Collective Wisdom & AI Storytelling: Scaling Human Stories Without Losing Humanity

Andy Goram (left) and James Warren (right) discuss A.I.'s influence on storytelling and capturing of emotional data

We live in a world where stories are everywhere. We tell them, we consume them, and now, somewhat incredibly, machines can generate them too. But what makes a story human? And why does that matter for leaders navigating today’s messy, emotional world of work?

That’s the question I explored with James Warren, founder of Share More Stories and the team behind SEEQ, a platform designed to help organisations understand the emotional meaning inside customer and employee experiences.

James believes storytelling isn’t just a communication technique. It’s a human survival tool. For thousands of years, stories helped us form relationships, build communities and learn from one another. They carried emotional cues, meaning, values, fear, and hope, long before we had surveys, spreadsheets or dashboards.

Today, leaders are drowning in data, but starving for meaning. There’s plenty of “what” and “when”, but barely any “why”.

That’s where stories and the emotional signals inside them, come back to the forefront.

James describes stories as “emotional code”, tiny glimpses into what people value and how they actually feel. And when you gather those stories in groups, something fascinating emerges: collective wisdom. Patterns of emotion that cut through noise and show leaders what’s really going on beneath the surface.

But here’s the challenge and the opportunity. AI can now help organisations read thousands of stories at scale, extracting themes and emotional nuance that would take humans months to unpick. It’s not replacing the story; it’s revealing meaning within it. Used well, AI becomes a lens, not a loudspeaker.

The danger comes when we let the machine take over entirely. James and I spoke about the rise of synthetic data, where AI is generating “responses” instead of humans. That’s not insight; that’s fiction. And it risks stripping out exactly what makes stories powerful: the emotion, imperfection and unpredictable humanity that turn information into truth.

Leaders today face a choice. Use AI to deepen our understanding of people… or use it to distance ourselves from them.

In my opinion, the future belongs to those who choose the former, those who listen, who are vulnerable, who hear the emotional layer in the stories around them, and who use technology to scale connection rather than replace it. Stories shaped us for thousands of years. They still can, if we let them remain human.

You can listen to the whole episode via the player below, or read the full automated transcript that follows:

Full Episode Transcript

[Andy Goram] (0:10 - 3:18)

Hello and welcome to Sticky from the Inside, the employee engagement podcast that looks at how to build stickier, competition smashing, consistently successful organisations from the inside out. I'm your host Andy Goram and I'm on a mission to help more businesses turn the lights on behind the eyes of their employees, light the fires within them and create tons more success for everyone. This podcast is for all those who believe that's something worth going after and would like a little help and guidance in achieving that.

Each episode we dive into the topics that can help create what I call stickier businesses, the sort of businesses where people thrive and love to work and where more customers stay with you and recommend you to others because they love what you do and why you do it. So, if you want to take the tricky out of being sticky, listen on.

Stories in a machine-shaped world

Okay then, we're living in a world where stories are everywhere from the ones we tell our children, the ones we tell each other and nowadays the ones algorithms create for us and even about us.

Now we live in a time where AI can now write, speak and even imagine on our behalf and I think it raises a fascinating question for us, especially with our focus in this podcast on successful modern business and leadership. So, can storytelling still be authentic when machines are involved? Now, my guest today is James Warren who has spent years exploring exactly that space.

He's the founder and CEO of Share More Stories, a research and communication business that's built a storytelling and insights platform called SEEQ that seeks to blend human emotion with artificial intelligence to help organizations understand and improve both the employee and customer experiences. Now, James believes that storytelling isn't just a way of communicating, but it's a way to connect, to adapt and to change. It helps us understand ourselves, each other and even what we might become.

But as technology gets smarter at telling stories, where does that leave the human element? And what role do belonging, trust and imperfection play in helping us tell stories that still feel real and resonate with us? So, today I think we're going to dive into all of that and ask how storytelling can still build trust and belonging when AI is shaping more and more of what we see and believe.

Because as machines get better at imitating us, I think the real challenge is holding onto our faith in what's genuinely human about the stories we tell and those we read. James, welcome to the show.

[James Warren] (3:19 - 3:26)

Thank you so much, Andy. I'm really excited to be here and top up this conversation with you because it's so timely and so relevant.

[Andy Goram] (3:26 - 3:44)

I'm just really excited to see what we explore together. Yeah, me too, mate. I have an idea in my head about where this conversation goes, but then I say that every time I sit down with a guest and then stuff happens.

So, I'm really looking forward to it. Before we get going, tell us a little bit about you, your background and the stuff you're focused on today.

Meet James Warren

[James Warren] (3:45 - 5:32)

Yeah, well, let's see. I think some of the most important things to describe is I have a family. I'm married and got four amazing kids, two are young adults and two are still school age.

I live in Richmond, Virginia and I'm originally from New York. So, I grew up in New York and a lot of my childhood, young adulthood place in the city, which definitely shaped my view of life. But I've also moved around a lot when I was a kid.

So, I started to see people in different environments and see things differently. And I think that gave me sort of a very personal connection to this notion of observing, interacting and engaging people and sort of seeing them and meeting them where they are. That's something that I just can't help but get away from.

It's the way I'm wired. And I'm grateful for that because it definitely shows up in the work. I wound up meandering through college in terms of starting with economics, then switching to English Lit and then switching to creative writing.

So, I think that also has a little bit of a background and seeded some of the things that show up for me in the professional journey. What we do today is we're really focused on helping, as you put it, companies and organizations. I mean, both the staff organization, but also non-profit organizations or public sector entities from brands really dive deep into the experiences people are having.

Why stories explain the “why” behind experiences

And what we mean by that is so much of the data that's collected today, all over the place, touches on the who, the what, the where, the when. It doesn't really get into much of the how or the why. We really want to help people understand the why, the W-H-Y behind their experiences, because we think that's really where you can understand people more deeply.

And I'm not huge on predicting the future, but I think you can be better prepared for that future if you really understand where people are coming from today.

[Andy Goram] (5:33 - 6:05)

Yeah, I love that. I think that sort of sets up the conversation for today really nicely, actually, because I've heard you talk about storytelling being something more than communication, being a way that we, I guess, make sense of the world, right? And so tell us a little bit about that and why, perhaps, integrated with all of that, stories play such a powerful role in creating that sense of understanding, that sense of connection, and maybe point the way to change, because I'm really interested in that.

Storytelling as human survival & connection

[James Warren] (6:06 - 8:13)

You know, there's something about when we listen to a story or read a story from another human, it starts to activate stuff in us right away, because this is hard-coded into our DNA. And if you go back to the earliest versions of the human experience, even if it were just gathered around the campfire, even if it was just about saying, hey, don't go over there. There's danger.

Let's migrate at this time of the year to a safer, better place. Those things were fundamental to survival. But as we started to advance as a storytelling, we added to it, we deepened it.

We started to realize that those sort of primal needs, but staying connected to each other for safety, still delivered other benefits. They gave us the ability to create relationships, to form community, even in the most basic sense of five people living in five, you know, pre-industrial huts together. Those ideas of sort of beginning to say, hey, there's something different about us and these other living forms around us.

We have this ability to connect, to listen, to share things. And so that basis of connection and community really sets the stage for learning, understanding, or saying, hey, you know, there might be something in your experience that I can relate to. And if I listen to you and I seek out what is common, I'm learning.

I may not have to go experience danger to know that danger is there, because I'm listening to your story. But I also may be able to understand in a very real sense, what do we have in common? Not just how are we different, but what do we have in common?

And so when you start talking about how do we navigate change as societies, as communities, as organizations, I think it requires two things. It requires our ability to empathize with one another, to sort of see ourselves in the other person, or the other group, or the other identity. But it also requires a new commitment, especially among leaders, to be vulnerable and to listen to stories of other people and groups, because that's how we will learn our way through these next several transformations that I think are ahead of us.

Humanity, belonging and collective wisdom

[Andy Goram] (8:14 - 9:00)

I think that's fascinating, because I think this thing around stories in particular, and we've had various people either reference storytelling before within the episodes that we've done, or specifically wanting to talk about the power of storytelling. And connecting what they've talked about, and what I pick up from you, James, is that we're giving a bit of our humanity in a story. Outside of just communicating through bullet points or whatever else it might be, helping us connect the dots, taking a piece of the delivery, taking a piece of the human that's communicating with us at that time, that's what stories, more than anything, allow us to do.

[James Warren] (9:01 - 11:05)

Is that the right? Yeah. You know, it is keeping the human, in the most literal sense, keeping our humanity in the forefront, in the center of our engagements and our interactions.

And I think this is huge for brands and organizations today. It's been true for a very long time, by the way. I think, to your point, stories are beautiful in that we can constantly rediscover their value and their purpose.

They really don't go stale, because it's stood the test of time in terms of 100,000 years, if you will. And so I think this idea that we live our lives through stories, we interact through stories, even at a subconscious level, that's what's happening. But the other part that's really interesting when you get intentional about the stories, is you start to realize that they are code and shortcut for how do people feel about this?

What's important to them? What are they valuing? The literal telling of the story and what they choose to tell about their experience reveals those things, but it also gives us things to hook onto.

And so that moves us into that space of turning what people are experiencing and sharing in their stories into nuggets of individual truth. We start to say, hey, there's a selective picture emerging here, kind of a collective wisdom that's emerging from this group that we should pay attention to. And I think that's the biggest challenge I've experienced in the work we do, is getting leaders to see and value that.

Some are more and more doing that every day. But the last 25, 30, 40, 50 years of business has convinced leaders that they already should know the answers to questions. There shouldn't be any questions that they're asking that they don't know the answer to, which means that they're not learning very much in a rapidly changing environment.

So I think this is also pushing almost philosophically on a different way to see organizations, customers, communities in ways that, while it's growing, there's still a lot of people out there who espouse that very predominant view of the last quarter century.

[Andy Goram] (11:05 - 11:58)

I like this idea of collective wisdom through personal experience. I think that's a lovely juxtaposition of, hey, we're all feeling this, but it's expressed individually, but we can still pull out those nuggets. I love that.

And if we relate that back to what you've just started to talk about here with a leadership focus, maybe, I know that you're very keen to think about the catalysts for change and adaptability and how storytelling particularly can be a real driver of those and maybe a multiplier of the effect of those things, or at least give us a real sense of understanding, helping people and organizations connect to missions or respond to uncertainty. How are you seeing that stuff evolve in practice and really solidifying or maybe accentuating the role that storytelling's playing in that context?

Navigating change with empathy and clarity

[James Warren] (11:59 - 16:09)

I think when you're navigating a significant change, if that's a human, we always say, whenever the concept gets a little too fuzzy, reduce it to one human. If it were you, how would you feel about this? And then start to zoom out, right?

Because you can almost always get an individual to empathize, to reconnect with the human aspect of this if you prompt them that way. And so when you think about what do people need to navigate change, especially big change, they want to feel secure, literally physically secure in the process. They'd love to feel emotionally secure in the process.

And then they want to feel like there's a clear path to get where they need to go. So all of those things are things that leaders can provide. Their path is the vision, the strategy, right?

You need to communicate it a lot. I think leaders get very bored of their messages after two or three times, like, what's the big deal? I've already said it.

I don't want to keep saying this. I'm like, they haven't heard a second of what you've had to say because they're consumed by their fear of the unknown. They're consumed by the fear of uncertainty.

So you will need to continue to message that, but you also will need to start showing them the pathway that you're about to lead them on into the great unknown is actually safe. And how do you do that? The physical safety is literally explaining how, you know, if we're going through a big organizational transformation that involves people in new roles, that these create things like opportunities for you to grow and thrive.

If earning more and growing in your career is your desire, we'll be able to help you do that. If you can't, because you're downsizing, you need to explain to them how we've fought long and hard about the lead time that you're going to need to find your next career opportunity. And here are the resources we're going to support you.

It's not a great message. It's not going to make everybody happy, but it's better than nothing. The emotional safety is where you actually have the most ability influence and impact this change journey for staff and even for your customers.

The first step is to empathize with them. And you can't empathize if I don't know what you're going through. How do I know what you're going through?

I invite you to tell me your story. What's your experience? How are you feeling about this?

What's a time like this that you've actually done navigating that well? Could you and we learn together about how to do this well by examining changed experiences that you've navigated were really challenging, but that you got through. And, you know, we did this with one of our, one of our customers is a health and wellness brand that was navigating a tremendous amount transformation and change.

And there was a point back to this sort of leader communication. There was a point at which there was rising frustration about staff feeling like, we don't know where we're going. We haven't heard these things and nobody's communicated.

So my initial reaction was, Hey, you know, CC, you've got to communicate more. What I started asking is the communication, the problem, or is it there's stuff blocking in their reception of the messengers? We went back to the stories.

We'd already collected a lot of stories from their staff. And basically the question that I asked our data was how are people navigating this change? And when you looked at the stories that were specifically related to the change journey that they were on, we found that people were in one of three stages.

They were either in anxiety or anticipation or achievement. Anxiety meant I can't handle this. I don't understand what's going on.

I feel aimless, directionless, rudderless, and that's fear, right? But the anticipation means, Hey, I've now seen enough sort of early signals that this is going to be okay. Um, early wins that this is not, we're not blowing ourselves up.

I'm anticipating a better future. And then achievement was done something in this process that makes me feel very confident that we are going to be okay. And so now what you realize is it's not that you just need more messaging.

You as leaders need to emotionally steward your team through each journey. You have to show them your vulnerability, that you know what it means to feel anxious. You know what it means to anticipate and you know what it means to achieve.

And you're here to help them get there. Once they heard that and switched, it was a game changer in terms of how they were able to show the organization where they were and where they were going with more alignment and resistance.

[Andy Goram] (16:10 - 17:52)

And did that, I mean, I love your point about leaders getting bored with their own story. You know, I've done lots of work in hospitality and I swear to God restaurants and businesses create new menus far too frequently for customers. Customers do not see the menu as often as you do.

It's not that tired guys. Um, leaders, the leadership point you make about telling stories or giving that message I think is so well-made because they've probably spent goodness knows how long fashioning that story or that, or, or let's hope they have. Um, and then they've told it a few times.

It feels like a few times, or, you know, I've told this story 10 times. Most people may have seen you talk about it 10 times. They have not taken in the message 10 times in its totality at all.

And I, I love this notion, uh, whether it's chief evangelist offer officer, or like you've just maybe there's, I mean, there's no, I can't think of many CEOs that would take the title of chief emotion officer, but I do like this note notion of look, this is about the connection. I'm a massive believer that businesses who really get this stuff and who supercharged their performance on a sustainable basis have somehow found that connection between where the business is going, what drives the business to get there and what drives the individuals who are working within that business. If we can find that sort of connection, that's the pixie dust, uh, for, you know, sustainable, amazing performance.

And I just love the notion of this ongoing job of the leader in that business or leadership in that business of just constantly telling and refining and making sure people connect to that story. It's about connection.

Connection and the power of “We”

[James Warren] (17:52 - 19:18)

I mean, and I really believe that, you know, people sometimes think that that's a squishy thing. I'm like, well, let's play out the opposite, do a quick thought experiment. How much progress have you made with people who have not connected?

And the answer is like, pretty little, you know, not much, or it's been, you know, sort of raiding against the grain, trying really, really hard to convince people to do things that they don't intuitively want to do, feel that they should do. So connection becomes that place where we go from us versus them to we, we're navigating this. It's not leadership versus staff or brand versus customers.

It's we, you know, when you, when you have a, we a lot, you can get done. So connection to me is, is a precursor to forming bigger. We is bigger.

Uses that allow the brand or the organization to, to say, this is a journey we're taking together. This is not a journey we're doing to you. You know, when, as, as customers, we experience this all the time, you know, you sometimes we wonder, we scratch our heads on the centre of the experience.

How long did they decide this was good for us or ready to be rolled out? Because the experience sucks from your point of view. And so you wonder, you know what, maybe I'm an outlier to them, or maybe they just aren't processing as well.

Collective wisdom has to reveal to them. How does your product make people feel? What does your culture make people feel?

Why does that matter to the experience and what can you do about it? I think those are fundamental questions that more and more leaders need to ask themselves if they want to grow their businesses and organizations.

[Andy Goram] (19:19 - 21:11)

Yeah. I absolutely agree with that. I think this is what it's going to be so easy for me to kind of just continue to talk to you about all the emotional connection and belonging.

And I don't want to ignore that at all. And I think we've come back to that, but I want to bring in the other side of this kind of conversation. And then maybe we'll meet at the, at the result of these things, because I want us to think about the AI piece here, the machine piece in storytelling.

SEEQ and quantifying emotional data

So we've broadly talked about the importance of storytelling, the role it plays for all of those key things around connection and change and adaptability and performance. And your work specifically is looking to gather more stories, understand more stories, analyse more stories, tell more stories. And to do that, you are really digging into the use of AI in that space and your platform SEEQ, which I'd love you to tell us a bit about tries to do that at some sort of scale.

We've just talked about the deep emotion element of storytelling. And now we're going to kind of broadly bridge into this topic of AI and storytelling. And I don't know, we're looking at one deeply human thing and one deeply machine-based thing.

And can AI really understand, enhance that human emotion stuff, or is it still struggling with that sort of stuff? And based on my own work with AI, trying to sort of talk emotionally or understand things emotionally, most of the time it needs a lot of help. And something is generally lost in translation because it's aggregating or averaging a load of stuff.

So I don't know, I've asked about 60 questions in that piece there, James. I'm sorry. Take me for it, my friend.

[James Warren] (21:11 - 27:47)

This is the mega question. I love it. So we'll ping on this for a minute.

Here's the transition point I see. The leaders who understand the value of connection, understand the value of human centred culture, brand, and impact, they get this intuitively, but they still don't know how to do it. So that's definitely where we come in.

So the leaders that don't value those things, it's a really hard sell. And there may be functional reasons why they're not ready to embrace this kind of leadership or thinking. And some of that is just, how's their business performing?

We tend to seek out large, mature industries where organic growth is hard to come by, past the low, mid-single digits, because those leaders are generally like, hey, we've got to find pathways to growth, whether it's innovation, new brand, new product. And that sets up the change sort of precipice. How are you going to get from here to there?

We're more receptive to ideas about how to get from here to there. There's still a part of their leadership brain that is used to quantifying things, used to earning things that feel intuitively true into things that they can measure and observe. And that's where SEEQ comes in, because we are quantifying the emotion in people's experiences.

We are quantifying prevalence of certain themes that show up in their stories and experiences. Before we talk about how we do that, I got to just tell you, this is always on our brain. And my partner, our CTO, his name is Andy Citizen.

He's a deeply human-centred developer, programmer, strategist. And he was actually checking out a podcast recently. Podcast was entirely made in Manhattan.

And I was like, well, whole thing? And he's like, uh-huh. And he goes, I'm a little broken today, because the banter, the human banter between these two thoughts in a recorded session, even the way you and I jump on each other and cut each other off in a polite, respectful way, they were doing that.

They kept saying you, but I noticed by the end, they had not named each other, which was wild. And the topic of the episode he sent me was the mind-bending one. They were talking about how AI can enhance human reproduction and what the ethical dilemmas in that might be.

And I'm like, what? I mean, it was painful. My brain froze for a minute.

And he was like, this is not a good morning, because I'm processing this, and I'm thinking about it. He's constantly thinking about how we bring ethics to our work, how we centre it in the human experience. So I know that for our product and our company, we're in good shape.

Well, we started this work in 2015, where we were using initially some of IBM Watson's technology to basically code stories for certain emotions. As that grew in usefulness and in application for our customers, two things happened that sort of changed our trajectory. One was IBM intended those things to be used at a massive scale of coding social media.

They didn't sell it. Companies didn't want it that way. We were using it in this very micro scale to go super deep.

And if we were their customer, they were like, this is not a workable business for us. So they shut it down. They gave us notice.

They shut down the models that they were going to use, that we were using. And so that created an existential crisis for our company. Well, I mean, yeah, we gathered stories, but that's the engagement side of it.

What we really do is deliver insights. And we deliver insights in a way that's perhaps more quantifiable, scalable, applicable. We might not have the technology to do that.

So Andy, our CTO, says, normally this would take a team and quite a few months to figure out. Let's see if I can do it. And we stumbled across, in the most literal sense, early on, the sort of growing prevalence of large language models and what they could be used for.

And initially, we used them just to classify stories and specific pieces of stories that related to different emotions. So in a more practical sense, we take a story, we break it up into smaller pieces, and then we'd score that story for 55 different emotions. And we use those emotional data to start to quantify how people are experiencing their time at your company or with your brand.

But that was still very much on the emotional side. And while it was interesting to a lot of people, they couldn't quite figure out, what do I do with it? Well, then, as large language models became even more popular and prevalent over the last two years, you know, hearkened by that GPT and the conversational AI, generative AI, we found we were in the perfect place at kind of the perfect time, where we could use those tools to accelerate the analysis process, to make sure that we designed this really, really deep context of the project, that it would not let outside nonsense seep in, or forget what we just told it, you know, an hour ago. And you don't need to keep reprompting and retelling your chat GPT.

No, no, that's not it. You know, you sometimes want to throw the screen, you know, throw the computer across the room. Been designing to minimize and eventually, I don't know if we'll ever fully eliminate it, but take that down a significant amount.

And so today, if a person's in the platform, collecting stories from their employees or their customers, can immediately see, how do those stories look emotionally? What's the emotional map of those experiences? And then they can use the tool to start analysing in real time, what are we learning about people's experiences?

So we've built some sort of predetermined reporting styles and templates. And I think that's part of how we go to your original question. How are we keeping AI human centred?

It's for us, AI is the enabler. It's not the answer. It's the enabler to understand at scale.

If I've collected a thousand stories, I can't read a thousand stories. You know, and that's why people say, we'll do a survey instead. Well, the survey is not rich.

The survey doesn't tell me why. So the sweet spot is going to look at how you think about qualitative research, which generally goes deeper and say, how do you scale that? You know, it's hard to do a hundred in-depth interviews and very expensive, but I could collect a hundred stories.

I could collect a thousand stories. So that's kind of the rationale in terms of why we're using AI. The question remains for us, how does this help a leader better understand the human experiences in their charge?

That's what we're deeply focused on.

[Andy Goram] (27:47 - 28:24)

I guess that was my question here, listening to you. And by the way, I'm in, I want it. But why do you feel it is important to measure the emotion or the emotional quotient or content of these stories?

What does it give us? Is it as simple and binary as, hey, they like this thing, it makes them happy. This makes them sad and unproductive.

What sort of things are we, are we tracking here? How is it helping these leaders, you know, move their business, move their experiences on question.

[James Warren] (28:24 - 31:00)

And in the most, so some of it is as basic and fundamental as you say, look, this is how your product makes them feel. This is how working there makes them feel. And this is why you should care about that.

Cause if they don't enjoy it, but they're not experiencing the emotions that you hope they would like at a brand level, you know, you have your brand values, you have your brand personality. You generally want people to like your brain. And if your brain has specific things associated with it, like it's a mission driven brain.

So the sense of, of achievement and self transcendence and these other things that sort of show up as values and needs, you might want people to feel that when they're interacting with your brain. And if they're not now, you know, well, this might be some of the lack of brand love, brand loyalty, brand relevance that we're experiencing. But the same thing happens inside the company, in the culture.

If you're a company built on a high level of achievement and, and, you know, a highly intellectual, curious culture, we can measure those things. We can measure the curiosity of showing up in their experiences. We can measure the achievement that showing up when those might be things that are really, really crucial for you to have that sense of belonging in your culture.

So I think measuring the emotions is both fundamental. How literally, how does this make people feel? And if you're a emotionally intelligent leader, I would argue, you always want to know how it makes people feel because that's like the essence of relationship.

Now, if you lack empathy, you probably don't care. And that's also true in a one-on-one relationship. If I don't have any empathy, I probably don't care how I make you feel.

But if I have empathy and I want us to grow together and I want you to be successful, then I should care how my actions impact you. The second piece though, to really the practical application of measuring emotions and experiences is it's brilliant for branch strategy, marketing communications, sort of specific leadership or organizational development questions. And, and, you know, what I would say is the biggest piece of it is it helps you understand how to talk to them about their own experiences.

You make more sense to them when you understand where they're coming from. And so that to us is really the rationale. We've seen leaders who adopt that, but putting it not just in that higher level, um, feeling state, they're applying it practically to better messaging, better product design, better experience design, better leadership development.

Um, they're using it as a compliment to their existing CSAT, you know, their customer satisfaction scores or their NPs. They're using it to say, why is that? Why is that what it is?

We see the dip. We don't understand the dip. Let's you seek to better understand why people are feeling this way or why they're, why their sort of relationship to the brain is getting softer.

[Andy Goram] (31:00 - 31:18)

I get it. And, and, you know, the repeated thing in there is, is, is why? And always when I was, if I think back to my marketing end of my, of my career data was telling me one thing, my questions always were, well, why is that?

Why is that? Where's that coming from?

[James Warren] (31:18 - 33:52)

Because there's a, there's a layer behind all of our decision-making, right? That some of it is in the subconscious, but even some of it's in the conscious. And what is that layer of our thoughts and feelings and values and needs?

Yep. Well, measuring my behaviour, knowing my demographics really doesn't tell us much anymore because we're becoming an extraordinarily diverse society globally and societies in our different countries are becoming more and more diverse. So demographics that used to be really, really predictive 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, that's changing.

So people started shifting to behaviours. Well, if I understand their behaviours, if I measure their behaviours and their actions, you know, the premise that the best predictor of the future is the past has been true, but that is also becoming a little frayed because people are becoming much more diverse in their motivators, their purchase decisions, their employment decisions. You know, new generations are saying, this is what I value at work.

That's different than what even people in my generation valued when I was looking for my career. My relationship to money is different. And so the emotional layer broadly captured as sort of feelings, thoughts, values, needs is increasingly playing a bigger role in their even kinds of decision-making.

And so if you want to understand where this consumer or organization or culture is either likely to go or better diagnose the challenges you see already, demos probably aren't going to tell you a ton, but behaviours are becoming still relevant, but maybe less relevant in those places where you don't have a lot of history or you were seeing new behaviours and you're like, why are they doing this? Back to that why question. Well, if we understand their emotional drivers, we have a better chance at understanding their behaviours.

And so this is that we call it the meaning layer. It's giving meaning to all of that behavioural analysis, which again, I'm not saying it doesn't provide a value, especially, you know, brands and companies that really want to understand the impact of their, their experiences. You need them to also need the emotional layer.

And if there's anything I want to base a prediction on, especially in this rapidly changing world, I'd rather base my predictions on that previous experience that you had, which I measured. Would it make you feel tremendous amounts of love and closeness and stability, or did it make you feel depressed? Because two people might exhibit the same behaviour and one might be loving it and one might be hating it.

If I don't know why you love it and why you hate it, I might assume that you're both going to ride with me for the next 20 years. And one of them is just waiting for a better opportunity to jump. They just don't see it.

Yeah.

The meaning layer: why emotion matters

[Andy Goram] (33:52 - 35:26)

I think that's really interesting that that colour that this stuff adds to really fascinating. Maybe I'm going to try and link and circle. So be prepared for another flipping long question or whatever it will be that comes out of it.

But obviously you've learned a lot of around ethics and how to use and what to do and what not to do in that experience. And then you've talked about trying to keep things in line or get the tech rather aligned with values and what have you, which I guess behind the scenes in the engine, there's a lot of tweaking and everything going on there. But if I come back to where I originally cut you off and moved us on, you talked about belonging and trust, two massively core constituent parts of our communication needs and wants and actually the effect of those things.

And you also mentioned the primal stuff about connecting to rhythms and archetypes and all that when it comes to storytelling. And I know predominantly what you're doing is extracting stuff from stories, not necessarily creating stories, but there was something you said to me when we first met about the role that imperfection played in all of that stuff that linked directly back to realism, trust, belonging, and was something that maybe AI had to work on or you're really having to focus on. Can you explain how that all comes together?

That almost, I'm going to say need for imperfection, but the effect of imperfection in this space.

[James Warren] (35:27 - 40:44)

It's a great question. And I think we're all wrestling with this in real time. You look at LinkedIn, there's been a raging debate for the last number of months on whether or not you can use an MDAS in a year and whether or not, it's not this, but that, which was a perfectly acceptable idiom in human conversation till eight months ago.

And all of a sudden, AI is like, oh, I love that formula. I'm going to use that in every piece of content I recommend to you. It's not this, but that MDAS one through three.

And it's like, oh, and so the, it's become very flunked, very, very flat. There's no peaks and valleys. There's no room for real meaningful difference in what people, so a lot of people think about difference as a divider.

It's just a measure of understanding who you are and what brings you here. Difference is not division. Difference is uniqueness and wanting to understand the uniquenesses and the similarities in each other, I think should be something we do as humans.

We've done it for a long period of time and we can, we should keep doing it. Imperfection honestly plays an interesting role, both in the diagnostic of that, but I think it also plays a role in response to this tech. I think it plays a role in our desire to grasp onto something that feels essentially human because humans are beautifully, perfectly imperfect on every scale, whether it's, you know, um, justice and crime to love and connection, no human gets anything right all the time.

And so that might be the thing that helps us best spot the human in the sea of, of tech is, you know, for the first few versions of AI generated videos, you know, people had eight fingers and it was like, ha, ha, ha. And it's like, now it's like, oh, I don't want to give anything because that's not perfect. So now you have these videos that are circulating that are made, um, that are just so realistic.

And so when you listen to them, you can still spot the small imperfections in the dialogue or the, the desire to jump to a conclusion. You know, when I would only work in chat, GPT, I would get very frustrated by it's, it assumed everything needed to be brief. It assumed that being concise was automatically the best way to communicate a thing.

I was like, well, it depends on what I'm trying to communicate because brevity does not mean clarity. Brevity just means brevity. And so the goal is clear communication, not necessarily shorter.

Sometimes it'll be short, but sometimes you need to give people more. Those models don't like doing that. So sometimes you can see you push it like you're condensing way too much.

You're skipping way too much. You're glomming way too much together. So that frustration led us to build our models very differently.

Like I said, this need for deep context who really focus on these human stories. What are they telling us? But I'll tell you maybe two years ago, right as chat GPT started to explode and the other tools did too.

We had our own firsthand experience with this because in one project we had just started doing data collection on, you know, if you see these things one story at a time as they're coming through, they look and feel normal. And you start realizing there's a pattern to these stories that does not feel normal. And you start realizing that some of these stories look like they're being, you know, somebody sitting behind a computer with their own, you know, script, just changing names, dates and places.

And we're like, timeout, you know, we, we don't want to do AI processing of AI generally. Number one, that's a, that would be a tremendous flaw in our business model and really weakened the trust that both our customers and our participants have given us. So we had to pause projects and fix that and say, why, how did that get in?

What do we need to do on the security side? The trust side, how do we validate and verify that people are sharing real stories? And it changed a little bit of business process, but also changed, you know, in like traditional paid research, it changed how and when we validate before people get paid.

But even if it's not paid research, even if it's just employee experience research, I don't want people making their decisions through AI's replacement of the human in the conversation. I want them making their decisions in a way that AI's enabled them to put their arms around as many participants people as possible, and then make a human decision about a human experience. And so that will be a challenge.

You know, the more AI gets better at these things, more people want, you know, faster, faster, faster, not necessarily better. And, you know, we're saying, hey, fast is good. Believe me, when I can run a top line report in 10 minutes, instead of creating one in five hours, it's great.

That's going to help our customers learn faster. The sacrifice we have to make to do that is, it's human centricity, is quality and accuracy, then we're not going to do it. And so it's been our journey over the past couple of years, as we've not only had our own AI tools improve, we've now find ourselves in a sea of people who are rapidly, maybe faster than we've ever done before, trying, testing and launching new things without the same level of human trial.

How does this show up? And how do we get there? And how does this make us?

How does this change us? I think those are things that we haven't answered the questions yet, even though people are, you know, betting trillions on this. So that's one of the things that we just feel like at worst, we're a light in that darkness.

I don't mean to sound sort of, you know, evangelistic about it, but that's the worst case scenario. And the better case scenario is, we show people that there's an alternative.

[Andy Goram] (40:44 - 40:49)

Listen, we love an evangelist on this show. Don't you be shying away from that, my friend, not at all.

[James Warren] (40:49 - 40:52)

The right Reverend James coming into your life. I love it.

[Andy Goram] (40:53 - 41:51)

Amen, brother. I'm all, I'm all for it. I think before I attempt to get you to sum up this conversation, I I'm interested in your view of the future.

And, and again, I'm not saying, Oh, is AI going to tell stories? Cause that's, that's not the end of the chain that you're working on. Right.

But I'm really interested in where do you think the understanding of nuance in human emotion is going to, is going to get to with AI? Because I think this thing about imperfection, there's one element there about AI tracking AI and filtering that stuff out, but there's so much nuance to the expression of emotion verbally through written stories. And for, I guess, AI to really help and understand this stuff, it feels like that's still quite a way away.

Where do you see it going? How quickly do you think we'll get there? And why do you come to those conclusions?

AI Storytelling, nuance and future guardrails

[James Warren] (41:52 - 43:33)

You know, there may be a point in the, in the near future where those humans use AI assistance and agents to do lots of tasks. One of them might be like people use it to help me write this letter, help me write this social posts, help me write this blog. So we will be facing the, help me write this, help me answer this researcher's question.

And we're gonna have to figure out like, what are the guardrails on that? How do we want to, you know, what, what becomes normalized in terms of AI-assisted communication and thought? And I don't just mean normalized in the, in the apps.

I mean, normalized societally and culturally. Where do we decide this amount of AI assistance is useful? Too much means you're not functioning as you, you're functioning as an agent of you.

And, and I think if a, if a company wants to understand how to make a better product or brand or culture, they still need to go to the source. The source is the person. So I think what's happening quickly is navigating that change of the right ratio of AI-assisted human expression, where we draw the line on that.

I also think that the nuance is going to matter even more and more as a way of differentiating products and experiences. It will become almost modified very soon, that anything can be made with AI and anything can be said with AI. So at some point, simple differentiator might be, this isn't.

And that may or may not capture five points of share, 10 points of share, who knows? But in a sea of sameness, you're going to want to find like, everybody's going right. I need to go left.

What is left to look like? And I think that's really where it's going to come down to because I don't necessarily think I want everything that I consume to be replaced by the machine. I would like to have some things be closest version to a human to human interaction possible.

And I think that's going to be true for a lot of people for at least a little longer.

[Andy Goram] (43:33 - 44:00)

Yeah, I agree with that. I think this whole space is fascinating and I genuinely don't know where it's going to go. There are times when I'm using it, I think like, my God, I've spent ages feeding this information about me.

It really does understand me. And then in the next breath, it hasn't got a clue. And clearly a lot of the large language model, the aggregation and the averaging is the thing that it kind of catches up with itself and maybe waters down some of those things.

I don't know.

Synthetic data and ethical boundaries

[James Warren] (44:00 - 45:09)

That's it. And the other piece that's happening, which is if you go deep into the research industry, more so than the experience management, as you write experience management is tracking all the things that we're doing. We've had this onset of issues.

Research is still asking people a question. And one of the emerging friends in research is, Hey, you need to, you need to get an answer to this really quickly. You don't have to recruit humans anymore.

Use synthetic data. So synthetic data is becoming and growing a conversation, but also use case of AI in market research. And, you know, there's, there's definitely more of a clear line in that space between companies and researchers who fundamentally believe like, no, like that's the limit for me is asking AI and ask AI what people would do.

That's a prediction engine. That would be interesting to actually replace human response with synthetic response and say, modelling is really, really accurate. I don't care how accurate it is.

Why? Why would you want to replace a human response with an AI generated response? And if the answer is, cause I can get like you make a decision quicker, you now understand something about the values of that organization or that brand.

[Andy Goram] (45:10 - 45:28)

Wow. I don't want to get into that too much today. I can only think of the dark manipulation that can go on with someone doing like an employee survey.

Yeah. Let's not talk to my employees. Let's talk to my ideal set of crafted AI employees.

And we'll put that out to the city. That's not, that's not a great place to be. That's a fascinating thought though, James.

Wow.

[James Warren] (45:28 - 45:54)

Between that and the AI podcast, you know, you live in a small window, like I'm in a bubble, we've got five years. And then you see things like that and you're like, holy crap, this is happening much, much, much faster than we think. And when you interview the folks out there who are building these things, they will tell you, yeah, this is going faster than we thought.

Look deadpan into the camera. I'm like, and when, what do you think about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Are you okay with that? Cause they're just like, yeah, this is, this is going really fast. Mm hmm.

[Andy Goram] (45:54 - 46:41)

Well, thank you. Hang tight on those reins, my friend. That's, that's cool.

I think, my goodness me, we could have gone all over in different places with this conversation. I think the work you're doing is really, really interesting. Uh, I definitely want to keep track of, of what you're doing and how it's evolving in an attempt to kind of summarize, uh, well, my rambling questions, your excellent answers.

Can you do me a favour? James, we've got to this part in the show, called sticky notes. I'm basically looking for, I guess your three key takeouts, your three pearls of wisdom, however you want to sort of phrase it.

That when we're thinking about really understanding the value of stories, not just in their connection thing, but in the, I guess, in the analysis element of that, what three pieces of advice could you fit on three little sticky notes, my friend?

James’s 3 Sticky Notes of advice

[James Warren] (46:42 - 47:58)

First thing I would say is start talking to the leader, whether it's a brand leader, organizational leader, company leader, your vulnerability starts the process. If you're willing to explore and share your own stories, that changes and shifts responsiveness in your organization. The second thing is, is deep, deep listening.

It's again, is still focused on the leadership expectation and experience leaders who listen, better understand the experiences of their customers, employees, and stakeholders. And if they, if they listen, they're generally more inclined to do something with what they've heard. So listening is the second big sticky note.

And then the third is really now switching it to the participant side of things, openness, trust. Those are things that I think we as people and consumers and employees want and need from the companies we do business with and looking there is doing business with them, especially now more than ever. So I want a sense of belonging and I want to, I want to be able to trust you.

I also, as a person, I'm part of that equation. It's not something that's done through me. It's something I participate in.

So, you know, sharing your own stories, being open, being trusting, being willing has benefits for you too, because it gets you the chance to see yourself more clearly and to see others around you.

[Andy Goram] (47:59 - 48:13)

I love those. That's great. What a lovely way to finish before I do let you finally go, James, where can people find out a bit more about you a bit more about SEEQ the platform and everything else?

Where should they head for my friend?

[James Warren] (48:14 - 48:42)

Well, if you want to find out a little bit more about me, I love spending time on LinkedIn. So you can find me on there. My profile is james-warren-SEEQ online.

You can find us at sharemorestories.com. You'll find everything you need to know about our company that are right at the home page. You could click in to learn more about the SEEQ platform and who we're helping them.

Between those two, our website and LinkedIn, you'll find me and you'll find us.

[Andy Goram] (48:42 - 49:31)

Brilliant. Well, I've loved talking to you, James. Fascinating topic.

I really sincerely hope this isn't our last conversation and I look forward to seeing what you're up to. Likewise. Thank you.

Okay, my friend, you take care. Okay, everyone, that was James Warren. And if you'd like to find out a bit more about him or any of the topics that we've talked about today, please check out the show notes.

So that concludes today's episode. I hope you've enjoyed it, found it interesting, and heard something maybe that will help you become a stickier, more successful business from the inside going forward. If you have, please like, comment and subscribe.

It really helps. I'm Andy Goram, and you've been listening to the Sticky from the Inside podcast. Until next time, thanks for listening.

Andy Goram is the owner of Bizjuicer, an employee engagement and workplace culture consultancy that's on a mission to help people have more fulfilling work lives. He's also the host of the Sticky From The Inside Podcast, which talks to experts on these topics from around the world.