going to be different. And so, you might have investors, you might have stockholders, you might not have the luxury of what some people say is sort of like, “Oh, we can all be the Kumbaya and, like, make everybody happy.” Like, I understand the thinking when someone says, “It’s business. This isn’t really a family, it’s business.” I totally understand it, I respect it. However, it’s not that black and white, because if you operate a business where you have human employees, then just telling them what’s going to happen, saying, “This is what you have to do.

Katie Robbert – 03:53
This is the rules, this is the thing. You’re going to do this,” and never giving them a voice, you probably have higher turnover. You probably have lower company morale. The other extreme is, you know, when you do give your employees a voice, you have employee-owned companies. You have people able to give feedback. That said, somebody still has to be the adult in the room and make the decisions. Now where you kind of find that sweet spot in the middle is where we are hoping a lot of companies are striking that balance of, “Well, this is what we have to do and why. But now I’m going to give you an opportunity to tell me how—you know—you feel about this.

Katie Robbert – 04:36
If this is something that you’re willing to participate in.” And giving your team members more of a choice, you’re allowing them to opt out and say, “You know what? I’m not going to do this.” So then the job is to explain, “Okay, if you’re not going to participate in this, this is what this now looks like for you.” And if they are going to participate, “Okay, this is now what that’s going to look like for you.” Again, this is sort of like the ideal balanced situation. So, in terms of getting to, how do you convince the unconvinced? It’s a lot of—it is through education and communication.

Katie Robbert – 05:12
And so, Chris, we’ve been working with clients where a lot of the misconceptions, a lot of the misunderstanding around AI is, “Well, I’m immediately going to be out of a job.” And so for some people, unfortunately, that’s been true because of the lack of understanding of what generative AI could and should do. And so, there’s a lot of executives who have made very rash decisions, like, “Well, it can write things, so I’m just going to get rid of writers. It can edit, I’m going to get rid of editors. It can code, I’m getting rid of my developers.” It’s a short-sighted way of thinking. And so, to answer your question, how to convince the unconvinced? It starts with education, and it starts with really understanding what’s happening in your own personal company. Forget what’s happening in Google.

Katie Robbert – 06:01
What Google is doing is different from what Trust Insights is doing. So, we at Trust Insights can’t worry about what’s going on internally at Google, and we can’t worry about what’s going on internally at whatever company down the street. The decisions we make and the education that we get around generative AI have to be specific to us, what we do, what our business goals are, what our employee needs, and that’s really where it starts. And it means that making decisions around the use of generative AI aren’t instantaneous. And that’s where a lot of people just want to skip to the decision making part.

Christopher Penn – 06:43
How do you handle a lot of those objections? So, I’ll give you a very concrete example. Over the weekend, Black Forest Labs released the Flux One model, which is a local image generation model that is really good. Like, when you look at the output, you go, “Huh, that’s like, pro-level quality,” on something you can run on your MacBook. A lot of people’s misconceptions about AI were based in truth at one point. Like, “Oh, look, here’s a picture of someone with nine fingers.” That’s definitely something the models used to do. Now the quality is on par, I would say, with the average worker—maybe slightly ahead of the average worker. It’s not the best worker, but the average worker.

Christopher Penn – 07:28
And so, when someone says, “This undermines my self-worth as a creative,” because the machine—maybe they in their own internal dialogue, they’re like, “That is better than what I can do.” So, they are then naturally anti-use of this technology. How do you—how do you work with somebody to help them overcome that?

Katie Robbert – 07:54
If you can. And that’s sort of the—”If you can” is a big part of the conversation—is you can’t reach everybody, you can’t be everything to everyone, and you can’t make everybody happy. And so, the best you can do is really understand what their concerns are, what their fears are. So, in that example, it really comes down to what the needs are of the company. So, for a company like Trust Insights, where we are small, I would absolutely embrace the use of AI image generation because we can’t afford a physical human to do it. That said, I would love to actually have a physical human sort of manning that ship, because that—I want someone who’s a subject matter expert in creative, in image generation, using those systems and putting their own touch on it.

Katie Robbert – 08:56
Because human to human, I’m going to have a better conversation with a person than I am with a machine because the machine is very literal and black and white, and everything you say they do exactly. Whereas a person, a human, can understand nuance and sarcasm and emotion and ask follow-up questions in a certain way because they know you as a person. Whereas machines can say, you know, basic follow-up questions, but they don’t know you as a human. So, they can’t—they can’t look at your body language and say, “You look like you’re thinking about something else,” or “You look like you’re not convinced this is the best idea.”

Christopher Penn – 09:37
You’re playing Candy Crush, or you’re distracted.

Katie Robbert – 09:41
And you’re playing Candy Crush.

Christopher Penn – 09:42
Exactly.

Katie Robbert – 09:42
And so, the conversation needs to be around, “What are your concerns?” So, if your concerns are, “I think the machine’s more creative than me,” then that’s something that you need to unpack with that person. And so, the machine is only as creative as you allow it to be. You, the human, are still the subject matter expert. And I think that needs to be part of the conversation is machines need subject matter experts in order for them to work properly. So, I can go into an image generation—you know—machine, and I can say, “I want—you know—a unicorn jumping over a rainbow—you know—with a backpack and roller skates on,” and it’s going to give me something fairly generic.

Katie Robbert – 10:31
I’m not a subject matter expert, so I don’t necessarily know the specific things that I should be asking for in order to get exactly what I’m looking for. But I know what I don’t want. And so, I’m looking for that human, and that’s where the conversation is, that “I still need you, creative person, to operate this thing, because you know what you’re looking for. You know what I’m looking for. You can interact with it. You know the terminology, you know the words. I don’t know what this picture is that I’m looking at. It has nothing to do with what I asked for. And this cat has, like, a weird hand coming out from underneath the table somewhere. It’s almost like there’s a second cat. It’s very strange. It’s actually disturbing me.”

Christopher Penn – 11:15
But, to your point about a subject matter expert being able to say, like, “Okay, we want this depth of field in this kind of image because you don’t want the patrons in the cafe to be in the same depth of field, otherwise, the image looks very flat. This gives it some volume and things. We want the paper to have the proper headline.” It’s—it is still misspelled “Financial Times.” Also, the Financial Times is printed on pink paper, which is incorrect. So, a subject matter expert would need to be able to look at the output and say, “Okay, well, we need to add more to this clip prompt so that it generates better results than what the naive prompt was.” So, this is a very naive prompt as opposed to a very detailed prompt.

Christopher Penn – 11:57
In fact, one of the things that we’re going to be teaching at this year’s MarketingProfs B2B Forum is using AI to generate its own prompts because it knows its own internal architecture better than you and I do. But we still need that human expertise to say, like, “This is what you want to do.” And I think your point about that human expertise is really important to have. It’s not human or machine, it’s human plus machine will get you the scalability, but it will also keep the quality.

Katie Robbert – 12:39
And the judgment when you think about it. And you, Chris, like to refer to AI as the “world’s smartest intern.” To me, it’s just another piece of software. It’s just another tool that’s going to support the work that I’m doing. And so, what I need to do in order to alleviate my concerns is figure out, what the heck am I doing? What does that look like? I probably need to do some process documentation so that I can figure out where in my work schedule AI is an appropriate use. So, for example, I’ve tried, like, AI calendar schedulers. Those don’t work for me because it adds more overhead, and it’s just more efficient for me to manage my own schedule than to leave it up to—like, an AI, for example. And I’m also, like, super controlling.

Katie Robbert – 13:36
But when it comes to outlining a blog post or newsletter, I’m happy to use AI because I’ve constructed—you’ve constructed—a large language model based on my work so that I can then, instead of spending hours going, “What the heck am I going to write about? How should it be framed? What should I do? Blah, blah,” I can say, “Hey, Katie GPT, help me outline a post that’s going to resonate with our ideal customer profile.” And she’ll give me some options, and I’m like, “Okay, great, that one looks good, let’s work on that one.” And I feel confident using it because it’s my words, it’s my work. Everything in the AI model is based on work that I’ve done.

Katie Robbert – 14:19
And so, to me, it’s just accessing parts of my brain that aren’t available at the moment to just do the same thing that I would have been doing anyway. And then I, the human, can take it and run with it. And that I feel like—So that’s a use case that’s specific to me. But the point is that, to talk with someone who’s unconvinced about AI—so let’s take my husband, for example. He’s a very analog kind of guy. He still uses—what—a regular telephone, one that plugs into the wall?

[Crosstalk]

A landline. That’s the word. He still uses a landline. He is someone who—give him a piece of paper and a pen—he’s good. Ask him to do it on a computer? Not happening. Doesn’t trust email, doesn’t trust social. Like, very analog.

Katie Robbert – 15:13
So, his company switched over to AI scheduling so that everybody’s work schedules are built on using AI based on their availability. And, according to him, it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to the company, aside from the other worst things that have ever happened to the company. And so, I started asking him. I was like, “So what does that mean? So, like, do you correct it in the system so that the AI can learn?” He’s like, “No, we just print it out, and we fix it all manually.” And so, he’s someone who’s—who would need to see the proof, need to actually see the thing working, before he can trust it. But he’s still of the mindset that he, the human, can do it better in that situation. It’s true, but they’re not giving the AI the chance.

Katie Robbert – 16:03
So, he’s going to stay in the “unconvinced pile” category until he actually works with it. I think that’s part of it, too, is for people who are so aggressively unconvinced, they may stay that way. And that’s okay because there’s plenty for them to do. Someone who might be teetering on the line of “I’m unconvinced, but let me know more,” is someone that you really need to work with and show them, “Here’s how you work with it. It’s not replacing you, it’s assisting you, it’s supporting you, it’s working with you. But here’s what you, the human, need to do. It actually gives you more of a sense of purpose.” And so, it’s just a matter of how you have that conversation. My husband’s never going to be into technology, and quite honestly, that’s fine. It—like, it’s totally fine for his job. Cool.

Katie Robbert – 16:58
For our job, I was the one on our team who was unconvinced, and I needed to see use cases that were specific to what I needed in order to cross that line.

Christopher Penn – 17:11
So you say for folks, “If you are just aggressively unconvinced, it’s okay,” is it? I’ll give you an example. Our old agency, before we started Trust Insights, was, at the end, was run by accounting folks whose primary skill set was in manufacturing in terms of the way they manage. They actually manage an agency using manufacturing productivity software, which is a whole different conversation. But I could very easily see that style of manager saying, “We know AI delivers productivity enhancements. We know that this task should now take 17 minutes. So, we are now only allocating 17 minutes for this task, and you will be held to that performance measure, or else—you know—you may no longer take two hours to do this task, and you must punch it in the manufacturing system—you have manufactured the—in 17 minutes.”

Christopher Penn – 18:11
You know, it takes 38 minutes to put it in the time tracking system. In that situation, if someone is aggressively unconvinced, are they screwed? Because there’s no way they can accomplish that task without the use of the technology to meet that very arbitrary decree from above. They’re not saying, “You have to use AI,” they’re saying, “You got 17 minutes to do this task.” And the only rational way that a worker could do this particular task would be to use some form of accelerated automation, like AI.

Katie Robbert – 18:47
Here’s the thing: We tend to forget about people. People have free will, people have choices. “Aggressively unconvinced” is a choice. I could decide, Chris, “You know what? I don’t believe in AI. We’re not going to use it in the company. I don’t care what’s happening outside of the walls of Trust Insights. AI is just not the thing.” I can make that choice. I then also have to live with whatever the consequences are. That’s on me. And so, I think that’s the part that people are scared about is, “What if my team members don’t fall in line?” Okay, then they don’t fall in line. You might have to, for the sake of the business, find people who are more aligned with what your business goals are. That’s just the reality.

Katie Robbert – 19:47
So, when I started the conversation saying I respected the conversation saying, like, “It’s just business,” that’s what I mean, is I understand at the end of the day, a business has goals. They have to meet those goals. They have to have the right people on the teams in order to meet those goals. So, if you have someone who is aggressively unconvinced, it sounds callous, but if that does not align with your goals—okay, that’s fine. That’s what I mean by saying, “They’re allowed to be unconvinced.” But then now the next step of that conversation is, what does that mean for the individual and what does that mean for the company? There might be other things that person can do that have nothing to do with AI. There’s a lot of stuff that we do in our company that AI doesn’t touch.

Katie Robbert – 20:40
So perhaps that person would get reallocated to do everything else that AI doesn’t touch. So, there’s still a role for them—or not. But that’s part of the conversation. It can’t just be, “All right, we’re doing AI.” “Okay, I don’t want to do it.” “Okay, you’re out.” Like, that’s just not enough information. It’s, “You know, we see a lot of opportunities by using AI in the company.” “Okay, I’m unconvinced. I’m really skeptical.” And that’s where you can have those conversations. Now, again, it’s not the quick fix, it’s not instantaneous. And that’s why a lot of people skip over it, and that’s why a lot of people feel that company cultures are crap because they aren’t having the conversations. They’re not taking the time to say, “Okay, you have concerns, we value you as an employee.” Instead, they’re saying, “Okay, you’re replaceable, bye.”

Katie Robbert – 21:37
And that person moves on. So again, it’s all fine, those are all choices. You just have to live with the consequences.

Christopher Penn – 21:47
So, in that situation, would you pull out something like the 5Ps and say, “The requirement is, this task has to be done in 17 minutes. How you do it is up to you, but you have to do that,” with the purpose of—task is clear—you have to create this piece of content, you have 17 minutes to do it. Would that be a way to sort of back into helping them realize they kind of have to?

Katie Robbert – 22:17
Well, even you’re saying, like, “You don’t have to.” And so they could just—you know—drink a bunch of Red Bulls and burn themselves out. Again, it’s an option. But yes, I think the 5Ps is an appropriate way to structure the conversation to say, “This is what needs to get done. This is how it needs to get done.” But then what you’re doing is outlining the options of what you see, and be like, “I see that you can get this done here. I see that you can get this done this way.” But it goes back to good process documentation of knowing how it’s getting done. And so, if you look at the process documentation and you say, “All right, so this task, the time has to be cut in half in order for us to make our numbers,” or whatever.

Katie Robbert – 23:00
The thing is, you could say, “It looks like this particular part of your task, of your responsibility right here, there might be some opportunities for efficiency. Would you be willing to try this?” You know, and again, I’m sort of approaching it as giving employees the option to try it. A lot of leaders don’t feel that way—completely honest. They’re like, “Well, I don’t really care if you want to do it. This is what has to be done.”

Christopher Penn – 23:28
Yep.

Katie Robbert – 23:29
All leaders are different. All managers are different. I tend to lean towards giving people a voice, some autonomy. But there are definitely times—and I’ll be completely honest—where it’s not an option, where I have to say, “This is what needs to get done. This is how, and this is why, and I just need you to do it.” And that’s a totally realistic situation. So I’m sort of—I want to give the disclaimer, I’m painting this picture of having the luxury of time to talk to people fully and completely about, “We really want to—you know—do this in the company. How do you feel about it?” Like, that’s an idealistic situation. It does not meet reality a lot.

Katie Robbert – 24:18
We don’t have time in the day with everything else going on to sit down and talk with each individual to say, “So, how do you feel about these changes we’re making?” I would love if we did. The other thing is, a lot of times, leadership doesn’t have the authority to share what’s going on. There could be something like, “Hey, we’re in the process of trying to sell the company,” and they can’t share that with the employees as a whole. So, I want to acknowledge that again, I’m painting a very idealistic scenario, but in reality, you have to find ways to have that conversation without giving everything away or by doing it more efficiently. And so that’s where things like the Trust Insights TRIPS framework comes into play.

Katie Robbert – 25:05
And so the TRIPS framework is a worksheet that allows you to do process documentation, or at least give a high-level look at process documentation to say, “It looks like these are high-value tasks that nobody likes to do that are super repeatable and super scalable. So, let’s start using AI here.” And you’re going to get some objections. You’re going to be like, “Well, but that’s my job.” Be like, “Okay, great, here’s the rest of the list that I need you to focus on because that stuff is also taking a lot of time.” And so, it’s just a matter of sort of rearranging the focus and the expectations. And so, yeah, you’re asking me a very complex question and you’re asking me to answer it on a 25-minute podcast.

Katie Robbert – 25:52
So, I also don’t know that I’ve gotten to a satisfying answer because change management—the not-so-secret is that—change takes time. And to do it well, it takes a good amount of time and effort, and people and companies are moving so fast right now that they’re just not thinking about that stuff. And so, to answer your original question, “How do you convince the unconvinced?” It takes time, and not everybody is giving it the time it needs.

Christopher Penn – 26:25
I think that’s probably a great summary of sort of the state of the marketplace right now is, yeah, people are rushing ahead, and in a lot of cases, not using the technology well, which further undermines confidence in it. If you take the time to learn it and take the time to apply it well and be thoughtful of it, then to your point, it’s like any other tool. If I just—if I rush, and I just use a blender for everything—well, steak night is going to suck because I just rushed, as opposed to thinking, “Huh, should I put a steak in a blender?” The answer is no. I probably should put it on the grill instead. But, if you don’t take the time to think it through, you just kind of—you get what you get. You get a lot of soups.

Katie Robbert – 27:11
Well, and if you think about all of these companies who immediately rush to lay off their writing staff, and the writing staff is seeing, like, “Oh, this is what they’re churning out. It’s really crappy.” Like, it does—it totally undermines the purpose. But instead of—you know—laying off your entire writing staff, wouldn’t it have been nice if you had worked with that team to say, “Hey, here’s a tool to enhance what you’re doing, to support what you’re doing. Not ‘We’re replacing you with robots that are going to churn out 10x more content, but the content’s going to be mediocre. Cool. Bye.'” Like, it’s a different conversation. And again, I’ll be totally honest, it takes time. Good management takes time, because change management takes time.

Christopher Penn – 28:01
If you’ve got some stories about how you have been dealing with people who are unconvinced about the value of AI or the change management of it, and you want to share it, go pop into our free Slack. Go to TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers, where you and over 3,500 other marketers are answering, asking, answering each other’s questions every single day. And wherever it is you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a channel you’d rather have it on, head to TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast, where you can find us in all places that podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in! We’ll talk to you next time.

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