Harmonizing AI and Human-Centric Approaches in Business Transformation - with Kate Bullinger

Dan Nestle [00:00:00]: Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. This morning, on the day of this recording, I got into a heated comment discussion on LinkedIn about the value of AI content. So I'm sure you can picture it and even predict how it went. But I'll give you a quick summary. The original post something like, only humans should write, AI sucks. It's insulting. Then like the first 15 commenters said, yeah, yeah, here, here. Yeah, down with AI. AI sucks terrible. Watch out for those em dashes. I love em dashes, by the way. You'll have to pry them out of my cold, dead hands. And then I chimed in and I said, what are you talking about? AI is brilliant. Humans are brilliant. Let's have both. As long as the AI assists the writer, it's all good. Now, it might surprise you that the later commenters missed my point entirely, which was if the human is at the center, if the ideas are human and the human understands how to work with AI, then bad ideas notwithstanding, the content can be spectacular. I'm subjecting you to all this nonsense because whether we're talking about AI or any technology, trend, practice, etc. The human is at the center. The human should always be at the center, and we can't possibly be expected to put the human first. If our values and behaviors aren't human centric to begin with, how do we get there? How do we ensure that our values are human centric? My guest today may have a few things to say about that. For over two decades, she has partnered with senior executives on enterprise organizational change, fostering purpose and value driven cultures, building high performing teams, and designing employee engagement strategies. She's a trusted advisor to Nonprofits and Fortune 100 companies alike. She got her start in PR at Burson Marsteller, progressed to the CCO position at Atlantic Philanthropies, transitioned to a partner at Mercer Consulting, and then change management at Weber Shandwick, and ultimately she took the role of CEO at United Minds, a part of the Weber Shandwick Collective. Please join me in welcoming to the show a trending communicator, if there ever was one, the amazing Kate Bollinger. Kate, how are you?

Kate Bullinger [00:02:28]: I'm well, Dan. Thanks for having me today. I'm excited to be here.

Dan Nestle [00:02:32]: Oh, man. You know, listeners don't know all the machinations that happen in the background, you know, as I put these things together laboriously with my blood and sweat and tears. And you know that my intro was a little scripted. It always is. And I'm gonna have to go back and change it, do it again, because I wasn't happy with it. By the time you hear this, you're not gonna know. But just full disclosure, I was watching Kate's face and I saw a couple things didn't land. So I'm gonna do that again. But anyway, I really appreciate Kate being here. I know, like, as a CEO of United Minds, I mean, especially these days where we're talking about so much disruption in the workplace, in the communication space, and you being basically right at the center of a lot of it, you know, at Weber. I mean, at United Minds, within the Weber universe, you know, I can imagine that you have your share of action and taking even a little bit of time to come and talk to Little Omi is a. Is a huge commitment. And for that I am. I am extremely grateful. But I want to hear all about what you're seeing about, you know, transformation and change. And, you know, I talked about AI in the intro. AI always comes up in our conversations. I'm sure it will. But you're really focused, and you've always been focused, at least for the last few decades, on this idea of human centricity. So I'm going to just start there and kind of put it out here to you. My intro is just sort of an offshoot of a human centric story just to get at that. But how do you see human centricity? What is it all about? How can we start that kind of discussion? Where's the right place to start the discussion about human centricity within the world of comms and transformation?

Kate Bullinger [00:04:25]: Sure. Well, thanks again for having me. I'm excited to be here. As you mentioned, United Minds, we really focus on business transformation and change. So within Weber, we kind of sit at the intersection of communications and change management, management consulting. And our whole sort of focus is on moving people to move business. And what we mean by that is that change can't happen if you don't bring the humans along for the journey. So we see in a lot of things that we do, we work on a lot of big transformations. And by that I mean anything, a restructuring of a company, a leadership transition, an M and A or another kind of transaction like that. And there's often a big push to work on the nuts and bolts of the change right from the time you announce it to getting all the systems and processes in place to make that change happen. But at the end of the day, a lot of those changes fail in large part due to people not coming along for the journey. So, you know, you pointed out that we can have all the technology, we can have systems change, but if the people who are at the heart of it, the people who are at the heart of a company and delivering on its strategy, haven't come along for that journey, then there's no chance of success. So what we really focus on, it's not to say a lot of times we're working alongside other consulting firms with clients who, you know, like Accenture, McKinsey or Deloitte who are working on that systems change. And we are in there talking about, okay, who are the stakeholders that this is really gonna impact? Largely inside organizations, but increasingly also outside organizations. How are they gonna react and what do we need to do to really inspire them to see both the case for change and the vision for the future? So that's kind of our. It's not that we're not paying attention to the other stuff, but that we believe that to make change happen, we've gotta bring the people along for the ride.

Dan Nestle [00:06:31]: Yeah. It's surprising even at this point in the kind of progress or progression of our system here. We've been through all kinds of M and A situations. We've been up and down in the economy. We've had countless transactions over decades and decades. And yet that one little kernel of truth that the humans involved in the transition are kind of important, you know, seems to still escape the minds of the architects of these transition.

Kate Bullinger [00:07:06]: Yeah.

Dan Nestle [00:07:07]: And, you know, maybe it's because it's, you know, it's share price driven. I don't know, there's so many different reasons. But, you know, why do you think that is? And, you know, clearly you're in that space that's, you're making people aware of it. But, you know, why have, why has that happened?

Kate Bullinger [00:07:22]: It's interesting because in the roles that I've had, I've been both a consultant and also have and the CEO of United Minds. So that's given me a new lens. Being part of an organization that has gone through rounds of change as well, which has given me a new appreciation when I was younger and just consulting, you'd say, why doesn't anybody see this? But I think one thing that happens when a company's going through a lot of change, and even now we're seeing one of the things we're focusing on a lot these days is how to lead through the squeeze. It's such a challenging time at the moment, and leaders have so many things coming at them, it's very easy to get sucked into the day to day job. Right. And to assume that everyone is where you are on what we like to call the change curve. Right. So you know, a leader who's in it every day and working in the teams that are working on an M and A or working on a restructuring or they're in it and you know, they're kind of probably going home at the end of the day exhausted by it all and thinking, well surely everybody knows where we are in this process, but they forget that. They don't necessarily forget, but maybe don't consider that not everyone has the same amount of information or has had as much time to process a change. And I think that's one of the reasons it's both timing and the demands on leaders time today along with their way progressed on the change curve and everyone else is sort of at step one and I think that's just easy to forget.

Dan Nestle [00:08:57]: Yeah. I mean, do you think it has, it also has to do with the types of transformations these organizations are going through because like I've been through a few, you know, both on the like communicating end where I could have used some help from United Minds in some cases, you know, certainly for figuring out the best way to get all the stakeholders in line. Instead, you know, I have, you know, I was doing it myself or with a small team, sometimes myself because it's very highly confidential information, you can't share it out. So. But also I've been on the, the other end where you know, there's been difficult restructurings or reorganizations and you know, I've been restructured out, you know, once at least and neither, neither cases is particularly enjoyable to be honest. But, but each of those things is very different, you know, trying to get the attention of different people, like who knows what, who, you don't, you don't know who, which executive to talk to because well, are they in the know? Do they understand what's going on? And then you feel like you're monopolizing or at least I do because this is just my nature. Just like I don't want to bother this person again, you know, even if it's mission critical. It's like, oh man, he doesn't want to hear from me, she doesn't want to hear from me. Another, geez, I'm going to have to make another point with the cco. My God, you know, so there's so much going on in my anxiety, adult head. But the whole thing is these different types of transformations, they have to have something to do with it. And I'm sure you're seeing tons of different kinds of transformations in your world.

Kate Bullinger [00:10:37]: Yeah, I mean, I think that every kind of transformation has some unique challenges, but there's also a lot of consistency in what leaders need to do. So you're, you know, one of the things that happens often is that leaders tend not to communicate if there's. Or they think they don't need to communicate if there's not new information to share. So a merger is a good example at the beginning of that, there's very little you can say because the two organizations can't really talk to each other. Right. And there's not a lot. When an announcement's made, there's a lot of work to get to close and then you've got to get to post close. So there's nothing to say. And a lot of people assume, let's just, there's nothing to say. Let's not put stuff out there that is just repeating what we've already said. But then just what you described that sort of. Employees begin to fill the void with what they're speculating and the rumor mill. And so it's that sort of point, if you don't tell your story, somebody else will. And I think that's never more true than in a big transformation where you as a leader may not want to go out and just repeat yourself and say the same stuff over. But, but even getting out there and listening and being present can quell a lot of those concerns or at least let people know that there's no new information to share. I think that's something that's really consistent across any kind of change because at the end of the day, it's really about human behavior. Right. And people don't like change. It's like we're wired to not like going through large scale change. And so figuring out what are those mechanisms and tactics that are going to help people work through that. And some of it is just, just being present. Right. Being present and consistent.

Dan Nestle [00:12:20]: Yeah. Just thinking about that whole idea of if you don't, if you don't tell your narrative, if you don't tell your story, somebody else will. You know, the idea of that, that, you know, nature abhors a vacuum and so does, so do people who, so does talking and, and writing and media and everything else. Everybody abhors a vacuum. So you need to control what you can control and say what you can say. But the worst thing to do is to not say anything at all and.

Kate Bullinger [00:12:48]: Exactly.

Dan Nestle [00:12:49]: And I feel like I've always had to sell that, you know, like, it's like, seems like such second nature things to me. But it's always like one of those further down proof points in a plan and oh yeah, and by the way, if you don't have a story, you know, then somebody's going to tell it for you. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we kind of believe you, you know, Wordsmith guy.

Kate Bullinger [00:13:10]: Yeah, I think that's true. But you know, we see in some high stakes situation with, with M and A in particular that when that happens the void also gets filled by, in, in a high profile M and A outside voice that are influencing your employees. Right. So you know, we had a situation we worked on recently where to cut through that disinformation, misinformation, cacophony of voices. We put leaders directly in front of frontline employees to have a conversation with them, you know, that to give them the facts as they, you know, the true facts and have a dialogue and that it's interesting because we talk a lot about technology and people ask what are the new ways of communicating to employees, especially if you have a big organization. But still that sort of face to face, even if you don't have all the answers, can really go a long way to bringing people along. And I think it's really important. I think another thing that's important is the idea of creating a North Star, which you could also say seems self evident that when you're embarking on any big change, you want your CEO and the senior team to paint the picture, the future. So you want them to explain why the case for change, why are we doing this? Because change is painful and people aren't going to move unless they understand there's a reason that we're doing it, which is not just a self inflicted wound. We have to change in order to do what. And that's where that North Star comes in. And I always like the example of Chris Nessada at, I think I say his name right at Hilton, who talks very eloquently about how he managed the turnaround there and the importance of establishing a North Star early on that as things got more painful, as they had to go through some layoffs, as you were talking about your own experience as they've had to navigate difficult change that created that anchor and when things were going well, it was the benchmark for how are we getting there. So that idea of both listening, creating consistent communications and painting that picture of the North Star, I think are all things that are consistent no matter what kind of transformation or change and even today, when we see CEOs and leadership teams trying to figure out how to navigate the complexities of a year when so much change, there's so much unpredictability, I think those things continue to hold true.

Dan Nestle [00:15:42]: Yeah, that whole idea of a North Star is even more critical in these times of change. And one thing that, that I've seen leadership struggle with, with the whole concept of a North Star and a vision, you know, is you'll have these meetings or you'll, you'll start to kind of think about what's the vision for this thing. And the, the leader in question may get it. You know, they may get it right. But, you know, if they need to be sort of, I suppose, handheld and walked along the path to where that is, you know, what I found is that they say, wait, we have a vision. It's the company vision. It's our company. This is what we do. This is our tagline, and here's our vision and our behaviors and the things that we tell our employees all the time. So everybody should know that. And my approach was, well, now's a good time to remind them of those things. But you need a very specific vision for why you're doing the thing you're doing. You know, it has to align with that vision. It's got to be like, can't be counter to that vision. So how do we create that North Star? And I, I, you know, I think that a lot of leaders need either to be kind of maybe educated about this, or I think once they go through it, they get it, but they don't necessarily see the need if the company already has a strong vision or any vision.

Kate Bullinger [00:17:22]: Yeah, I think that's a good point. It's interesting because typically they have a vision. They're not for the change. And I think you make a really good point. There's a difference between the company vision broadly versus the vision for what they're trying to achieve by taking the organization through a great deal of sometimes painful change. Right.

Dan Nestle [00:17:43]: Yeah.

Kate Bullinger [00:17:43]: But they, obviously, they have a reason for doing it right. There is a vision for if they're embarking on an M and A, or they're spinning something off or, you know, that could be about focus or an M and A is like entering a new market or broadening the footprint in the organization or whatever it might be. There is a vision, I think, where communic communication team and leaders can come in to play, is helping them understand that not everyone to change, to get people to believe they need to be brought along for that ride and to do that. It's both simultaneously explaining why the status quo isn't going to work anymore and saying, what will things look like if we do this initiative? Well, if we do this M and A, if we restructure, we have to do it because, you know, we need to be more competitive. Why is that? And, you know, make the case for people. But you've got to paint the picture of where you're headed as well. And that's not necessarily the company vision broadly. Right. It's we, you know, it might be much more granular than that. And then I think it's repeating that over and over again, which is again the Hilton example. What I thought they did quite well is, is to make that the centerpiece for the reasons difficult changes are made, the reasons great things happen and are celebrated, that it all comes back to that. And I think communication professionals can really help. What we try to do is help leaders both understand why that sort of drumbeat is necessary and how you pull the content out of them. If they're some CEOs that I've worked with, get that intuitively right away and they understand about creating a movement in an organization, what you need to do to make that happen. And they're asking us for it. Others are saying, why is no one. Why do we continue to get questions about why this is necessary? It seems self evident. And we, you know, they under, they have that in their, in their brain. We. It's pulling it out and turning it into something that can then appeal to anywhere. Tens of thousands of employees. Like you're trying to move an organization that at many times is not only large but far flung and represents different cultures. So it's not a simple task.

Dan Nestle [00:20:13]: Yeah. It seems that the communicator's role here is so central to advising the CEO and just really helping them to understand that communication with your scattered, multicultural, global audience or even your single factory in, you know, suburban New Jersey or wherever it is, require different approaches. They all require that drumbeat. They require this kind of understanding that you're on this journey together and sometimes just sending an email just doesn't cut it. Ma' am, Sir. You know, and, and that is, that's. And it's funny when they throw it back on the communicator. Well, you're supposed to write a better email then. But, but I've seen it happen. You know, I've seen it happen. It's, it's interesting. Look, I mean, you've. We've been talking a little bit about you know, certain type types, CEOs do this and certain types do this and leaders do this. I'd like to ground us a little bit here. Can we go back a couple of clicks? It's funny that this whole idea of go down two clicks or click into this a little bit more. I only heard that in agency speak. But anyway, let's take it up a couple levels and we're talking about these different transformations. First of all, very practical level, what are the various types of transformations that you are seeing happening now? And yeah, you know, if there's, if it's very, if it's just like, hey, that is blatantly, obviously what that is, great. But if there's a need to define any of them, you know, give us a little context.

Kate Bullinger [00:21:52]: Sure. So it's interesting because we went into this year thinking there was going to be with a lot of predictions about an uptick in M and A. We've had a few years where we do a lot of M and A work, but a couple, you know, a few years where it's been quieter. Not that there hasn't been any, but it's been quieter. And the predictions were this year that would take off and there would be a lot of, there's money ready to go to do it. Companies were sort of primed and then obviously we faced a great degree of uncertainty and CEOs are saying they're just not ready to make those kind of moves at the moment. There's some, but it's much less than what we thought. In fact, we have a partnership with S and P and they were saying January was the sort of lowest activity month, remember? And it was at least a couple of years. So we came into this year thinking like this is going to be the year of the M and A. And there's certainly some of them, but it's not to that degree.

Dan Nestle [00:22:51]: I should, I should just interject a little bit. People will be listening to this, different times. So I just want to let everybody know that we're recording this, you know, at, you know, mid end of April, 2025. That's all I will say. Google that date. You know, you'll see, you'll see the.

Kate Bullinger [00:23:05]: Chaos going on on their plate. Right.

Dan Nestle [00:23:07]: And I'm sure, I'm sure by the time this comes out, it will still be somewhat, if not completely, a totally chaotic, chaotic economic environment. But let's just leave that there. And, and so you're saying that M and A traffic or M and A, the demand for M and A is.

Kate Bullinger [00:23:23]: One category it's not in it and it could, it could pick there has the money was there to start it. You know, the conditions were there. You know, it could, we could see that begin to pick up later in the year. Another one is spin offs. You know, we worked with a company last year that was spinning off one of its businesses and those are always really interesting from communication standpoint because you're kind of what we talked about before the story, the case for change and the vision. You're doing that for two different entities. Sometimes we've worked on both sides. You know, the company where the, that's divesting the asset and for the, for the new company. And the other thing that's exciting about that is there's often a branding element and you're creating the whole thing from scratch, which can be really exciting and fun. So that's sort of one, you know, the M and A, the spinoff. We also see a lot of restructuring. So I would say in the last couple of years that's more of the large scale change we've seen is our company's restructuring. And that might be outsourcing, reorganizing around a different strategy. And there's a lot of having to lay people off and restructure. Those are always very complex. You know, they, they, they maybe have not quite as many of the M and A is fun to work on because it brings everything. It's like the vision, the brand, bringing two cultures together. Restructuring tends to be a little bit more insular depending on what it is that it's inside the wall of the company. Unless it's something that's really causing a lot of layoffs or what have you. But those are very complex as well.

Dan Nestle [00:25:07]: I mean, does restructuring always go hand in hand with layoffs? I mean, you know, sometimes, not always.

Kate Bullinger [00:25:12]: Yeah, often. You know, there's one I've been advising on that's, that's looking to outsource. They have to become leaner and more efficient. And those are always really tricky and complex situations. Anytime you have people impacted like that, the question is how do you do that in the most authentic, transparent way that's consistent with your values and respects the people who are leaving and the people who are staying. Yeah, but there are certainly cases where there's restructuring with, with not, you know, with minimal, minimal layoffs. We also see leadership transition, which is often fun to, to work on there. As you probably know, the turnover rate or the longevity of a CEO is shorter than it used to be. And I would also say the ramp up Time we used to say, remember the 100 day plan? And then it was all sort of built out that way. And I don't think leaders today have the luxury of that kind of being able to take a year of a honeymoon period. Especially now they're dealing with things coming at them right and left. And so the challenge there is helping a new CEO on board get the right information quickly, understand the organization, and be able to start coming out with a point of view. And that's always fun to work on as well.

Dan Nestle [00:26:40]: Yeah. Now, a lot of these transactions that we hear about, and certainly, certainly M and A, you know, anything that has a strong media element that requires these, you know, huge preparations and big programs, people automatically jump to or think about. We're talking about enterprises, we're talking about large, large companies, you know, companies with, let's say, you know, anywhere from a couple thousand employees on up. Right. And, and I think, you know, heard yesterday the number like her, 99% of all businesses in the US are small businesses under, like they call it under 10 million or something. I think that's the category. It's hard to conceptualize for most people, I think, what, what that means and the kinds of things that you're talking about, these transition and transformation happens at all levels. And you know, maybe an M and A would be a lot less complex. If you're talking about one LLC buying a one person llc, that's different. But when you have, you know, employees involved at any number, or when you have different systems or different. It's just a matter of scale. So thinking about that, that it is relevant, I think across the different ethnographics, psychographics, business graphics. What do you call them? Firmographics. Thank you. Thank you, Jake. Firmographics. Different types of companies. What are the commonalities that you see? Let's just look at leadership behaviors. What are the commonalities that you see across or maybe just the archetypical leadership behaviors that communicators need to deal with across all these different M and A's or all these different transformations.

Kate Bullinger [00:28:31]: Yeah. I think actually the behaviors are often quite similar. What I think it's kind of fun working with smaller organizations because especially if you. I always thought there'd be a really interesting. For, you know, pre IPO and immediately post ipo, companies tend not to have focused as much on the leadership infrastructure and the communications infrastructure to do that really well. That's not across the board, but in general we don't tend to work as well. You know, they're very Focused on the IPO itself and not so much like, how are we building out the.

Dan Nestle [00:29:03]: Well internally, are they more focused on product? And like, is that where they're, I.

Kate Bullinger [00:29:08]: Think, getting to the idea? I mean, we, you know, you see some P firms and we've worked with a couple who are like, want to up level the leadership skills of their portfolio companies. And you know, that's exciting work. But I think what's interesting about companies in an earlier phase like that is they maybe don't have all the, you know, the tools or the approaches for this and that you can really see an impact in the work you're doing. Right. In all the things we've just talked about. I think the behaviors themselves, again, it sort of goes back to that universal what does it take to change human behavior? And any example organization, Some of the best CEOs I've seen are in smaller organizations where they create an incredible following of people who believe Patagonia is always cited and they're not so small now, but how they created that culture and the North Star and the like I think is really powerful. So I think the same behaviors are there. It's sometimes fun to work with those companies because you can see the impact of the change. When you make recommendations as a communication or a change management professional, you see the impact of it more quickly.

Dan Nestle [00:30:28]: I can see that having been mostly for large companies when I was in house. Change is slow, change takes a while. Impact is, you know, it's the brontosaurus tail. You smack it and you know, who knows, a couple months later.

Kate Bullinger [00:30:43]: And I think that's one of the things, you know, we've been thinking a lot about is in the world of change management, how do we create more agile approaches to doing it. And I also think that's where AI can come in to help. We've used AI, for instance. A really important thing is understanding where all your internal. What everybody's thinking in different parts of the organization. We've used AI to take lots of data from different parts of the organization and very quickly assess how the changes is hitting and what the major issues are. And that's something that would have taken us a couple of weeks to sort through. And now we can feed in. If we have that kind of input, we can feed it in and really understand like, okay, over here, this group, there's a lot of questions about this. So I think that idea of being more agile even in a big organization, to your point where change is harder to. It's harder to pivot on a time.

Dan Nestle [00:31:44]: Yeah, I do want to get back to the AI Thing, because that's my thing, and I love talking about AI. My voice is a little hoarse today because last night I was talking about AI, however, so much, and this might be a first for the show, that I'm more interested to talk about something else besides AI in a particular statement. And it was this point becoming more agile and figuring out ways to speed up transformation. Clearly, people want. I mean, audiences, your employee audience, your executive, your stakeholder audiences, all of them, you want things to get done and over with. Right. But if we're looking at things from a human centric approach, and maybe as part of this, you can kind of double back a little bit and highlight some of the qualities of what it means to be human centric. But as part of a human centric approach, does that conflict with speeding things up sometimes? Is there. Is there an inherent contradiction there, you know? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if there is. I just want to know because I know people take time as much as they. Everybody's different. I will adopt new technologies in a femtosecond, with a blink of an eye. I know people who are far more capable than me in certain areas of communications who take ages or may never, ever look at a, at a technology because, you know, it's just not in their zone. They're not interested. They want to do their job a different. Whatever it is. Doesn't matter what the benefits are. But I'm fast, they're slow in that. I take forever to write something, somebody else does it in 30 seconds. It's just like a thing. But when it comes to adjusting to, I guess a paradigm shift or a, or culture shift or a, you know, hey, these were your behaviors. Behaviors yesterday. Now, as part of the new copy, we're going to add these two to it. Or you have to exhibit these behaviors or the culture is changing in this way. And yes, I know that you were living in one culture yesterday. This is the new culture. You know, it's kind of like getting on a plane and going from the US To Japan and understanding. All right, I was in this culture. Well, now I'm in this culture. I have to behave this way. But one of them is my home culture and one of them isn't.

Kate Bullinger [00:34:07]: Yeah.

Dan Nestle [00:34:08]: And it must. It must make for some very interesting dynamics. So speeding that whole process up doesn't always sound like it's. It's precisely human centric. So just thoughts on that.

Kate Bullinger [00:34:18]: Yeah, that's a really interesting way to think about It. And I think that you're right. People go through the. We have a slide that's got the change curve. You know, people think of the change curve as this one traditional line, but when you think of an organization, it's multiple versions of that line together. Because people don't go through it in different parts of the organization. They go through it at different. A different pace, different stakeholder groups. I think that's one thing. Communicators, you know, when I started in this would think of employees as just one big mass of people, right? It'd be like, even in the aftermath, they'd have the communication announcement, plan for an M and A. And then somebody would be like, what should we say to employees writ large? And I think to your point, you've really got to look at employees as a very diverse. I mean, sometimes you can have 400,000 people in an organization and they're all going to have very different views depending on where they sit. So I think in terms of speeding things up, people have to have time to process. And you're absolutely right about that. I think where technology can help is sort of engaging people in ways faster. And one of the things I talked about before was listening and understanding what those different stakeholder groups think. So if we can pinpoint faster where are people stuck or what are the questions and get on top of that sooner, it's going to help people process through the. Through the change faster. I think another thing we're doing, we haven't talked another kind of change we do a lot of work on is culture transformation. And we've got a client we're talking to right now who's. I mean, they. Their goal is to try to, you know, facilitate this culture transformation and really get people's voices involved because, you know, the more people feel like they've had a voice or they've had some fingerprint on the process, the more they feel bought in. And it can speed the change up. Right. So they're looking at how can we use technology to engage 150,000 people in what worth looking at for our new culture framework? And that's really exciting. I mean, we've always had versions of that. You had IBM's values jam many, many, many years ago. Right. But today that process is like, how do we use technology to facilitate that kind of dialogue with that number of employees and distill the themes out of it quickly so that we can move faster? And I think that's really exciting. It's not that people are processing faster, but that our Ability to engage them in a meaningful and more targeted way that's stakeholder centric. Even inside the organization, I think is where we want to lean into AI and technology.

Dan Nestle [00:37:03]: Yeah, I suppose. So you can speed up some of the processes and the supporting infrastructure that helps the transition along and kind of clear some of the noise away from people's heads. So they're freer to focus and think about getting a cultured about what this new thing means to me in my life. And it's, it's a, as you, as you're talking, I can't help it. I just kind of start thinking of use cases for AI.

Kate Bullinger [00:37:32]: Like, okay, well, I think one thing that's been interesting is like it's harder to the use of it internally is like, you know, there's things that we've done to understand stakeholder groups in terms of narrative intelligence. We have a great team here at Weber Shandwick that does cutting edge work on that. And we do, we use that too when we're working on an M and A to understand the external voices that are influencing employees inside. It's been a little trickier to figure out how do we use it inside organizations because if we're looking at data, there's privacy, there's issues around how you're using that kind of data. But we are finding ways to use it to really speed up the work that we do. And not just speed it up, but engage bigger swaths of people in a more engaging, more consistent way and giving their, their input and thoughts.

Dan Nestle [00:38:24]: Yeah, something, I mean, it sort of ties together something you, you said earlier about looking at these employee audiences as, as, as just so diverse and varied. And term that comes to mind for me is fractured because that's what I've been saying about the entire audience landscape right now. For all of us as communicators, the challenge and marketers, the challenge that we have to absolutely understand and accept is that the audience is fractured and you're not going to reach them the same way you used to before. And for the most part I think people understand that. But rarely is that lens kind of flipped around and focused in on an employee public. And my friend Ethan McCarty always calls it, our friend Ethan always calls it having employees as a public.

Kate Bullinger [00:39:17]: I've heard him say that. And that's a good way to think about it.

Dan Nestle [00:39:20]: Think about it.

Kate Bullinger [00:39:21]: Yeah, yeah.

Dan Nestle [00:39:22]: And, and, and, and you're dealing with essentially a fractured group of people. And the larger that employee base is clearly the, the more fracturing it is. So you know I, I, I have been an advocate, I believe and I've, and I've actually practiced put my money where my mouth is or my mouth where my money. I don't know that, that you can skillfully AI tools to better adjust your messaging for those different audiences in a better and faster and more effective way. But I was just thinking about just pulling survey information and being able to talk to people and getting their verbatims. You don't have to sit and fuss with these big long spreadsheets. Take three weeks to figure out what employees think about, you know, their new, their new seats or is did the CEO's vision make sense to you? I mean anything.

Kate Bullinger [00:40:19]: Exactly. And you have to have that input. So we, we had a client last year where it was in Europe. You know, they have a period when you're doing any kind of restructuring where employees have an opportunity to submit questions. Oh yeah, right. And so we were able to train a tool, you know, the first time out it maybe didn't do what we needed it to do, but we were able and we were just going to be a rinse and repeat process so we could track Sentimen over time to train the tool to really pull and target sort of where the issues, what are the big questions. And that's I think a huge opportunity in change management to your point, to really distill and arm leaders with like, who wouldn't want to know that? Where are the sticking points? Like what's going to hang us up? Another thing we talk a lot about is how powerful employee voice is. And we actually wrote a study back in 2014. It was the first study on employee advocacy. This notion of, we started off saying it seems a little naive now, like employees can be a great voice for your brand and they're on social media. And it is true. That's all true. But the next study we did in 2017 was like there's a flip side to that and it's about employee advocacy, the dark side of it. And we've seen that if employees don't agree what a vocal body that, you know, population they can be in an M and A situation or anything else. So for us to be able to understand using AI and using these tools, where are we seeing hotspots is an incredibly powerful thing. And both inside and looking at, using it outside to look at places where employees comment and kind of sense like where, you know, where do we see these issues?

Dan Nestle [00:42:07]: I mean there's, there's massive amounts of data available. I think for the data scientists who are Looking around for, for, for those, for us mere mortals who are, who only have ChatGPT or you know, whatever, our, whatever our internal kind of, you know, our generative AI stuff though, I, I absolutely think that there's, there are huge cases, huge ways to be using these tools to, to really to move every, all of this forward. And as you were talking about it, I was thinking about, you know, I was thinking about this, this idea of so, you know, you have, you have all these surveys, you're pulling in all this data, you're getting all the kind of information from, from the, from the employees. You know, like taking that and then manufacturing, they're kind of folding that into your normal corporate talking points and the kind of, you know, using it to, to make adjustments to the strategy. I don't, my mind was going in all these places, but, but actually where, where I kind of kind of like perked up or perked down a little bit maybe was this whole thing about employee advocacy. Right? Because like all of these things, all this data can feed into that. You know, you can, you can understand your employees better and give them the better information to share or just kind of understand, hey, some of these people. This group is not a sharing group. This group is a sharing group. Like you have better intel about their behaviors, which sounds a little spooky, but you can. But the real, like the thing that really caught me and I remember was the follow up to your employee advocacy study where there's the dark side. I think a lot of people missed that one. Like, I feel like, well, they, they.

Kate Bullinger [00:43:54]: May not, they may not have read the report, but they felt it elsewhere. I mean, there's, you know, you know.

Dan Nestle [00:44:00]: I just feel like people aren't, were, you know, even now, I mean, Reese, as, as recently as, I don't know, like my most recent role, like you're talking about employee advocacy, getting them like, we gotta get our employees to share stuff on LinkedIn. We gotta get them to do this. And we've been saying the same thing for 15. LinkedIn's been around 22 years. We've been saying the same thing for at least 10 of those. Yeah. And having that kind of fund, that foundational data to begin with to understand where you're able to push before you go there, that would be priceless. I don't know if it's exactly legal in all countries, but.

Kate Bullinger [00:44:36]: Yeah, yeah, you know, it's a tricky, it's a tricky balance. Right? Because again, like we see in a lot of deal situations that employees have a voice and they may not agree with what you're doing and that can be a huge disruptor depending on what it, you know, what it is. But again, it's about understanding, trying to understand that sentiment and doing that stakeholder analysis and having the data available to make those smart decisions and know where your hotspots are going to be.

Dan Nestle [00:45:11]: If nothing else, there's no longer an excuse to not be better prepared for all these things with what you have available to you, you, you know, I don't think you can go into an engagement or be an in house comms person or whatever your role is and argue that, well, you know, hey, I just, I didn't, I didn't know what, how this would, you know, kind of, I didn't know how this would affect the audience or I didn't know how this messaging would, would feel or I didn't like, you can make far more reasonable kind of judgments because you have great tools available to you. And let me give you an example. And this gets back to transitional change and management. Believe me, you're talking about how the flip side of employee advocacy. And it just made me remember I've been playing around a lot as my listeners know, with NotebookLM. It's my very favorite thing for a lot of reasons, but I know my generalist communications skill set. Like I, I'm, I'm self aware and I know that there are certain areas that I've never been really thrilled to do. I do them anyway when asked. And there are certain areas that, like I said, there's a billion people who could do better than I can. There are some things that I know that I'm stellar at, but looking at, let's say, crisis, for example, now I can handle crisis communications. I can't handle crisis communications as well as, I don't know, dozens of people that I worked alongside in crisis situations. I've learned from them, but I know that I need to kind of rely on them. My point is I created a crisis communications basecamp within, you know, NotebookLM as an AI research tool for myself because it's not like I'm having crises or anything, but I want to be able to at least give the surface level to my clients so that, you know, I can go this far. And then you need to bring in, you know, the help, the lawyers. It's amazing how some of the reservations I had about crisis I was able to kind of dismiss because it's the speed of absorbing information and kind of making sense of the various messaging that's going around now. The reason this is the reason this kind of came to mind is because the simulation that I started with was that almost the exact thing that you talked about, which is, you know, your, your company has made some kind of a reorg and a very vocal employee has taken to social media and trashed you. You know, I made up some story and here's what they said and blah, blah, blah, right? And gave it all kinds of context. And then it gave me a, a response plan, a even kind of took a shot at holding statements, initial media response, all these great things that would have taken me so long to create myself. And they were good because I used the right sources for the material. I used just the right stuff. The Christ experts that I know, I use their knowledge in their material to advise me. So the whole, the whole point of all this, I think is that A, AI is awesome, but B, employees really as a public employees as a, as a fractured audience, you know, are, are critical to the success of any transition and any transformation and are also one of the biggest risks you have to any transformation. Yeah. And, and for that reason, putting them at the center. Right. That human centric approach is making more and more and more and more sense. Right? And is that human centric approach, right? Is that, man, is that about prioritization? Is it about messaging? Is it about timing? In other words, you tell them first before you tell other people. Like, what does it look like?

Kate Bullinger [00:49:29]: I think it has to be stakeholder driven and figuring out it's going to be different for every part of the organization based on what you're trying to do. You could be doing a change that's really only going to affect majorly one part of the organization. And so I think it differs in every case, just like crisis work can differ in every case. And it's interesting, you talk about the toolbox or my base camp. You call that your basecamp? Because I started creating a modern change management playbook. There's lots of different approaches to change management out there, prosci and other things that some of your listeners will know about, but what I think we're really trying to do is a modern version of a change playbook that can be more agile and stakeholder centric. Not that any change management plan is focused on moving people along a continuum, but I think today things are moving so quickly, we have to create something that can help organizations be more agile with it. And interestingly, I actually started building it using AI and to your point, I was prompting it to do certain things like how would we, you know, what, what Change skills are going to be needed in the, you know, sort of. It was spit out some really interesting stuff that I'm excited about. We're working on developing sort of a change playbook that could help organizations like your basecamp really navigate and create. Because it's not a one size fits all. Depends on the change. It depends on the employee base, who's being affected, what you're trying to accomplish with them. But the playbook would help you sort of work through that and sort of test and learn an approach around. Is this message working? Are we moving the stakeholder group? Who else is going to be worried about this in the next three months? So I think we want to both help equipment companies. Obviously, we love consulting with our clients. We want to do more of that. But there's also sort of a need for, like, this methodology and approach, like your crisis basecamp that would help people sort of get their head around it.

Dan Nestle [00:51:53]: Yeah. Again, to me, it's like, partly it's because I always say I'm fundamentally lazy and I want to create shortcuts to things. So I don't want to have to go, you know, I don't have to go and, like, read a book about crisis. Who wants to do that? I don't want to go, like, research and have it all in one place.

Kate Bullinger [00:52:11]: Exactly. That's the same idea of what we're trying to create.

Dan Nestle [00:52:14]: Yeah. But it's a great. It turns out that, hey, it's an incredible validation tool and it actually spurs me to learn more. I'm always tongue in cheek about the whole laziness thing, but I am looking for faster, shorter, quicker ways to do stuff. And the idea of building out a crisis playbook sounds amazing to me. Sorry, A change management playbook sounds amazing to me because it's such a. I don't think it's a very well understood term. I mean, I don't think it's. People understand that there's change, that it needs to be managed, but that there's a whole discipline around that is kind of, I don't know, alien to, I think, a lot of folks out there who aren't in it. Like, who aren't in.

Kate Bullinger [00:53:02]: I think that's right. I mean, if you think about it, it's most simple terms. It's really about creating a movement in an organization. Right. So it's like a lot of the psychology that you think about when you're. When you're doing a political campaign or bringing people along for any sort of major journey. Yeah. Looking at the future you know, it's using a lot of those same tactics. But yeah, organizations aren't inherently democratic. Right. So, like, historically, you know, they haven't always had to think about how are we bringing everybody along. The best CEOs I think have. But, you know, and I think today it's really a requirement because of what we were talking about. Employee advocates, advocacy and activism. And I think communicators, your audience, have a really big role in that. In fact, we had a client last week ask us, do you think you could build us a change playbook? And it was the comms team. I think the comms team ends up sitting often at the center of these things because they come to it with maybe less of a. They're the convener of everybody. Right. So it's like you've got a lot of different folks who are trying to. They're working on one piece of the puzzle and the comms team's trying to make sense of it all and bring it together. An important role to play.

Dan Nestle [00:54:22]: Yeah, it's the source of both value and fear for an organization that the comms team is just like the nerve center. Hey, those folks know something about everything and they're putting it all together and helping us tell our story. And certainly, you know, if you need to know something, hey, let's talk to the comms team. Because they really can get the. They'll get to the right people, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, you know, you know, those people who know everything, the comms team, my God, they know everything. Geez, isn't that like, what do we do about them? It sort of starts to flip in the other direction, you know, And I was reading about, I think it was in Dr. Laura McHale. She's a neuroscientist and communicator. She used to be the head of internal comms for Deutsche, I think, in. In. In Asia. And she went on to become a. A neuroscientist and. And consultant for communicators. She wrote this great book called Neuroscience for Communications Leadership. And I think in the beginning of the book, and forgive me, Laura, if I'm getting this wrong, but she talks about how comms is in this sort of unique place and we often share the fate of the CEO because, you know, we're. We're highly trusted. We, we kind of stake our effectiveness and our career on our capability to build relationships and trust with the leadership. And if we go too far, we build that leadership trust. With a CEO. Next CEO comes in, that can be problem, problematic. You know, we're too right to aligned and I imagine that's part of transition. Sorry, it's part of transformation that you might deal with. I mean, you know, when you have, especially when you have two organizations coming together and you've got different CEOs and different comms teams, you know, have you ever seen that kind of A, or had. Or had to manage through that sort of a conflict where there's a suspicion and trust issue across with these different teams with new CEOs, et cetera?

Kate Bullinger [00:56:20]: Yeah, I mean I, yes, both in. If you think of an M and A, it's quite. There's two teams so you're always going to have the, you know, and to your point, there's often an alignment. It's the kind of role. And it's actually interesting because we're doing a qualitative study right now. It's the second of a series that we're doing on the CCO ccao, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer role and what's on their mind today and how the role is broadened to become really what we were talking about, that sort of glue and really a business having to get much more involved in understanding the business. And I think that because to your point, you get so involved with a leadership team that can make it, when there is a new leadership team after an M and A happens, that CEO is really going to pick the person to play that role. And I think that happens in leadership transition as well. So we're often in a lot of cases we also counsel communication leaders and their teams on what their role is post the change and how they might need to rethink their team and their strategy to either support a new CEO. So it's interesting to your point. It's a unique position because of the closeness and the council provided specifically on the CEO and the CO's agenda.

Dan Nestle [00:57:52]: Such a tricky game, isn't it? You know, you've got this, especially in a merger or, or an acquisition where the acquiring company has essentially the leverage and you know, the comms team of the, of the acquisition of. If the. What do they call it? The. Of the quiry. Yeah. You know, you know that this is going to be a 6, 8, 10, 14, 16 month process. And if you have any reasonable level of wisdom, you know that at the end of that process there's a very good chance that you will be out of a job and that either becomes a, it becomes a fight or flight thing. You're either gonna, you know, try extremely hard to prove value in positive ways. See where I see it. Just see how it goes, or you're going to do your best to get the hell out of that organization and hopefully not, you know, not sabotage the place that you're in on the way out, which is always dangerous. And I. And it's, you know, I suppose on smaller teams is probably worse, but the trick, the intricacy there, you know, and where do you go from there? And then you have to be the people all along the way who are.

Kate Bullinger [00:59:11]: Responsible, who are supporting. Yet don't know your fate yourself. I do have. I have a friend, colleague, client. She's sort of been all those things who has worked on a lot of companies who have done major transitions that have ultimately ended up with her leaving the role. And I actually think it's interesting when I think about the complexity she has navigated and what that has brought, the skillset she has, which is quite unique to have gone through, you know, multiple transformations, be it spin or a merger or a restructuring that she's had to manage and then move on. I think it's quite a unique skill set.

Dan Nestle [00:59:55]: Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Kate Bullinger [00:59:57]: And it certainly takes a lot of tolerance of, you know, uncertainty and high stakes because, you know, when we're working on an M and A, I mean, that's. It's just the level of activity. It's like working on a crisis. Right? Yeah. So if you go from job to job and you're doing that, you've got to be up for that kind of intensity on an ongoing basis. But. Yeah, yeah.

Dan Nestle [01:00:21]: And if, you know, if you're. And if you're like, if you are on the comms team, especially, you're, you know, you are, you're. You're trying to figure out how to message all of these things into the rest of the employees and create the messaging for the executives and figure out what you're going to say to the media if they ask and then understand, you know, at the end of this whole process, I'm out of a job. But, you know, this is going to be good for me. Maybe I can. Maybe I can negotiate an exit. No, I don't think I'll be able to negotiate an exit because I'm not supposed to know all these things. Like, it's this whole thing that. Imagine the pressure and the stress that that causes the communicator. It takes a rare breed, I think, to not only survive that, but to really thrive in it and say at the end of it all, hey, look, I know the situation. I've delivered this incredible work for you and I will continue to do so, if you ask me. But I realize you don't need two of me, so.

Kate Bullinger [01:01:15]: Yeah, yeah. I mean, in many ways it's like the crisis work you're describing because they're operating at that level constantly, but without a real line of sight. That's really only mostly true when you're doing an M and A, even in a lot of CEO transitions. Certainly CEOs bringing their own communication people sometimes, but I've also seen a lot of teams stay and onboard the CEO and manage through that.

Dan Nestle [01:01:38]: There's always a little bit of fear and anxiety management, any of those things.

Kate Bullinger [01:01:41]: But that's where at the beginning of the conversation I said to you, M and A has it all right. You're doing leadership, positioning the North Star, the new, potentially branding of the company you're doing. It's kind of got everything we often are helping stand up a new communication team and navigate and set their strategy to support the new organization. Yeah, so it kind of has. They're fun to work on because it's everything everywhere all at once.

Dan Nestle [01:02:13]: I've been on a couple of those projects and yeah, I've thoroughly enjoyed them. I wish in some ways that I was more involved in one of them and less involved in another, but they are really fun. They're intense, but fun. And you come out of it with like a, with a work product that you're like, you look back on and you can actually, even if you can never, ever show, like, you can never show it to anybody, but, you know, who cares? It's so good. Yeah, we have, we have covered so much ground and there's so much ground I still want to cover. I didn't even talk to you about, you know, I was so curious about how generational differences affect, affect transformation. And I was like. Because I've been talking about that a lot lately, but I'm going to put a pin in that one and ask, ask you to maybe come back again to talk about that. But in the meantime, any last words, anything that, you know, to sum it all up, any, any kind of, you know, big points or takeaways that you'd like to, to, to give to our audience? I always kind of do this as a, as a hey, what's keeping you up at night? Type of question, and if you could, you could answer it that way if you'd like. But I'm going to make this player's choice if you'd like to, you know, anything you'd like to kind of give us on the way out so that, you know, I think some takeaways.

Kate Bullinger [01:03:26]: Y. Sure. I think one thing that's keeping. I'm going to answer that one first because something comes to mind very quickly that I think communicators could really be thinking about, that I've been thinking a lot about is the next generation of leadership in all of this. And when you talk about the convergence of AI hybrid work, all of these things, what does that mean? And we've talked a lot about the role of leadership in change and transformation. And I just. It's like the next generation of leaders who are going to be running organizations that are not. I know. You know, right now we have a lot of legacy leaders pushing for people to be back in the office for all these things. But when you think about 10 years from now, what is it going to look like to lead a large global organization? I don't. Those leaders won't be in their jobs anymore. It's the people who are, you know, millennials and Gen Z who are going to be. They haven't even. They've grown, largely coming to the workforce when it has been remote and it's been harder to build culture and do all these things, and AI will advance and other technologies will come along. And I think there's like a code to crack on what does leadership look like in that environment. And it's probably going to be that generation to figure it out.

Dan Nestle [01:04:50]: God help us.

Kate Bullinger [01:04:51]: So that's kind of, to me, not that we don't have any, you know, thoughts on it. You know, I think that's a really interesting challenge to think about, because right now I feel like we're at this tail end of, like, the more traditional way of doing things, and you've got to be back in the office or. I just don't think that's going to last forever. And so what does it look like to be a leader 10 years from now?

Dan Nestle [01:05:16]: That would keep me up, too. In fact, now it will.

Kate Bullinger [01:05:19]: Sorry about that.

Dan Nestle [01:05:20]: No, no, I mean, it's interesting how like the. To me, the question that then pops up in the sub question again, I'll say this for another time, but just to put in your head is, okay, fine, they'll be our leaders in 10 years. But what do you do about the skill atrophy that is happening because they're using various tools to take care of what they would normally have taken care of as humans, and the wisdom that you gain from either cranking out written documents and writing reports or doing research, whether what. No matter what your role is, that now that's made fast and easy by AI. For better, for worse. You know, your skills are not going to be as sharp 10 years as somebody who's been doing that by hand for 10 years.

Kate Bullinger [01:06:03]: So unless you're, I'm not, certainly not an expert but unless you become so good at writing prompts that that's the skill now as well.

Dan Nestle [01:06:11]: And that's, that's the question. That's the thing, isn't it? Like, well, maybe those aren't the right skills then maybe there's just different, a different set of skills and we just don't know. I mean, yeah, it's like any other.

Kate Bullinger [01:06:22]: Revolution, the industrial revolution or are they. It's like, can we picture what that is? And I don't even know that we're there that we can picture that.

Dan Nestle [01:06:29]: I don't, I don't think. But I don't think anybody knows or, and if they do, they're, they're, they're trying to sell books. The.

Kate Bullinger [01:06:37]: I think a worthy cause.

Dan Nestle [01:06:38]: A worthy cause. So look, this has been awesome. I, I think that you've given a lot us a lot of things to think about. Transformational change is so critical and it's really that the whole point about being human centric has to I think play out in every level of our professional lives. And I won't, you know, certainly in our personal lives. But let, don't blame me for having like being value driven or have making value judgments about that. I'll just say for professionally, you know, putting humans first. Some companies have been blowing it lately in my opinion and I'm sure in yours too, human centric, we have to continue that way. No matter whether you're talking about a very simple AI task, writing a LinkedIn post or all the way up through, you know, how you run a change comms program and how you address your employee audiences. I so want to talk about this more but for now I will just say to everybody, if you want to learn more about Kate, check her out on LinkedIn. Kate Bollinger. Her name will be spelled properly in the episode title and go to unitedmindsglobal.com unitedminds global.com that's, that's where you'll find all the information.

Kate Bullinger [01:07:56]: We're just relaunching our website, so we're.

Dan Nestle [01:07:58]: Oh terrific. So just in time.

Kate Bullinger [01:08:00]: And just in time time.

Dan Nestle [01:08:01]: Yeah, I'm sure that you can navigate to United Minds from the Weber Shandwick properties, but go to united mindsglobal.com check out Kate on LinkedIn any place else people can find you, Kate, that you that you tend to be active professionally and want to want people to know about.

Kate Bullinger [01:08:18]: Those are the two best ones on LinkedIn. But those are great and you can always reach me through United Minds Global.

Dan Nestle [01:08:27]: Well, be on the lookout for Kate at speaking engagements. You know, watch your local conferences, et cetera, to see if she's on the stage. I would go, but definitely reach out to Kate if you have any questions about her, for her or about transformational change. Thank you so much, Kate. It has been.

Kate Bullinger [01:08:42]: Thank you. It was such a pleasure. I've had a great time.

Dan Nestle [01:08:45]: This is awesome. Thanks so much. Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know@dantrendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending communicator, Sam.