Varun Rajan 0:06

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Push Pull Podcast where we talk about career transitions and the future of work. So last week we left our conversation with James Warren when he had just left a very successful corporate career at Altria. He spent a brutal first year trying to figure out exactly what he was building, sabotaged himself in job interviews that he half wanted to take, and ended up in a warehouse office sketching on a whiteboard with a man that he had known for all of. Two days and agreeing to something that felt as James put it like an arranged marriage in business. This week, we're going to dive into what that arrangement required of him, what it cost, and what he eventually built. Now, I'll say this upfront that this episode covers a lot more ground than we did in episode one. we spent quite a bit of time really diving into what share more stories eventually became what the technology does today that it couldn't do five years ago, and what changed in James personally that made any of it possible. And a lot of what I get out of the conversation is what he's learning on the other end of it, in terms of what companies are doing today in order to meet. Their employees where they are, and really understanding that the emotional landscape of the companies that they lead actually has a lot to do with the quality of their output and how customers feel about their companies as well. So, super excited to share this part of the conversation with you and, uh, yeah, enjoy part two of my conversation with James Warren. when you guys entered this partnership 10 years ago, you had these kind of like concurrent visions. Can you tell me a little bit more, obviously, you know, you had your, partner as an investor in SMS, uh, obviously I'm sure that there's the actual like business and legal kind of like distinctions that you had to work through, but. how, how did you kind of align on having a shared vision for an entire decade and kind of like operating in tandem, because it does sound like maybe two separate full-time jobs, but, uh, what you had mentioned and what I had heard was that it was actually very in line and, and had, you know, just a lot of synergy, right?

James Warren 2:17

Yeah, I think sometimes you have to be able to do that at the, you have to be able to do it at the interpersonal level because, from my perspective, at the beginning of that journey, I was giving, not giving, but it felt like I was giving a sizable chunk of my business to an unknown future. And, I wasn't sophisticated in ventures and investments and it wasn't a question of unequal, it was, you gotta make a choice. Do you want his help? Do you want his ability to help you grow and scale, even if it means giving up some control? And control, for me, was the biggest thing I was afraid of losing. it took a long time to not be afraid of that. you talk about patient capital, like I've, he has been the most patient capital I could have ever had because a lot of my growth and development as a founder and a, and an entrepreneur and then leading this company was personal growth and development. like a lot of things that I had to learn and unlearn the corporate way. Some things worked, a lot didn't. And then some of those things that didn't work then work now. And if you're gonna be up close as both an investor and a business partner. sometimes you're like, I don't wanna have to wait for all that to happen. I'd like to see my return on investment sooner rather than later. But he was patient. He was patient for my personal growth. He was patient as I was really learning how to iterate, on team members, still navigating that in close proximity with JMI. seeding some of that voice to him to say, what do you think? And letting him guide me or give me advice and give me counsel because it was the fear of losing my sense of control or identity early in my journey was something that I think probably even, blinded me to certain opportunities. But as I got over that fear and as I really started to come a little bit into my own with his help and with his guidance and his support, I started really learning how to, you know, lead the team better. I started learning how to better prioritize and manage my own time. and I talk about them being two different teams because in my mind they were leading an agency of, brand and communications professionals for me is very different than building, what I wanted to be a technology and platform-based company And they have different investment needs, different growth strategies, And so those were talent things we had to work through because we didn't always see eye to eye on those things. but I knew that, I think we both agreed that we both had a lot to offer both businesses, I think what kept it aligned was the big picture of, wanting to grow businesses that could really make an impact inside companies. in the nonprofit and public sector. lot of like technical and intellectual alignment around communications and experiences and insights. I'm definitely keen on the insights piece with SMS and then we wanna really help them develop great strategy and then we want them to turn that into experiences that they can, deliver in the marketplace. So there was also a business, it made sense for these two companies to even at small scales, be connected because a unique differentiated insights offering made JM i's offerings stronger. And having a agency to help us scale operations, like if we had a big research project that needed people, had an agency that I could tap into team members who reported directly to me and permission to say, yeah, let's leverage those people to grow or execute the business. And so at first there were times where I felt very, I liked my structure and I felt very he moves in a different way and I'm like, there's not enough structure for me and I don't have enough structure. I can't have control. And if I don't have control, like what am I gonna do? But then I would learn this idea of, If you are able to move fast, you can. You can identify and tackle opportunities when they come, if you are also able to slow down and take the pause, you can see what's coming around the corner a little bit better. And years with him taught me how to do both of those things really well.

Varun Rajan 6:17

Yeah. That's incredible. this kind of like, really. A symbiotic relationship that you had with, with JMI. and correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just actually trying to understand technically a little bit how this worked where it was like, in, in a lot of cases maybe JMI's clients and SMS's clients and projects were essentially the same and like feeding into each other. is that fair in terms of how you guys would

James Warren 6:41

and sometimes we were very different.

Varun Rajan 6:42

Yeah.

James Warren 6:43

we would pitch, like an integrated pitch, Because we also had a strategic partnership, which made it, jm I could pitch SMSs business in a, exclusive way and then eventually in a sort of preferred way, But I would say like there were, there were clients that we on as in a holistic, integrated way. were clients that JMI had would have and will have that weren't, they didn't need what SMS was offering. And then there were clients that SMS had, customers that we had that didn't need what JMI was offering. And I would say that most of the time navigating that balance of difference was okay. there were definitely times where I felt going in two different directions because it's, it's intellectually and mentally fatiguing to like really be switching gears. some days that felt fine. Other days that felt. Exhausting.'cause it'd be a lot. I think to learn how to get more efficient. I had to learn how to develop team members so that they could do more and better. And, developing in the, in a startup or in a small business, or even a medium sized growing business is very different than in corporate. Corporate. You've got all the programs, resources, protocols, training plans, you've got it all. if you've started your own company and you're bringing teams on, you've gotta bring on people who can hit the ground running. because there is no development plan on startup. There's build and ship and scale, and definitely do it from a place of culture. you're, you can't bring in people who aren't in build mode. And I do think sometimes build mode is, it's not age limited at all. It's not generational, but it definitely is mindset. And it might be a little bit of not, if not career stage. Career aspiration. goal is to have a job that is, that doesn't have a lot of variability, that allows you to do one or two things really well all the time, early, early stages of a startup or a super creative business, it's not gonna be like that. There's gonna be a lot more variability and change. some days the, like I said, it would be easier than others, and other days it was harder than others. But at the end of the process, we definitely had built clear clear growth paths for both companies, and got to a place where I definitely felt comfortable, I've gotta make this move full-time to SMS that I can devote all of my time and attention to it. and that wasn't necessarily an easy discussion because. We had grown super close as business partners and colleagues I had invested a lot of my time and energy in growing his business and he had invested a lot in growing my business. And so some would say, why not just keep it that way forever? And in my mind, what both businesses needed to truly hit the next level is dedicated leadership. And so

Varun Rajan 9:36

Yeah.

James Warren 9:37

that was a series, that was a journey to get to that point of agreement. we did. and it was very much still, deeply aligned. We still do business together. We still, projects together still, investor and partner in my business and I still help them with some things, but I've been able to really shift focus and attention to what SMS needed. And there was nobody else who could do it for SMS at this stage. I've got phenomenal team, but we're still. We're still building. we've been early. It's like people love to tell us you guys are really early. And I'm like, great. that's not good. that doesn't help me. and people feeling oh wow, you guys are so ahead of the curve. I'm like, it's not a good place to be. I'm not saying I wanna be at the back, but, being first only works in a very few occasions. And if you're first, you have to have the capital to withstand what happens when people come after you, when they have bigger pockets. And if you're early, conceptually a lot of education to do of your customer in your market. and that takes time. It takes more time than money to be honest, because the reason why nobody's following you yet is'cause you're still way too early. So you're competing against of education of the opportunity or the problem. You're not competing against challenger or fast follower. You're competing against the lack of understanding and education about the product. That you're trying to sell. And if it's really, if you believe it's groundbreaking and revolutionary, you might be right, you might be wrong, but you're definitely gonna be one of the few trying to do what you're doing that's gonna take time.

Varun Rajan 11:06

I want to transition a little bit to talk about SMS specifically and why, you know, kind of like dive into the kinds of things that you're learning from SMS and what it tells us about the broader state of work. So first and foremost, um, and you know, you and I had talked about this a little bit before, the first time we chatted, what was SMS doing to start with and how has it kind of evolved over time?

James Warren 11:29

Yeah. I think in the very beginning, once we started getting clear on a business, it's funny, some of my early concepts are now things we do, but we went through years not doing them.'cause we couldn't do it, didn't know how to do it, didn't have capacity or the resources to do it. In our beginning, we started trying to sell SMS as a. As an insight solution, but less insights in terms of, like you would think about market research or consumer insights or employee insights. We thought about it more as helping brands build brand communities through storytelling and also helping them understand the data that community would generate by itself. And that was interesting to people, but not motivating enough for them to really move on. We had a few early wins, but it was definitely, this isn't quite it, we started doing small pivots and I remember one of the first things we know, we had a web-based presence. We had some early stage products and we were trying to sell like this product in a journey. Like you start here, you go to here, and I would go to conferences, I would meet with, pitch customers, and we just weren't getting wins. one of the things we had to do was almost slow it down and dial it back. Like the very first stage of that technology based platform was, we will come in and do a workshop, to help, we called it seed stories. We'll help your employees or your customers explore their stories in a small group, small and learn from that before we scale it to hundreds or thousands of people. And it made sense at one point to say, let's just see if we could sell that. Like we'll do storytelling workshops. And so that's where we really started to get the very first to hold that. Like the first customer projects were that like, yes, let's do your storytelling workshops are great. let's do those. We started. Testing them, piloting them, and would say yes, but it wasn't a scalable business and it wasn't an easily, to do more workshops, you needed more people in hours.

Varun Rajan 13:31

Of course.

James Warren 13:32

also hard to recruit participants for those workshops. Our first workshops, I laugh, they were four and a half hours long. and people would be sitting in there like thinking really deeply about a story that maybe didn't need two hours of deep thought, maybe 15 minutes. Didn't know anything they like, yeah, like the deeper and the longer it goes, the more immersive it is. And there were some deeply engaging moments. Like people would come to our workshops and leave saying they'd be in tears. I had no idea I was gonna be in therapy. And I'm like, there was something about the way we were helping people reflect on their own experience through a story. So that is the nucleus that has not changed. We learned what to say, what to do, how to. How to position a room, how to position them in a room to get them comfortable doing something they did not want to do, was reflect on their own lived experience and write a story about it. They'd be like, I'm not a writer, doesn't matter. I don't have anything to talk about. Yes, you do. what about, fear of judgment, you're in a safe space. what about my privacy? This is a secure platform. there were so many things we learned to overcome I'd be like, look, what'll be the problem? We're gonna have dozens, millions of people because look at all these people who put shit on social media. And then you realize this has got nothing to do with that. that is so surface and transactional and we're asking people to go super deep. so we had to learn what it took to get people to say yes to that. And the workshops gave us a lot of insight. So we started, doing workshops and then gradually we would sell. Packages of workshops, and then gradually we'd start to sell like a little bit of the research in the workshop. And so one day were, I was at a conference and I was in New York and at the conference I always tell this story about the customer that wasn't because she was like, a significant, had a significant portfolio of business in one of the largest CPGs, consumer packaged good companies in the world. She was head of Global Insights for the biggest brands. And we're in this workshop at this conference and I'm just there volunteering so I could get a free ticket to the work, to the conference, right? And, she's saying something in this workshop about how I just wish we could move past, this is 2015. She goes, I just feel like today's research tools are just, there's gotta be something more. I'm looking for deeper, I'm looking for something deeper. I need, we need to get into people's stories. So I said, we, we have that, we have a product for that. And she turns around and she's really? I was like, yeah, we're using stories to understand consumer insights and we had nothing of the sort. but she was like, all right, yeah, we should talk. And I was like, great, we should talk. So I, we gave, exchanged business cards and got back to Richmond and followed up. And she said, I said, I'd love to show you what we can do. Is there a time you, we could to you or you could come here to Richmond? And she goes, actually, I'll be going to Atlanta next, next two weeks from now, and I'd be happy to stop by Richmond on my way back. I said, great. So I have this huge person in CPG Consumer Insights coming to Richmond, and I call up my developer and I was like, how could we extract insights from stories? He was like, what do you mean? And I was like, we've got an opportunity to pitch this. And he was like, let's give it some thought. And We stumbled on this little teeny startup that was in Canada that was doing much more than like basic sentiment analysis. They were starting to explore emotions and they had an API and the API was like on their website. So we started playing with their API and built like a demo used that demo to pitch to this person when they came to Richmond. And we were all the way down. Like our first customer would've been a fortune hundred company and it would've been like major. And she left the company and the deal left with her. And we had built that. I still love that because it gave us enough to believe that we were onto something. so that put us on a journey to really start exploring what were the technological ways we could use to analyze these stories that we would get, and how could we really, through our own experience and the tools get smarter and better at how to analyze'em to not just believe. That what that algorithm is saying, but tune it, train it, understand it, understand our data, understand the stories, and really have enough of our own context to know when the technology was right and when it was wrong. So that put us on a period, almost like a little bit of a valley where we're just incrementally getting better. And then a few years later, I start finding folks who want to get, become part of the team and join the vision. And they started bringing things like, our CTO Andy brought, Hey, we could solve for this in AI and machine learning and NLP. And, for a long period of time our fractional chief growth officer was a friend of mine that I'd known for years and actually been her client and she came on board to help us start thinking about how to level up the way we communicate and what we talk about. And after a year or two of them both being there, we started Seek and Seek became, the beginning of Seek is what we are still doing today, but we've added a lot of technology processing to it to be able to. What we do scalable for customers and partners, more impactful for them. but everything we're doing now, I could trace to a pivot or a, a product innovation or a product failure that goes back a lot over these last, now 11 years.

Varun Rajan 18:48

Yeah. that's incredible. and what is the state of SEEQ and SMS today? Um, what are you guys doing for your clients? Uh, what are the kinds of outcomes that you're really proud of?

James Warren 19:01

Yeah. you asked a question about what did I learn from that process about work? And a big part, for a while, we built SEEQ. We built SMS on an entirely fractional team. Including myself,'cause I'm split between two jobs.

Varun Rajan 19:20

Yeah.

James Warren 19:21

so that was part of what was also calling me. I'm like, I know that if we can get more, myself included, working on this thing full time, we can go faster. If we can go faster, we can figure out some things. you know that, but I also learned like when you're in a highly fractional environment, you have to have a lot of trust. there were times when, not because of anything anybody did, it was all me. I was still struggling with trust still struggling to let go of control. Still struggling to really let other people own their piece of it and run with it. And I don't, I don't have to get into all the like, whys of that.'cause that's a combination of therapy and figuring out like what was it about you that was so afraid to let go of control. but I do remember when it started to change I lost my sister three years ago and.

Varun Rajan 20:07

I'm sorry to hear that.

James Warren 20:08

shifted. Thank you. that shifted my view of myself, my life, the world. It was like I, I can either in honor of her, really commit myself to being the most impactful, engaged, and empathetic human I can be And I chose to do that. And that meant starting to face things about myself that I had to come to terms with how to really be the leader, the person I wanted to be, how to be a better person in my family, how to be a better person in business. And that included like my working relationships with my team. And so we were building what, what is now SEEQ, all the little ingredients from workshops and the technology that Andy was building and starting to productize it. Did our first launch in, like late 2022. And I'm like all going, the damn thing worked. Like every user got in, not a single problem. We were like, this is cool. this is launching a product. And was very nervous about what would change in the user experience, the participant experience. I thought it was gonna get compromised or like flat and they were deeper. They wrote more, they had more to say. So we were like, okay, we might have something here. then 2023, I'm thinking, we're just gonna take off 2023 was the eye-opener. It was like, oh, okay, now I'm thinking, Hey guys, we've been working with you, helping you understand employee customer experience through stories and now we've got a product to do it. And they were, most of our customers past and present were like, that's different. And I'm like, no. It's not different. It's just we've put what we used to do for you in a very high touch way into this platform. I'm like, so you're selling a product now? And I'm be like, no, we're doing the exact same thing. it literally, we had to reeducate the market because our customers saw it for whatever reason. As fun as a very different proposition, us to bring people together to share stories, or in our minds hiring us to bring people together to share stories in a platform. We didn't think there was that big of a difference, but it was a big difference. other thing though, that it did by productizing it, it made it ultimately easier to sell we had lots of conversations with people that never went anywhere because it sounded too conceptual and there was nothing to look at or see or react to. You did this research and all you could talk about was like a one page of, mini case study outcomes. You couldn't really show people. You could only tell. And so even though on one hand that those first six months of launch were very painful. Something was happening where people were becoming educated a little bit more because there was a product to react to 2024. It started to take off for us. we started to have lots more projects and customers. we started to be able to grow the team a little bit, grow, increase the effectiveness of our proprietary technology, get smarter about what was happening with Gen AI and come 2025, the first half of the year was a little rocky. But then we get to the second half of the year and it's gangbusters again. And, we've got a lot of really good business on our plate right now, which is great. So now we're back into the lab, like, how do we turn this into the next scaling function? How do we turn this moment into the next. Really meaningful product innovation that by, the litmus test as it has to help us scale efficiently, but it has to drive value. Otherwise it's a paper, it's just an a paper exercise. So what are we doing today? We're really working with, I say leadership teams, CEOs, C-suite leaders or folks really influential to them. We're starting there because we are selling something that challenges the status quo of either their research tools or their experience management tools or both, because depending on how you see our application in your business, you're like, oh, your experience management. actually we're an insights tool focused on customer and employee experience. They will say, we get data and analytics out of our CX platform, but they don't get the kind of data and analytics we give them. they're saying, oh, so you're a research tool. And they compare us to the research tools that they're using in the qual and quant space, and then they realize. Oh, but your data is very different because you're capturing stories and measuring emotions, and so there's still an a decent educational curve. you continue to stay at it, you get smarter about your customer, you get smarter about your ICP. You get smarter about, what problem are you trying to solve. And so for these leaders, we're helping them solve a couple of key problems. The first is, I already know something. Something could be better in my ex and employee experience or my cx, I don't have the tools to show me the way. The tools I have. Don't actually tell us why or C sets dipping or why our NPS is dipping or why our employee engagement score is where it is. It just tells us what, but it doesn't tell us why. we're showing them why. The why is in the stories. The why is in the emotions of people's experiences. thing we're doing in that process is actually helping some leaders learn how to listen To the voice of the customer and the voice of the employee. I would say that's not always the most prominent selling proposition because they don't necessarily see that as the thing that they should buy as better listening, but it quickly becomes the value that they experience. And so then we can sell against that in a supporting way or in a Proofpoint way. Because when you start accumulating use cases of leaders and leadership teams, bringing Seek in to help them improve the employee experience or improve the customer experience, and they realize that this helps me actually understand and empathize and listen to the customer and the employee differently, then they really get excited. And that's why we say it's empathy at scale. Because if you care about it, then you get it. And if you don't care about it, you won't buy in because you don't have any, you don't have the wherewithal or the attention or the intention to wanna listen to your employees and customers. The way Seek helps you do almost makes you do.

Varun Rajan 26:07

Yeah. I, I would really love to dig into some of, even like the results that you've seen, from SEEQ from SMS like broadly. obviously with, with the kind of things that I'm interested in, I'm definitely a little bit more curious about some of the employee, insights specifically. Uh, but I'd be curious, right? Like you. Founded this company and have built and iterated on the premise that storytelling reveals what surveys and other metrics like NPS really can't. So I'm curious, what have you learned most about people, whether employees or customers, through stories that surprised you the most?

James Warren 26:51

That's a beautiful question. I have been able to be witness to for years now. Now tens of thousands of people who have shared their stories in one form or another, either in a workshop, a large conference setting session, or on our platforms. And I take very deeply, and we take deeply as the kind of the soul of our company. We are a place where these people feel like they can trust sharing some of the most personal things in their lives. And that's why it's not social media because it is very focused on them going deep, and I don't know how, I don't know how broad that opportunity space is. I like to say, we've all got stories and we've all got lives some of us are more maybe ready to explore it than others. Maybe that's the difference. But I've been witness to people navigating some of the most challenging experiences their lives and showing up in like their day-to-day life, not with a mask. But handling it, coping with it below the surface and it doesn't come out until you prompt them to say something and then they're like, I've been holding this in for a long time. And that's why we say we rely on Dr. Maya Angel's quote, which says, there's no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. I've learned that at work people are bringing untold stories with them to work wear like a backpack.'cause it could be what's what I've been living through my whole life. It could be what happened at home. It could be the trauma I've experienced in my personal life. It could be a failure that I'm navigating professionally or financially, career losses, grief, all kinds of things that people are navigating that in. A lot of corporate cultures and environments, not even corporate, just a lot of work environments. don't feel that is the place where they can maybe not say, Hey y'all, here's my problems. You deal with it. That's not the point. But the point is to say. Hey, I would rather people know that I'm dealing with something than not.'cause maybe I need a little bit more of their patience or their support or their kindness. sometimes we have to be willing to be vulnerable. But sometimes the places we're in don't make it. Don't suggest that we should be vulnerable. They suggest that if we're vulnerable, we might, we might wind up paying the price for that. so what I've learned about people and work is leaders and cultures that enable, people don't demand that they show up their whole selves, give them the room to do so if they want to. Those are places where people feel very high levels of psychological safety. They have high levels of achievement in our, in, like in our emotional score. They have high levels of closeness. They have really high levels of self-transcendence in their stories. They see themselves as part of something bigger than themselves. they, most people who experience deep empathy tend to reflect it back. That's the beauty of a story, is I relate to it and makes me go, oh, I can think about that. And you in a different head space. So that's been some of the most incredible things that I've been able to see about and learn about people. I've become very observant. Very observant. if we're doing live storytelling, I'm watching people and it's how I facilitate anyway. I can see where people are at in the room, in the conversation. hope people's stories onto each other. there's one thing I miss from when we used to only do storytelling workshops because especially if we were in a company, in their workforce, we get to this point after we do the facilitating, and then it's you're gonna write your story right here, right now. And I'm like, right now, yep, you're gonna write right now. give them like anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes and they'd be like, what am I gonna do? I'm like, remember you were, when you were in grade school or college, you had a timed essay and you did it. So you could write 500 words in 30 minutes. Just get there. And one by one they'd start writing or typing and, just doing this little thing. and one by one, their heads would go down and they'd get engrossed in their story. And I would call that the magic moment because when you get a room of 30, 60, 70 people, a hundred people all quiet, reflecting and writing about themselves, I was just like the most amazing experience to be part of and to

Varun Rajan 31:11

Yeah.

James Warren 31:12

get to. So I think one of the most important things I love doing in this work, even at scale, is we're helping people feel heard. We're helping people feel seen and feel understood. And we're helping people who are in a position to do something about that, to first listen and then empathize and then. better leaders, better brand stewards, better community leaders. All of that be better once you know the impact of your leadership on them, and once you know the quality of the experiences that they're going through.

Varun Rajan 31:44

I do want to touch on that. I remember one of the things that we spoke about earlier. you mentioned that leadership breakdowns often underlie employee struggles. and I'm curious about a couple of different things. So one is, what do the best leaders do differently to buy into their own change? and from your perspective, as someone who is coming into essentially aggregate and distill the insights that lead to that change, how is your relationship with those leaders? is it ever contentious? Like what do they, so it is like two part question. What do they need to do in order to actually drive that change, to, you know, get beyond those leadership breakdowns. And what has your experience been with leaders who are in that position?

James Warren 32:37

Yeah, great question. think the first thing that they have to do is they have to, for their own sake and for the credibility of what they are seeking to do with their teams. to get comfortable with being vulnerable. So I talk about there's bad vulnerability or painful vulnerability, and there's healthy vulnerability. Healthy vulnerability is usually modeled by people who have a choice, whether to be vulnerable or not. once I model it, like I could choose to stay closed off, and this is not just about leadership. I could choose to stay closed off. pretend I've got it all figured out, or I could make the choice to be vulnerable and say, I don't know everything. I don't have all the answers. and I welcome other people to help solve for this. There are other times when somebody imposes conditions on you that make you vulnerable. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the healthy kind, where I can choose to be vulnerable in this setting. And sometimes it's a privilege to be clear, but that's also a privilege that leaders have. And so your position gives you that privilege. What you do with is up to you. So the most important thing, I think, leaders that are trying to lead change in themselves, in their teams or their cultures, is to get comfortable with being vulnerable that will prompt them to do things, explore things. The most telling indicator that vulnerability is their willingness to ask more questions that they don't know the answers to. So much of like our traditional corporate leadership is about knowing the right answer and having the right answer and telling everybody the right answer. Oh, look at me, I've got all the right answers. we're moving into the unknown, if we're trying to do new things, build things that haven't been built, or build things that are more impactful, nobody's got the answer yet, we will figure it out together. And as a leader, you have to show that you have to be willing to be that kind of person. So sometimes in our work, that means convincing the leader that you know, you might have to share your story first in order to get them to be, feel comfortable sharing their stories in our platform, knowing that they're gonna, even if it's rolled up and it's aggregate, they still are worried about what will he think or she think if they knew that was me. That's that fear of, repercussions or fear of loss of i of confidentiality. So we do a lot to make them feel good, but the leader's gotta be part of that process. The leader's gotta say, I really want to know about your experiences. I'm not gonna know who you are individually, but I need this team or this organization or this company to share and to show you that I'm serious. I'm gonna share one first and you will know it's from me. And so that helps to sometimes break that process and get them into a state of vulnerability. that's the first thing. And that, and like I said, asking those questions is key. when leaders can get comfortable asking questions they don't know the answers to, they start learning really fast. It makes, it's uncomfortable. But the faster you get comfortable with that, the more you learn quickly. And that was true for me. The more I started asking unknown questions for myself, for my

Varun Rajan 35:37

Yeah.

James Warren 35:38

with our customers, it's like the opposite of what they say. Like the little, stereotypical phrase about a legal courtroom battle is you never go into the courtroom asking a witness a question you don't know the answer to. for me, this is the exact opposite of that.

Varun Rajan 35:52

Yeah.

James Warren 35:53

is asking questions I don't know the answers to all the time, and I'm trying to teach, I try to share that with other leaders and other executives. How do I get comfortable with that? I've got to reflect, I've got to ask myself questions. I don't know the answers to. Even if you're not a writer, take notes. Get stuff out of your head so that it's not just swirling around. then practice in small spaces with one or two employees. Ask them questions you don't know the answers to. They will start to tell you and then you get in this cycle or habit of, oh yeah, it's actually really fun'cause I'm learning again. Which the unintended consequence benefit is a lot of leaders have lost the joy of learning because they're in a, they're, they feel the responsibility to only produce like, this is the pinnacle of my career. Now I'm gonna, it's this and then I'm done. And when they start learning again, they get so excited. they get flushed. They go wait, what did we just learn? my gosh, like these emotions. I feel like I'm getting like a map of my organization. are, you're hearing in words and in the emotional analysis and numbers you're seeing. people feel about their experiences with you, and now it's up to you what you wanna do with it.

Varun Rajan 37:03

How do you, when, and this might be a question of how you're selling or validating to a leader, right? you mentioned that you go straight to like the leadership of the companies when you are essentially trying to lend a client. I'm curious, what does, what, how do you pitch the business value, particularly when it comes to the employee experience side? you mentioned a little bit about like doing the education when they're like, we have our employee experience tools or surveys, or things like that. I'm in particular, I'm really curious about the, the impact that the employee experience actually has on the customer experience, and how that impacts overall business health.

James Warren 37:50

What you just described has become,'cause we're learning too. We learned from one of our customers that relationship, they, they said yes to. Let's do, we were trying to sell'em on customer experience re and they said, absolutely, but we wanna start with the employee first. I was like, okay, great, let's do that. And they said, we are, we really believe in the chain of excellence. And so we know it starts with leadership and then employee engagement, which we wanna get through Voice of employee and then, customer experience and brand satisfaction through Voice of customer. And then that'll deliver our impact. So they almost, without, they, they gave us the template for how to sell this. And so we said, okay, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. And when we started doing employee experience research, you would immediately identify tons of things. If you have a CEO or a C-suite leader that is trying to grow their business or their organization, they usually. I would imagine one of the differentiating skills is an ability to recognize when things could be better or where things are about to get worse. And I think when, back to intuition, I think if you have that, have a capacity that maybe is hard to put your finger on, but a lot of those leaders will tell you like, that's some of what they're navigating. They'll say things like, all the data in the world, and I'm still gonna make a decision. Some of those decisions are intuition and some of those intuitions get honed by experience. And so when they are confronting something, they may not be able to say, I see it in the data, but they start informing an intuition, this could be better, or this is about to get worse, or where we're about to go is gonna demand that we rise to that occasion and we're not ready yet. those types of or anticipated pivot points that the company is seeing or inflection points are really good opportunities for us because. the business case. Like you're about to navigate a big change into the unknown. This might be a good time to understand like, what's the culture like today so

Varun Rajan 39:48

Yeah.

James Warren 39:49

inadvertently screw something up

Varun Rajan 39:50

where are the risks? potential risks? Yeah.

James Warren 39:53

where do you have capacity and capability and where don't you, or do you already have the culture ready for this and you should be like, let's get after this. what is it that you, we say, what is it that you need to know to do what you think you wanna do?

Varun Rajan 40:05

Yeah.

James Warren 40:05

that's the question we start asking them and gets them opened up. So then, when you do that work, you start to almost immediately see that in a, in a stressed culture that's healthy. there is a, there's a lot of mission orientation. They're very deeply focused on wanting to do the right thing for the company. for the customer, even if it's a stressful culture or a demanding job. so then that starts to say, then let's start to unpack, what exactly are we trying to do with the customers? And how's that working? And so then we'll go do some customer experience work. And then you might validate some things that, Hey, there's a relationship here. we worked with an organization last year into this year that had us on that cycle, right? Employee experience, help us facilitate the learnings, then go do some customer experience research in another wave of employee experience research. And in that cycle, as they were doing a major realignment and embracing a totally new, really revolutionary vision for their organization, we were able to understand what parts of that change journey were stressing the culture. We were able to show pre and post impacts on the customer experience. What used to be really strong and might be a little shaky, or what actually grew through that testing. We were able to show them, Hey, there's actually a journey that your employees are on that we really need to, the stories us, so clearly they're on a journey from anxiety to achievement. navigating so much change that the anxiety levels like going through the roof and different people with different personalities respond to that differently. But you could see it throughout the culture. So then you could see, oh, but there's some folks who have made the turn. They're now starting to anticipate where you're trying to take them.'cause your leadership messaging is resonating with them. Your vision is resonating with them. So they're in a state of anticipation. They can't, it hadn't happened yet, but they starting to believe it. And then you have other folks who've already started to experience the impact this new direction in a positive way. So they're achieving something now that they didn't think they could achieve a year ago. we said, and there's some employees, if you look closely at their stories. all moved through all three. became a framework that we were able to deliver to the company. To say, you've now gotta get smart about understanding your, you gotta help your team leads and your managers coach to these three different emotional states. gotta become emotional stewards of these teams. the process, the SOPs, that great. You've gotta emotionally coach them through change. And if your leaders aren't ready to do that, then you've gotta coach your team leads through their anxieties and their anticipation. And this thing opened up it was just crazy. It was like, wow, this is exactly what we're experiencing. And so when we started to make the connections, and here's how it's showing up in the customer experience, one of our case studies, we show the curve of the emotional data of trust, the percentages of very high to very low trust. That curve in the employee experience was exactly the same. The customer experience. And this was mind blowing for us and for the customer and for others because when I said it to people, they were like, wait a minute. So that's the employees and that's the customers and their trust mirrors each other. I said, exactly. So when you have very low levels of trust, so does the other party. And when you have very high levels of trust, so does the other party. And when we look at stories where the trust level is very high, is feeling loved and supported and excited and they're growing and the employee feels valued and needed and making an impact. And these low levels of trust, the experience sucks for both of them.

Varun Rajan 43:50

Yeah.

James Warren 43:50

so now what you gotta do is figure out what is it that's happening in the high trust experiences on both sides of the coin that you can design for. You can train for that you can communicate for, and the answers were already in the stories. So this became it's like the story really holds so much of the key to figuring out where are we and what do we do to get better? Because there's usually enough of a distribution of experiences where's either in spite of or just because of they're thriving and some people are not thriving. So let's figure that out and then let's figure out how to design for thriving that employee culture so that you can deliver the customer experiences that you want. We had somebody say those, it was the most spot on comment we shared this. Somebody said, this is something that I think a number of leaders have known intuitively for a long time, we could never put our finger on it. we could never show it in the data the way you've just shown this. this is profound. And so that's probably the biggest shift in our messaging right now is we're really doubling down on the importance of understanding how your ex is affecting your cx. So that if you want better CX outcomes, you gotta move upstream. You gotta start with the employee experience.

Varun Rajan 45:01

I, I think all of these examples kind of point to this theme that I'm picking up is that ultimately, The KPIs and all of the numbers and the technology and like you were saying, right, like the SOPs and the trainings and the outcomes that we're trying to target in a business environment are all, you know, really important. But what underlies them ultimately is the kind of like emotional wellbeing and like resonance of the employees with their organization. Or, I guess maybe another way to put it is, I mean, we, we are like, biologically, psychologically narrative driven creatures and so. When we're trying to uncover the truth about a system and an organization, you aggregate, like first you capture at the individual level and aggregate like what that narrative is to really find what the bottlenecks to progress are. To really find like what's actually like working and what's not. Uh, in ways that just trying to maybe slap numbers that you may be borrowing from, like what you've learned from other businesses just won't.'cause culture is not necessarily something that, is, it is something that's kind of like learned academically and applied right. it's very much organic in a lot of ways. and I think it's really, it sounds like that's the kind of thing that you guys are excavating, and showing new leaders.

James Warren 46:26

Yeah. I call it sometimes I love your point about excavating,'cause I've often used the phrase emotional archeology and, I think that is exactly with leaders who are vulnerable, willing to be vulnerable. That's the journey they go on because they realize. I wanna be better. If I want my company to be better, my brand, my organization to be better, I want my community to be better. And I'm, and I have some role of leading it, then I also have to get better. I can't ask my company to get better and not be willing to get better myself. And so I think those kind of leaders get what we're trying to do instantly, and they help us improve it because they're trying to deliver the solution in their own organizations. one of the products we rolled out recently is, we've been doing AI based, algorithmic predictive work for since 2018. No, since 2016 when we were part of IBM's global entrepreneur program. And we were experimenting with this initial customer that wasn't company that I told you about. They got bought by IBM and they got rolled into IBM's Watson portfolio. So we were playing with AI tools and. Our website and our content and trying to figure out like, how can we find other deeper ways to analyze these stories and predict these emotions in a increasingly accurate way.

Varun Rajan 47:40

Wow.

James Warren 47:40

And that's something that for most of those years, most people are like, that's just a black box and nobody understands it. And then all of a sudden generative AI busts into the scene and everybody's talking about ai, even though still there's a lot of misconception, misperception, lack of understanding, it become

Varun Rajan 47:54

True.

James Warren 47:54

super popular overnight. and that for a short term also means sometimes if you say ai, people are like, ah, whatever. And then other times you need to say ai, so be like, oh, you're relevant but in this case, what we found is, there were some things that generative could add to our analysis process and our reporting process could help us deliver insights that were really reliable and extremely fast. So if you go into the SEEQ platform, you collecting. Stories, and now you've got a few hundred stories from employees or consumers, and you have to, what's happening is you're seeing all their emotions in there. And then if you wanna analyze them, you'd have to download them, do your own thematic analysis, or we download it more often than not, do our thematic analysis for you and write a report. Report. Now, because of the power of generative and the way we could structure it in an adjunct way, we built our own high context in the platform. So if you're in your own project you wanna understand the stories in your own company, you go into SEEQ GPT, and you just start having a conversation in the most literal sense with the voice of your customer, with the voice of your employee. And there's none of this contextual drift. There's none of this. AI is really pissing me off today because it's not listening and it doesn't remember what I said, and it keeps giving a really crappy answer.

Varun Rajan 49:17

Yeah.

James Warren 49:18

We still have a couple of glitches here and there, but the context is what we built because the context has to change based on the project, based on the stories that are submitted. And so now what we have, what we're showing to our current customers and our prospects is let me show you how we would go into your project, how you as the CEO in here and start your own. Simple. What do you wanna know? are, what are employees feeling about the merger? Ask it, are employees? How are employees navigating our culture? What are some of the best, and worst challenges employees are having? Ask it and get those answers. As a C-suite leader in meeting, and I said, I don't mean this in the most literal sense because I'm not a, confrontational person. I'm a collaborative person. But in the sense of are we hitting the right note, we should have C-suite leaders telling us, Hey, I love your platform. My. HR decision support person is really pissed off at you. My market research department is really pissed off at you in the worst case scenario, sometimes those departments unfairly and sometimes fairly get labeled the gatekeeper. They're doing their best to protect the company's interests and sometimes that makes them, very good at maintaining the status quo. I love when I get to work with an HR leader or an insights leader that wants to break things a little bit because they see the future. but those folks are not, we haven't found as many of them as we found the actual business leader or organizational leader who's trying to find this solution. So being able to now bring the voice of their customer and employee right into them, literally on their phone or on their laptop, and be able to just log in and be like, what are customers feeling? What are employees feeling? It is huge and I demoed this with A CEO and their. And they're head of, organizational development in one Zoom. And I'm like, let's go into this project we just did with you as a pilot. we collected 70 stories from some of your, program participants. what do you wanna know? And they'd be like, what was our prompt, or prompt was, tell me about a time where you felt like you really belong. These are leaders in a metropolitan area. So I started asking like, gimme a top line themes in a minute. Top line themes used to be like an hour of work, even with generative ai be like, still a decent hour of it's almost right, but it's not right enough. So I gotta keep fixing it. Okay, let's go deeper. What about people with this background or people who work in the for-profit sector or people who've been in their jobs and careers for 10 years plus? it. Five minutes. they're like, minds are being blown in real time. They're like. wait a minute. So now I could do all the analysis that you guys do. I could do it myself, and I could do it really quickly and it's right, and I don't have to question it. Yes. That's what we're doing. And so that's what we're selling. Now we're pitching that in a different way because it was another example of when you productize things that you feel like you've learned deeply and you feel like you really understand your customer's pain point, and you take that knowledge and you put it into product form, has an emotional resonance. It has that feeling of, oh my God, this is what I've been looking for,

Varun Rajan 52:19

Yeah.

James Warren 52:20

when they didn't know it and really hard to do it and it's very rare and most companies spend their whole existence trying to do it. I feel like that's the moment we're at now where we've taken so much of. In-person human learning, and then small scale digital human learning, are able to now develop a product with a lot of conviction because it's not arrogance, it's not hubris, it is all these stories and all these experiences that we've collected ourselves with our own customers and that they've collected their employees and customers. That gives us a lot of confidence that we've got something that's meaningfully different. Not just different, but meaningfully different.

Varun Rajan 53:01

James, this has been such an amazing conversation. I'm gonna have to wrap it up here, but I would love to do another one of these where we jump into more of the insights that you guys are getting.'cause, it's, I still have so many questions about like, what you guys are, are, are, are learning from this stuff, and it's clearly having an impact on the organizations that you're working with, a largely positive one. I really thank you for a sharing your journey, going into the depths of like, entrepreneurship, and also talking through, how these, uh, how, how the work that you're actually doing is impacting people's work, uh, on, on the day to day.

James Warren 53:39

Yeah.

Varun Rajan 53:39

enjoyed the conversation.

James Warren 53:41

Thank you, man. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you space for this conversation because, it's always, I always find something different that I reflect on when, I'm in the hands of somebody who's at asking good questions, so I appreciate it.

Varun Rajan 53:55

that. wonderful. anything, anything maybe you would like to leave my audience, James, I guess one, one of the things I might ask is if you were speaking to someone in, in, in our audience who feels stuck between what work demands, and what they really want and are resonating to, what story would you share from your own journey or what advice would you give to them?

James Warren 54:16

I think no matter what life stage you're in, career stage you're in, there's different, there's definitely practical and realistic considerations that you have to think about you are navigating between those two things. I'll also just say part of it means you have to really start by asking, am I here? what is my purpose? Or calling, not in a selfish way, but in a genuine way. What really makes me happy? What do I love doing? And if you start with those two things and you start filtering your decisions through it. Some of the answers will feel deeply emotional, some will feel rational. Both are okay. Put pen to paper or put it in your phone. really? what do you think about these? Because if you have these two choices, which of them feel more aligned with why you think you're here? of them feel more aligned with what genuinely makes you happy? And then add a little bit to it, add some purpose to it. What, which of these two would enable me to either, be better with and for my family and friends, or make a bigger impact in my community or the world? And I don't mean make a bigger impact, means you've gotta be like world famous. We can all make a bigger impact on the world by doing things in our small corner of the world a little better. which of those allows you to do that? Now, if you've got some risks, articulate those two. Which of these things is going to most inhibit or prevent me from doing what I love? Even if what I love, sometimes you have to say, I love. I love what the job gives me more than the job itself. Sometimes you have to say that, but I don't think that's a choice that a person could make for, especially in today's world. For a very long time, our parents made those choices, often to give us what we have, to give us the opportunities, no matter what kind of job they had. They made a lot of choices careers that were expected of them or that they saw as like social norms where they had to sacrifice things that they might have wanted to do in favor of doing the thing that would enable them to do what they wanted to do. And I think people now have far more choices than they ever did, especially if they're newer in their careers. But I see people older in their careers press and restart because either they want it or they need it or they just can't handle where they are anymore. I also, we have so much economic disruption where there's lots of, restructuring, layoffs, ai, so there's a lot of. Current and future dislocation in the labor market. This is also a good time for people to really start to ask before it happens to me. How can I happen to it? What do I want for myself, my family, my community, my neighbors? Which of these pursuits in life is gonna enable me to do it? and that's what I would get after. There's no time like the president. what do they say? Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today.

Varun Rajan 57:07

Yeah.

James Warren 57:08

to figure out what you wanna do with your life was 10 years ago. The next best time is today.

Varun Rajan 57:12

Love it. Sage advice. Sage Wisdom. James Warren, thank you very much.

James Warren 57:18

Thank you. This was a pleasure.

Varun Rajan 57:27

And that's part two of my interview with James Warren. I wanna sit with the idea of trust within organizations for a minute. Uh, the case study that James described where they mapped the emotional data of the employee experience against the customer experience and how the curves matched when it came to sentiment of trust. When trust was low on one side, it was low on the other, and when it was high, it was high on both. James mentioned that a leader told him afterwards that this is something that he had known intuitively for a long time, and we could never show it in the data the way you just did. And that stopped me because I've spent a lot of my career in organizations trying to build the infrastructure that lets leadership ask better questions, not just are we hitting the number about which lever is moving it and why, and. what James has built is. A version of that for the emotional layer of an organization that layer, that most operating systems don't even try to measure. And he built it by starting with story and not metrics. I don't think that that's a coincidence. The organizations that get better at this, at understanding what their people are actually experiencing, not just what they're reporting. are the ones that can really make change stick, i've also done a lot of trying to understand the emotional landscape of wherever I go in a working environment, because that helps me understand what levers I need to be pulling and what ultimately is causing success or failure of any given initiative or reorg or transformation. that's the thread that I keep pulling on. And James gave me a lot more thread to work with. That case study that mapped employee emotional data against customer experience data It's a diagnosis. It says that what your people are experiencing internally shows up in what your customers experience externally in measurable, trackable ways. And most organizations have no system for seeing that connection. They're running employee engagement surveys and NPS scores and separate rooms and wondering why the interventions aren't working.

59:36

The work that James is doing is exactly the kind of thread that I want to continue pulling as we figure out exactly how we want to build the future of fulfilling work going forward. I.