Stop measuring AI by tool adoption

It's my pleasure. thank you for asking me.

So when I first started my career, I started in strategy consulting, and I always had in the back of my mind that someday I wanted to run my own business. But I imagined that that day would come in my late 50s or 60s, like when I was basically finished my main career, I would do something where I would be my own boss and run my own company. But along the way, in my late 20s and early 30s, I started to notice something that I I was interested in that no one else was really focused on and did some market research and found that it could be a viable path and then had to make a decision. I was in a quite a big job, a country level responsibility for running a business unit within a large technology company within Hewlett-Packard. so I represented Canada in our business unit. And I had to make a decision of whether I wanted to continue to grow my career up the corporate ladder into, you know, Canada as a country level responsibility I had attained. Did I wanna move into a worldwide role or something bigger? Or did I want to actually take a chance on myself and leave and start this business in a new area that people were not overly active in? So it was risky, but I really felt like in that moment in my early 30s, if I stayed in corporate, I was gonna stay in corporate for a really long time. And this gave me a window of if I left, I could go and give this a shot. And if it didn't work out, I'd still only be in my mid thirties. I could always come back to corporate. So I decided it was worth it and took a look at the business plan I'd put together. And left my corporate career in technology to launch a company that was entirely focused on how demographics, longevity, and intergenerational relationships were changing the way that work was done inside of economies, inside of corporations. I I shifted my focus entirely to focus on the people as opposed to the technology.

Yeah, so at the time I had a fairly large team. more than a hundred staff and the average age on my team was 48 and they'd been at the company for 18 years. And I, as I said, was a relatively young manager in my early 30s. And I had all kinds of tools and things that the company had given me in order to be able to help anybody that was within the the organization continue to move. So talent mobility would to continue to move Move within their careers. So, you know, new jobs in different parts of the company, or exploring work in other countries, or advancing their careers into other roles. There was all kinds of things that people could do. And with this amazing team that I had, who were really great performers and customers, loved them and Everything was, you know, all the boxes were being ticked in terms of were we doing the things we needed to do, I'd start to have a conversation with them about okay, what do you want to do next? And none of them wanted to have that conversation. They all said, You know, Lisa, I know we need to talk about this, but really until my mortgage is paid off or until my last child graduates from higher education, I'm just gonna Stay put where I am and not take any risks. I I don't want to do anything new at the moment. I'm good where I am. And then at some point in the future, I'll figure out what I want to do next. And when I asked them, okay, let's pretend today is the day and your mortgage is paid off and your kids have graduated and they're successful. What do you think you want to do? Nobody knew how they were going to figure out what they wanted to do next. And so I became really interested to know: is this unique to my team? Or is it unique to Canada? Or is it unique to the Western economies? Like, why is it that large groups of successful, engaged, productive people were okay just coasting for sometimes up to a decade? waiting to be able to do something that they wanted to move into and not even knowing how to figure out what that was going to be. So what I had stumbled upon was the gap that happens in late career with us living longer and wanting to contribute longer. There's no infrastructure to support someone to reevaluate what work and identity and and family life and community life. What does that mean for a forty, fifty or sixty year old and how do they move into their next phase with work being a component of that. So this was a long time ago, more than a decade ago, and now the longevity movement has really grown around it, but we were really one of the first when I took the leap, seeing the trend and just noticing what was happening to recognize this as a large population of people that'll have a significant economic impact, as well as a health and well-being, a social impact. so many good reasons to think about how that population contributes in our overall economy.

That's right. And that I love that you brought it back to what it means to you because this actually is it's just career, I mean, I say just as if it's not important. It's it's career literacy and career development. And it happens at every age and stage. It happens with 18-year-olds deciding what to do after high school or secondary education. It happens when you're in higher education or in your first jobs, but it continues to happen all the way through your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. The need to really know who am I and what do I need and want and what talents do I want to be applying? And where's the market? And what what is the right timing to take action, even if it's a little bit risky or scary? Do I have the foundation in place? Because there's nothing wrong with taking risks as long as you know what they are and you've planned for them. And in fact, Entrepreneurship or the way that economies grow is by people deciding to build something new. So it's really important.

Yeah. So when Challenge Factory first started, we worked exclusively with the individuals exactly as you described, who was looking for how they can make that transition. And there we applied a different approach than the way that career guidance would be provided earlier in careers. It was very experiential. We allowed people to test drive, do one-day informed test drives of all different types of jobs and occupations that they thought might be good so that they could apply their wisdom and judgment, their gut check, in addition to traditional ways of imagining how you can move through a career transition. So we had unique methodology and unique insight, but I very quickly became unsatisfied with the impact of challenge factory working one by one by one with individuals. I had left a big job, a consulting practice with a hundred consultants. I didn't necessarily leave it to become an individual career coach. And I started to think about why I should at this time Canadians, that's where I'm I'm from. Why should Canadians only get this kind of service or this kind of support if they happen to come across Challenge Factory and have the means to be able to purchase our services? And that's where I took the company. And instead of us being focused on individuals one by one by one, I leveled up to where what tools could we start to provide managers so that the me in the story when I was working with my team would know how to do a better job of helping my team do that. How can we make career guidance and career development stronger across managers and inside of organizations? And so then we did work for a number of years at the corporate level. still working with individuals, but really focusing more on how can we have a broader impact and reach larger workforces inside of corporations. And then I became dissatisfied with even one company at a time, how does that actually make a change at the country level? And that's when we started to notice the patterns that we were learning in working with individuals, in working inside of companies, to start to inform policy and to be able to be advisory to industry associations and to governments. And so all of this took place over the early years within the company. And today, Challenge Factory is not so much focused on helping individuals make that transition, although we have deep skill in that area, but how do countries actually create the infrastructure so that it's completely natural and people don't ask the question? How can I transition? It's just a naturally provided way of thinking, of a mindset, and of where labor supply, the people who want to continue working but in different ways, is met with labor demand. Employers that recognize the value of that particular age cohort and specifically have roles that they want to be hiring for. They're redesigning the work for demographics for longevity, just the same way that in today's Era, we have to redesign the work because of AI capability. There's actually a really strong parallel between older workers wanting to do things differently and AI enabling us to do things differently. And all of these topics are now a part of what Challenge Factory is expert in and has worldwide expertise in.

Yeah, so much of what gets talked about with AI is on tool adoption. So the metrics that get reported, you know, what percentage of companies have people that are using tools? Or you know, how are can we advance tool adoption and the skills so that people can use the tools? But the post that you're referencing, if I remember the right one, is where I use a really practical analogy to help people understand the difference AI is actually making and why a Focus on tool adoption is not necessarily the most productive way forward. So lots of people talk about AI as if it's electricity that just all of a sudden, you know, we could turn on lights, we could use electricity in the way that things work. And it it it is a great analogy and it makes sense, but there's so few of us that have any kind of memory at all, or even second generation memory at all of what things were like. before there was electricity, that it makes it a little bit hard to be able to actually make it practical and tangible. So instead, what I was sharing on that particular piece was that a stronger analogy is to think from the perspective of aviation. So when we went from not having flight to having flight, In the early days, the first instances of flight, pilots followed the rivers and the roads, the visual cues from the sky that basically had new technology traveling the same pathways as how we had traveled in the past. And then as technology advanced and as we realized the full potential and power of what flight can do. We started to change everything. We could ship goods from one part of the world to the next. We we didn't just follow the rivers and roads and just use more expensive technology to go faster. We completely changed the way that the world communicated, ship goods, had relationships. everything changed because now we have this new capability and we have wide open skies that we can plan flight paths for. AI is the same. So applying a tool to current processes to do it faster is like following the roads and rivers. And what we need to do instead is to imagine if we were to rewrite job descriptions and redefine the work that happens inside of organizations assuming full AI-augmented capability. What's the open sky that we would create? And where would we actually have people focusing their time as opposed to this trade-off of is it human or is it tool? Let's imagine what the wide open sky looks like and apply the tools to get us to that vision as opposed to laying, you know, planes that are following roads. And I think that analogy usually captures people a little bit more into the discussion than the electricity analogy, because people can can imagine what it was like before we had like that they can they can relate to that a little bit better.

Well, that one is unique and and true to the research and the work that Challenge Factory has been doing. It's the kind of thinking where we think very, very far into the future with big ideas and concepts, but are able to make it very practical and tangible, which is a bit of the secret sauce for how you do the kind of work that we do. if it stays too theoretical, it's really hard for people to know what to do next. And if it's too practical and not based in leading edge research and theory, you're just copying what everyone else is saying.

So I this is the answer that I should have the strongest. This is the question I should have the strongest answer to. And I always feel like I never quite do. And I think part of that is because Challenge Factory continues to evolve and change so much one year to the next. And every five years, because we're focused on trends that are impacting the future of work. The things that we're doing and the scale that we do them at. You know, I I told you the story of starting with individuals and now consulting and being part of national transformations. imagining where that can go is actually quite challenging and quite hard. The things that I do know though is Challenge Factory. So some of the things that are important, Challenge Factory is a certified B Corporation. That's a global designation that means that we're audited every three years for the impact that our work has. And so what I do know is that I want Challenge Factory's impact, the actual change that we make in the world, to continue to accelerate. And that to me is actually more important. Than whether our revenues or our profit accelerates. Of course, we need to be a profitable business, but the idea of the impact that we're actually making in the world is what drives me and the decisions that I make. And the way that we do that together as a team. Our future as a business will lead us hopefully into a path where Challenge Factory will become employee-owned and building that. Muscle and capability within our employee base to actually become the future owners of this organization does two things. First, it motivates us in different ways and has that future vision be a little bit different than other organizations might. And secondly, it means the future potential and vision of Challenge Factory, even though I'm the owner of the business today, is not actually mine to define. It actually is the employees to help me with that definition. definition and eventually take it over. And I find that really exciting, but it makes answering that very simple common question I get as a founder, what's the future vision for the company, very challenging to answer.

if I'd start in today's world of AI, it would be very different. But I think before we get to AI itself, I you know, when I left corporate, I I stepped into entrepreneurship in an environment, you know, in Canada, entrepreneurship is often seen as an alternate path when something has gone wrong in your career. So certainly tech startups are celebrated, but general entrepreneurship outside of the technology field is not necessarily a dominant career path. And so I didn't have a lot of friends or colleagues that had been entrepreneurs before. I had my father, who was a good inspiration and a great supporter, but Really, in those early days, I I've I was in kind of uncharted territories a lot of the time. And one of the things I would have wished that I would have done was have a little more confidence in those early years and take bolder steps. I had taken this big risk to start the company, and I probably could have moved faster in some of the other risks in order to grow the company a little bit faster and not be so tentative in those early years about what was going to happen next. So that's one thing that I think I could have I could have done differently.

Yeah, so our website is challengefactory.ca and I'm on LinkedIn. on LinkedIn there's many Lisa Taylors, so my handle is author Lisa Taylor, and I'm based in Toronto, Canada, if that helps with searches.

My great pleasure.