Karen:
Today's guest is the kind of person who can drop into your company,
talk about AI, and somehow make you feel both smarter and like you've been
living under a rock. He recently ran an AI training for our team at American
Crane, and it was one of those sessions where the light bulbs went off and
haven't turned off since. He's a strategist, a coach, and a tech whisperer, and
he's helping leaders avoid being flattened by the future — and not just bracing
for change, but lifting with it. Chad Harvey, welcome to Always Lifting.

Chad:
Thank you, Karen. I appreciate the introduction. And it's always
nice to know that I've turned some light bulbs on for people.

Karen:
I wanted to ask you a question. I know you here today with the
background of me and you meeting, which is around learning about AI. But you're
more than that — you're also a Vistage chair, which, you know, I'm in a Vistage
group and it's been so valuable to me. What is your journey? How did you get
into coaching, and then how did technology and AI come into it?

Chad:
My journey is very twisted — I've got a very unique career path. I
like to tell folks I'm a recovering attorney that never really practiced. I've
been a lobbyist. I used to build web pages for beer money when I was in college
— I was very much present at creation at the dawn of the internet. If I'd had a
little more courage in the mid-to-late '90s, I probably would have dropped out
of college and moved to Silicon Valley. I did not. I stuck with the traditional
higher education track, ended up running a number of organizations involved in
construction, first residential, then commercial, but with a data bent.

The last organization I ran, we
built our own software, but we were also in the process of being
disintermediated — somebody had moved our cheese, and the board I reported to
didn't quite understand it. There was a lot of cleanup to do, and that's when I
realized I needed support. I sought out a peer advisory group and an executive
coach. Years later, when I exited that role, quite burned out, I took some time
— a lot shorter than I thought it would be, because I got into this line of
work accidentally on purpose. People started knocking on my door asking for
help with projects, and my own Vistage chair at the time told me he thought I'd
be a good chair myself. That was my foray, about a decade ago, into this line
of work. One of the things I tell people now: every business is a technology
business, whether you recognize it or not, because there are only three things
that power organizations — people, process, and tech. I don't care if the tech
is a crane or an AI system. It's all the same. We're inventive apes, and we
make tools.

Karen:
Is there a framework for bucketing all this — how do you go from
shiny object to something with actual strategic value?

Chad:
That's really tough, because oftentimes shiny objects do turn into
areas of strategic value. Crypto is a great example — very overhyped, and a lot
of people view AI through that same crypto-bubble lens, like it's never going
to pan out because the last one didn't. But the underlying blockchain
technology is genuinely useful. So there's strategic value nested inside
something overhyped. Discerning signal from noise involves experimentation,
iteration, and a growth mindset.

I've actually been unpacking
this for the first time right now: I call it a Triple A rating. You can do
three things at three levels with AI. You can augment, automate, or accelerate.
Augmentation is where most organizations look first — increasing the capabilities
of the people you already have. The next level, automation, goes well beyond
standardized robotic process automation — this is true automation, and I think
agentic AI is going to help fulfill a lot of that promise. The third level,
acceleration — maybe evolution is a better word — is where you invent new ways
of doing things, new products and services, using the first two levels in
conjunction. The technology matters less than what you can do with it and how
you view it through a strategic lens.

Karen:
You had a great quote in your newsletter — you quoted Jeff DeGraff:
'for those who learn to work with paradox instead of resisting it, chaos
becomes clay.' What does that mean to you?

Chad:
Change is an overhyped, overused word — but it's overhyped and
overused because it's so critically important. The entire history of documented
human civilization is one of change and evolution. A lot of times that change
has been spread out over longer periods, and it's been more manageable. What
we're seeing now is a compression of the time frame in which we have to change.
We have to be uncomfortable, we have to keep pushing ourselves, but we also
have to understand that it's exhausting — genuinely exhausting. So whether it's
at home or at work, we need to make sure we've got recharge space and white
space, and that we know when we're primed to engage in something that's going
to drive change, versus when we need to just sit with it for a while.

Karen:
I think in our lives in general, we have to find the space to
recharge, whether that's self-care or whatever it looks like for you, in order
to be successful implementing AI, or really anything.

Chad:
We do need to find those spaces. And I think we need to lean into
the idea, especially at work, that work should work for the individual. There's
work that I draw energy from, and work that sucks energy from me — I want to do
less of the work that drains me and give it to people it might energize
instead. At the end of the day, no matter how much money we make or what our
accomplishments are, the only thing that really matters is this right here —
the relationship with the person across the table from you. AI is both a shiny
object and a huge driver of change, but it's never going to replicate that. The
human element is really what drives everything.

Karen:
The Nvidia CEO said AI won't necessarily take jobs, but those who
learn to leverage it effectively will gain a competitive advantage. What are
your thoughts on that?

Chad:
I don't love the phrase 'take my job.' Just like the typist pools of
the 1950s went away, a lot of jobs are going to change significantly or go away
— but we've never faced a technology with all the preconditions for rapid
scaling that disrupts cognitive work specifically. Think about the Luddites —
the term comes from weavers in Britain who smashed looms as automated factories
put them out of business. That's how humanity pushes back when scared of
change. When the telephone first came out, people swore it was the tool of
Satan. That says less about the technology and more about the fact that
humanity doesn't like change.

Take the Great Horse Manure
Crisis in New York City at the end of the 19th century — hundreds of tons of
manure a day, a real national problem. Twenty years later, it was gone because
of the automobile. The people delivering ice or groceries by horse-drawn wagon,
their jobs didn't vanish — the delivery driver today is the spiritual successor
to those jobs, just looking very different. I think evolution is the key word
here. We've got to help people upskill and develop more flexible mindsets, and
understand that the jobs aren't disappearing so much as transforming, in a much
more compressed timeframe than we're used to.

Karen:
I'm obsessed with the Vikings — they had this whole oral tradition,
remembering everything through stories and sagas, no written word. Then the
printing press comes along and I can't remember anything without my task list.
How is AI going to change our brains — good, bad, or something else?

Chad:
Language itself is technology — we didn't come fully formed able to
speak in complex sentences. As we invent new technologies, we generate more and
more information, and I personally believe AI was inevitable because we lack
the capacity to absorb and make sense of the voluminous amount of information
we're now generating. Our brains aren't evolved to deal with the environment
we're in right now, and I don't know that we can organically evolve fast
enough. If you look at where CRISPR and other converging technologies are
headed, I think we're going to have to grapple with something like forced
evolution over the next decade or two — and that's going to be scary, with
religious, philosophical, and societal pushback. But I think the only way
forward is deliberately evolving who and what we are.

You've touched on
metacognition, really — thinking about how we think, and the way our sensory
inputs shape that. I've come across people in different environments, whether
hearing-impaired or visually impaired individuals, who think differently
because of different sensory experiences. These aren't esoteric academic
concepts — they're deeply relevant to leadership and organizations right now.

Karen:
What do you think is the difference between someone who leads well
and someone who truly lifts others?

Chad:
There's no one way to be a leader — I had someone in the nonprofit
space once say, 'you've seen one association, you've seen one association,
they're all different.' It's the same with leaders. But if I had to distill it
into fortune cookie wisdom: the most effective leaders understand that their
job is not to do, it's to enable. Enable more, and do less.

Karen:
Sometimes you do more by not doing.

Chad:
Exactly. And here's a radical thought on empowerment: I think
there's a possible future where everybody is essentially their own business —
the traditional employer-employee relationship turned on its head. We're coming
off 200-plus years of industrialization, and I think we're in transition right
now. I wouldn't be surprised if one future scenario is everyone operating as
their own independent LLC or S-corp, contracting with organizations as needed.
What's missing in a lot of modern workforces is empowerment, a sense of agency,
and purpose.

Karen:
So what's lifting you right now?

Chad:
I think what's lifting me is a sense that even though we're in
uncertain times, with a lot of chaos and pain right now, we're on the cusp of
something really interesting and potentially special — even though we're going
to have to walk through some fire to get there. The other thing, much closer to
home, is the age of my kids and where they are in their journey. I've got a son
headed to college this fall, a daughter headed into her senior year, a stepson
headed into his senior year. Getting to see the world the way they see it, to
the extent they let me — that's a gift. I recently spent two weeks out west
with my son after his high school graduation. We spent a week in Yellowstone,
some time in Cody and Thermopolis, Wyoming, and at one point got surrounded by
a herd of about 500 buffalo for 40 minutes in the backcountry. Things like that
are what lift me — those experiences, that one-on-one connection.

Karen:
You've lifted our thinking — you've plugged our brains into the
future without frying our circuits, I hope. Thank you for being our guide on
that journey today.

Chad:
You're very welcome. If I had any parting wisdom for your listeners:
channel Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix. Don't be afraid to take the red pill.