There's a surprising trend I'm noticing amongst the leaders that I talk to. It used to be, okay, we're talking about

framework thinking, being able to think fast, and speak really clearly, especially in the moment under pressure,

so that your expertise is seen, all the analytical strength that you have is being demonstrated, and others can

recognize that. But, increasingly, the conversation always comes back to AI these days. And

two people mentioned the exact same thing, so I wanted to talk about it on YouTube because I feel like more people

must be feeling this, which is, okay, I'm a leader of a team, and my team is adopting AI, you know, we're we're

creating workflows, we're automating things, there is productivity increase, which is great,

but somehow I'm still getting a lot of pressure from the exact teams. They're asking, you know, are you using agents?

Are you actually delivering value? Make sure that you're pushing the team to see those results.

And you wonder, but we are seeing those results. Like, why is there this disconnect between all this noise that's

happening around, and our work not being seen, and there's a miscommunication going on here.

So, the problem is twofold why this happens. The first one is a timeless one, which is, of course, just because

you do good work doesn't mean it gets recognized, right? We we have seen this so clearly because everyone is focused

on their own thing. Just because your team is actually delivering results doesn't mean anyone knows about it,

right? They are facing the same type of pressure, and they're wondering, okay, what do we do? And if they're not as

advanced as your team is with all of this AI stuff, they're going to be swamped, no time to pay attention to

anyone else, which is really a vicious cycle because if your team has figured something out, there's learnings to be

had, which both helps your team because they get the recognition for taking that experimentation forward, for adopting

AI, as well as being able to help other teams. Okay, so that's the first

problem. The good work does not speak for itself. Which brings me to the second work of

even when you talk about it, and these leaders, of course they mentioned, right? Like, oh, we came up with this

workflow that saved us 6 hours a week. Great. But just by saying that doesn't mean anyone actually hears what it

means. Right? And the skill is in how do you communicate so that other people actually see the strategic value of what

you're doing, actually see the consequence and the so what of what you're doing. So we'll also talk about

that today. Let's start with a framework I call directional communication. And this is

going to be able to solve these two problems at the core. So directional communication means you

keep three directions in mind as you're communicating. First, you want to think about the North

Star. Then you want to think across for alignment.

And go down deep to articulate your expertise.

And when you cover all three directions, it makes it a lot easier for other people to both understand and see how

it's relevant to them because every single communication, what is the point? The point is what the other

person wants to hear, right? They want to know why this is relevant to them. And so being able to talk in these three

directions will help you get that point across. Let's go one thing at a time. First, let's talk about

the North Star. All right, this is the goal that the organization has or your department has. These are the priorities

that everyone cares about at the executive level, right? For example, it could be that by the end of this

quarter, we want to achieve a 10% uplift in productivity using AI. Okay, if that is the case, then your workflow that

saves 6 hours need to be attached to the priorities, so instead of saying, "Okay, we automated something through a

workflow that saved us 6 hours." Translate that into how does it help that 10%? It could be that, "Okay,

within our department, we've already within the first month of starting this quarter

achieve that 10% uplift in productivity. What we did was create a workflow that automated a very complicated process,

and now it happens every single day for 5 minutes, and everyone gets emailed the results. So, our department already we

created that 10% increase in productivity." All right, now everyone knows, "Okay, we can

check off, you know, for your department, let's say the strat- strategy department, we've done this."

This is awesome. And then that leads me to the second part, which is alignment.

Right? Of our department did it, but others haven't, right? So, what are the learnings that I can help deliver so

that others can also be able to benefit from this. It could be that this workflow helps us save 10%, and then the

output also helps, you know, department the sales department and the marketing department. Right? All of a sudden,

you're bringing others in. So, your learnings could be Now, we know exactly what to look

forward to automate this work process, so we can work with sales, we can work with marketing to be able to identify

what are the things that they need to do so that they can also benefit from our workflow.

And by saving them time, it will also contribute to that 10% overall uplift in the productivity that we're looking for.

Now, this becomes strategic impact, exactly what execs love to hear, right? Is you achieved it for your department,

you know how to help other departments do it, which then brings me to this next part, expertise.

Right, of these are the things that we learned so that we can help others do it in a more productive way. Not only are

you collaborative, you can also show depth in what it is that you know and what makes your team, your department so

incredibly valuable. Right, it's not we have to hire outside consultants to help us do this. We did the work, we had the

learnings and we're going to tell you what are the things that we found. And this brings me to the next question I

heard a lot from leaders, which is should I get my hands dirty with AI and actually build the workflows?

Well, that depends. It's can you articulate the expertise that your team has been

building in order to figure out how to do these workflows. And I err on the side of yes, you want to get your hands

dirty and figure it out. You don't have to set up every single workflow for every single thing that your team does,

but it is very helpful to learn by doing because coming back to why the execs team didn't

see your team's impact is because for a lot of people they were nervous about talking about it, especially if they're

a non-technical team lead, is I don't want to get into the details of it because I don't know that much and I

feel I'm not AI literate enough to go into the details. And that lack of confidence holds you back from talking

about the impact and talking about the learnings because you actually didn't have them first hand. Right, so this is

why being able to go deep and being able to one, know what the expertise is and two, what they actually

are and what they mean and how you got there is important, right? The change in AI, right? Nothing has

changed. It's still the same idea of, you know, good work doesn't speak for itself. You got to know how to

communicate your ideas but in executive situations, you know, in cross-functional situations. But what

has changed is that now leaders you used to have expertise in the thing that you're doing. So, when you go into

these conversations by just saying, "Hey, keep an eye on the North Star, focus on the alignment, and focusing on

the expertise," you can find the insights to share. But the thing is with AI, if you haven't

played with it, then you don't have the expertise. Even though you have domain expertise, let's say, you know, you're

in the strategy department, so you have strategy-based insights. You don't have the AI technology

insight, which is why I definitely recommend the leaders to give it a try. And if you need free resources, I mean,

they're everywhere. I have my AI agent free resource down below as well. Go through them and just try it out.

Even if you don't use it on everything, it helps you articulate the insights. And in the end, insight

is just something surprising. Right? It has to be

an element of new. And so, you can't regurgitate everything that is on the internet. But if you tried building out

a workflow and you saw, "Okay, as I was building it, surprisingly, this is where I got stuck." Maybe it's

we couldn't we didn't know how to find good use cases. That could be the insight. It could be when we decided on

the use case, we realized we didn't know how to capture the expertise. That could be the insight, right? And then it could

be because we saw this problem, we solved it by trying these things, and we found, you know, X really worked. And

here's the reason why. Well, that's really interesting, right? People are going to be leaning in and trying to

hear, oh, what are the things that you actually found? So, if your team is already doing good work and it's not

being seen right now, make sure that you know how to mention both the North Star, how it aligns and relate to others, as

well as what's the expertise that you can bring that others will find surprising. Because especially at the

end of the day with AI, people in the organization are going to have different levels of AI fluency. So,

the way that you talk about this has to be really concise, really easy to understand, and yet shows that you know

more, you have more insights than the basic thing that everyone shares. And having done so many, you know, change

management, digital transformation projects in the past, you'll realize that even though

everyone's talking about the technology, in the end, whether a transformation works, whether change management works,

really depend on the humans, right? Human, as a default, we don't like change. And so there's going to be

emotional responses to these things that seem very foreign. As a leader then, you have to be one

aware of that, and two, be able to go through that same emotional journey and figure out where the places where people

get stuck, so that you can talk about it, right? The execs are going to going to think about how are people going to

adopt these, right? And so people are doing crazy things like token maxing, or like use as much as you can, otherwise

you get fired. Okay. All are tactics in the short term, right? Eventually it will come back to

meaningful adoption, people actually seeing how this helps them. And so, it is not a just about the technology,

but about how you communicate that, right? Like how if your team is the one that is adopting AI, you don't talk to

your teammates about, you know, how they they felt okay experimenting with this. Google had this fascinating report of

how teams that are AI native actually work. And it's not about better prompting. It's not about the

technology, right? It's about curiosity and experimentation. It's the mindset and the culture that you set up for your

teams. It's also about, you know, data-driven decision-making, clear thinking.

It's also about resiliency through flexibility, knowing how to adapt, which is going to be a core skill going

forward. And Microsoft also had this really interesting research into AI native startups and realized that AI

native teams are less hierarchical, which means that even junior roles can be strategic instead of tactical. What

that means is for those who are more seasoned, you can do higher-order thinking, right? Things like actually

managing AI because it's just like managing people and it managing is an art and science of itself, right?

Management consultant, literally, we use all the frameworks in the world and create more so that we can get better at

managing resources in order to deliver results, right? And these are about assigning the right tasks, providing

feedback, moving forward with decisions. And these are critical thinking skills, right? Things that require you to think

very clearly and be able to articulate that. Whether it's providing feedback, what whether it's managing teams,

whether it's telling the AI what it needs to do or telling the human what needs to be done and why we should do

them. These remain timeless skills. So, even though AI is creating a lot of anxiety and, you know, feel like you

always have to keep up because every other second there's news breaking out. At the core of it, use directional

communication to be able to communicate all the things, all the experiments you're doing, all the results that

you're seeing at this level so that you get more resources, more validation, and more opportunities to work with others.

I think this is the moment we bring together framework thinking, speaking with frameworks, as well as AI. So, if

you want more videos like this, check it out here, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.