Introduction

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for giving your midweek evening to Conversations that Matter between people, systems, and the intelligence reshaping how we lead and collaborate.

I'm Bharath, or Baz. I'm founder and CEO of Sitting Pretty, and also the co-founder and CTO of a recruitment pre-screening venture called CandidScreen.

But at Sitting Pretty, what we mainly focus on is identifying and automating what gets in the way of the job, so specialists in your teams, whatever the industry, get back to what you hired them for. But tonight isn't so much about what we do, yet.

From Ego to Eureka: The Journey

Over the past few months, I've been talking about a journey that we're all primed to take, often on a daily basis, from ego to eureka.

Lessons from Lisbon and Porto

In Lisbon, on the 4th of June, I talked to international business students about intelligence learning to let go, building on the power of the Buddhist philosophy of the beginner's mind and how this translates as professional competitive advantage. In Porto, a few days later, we advanced the philosophy to show tech leaders how intelligence learns to collaborate after it is let free to roam.

Why This Is Hard—and What You Can Do

Tonight, I would like to tell you about why that's harder than it sounds, but also what you can do about it.

Brutal Truths for Teams in the AI Era

So you've probably left talks like this feeling somewhat inspired. Maybe you go back to your team excited about your newfound intellectual humility and evolved systems thinking and how to do things the right way. And then it starts with the roll of the eyes.

Truth 1: Nobody Wants Another New App

The classic childlike ego states of barely concealed contempt. We all know and do it. That moment when you see another poorly scoped and surely doomed Gen A idea from leadership dropping into your inbox and you see the eye rolls.

The folded arms and pouty lips. The slow blink and tightening jaw.

We've heard and thought all the comments. AI can't think like me. It'll make us stupid. 95% of gen AI fails anyway.

Yeah, but what if it replaces me, though? Years of expertise, hard-won knowledge, and now some hallucinating chatbot thinks he can be your team's new co-partner with an agenda to reduce headcount.

That isn't ignorance. That's intelligence using ego to protect itself from feeling insulted.

Now, I mentioned the beginner's mind at the start, and this concept was articulated by a Zen master named Shunryu Suzuki, who observed the Zen principle called Shoshin, which was something profound, to me at least, at the time. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few.

The beginner's mind is beautiful in theory, but theory without concerted practice is just nice, floaty words that mean or do very little.

The practice is sometimes brutal, although I do prefer the term radically honest. But it does serve an important purpose, to down-tune the ego to a background hum and start building something actionable and repeatable that serves and continues to serve your evolving business ambitions.

Tonight, I'd like to talk to you about six brutal truths, showing how, when we turn down the ego, teams of experts and specialists start to move from resentment to repeatable, sustainable progress. The beginner's mind is less about naivety and more about choosing openness over ego, even especially when you've seen it all before.

Got a few animations on here, so it might take a second to load.

Let's start with truth one. Absolutely no one on your team wants another new app.

Ask Smarter Before You Buy

I'd like to ask you to do something for me. Could you raise your hand if your team uses a big name SaaS software as a service, be it Jira, Salesforce, Teams, Slack, HubSpot, Zendesk, SAP, Zoho, Pipedrive, or wherever your data essentially strives to live? Okay, and if you could just keep your hands up. Now, keep your hands up if you feel you got the most out of it for what your business are paying. Thank you for that.

Now, the traditional industrial complex has sold us a bit of a lie. Dozens of horribly pricey long-term subscriptions later, specialists on your team spending full days moving data around like digital sharecroppers, not thinking, not creating, just feeding hungry platforms that are never satisfied nor satisfying. But here's what they don't say so loud.

The intelligence you're paying for belongs to them, not you. Their product roadmap, their perceived pricing that punishes growth, customer support that drops off straight after onboarding, your data feeding their intelligence.

Every shiny new AI tool or initiative comes with big numbers, time savings, promises, and claims to be different. Cut 70% from time to hire. Save 40 plus hours per week with our AI workflows. Generate 10 times more leads. Kill 90% manual tasks and reduce headcount by 1.5 full-time equivalent.

Traditional SaaS is often about selling tools to buyers who then drop it onto end users with a little more than a, here you go, get on with it, good luck. But they're actually increasing resentment in your team by making the users of the product. And with the world having entered headlong into the darker ages of techno-feudal fascism, as commandeered by some of the worst men to ever exist, that's not a vibe that works with humans aspiring to be intelligent and resourceful anymore.

So what to do about it?

So in terms of questions to ask yourself, with every new tempting shiny tool that promises the world, try and ask smart questions along these lines.

Adoption Over Addition

Does this eliminate an interface or a manual action, or does it create one? Do we own our data, or are we giving away our organizational wisdom and intelligence? Will my team feel supported in adopting this new tool, or are we just throwing it over the wall at them and saying, good luck?

1The most effective AI implementations we tend to find tend to be invisible. They work within what you already have, not alongside it.

Truth 2: No One Wants More Clicks—And No One Works the Same Way

Truth number two. No one wants more clicks, and no one works the way you expect.

The Cost of Context Switching

Context switching. Context switching is the silent, unmeasurable killer of flow states. Your team's cognitive load is likely often maxed out regularly.

Now you want them to learn another interface. Remember, another bloody login they have to authenticate on their phone. Switch between 17 more tabs when Chrome is already making your dusty Lenovo ThinkPad or creaky 2015 MacBook run slow and heavy.

But the problem runs deeper. You're designing for imaginary people who work exactly like your processes and best practice documentation says they should.

Design for Human Variation

Let's take an example. Sarah in the office takes notes and voice memos during her commute. Marcus thinks better with three monitors and 17 browser tabs. Elena does her best strategic thinking in 90-minute blocks with her phone in another room.

Your streamlined workflow ignores all of this. Every person has their own cognitive rhythm, their own tricks for staying focused, their own way of processing information. Force them into your standardized system and watch adoption rates crater.

The future isn't more shiny tools. It's orchestration that respects how humans actually think and work. AI that surfaces the right information to the right person in the right format at the right moment without breaking their flow.

Your specialist could be making decisions based on purposely mined information, not sweeping disconnected data around multiple tabs, windows and monitors.

So what to do about it?

Zero-Click Principles

Essentially, I think it's best to design for zero additional clicks and the possibility of infinite human variation. If your AI implementation requires everyone to work the same way, maybe it's time to think that you're solving the wrong problem. Machines should adapt to humans, not force humans to adapt to them.

Truth 3: Your Best People Might Be Your Biggest Problem

Next, we move on to truth three. Your best people might be your biggest problem.

Watch the room, pretty much any room nowadays, when AI gets mentioned in front of normal, non-techy people rather than AI nerds such as myself and likely some of you. Those rolling their eyes aren't necessarily lazy. They're more often than not your experts, your top performers, the ones with the secret sauce.

They've spent years building expertise that AI threatens to flatten into commodity outputs. They're the ones who know the edge cases that break systems that claim to be fully automated. They've heard enough vendor promises to spot the gaps between demo environments and production hell.

These aren't people that are resisting progress. They're protecting craft. And craft in a world racing towards cold, hard, dead efficiency for the benefits of the privileged few feels like rebellion.

The irony cuts deep. The knowledge that makes them invaluable also makes them afraid of becoming replaceable.

Start with Curiosity

So what to do about it? I think it's always better to try and start with curiosity, not solutionizing or implementation.

Ask your best people, what gets in the way of you doing your job smoothly? What makes you do your best work?

And from this, we found that their resistance contains the raw materials for systems that work to serve them in your business, not the other way around.

Truth 4: You Can’t Optimize What You Can’t Describe

Truth number four. You can't optimize what you can't describe.

Businesses, through no fault of their own many times, are often digital hoarders. 25 tools, budget to justify, no coherent workflow, data scattered over countless bunches of documents and tools. Then they want AI to automate everything.

As if intelligence can organize chaos, they can't describe themselves. As a business owner, complex sounding AI agent frameworks can sound tempting, especially when it justifies, on paper at least, cutting staff. But often basic but smart prompt engineering might solve your problem.

It's tempting to buy expensive tools without understanding what drives results. You may want to automate workflows that exist only in people's heads, when absolutely no one works exactly the way you expect them to.

Here's the brutal truth from another perspective. AI won't clean up your mess while operating within it. Garbage in, garbage amplified exponentially out.

So what to do next?

Document Before You Automate

1I think a really good starting point here is to document one complete workflow before thinking of automating anything. If you can't draw the ground up process from start to finish, you're probably not ready for AI and automation to do the heavy lifting.

Fix your foundations first.

Truth 5: You’re Measuring the Wrong Things

Okay, and then truth five. This one felt especially hard to write. You're measuring the wrong things.

Every traditional KPI key performance indicator that you hit is a nail in your career and your business's coffin. You're competing to be the world's best horses moments before the first automobile rolls off the line.

Time to task completion. Time to hire. Pay per click.

Number of active users. Individual productivity and volume outputs, like tasks per hour, closed tickets, email sent, calls made, leads generated. Cost per unit efficiency. Return on investment based on headcount reduction.

Metrics once meant progress, but now they only seem to measure only what tech does well, not what your customers value most from you. Taste, curation, reassurance, delivery.

Think of a chemical technician versus a master whiskey distiller. The technician executes processes flawlessly, The mustard distiller has taste, something unforgettable that no algorithm can quantify.

Become the Artist

AI is fast mastering the hard science of most professions. This is where you must become the artist.

Measure What’s Felt, Not Just Counted

What to do about it? Stop asking how to be better at your job.

Start asking what part of my value cannot be measured yet, but only felt. Then work out how to store and categorize such insights.

In the AI era that we are in, what compounds curiosity, learning and unlearning, and connection is worth more than what merely completes?

Truth 6: AI Doesn’t Kill Critical Thinking

Next, truth six and the final truth. AI doesn't kill critical thinking.

It exposes where you've been killing it yourself. AI is radically honest about the quality of your thinking despite hallucinations and mistakes and everything else. But if you're radically honest, it's still a case of moving away from garbage in, garbage out.

Ask Deeper Questions

It's easy to ask shallow questions if you're afraid of the deeper ones. Help me finish this assignment instead of why am I really struggling with this project? Give me the right answer instead of what would I do if I weren't afraid of being wrong?

Again, AI doesn't kill creative thinking. It exposes where you've been killing it yourself.

A Mirror for Better Judgment

Those who use this as a mirror for their own limitations discover something revolutionary. You can finally bet on yourself with compounding intelligence backing your judgment.

From Insight to Action

So what now?

The eureka resolution.

Tactical, Not Theoretical

Do we give up on philosophy? Do we go back to ego-driven expertise hoarding? No, we get tactical about transformation.

The Revolution Between the Screens

The revolution won't have a dashboard.

It happens in the spaces between screens and the spaces between our ears. The journey from ego to eureka isn't just about AI.

It's about becoming the kind of human and professional that orchestrates with compounding professional intelligence instead of fighting it.

Honesty, Curiosity, and Humility

The path forward isn't necessarily more complex. It's more honest, more curious, more willing to admit that we don't know.

Building to Serve Humanity

So intelligence, human and artificial, may build in order to serve and empower humanity best in uncertain and deeply turbulent times.

Closing and Call to Action

Thank you for listening.

Oscar Wilde on Mechanical Slavery

I always like to end with a quote by drumroll and no prizes for originality, Oscar Wilde. It's something that stuck with me for decades and still feels ahead of its time and feels now more relevant than ever.

The fact is that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.

Human slavery, obviously, is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Our Mission at Sitting Pretty

At Sitting Pretty, we exist to uphold this statement. We work with your team to understand how to make tech work for you.

Through research, training, and killing the noise, curating lasting solutions so your unique organizational intelligence may build and flow. We believe that the most sophisticated solution is the one that feels invisible, giving the right information to the right people at the right time.

Systems that serve people, not squeeze them.

Connect and Continue the Conversation

So if you're interested in learning more, and when my QR code comes back up again, feel free to take a picture of that, slide into my DMs, say hello.

Thank you so much for listening.

And if we have time, shall we do?