Beyond AI: Wisdom at Work

In this episode of Qonversations, entrepreneur and AI strategist Chris Carter sits down with host Brian Gorman for a grounded, practical conversation about what AI can and cannot do for leaders. Together, they cut through the noise to explore how AI can support thinking without replacing judgment, why the quality of your questions matters more than the tool you choose, and how leaders can stay firmly in the role that only humans can play. This is not a technical tutorial. It’s a human conversation about discernment, pacing, and responsibility in an AI-enabled world. And it may well provide you with insights that change your entire approach to using artificial intelligence. 

In this episode of Qonversations, Brian Gorman sits down with leadership author and advisor David Liddell and President of Liddell Consulting explore what happens when leadership shifts from managing effort to cultivating meaning, alignment, and energy. Through stories from manufacturing, healthcare supply chains, and leadership practice, the conversation surfaces a tension many organizations feel but struggle to name: people are busy, capable, and well-intentioned, yet disconnected from purpose, clarity, and shared outcomes.

Rather than treating this as an engagement problem to fix, Brian and David frame it as a wisdom challenge: helping people understand why their work matters, how success is defined, and where their energy is best applied. They explore moving beyond activity metrics to meaningful outcomes, the role of sense-making and unlearning in leadership, and why people commit differently when the human impact of their work becomes visible.

As organizations move beyond Industrial-Age assumptions about control and productivity, this episode offers a grounded look at leadership guided by wisdom, not just intelligence, for those who sense that work is changing, even if the language for what’s emerging is still taking shape.

Change doesn’t fail because of bad plans. It fails because of missed conversations. In this episode of Qonversations, Brian Gorman talks with Founder and Principal of MI for Health and behavioral scientist Jeff Wetherhold about why most change initiatives fall short and what actually works. Together, they explore change as a human and emotional process, the limits of top-down approaches, and how leaders can use better conversations to unlock intrinsic motivation and sustainable change. This is a grounded, practical conversation for leaders navigating constant transformation.

In this episode, host Brian Gorman talks with Wes Towers, founder of Uplift360, a digital agency in Australia, about what it really means to lead in an AI-shaped world. Brian and Wes explore how AI can boost performance and free up time, but still can’t match human wisdom, intuition, and contextual judgment. Leaders may get faster answers from AI, but the ability to sense what matters and why remains deeply human.

They dig into the risks of relying on AI for complex decisions, including inconsistent or overly generic outputs, and why expertise and discernment are still essential. Wes shares how these gaps show up in real projects and why he advises leaders to pair AI tools with trusted human guidance.

Their conversation moves into creativity, human connection, and the parts of work AI can’t touch. Wes describes how automating technical tasks has allowed him to focus more on listening, relationships, and understanding clients at a deeper level. He also talks about a turning point in his own business that pushed him to elevate relationships over transactions.

Brian and Wes close by comparing different cultural approaches to business, some beginning with relationships, others with deals, and reflect on why the future favors the former. For leaders looking to adopt AI wisely, their advice is simple: choose tools intentionally, stay rooted in your values, and don’t go it alone.

The demands on leaders are changing even more quickly than the worlds that we are leading in. Those leaders who believe that the path through the uncertainty is to “hold the course” on their approach to leadership will not be successful. From engagement rates, to turnover, to failing strategies, and more, the evidence is clear. Leadership needs to change. In this episode, Rob Matzkin, CEO of the Rob Matzkin Group, joins host Brian Gorman to explore some of the more subtle and some of the more profound ways that leaders need to evolve as they seek to bring their organizations into the future.

In this episode of Qonversations, host Brian Gorman sits down with Co-Founder and CEO of FlipWork Nikki Barua for a grounded, future-facing exploration of what sets humans apart in an AI-driven world. Together they get to the heart of why creativity, communication, compassion, adaptability, and self-awareness matter more than ever and why the future belongs to those willing to evolve. Among other things, they unpack the shift from “human doing” to “human being,” the collapse of the old pyramid model of leadership, and the rise of more distributed, values-driven, adaptive ways of working. They explore how culture must behave like a living system, how energy matters more than time, and how diversity and belonging fuel innovation in the age of intelligent machines. At its core, this conversation is about unlocking your unique zone of genius, the human qualities no algorithm can replace. If you’re navigating the intersection of human potential and intelligent technology, this conversation is a reminder: the future isn’t about competing with machines. It’s about becoming more fully, consciously human.

This is the second part of leadership advisor and coach Ted Whetstone’s interview with host Brian Gorman based on Brian’s book Leading into the Age of Wisdom: Reimagining the Future of Work. In this episode Brian and Ted explore what is meant when leaders talk about the future of work using terms such as “spirit,” “soul,” and “love.” They discuss Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophy of architecture and how it applies to organization design. And they challenge traditional approaches to organizational change management, which have a dismal success rate. Together, these two episodes (Episodes 143 and 145) offer a vision of the future of work in which AI serves as the catalyst not for a more dystopian future, but for a future that is more humane. 

How, and why, would you make an organization-wide change optional? What would make people want to opt in, even when doing so would cost their team to do so? When was the last time that you fired a team, telling them that they no longer could participate in a change initiative? These are only a few of the stories that Phil Gilbert shares with host Brian Gorman in this episode. Phil, the author of Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success, tells how he and his team succeeded in achieving a significant culture change across 400,000 IBM employees globally. There are important lessons here for every change leader, and every change practitioner, regardless of the size of your organization or the nature of your change. 

Host Brian Gorman becomes the guest for this two-part interview that takes a deep dive into the thinking behind Leading Into the Age of Wisdom: Reimagining the Future of Work. Leadership advisor and coach Ted Whetstone joins Brian to dig into a number of topics as we become immersed in a world in which AI continues to play an increasingly powerful role. Among the many questions this conversation addresses are the ways in which human wisdom is at our core, making us uniquely different from AI, what it means to lead with wisdom or not, and what does it take to be a maverick leader finding the way into this new age dominated not by AI but by wisdom. 

What is the future of work? Will it be dominated by AI, as predicted by many of the voices we hear? Or will it be a future of work led by wisdom? In his book Leading into the Age of Wisdom: Reimagining the Future of Work, author and Qonversations host Brian Gorman examines the differences between intelligence and wisdom and calls out the danger of turning our future of work over to AI. In this episode of Qonversations, Brian addresses these challenges and, drawing from his book, discusses the transformational changes required to lead into the Age of Wisdom.