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Why Behavioral Innovation Is the Next Competitive Advantage
Executive Summary
In this episode, Ted speaks with Lucy about why the hardest part of legal innovation is not the technology itself, but the human behavior required to make it work. Lucy draws on her background as a lawyer and behavioral science specialist to explain how law firms often over-focus on AI’s capabilities while underestimating culture, incentives, identity, and habit change. The conversation explores why adoption moves more slowly than the hype suggests, why lawyers need to be involved early in innovation efforts, and why leadership must take a longer-term view. Together, they make the case that the future of legal transformation will depend less on AI acting on the profession and more on people deciding how to use it.
Ted: Lucy, how are you this afternoon?
Lucy: Hello, Ted. I’m very well, thanks. How are you?
Ted: I’m doing great. I’m so excited about this conversation. I don’t know if you remember, but I heard about you through one of our team members. I saw you speak, was it in Italy or at a Cosmonauts event?
Lucy: Yes, it was in London.
Ted: Okay. Yes. He hit me up and said, “You’ve got to get Lucy on the podcast.” So here we are.
Lucy: That’s very kind of him.
Ted: Why don’t we get you introduced? Maybe take a few seconds and tell us a little bit about what you do. I think your background is super interesting and unique, and it lines up really well to a theme that we’ve been having on the podcast lately, which is the human side of legal, because that’s where the hard work really, in my opinion, and I think in your opinion, lives in this transformation. So tell us a little bit about yourself.
Lucy: First of all, Ted, thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here with you today. I love your podcast. I love the fact that you bring different narratives and narratives that are provocative and that open the conversation to more interesting discussions, in my view. Also, congratulations on being recognized by the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers 50 recently here in London. Well done. Massive recognition.
Ted: Thank you very much.
Lucy: I’m a lawyer by trade and by background. I practiced as a lawyer for over 20 years, and then I transitioned full-time into an innovation role. I quickly realized, when I started working on innovation, that innovation in law, let’s say pre-pandemic, was very much focused on tools, technology, features, and we were not talking, or we were not talking enough, about the human component or the human behavior component that unlocks innovation and unlocks the useful use of technology.
So as such, I developed an interest in behavioral science. Behavioral science is a science at the intersection between economics, psychology, organizations, and transformation sociology. I started a new career and studied behavioral science, and now my work is in behavioral science as well.
The work that I have been doing for the last eight or nine years has been focused on the human side, on the human aspects of technology and AI adoption, but also on what needs to happen from a human behavior perspective for innovation to happen in law firms.
Everything I say and everything I will share with you today, when I talk about law firms, my experience has mostly been in law firms, although I worked five years as general counsel of a multilateral organization in Latin America. Everything I say today could be applied either to law firms of all sizes and also to in-house legal teams.
So I would say that my role, or what I bring to organizations, is precisely the observation of how lawyers and business professionals work, how they behave, and what needs to change in their behavior and habits for AI to make sense, for technology to make sense, but also for actual organizational transformation to happen.
We like to talk about how AI is going to disrupt this or that, but it’s not AI that will disrupt this or that. It’s people using AI who will disrupt this or that. So yeah, sorry, that was more than a few seconds.
Ted: No, that’s really good because what really attracted me to having you on as a guest was your title, which I’ve never seen in a law firm before, which is behavioral innovation. I thought it was a very progressive-sounding role. Maybe you could just take a minute. What is the remit for a behavioral innovation role inside a law firm? What does that look like?
Lucy: This is such a great question. For the most part, for the last few years, most conversations around innovation and technology have focused on what the technology can do. Now, to me, the more interesting question is how organizations respond to AI and technology and change in general.
So my work sits at this intersection where I help legal organizations, law firms of all sizes, and in-house legal teams build the capabilities they need to adapt successfully to change. In a way, everything I do, all the programs that I lead, are of a different nature. It could be about developing creativity capabilities in people. It could be about encouraging practice groups to develop radical ideas to reinvent their business. It could be helping leadership see things around AI from a different perspective, outside the echo chambers that are very predominant in our organizations and in our industry.
My different projects bring a perspective that is informed by behavioral science and that tries to generate debates around these issues in the organization and develop strategies and frameworks that organizations can apply to make change effective.
I should probably say something right from the outset. I am coming from a rather unusual position. I’m not trying to build an AI product. I’m not trying to sell a platform. I’m not trying to even sell behavioral science to organizations. There’s this saying that I love: never ask a barber if you need a haircut. Because if you asked me, I would say everything is informed by human behavior.
What I think is that we all tend to see the world through the lens of what we know best, and I’m conscious of that. I don’t think behavioral science is something that should operate in our legal organizations independently from technology, strategy, or legal expertise. I see the value when we approach innovation and projects with this behavioral science lens. We tend to bring leaders more useful and effective strategies to make change happen.
We tend to believe, and I think we’re going to touch on this later on, that by having a strategy and by buying technology, magically everything will change. We’re going to be much better at what we do, our clients are going to be happy, and everybody’s going to be happy. That’s not how it works because we are forgetting a missing link there, which is that for all that to happen and to be unlocked, we need to change the way people behave day in and day out.
What I say about my job, or the work that I love doing and my passion, is that I love working with everybody in the organization, from the most senior lawyer to the most junior business service professionals. I like to mix them together. My most successful programs, like the Innovation Certificate Program that I launched at DLA Piper, the success of that program, which ran for five years, came from mixing everybody intensively for three months and letting them collaborate without hierarchies, without titles, without thinking, “I’m better because I earn more money,” or “because I’ve been in the industry for 20 years longer than you.” Everybody on the same level playing field, generating ideas and thinking, “How can we do this differently, and how can we survive in an environment where only some of us will survive and few of us will actually thrive?”
Ted: I have been, since this whole AI transformation story has been discussed, feeling like there’s a spectrum between the doomsday and the utopian perspectives. A lot of people in the doomsday camp are drastically underestimating the amount of human friction that’s going to need to be overcome in order for industries and organizations to transform. The doomsday scenario really relies heavily on us not having enough time to adapt. It’s like people are out of work tomorrow, all knowledge work is going away, the only thing that’s going to be left are the trades and manual work.
I think that is impossible because of all the human friction necessary. I spent a decade at Bank of America in process engineering, management, and part of my job was to go in organizations and retool how the work gets delivered from first principles. That is so incredibly hard, especially with a constituency like lawyers that are, the ones that are more senior in their career. Like Richard Susskind says, it’s hard to tell a room full of millionaires they’re doing it wrong. That is real.
The work that you describe in your behavioral innovation role sounds really, really hard to me in a law firm because of some of the things that you just mentioned, like taking away the hierarchies. The hierarchies are really embedded deeply in law firm culture. We hear terminology like “non-lawyers,” which I think is slowly starting to change.
I’m in the middle. I’m not dystopian or utopian. I think this is going to be a big shift for our economies globally, for knowledge work. But I do think we’re going to have much more time. The tech could be ready today, and it’s not, by the way. I feel very strongly that there have been some inflated assessments as to what the tech can do, especially in a legal context. Long-horizon generative work is still nowhere near where it needs to be, especially for a very high-stakes industry like legal.
But even if it were ready today, it would be years before we would be in a place where both inside legal teams and law firms had actually transformed. I know there’s a lot of CLOs and GCs saying, “You’re not moving fast enough, law firms.” Ford Motor Company’s CLO had a post on Bloomberg recently. So we’re getting a lot of signals that it sounds like the inside legal teams want the law firms to move faster, and on the law firm side, there is a tremendous amount of human work that still needs to be done.
I was so intrigued that your firm had the foresight to invest there. So would you say that, first of all, have you ever seen somebody with the behavioral innovation title in a law firm?
Lucy: No, I haven’t, actually. I think it was an interesting way to describe what the role was about. I haven’t seen a role such as that, and I wish there were more roles like that because the need is there.
What you’re saying is very powerful because I’m with you. I don’t think we need to be dystopian or utopian. When we talk about AI, we just need to be more analytical and observe what’s going on.
When we talk about AI, we often focus on what the technology is capable of doing. We talk about process mapping, workflow, tasks, automation, features, agents. Behavioral science or behavioral innovation shifts the conversation towards humans and what they are actually willing and able to do with that technology. So those are totally different conversations.
Sometimes I like to describe this as the difference between potential and realized value. Technology creates the potential. We have amazing technology with the potential to do amazing things. Now only people are going to determine whether that potential is effectively realized or not. That has led me to believe that developing behavioral capability in every organization is a strategic capability, and it sits within boardrooms to make that decision.
It’s not simply about managing change well or change management. It’s about building organizations that can develop the adaptability capability, organizations that learn, adapt, and evolve as technology continues to change.
One thing that I noticed about AI, and I love what you said about the doom and the utopians, is the way we talk about AI. We often describe it as though it’s an independent force acting on organizations. We hear phrases like “AI is reshaping the legal industry,” “AI is replacing lawyers,” “AI will kill the billable hour,” “AI will transform the profession.” It’s interesting because that language subtly removes the human agency from the story. It makes AI sound like something that’s happening to us rather than something we are actively shaping through thousands of decisions we make every day as individuals and leaders in organizations.
This is a very important reminder that doom or utopia depends pretty much on us, not on AI. It will depend on the decisions leaders make in relation to their people, but also on how each individual shows up every day at work and whether the conditions allow them to show up in the way we want them to show up.
AI doesn’t decide how work will be done or redesigned. Those are people. Leaders need to think and strategize, but also implement strategies that are tied to work, understanding how they are going to make people do things in a way where AI brings the value and releases the potential that it has within itself.
I would like us, all of us as an industry, to stop giving AI too much agency and regain the agency that we as humans have in this process. It depends on us. Nothing is going to be imposed on us. It will depend on human decisions and how we want to address that for our organizations and as an industry as a whole.
Ted: You used a metaphor about a car in London when we had lunch a couple weeks ago while I was over there for the Financial Times. Maybe you can talk a little bit about it because I think that’s a great way to visualize the paradigm that I think we’re in.
Lucy: Yes, I love that metaphor because it’s very graphic. The way I think about it in legal organizations is by thinking about two systems that interact. On the one hand is the technology system, and on the other hand is the human system. There are other systems and other organizational levers that are important for this conversation, but if we just take these two systems, technology and people.
The technology system is advancing absolutely at a speed that we cannot even believe. It’s advancing at a pace that is very difficult for us to even comprehend. That’s technology. On the other hand, we have humans, and the human system in organizations moves at a much slower pace. Why? Because we as humans behave based on values, on thoughts, on feelings, emotions. We are complex creatures.
If you want to change a habit, think about our personal lives. If we smoke, or eat badly, or don’t exercise, how long does it take for any individual human being to change that habit? It takes a long time. So there’s a massive disparity when it comes to the pace at which humans can change and technology can change in an organization.
The Ferrari or the super-fast car in London is this. If you think about technology and humans, and how humans are also heavily influenced by the environment, when we talk about the human system, we need to remind ourselves that the way your people behave in organizations, they don’t just behave the way they want. They also behave in a certain way because of the context of the organization you have built, because of the environment. Their behavior is heavily conditioned by context.
If we translate that to cars in London, if you have the best car in the market, the fastest car in the market, you buy it because it is the fastest car in the market. The moment that super-fast car enters Central London, the car is not going to go at the maximum speed it can go according to its features. It’s going to go at the speed of the context and the environment created in Central London by other hundreds and thousands of cars trying to get into Central London and creating traffic jams.
If we translate that to organizations, it’s the same thing. We are buying technology, we are developing technology, we are talking about how much technology is going to change us. But then when we bring the human system into the equation, we realize, hang on, this is not going as fast as it possibly can because people are slow to change, and people are slow to build new habits, and people have fears and concerns about their identities being impacted by AI.
When you have two components at different speeds that interact with each other, the whole system is going to go at the speed of the slowest one, not the fastest one. The same thing happens in organizations. This is why you go to most law firms, most legal in-house teams, or most professional services organizations, and things don’t look very different really, even though there’s more technology. I’m not so sure we have found out what we are going to do with that technology to increase the pace of change. This is where different lenses, different approaches to unlock that, are important.
Ted: There’s a book that was required reading when I entered business school 25 years ago, and it was called *The Goal* by Eliyahu Goldratt. Are you familiar with it?
Lucy: No, I haven’t read it, but I’m writing it down to read it.
Ted: Yeah, it’s a really good book. It talks about the theory of constraints and how a system only moves as fast as its slowest-moving component. They use a metaphor, and I’m going back in my mental archives here, so I might get this a little bit wrong, of a marching band. However fast the slowest drummer in that marching band goes is how fast the system moves. So yeah, that was a very early teaching. It was an entry-level class, and that was required reading. So it’s very real, it’s very true.
Something that you touched on is identity, which I think is really interesting. I’ve been talking about culture in law firms for a really long time, having not spent my entire career there, having spent time at Microsoft, at Bank of America, and as an entrepreneur before that. There are so many cultural components in a law firm that are really foundational, like cornerstones. One of them is the KPIs that end up being the axis around which the law firm rotates, which is the billable hour and originations. That’s how lawyers are measured. Those are the two metrics that determine your career path, your compensation, how you’re viewed by your peers. Really, the identity of the lawyer is wrapped up tightly, or tightly coupled, to those metrics.
We’re now entering into an era where the billable hour isn’t necessarily, and I’m also not one of these believers that the billable hour is going away now. I do think it’s going to lose ground to alternative pricing structures, for sure. There’s no way it can’t. I think there’s going to be a much longer horizon. It’s not happening tomorrow. It’s going to happen. It’s going to be an evolution, not a revolution. There’s so much pent-up demand for alternative pricing structures that the market on the buy side is really chomping at the bit.
The reality is, not just take people out of it for a minute, but just the technology itself, there’s still so much human-in-the-loop work required. There are so many areas of practice within a law firm that really incorporate a level of variation or variability. I’m a Lean Six Sigma black belt, and variability matters. People think Lean and Six Sigma are the same thing. They’re not, just because they use the words together. Lean is about waste reduction. Six Sigma is about quality control. If you’re operating at Six Sigma, and I’m going to butcher this because it’s been forever, but it’s like 4.3 defects per million opportunities. So if you’re manufacturing widgets and you have more than 4.3 out of a run of a million go defective, then you’re not operating at Six Sigma. So it’s a very high bar.
But going back to the identity piece, talk a little bit about the double mismatch and rebuilding lawyer identity.
Lucy: Yes. I love your questions. We discussed them when we were preparing this conversation. I had some ideas and now I have more ideas. I’ll try to be brief.
When I refer to the double mismatch, there are two mismatches here, or gaps. The first gap is between the speed of technological change and the speed of organizational change. This is similar to what I just mentioned about the car in Central London. Technology is advancing very fast, but organizations change very slowly because we need to consider governance, regulation, client expectations, organizational processes, but also because past successes are sometimes a very important obstacle for change. We believe that if we’ve been doing something for the past five decades or for a long time, then we know how to do things, so why change? That’s the first mismatch.
But the second mismatch, and I think we discuss this less, is between what technology is capable of doing and how people experience that change. If you talk to an AI person or a technology person or an engineer, or people like us who work in innovation, we perceive AI as a technical achievement, as something that is amazing, full of features. You can do this, this, and that. This is why when vendors or people who develop amazing technology come to us, they explain to us how amazing their tools are.
Now, when we talk about human behavior and how people think about technology, especially lawyers, we experience AI as a radical change, as a radical change to the way we practice, we develop expertise, and we create value. So much so that AI is perceived as a threat to our professional identity, especially for more senior people like us. We were trained a certain way. Now AI scraps all that and, in a way, forces us to think differently about the value we bring to the organization and to our clients.
This double mismatch creates two different conversations that don’t talk to each other or don’t relate to each other. One group of people in an organization, or one group in the industry, is talking about AI capabilities, and the other group of people who are needed for AI to make a change is thinking about themselves and the value they bring as professionals.
One thing that research has shown us is that people don’t simply evaluate change objectively. When we tell people, “This tool is amazing because of this or that,” information alone is not what changes people’s behavior in relation to that technology. When we receive that information, we interpret that information through our existing beliefs, experiences, and professional identities.
So when you have a leader or a group of leaders who want to introduce AI, they are not just introducing technology. They are introducing uncertainty, and uncertainty for their people, uncertainty about careers, about expertise, about progression, about where’s my value.
This is something very interesting. There’s a line of research that is very interesting. When there’s a mismatch between the behavior you want to promote and the behavior you reward, for instance, if you want to promote more use of AI but you reward working long hours, that mismatch creates a problem for people. People solve the problem by leaning towards the behavior that gets rewarded, not necessarily the behavior that the organization expects people to have.
So your point about billable hours is a great example. I don’t even want to get into the decades-long conversation about whether it’s a good system or a bad system, because I think most of us know the prevalent view on that. But if we want our lawyers and business professionals to use more AI, and we don’t change simultaneously the context in which that behavior will take place, the incentives, what gets rewarded, what gets recognized, what makes people progress in their careers, then people are not going to adopt AI the way we want them to adopt it. We need to change all that for this little thing to work, for AI to work.
This is the last thing I’m going to say, because you mentioned KPIs and I love that. We constantly get asked, “Well, what’s the ROI of innovation? What’s the ROI of behavior change? What’s the ROI of this and that?” I really would like us to push back on that question and say, “Well, I’m going to answer that question when you as leaders of organizations also start thinking how the rest of the organization’s levers need to change to measure accurately an ROI of AI, behavior change, and innovation.”
Ted: That is such a good point. I have been beating the drum for a while now about the risk of firms that over-index on ROI too early in this transformation, because I think so much of the ROI is learning. It’s experimentation. In innovation, if you’re not failing, you’re not innovating. It’s a requirement. It’s a process of trial and error and experimentation, and that necessitates failure. Failure isn’t bad in that context.
When we had lunch a couple weeks ago, you talked about something that I thought was an interesting concept, the IKEA effect. Tell me what that means.
Lucy: The IKEA effect is a cool concept in behavioral science. It’s about research finding that people place greater value on things they have helped build themselves. I think this is an important lesson for legal organizations because we often treat lawyers and business service professionals as the final stage of an innovation process.
Traditionally, a group of people within the organization, who are not normally lawyers, select technology, workflows are designed, processes are developed, and then when everything is ready for lawyers to use, we bring it to the lawyers, give them all the information they need, and give them 100 trainings on how to use that technology. Then we cross our arms and magically expect that people start using the technology.
What research has constantly found in terms of how humans behave is almost the opposite approach is the right one. According to this IKEA effect, you should bring lawyers and business professionals into the process, whether it’s technology building, buying, or innovation in general, right from the very beginning. You have to ask them what the frictions are, which tasks they hate doing or drain their energy, which ones they love doing and give them a sense of purpose, what their clients like, what they don’t like, what matters to them.
There’s also a question that I always love to ask. I would ask people, “What part of your job, if removed, would make you feel less important, less valued, less recognized, and less willing to show up and go to the office every day?” Because those questions are going to give you very valuable insights to understand what you should do next, what you should do with the technology you buy or build, how the technology should be built, what features it should have.
How can we really start reimagining everything that needs to be reimagined in a law firm? This is something that is very interesting because, again, we think that if we give people information at some point at the end, things are going to dramatically change, and that’s not the case. This is why you can invest as much money as you want in technology and run as many training programs as you want, but then that’s not going to impact adoption at scale.
This is why I would say what’s important in every innovation project, whether it has to do with AI or not, is that you need to involve lawyers right from the very beginning.
There’s something that I found in law firms that is a bit of an obstacle. We don’t like to ask for deeper questions. Even clients, we don’t like to ask people or clients about our service, and we tend to underestimate the power of asking people what they think about things. If we did that, it would probably lead us to much more successful outcomes when we roll out that technology or when we try to push for a certain change.
Ted: That makes a lot of sense. In technology, in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, there was a software development lifecycle methodology called Waterfall. Waterfall is a process where you bring a group of users together with a business analyst and you write down the requirements of the system. Then the technology team goes off in a vacuum, builds the solution, and the first time that users get to see it is during user acceptance testing, or UAT.
That created so much friction in the world of technology that in the early 2000s there was a group of thought leaders in the technology space, and they signed something called the Agile Manifesto. The Agile Manifesto was really the beginning of the Agile movement in technology. If you had to sum it up in one word, it’s iterative. The mantra is to deliver value incrementally and engage users early and often.
So the users are seeing live working software and engaging with it, providing feedback, and you have really short sprints, development cycles, before the next iteration is released. That has proven to be massively successful in the technology world. I think it doesn’t just apply to technology. It applies to any sort of massive change that you’re going to introduce. So yeah, I feel like technology figured this out a long time ago. But to your point, I think there are still some remnants of the Waterfall mindset in other areas of the organization.
Lucy: One hundred percent. You’re raising an amazing point there. I am a firm believer that we need to be inspired by other industries and people who do things better than us as lawyers and legal organizations. This concept of analogous inspiration.
I love the examples you bring from the software world. I love to talk to people who are in the advertising industry or who are in other professional services industries. At one event that I organized, I even invited my dentist as a speaker, and he was a massive success. I thought, this guy is one of the most amazing service providers when it comes to client service. Every time I would go to his practice, I would feel happy to go to the dentist, which is something that you would never feel. I found so many parallels with how people show up when they go to a lawyer and when they go to a dentist. I learned so much from him. When I brought him to the firm, everybody was excited to hear his stories in terms of how he approaches a difficult service he provides in very innovative ways.
I do think you’re absolutely right. In the legal profession and legal industry, sometimes we haven’t been so open to learn from others. We see what we do as very special and disconnected from everything else, and everything has to do with everything, really. It sparks curiosity. It sparks new connections just to speak randomly with people who do things differently, and in my view sometimes even better than us. We should seek inspiration as much as we possibly can to flex that muscle of creativity, which again, I think everything that we’re talking about today is the foundation for making change happen, flexing the creativity muscle in our people day in and day out.
Creativity is not a switch that you can turn on and off when you want. Creativity is something that is compounded over time. It’s cultivated, and the more you create an organization that, as you were saying before, allows for creativity to happen, allows for mistakes to be made in the context of experimentation, allows for projects to fail, that is something that creates an incredible capability in people to think, “Well, I can try this. I’m not going to be perceived as less competent because I tried this technology or this idea and it didn’t go well.”
Everything is related. In a way, this connects perhaps to something we have time to discuss or not, which is the constant challenge that we have between short-sightedness and the long view when it comes to decision-making in organizations, and whether we are able to see around the corner. If we are able to see around the corner, we will be much better placed to face the challenges, not just related to AI, actually. AI is just one component, but there are so many challenges, and we need to be prepared. That will only happen if we are able to see around the corner and not just react to the immediate.
Ted: I love the analogous inspiration terminology and concept. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard the story of Chick-fil-A and bringing in the Ritz-Carlton to learn about customer experience, but they did. They were laughed at by their peers in the fast food business 25 or maybe even 30 years ago when they did it, because there are such different worlds, high-end hotels and resorts and fast food. Who would ever think? And look how incredibly successful they’ve been.
Ted: We have a few minutes, and I want to hear your perspective on the short versus the long view. What is your take on that?
Lucy: Human nature is that we are great at reacting to the immediate, to what’s pressing, to what’s urgent, to what’s in front of us. Leaders have a lot of pressure to show results within short timeframes, very similar to politicians. If you want to keep your voters happy, you need to show results in three or four years or whatever your mandate lasts.
Leaders in organizations, in law firms, but also in organizations that have in-house legal teams, also need to show achievements and objectives and goals within relatively short timeframes. The problem with that is that innovation, behavior change, organizational transformation, all that, as we said before, takes time. The reason why all that takes time is because it’s dependent on humans, and we already established that we don’t change easily.
There is a constant tension there. I’ve seen both types of leaders. I’ve seen the leaders who are focused on delivering on the short-term goals that they need to deliver to keep their stakeholders happy, but also leaders who are very interested in their legacy, in how they want to be perceived not just in the three, four, or five years of their mandate, but actually after that.
If you ask any leader of any type of organization, “Would you like to be remembered by a tool you implemented, or would you like to be remembered as someone who established the conditions for the organization to be more progressive, more forward-looking, to see around the corner, to behave more like a true organization that doesn’t just focus on the immediate but actually focuses on long-term sustainability?” I would say most leaders would take the second option. No one is going to care if I was responsible for the adoption and rollout of X or Y technology.
But there’s also a massive gap between intentions and behaviors. While some leaders would like to be perceived by their long-term legacy, I feel that short-term goals have a lot of weight, and that’s problematic. It’s problematic to make change happen. This is why, in my view, we haven’t seen the rapid change and the transformative change that we should have seen by now in most of our organizations.
Ted: Especially considering that law firms are private, at least here in the United States. I know there are public law firms in the UK, but here in the US there are no public law firms. It’s all private capital, and even the ones that have accepted private equity do so through a non-public mechanism.
So I do think there’s opportunity there. It’s really hard when you’re publicly traded because investors and analysts are so focused on short-term results. There are huge corrections in the marketplace happening right now in the tech world. Massive. Nike’s down like 70 percent over the last five years. IBM went down 25 percent in one day.
Lucy: Yeah, it’s crazy.
Ted: It’s crazy, the swings that we’re seeing. There are a lot of questions in the AI world about new releases, open-weight models, and legal benchmarks. It’s an interesting time to be in the space. I love that your leaders recognized the need for a role like the one that you built out.
Ted: I can’t wait to hear what you’re up to next. So maybe once that’s announced, we’ll have you back on at some point, because we didn’t even get through half the agenda.
Lucy: I know, I know, but I knew this was going to happen. Because every time you and I start a conversation, we can’t stop. But yes, I would be super happy. I can’t wait to tell you more about what’s coming in my career. I would just like to say that it’s going to be all about going deeper into behavioral change and developing or helping leaders develop organizations that are more progressive and more focused on human beings. They are not just thinking about AI as a way to replace their people, but actually leaders who want to make better organizations with AI and their people.
I think the future is very exciting, and I cannot wait to share more with you and your audience as well.
Ted: Yes, that’s great. So how do people get in touch or follow what you write or speak about? Are you on LinkedIn? Is that the best way?
Lucy: Yes, yes, yes. I’m on LinkedIn. I can share my email as well if there’s a place for you to add it on your website, but LinkedIn is the best place. I really would love to hear from people what they think about what we discussed today. I think we need more people like us talking about this topic, so it would be exciting to have offline conversations.
Ted: Absolutely. We’ll include your link, your URL, in the show notes so folks can get in touch. Thank you so much for taking some time. I look forward to the next conversation.
Lucy: Thank you so much for having me too. It’s been an amazing conversation, and you made my day.
Ted: Likewise. Ditto. All right, well, chat soon.
Lucy: All right. Bye-bye.
Ted: Bye-bye.
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