The Provocateurs:

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, the co-founder of Thinkers50. I’d like to welcome you to Provocateurs, a podcast where we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim with this series is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with insightful leaders who offer new perspectives on traditional business thinking. This is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte, and my co-host today is Geoff Tuff. Geoff is a principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP, where he holds various leadership roles across the firm’s sustainability, innovation, and strategy practices. He’s also the co-author with Steve Goldbach of two books, Detonate: Why and How Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices and Bring a Beginner’s Mind, and most recently, Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws. Geoff, great to see you as ever.

Geoff Tuff:

As always, Des, great to be here. I’m really excited about our chat with today’s guest. I have to say we never really have bad guests on this thing, but today’s guest, in particular, I think really does fit the profile that we originally imagined as a provocateur, even all the way back to writing the book Provoke. And that is that Atif Rafiq, who we’ll introduce in more detail in a moment, has been known and seen as a digital disruptor. But what he does, and I think what we’ll hear about in his story today, is that he helps companies push into the future even in the face of uncertainty, and that is the very definition of a provocateur. So I’m sure we’ll have a fascinating conversation today. We’ll hear about his journey. But a few snippets just to get us going here.

As I understand his background, he has been disrupting and provoking companies for more than 25 years in both Silicon Valley and the Fortune 500 and through a variety of different companies that he started himself. He started his journey rising through digital native companies like AOL, Yahoo, and Amazon. He’s held C-suite roles in a variety of very well-established and bigger companies as well in industries ranging from entertainment to automotive. He was named the first digital, Chief Digital Officer in the history of the Fortune 500 when he took on that role for McDonald’s. And he has overseen thousands of employees as a global P&L transformation and innovation leader.

Today, over a half million people follow his ideas about management and leadership on LinkedIn, where he is a top voice, and his newsletter, Rewire, has over 100,000 subscribers and his book, Decision Sprint, was a Wall Street Journal bestseller. I’m sure we’ll hear more about the companies you founded, including Ritual, and everything else along the way. So Atif, welcome. Maybe just to get us going, just tell us a little bit about your background and where you came from to begin this journey.

Atif Rafiq:

Sure, Geoff, and it’s a pleasure to be with you and Des today. So yes, I’ve been around the block and I’ve had a few metamorphosis in my career. But at a high level, I really early on fell in love with the internet. This is in the mid ’90s before it was a career path for people who had MBAs for example. I was lucky enough to get involved with the big behemoth of that time, which was a company called AOL. Probably no one has heard of it anymore, maybe some people still have the email addresses. But that was a calculated bet I made to go into an industry early, and then I sort of never looked back. In the next 15 years I was just riding the wave of all the innovation coming out of the internet.

In 2013, I was a GM at Amazon. I was overseeing a multi-billion dollar business unit, and I thought I’d stay with the technology companies for the rest of my career. I got a call from the CEO of McDonald’s and he said, “Hey, I want to go big on digital.” I thought he was kind of nuts. I was like, “What does digital have to do with a restaurant business, the largest QSR in the world?” But after a couple of conversations it dawned on me that this was actually a game changer for the bricks-and-mortar companies. And so, one thing led to another. I became the first Chief Digital Officer in the history of the Fortune 500. It really wasn’t a thing. A lot got done for McDonald’s and a lot of things were set in place for other companies to replicate and follow, things like embracing customer experience, things like bringing product management as a discipline into a company where the product was viewed as the hamburger, but not the digital product. By way of example, collaborating with Silicon Valley companies. All those things were not norms but we felt things out, new territory, in my days at McDonald’s and then subsequently in some other large global corporations. It sort of became the template for how companies began to innovate at a higher pace and this whole idea of digitization. I’ve been in the C-suite for about 10 years in progressive roles and most recently, the success at these other organizations allowed me to become the president of MGM Resorts, which is another large company. And so, of course, never settling, I then decided to make my third metamorphosis, which is to be an entrepreneur, which we can talk more about. That’s a decision I made a couple of years ago, and I’m in the midst of that at the moment.

Des Dearlove:

I remember AOL. That tells you how old I am. That’s how far I go back, and I remember those email addresses. Tell us though, I’m fascinated to know, as you were saying, from a digital background to then step into a company like McDonald’s to be the first Chief Digital Officer in a Fortune 500, what was that like? Almost making the journey from clicks back to bricks, how did you provoke that culture? How did you bring the people along with you who probably… I mean, clearly the CEO got it, but you must have encountered some, let’s not say resistance, but a different culture.

Atif Rafiq:

Well, absolutely. I mean, I think for a company that’s more accustomed to incremental change, it’s difficult to embrace a brand-new territory and build new capability because there’s risk in it naturally. There’s great upside and there’s great risk, Des. I always start with what good looks like and painting a picture around that. What I’ve learned over the years is to do that in familiar terms to the organization because there’s a reason why McDonald’s has been so successful and sustainable for 60 years. So we want to really stay connected to that heritage. And so I would typically just anchor on the notion of convenience and distill our mission to say, “Look, this company is about three things: taste, value, and convenience. I can’t help you with the first two, but convenience, we can define a new level of convenience.” When you speak in familiar terms, you get people willing to learn more and listen to more of what you have to say. And then from there you can build around it and explain that, “What if we take our customer experience to the next level?” When I arrived at McDonald’s in 2013, there were really only three ways to use McDonald’s. You’d walk in, stand in the line, get a tray, and sit down, get a bag and leave, or go through the drive-through. So we said, “Hey, what if we can invent two new service models?” Now we have the next level of buy-in and willingness to listen. “Okay, well, what could those be?” So on and so forth. So then we can talk about things like skipping the line or a curbside pickup where the food is brought out to your parking spot or delivery. And so you’ve got to work from the company’s heritage and paint the picture of what you’re talking about and take them on the journey. Now, fortunately, Des, this only took 45 days, to paint that picture, and within two months I was in front of the board making a significant ask, billions of dollars, to digitize the company to redefine what convenience means in QSR. And they loved it. Now, it took a lot more than two months to get the momentum for these ideas because the main thing you encounter is that what your vision is is very different than how the company works. And so the internal ways of working, I had to spend a lot of time, and many of us did, over the next few years, trying to make us more comfortable with the ambiguity that comes along with new ideas and new territory.

Geoff Tuff:

I’m very interested to hear, Atif, about your mindset or your belief system coming into a company like McDonald’s or making any of the changes that you have over the course of your time in your career. Because what I’m hearing from you is a desire to show respect and have respect for the heritage of the company and what’s made them successful, but also to think about ways to move it forward. Do you think about your job as being to provoke, to disrupt, or is it more about… Well, actually, let me not try to put answers into your mouth. Tell us a little bit about how you think about that.

Atif Rafiq:

Well, it’s definitely, at the beginning, a situation of conflict. Here’s why, is because the conundrum is a few things. First of all, as a senior executive in a traditional company, you’re not really involved in how the sausage is made. You’re more receiving very finely-tuned plans, very polished plans at the end of a lot of time and hard work. And you’re supposed to say, “Oh, this is great” or “This is terrible.” But that’s really not the role of a leader in my view. In a company like Amazon, you’re more involved in the calibration of the ideas from the beginning, so you’re kind of helping shape the ideas. Not because you’re micromanaging, but because you want to provide that input along the way, the team doesn’t have a blind spot. And then what comes out of the sausage factory is really something solid and you can’t poke holes in it. There’s fewer blind spots. You can get more confidently behind those plans. And so you have issues like that where you’re trying to change the ways of working in a traditional company and that can come across as, well, do you not trust the team or are you getting too involved? So you have to introduce a new language for how you’re going to collaborate, what’s going to be the role of the working team, what’s going to be the role of the sponsor and the stakeholders. So I can’t tell you that I knew any of this when I started, so I had to learn through necessity. And over the years I developed my toolkit and I had to explain that, “Well, we have input meetings and output meetings. I want to have an input meeting with you where I don’t expect any answers and I don’t really think we’ll know the solution to what our problem is. But I want to spend time on what is the problem we’re trying to solve and how do we think about let’s get all these really important relevant questions on the table. We have no answers. And that may make you feel good because we don’t have the answers, but we know we’re canvassing this problem in the right way. I trust you that with time I can step back and then you can sort through it and come back with some solid recommendations. But let’s have this input meeting.” So I had to introduce things like that, new methods, and then explained that my role as a leader was calibration and not just being there at the end to say yes or no. You’re not getting enough input from me, and I’m not contributing enough. So clarifying how things were going to work. This is like a system I came up with over a lot of trial and error over many years. As I said, 10 years in the C-suite, you learn how to refine your recipe.

Des Dearlove:

And then you mentioned earlier that the more recent metamorphosis is into entrepreneurship and into working with entrepreneurs. Now, did you have to add to the leadership toolkit to work in that space? Is it the same tools but perhaps on a smaller scale, perhaps you haven’t got the same billions of dollars of investment to put against the digital strategy? Or did you find that you had to develop new ways of operating?

Atif Rafiq:

Well, I guess the first thing I’d share about this latest metamorphosis, Des, is that basically it is a way to take what I learned over these 10 years managing large numbers of knowledge workers and then turn that into software. So the product that we have is essentially something that brings to life, in the living system, a lot of the ideas and practices that I learned the hard way. But to get to your question, I started my first company in my 20s, and so I’ve been an entrepreneur before. But now I’m definitely not in my 20s, number one, and I have experienced some success in corporations where, as you mentioned, exactly, you have a lot of support. I’ve managed over 10,000 knowledge workers in my career. When you get to the C level, one of the top three roles, top five roles at a global corporation, you have a chief of staff, you have one assistant, some people have two assistants. I mean, it’s pretty crazy.

Now when you’re an entrepreneur, of course you have to get used to doing it all yourself. So there’s a survey for customers, well, you need to come up with questions, you need to learn a tool and populate the questions in the survey and get it out the door. I mean, you need to be ready to roll up your sleeves every single day. Not everyone is wired for that, and if you have never tasted that, then I think it’s a fairly big leap. But at the same time, it’s very rewarding because you’re building things. So if you’re a builder, then you’ve got to lean on some of those skills. I wouldn’t say it was terribly hard for me, but it was an adjustment coming from the period of time I had in the well-known brands and companies.

Geoff Tuff:

I really like your notion of the input versus output meetings, and I’m interested. First of all, I wanted to ask you, in your more corporate career, if I can call it that, what was the ratio of input versus output meetings, and how has that changed now as you work in a smaller setting as an entrepreneur? Or do you actually use a different way of thinking about it?

Atif Rafiq:

Well, it’s a great question, Geoff. I think over time I was able to articulate to the team how we would work together. So I would usually articulate it as a three-step process, the first step being a very messy one where we just get it all out there. What are we trying to explore? What are some of the key issues, considerations, questions? We don’t really need any answers. In fact, we’ll probably feel pretty overwhelmed, and that’s okay. And then I give the team some space and some time to begin to go deeper into these issues, get to the bottom of some of them, and come back in the second check-in and say, “Here are some hypotheses” or “Here’s what we’re currently thinking,” do some calibration. And then in the third meeting is where basically my expectation is that there’s sound recommendations and they can connect the dots between what they’re recommending and how they got there. Now, why is this different than the way things typically work in a typical traditional company? Is because usually with the executive you get the first meeting, the kickoff, where you say, “Oh, we have an objective. Here’s what it is. Here’s why it’s important. Here’s what the board wants or the shareholders want.” And then you get the last meeting, which is, “Okay, show me the PowerPoint with all the answers or the recommendations.” That is pretty risky because maybe the right assumptions were made or maybe there are no blind spots and that’s great, but if there are, then you’re not going to get buy-in, you’re not going to be confidently supporting these ideas. They may have to be reworked. That makes things slow and bureaucratic. So I had to explain to the teams how we would work together and why that actually will eventually speed things up for everybody.

Geoff Tuff:

So it sounds to me, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think you have a fascinating outlook on what your job is in these situations, because a lot of people in the senior executive roles that you held could see their job as being to shepherd strategy amongst various other things, where you declare some strategic intent, you set the north star, you set the team off to go and do it, and then you wait for their results and expect it to be executed well. What I’m hearing from you is that, in fact, you engage directly in the way work gets done and you directly intervene with the management systems that either get in the way or support the team members to try and get their work done. Am I hearing that right, and is that an explicit part of your philosophy?

Atif Rafiq:

100%, and it can be quite different than other management styles. There’s a former CEO of one of the companies I worked for who would tell me, “Hey, my job as the CEO is really just two things: It’s to hire the right people and hold them accountable for their objectives.” I think this is not correct. I think that’s only part of the job, because there’s too much ambiguity and uncertainty in the things people are trying to sort through, really hard problems, new territory. In the end, if you want to create more clarity for everybody, so it’s pretty obvious what is the path we should take, how we should cross different ports in the road, then you have to make yourself available. You have to not just roll up the sleeves a little bit, but lend a little bit of your mind. So I think that’s really important.

Now, there are plenty of CEOs who do that. I mean, I worked for a large automotive company and the CEO is literally saying, “I don’t want to be in any meetings where we’re looking at reports and results. I don’t want to see any outputs. I just want to be involved in… ” 90% of his day was, “How are you thinking about the problem you’re trying to solve?” You’re solving a sustainability issue, you’re trying to do something around electrification, maybe you have something about the connected cloud and the car. He was generally curious and wanted to know how the team was thinking about the core issues because he knew if he got those things right, mentally synced up with the team, he could step back and give them plenty of space, and a couple of months later, probably the right things would be happening.

Des Dearlove:

You were talking about ambiguity and uncertainty, and this is the difficult part of being in the leadership role. I mean, I get the feeling that it’s more acceptable these days for leaders to say they don’t have all the answers. Once upon a time we’d look to our leaders to tell us how it was and lead us into what we were led to believe was a certain future. Is it okay as a leader now to say, “I don’t know,” or is that ducking the responsibility?

Atif Rafiq:

Well, it depends on what we’re referring to, Des. I mean, I think the leader’s job is to know what the North Star is. And basically-

Des Dearlove:

Sorry, I mean in terms of strategy, I mean the big bet of, “I’m not sure what we should do now given the market circumstances.”

Atif Rafiq:

I think the leaders should be able to set the strategy at a high level. Define the problem-solving frontier, is what I call it. It’s like, we will grow, and we will be an enduring company and customers will love us if we solve for these things. Within those things that we have to solve for there’s, as you said, a lot of unknowns. And then I think the job as the leader is to actually set up the machinery, which is essentially do you have the right working teams for the different initiatives that are important, which means, have you really leveraged the collective intelligence of the organization the right way? Which is very different than work happening in silos, for example. So really driving a collective intelligence to be an organizing principle around how the teams are formed, I think that’s important. Putting in place a model for how do you get from a messy pile of questions to recommendations, what is that? Is that three steps? Is that two steps? How will we work through ambiguity? What will be the role of the leader? In my view, that’s calibration not control. What will be the role of the working team? What are their interfaces and interactions? This is like the systematic way to develop a culture of problem-solving towards the things that are going to accelerate the North Star of the organization. I think that whole systematic approach to setting up the company is where the leaders should probably over-index on how they spend time.

Geoff Tuff:

And safe to assume, Atif, that this is really at the heart of Decision Sprint. In the opening, I did mention it was a Wall Street Journal bestseller, but the subtitle is The New Way to Innovate into the Unknown and Move from Strategy to Action. That’s a lot of what you’re talking about right now. Are there some key messages that you haven’t hit so far that you would like people to think about when they read your book and to really take away and try to put into action in the world?

Atif Rafiq:

Sure. Well, yeah, I mean the main impetus for the book, as I said, is necessity is the mother of invention. So I go from Amazon, which is very comfortable with unknowns and ambiguity, to McDonald’s, which is more of an environment of certainty. And then I start reflecting, “Hey, what’s the difference here?” Where I see the difference is McDonald’s being just so amazing at execution, really an execution culture. Once we’ve decided what to do, wow, I mean, just watch out. This company can execute best-in-class. Now, there’s another body of work that comes before execution. That’s where I saw a gap in the market and I decided to create some clarity around it. This gap is what I call the upstream part, or upstream work, which is we have the raw idea or the raw objective, it sounds like the right thing for the company, but it’s a lot of work to navigate the steps of thinking through the unknowns, the uncertainty, creating alignment, coming up with the recommendations, getting buy-in, getting to the decision point. So the space between having the raw objective and the decision point is what I call the upstream stage of things. And for many teams, that’s a process of weeks and months. There wasn’t a lot articulated on what’s involved and how to do it well, and so I tell some stories, but I also break it down into specific workflows that teams can embrace. And so it makes me very gratified when I hear somebody say that they picked it up at the airport and they began to put in place this new way of working in their organization and it really helped them get an idea off the ground as opposed to being stuck. That’s really where the book focuses. The idea of upstream work, knowing what it is, recognizing it, and having a workflow for it is really what I’m trying to spread.

Des Dearlove:

We talked at the beginning about you being a digital disruptor. I mean, obviously everyone’s talking about generative AI at the moment, everybody’s trying to figure out what it means. How big a disruptor do you think that is, and what should CEOs, perhaps particularly the non-technology, people who don’t come with a technology background, what should they perhaps be thinking about and considering at the moment?

Atif Rafiq:

Well, I mean, generative AI has very massive impacts across all kinds of spheres. The specific area where I am focused is on knowledge work, and so my thoughts are that it’s actually a perfect companion to a knowledge worker because it’s based on the natural language. I think a lot of the work that happens in organizations is things like, “Hey, I have a problem. Okay, what questions do I have? When I try and develop answers, how well-formulated are these answers? If I knew the right questions and had pretty good answers, what conclusions would I draw?” This is actually perfectly suited for large language models. It’s not because the large language models know everything, but a lot of things have been explored in the world prior to me looking at it when it’s relevant for me. And so why wouldn’t we want to use that to accelerate work? So I see it increasing the velocity of defining problems, solving problems. It’s not obviously going to give you 100% precision, but it will help humans overcome cold start problems, find weak links in their thinking, just tighten things up a bit. All of that serves to increase the velocity of how companies solve problems–if it gets integrated into the workflow of the companies. Because unlike a consumer, it’s not just one person interacting with a machine, problems in companies are solved by teams. There’s usually not one person who’s fully accountable. So the gap today is basically that people have really struggled with bringing GenAI into the workflow of how things get done because you need everyone to agree how to do that. Not one person can say, “Oh, I’m going to go allow this language model to smarten up on a topic and then show up in a meeting.” That’s just very different than actually how collaboration works in organizations. So that’s really the step that needs to be taken.

Geoff Tuff:

What I’ve experienced in this conversation so far is that you have a very methodical approach to getting to certain decisions, to getting to certain outcomes. So I’m now interested to hear how you apply that to the adoption of GenAI in the right way, because I believe, what you just said, that we do need to define how it operates within the workflows within companies. But what does that adoption curve look like? Is it individual exploration that eventually comes together where we redefine the workflows? Do we have to define it from the top down? And if I could layer on a second part to that question, how do we make sure that the widespread adoption of GenAI actually leads to widespread improvement in the quality of thought as opposed to widespread degradation of engagement?

Atif Rafiq:

Yeah, it’s a wonderful question. So to start on the first one, where there’s workflow, that’s where you’re seeing GenAI being adopted today because there is a workflow. That’s a good thing, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. So for example, if there’s a corner of the company where someone generates reports or makes sense out of data to provide insight, there’s usually what I call a single-threaded problem where it’s like, it’s one corner of the company, you don’t really know how the sausage is made, and if they go into the sausage factory and now they rewire it and they begin to use GenAI to just do some of the heavy lifting and streamline things, that’s where the action is today for integration of GenAI. But it’s so limited because really where the needle-movers are in organizations is, what I referred to earlier, which is your problem solving frontier. I mean, what are the real strategic objectives that if we get them right we’re going to really create a growth engine for the next five to 10 years? Those are generally cross-functional problems. They take collective intelligence, it’s not one corner of the company. So now the problem with integrating GenAI, exactly as you mentioned Geoff, is you can have one smart guy or gal go in a corner and prepare themselves for a meeting using ChatGPT or Bard, and they can look good in a meeting, but that’s very different than actually integrating that into the workflow where, when it comes to a big idea, the workflow follows steps. What’s the problem we’re trying to solve? What issues did you look at? How did you think about those issues? What’s your recommendation? How do you defend those recommendations? If these recommendations are sound, what decisions should we make? That’s the flow. And so of course, that’s why I wrote Decision Sprint because I found an absence of this flow in some cases, not all organizations. But if you now begin to marry the workflow for problem-solving with AI, now we’re looking at more 10X opportunities for companies where their strategic objectives could really be accelerated.

Now, coming to your second question, which I think is a great one, how do you make sure that it’s serving the purpose of upscaling versus, let’s say, just creating atrophy in your brain? That is also something which AI can help with because it kind of raises the bar for people. It really stimulates, if it’s integrated in the right way, it’s like, okay, you give it some raw input and it helps you think through it in a more precise way. It should be upscaling the users of the AI in the process to say, “Ah, okay, yeah, this is how I think a little bit deeper than I was before. Why did I miss that?” If I come up with a question and AI gives me a related question, why didn’t I think of that one? That’s how it should be used; to raise the bar on everybody.

Des Dearlove:

You are very methodical and the book’s very methodical, and for someone who’s probably a bit scatterbrained like me, it’s a wonderful gift. But tell us a little bit more about Ritual and where that came from and how that works.

Atif Rafiq:

Sure, Des. Well, I wanted to say one thing about being methodical. I think, interestingly, in companies, people found me not methodical, which is kind of funny, which is because they didn’t understand my method. Whatever your role, I don’t want to say senior executive, whatever your role is, you could be a mid-level manager, but when you give people space and time for reflection, they often think… People are expecting leaders to tell them what to do. This is the bottom line. And then when you’re a leader who’s like, “I’m all ears. I’m not telling you what to do, I’m here to listen and then calibrate. If you’re good to go, I have nothing to add. And if you’re not good to go, you’re definitely going to hear it,” then that’s just a different methodology. So yes, I am methodical, but interestingly, when your method is one where you’re trying to calibrate, and therefore you need to listen first and give people a voice and a chance to explain where they’re coming from, often that’s viewed as like, “Oh, you don’t have a method. You don’t really know what you want,” which is interesting. Now, after you get to know people and work with them a bit, then of course they understand, yes, you do have a method, it’s just a bit different.

But coming to your question, Des, I was helping one company at a time, and that’s very impactful. I could be overseeing thousands of knowledge workers and really bringing these new practices and ways of working, and people appreciated that. But as an employee of a company, even at a high level, I’m helping one company at a time. And so the third metamorphosis in my career, essentially I reflected and said, “As opposed to helping one company at a time, how do I scale myself?” And I love software, so I thought about software and scaling myself, and that’s where I came up with Ritual, with my co-founder, as a tool for any team in any organization to use to accelerate their objectives and their ideas. What it does is it helps any team build and run explorations and do high quality purposeful exploration and do it quickly and effectively. That is what they need to, to do everything from pitching their ideas to putting recommendations on the table to prioritizing different ideas and being able to compare them against each other through software. We started the company three years ago, and of course, it’s only 18 months ago where GenAI became a thing, and so now embedding that has just made it so timely. So that’s where our focus is.

Geoff Tuff:

You’ve referred a number of times to metamorphosis, or at least we all have along the way. Are you anticipating another one? Is Ritual ‘It?’ Actually, maybe the question behind the question is, as you’ve entered your, let’s say it’s a new opportunity, have you ever thought about what the next step is and how to grand plan behind all of this? Or is it really about learning and then pivoting and doing something different when the opportunity arises?

Atif Rafiq:

Yeah, I think it is definitely more accidental in terms of my career progression because I think certainly when I was in the consumer tech, internet tech companies I didn’t have a thought of ever leaving that. It’s always, what’s the next thing you want to do at Amazon or the next wave you want to catch in technology? And so this whole idea of bricks-and-mortar organizations was totally met on the radar. And then once I was into that, it was like, “Wow, let me just keep going here. This is something I know how to do well, is inject growth and transformation in traditional companies and get them moving. So let me do that forever.” And then until it wasn’t the case, until it was like, “Okay, well, I’m at an inflection point here and then really what do I want to do?” So it’s much more unplanned. But in terms of where I’m at now, I see myself doing this, getting Ritual and changing the approach to modern management and teamwork and collaboration. This is probably a 10-year endeavor. I think that’s the mindset you need to have to make it last. I think I’m so excited about that because I think that’s the amount of time it’ll take for the game-changing potential of AI as really being redefining knowledge work, what the humans do, what the machine does, how they pair together to do knowledge work in companies. To me, that’s going to take another bunch of years to create clarity around, have the software systems in place, and that’s very exciting to me.

Geoff Tuff:

Is there a rallying cry that encapsulates the work you’re doing with Ritual right now that you’d like to take out to the world? I don’t want to force you to simplify it or make it more simplistic than it actually is, but if you had to name the key message, what would it be?

Atif Rafiq:

Well, the idea is that things really begin upstream. So if we want to get a yes, like a buy-in for an idea, if we want to move on to execution, we want to get momentum for these ideas and objectives, we need to start further upstream. So the further upstream you start, the more likely the thing will get off the ground and with the right momentum. And that does begin with things as simple as defining the problem correctly and basically doing your discovery and exploration around that problem quickly and effectively and purposefully. When you do that, it unlocks everything else. So really this upstream message is the core focus. My question would be, what do you have as tools to help you with that? Is there methodology? Is there software tools? Those things can really be a game-changer because teams have methodology and tools around execution, they have project management, they have agile systems, but that’s all useful for when the organization has decided yes. But getting to yes is, of course, a difficult process with a lot of forks in the road, so you need to have some method to the madness there.

Des Dearlove:

We’ve had an insight, I think, into your leadership style and you’ve talked about leadership tools and you’ve talked about management tools, but it seems to me, listening is obviously one of the most important leadership skills, and being prepared to offer that space as part of a methodology, is that something that just came naturally to you or have you learned and can leaders learn to become better listeners?

Atif Rafiq:

Well, I think for me it’s both learned and natural, Des. I’m naturally a questioner personality, so I lead with questions because I want to understand something pretty well before I say yes or no or give my perspective. I don’t assume that even though I might have experienced that… I don’t want to introduce bias with my perspective, I want to get some of the cards on the table. So I’m not some amazing, compassionate leader. I’m just very selfish. I want to have good information. That’s all it is in the end. But I think I also learned it, and this is where working in different cultures helps you. So when I worked for a large Swedish automotive manufacturer, it was very different than the American context. In the Swedish culture, it’s very important to allow people to be heard. And so this part of getting people on board, it’s a beautiful thing actually. Because it doesn’t cost anything and it doesn’t mean you need to actually agree to it, you just need to understand where people are coming from. And so the beauty of it is you can even say no to every single thing that they’re recommending, but as long as they’re heard, then you might get a good amount of buy-in to whatever is decided. And so this actually serves a number of purposes. It gets more information on the table because you hear where people are coming from, but also then you actually get that alignment you need in the end. So, as an American corporate executive coming in, I was like, “This is slow.” But actually, it can speed up alignment in the end.

Des Dearlove:

It is wonderful to hear in this conversation about GenAI and all this technology that this very simple human technology of listening still has, not just a place, but it’s still so important.

Listen, it’s been really great talking to you, but we have inevitably run out of time. So a huge thanks to our guest, Atif Rafiq, and to you all for listening. This is the Provocateurs podcast, and we’ve been Des Dearlove and Geoff Tuff. Please do join us again soon for another episode of Provocateurs.