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speaker-0: What's my outcome gonna be by leveraging this technology to do something? Am I gonna get it done quicker? Am I gonna get it done better? Am I gonna be able to do more with less?
speaker-1: Without that deliberate behavioral based communication, you're lost now in somebody's reaction or assumption of the meaning.
speaker-0: They just wanna see you sweat and perform. That's what we did. And you know, if they can do it, I can do it, and you can accomplish great things when your mind is focused in the right direction.
speaker-1: Dr. Amy Aethe, as a licensed psychologist and performance expert, working with elite athletes, C-suite executives, and high performers operating in some of the most demanding environments, I've seen what it truly takes to perform when it matters most. From supporting members of the Naval Special Warfare community to advising leaders in high stakes, high pressure situations, OneTruth remains consistent. The tools that drive performance are the same. You prepare in a way that allows you to show up ready when the moment arrives. Each week I'll share practical tools and insights to help you strengthen how you think, lead, and perform. Welcome to Still Evolving. Something I have talked about for years across nearly every high-performing environment I have been a part of is what I call the Find a Way Mindset. It is one of the most consistent characteristics I have seen in people who deliver when the moment matters. And it is what I want to open this conversation with today, because it also sits at the very heart of what today's guest brings to the table. The find a way mindset gets misread a lot in professional settings. It gets treated as a personality trait, something a very few naturally scrappy or resourceful people happen to have, and the rest of us do not. My experience across high performing environments. says something different. Finding a way is a skill. It is trainable. It has recognizable components. And every high performer I have worked with, whether in sport, in the military, or at the executive level, has built some version of it. Whether they knew that was what they were doing or not. Today's guest calls the same instinct being a good figure outer. And that language captures something that the corporate world has struggled to name. Which is that in disruptive moments, the leaders who win are the ones who trust that they can work their way through it, even when the map has not been drawn yet. Most of my career has been spent inside worlds where you cannot look up the answer to what you are facing, because the specific circumstance you are in has never occurred in exactly this form before. In elite sport, no two competitions are ever identical. In the military, no two operations unfold the way the planning session predicted. What both of these environments teach, and what most executive settings do not teach explicitly, is that performance rests on your ability to walk into an unfamiliar situation, quickly
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identify what actually matters, and act with enough humility to keep adjusting as new information arrives. That is what finding a way really means. Not knowing before you start, being able to move well without knowing. There are a few things I have noticed about leaders who do this well. They tolerate the discomfort of not knowing longer than most people can without letting it slide into paralysis. They ask better questions than ones being handed to them by the room. They separate the noise, the jargon, the news cycle, and the opinions of everyone with a take from the actual problem sitting in front of them. And they keep their ego low enough that the fastest path forward is not the one that makes them look the smartest. That last piece is easier to name than to practice because senior seats are not usually designed to reward the person who says, I do not yet know yet. Let's go figure it out. In my book, Moment Ready, I write about four capacities that let high performers show up well in the moments that matter. These capacities are composure, clarity, connection, and courageous action. The find a way mindset lives inside of courageous action. And the way I define courageous action in the book is exactly this. It is the willingness to take the action that matters even when you do not feel ready. Confidence is not the ticket in. Preparation, curiosity, and the willingness to move without certainty are. And what I keep seeing in every industry that is being reshaped by AI right now is that the ones pulling ahead are the ones who have made peace with not knowing and gotten to work on finding a way through. Today's guest is David Quackenbush, a longtime advisor to executive teams navigating change at the intersection of technology, business, and organizational design. David has built his career on the practice of walking into unfamiliar problems and finding a way through, going back to his early consulting days where he was handed a COBOL assignment that he had never seen before and told he had two days to figure that out. That instinct to just start working the problem has carried him across decades of advisory work and shapes how he thinks about the current AI moment as well. He is refreshingly skeptical of jargon, refreshingly practical about what these tools can and cannot do, and refreshingly clear that the fundamentals of leadership and the problem solving has not changed just because the technology has. He brings a one percent better philosophy to his own life that he picked up from the fitness world and applies to nearly everything else, which is a thread that ties this whole conversation together in a way that I think you're going to appreciate. David, thanks for making the time. Let's get into it. Welcome to Still Evolving.
speaker-0: Thank you, Amy. Glad to be here. Honored to be here and look forward to ⁓ what we have to talk about.
speaker-1: Yeah. you know, I talk, as you know, my journey has been in high performance. And one of the mindsets that I think is common in high performers, regardless of the performance domain, is kind of a find the way mindset. Now you have been ⁓ w in our conversations. I I love talking with you as you've talked about people who win in disruption or challenge, ⁓ are often Very good figure outers. ⁓ can you share a little bit more about what you mean by that and where did you first see this matter for your career?
speaker-0: Sure. So it's ⁓ you know, I've always felt like for me, ⁓ my strength of being able to go in there and problem solve by by literally figuring things out as you go, because we everybody encounters the same thing at some point. I've never done that before, I've never done that before, I've never done this before. And that's a limiter. ⁓ because really we all have to figure it out. Right. For the first time. doesn't really matter what it is. I mean, ⁓ so I've always just sort of gone into things going, Look, ⁓ there's no reason why you can't just go figure this thing out. I mean, you know, you're given a problem to solve, go figure it out. You know, we were trained in my career, I'm fairly advanced in age. ⁓ th there wasn't a lot of training. You know, it's like, hey man, I need you to go do this and you know, making a response like, Well, I've never done that before really wasn't a welcome response. You just said, Okay, cool, I'll go I'll go figure it out. So I've always sort of just prided myself on the fact that ⁓ problem solving by p figuring out is is a great way to learn and ⁓ and get things done.
speaker-1: ⁓ speaking of your career, can you think back to one of those earlier moments when you were handed something you you had no idea what to do? What was that kind of initial gut reaction and then what got you moving forward? Right. Like I I hear you saying that the response of I've never done that before really wasn't very welcomed. ⁓ and I think sometimes people can get in this place of like inertia or just kind of feeling stuck. by perhaps the self-doubt or just quote unquote not knowing what helps get you moving in the that moment.
speaker-0: Well, you know, the Interesting. A f fear's a great motivator in a lot of ways. So, you know, y when someone gives you something to do and you know you want to do well at it, ⁓ you know, the fear of failure is a great motivator to just get you moving. So I, you know, my first probably my first real one of these professionally, ⁓ I had lots of them growing up as a kid and and in college, but professionally they said, Hey, I j I just joined a consulting business had never done any programming in my life, really, to speak of and they go, Hey, here, you need to go, ⁓ you're go finish this COBOL program and it's due in two days. I'm like, hmm I've not really ever coded in COBOL before, but I can't really say that to this group of ⁓ colleagues. ⁓ I just need to go in there and figure it out. So I was like, Okay, well, I'm just gonna go in there and start looking at this stuff and
figuring out what I see. Unfortunately, ⁓ the first one was the easiest one because it was kind of like a clone of something else. So all I to do was basically just tweak a few things and I was done. ⁓ they were just testing me. And this was sort of part of the culture I think I grew up in ⁓ in the big big six back in those days. It's like it was not ⁓ was not a difficult task and but They just wanna see you sweat and perform. And so that's that's what we did. And you know, it it was a great experience, it was stressful, but at the same time, you know, you started to realize just like everybody does, I think, at some point that hey, if if they can do it, I can do it and y you know, the whole competitive thing and everything starts to just rush in and and ⁓ you can accomplish great things when your mind is focused in the right direction.
speaker-1: I l I love that emphasis on the attention. Like where are you pay paying attention to? Are you gonna pay attention to the noise either internally of self doubt or questioning? You're gonna pay attention to the external noise where there's a lot of a lot of people's opinions, a lot of information out there. This this won't work or this, that or the other thing, right? And it's just like, no, we're gonna we're gonna send it. We're gonna do this. ⁓ I love that. You know, in this world today. information is not lacking, if anything, if we're inundated. ⁓ I'm I'm I think about the, you know, my daughters are in college now, which is crazy. ⁓ but here we are. and, you know, a lot of me a lot of discourse around the role of AI and the disruption and the the the job skills that are gonna be needed now of this next generation coming out. ⁓ can we talk just for a moment? I am trying to figure it out, right? Like how I can use agents to help improve whether it's my productivity, efficiency, and response. and I'm reminded of when I was in college, that's when, well, I did not have email until my senior year. Just saying.
speaker-0: Yeah, we didn't have it at all. So,
speaker-1: And and all and I do remember the days of switching to Windows, which I thought was absolutely insane. I'm like, what do you mean, drag and drop this and the other thing? But nonetheless, ⁓ there wasn't as much information back there then in that evolution, right? Like there my professor was instructing me. I had some classmates who could instruct me. I don't even remember if it was really in a textbook, right? Nowadays, this generation coming out with this this AI evolution, there's like a shit ton of information. Like every time I turn around, ⁓ and I'm not on socials a lot, but when I am, it's just somebody else is sharing on AI. What do you think separates those people, and maybe what advice you might have for that younger generation from of those people who are generally figuring it out, from those who are just consuming all of this. Content around it.
speaker-0: That's a great question. ⁓ you know, the ⁓ the thing about this current environment and the tidal wave of AI this, AI that, you know, I think it's just easy for everyone to get overwhelmed with what is this and what is it doing to me? What is it doing for me? You know. ⁓ and really the the short answer is embracing it and and again figuring out how it can be an it and it help to you. ⁓ how it can make you better is really the I think the path forward because these tools are outstanding but they're not a panacea for using your brain to solve problems and and using the humanness of of how humans go about doing things versus how machines go about doing things for doing that. But but it's a great accelerator and in some ways ⁓ while it can you can see it as being overwhelming at on the other end of the spectrum really you can see it as being something that's focusing because everyone's had at least one case already, I'm sure, where they've created something with an AI platform and given it to somebody and gone, Ugh, God wish I wouldn't have done that. I needed to really spend more time kind of learning what it created. ⁓ before I just handed it out. Because there might have been some things under that I didn't even want it to say or or was just incorrect. So, you know, get that moment of really understanding that, hey, it's great, it got me this far in a short period of time. I can spend more of that time now doing the part that's really me and making it something I'd be proud to present to somebody else as a piece of quality work of whatever form, whatever communication or or work it is.
speaker-1: You know, I remind people that ⁓ at the end of the day it's still about human performance, right? Like yes, you know, we've seen advances in industry where ⁓ automation has propelled even even not just quantity or efficiency, but like quality. And at the end of the day, like we're the ones being called to show up in the meetings. We're the ones being sh ⁓ called to make decisions, to execute perhaps you know, a particular business strategy, ⁓ an action step supporting that.
speaker-0: Somebody control us or or we can control it and do more with with the the you know the co pilot thing is a great analogy or the side by side the assistant because it really can be that for you. You know, if you if you choose to learn how to harness it and and leverage what it does really well that sometimes humans don't do great, ⁓ it's a good partner.
speaker-1: It it is. It's a great great point. The the partnership that comes in. The role of the human is in the critical thinking and the and certainly we still have the agency, as you mentioned, to to drive where we're going. You you consult ⁓ with a number of or advise different businesses. I'm c I'm curious where do you see the real change starting to happen? ⁓ and or where do you see it as the converse of ⁓ mostly it just being noise and As I mentioned, like the doomsday scrolling that is out there.
speaker-0: Yeah, it's ⁓ it's kinda funny. We're wrapping up a project right now, a strategy
project for a client, and ⁓ the CIO and I have kind of made it a a a stated objective to not really talk about AI too much in our sessions, even though the outcome and the end product is to help the company be more prepared and more ready for leveraging AI solutions, AI based solutions and things like that. And so I think the ⁓ the long and the short of it is there's a lot of playing around going on out there and not a lot of like, ⁓ my God, we're gonna do the real heavy lifting yet or very disruptive things. There's a lot of co-piloting and and things where people are getting benefit from ⁓ shortening cycle times for research or other things like that. But the disruptive side of things hasn't quite reached, you know, critical mass yet, mostly because the underlying foundation, both across people processes and technology, just isn't there yet. You know, the organization's not ready to be disrupted. That's a change management activity that's going to take a lot of of hey you look changing your job doesn't mean you're losing your job, right? Changing your job doesn't mean how you do your work is is a bad thing. It actually can be a good thing ⁓ if you if you embrace it and then disrupting the business process, well what does that really look like? I mean there's you know there could be some really great advantages, but not everything is going to be made better by throwing AI in the middle of it and going, ⁓ look, we've done you know, so all the all the hype is starting to kind of come back down to earth and everyone's starting to realize that this is another great tool, but it's it's not without its own challenges and I still have to figure out where are its best applications.
speaker-1: It's interesting, David. You're you you led with sharing ⁓ this project you're working on with another executive and the intentionality behind ⁓ actually not leading with the AI as the language, even though perhaps that's the target on down the line of of how you can help support that company and and being prepared or or ready for that such implementation down the road. ⁓ Are there other things or perhaps maybe on a similar vein, like that you wish executives were saying actually out loud during this uncertain time? ⁓ because you're you're intentionally like partnering with him around language, perhaps maybe informed by the change process and understanding the the culture and the and the team there. But ⁓ I guess the flip side or is there something else you wish executives were being more vocal about?
speaker-0: I think that I think the first thing you have to kind of do and and Probably a lot of this has to be kind of getting out of the news cycle with and and kind of seeing the reality of what's going on inside organizations. It's one thing to see the news cycle ⁓ use AI as an excuse for the problem of the day or the reduction in force of the time or what have you. It's a whole other thing internally to go, Okay, here's a here's a set of technologies 'cause it's
not just a technology, it's a whole bunch of different things. ⁓ And so our charter as an organization to always be better is to figure out how to get the most use out of these things if it's and where it's most applicable. So I've I mean to me, I think an executive team that's well informed and not just reacting to ⁓ you know, ⁓ why aren't we doing more with AI question, but actually saying how do we really take advantage of of all these technologies? 'Cause they've been taking advantage of some of them for quite some time. It's not like the stuff that just showed up last week. And every starting to jump on board. I mean this some of the stuff's been parts of AI have been used for a very long time and no one really a pa paid any attention to it. So it's all about generative AI, it's really the hype cycle talk right now. And again, you you have to kind of get back to say, okay, how do we, you know, as a business, what am I gonna get out of it? What's my outcome gonna be by leveraging this technology to do something? Am I gonna get it done quicker? Am I gonna get it done better? ⁓ am I gonna be able to do more with less? and and again, so it becomes a s just another strategic investment question, ⁓ as opposed to, well, this is gonna, you know, disrupt our business and and we have to be careful about how we describe it to the masses. The masses are the ones that are gonna make it succeed or fail. I mean, you know, in inside an organization, you're not gonna ⁓ unless you're born digital, if you're the one person company, the person that starts their own company and it it's all AI based, whatever there's a couple of stories out there like that's great. But if you're a hundred year old company, if you're Exxon Mobil, ⁓ doesn't work the same way inside those businesses. They they have to have the workforce bought in and engaged with whatever the strategy is. And this is just another ⁓ I'm to as far as I'm concerned, it's just another element of it. So I like to get rid of the jargon and the noise when I talk and and when you know it's like because it's a distractor. What what problem are you trying to solve y you have to just go back to fundamentals. What problem are you trying to solve? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: And I appreciate the point that some of this is not The latest, you know, invention. Like some of the the tools that are being used or have been used to solve some of the problems are have been in place, right? That you are likely evolving and building off of processes, tools that are currently in place, not radically breaking something or building something from scratch.
speaker-0: Part of the problem of of being lost in your own jargon is that, you know, you say AI and to the average person they just kinda see it and have a reaction to it not knowing exactly what it is that you're talking about because you're really using it as jargon. You're not really using it as a definitive thing that you're going to do. ⁓ and we've always we've always
kind of laughed about it in our career of colleagues I've gotten an opportunity to work with is like, you know, how do we get the jargon out of our out of our lexicon? Because everybody uses it. Everyone, every industry has their own jargon. And they use it as a I think as sort of a way to sound like they know what they're talking about when ⁓ it's better just to explain it. You know, this is what we're doing exactly. Here's what we're doing, exactly. And try to keep the jargon out of the out of the sentence if you can.
speaker-1: I ⁓ I I very much appreciate the point because it's lost meeting in some way, right? That then you you have lost if you're talking about, you know, who's driving this, then you've lost then with without that deliberate, ⁓ very behavioral based communication, you you're lost now in somebody's reaction or assumption of the meeting, right?
speaker-0: You know, most of us ⁓ humans are very similar and the last thing we're gonna do is go, What do you mean by that? You know, and that's just like when you're in a meeting and someone goes, We're gonna use A AI is gonna be the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Very few people in those such situations would go, Well, what do you exactly mean by that? you know, it's just not part of the normal course of dialogue in most organizations. and so it can get lost. I mean, you can get lost in Well what are we doing? That all I heard was a bunch of three letter acronyms. ⁓ and that didn't really I didn't understand any of them. And yeah. Doesn't make me dumb, it just means I don't understand them. And you know I've heard enough three letter acronyms that have three or four different meanings in my career. It's like, well, which version of that are you talking about? Because I I don't know what that means.
speaker-1: The cascading impact, right? Of whichever one you choose is is great. ⁓ David, I it's been one heck of a journey. I I've really appreciated our conversation, the opportunity to learn from you. I'm curious, we tend to close and asking all of our guests, ⁓ what's helped you sustain it? So perhaps maybe there was a daily, weekly routine that helped renew you, ground you. ⁓ what's helped you stay engaged as you are and ⁓ sustain this high performance over the over the years.
speaker-0: ⁓ well I think there's a number of things that began for me as a somewhere in in my DNA, I suppose as a child, I always worked, even when I didn't have to, ⁓ growing up, I always wanted to work and learn things and not school things. So I was never good in school. So I'll just go ahead and clarify that right now. School was not my thing at all, but I always enjoyed fixing things. And so ⁓ being a a problem solver and a fixer upper came from that. I fix all kinds of stuff. ⁓ and and I've never been afraid to go tackle that. So for me it was always about, well, if they you know, I always kind of look at it as like, well if I they can do it, I can do it. You know, it's ⁓ again, sort of a competitive thing in a way, but but also it's like, you know, there's no reason why I can't figure this out or can't go do this. So that keeps me excited. In fact When I'm doing stuff that's like not interesting is when I lose interest. ⁓ when I get the most like, ⁓ I'm not I'm not my best. ⁓ if I'm not really pushing myself ⁓ to kind of figure something out or learn something, I can be like very average. ⁓ so that also causes me to wanna keep trying to learn new things. I mean at my age, trying to learn all about AI and things like that, most guys that I worked with or almost retired, ⁓ or wanting to retire and I'm s I'm still trying to figure out how am I gonna take advantage of these tools and and do something with them for whatever remaining work years I've got to go. Right.
speaker-1: Yeah, I love it. It really is the challenge that keeps you in the game. Right. If if if you've been there, done that, and it's it it may be a core strength and it may be something that you've rehearsed thousands of times, but then to do it one more time, the challenge is lacking. And yeah. There's research there. It's interesting about how kind of like the neurophysiology behind that, but that having that little small challenge in your day. And then working that problem, being able to learn, being able to produce or or execute on that challenge, it is it can be ⁓ incredibly ⁓ motivating and and momentous in that energy. So
speaker-0: That's awesome. I follow it in the guys I got into this fitness thing a number of years ago, ⁓ which was really a good move for me. ⁓ that wasn't me growing up. And their thing is always like one percent better, one percent better, one percent better, and it's just stuck. It's like I get it. I mean, you know, you don't have to be great day one, but if you're constantly working on something. ⁓ to improve yourself. It doesn't even matter what it does it doesn't have to be work. I mean just as a person. You know, how you treat others, how you you know, encounter the world, how you think about all the noise that's going on now and and not backing away from it but it sort of engaging with it and saying, Hey, you know, how can how do we get a little bit better from this? What do we learn from it? How do we move on? ⁓ those are things that have always stuck with me for whatever reason. I'll call it genetic. I'll blame my parents because ⁓ they allow the credit.
speaker-1: That's awesome. Well, wonderful lessons learned and I'm grateful for you for you and and this conversation where you could share them today. So thank you for joining me today on Still Evolving.
speaker-0: Thank you, Amy. I appreciate it. I'm ⁓ honored to be part of it, so I appreciate you asking me.
speaker-1: Awesome.