Garrick Jones (00:02.207)
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage Podcast. My name is Garrick Jones, and today I'm here with my co author Simon Brown.

Simon Brown (00:10.702)
Hi everyone.

Garrick Jones (00:12.415)
Today we're delighted to be joined by Doctor Shamla Chatti. Hi, Shamla.

Sharmla (00:17.894)
Hi there.

Garrick Jones (00:19.349)
Shamla is the CEO of Duke Corporate Education, where she works with leaders and organizations around the world on transformation, workforce capability, and human-centered leadership. With more than three decades of experience across global markets, Shamla is recognized for her work in leadership resilience, AI readiness, and organizational change. She holds a doctorate in leadership resilience from Middlesex University London and is the founder of Women Leading Change, Lead with Her and the AI Club.

Welcome to the Curious Advantage podcast, Shamla.

Sharmla (00:51.452)
Thank you so much, Gerrit. It's so wonderful to be here with you and Simon. I'm a great admirer of both your work on curiosity. It feels exactly the right conversation to be having at this moment in time, and especially where the world is around skills and capability. This is a defining moment as well. So thank you so much for having me.

Garrick Jones (01:14.615)
it's wonderful. I I'm a huge admirer of yours and always interested in what you have to say about leadership, given how broad your experiences around the world working with the C suite with the most important organizations of the world. And let's start where we always do. How do you personally define curiosity, Shamla, and what role has it played throughout your life and your career?

Sharmla (01:40.519)
I think for me, know, curiosity is a way of being in the world. And I think for me, that is exactly who I am. It's about, you know, reinventing myself, rethinking problems. You know, it is it is the discipline of staying a student, the humility to say, I don't know, and the courage to find out and the courage to learn and relearn, especially right now. I think we all know this. Four in 10 skills will change in 20

30. Six in ten workers, we will need retraining. But most importantly, when machines hold all the answers, the human edge moves to questions. And for me, that is around curiosity. So the defining question of a career is no longer what we know. It is how fast you can actually learn what you don't know. I think that's the big question everybody is grappling with. That is not a threat.

It is the most exciting invitation of our lifetime to be a student again. And I think for me, this is a time for us to actually relearn and to actually be quite humble by saying, I don't know. I read your book and I just love it because I think there's so many defining chapters that talk about being a student again. And I think for me, it's a wonderful opportunity.

Simon Brown (03:05.997)
We share a lot of the same beliefs there, Shamla, so it's fantastic to see we have an alignment there. And I think, that human edge from if machines have all of the answers, then we need to move to asking better questions and recognizing we don't know is absolutely in line with our thinking. And in fact, where we're going with our next book as well, which we will be talking more about over the next couple of months. So maybe let's have a look at your work, first of all, with Jupyter Corporate Education.

amount of work with CEOs, CHROs, with boards, with senior leaders from all across the world. In light of all the changes that you were just describing, how does leadership change, I guess, in light of that? How do people need to change how they think about leadership in light of what's happening at the moment?

Sharmla (03:56.797)
So I think right now there's so much happening. We all know this. For the first time in history, leaders are managing two workforces, a human one and a digital one. And I've written a lot about this with Professor Marawalla, and I just met with him a bit earlier today. He talked about, we must now train leaders or risky leaders to manage both people.

and the AI agents. So what does this look like in the new workforce? You know, he talked about yesterday leaders allocated tasks. Today's leaders decide what belongs to human and what belongs to machines. And I think for us it is how do you make each other work together? And so across our client base globally, we are hearing the same truth. The pace of change is out running the

playbook regarding leadership. There is no playbook, you know, for a moment like this. We've got to write it. We've got to lean into it. It is a privilege to actually work around the challenge because we can all learn and that the moment of leadership is around once again the human centered piece about the ability to relearn and unlearn and not to go in with the traditional way of thinking of the past. I think here that

leadership is at the edge. We can see what is happening around us, but how are we leaning in and being present in that moment in time?

Simon Brown (05:34.799)
Absolutely see that. I guess as we're starting to have that human and agentic workforce, we'd recognize there are different skills with them. One of my team guy Dickinson, we've been talking around the three D's of agent management. That's around delegation, discernment and debugging. So what do you delegate to humans? What do you delegate to the agents? Discernment to know when they're doing something right or wrong and when you interrupt them and then debugging because you probably won't get the right results in the first answer. And so you need to iterate that.

Sharmla (05:54.962)
That's good.

Simon Brown (06:04.752)
It's from the work that you're doing. Are you seeing particular skills that leaders need beyond that sort of broad change to their leadership and asking questions? Are there particular skills or mindsets around how they think about working with an agent workforce as well as a human workforce?

Sharmla (06:21.562)
I think for me the whole thing around working with an agent versus a human workforce, and I think the 10 skills that we talked about with the World Economic Forum, I think humans need to adopt these skills, right? And the whole notion about the ability to unlearn and relearn, this should be a core capability as we think about it as a foundation to say, I don't know the answers, I'm going to learn with an agent right now. You know, a good example is, you know,

myself the question, how many agents do we have?

You know, I had to learn with an 18 year old that is my nephew to create agents. And I remember him saying to me, and Shamla, we don't code anymore. We've got to you got to have agents and how many agents do you have? And for me, that learning was amazing. What I also found out is that automatically you think that having the skills he's doing, you know, MSC and AI, he knows all the answers.

then I have the other nephew that was, you know, a become in, in tech, I mean, in accounting, he was learning faster than the one with AI skills, right? So I think the whole notion about we can't actually confine skills to one person or one population group. think everybody as in this whole thing about saying that I have to learn and learn fast, right, and lean in quite quickly. So I think for me, is that how do we

lean in and how do we learn fast but how do we fail fast too because new skills that are not coming all the time.

Garrick Jones (07:59.734)
It astonishes me and impresses me that you getting involved in learning about the genetic stuff from your y your nephews, we're all trying to find

little side hustle projects I think that we can practice and rehearse and learn. I know Simon's been doing things remarkably in in the marketplace with his stuff and he d he does things for us on the curious advantage. But and I'm trying to do it on the music side. just a and using AI agents is completely new to me. And I it it's when you talk about unlearning or relearning, I mean this is an area I have no sort of background that I can

drawn. It's it's completely new. And as you say, it's the young people who help us get there. I was interested in you know this growing challenge for the organizations. As organizations are accelerating their AI agendas, there's a challenge around bringing technological transformation but also the human agenda together. And for you, Shamla, what does human-centered leadership look like in this AI-driven organization that's emerging?

Sharmla (09:13.5)
think it starts with who owns the conversation fundamentally. It's an important question we all ask each other. So I think the big thing which I shared with you a little bit earlier.

We cannot leave the AI to data scientists or technology teams. And I think that piece is important. You Marwala and I talk about it. He's the scientist and I'm the practitioner. So those of us who lead people own this conversation. And I think for me, it is an important moment to claim this conversation in practice. And three things for me emerges. The AI answers the question.

Human must still answer the right ones. Ethics, judgment and responsibility remains human work. We can't like deploy that to somebody else. know, design AI around people, never people around AI. And I think we are hearing this a lot with our clients, you know, and also not just our clients, we are engaging the younger generation as well. Right. And remember what

What the technology is for leadership in an age, in an AI age must focus on not on machines, but on people. think technology must be seen as the amplifier. Humanity must be the signal because at the end of the day, we are dealing with society. We are dealing with unemployment. We are dealing with nations that don't have access, right? We're dealing with people that don't have technology. So once they get in, what does this look like?

I think with us it's about really being responsible, thinking about judgment, thinking about ethics. That must remain human work.

Garrick Jones (11:05.103)
I am very interested in your raising the idea of ethics and judgment and responsibility. I saw well I read in the Economist just last week, I think it was, an article saying that the AI organizations around the world have in the last eighteen months employed more people with philosophy degrees than with tech degrees.

Which I think is astounding. That, you know, we've launched AI, we've got this tech out there, and what it's asking us to do is fundamentally question what it means to be human. And these AI organizations, because of the language that's required and because of the ethics that underlies so much, are employing phil philosophy graduates. I mean, I remember there was a time where if you told your parents you were going to study philosophy, which I did, they looked at you squarely, wondering why you were going to make

any money in the future. But those days have changed. What do you think is also I mean under underpinning all of this change? So so

Sharmla (12:10.386)
So I think you're absolutely right. you know, this is an interesting point you're raising because I had a CEO of a large bank in South Africa that commented on that article.

And there was mixed reviews on that article and he called me because I often talked about that the skills that we're going to employ are fundamentally different going forward, right? And the capabilities and exactly what you're talking about, getting more creative skills, getting skills from humanity. And I think here the whole notion around having hard technical skills are fundamentally going to change. But not just that. I think, we going to be getting people

that have the traditional degrees. Not really. We're going to see new pathways emerging.

in terms of qualifications, we may not necessarily go the route that most universities are looking at. for me, is that will universities would formal qualifications look at the same way that we're looking? Fundamentally, we had a whole reinvention of the education system, right? Whether you're thinking of people coming in from philosophy, whether you're thinking of, you know, new skills and capability, new pathways, I think that type of thing is

is going to be quite interesting for us. I think we are seeing this as emerging trends happening, and we're to see more of this at a speed that we too have to rethink the whole roles of jobs, structures, workflows. mean, Simon, you know this right now, working in corporates. The structures are fundamentally going to be different than the way it is. Workflows are going to be looking differently. So I think here, because we're going to be working with agencies

Simon Brown (13:51.982)
Mm.

Sharmla (14:02.356)
So I think it's an interesting time and it's a time for us about reinvention as well.

Simon Brown (14:09.71)
I guess in your role you have a great view both into the corporate and also with the linkages into the university space as well. Are you seeing more broadly across the education sphere that education is adapting to what you were describing there of the sort of needs of employers? Because I guess the common messaging seems to be sort of that many view AI as cheating, therefore don't use AI rather than actually building AI skills.

that maybe the workplace is requiring, but what's your view of what you're seeing across that?

Sharmla (14:42.315)
So I think here that...

universities are at different life cycles at the moment, right? And you're finding some that are saying that I'm going to actually evolve quite quickly because I need to be, you know, be part of this pace and this change and partnering with tech companies too, right? And having these partnerships. So you see different universities, you know, Duke as an example, you know, we are having

we are bringing in AI as part of our curriculum and we're actually designing around this as well. It's not just from a Duke Fuqua perspective, but we're thinking about it from a custom education. I think for us, it's not the one, it's the full ecosystem of how we actually play. at the moment, the question is not, is universities where they are? I think universities have no choice. Business schools have no choice.

Custom education is no choice. I think this is a moment where we all have to say it's a pace that is evolving. It's a pace that we need to reinvent our stuff. It's also time where we have the opportunity to create a new workforce, to create new skills, to create new jobs. We have a responsibility for a broader society. I think for us, this is not doing the things that we have done in the past, but saying, can we lean in?

we need to actually solve a bigger society question for all, for better of humanity.

Garrick Jones (16:18.261)
It's f fascinating again to me to hear you talk about the pathways changing, the pathways for education, because as we know, one of the biggest blockages has been allowing young people to move through who come from more difficult backgrounds or kids who don't have access to traditional education or traditional universities. And if that's changing and if there's actually an enormous

democratization, if you like, of education because of AI or greater access to knowledge because of AI. that's probably a good thing, but as you say, we all have to understand the change that's coming. you talked about partnerships and new partnerships with with tech companies and other companies to enable

education but you also talked about designing with AI or and I wanted to explore that a little bit further. D are you putting are you using AI in the education process and do you think AI is going to become absolutely part and parcel of how we educate going forward?

Sharmla (17:30.52)
Absolutely, I don't think we can leave it outright. We hear lot of organisations saying they're becoming AI-ready.

But what does genuine readiness actually mean? I think that's the big questions all of us ask regarding the workforce, right? And I think, it only about the workforce or is it about a bigger society? It is primary because technology and skills are something deeper is about to change. That's what everybody's talking about. Whether you talk to a board, whether you talk to a family as well. Previously, they said to kids, don't touch your technology tools. But parents are leaning in and saying,

to learn, right? You've got to take a course. You've got to actually rethink the skills and capability. you know, Jared, you talk about this. mean, everybody knows this. I have a nephew. He does this BSc, you know, in AI, and that's his degree. But he's on Spotify making beats.

And you know, initially his parents are all saying, you you've got to finish this degree. And he has this absolute creative mindset at the moment. Right. And if you look at the music he's producing and I too had to step back, take a step back and rethink this to say that I have to encourage him because that whole notion about creativity. So for me, you know, when I reflect where the whole thing is going, the uncomfortable truth is that

Most organizations have brought AI faster than they have the ability to build it or use it, right? We're seeing a lot of our clients are saying that. We're also seeing nearly 6 in 10 of the companies that we work with or talk with have embedded AI into their operations. But fewer than 1 in 5 have actually complete governance around this. And that's a big challenge regarding the

Sharmla (19:29.294)
ethics, know, the challenges around how they're using it and managing it. I mean, we can see this, right? So I think for me, genuine readiness as three tests, non is a technology test. I think for me, that is fundamentally, you have to think about it in that format. Capability, you know, has everyone being equipped from frontline to board, you know, if you whether you're a teller in a, you know, retailer to working on an aboard, not

I think that notion, often think that it is AI training or skills or capability is restricted to one person. I think trust as a second one, do your people trust the technology enough to change? That's the big question. Trust that change is for them and not to them. Right.

And the third thing is for me, this is like a big thing that I worry about the governance piece and the ethic piece. Does someone own whether your AI creates value and who? Not just for your organization. We've got to bring society into this. We've got to take it at a higher level.

And we've got to put society first, not from an organization or individual. We've got to put society first for me. I think that governance for me is that we've got to be far more responsible. So and I think here, you know, as I reflect, transformation fails on capability and change leadership long before they fail on technology. You know, I often say this to a lot of, you know, my team members, you know, when we engage.

with their own clients, the licenses are the easy part. But what does it mean regarding readiness? Lives in people, and that is the good news because people can be developed. People is like the value creator in terms of, you know, society.

Simon Brown (21:41.929)
I very much agree. think World Economic Forum event that was at a while back, they were talking about 70 % of the change being around the people, sort of 20 % on the data and 10 % on the algorithm. So it's like giving someone the license is the easy bit. It's then those other pieces that are the messy piece. So if I got that right, the sort of three pieces you see is sort of the capability, the trust, and then the governance as being those critical elements that only one in five organizations actually gets that governance right, if I understood that correctly.

Simon Brown (22:14.956)
And then maybe a follow-up piece.

I'm curious, you referenced a few times around the impact on society. how do you see it playing out? Because we've been bouncing this around as we're writing the new book at the moment. And one of the concepts in there is around the bifurcation of you end up with a sort two-tier society where it bifurcates into those who have AI skills and potentially reap the rewards of AI, and then those who don't have the AI skills and struggle to be able to

get access to the same level of employment etc. How do you see the societal impacts playing through?

Sharmla (22:55.358)
I think the world as we think about is an uneven world, right? So we're going to leave a lot of people behind. And we're going to leave a lot of economies behind. I ask myself the leadership question, if we're thinking about a better world, a better society, are we taking ownership and accountability of this world?

you are building a product, whether you are selling a product, whether you are part of a solution, how are you leaning in to say that...

We can't be treating this as a tool. We've got to be looking at this as an enabler for a better world. And a better world means better judgment, ethics, governance. And we also have to think about this as funding. You cannot say that the societies that don't have technology

And they have to be, we've got to actually invest in that. We've got to build infrastructure. We've got to give them the tools. We've got to give them access to be part of this. So I think for me, that when you're thinking about the speed of change regarding AI, you're thinking of the speed of change of what is happening. We've got to lean in differently to say, are we being responsible of this change? But how are we actually putting our resources and our money behind this too?

Because you can't be saying the change is happening and these are the tools. But if you are living in some parts of the world, you don't have food, you don't have electricity, you don't have access, you're going to be left behind. The reality is, you know...

Simon Brown (24:46.467)
Yes.

Sharmla (24:49.658)
We all need to take ownership and accountability and say that we can't leave people behind because we're going to leave societies behind. And we're going to leave so many people in this era behind.

Garrick Jones (25:04.181)
That's an incredibly sobering warning to all of us, especially from the viewpoint that you hold and the things that you see going on around us. And it's also encouraging because it means that the conversation's being had at the at the highest levels. If

If traditional performance measures no longer give us the full picture, what else should leaders be paying attention to, Shamla, when assessing whether people and organizations are genuinely future ready and genuinely making a contribution to a better world?

Sharmla (25:38.931)
I think the piece around the traditional, know, firstly, you know, the traditional measures no longer give us the full picture. Right. You see, we've seen this, the whole notion of the way we've been measuring before. For me, if I think about it, the three things that never appear on one's dashboard, are we learning all the time?

How fast does a new capability travel from one team to the other? Are we seeing that? Right. The second piece is that trust the balance sheet you cannot see if it sets the speed of everything else around us. Right. And so the question counts around in your meeting, who asked the questions, who's allowed in, who's allowed to fail as well, who's allowed to experiment.

Who's allowed to actually say that they've learned this and it has not worked and this impacts You know a broader ecosystem that we can actually bring into as a user case So for me an organization where only senior people ask You know ask the questions and I mean potentially may have stopped learning But if we add new matrix to every board pack, we are curious at every single level I think that whole

notion about curiosity should be a leading indicator now for organization. You know, I think that performance is a lagging one, right? So me, for me, you got to think about this curiosity. Are we actually enabling this? Are we actually creating this as the first enabler to strengthen, to, to allow people to be curious, to allow people to say, you know, I'm curious, but I'm also okay to fail. I'm also okay to learn.

I'm also curious to see how others have the ability to unlearn so I too can adopt that. Right? So you've got to create this curiosity.

Sharmla (27:45.635)
as a fundamental culture change, right? A cultural rhythm of saying that if this is the number one skill or part of the 10th skill, foundationally, we should actually, can we put this as a charter of an organization? If we put it as the values, I think the whole curiosity piece around values is missing in an organization, especially now, right now.

Simon Brown (28:12.066)
And is that part of the concept that I know you're exploring around performance intelligence? is that how you look at some of these broader metrics within an organization?

Sharmla (28:21.52)
So this is actually interesting as you know, I write a lot with Professor Marawalla on performance intelligence. I think for us, the insight is simple. The scorecards were built on an industrial world. It's the past.

They measure output, not around capability to keep performance when everything is changing. Think about it right now. So much is changing around us, right? And we have to adapt.

But we're also being curious around what is actually happening around us. You we ask ourselves lots of questions. So as Marwala and I talked about this, the formula was around human performance plus artificial intelligence plus agentic actions, you know, multiplied by leadership. But the second piece around this is that we just didn't leave it there. We're bringing in another piece around us, it's around society.

So we kind of like wanting to, you know, experiment around this and say the multiplier is the point where people, technology and everything around this. But I think for us it is we've got to see this as a full picture regarding how does you measure society around performance intelligence. You can't leave society behind. And ease the piece around, you know, we've also been exploring about empathy as well.

regarding this as well. there's a lot of work, but the first formula was really, you know, very simple on three insights. But I think as we are playing with this, we kind of saying, you know, what else around us regarding society?

Garrick Jones (30:07.813)
Regarding society. I'm hearing you talk about new criteria and new values that can emerge and that we should pay attention to. Values such as the society impact, the the curiosity of preaching to the choir, and the the the impact of empathy, which we should pay attention to. I've also heard you talk about trust as a strategic asset.

Could you tell us a little bit more about how trust and building trust fits into into all of this?

Sharmla (30:40.028)
So I think you're absolutely correct. This year's Elderman Schastbarometer describes a society retreating.

And I think trust is on everyone's mind at the moment. It's a big thing around us. so that's emerging quite a lot. I think for me, the most trusted institutions left standing is the employer. We see this a lot of times. hearing this. I can't remember the numbers right now, but 78 % far ahead of government and 53%.

I just need to check the number. So think what this means. In a fractured world, the workplace is one of the last rooms where people would disagree still build something together.

Sharmla (31:40.775)
That makes trust a strategic asset and it sits on every CEO's desk right now. We're also seeing a lot of people, know, three quarters of people expect CEOs to lead trust building.

We hearing this a lot of times. know, what I've learned from you about this is that, you know, when we were working with a large mining company, especially around 10,000 frontline supervisor, they had serious safety problems. I had to, you know, ride a bus with miners to understand and build trust with them, be part of understanding, being

empathetic. What does it mean to get up at 2 a.m. in the morning? What does it mean to have that cup of tea and stand in that line and then go underground with them, be part of understanding of their lived experience? So when I looked at designing the program for them, the performance problem was a trust problem.

Garrick Jones (32:39.197)
And I'll see you.

Sharmla (32:53.464)
It was rebuilt around safety, trust, right? And we had to co-design the people. We had to make them to see that if you have an accident-free operation, productivity will rise, right? That was an important component. So trust is the speed at which the threat travels in the organization. And the same thing happened in mining, right?

in mining, right? And I think here that in this era where AI is happening, you've got to make sure you bring everybody along because I think trust can be eroded with so many other things that are happening around us. I think for me it is being empathetic, leaning in and actually being in that moment with people around you to build their trust.

Garrick Jones (33:36.317)
Thank you.

Garrick Jones (33:42.311)
Mm.

Garrick Jones (33:51.562)
Yeah. I have a big question, but I think it it's a more of a synthesis question. You recently brought together hundreds of senior leaders and CHROs for conversations about the future of leadership and work. A very important moment and asking really important questions. What themes

Did you see, Shamla, emerging from those discuss discussions? What seems to be occupying leaders' minds most right now? And when you look across countries and industries and organizations with your global perspective, what are the what are the organizations adapting well and and doing well that are different from everyone else?

Sharmla (34:32.336)
I think the first piece, think a lot of C-suites around the world and especially in that room were saying the change is happening at such a high, at a pace. How do I keep, you know, aligned with this change? You know, because knowledge...

is happening so quickly, adapting to that knowledge is really difficult. I think being human and then also the second piece around that, they talked about AIs move from experiment to accountability, you know, and they shared boards that stop asking what AI could do. But now they're asking, what is it delivering? Who is answerable to this? And what does it mean?

for a workforce, right? And it's about if this workforce, this is the workforce, what does rescaling mean from an urgent point of view that everybody is on this journey together? It's not a theory thing, but it's a more practical piece because you can access knowledge so easily. You can get an AI course so easily, but also the safety. You know, a lot of the participants were talking, mean, the panels talked about

safety as well. I think, yeah, the third was on culture.

quietly eroding under hybrid work. There's so much restructuring happening. There's geopolitics happening around the world. How are we coping around managing it? Do we have the skill around stakeholder engagement, negotiating? Do we have the skills around dealing with multiple cultures as well? So I think here, ultimately, somebody said this quite wonderfully, when machines produce the answers instantly.

Sharmla (36:31.204)
Leaders need to ask the question, you know, what are humans there for? Right. And I think, yeah, if that's and then the piece around the big question was around judgment, care, imagination, trust, curiosity. You know, are organizations thinking about this in a way that they can embed this fundamentally as part of a DNA? How do they

get those skills in it and make people safe. What psychological safety do they create around the skill regarding this movement of change? You learn together to create a bigger movement of this change.

Simon Brown (37:20.686)
Lots of rich material there. So I'm going to do my best to try and sum up the conversation and in a moment I'll come back to see what would be your sort of one takeaway, Shamla, for all of our listeners. So if I try to sum things up, so...

We talked about how people, or how you're reinventing yourself as well and the discipline of staying a student, the courage to learn. We talked about how the human edge in the age of AI will move to questions and how fast we can learn and how we recognise maybe what we don't know. The leadership challenge moves to challenge of leading two workforces, so the human workforce, but also the digital workforce and how we're to train our leaders to be able to manage both age and

and people.

We talked about the challenges that that creates when there's no playbook. We talked about the 10 World Economic Forum skills and how do we unlearn things and then relearn things. How you personally are learning from your nephew and the difference that you see between your two nephews and the way that they're learning their AI as well. How do we lean in and learn faster and also fail fast? How we need to look at the human agenda and not just the tech agenda.

that there's this open question of actually who owns the conversation now, so who's going to be driving AI forward. It's not just about the detail of the data science behind it. You introduced to us the concept around human ethics, judgment and responsibility, those key three elements. We dived into actually what are going to be the degrees and the traits that we need for the future and how maybe some of these AI firms are hiring for philosophy over tech degrees. And yeah, we need to look at these new pathways that you described and the impact

Simon Brown (39:11.138)
that that will have from a society perspective and whether maybe not all of the universities and education systems are as forward thinking as you described for Duke who are bringing AI into the curriculum. We need to ask what it means to be AI ready and yeah how do we make sure that we have the right societal impact we think through the ethics from a society perspective and we don't leave either people or economies behind as well. We talked about the making it a success, you fewer than one in

five organisations focus on governance, even though six out of ten are embedding AI, and that there's a need to think about the capability not just for leaders but also all the way through from the frontline to the board. We talked about trust and then the governance and ethics there. What else did we cover? There's a lot. We went into your performance intelligence equations, so human performance times AI times agentic actions and maybe now also leveraging in leadership.

into that as well. And then how trust is on every CEO's desk and how to build trust. Sometimes you need to roll up your sleeves in your example of the mining safety issues and actually riding the bus with the miners to build that trust and understand what was really going on.

how from your forum around the future of leadership and work, looking at actually, how CEOs are asking, how do they keep aligned and how do they actually develop the knowledge when things are changing so quickly? And then, yeah, some of the challenges around culture and geopolitics and restructuring and really asking that open question of do we have the skills? Rich conversation, lots of great stuff there. If there was one thing from all of that, Shama, that you would leave our listeners with, what would that be?

Sharmla (40:57.072)
I think.

This is where we started the whole notion about curiosity, stay curious, be a student, and the ability to learn, relearn, and unlearn. And the whole notion about just being human, because we don't know all the answers. I think, for me, it's such an important ingredient. And the last piece around this is that whether you're working for an organization within NGO, ultimately, it's

society that prevails over us. Take ownership and accountability around that for a better world.

Simon Brown (41:37.304)
can't ask for more than that. So thank you. Thank you. If people stay connected with you, then what's the best place for people to get in touch or to find you?

Garrick Jones (41:39.221)
Thank you so much.

Sharmla (41:47.708)
Good, thank you. Thank you. I hope it was fine, by the way.

Simon Brown (41:50.74)
Absolutely, yep. So should people contact you on LinkedIn or how should people get in touch with you?

Sharmla (41:55.086)
LinkedIn, LinkedIn, great, yeah, LinkedIn. Thank you. But thank you both. Thank you. And by the way, Jared, I've been reading your book on quantum and it's wonderful, the chapters. I just love it.

Garrick Jones (42:02.813)
Yeah, that's

thank you for that. we we're gonna trail quantum leadership down the road, but we wanna get the curious imperative out first. But at the moment, I mean the the quantum leadership book, I'm getting fantastic feedback from people using the Substack and and people just sending me emails and so on. So it's been a fascinating project too. And I think we've got really something to say. but Curious Imperative first and then and then we'll get quantum leadership out.

and be fun to talk about that with you on another occasion. Definitely.

Sharmla (42:39.506)
Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you so much. I'm so sorry about all the connection.

Garrick Jones (42:44.947)
Not at all. If you give me just a sec, I'm going to do the the outro it's called. And I'll just finish that for the recording. Just one No no no, not yet. you've been listening to the Curious Advantage podcast. What are the Curious Sorry

Sharmla (42:53.298)
I didn't know after we finished but go ahead.

Garrick Jones (43:04.211)
You've been listening to the Curious Advantage Podcast. What are you curious about after this conversation? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, rate, and follow us on Spotify, or join the conversation with us on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear what resonated, surprised you, or made you think differently. Our new book, Curious Imperative, Why Questions Beat Answers in the Age of AI, is coming this fall, exploring why curiosity matters more than ever in a rapidly changing world. Subscribe, stay curious, and we'll see you next time.