In today’s rapidly evolving workplace, the disconnect between people and their work has never been more apparent—or more urgent to address. That’s why I was thrilled to welcome Brent Kedzierski, a renowned expert on the future of work and human-centric design, to the On the Brink podcast.
Brent’s mission is clear: to improve the human condition at work, one experience at a time. With more than 35 years of experience—including as Head of Learning Strategy and Innovation at Shell—he brings unique insight into why digital transformation fails, how people resist change, and what organizations can do to rebuild engagement and purpose.
The Future Is Human-Centric Design —And It Is Already Here
As William Gibson reminds us, “The future is already here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” Brent feels the same way. People often assume technology is the answer to productivity and innovation—but without human adoption and emotional investment, it falls flat. In fact, 90% of digital transformation initiatives fail, not because the technology is flawed, but because people aren’t prepared to embrace it.
Why? Because humans are fallible, social, adaptable—and resistant to change without a clear purpose. It is that clear purpose that seems to be the hardest thing to get agreement on. Without focus, people wander all over, creating meaning when there is none.
Watch the video of our podcast here:
Understanding the Human Condition at Work, and How to Build a Human-Centric Workplace
Brent grew up in Pittsburgh, a city built on industry. Watching his family work in steel mills, he developed a fascination with why people work the way they do. That question still drives him. At Shell, he led global initiatives using simulations, virtual reality, and HR analytics to optimize human performance—but found again and again that vendors focused on tech, not people.
In every successful transformation, Brent starts by understanding the human experience. As he puts it, people need:
- A reason to believe change is useful
- Tools that are easy to use
- Proof that change offers a relative advantage
- Compatibility with their current reality
These four principles make up 80% of successful adoption. Engagement only happens when people see, feel, and believe that something will make their work—and their lives—better. And, trust me, if they don’t “see it” they have no idea what you are talking about.
What Is Human-Centric Design?
Human-centricity isn’t new. Since the 1950s, design theorists have argued for putting people at the center of systems. But Brent takes this further by introducing the Human Experience Model, which maps out the full work journey:
- Expectations – What workers anticipate about a task.
- Experience – What actually happens when they perform it.
- Adaptation – How they adjust in real time.
- Reflection – What they take away and how it shapes future behavior.
When organizations ignore this model, they create what Brent calls “experience debt”—inefficiencies, stress, and disengagement that build up over time. As Brent said, “People only change when they see the value and feel a sense of urgency. Without that, even the best-designed systems fall apart.”
Health, Wellness, and the Cost of Disconnected Work
The toll of misaligned work isn’t just emotional—it’s physical and economic. Brent notes that 70% of all primary care visits today are stress-related. Poor workplace design contributes to chronic conditions, burnout, and even work-related suicide. He reminds us: “Contented cows give better milk”—in other words, healthy, supported humans produce better outcomes.
Organizations that invest in worker wellness—clear communication, psychological safety, autonomy, and purpose—see higher engagement and productivity. And they reduce the enormous costs of turnover, illness, and missed opportunities.
Lessons from the Field on Human-Centric Design
Brent shared powerful case studies, including one at Shell where digital procedures on iPads replaced outdated paper manuals. Initially resisted by veteran operators, the new system became a hit—not because it was faster, but because it gave workers a voice. Their field notes were finally visible to others, prompting action.
In another project, avatars in a virtual training module used thoughtful communication techniques. The surprising feedback from Gen Z trainees? “I wish my supervisor talked to me like the avatar does.”
What Comes Next?
As we wrapped, Brent offered a teaser: the rise of AI and the flood of data pose a new challenge. By 2026, 90% of online content is expected to be AI-generated. Yet 80% of the data companies create today is never used again—a growing source of digital waste.
To navigate this future, we must design systems that balance tech innovation with human needs. Brent calls this the move from Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0—where technology elevates, not replaces, people.
The Takeaway: See, Feel, Think—Then Change
As a corporate anthropologist, I urge clients to change only after seeing what’s going on and feeling how it impacts people. Brent’s insights reinforce that truth: transformation isn’t about adopting the newest tool. It’s about designing work that empowers humans to thrive.
Let’s rethink what work really is. Not a place, not a task, but a shared human experience.
How to reach Brent:
Brent A.’s Profile
linkedin.com/in/brentkedzierski
Other podcasts you will enjoy:
429: Embracing the Future: How Matt Leta is Guiding Companies
427: Empowering Women in STEM: Rashmi Chaturvedi’s Journey
424: Embracing Authenticity in the Age of AI: Vladimer Botsvadze
Additional resources for you:
- My two award-winning books: Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business and On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights
- Our latest book, Women Mean Business: Over 500 Insights from Extraordinary Leaders to Spark Your Success, co-authored with Edie Fraser and Robyn Freedman Spizman
- All of our white papers, particularly those on Blue Ocean Strategy
- Our website: Simon Associates Management Consultants
Connect with me:
- Website: www.simonassociates.net
- Email: info@simonassociates.net
- Books: Learn more about these books here:
- Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business
- Women Mean Business
- On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights
Listen + Subscribe:
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Reach out and contact us if you want to see how a little anthropology can help your business grow. Let’s Talk!
From Observation to Innovation,
CEO | Corporate Anthropologist | Author
Simonassociates.net
Info@simonassociates.net
@simonandi
LinkedIn
Read the text for our podcast here:
Andi Simon
00:00:01
Welcome to On the Brink with Andi Simon. I’m Andi Simon. As you know, my job is to get you off the brink. And I go looking for people who are going to help you. And I say these words very intentionally see, feel and think in new ways so you can change. And it doesn’t help you to change before you’ve seen what’s happening and understand how it feels for you and the folks who work with you or for you. And this is a very important time. Today we’re going to focus on work. Today’s work, the future of work, all the kinds of changes. And remember, I specialize in helping people change. They hate me. The first thing they say is I hired you away. Don’t come out. Lock me in the closet. But the times they are changing, and you can debate them. You can argue about them, but they are changing. So today I have with me a wonderful gentleman, Brett. And I am and I’m working hard on his last name because Brent, came to me after looking for some great podcast to go on, and we’re going to have a good time today.
Andi Simon
00:01:09
Let me tell you about him and why it’s important for you to listen and listen carefully to what he has to share with you. He’s a sought-after keynote speaker and a thought leader. His mission. His purpose is to improve the human condition at work, one experience at a time. Think about it. My own clients. When you’re listening to this, think about how we improve the human condition because your talent is your most valuable asset. As a senior program manager at hexagon, an international industrial enterprise solutions organization. Brent push boundaries in the design of human centered, connected working ecosystems. He’ll tell you more about what those words mean. They prioritize designing technology to enhance and support the workers experience, amplify their skills, and foster seamless collaboration between humans and machines and between humans and humans. I mean, these are really complicated times. There’s a triad here, with 35 more or more years of experience. He’s been a go to expert featured in top publications from Harvard Business Press, workforce, dot com, and BBC news.
Andi Simon
00:02:19
We are going to talk about the disconnect between work and people enabling human centricity. What does that mean and how humans and the future of work are really together. And you don’t think there’s a robot coming, but even if there’s a robot coming, there’s going to be a lot of humans who are going to be working with those robots. It’s going to be a very interesting future. And remember, the future’s already here. It’s just not widely distributed yet. Brendan, thank you for joining me today.
Brent Kedzierski
00:02:47
Thanks, Andy, and thanks for having me on the show.
Andi Simon
00:02:49
Well, it’s a pleasure. Please tell our audiences, who is Brent? What’s your story? I gave them a brief, you know, overview. But you have a very interesting journey. And when you and I pre talked I said, oh this is going to be fun. Who are you.
Brent Kedzierski
00:03:03
Well it’s yeah, I’ll do it quick. But you know I grew up in Pittsburgh suburb of Pittsburgh. I could look out, see the steel mills.
Brent Kedzierski
00:03:10
All of my family, you know, came over from Europe and they worked in the steel mills. And I’ve got a lot of the old pictures of grandfathers working in steel mills and in coal mining situations. And, you know, I myself grew up through high school working in kind of mill settings, industrial kind of settings. And I went to school for like industrial organizational psych. And it was always fascinating to me why some people work so hard, why some people didn’t, why some people had an affinity towards what they did, why some people just, you know, looked at the clock and tried to get through the day. You know, I read articles about my great grandfathers and things getting killed at work and through pumps and disasters and things like that. So I just had that affinity. I was fascinated by this concept of work. fast forward, I went to DC. I got a chance to work in some really high-profile projects with the government, with federal agencies, things like that.
Brent Kedzierski
00:04:04
Military aviation worked my way to shell and from there worked my way up to my, destined position of what I always wanted to be the head of learning and strategy and innovation at shell. I did that, and then I decided it was time to move on to other things and kind of capture other kind of dreams that I had.
Andi Simon
00:04:22
Well, you have a particular interest and fascination with learning and with how people do learn or don’t learn and how they apply the skills, and they don’t apply the skills. So when you left shell a little bit about where you went and how you applied that well.
Speaker 3
00:04:37
So it’s shell.
Brent Kedzierski
00:04:38
Being head of the learning strategy and things, that meant I, I was implementing a lot of big global programs, whether it was virtual reality, whether it was simulation, whether it was, HR analytics and business analytics and all those kinds of things. And I worked with a lot of big vendors, and I found that the vendors were so tech centric, they weren’t human centric. And, you know, typically, you know, these things fail.
Brent Kedzierski
00:05:05
And we even know today that digital transformation is failing at a miserable rate of like 90 plus percent. So the investments, the trillions of dollars that are going into digital transformation aren’t delivering the results that were intended, aren’t delivering as much as was thought and just are failing because of user adoption, and other kinds of aspects relative to human acceptance and human adoption.
Andi Simon
00:05:33
Well, you know, I often tell a client, if you want to change, have a crisis, or create one. If not, humans are very happy sticking with the habits that have always worked well for them in the past. And while they will, yes, you and they will acknowledge the fact that something new is coming. They will use just enough of the technology to get by, but not all of it. I can’t tell you how many clients have taken out to see how their technology is being applied, and they’re fascinated by how they’ve overengineered it, or under trained people on how to optimize it. And so it’s a real interesting question.
Andi Simon
00:06:08
So as you have been exploring this, both in shell and outside, you’ve learned a whole lot about this disconnect between humans and technology, even though humans creating technology and embrace it often, but sometimes they are resisting it. And I often tell people the resisters are somebody to learn from because there’s something not clicking in both the benefit of what you’ve got and the way they have to use it. What have you learned?
Brent Kedzierski
00:06:36
Right. That’s a great setup. And what I’ll tell you is the greatest thing that I did at shell, because I did global transformations related to things that impacted humans or things that humans impacted. And the best thing to do to create a case for change in sense of urgency was always to have an audit done and they hated to have an audit done.
Andi Simon
00:06:59
But you laugh. But you’re right.
Brent Kedzierski
00:07:01
That raised executive attention. I mean, as soon as you had audit items and actions for executives to close, something became very important to them and very vested for them because, I mean, that was a big deal.
Brent Kedzierski
00:07:13
So I always tried to sneak discussions with the auditors and try to get an audit to set my way for any big project that was given to me. And that was a little trick that I used. the other thing that I would tell you is that I start with the human condition. You, me, my neighbors, your neighbors, the folks listening to the show are watching it. We’re humans are fallible. We make mistakes, and people have to know that. But we’re adaptable. We’re prone to hopefully, positive change. Learning from ourselves. Learning from incidents. Learning from others. And then also we’re social. We want to have a reflection of how we’re looking to the world and how the world looks to us. And is there a coherence to. That social proofing that we seek. And the last thing is it’s came out of Covid. It was always there, but it became much more pronounced as people want purpose. So I start with those things. People are going to make mistakes. Hopefully we can get them in the right pathway.
Brent Kedzierski
00:08:12
Hopefully we build our best ideas. Getting people together, building and building in the whole aspect of, you know, leadership and how people can improve and then give them a clear purpose. but I will tell you, and you probably see it too, in companies today, especially the big companies I’m consulting with. There’s an experience debt that’s seeping up, and that is where organizations today seem to be more inclined, because basically, from a psychology perspective, all humans are inclined to trade the hard choice or the solution of tomorrow for an easier choice today. And just to give you a real-world example, it’s like it’s like, health and wellness. Easy to opt for, you know, driving down the road, stop at McDonald’s for fast food, and it’s easy to watch something on the couch and get downstairs or to the gym and exercise. and that’s all more convenient, but it leads to the long-term issues of health later, which is going to give you some real hard choices in the future when you’re set against one of the big things that work causes, which is the medical crisis and human wellness that’s going on today with obesity, drug and alcohol abuse, cardiovascular disease, you know.
Brent Kedzierski
00:09:32
and, you know, anything else that’s going on? I mean, we’ve got an epidemic today with, you know, 70 plus percent of all primary care physician visits are about, you know, stress levels. And the doctors are stressed, and a lot of them are getting out of the trade because it’s become commercialized, where they don’t have time to help people manage their stress, so they just turn to quick medication again. Another easy choice easy solution today that’s going to give people a bigger hard choice tomorrow. So I mean, that’s kind of what I frame that in. So we’ve got this big economic burden with health at work. We’ve got a lot of these increasing risk factors. And I’ll leave your audience with this, and we can move on. But, you know, the research and I love this article. I read it years and years ago, but it said contented cows give better milk. And I don’t mean to say or equate humans with cows, but a lot of studies in the agricultural industry showed that stress can negatively impact milk production and cows.
Brent Kedzierski
00:10:33
So factors like the cow’s nutrition, the gentle handling, sufficient rest, clean living conditions, they all contributed to the well-being of dairy cows, which when they were in this healthy, stress-free environment, their bodies focused on producing better quality milk, and it had higher yields and overall better quality. So I mean, again, that’s a kind of a summation to say if people or cows or anybody’s healthy, they’re going to do better from their bodies, their minds, their energy. And again, that’s how we get into this thing of all these brain chemicals that work, that we don’t design work to activate like dopamine, serotonin, all those funny things. So I would say all that kind of stuff. And again, one last thing is this whole business of work-related suicide. I mean, it’s actually gone up. and it’s especially high in industries like construction, agriculture, mining because of, you know, sedentary behavior and some, you know, the, the, the trauma that they’re exposed to.
Brent Kedzierski
00:11:41
Like law enforcement, you know, the stress and burnout, like long hours of construction or isolation and farming, or the emotional strain that a lot of our health care workers have. So it’s all these kinds of things that, you know, your listeners have to really think about, because a lot of people don’t see them because they’re, you know, you have weak signals in the environment. And these are a lot of the weak signal signals that result in trillions of dollars of waste and, other factors on our economic progress.
Andi Simon
00:12:15
It sounds awful when you think about what you’ve just said. The world here and maybe across the globe is trying to cope with, isolation, the depression that comes, maybe the pandemic, etcetera, exaggerated it, but it certainly accelerated it. and then a poor lifestyle habits from the food that we eat, the exercise we don’t do, and the kind of socializing, you know, people who live to be 100 have a different lifestyle. And that social part where humans are copycats, and they do want to be with others.
Andi Simon
00:12:51
I want to tie together something, though. The growing disconnect. How do we reverse and human centricity? What does it mean? Because, you know, I do think those two are closely related. If we’re going to be reversing this disconnect, how does human centricity become a key strategy for doing that? Can you share with us what centricity means? And then let’s see if we can tie them together as a methodology for really overcoming the world that we’ve created. What do you think?
Brent Kedzierski
00:13:21
Yeah. So to transition to this, you know, every person is going to spend approximately 100,000 hours at work of their lifetime. Now, if you think about how much time you spend looking for information in unproductive meetings and unnecessary meetings, you know, waiting for somebody else to make a decision. All the kind of junk work, which actually equates to about 60% of all work. So you’re spending really about three days out of five. I’m typically doing wasteful work, which is work about work. you know, and so you don’t want to have out of your 100,000 hours, 60,000 hours of kind of junk work.
Brent Kedzierski
00:14:02
So that’s how we have to fix the anatomy of work. And we’re coming to these evolutionary, new ways of thinking. So, for example, you know, we’ve got an issue in the US about sedentary behavior. You know, now we are in a phase ten years ago, everybody get a buzz on their watch, and they want to stand up. And, you know, you didn’t want somebody sitting at the desk eight hours. But we’re coming to this confluence where. But we also we want more cognitive level jobs or higher order thinking more in the zone, as we say, kind of jobs where people are really focused with less interruptions and, and, you know, they can actually focus and concentrate without being bothered by interruptions. So you have the thing about trying to get people more flow or where they’re sitting longer and thinking versus, we don’t want people sitting too long because of health issues. So again, these are the kind of higher order kinds of thinking that, you know, businesses have to shift their thinking towards.
Brent Kedzierski
00:15:00
But anyways, to go to, the idea of human centricity. It is an idea that’s been around really since the fifth, a little bit earlier, but more mainstream in the 50s. when we started to say, you know, humans have to be at the center of design when we design things, for a lot of industry, it was, well, the shovel or the tool or the wagon wheel or the, you know, for the horse was designed for that purpose, but there was no consideration for how the humans would use it. so it’s really about that. And there’s this thing called, the human experience model, where anytime you do anything, you always have, like, if I could go to the store or go to the, you know, wherever I go, I’m going to have expectations. Some initial beliefs are that that shape how I’m going into that exchange. and I’ll either be motivated or I’ll be anxious or, you know, whatever it is. But that’s the first thing. So how is work building the expectations of the worker.
Brent Kedzierski
00:15:59
And then they have the experience. And that goes back to this anatomy of work that I’ve talked about. So how much frustration are they having? How much anxiety, how much, you know, inflexible operations are they having to deal with. It’s impacting their wellbeing. So, you know, that carries the frustration of monotony and all those kinds of things that are all dirty, dangerous, demeaning work. And so we’ve got to think about expectations, then the actual experience. But then you have this thing in any experience in moment adaption. So once they’re in the middle of work, how do you help them as a company? You know, do you give them the right tools? You give them, you know, the right support? and then what’s going to happen is people are going to reflect post that experience. Are they going to done that? And then what that reflection does is that rebuild their anticipation and planning for the next time they have to do it. So are they going to try to avoid the work, or are they going to try to delegate the work or get somebody else to do it? You know, it’s so it’s this vicious cycle that companies don’t do enough to think about the design of work, how to meet these needs, especially as we’re trying to design work to promote the fluid nature of positive brain chemicals.
Brent Kedzierski
00:17:16
You know, I mean, and like I said earlier, the serotonin, all those kind of brain chemicals, we know through neuroscience, you know, engage people, they build their energy, they boost their productivity. And we’re not doing enough. And towards companies having actual people that really know how to design jobs, because remember, the old way to design jobs was about what’s the accountability level? What is the scope of authority? What is the financial management oversight? And I think in this industry five that we’re shifting to from industry for being very tech centered on, you know, digital transformation. We’re moving this industry five where it’s more elevating the human with technology and, you know, making a better balance. So it’s not just tech centric, but you’re actually elevating the two.
Andi Simon
00:18:10
Well, you know, I’m listening to you. I want you to dig a little bit further into to industry five, and I’ll put it in this context. I’m working with a client, and they’ve asked me to help rebuild engagement among their staff after putting a productivity modeling.
Andi Simon
00:18:25
They think that was the cause for it to have dropped. but you’re talking about something that is a profoundly different approach. Don’t fix it because you did something, and it broke. Begin to rethink it. And from a human centered perspective, what does the word engagement mean? What is it we’re looking to achieve? Because it’s a. If I hear you, I’m. I’m hearing it not as a problem to be fixed, but as a way of creating, a way of living an organizational culture that is much more built around how people want to be motivated and mobilized, empowered, have autonomy, feel as fairness, begin to really get the drive that Daniel Pink spoke about. They want, you know, mastery, autonomy and purpose. And those are very interesting words, often misunderstood because we go about trying to rebuild engagement and we’re trying to build this at the same time. So come back and go a little deeper for us. And if you have a case to share us, that would be helpful too, because I think this is a real big idea.
Brent Kedzierski
00:19:29
Yeah. That’s good. So there are about 8 to 12 human centered design principles. It depends on, you know, what expert to go to. But there’s three things. And it’s an 8020, 20, 80% of the impact of any human solution or human centered solution is going to be based on the 3 to 4 essential fibers that mean the most to human. So the most important factors for humans, and then the other 20% are made up of two other things engagement enhancers and adoption catalysts. Because the biggest thing we have in the digital transformation age is getting people to, you know, accept and adopt something. But the essential drivers, if you think about your clients and you know, when you talk to your clients, the worker only adopts technologies or org changes that are perceived to be useful. And that’s the biggest percentage that we have in terms of the research. So they adopt technologies. They don’t enhance their life performance, work, performance help. The next one is it easy to use.
Brent Kedzierski
00:20:38
So, you know, are these tools or these processes or whatever they are? Are they intuitive? So, you know, because not people are going to resist them. They’re going to say the old way was better, blah, blah, blah. Right. And then the other two are, you know, the relative advantage. So they get away something. So I always told people everybody carries two big buckets full of water at work. And anytime a company asks somebody to put another drop in the bucket, another drop is going to fall out. So they have to see that the innovation or the improvement or the additional asked by management is going to have an advantage to them. And that is the only thing that will help drive their actual engagement. Okay. And the last thing is its compatibility. So do they think this new solution is going to be compatible with their existing world? So if you don’t have those 3 or 4 things, I can guarantee that, you know, with 80% predictability and confidence that your investment is probably going to not meet your expectations and not meet your targets.
Brent Kedzierski
00:21:42
And then the other two are really simple. The engagement. Have you gotten people engaged along the way? And these things? Did you get them involved? You know. Did you involve them in the actual design of the solution or the design of the organizational transformation that you get? And then did you give them the right support? The training? Did you explain it intellectually to them? Because remember, people only change with four things they have to see. And these are executives. They have to see a case for change. But that’s not good enough for most people. You can give them a case for change, and you don’t get their attention until you heat it up with a sense of urgency. So, you know, intellectually they’ll get the case, but they don’t get the need to move until you heat them up with urgency. And then the next thing, which this is I found at shell and other companies, you have to have the capacity to change. And more and more today, companies aren’t having the capacity it used to be they didn’t have the physical capacity because they would not put enough capital in to make projects succeed, so they didn’t factor in the need that if it was going to innovate, well, they probably got to put about a 30% budget into just learning and failing and progressing through learnings.
Brent Kedzierski
00:22:56
Nobody ever did that. And, you know, they’d get they’d get a budget from Accenture or IBM or whoever. And, you know, it might have a little bit of wiggle room, you know, 80, 80, you know, estimate. But they never factored in these things that they preached about. And so that’s another thing. So they didn’t put in the physical, they didn’t give enough subject matter experts or another, you know, field experts or operational experts. They didn’t devote enough time because it shifted from the 1990s of re-engineering. This digital transformation is a much more complicated era than just simple, you know, flow diagrams and process, you know, charts. So but the more important thing is the intellectual capacity to change. And that’s where I saw people come down. They did like it, for example, at shell. We and I was driving the world’s largest. It wasn’t just Shell’s large. It was the world’s largest integration of virtual reality training. And at the time, this was ten years ago.
Brent Kedzierski
00:23:55
And it was an expensive project. But going into it, the modules were great, and the vendor was working great in March, but we didn’t know, and the vendor didn’t tell us because they kind of assumed that we would know, but it was going to cost $1 million to put it in the cloud. Well, when I budgeted it and when we did the project, we spent the money for development. And then after we development, we said, oh, hey, Brent, it’s going to cost another million to put. I said, what do you mean? I thought I paid for it, I know, well, you paid for it, but you didn’t pay to get it on the cloud, so you can’t distribute it. Well, then I had to go to the board and, you know, they thought, hey, Brent, how dumb are you? You know, and I said, well, wait a minute, did we ever do this before we learned, you know, so that’s the kind of stuff this intellectual, and did they have the intellectual capacity to understand that cloud distribution would cost $1 million? No they didn’t.
Brent Kedzierski
00:24:45
That shocked them now. Does it shock somebody today ten years later? No it doesn’t. So at the time though, intellectual capacity to change. They didn’t have it. And you think and you and you could probably give me examples throughout history of telephones or computers or, you know, space shuttles to the moon that at first seemed unfathomable intellectually.
Andi Simon
00:25:06
Well, unfathomable is and to resist it. You know, when Henry Ford came out with his model T, people put barbed wire around it. It was terrifying. You know, it was, you know, a devil that was going to destroy the horses of the world. And for 4000 years, we rode horses. What did we need a model T for? So it is it’s interesting. It’s a little like today. The gas cars are being replaced sort of by the electric vehicles. And that’s a whole new breed of, of being. But this is so interesting. talk a little bit about the future of work.
Brent Kedzierski
00:25:41
Okay.
Brent Kedzierski
00:25:41
Well, let me finish up with the last thing. So the last idea of this is, you know, we talk about the essential drivers, the engagement enhancers. So remember, core things that drive will the solution work and then. Well, how do you enhance the engagement of people. But then the last one is how do you, you know, get an adoption catalyst. So, you know these are things like, you know, if you ever read Robert Cardenas book, influenced I love that book. It’s one of my favorite books. And he talks about reciprocity, and he talks about social proofing, and he talks about all these things that influence people. Well, in this digital age, you know, by ability, letting people have pilots and small trials and build their confidence that this thing will work with hands on experience. And this thing about the social proofing, the observability. So the success stories that you always talk about case studies and so people can see visible, little, you know, visible results that validate the technology or the solutions benefits.
Brent Kedzierski
00:26:41
but anyways. But yeah, so look, if we switch.
Andi Simon
00:26:45
Before, let’s just drive that point home. You said something real important. Humans have to see it to understand what the words mean. And that’s just what you’re talking about that we need time for them to have, whether it’s a pilot or it’s experiential. But we learn experientially, not from a document that we have. And consequently, if I have never done it, I don’t know how to do it. Now, somebody is maybe going to show me how to do. It becomes extremely important for people to have a story in their mind that opens it up and says, let me try this. How does it feel? What are they saying? Because when you say your words, they hear something that fits what they already know, and you’re talking about something that they’re not. Even that cloud wasn’t even in the mindset. So it’s a real interesting human that we got to change.
Brent Kedzierski
00:27:31
Well, I know you like case study, so I’m going to give you two that I think are, are, purposeful.
Brent Kedzierski
00:27:37
So we implemented digital procedures at shell again like ten years ago. And I had senior level operators that had been in the company 30 years. They had these big fat three ring binders that, you know, they were in there and they had their notes, and we tried to give them an iPad with digital. And I don’t want that. I got my notes, and I’ve got all my notes in it. I don’t want to change. And at the end of the implementation, we had people loving these digital procedures. But they, you know, but the thing they loved most, and we never expected the unintended consequence, the digital procedures, a lot of them put notes in and assign things and like pass on information. And in that ecosystem of work for 50 years, an operator would always go out in the field and say something, this is rusty, this has corrosion, and nobody ever did anything about it. But now with these iPads if they put it in there. It was documented electronically. Everybody saw it and they finally thought their voice was heard after 50 years.
Brent Kedzierski
00:28:41
And we never even expected that. That wasn’t something that is a benefit that we even planned on.
Andi Simon
00:28:46
Oh, but they are clever and really clever humans. And simply by doing it created a whole new documentation that could be now acted upon in a way that wasn’t necessarily useful before. How cool.
Brent Kedzierski
00:28:59
Right. And I’ll tell you the other thing. When we did that, we did a big, onboarding program of operators at shell, and it was a video-based onboarding. And I was very familiar with how you developed, you know, practical, behavioral modeling, like, you know, learning and things. And I wanted to incorporate a very, just not have dialogue for the simulated people, you know, the operator manager and the workers that they’d see virtual reality. I wanted to have them speak in a thoughtful, constructive manner. So I asked the vendor to incorporate what’s called the military uses. It is, you know, three-part communication. So, for example, you’ll say, I’d like you to go and change this filter on this pump.
Brent Kedzierski
00:29:50
And then the worker would say, so as I understand it, you want me to go and change the filter on pump, see? And the manager say, yes, I do want you to change the filter in part pump. See. So this is the kind of the simplicity of three-part communication. But we put it in there. And the feedback that we got when we did the trial testing in Germany from all these young millennials and you know, we’re very young Gen Zers. At the time we thought we were going to look at, you know, did they like the engagement level of the simulation. Did they think it was moving too fast, too slow? They you know, what they said to me? They said, I wish my supervisor would talk to me like the avatar does.
Andi Simon
00:30:37
well, yeah. Knowing how important the metaverse is. their avatar may be their boss in their future, and they may be doing things that are creative in a way that’s unfamiliar with us.
Brent Kedzierski
00:30:51
Well, yeah.
Brent Kedzierski
00:30:51
I mean, just think if you had a personal assistant or, you know, whatever you want to call it, a digital cognitive support system or whatever, that, you know, knew your questions, understood, you listened to you, remembered you, you know, all those kinds of things. Again, it goes in this era of the personalization. Well, okay. Now, but you want to talk about the kind of work environment today.
Andi Simon
00:31:12
No, because I’m looking at our time. And for our listeners, we usually give ourselves exactly a half hour plus or minus a few minutes. What I would like to do is have you wrap up, and then what I’d like to do is set up a date, maybe three months, and bring you back just on the future of work, because that way I can tie the two together and our listeners will have enough time to think about what you’re talking about and apply it, and begin to then think about the changes that are coming. Because the future is today.
Andi Simon
00:31:39
And now we need to spend enough time. And I don’t want to shortchange you on this topic because it’s a big one. Would that be, okay?
Brent Kedzierski
00:31:46
Sure. And I’ll give you a kind of a teaser then. But one of the biggest challenges I look at now in the Anatomy of work is with this boom of AI. you know, experts predict that, you know, by 2026, next year, 90% of all the content will be AI generated. That’s online.
Andi Simon
00:32:05
Yeah.
Brent Kedzierski
00:32:05
And the next thing is, 90% of the world’s data that’s been created has been 90% has been created in the last two years. So and I’ll leave you with this because there’s a lot of things like we’ve got to talk about. Well, what are you going to do about that. How are you going to manage that? you think about that. Just the data centers in the United States consume about 4% of US energy, okay. And it’s equivalent globally to heat. A storage is in data centers. It’s contributed to the similar levels of the airline industry in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
Brent Kedzierski
00:32:47
Yeah. Okay. And all this stuff is just going up and up and up. So that’s how much I and what the things called dark data, the data that’s created and companies create, and they spend a lot of money to create it, 80 to 90% of it stored and never used again, never analyzed. And it just takes up energy in the global marketplace and it creates emissions. So that’s something that we can probably ease for next time we talk, and we’ll get into more of, you know, the impact of work on the future trends that are coming towards us.
Andi Simon
00:33:20
Well, and I don’t I don’t want to shortchange the wisdom that you’re bringing to our audience and, and dilute what they’re hearing, because I do think you’ve led them to the point, which is, now what do I do? Right? And how do I do it? Because it isn’t, simply adding, you know, the internet was transformative. I remember doing my doctoral dissertation on punch cards. I mean, we’ve all lived through tremendous changes, but what’s coming next is accelerating at a speed that’s hard to understand.
Andi Simon
00:33:50
And it’s important that we begin to understand how to change the way we get things done. What is work anyhow? So my interest is let’s rethink what does work and when do we have to do it? Where do we have to do it? Why are we doing it next time? So if they want to reach you to dig more into what you’re talking about, perhaps hire you as a consultant. Well, what would be the best way to get Ahold of you?
Brent Kedzierski
00:34:12
Well, obviously, you know LinkedIn. I’m on there. And I think you’ll probably put the spelling of the name in the notes. And you can then go to the hexagon website. I’ve got a lot of articles posted. I do a lot of blog series on future of work. Connected worker ecosystem. Human centric design. you know, the future of human centered content and AI. So all those kinds of things.
Andi Simon
00:34:37
Cool. I’ll make sure that in our blog post, all of that information is there. And on the video.
Andi Simon
00:34:43
The last page is full of contact information, but in fact, you know, you can get Brennan, and I’ll spell his last name for you. It’s k e d z I e r s k I. Because if I said it, you still wouldn’t know how to spell. and he’s got a great LinkedIn profile. But this is a time for us to begin to rethink, the way we approach our day and how we work with others, and even how we’re building a business where the world engagement seems to be so important. And how do we apply new technology, new productivity, all kinds of new stuff to people who basically hate to change. And it isn’t personal. It’s just humans. They’ve they have stayed the same and changed forever. Anyway, it’s been a pleasure for my own listeners and audience and those who have come new to hear. Brent, thank you for coming to On the Brink with Andi Simon. Send us your emails to info at Andy simon.com. And remember that you are the future, and it is today.
Andi Simon
00:35:42
And so don’t run away. Enjoy the journey and really find it exciting for yourself. My three books are on Amazon. I love it when you buy it and review them. And the reviews are terrific, and they’ve always sold really well, and we are here to help you see, feel and think in new ways so that you can adapt to fast changing times. My podcast, this one is here for you to subscribe to, share and spread the word. It’s a message for you to have. I enjoy doing it and I enjoyed Brent today. Thank you for coming sir.
Brent Kedzierski
00:36:15
Thanks, Andy.
Andi Simon
00:36:16
Been a pleasure. Bye. Bye now. Take care. Have a great day. Remember our tagline. Take your observations. Turn them into innovations. The future is here for you to create right by now.
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