Meridian Point

Guest: Suzel Wyvill-Jones, Founder, Mindshift Dynamics

Air Date: June 02, 2026

Here's the part nobody warns you about. The AI demo always works.

The vendor walks in, the synthetic data behaves, the dashboard lights up and every executive in the room is sold. Then the rollout starts. The real data shows up. And the whole thing falls apart.

Suzel Wyvill-Jones has watched that movie too many times. She spent over twenty years leading $120 million-plus portfolios at AT&T and Cricket before walking away from the corporate ladder to build Mindshift Dynamics. Now she works with executives who are tired of being sold AI and want to know what actually works.

In this conversation she does not pull a single punch.

She explains why most companies are treating AI like shopping without a list. She walks through the fraud-detection example that exposes why every vendor demo lies to you. She gets into bias, the kind that quietly shapes who gets a loan and who gets a missed cancer diagnosis. She tells you exactly which AI tool a CEO should buy first (it is not the one you are thinking of). And she calls the AGI-in-five-years narrative what it is: overhyped, because the data on this planet is not even close to ready.

If you have ever sat in an AI strategy meeting and wondered whether anyone actually knows what they are talking about, this episode is going to feel like a friend finally telling you the truth.

Stick around for the end. Suzel shares the moment she realized why this work has become urgent for her and it is not what you would expect from a former corporate executive.

The full conversation runs through everything below. Some of these moments are tactical. Some are philosophical. A few are personal. All of them are worth your time.

Why most companies cannot answer the simplest AI question. Ask an executive what business problem their AI initiative is solving. Suzel explains why most cannot answer and why that single failure predicts everything that goes wrong next.

The fraud-system story every executive needs to hear. A perfect demo, a confident rollout, a complete collapse on contact with real data. Suzel walks through the pattern she has seen play out across multiple Fortune 500s.

Where to actually start with AI. Hint: not where your vendor wants you to start. Suzel explains why repetitive workflows, weekly dashboards and project management tasks are the right entry point and why enterprise-wide deployments on day one are almost always a mistake.

The data-readiness conversation no one wants to have. "There is no AI without data." Suzel breaks down why most enterprise data is not ready for AI, why nobody wants to admit it and what to do about it before you spend another dollar on tools.

Bias, the Pope and the part of AI nobody is talking about loudly enough. Suzel references the Pope's recent publication on AI bias to make a point that is bigger than religion or politics. When biased data trains a credit model or a cancer diagnostic, it makes biased decisions at scale. This part of the conversation will change how you think about responsible AI.

Why probabilistic decisions and credit decisions do not mix. AI does not make the same decision twice given the same input. For some use cases that is fine. For others (loans, mortgages, anything an auditor might one day ask about) it is a real problem. Suzel and Kumar work through where the line is.

The "Claude Mythos" exchange. A short, candid moment where Kumar brings up an unreleased AI model that even its creators say is too dangerous to publish. Suzel's response on regulation, who should write the rules and why the people building this stuff need to be at the table is one of the sharpest moments in the episode.

What AI amplifying human leadership actually looks like. Suzel describes producing a PowerPoint in five minutes that used to take two hours. The point is not the time saved. The point is what she does with that time. Stay with this section.

The AI Collective and why grassroots is outpacing corporate. A 160,000-person movement called "the human side of AI" is growing faster than most enterprise AI programs. Suzel explains what they do, why it matters and how her work teaching AI literacy to elders came directly out of this community.

The quantum-computing metaphor that closes the episode. Classical computing is zero or one. Quantum computing holds both as possibility. Suzel uses this to make a point about how leaders, teams and societies could move past either-or thinking. It lands harder than it sounds.

The lightning round. Brazilian engineering culture and what Silicon Valley gets wrong. The introvert-engineer-to-podcaster transformation. The one AI tool a CEO should pick for the next twelve months. The skill a 25-year-old should be developing right now. And one prediction about AGI that will either reassure you or worry you, depending on how you feel about hype cycles.

"Companies are looking at the shiny object when they say 'I have AI,' but they are not looking at what kind of problems they actually need to solve."

"There is no AI without data."

"Demos work because you have synthetic data. Everything is perfect. Then you go look at the real environment and one missing component breaks the whole thing."

"Right now I can produce a PowerPoint in about five minutes. That allows me to be a better professional and a better person."

"AGI in five years is overhyped. The data on this planet is not conducive to this."

"Instead of dividing society, maybe we should look at ourselves together as a possibility, instead of the separation."

"I have children, and when I go, I want to leave here a better place. Lately it is becoming very urgent."

If you are an executive, transformation leader, founder or senior practitioner who is sick of AI keynotes and wants a real conversation about execution: this is for you.

If you have ever sat in a vendor pitch and thought "this is too good to be true" but did not know how to push back, this is for you.

If you care about responsible AI but do not want to wait for Washington to figure it out, this is for you.

And if you are a parent or a leader who thinks about what kind of world we are building for the people who come after us, the last few minutes of this conversation will stay with you.

If anything in this episode lands with you, reach out to her directly. She is one of the most accessible AI strategists I have come across.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/suzelwyvilljones

Website: mindshiftdynamics.net

Email: [email protected]

Phone: (404) 277-7177

Location: Brookhaven, Georgia (Atlanta metro)

Book: AI-Powered Business Transformation: From Strategy to Scalable Execution in Weeks

Join the AI Collective: A global grassroots movement of more than 160,000 people focused on the human side of AI. Search "AI Collective" on LinkedIn or Meetup to find your local chapter. If you are in Atlanta, Suzel runs it.

Suzel Wyvill-Jones is the founder of Mindshift Dynamics, an AI strategy and transformation advisory firm based in Atlanta. She is a published author, transformation strategist and AI innovation advisor with over twenty years of enterprise experience leading $120 million-plus portfolios at AT&T, Cricket and other companies across telecommunications, financial services and supply chain.

Kumar Dattatreyan is co-founder of Agile Meridian and co-creator of The Disruptor Method. He is an ICF PCC executive coach who works with Fortune 500 leaders and C-suite executives on organizational transformation, business agility and leadership alignment.

The Meridian Point is where Kumar sits down with the transformation leaders, founders and executive coaches who are actually doing the work. No fluff. No hype. Just honest conversations about disruption and innovation.

Connect with Kumar:

If this conversation gave you something to think about, do me a favor. Subscribe wherever you are listening. Hit the bell on YouTube. Follow the show on LinkedIn. Leave a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It takes thirty seconds and it helps more leaders find conversations like this one.

Listen and follow: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube |

And if you know a leader who is currently stuck in AI hype-cycle hell, send them this episode. Suzel might be the conversation they have been waiting for.

#AIStrategy #ResponsibleAI #DigitalTransformation #AILeadership #EnterpriseAI #AIAdoption #AIGovernance #BusinessTransformation #FutureOfWork #TheMeridianPoint

Here's a number that should stop you cold. Nearly 3,000 people a year fly in from four continents to visit a software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They're not coming to see the technology. They're coming to see something almost no workplace has figured out: what it looks like when joy is built into the way a company actually operates.

Rich Sheridan is the co-founder, CEO, and Chief Storyteller of Menlo Innovations. He's also the author of two bestselling books, Joy, Inc. and Chief Joy Officer. And in this conversation, he does something rare: he tells the full, unvarnished story of how Menlo came to be, what makes it work, and why most leaders who try to copy it get it completely wrong.

This one is going to make you rethink your team, your culture, and probably your next all-hands meeting.

Rich was almost a canoe camp director. No, really. By his mid-30s, Rich had the VP title, the stock options, the upward trajectory — and he was miserable. His teams were missing deadlines, shipping broken software, and calling end users "stupid." He was seriously considering walking away from tech entirely. What pulled him back wasn't a promotion or a new job. It was a realization that hit him while reading Tom Peters and Peter Senge: this isn't a technology problem. It's a human organization problem. That shift in thinking became the seed for everything Menlo would become.

The reason Menlo is named after Thomas Edison. Henry Ford literally picked up Edison's Menlo Park laboratory and moved it from New Jersey to Dearborn, Michigan. Rich grew up visiting it as a kid. What struck him wasn't the inventions. It was the room — big, open, everyone working shoulder to shoulder on different experiments at the same time, where a failure on the lightbulb could spark a breakthrough on the telephone transceiver. That energy, that camaraderie, that creative friction between smart people — Rich built Menlo around it.

Why open offices don't work — and why Menlo's does. Most open office layouts create noise and anxiety. Menlo's creates clarity and connection. Rich explains why 25 years of evidence shows the introvert/extrovert split doesn't predict who thrives at Menlo. The difference isn't the layout. It's whether there's a real culture underneath it. Which leads directly to the thing most leaders get wrong.

They have people whose job title is "High-Tech Anthropologist." Their entire job is to observe end users in their native environment, the way a scientist would, without influencing what they see. The insight Rich keeps coming back to: the genius is in the end users. Most companies build products for imaginary users. Menlo studies real ones. And the anthropologists sit right alongside the development teams so what they learn never sits in a report nobody reads.

Menlo reorganizes itself every week. Every five business days, the pairs rotate across the entire team. Rich told a story about a multibillion-dollar insurance company that admitted four programmers leaving would put them out of business. Their entire institutional knowledge was locked inside a handful of people. Menlo doesn't have that problem. Everyone has been systematically cross-trained. Anyone can pick up any project. People actually take vacations without their laptops.

What leaders get wrong when they try to build this. This is the part every leader listening needs to hear. Rich has watched hundreds of inspired visitors go home and tear down their office walls, move everyone into one room, and wonder why half the team quit two months later. His answer is direct: you didn't build a culture. You built a floor plan. Menlo's workspace is a reflection of their cultural mindset — not the cause of it. Run small experiments. Iterate. Bring your people along. Don't change everything at once because humans don't work that way.

"I was stuck in a room full of manure and I knew there had to be a pony in there somewhere."

"The challenge I was facing was not a technological challenge. This was about how do we organize the humans more effectively."

"We didn't build an open and collaborative workspace. We built an open and collaborative culture. Our workspace is a reflection of our cultural mindset."

"The genius is in the end users themselves. We just respect that genius enough to study it."

"Four programmers leaving would put them out of business. An insurance company is in the risk mitigation business. They were willing to survive with that. That's ridiculous."

"People will either leave — or worse, they'll stay and quit in place. One of the seventy percent that's disengaged, just collecting a check. Which is painful for them as well."

The dysfunction in your organization probably isn't a technology problem or a process problem. It's a human organization problem. Joy isn't a perk you add on top of the work. It's a structural decision about how people are organized, trusted, and led. And if you're thinking about transforming your culture, Rich's closing advice is worth the price of admission alone: don't change everything at once. Your people have to come with you, or nothing changes.

Rich said it himself on air: find him on LinkedIn, mention The Meridian Point in your connection request, and he'll accept and answer your questions.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/menloprez

Free Virtual Tours of Menlo: Two to three times a month, Menlo runs free public virtual tours. No travel required. Go to menlosolutions.com and click the Tours tab.

Visit in Person: Ann Arbor, Michigan. If you want to see the culture in action, they welcome visitors.

Rich's Books:

Ready to explore what disruption could look like for your organization?

Book a 30-minute conversation: https://tidycal.com/coachkumar/30-minute-meeting Take the Disruptor Method quiz: https://www.thedisruptormethod.com/quiz

Kumar Dattatreyan is co-founder of Agile Meridian and co-creator of The Disruptor Method. The Meridian Point explores disruption and innovation through conversations with transformation leaders, executives, and entrepreneurs navigating change. 

Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube and join us live every other Tuesday at 12:30 PM Eastern on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook.

#JoyInc #Leadership #OrganizationalCulture #Disruption #Innovation #AgileLeadership #WorkplaceTransformation #TheDisruptorMethod #MenloInnovations #HumanCenteredDesign #FearlessLeadership #TheMeridianPoint #ExecutiveLeadership #BusinessTransformation #FutureOfWork

Guest: Tom Stiehm, DevSecOps Expert & Software Engineering Veteran
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
Duration: ~ 34 minutes

Here's something nobody in the AI space wants to say out loud.

If you learned to code using AI, you have no idea what to do when it fails. And it will fail.

That's not a doom prediction. That's Tom Stiehm — 30 years in software, former CTO of Coveros, now bringing those hard lessons to the public sector at Steampunk. Tom is one of the most grounded voices I've had on this show. No hype, no fear. Just a practitioner who has seen every wave of technology promise hit organizations, watched how they handled it, and has a very clear read on what's coming next.

This conversation got real fast. And it stayed there.

A team at Fannie Mae was mid-sprint when federal legislation dropped: anyone in Houston affected by the hurricane would get mortgage relief. In the old world, that's a back-office nightmare. Manual workarounds, endless errors, people falling through the cracks.

This team did something different. They canceled the sprint. Went back to planning. And in three months — with a full month of testing to spare — they shipped the software that made it happen cleanly.

That's what real business agility looks like. Not the ceremonies. Not the certifications. The actual ability to turn on a dime when the business needs you to.

Tom had coached that team. He'll tell you it wasn't magic. It was a great Scrum Master, serious investment in test automation, and management that actually trusted the team to drive. All three had to be there. None of it happened overnight.

Tom called application security the poster child for third-class citizens in software development — behind even QA. Security was the thing you did in the last week before a release, when there was no time to fix anything. So you'd negotiate which vulnerabilities were acceptable to ship with. And then just hope.

DevSecOps flips that. Security moves left — into the daily build, not the last-minute gate. Tom has spent years making that shift happen at financial institutions and government agencies. The organizations that resist it aren't just creating compliance risk. They're creating business risk.

Tom's framing is not boom or doom. It's something more useful. AI is a real productivity tool. Used well, it genuinely changes what a developer can accomplish. But here's his analogy for what it's actually like to work with an AI coding assistant:

A very enthusiastic, sometimes drunk intern.

They'll do a lot of things for you. Some of them brilliantly. And you have to verify everything, because when they get it wrong, they get it confidently wrong in ways that are hard to spot.

The problem isn't the tool. The problem is what happens when organizations skip the fundamentals and go straight to the shortcut. Tom calls it the vibe coding trap. He compares it to Visual Basic — Microsoft gave people a powerful tool, most people used it for things it wasn't designed to do, and when something broke they had no idea how to go one layer deeper to fix it. Those codebases became a mess. VB got a reputation. Sound familiar?

Tom made an observation that I think is one of the most important things said on this show this year. The way Agile adoptions failed is a near-perfect preview of how AI adoptions are going to fail.

The pattern is always the same. You want the benefit of a change. Doing it properly seems like a lot of work. So you do some of it and hope for the same result. With Agile, that meant bolting Scrum ceremonies onto existing structures without touching culture or incentives. With AI, it means handing everyone a license for a code assistant, skipping the training, and watching them spend six months in trial and error developing patterns that don't work.

Tom's prescription: smaller experiments. Active training. A safe place to practice — what he calls the dojo model. Get experience before you get burned.

Most commercial pilots will never face an autopilot failure in a 40-year career. But the industry puts every pilot through simulator scenarios for exactly those situations anyway. Because when it does happen, you need to know what to do without thinking about it.

Software teams need the same thing. Not for emergencies they'll face every day — for the AI failure modes they'll only see once in a while, but that will be catastrophic if no one knows how to handle them. Tom thinks we'll get there. We're just not there yet.

Behavior-driven development is a test-first approach where you write tests before you write software — grounding development in how real users actually move through a system. Tom co-authored research on using large language models to accelerate that process. It's structured, disciplined, and produces real value. It's the opposite of vibe coding. And it's a useful model for what AI-assisted software development looks like when there's an actual framework underneath it.

After years in the commercial world, he's joined Steampunk — focused on bringing better software practices to government. Same work. Higher stakes.

If you lead teams, make technology decisions, or are trying to figure out where AI actually fits in your organization — this episode is for you. Hit subscribe. You won't want to miss what's coming next.

CONNECT WITH TOM STIEHM

CONNECT WITH KUMAR

New episodes every other Tuesday at 12:30 PM Eastern — live on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook.

Episode 166 — International by Design If the Fannie Mae agility story resonated, this one goes deeper on what systemic agility actually requires across teams and borders.

Episode 162 — When Doing Scrum, Don't Do Scrum The trap of following the framework instead of solving the problem. Everything Tom said about how Agile goes sideways lives in this episode too.

Episode 152 — From Agile to AI Avoiding the same transformation mistakes when the methodology changes but the culture doesn't. The perfect companion to this one.

The Meridian Point is hosted by Kumar Dattatreyan, co-founder of Agile Meridian and co-creator of the Disruptor Method. New episodes every Tuesday at 12:30 PM Eastern.

Here is a question worth sitting with for a moment.

Your organization has spent years hiring smart people, building knowledge repositories, documenting processes, and training staff. You have accumulated a lot. So why does it feel like the moment something genuinely new shows up, the whole machine slows down?

Diana Larsen has an answer. And it is not a comfortable one.

The problem is not that your people don't know enough. The problem is that knowing and learning are two different things. And most organizations have spent decades optimizing for the wrong one.

That's what this episode is about.

Diana has been in this world longer than most. Over thirty years working at the intersection of teams, learning, and leadership. She came to Agile before there was an Agile Manifesto, through a discipline called socio-technical systems design, which is a fancy way of saying she was already thinking about how people collaborate to get hard things done. She co-authored Agile Retrospectives, one of the most dog-eared books in the field. She co-wrote Liftoff, which is still the go-to guide for getting teams started well. Her most recent book, Lead Without Blame, written with Tricia Broderick, tackles the culture problem that sits underneath almost every team failure.

She also co-originated the Agile Fluency® Model, which is worth knowing about if you have ever felt like the Agile frameworks your organization adopted were designed for someone else's problems.

She is sharp, candid, and genuinely funny. This was a good conversation.

The Knowledge Work Trap

Peter Drucker gave us the term "knowledge worker." It was a useful frame. Lawyers, accountants, analysts: people whose value comes from what they know and how they apply it. That model worked for a long time.

It is not enough anymore.

Diana makes a distinction that I have not been able to stop thinking about since our prep call. Knowledge work is about applying what you already know. Learning work is about noticing when the world has shifted and figuring out what that means before your competitors do. Barry O'Reilly wrote a whole book about this called Unlearn, and the core idea is the same: the knowledge that got you here may be the thing slowing you down now.

AI is accelerating this problem. The things AI does well, retrieval, synthesis, pattern matching across large datasets, those are the core skills of knowledge work. So if your people are mostly doing knowledge work, you have a real problem on your hands. Not someday. Now.

Learning Together Is Harder Than It Sounds

Learning as an individual is one thing. You can figure out your own gaps, seek out new information, adjust your approach. Most reasonably self-aware professionals can do that.

Learning as a team is a completely different skill set. Diana calls it co-intelligence, and it is one of the central ideas in Lead Without Blame. It is the shared body of understanding that a team builds together through working, failing, reflecting, and adjusting. You cannot build it by aggregating individual expertise. You cannot buy it. You have to grow it deliberately.

Most organizations have no idea how to do this. They run retrospectives that produce action items nobody follows through on. They hold all-hands meetings that feel more like announcements than conversations. They promote their best individual performers into leadership and then wonder why the team dynamic shifts.

Why Blame Is the Real Enemy

You cannot build a learning culture inside a blame culture. Full stop.

When people are protecting themselves from consequences, they are not taking risks. When they are not taking risks, they are not learning anything new. When they are not learning anything new, the organization stagnates while the market keeps moving.

Diana and Tricia Broderick designed the Lead Without Blame framework around this reality. The shift they are asking for is not soft. It is moving from "I hold you accountable" to "we take responsibility together." That changes who shows up to work and how.

Valiant Leaders

Diana has a concept she calls valiant leaders, and it is worth understanding clearly. Valiant does not mean fearless or visionary or any of the other adjectives that get attached to executive leadership. It means courageous enough to try things that might not work. Caring enough about the people doing the work to create the conditions for them to succeed. Willing to get out of the way when the team knows more than you do.

That last part is where most leaders struggle. And it is exactly where the learning work has to start at the top.

The Agile Fluency Model: A Framework That Asks a Question First

Most Agile frameworks tell you what to do. The Agile Fluency® Model starts by asking what you actually need. That is a different posture entirely.

Diana co-created it with James Shore because the "one right way" conversation about Agile was not matching their experience on the ground. Different organizations need different things from their teams. A team supporting internal tooling has different requirements than a team building a continuously deployed software product. The model helps you get clear on what you actually need before you decide how to get there.

Free white paper at agilefluency.org. Worth the read.

One Thing She Changed Her Mind On

Diana spent years going to the mat for co-located teams. Teams had to be together. That was the position.

She changed her mind.

In-person time still matters. If you want a high-performing team, you should plan for it intentionally. But it is no longer the prerequisite she once believed it to be. With the right tools and practices, distributed teams can be genuinely high-performing. The fundamentals still apply. They just have to be applied more deliberately.

What's Coming Next for Diana

She is building a new program called Thrive in Turbulent Times. Small groups, a mix of in-person immersions and virtual sessions, designed for middle managers and senior leaders who are responsible for creating work environments for their teams. Because the quality of that environment determines everything that happens downstream. If you are feeling the weight of that responsibility right now, this is worth knowing about.

BOOKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED

Lead Without Blame: Building Resilient Learning Teams — Diana Larsen and Tricia Broderick

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great (2nd Edition) — Diana Larsen and Esther Derby

Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams — Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies

Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results — Barry O'Reilly

StrengthsFinder 2.0 — Tom Rath

Agile Fluency® Model white paper (free): https://www.agilefluency.org

Website: https://www.dianalarsen.com Go to the top of her website and hit Subscribe. You can choose to receive her newsletter, workshop announcements, or both. Details about Thrive in Turbulent Times will land there first.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianalarsenagileswd/

If this conversation sparked something for you, let's talk about what it means for your organization.

Book a call: https://tidycal.com/coachkumar/30-minute-meeting

Take the Disruptor Method assessment: https://www.thedisruptormethod.com/quiz

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kumardattatreyan/

Website: https://www.agilemeridian.com

The Meridian Point goes live every Tuesday at 12:30 PM Eastern on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. If you are not subscribed yet, now is a good time.

The Meridian Point Podcast | Agile Meridian

Why Your Best People Keep Getting in Each Other's Way | Ryan Behrman

Guest: Ryan Behrman, Owner & CEO of StrongSuits and Principal at Touchthink

Host: Kumar Dattatreyan

Episode Date: April 7, 2025 Watch on YouTube

Your best people are getting in each other's way. They are not doing it on purpose. Most of them do not even know it is happening. And the personality assessments you have been using to fix it are part of the problem.

Ryan Behrman has spent years watching high-performing individuals become the source of team friction, not because of their weaknesses, but because of their overplayed strengths. The empathetic leader who becomes the pushover. The detail-oriented analyst who becomes the bottleneck. The optimist who misses the risk everyone else saw coming. Every strength has a shadow version, and most teams have no idea theirs are on display.

In this conversation, Ryan shares how StrongSuits, a card-based team development system he now owns and runs, replaces the PDF report with something far more powerful: your teammates telling you who you are, in real time, in the room. The feedback is direct, the format is playful, and the results are the kind that stick because people experienced them together rather than reading about themselves alone.

If you work with teams, coach leaders, or have ever wondered why smart people keep creating friction for each other, this episode will give you a new way to see it.

Why Your Assessment is Missing the Most Important Variable Sitting alone, answering 60 questions, and receiving a report tells you something about yourself. It tells you almost nothing about your team. Ryan explains why the real insight comes from the live, face-to-face moment when a colleague hands you a card and says "I see this in you," and why that experience changes the dynamic in a way that asynchronous assessments cannot replicate. The team is the unit of analysis. The report treats the individual as the unit. That gap is where most team development falls apart.

The Overplayed Strength You Are Not Tracking StrongSuits is built on a concept that sounds simple until you apply it: every strength has an overplayed version, and that overplayed version is usually the source of team friction. Ryan walks through how the system surfaces those patterns not through self-reporting, but through real-time feedback from the people who experience your overplays firsthand. The result is a conversation the team could never have started on their own.

Opposite Strengths and What They Actually Mean Most teams try to balance personality types by filling gaps. Ryan challenges that framing entirely. If your whole team lands in the same quadrant, the question is not who is missing. The question is what that pattern is telling you about what you are trying to do and where you are likely to get in each other's way. The systemic question is always more useful than the inventory question.

The Moment That Changes a Team Ryan describes what happens when someone hears from five teammates, in rapid succession, that they have been seen for a strength they never thought anyone noticed. That moment shifts something in the room that no report ever could. The feedback is no longer abstract. It is personal, specific, and delivered by the people they work with every day.

Why 32% Engagement Is a Design Problem, Not a Motivation Problem Leaders reach for tools like StrongSuits because they want to understand why people are not more engaged. Ryan reframes the question. Thirty-two percent engagement is not a problem with people. It is a problem with the systems, structures, reward mechanisms, and communication patterns surrounding them. Kurt Lewin said it simply: behavior is a function of the person and their environment. Fix the environment and the behavior follows.

How to Actually Try StrongSuits Ryan walks through exactly how teams can get started, from buying a physical or virtual deck and playing the out-of-the-box games, to the single-player app for solo exploration, to a two-day certified facilitator training for those who want to run it with their own teams. The full multiplayer app is in development. For now, the highest-value experience is teams playing the eight flagship games together in person or on Miro.

"It's not about the cards you end up with. It's the feedback you get to give people in real time."

"The greatest benefit comes when the team plays the games together. Everything else is a pale version of that."

"Your best people are probably not getting in each other's way on purpose. They probably don't even know it's happening."

"Behavior is a function of the person and their environment. StrongSuits tries to bring in both."

"If you can figure out where the flow of information is constrained and unblock it, that frees up the latent energy your organization already has."

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanbehrman/

StrongSuits: https://www.strongsuits.com

Physical and virtual card decks, the free manual, the single-player app, and certified facilitator training are all available at strongsuits.com. If you want to explore becoming a licensed partner, Ryan and the full network of licensed trainers are listed on the site.

Are you disrupting or about to be disrupted? Find out in under five minutes: https://www.thedisruptormethod.com/quiz

Book a 30-minute conversation: https://tidycal.com/coachkumar/30-minute-meeting

Air Date: March 24, 2026

Is business agility dying—or just revealing its true colors? Evan Leybourn, founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute, joins The Meridian Point with fresh data from the 2025 Business Agility Report covering organizations across 85 countries. The conversation reveals alarming trends: trust is fragile, authoritarian leadership is rising both politically and in organizations, and the volatility of the past three years mirrors stock market swings.

Evan unpacks his "Theory of Agile Constraints"—that organizations can only be as agile as their least agile function—and explains why that constraint is no longer technology. We explore the six domains of business agility, why scientific management's distrust of workers still haunts modern organizations 120 years later, and the controversial #noprojects philosophy that argues temporary endeavors are fundamentally flawed for product development.

Plus, breaking news: The Business Agility Institute and ICAgile are merging to form a new entity called XtoA (X Factor to Achievement), combining independent research with credentialing to help organizations achieve their goals.

The 2025 Business Agility Report Seven years of data (2018-2025) show consistent improvements until 2023, when volatility began. The last three years mirror stock market patterns, reflecting economic uncertainty, massive layoffs (Microsoft, Google), and return-to-office mandates that broke organizational trust.

Evan's Theory of Agile Constraints "An organization can only be as agile as its least agile function." Technology isn't the bottleneck anymore—it's moved to governance, funding models, and HR practices. It doesn't matter if you can release software in 33 seconds if budget approvals take 9 months.

Six Domains of Business Agility Leadership | Strategy | Structure | People | Governance | Ways of Working

Organizations excel at Leadership and Ways of Working but struggle most with Governance—funding models, performance management, and compliance are the biggest constraints.

Authoritarian Leadership Rising CEOs who built trust during the pandemic are reverting to command-and-control as economic pressures mount. The "empower with accountability" capability is declining, and the superhero CEO myth persists despite organizational complexity.

Scientific Management's 120-Year Legacy Frederick Winslow Taylor's turn-of-century management methods were built on fundamental worker distrust during class conflict. Despite modern approaches, this distrust remains embedded in organizational systems today.

The #noprojects Philosophy Projects work for bridges (done = done), but digital products have continuous lifespans. Mature organizations fund products/platforms using rolling budgets, lean accounting, or throughput accounting—not sequential project funding.

BREAKING NEWS: XtoA Launch Business Agility Institute + ICAgile = XtoA ("X Factor to Achievement"). Both organizations continue their missions while the new entity helps organizations understand the DNA of modern agile organizations. Learn more: xtoa.com

Where to Start Find YOUR organization's biggest constraint right now. It's probably not technology—could be funding, performance management, or outdated processes. Focus there, knowing it will shift in 6 months.

"Business agility is a set of behaviors and capabilities that affords an organization the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose, no matter what the future brings."

"An organization can only be as agile as its least agile function. That's not technology anymore. The limitation has moved to the rest of the organization."

"It doesn't matter if you can create a shippable product in two weeks if it takes you 9 months to get a budget change approved."

"We have CEOs who built trust and collaboration throughout the pandemic, and then flipped straight back to command and control when the economy changed. That is the broken trust we're seeing."

"Management methods from the turn of last century were built on fundamental worker distrust. That principle has cascaded through 120-130 years, leading to the environment we see today."

"Every organization has a constraining factor to their agility. Focus on your point of greatest constraint right now, knowing it will shift in 6 months."

Business agility is behaviors, not frameworks—it's about how you act, not which methodology you follow

Evan's Work:

Connect with Evan: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/evanleybourn
Business Agility Institute

Evan Leybourn is founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute, a research organization with 7,000+ members across 85 countries. He's the author of two books on organizational agility and the #noprojects movement. Based in Melbourne, Australia, Evan speaks internationally on business agility and organizational transformation.

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Guest: Patricia O'Shea, Senior Director, Product Management, ADUSA

Patricia O'Shea spent 30 years in technology transformation, starting in the most unlikely place — raising funds for cancer research through telemarketing. That early experience gave her two lessons that still guide her today: say yes to things you don't know how to do, and never lose sight of the purpose behind the technology.

In this conversation, Patricia walks us through her deliberate 5-year career pivot from leading PMOs to product management — a move her mentors said couldn't be done. She shares the Individual Development Plan strategy that made it possible, why technology consistently runs ahead of people's ability to absorb it, and the house analogy she uses to explain just about any technology problem. Patricia also tackles the biggest misconception companies have about product operating models and shares why she changed her mind about AI hype.

The 5-Year Career Pivot — Patricia rose to senior director leading PMOs, but when she got exposed to product work at Cars.com, she realized she wanted to lead product directly. The challenge: her mentors and peers couldn't see past her program management identity. Her CPO coached her to research product leaders on LinkedIn, inventory her transferable skills, and pursue adjacent roles that would build product capabilities without having "product" in the title.

The Individual Development Plan (IDP) — Patricia maintained a personal development plan throughout her pivot that served double duty: it tracked her deliberate skill-building AND gave her a platform for strategic conversations with product leaders. When the right role opened, the hiring leader already knew her name, her plan, and her readiness. Her formula: you have to be ready, the role has to be open, and the people hiring have to know about you.

Adjacent Moves Strategy — Rather than jumping straight into product, Patricia took roles that built product muscles indirectly. Leading an Agile Center of Excellence taught her to treat internal capabilities as a product. Business relationship management gave her experience developing technology strategy with business leaders. Each role added product thinking without requiring the product title.

Purpose-Driven Leadership — Drawing from her nonprofit roots, Patricia connects teams to customers through stories, app store reviews, and getting people as close to the end user as possible. She defines customers broadly — anyone using what you're building — and emphasizes that purpose is what sustains teams when the work gets hard.

The Marathon Effect — Patricia describes how leaders who have been processing a change for months forget that their teams are just hearing about it for the first time. Like runners starting at different points in a marathon, leaders are at mile 20 while their teams are at the starting line — and then wonder why nobody's keeping up.

Technology Outpacing People — Patricia's change management roots (she started as a Microsoft Office trainer) give her a strong perspective: we've stopped investing in training and assume everything is intuitive. Her insight: half the battle is knowing what the tool can do. If people know the capabilities, they can teach themselves the steps. But we're not even giving them that foundation.

The House Analogy — Patricia's go-to technique for simplifying complex technology concepts. A beautifully renovated house where a pipe bursts — suddenly you're wondering what else you can't see. Is the wiring okay? She applies this to technology operations, hidden risk, and quality — and says it works every time.

Product Operating Model Misconception — The biggest mistake companies make: treating product operating models as just another way for the technology team to work. Good product thinking is a company-wide mindset, not a tech team reorganization. It requires working across multiple groups, staying close to customers, and driving toward company-level outcomes.

AI: From Overhyped to Right Level of Hype — Patricia initially thought AI was overhyped, but changed her mind. Two things shifted her view: the pace of democratization (capabilities becoming available to everyone) and seeing companies take a pragmatic approach — focusing on data foundations, avoiding automating broken processes, and being surgical about where they test AI investments.

"When I talked to the product leaders around me, many just couldn't see it. They saw that I was very good at program management, but couldn't imagine that I could do product."

"You have to be ready. The role has to be open. And the people who are hiring have to know about you."

"Half the battle is knowing what this tool can do. If you know what it can do, you can teach yourself how to actually do it."

"You could buy a house that was rehab that looked absolutely beautiful, but then all of a sudden you have a pipe burst. And then you're going to start wondering — what else is it that I can't see in this house?"

"The biggest misconception is that product operating models are just another way for technology teams to do their work. Good product is not just a technology thing. It's a company thing."

"Own your career. Don't look to anyone else to do it and spend the time because it absolutely does pay off."

🔗LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patriciaosheatech/
📋 Title: Senior Director, Product Management, ADUSA

Patricia is also open to career coaching conversations — if you or someone on your team is thinking about a career pivot, she's happy to connect.

Connect with Kumar Dattatreyan & Agile Meridian
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Humanizing Product Disruption with Roman Pichler

From Agile to AI — Avoiding the Same Transformation Mistakes

 From Agile Burnout to Reinvention Coach — Todd Kamens' Transformation

Guest: Glenn Marshall, Transformation Expert & Energy Economics Specialist
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
Episode Type: Fireside Chat (No Preset Agenda)
Duration: ~1 Hour

In 1903, a banker told Horace Rackham: "Don't invest in Mr. Ford's company. The automobile is merely a novelty, a fad. The horse is here to stay."

Rackham ignored him. Invested $5,000. By 1919, Henry Ford bought him out for $12.5 million.

Glenn Marshall says we're living through that exact moment right now—except this time, it's about electricity. And most people still can't see it.

Glenn drops this bombshell: Your $200/month electric bill is about to become $40-60.

Not in some distant future. Not if you wait for government subsidies. Just... math.

Here's what happened while nobody was watching:

That's "grid parity." And it changes everything.

Here's the wildest part: Texas became America's renewable energy leader by accident.

In 1997, Texas deregulated their electricity market with one rule: "May the best technology win." No favorites. Just economics.

Coal won for a while. Then natural gas. Then wind. Now solar is crushing everyone.

Glenn's insight: "They didn't set out to be renewable. They just wanted cheap power. And solar won."

The same entrepreneurial Texas that loves oil is now leading the renewable revolution. Because capitalism works when you let it.

Ever heard of Wright's Law? It's why solar keeps getting cheaper while nuclear gets more expensive.

The pattern:

"Solar and batteries have essentially zero operating costs. You pay the loan off, and then you have it for free. It's pretty hard to beat that."

AI companies are freaking out about power. Data centers in Virginia already use 25% of the state's electricity.

Everyone's talking about Microsoft restarting Three Mile Island. Meta signing nuclear deals. The nuclear headlines are everywhere.

Glenn's reality check: "Nuclear hasn't had a prayer. The economics don't work."

But here's what the articles aren't telling you: While nuclear gets the headlines, solar + battery is doing the actual heavy lifting. Texas added 32 GW of solar in 2024. Nuclear? Maybe 10-20 GW globally by 2030.

The nuclear deals are solving a 2024-2028 problem (interconnection queue bottlenecks). Solar + battery wins the 2030-2035 future.

Traditional utility business model: "Sell kilowatt-hours for profit."

Problem: When you install rooftop solar + battery, you buy fewer kilowatt-hours.

The spiral:

Glenn's take: "The power companies want to protect their business model, not give you cheap power."

Duke Energy in Florida figured it out: Lower rates with solar + batteries. Customers stay. Everyone wins.

Glenn's not just analyzing data—he's living this transformation.

From permaculture to climate science to energy economics, he's spent years connecting the dots that most people miss. This fireside chat format let him unpack the story behind the story: How exponential change always looks linear until it doesn't.

The warning: "I have a caveat—I hope it happens fast enough—because we're going to be in a beautiful place. People will have a lot of abundance."

Time matters. The faster we act, the better the outcome.

1. Call Your State Lawmakers Ask for "competitive procurement, technology neutral." Texas-style deregulation. That's it.

2. Remove Regulatory Barriers Push for rooftop solar freedom, direct Power Purchase Agreements, fair net metering.

3. Think Bigger Than Just Panels Solar over parking lots. Agrivoltaics (solar + sheep farming). Community solar. Get creative.

4. Recognize the Trend Solar: 8% cheaper every year. Batteries: Following the same curve. Oil/gas: Volatile, not improving.

Point out to decision-makers: "Technology is changing rapidly. We need to be ready."

Professional Background:

Areas of Expertise:

Want Glenn for Your Podcast/Event? Reach out through The Meridian Point or Agile Meridian.

This is our first experimental fireside chat—no preset agenda, just following where the conversation leads.

"Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get."

We might continue the energy discussion next time. Or pivot to something completely different. That's the format.

Subscribe to The Meridian Point and join us for the next conversation.

"In 1903, the banker said 'the horse is here to stay.' By 1912, it was obvious the car had won. We're in 1903 for electricity right now. Most people just can't see it yet. But the data is clear: Solar + battery wins. Your electric bill is about to drop 70%. And when you have free electricity, you have free fuel for EVs, free power for water pumps, free manufacturing input. People will have a lot of abundance thanks to this."

The question is: Will you be the banker who said "horses are here to stay," or the investor who saw the future coming?

Related Episodes:

Newsletter: The Meridian Point
Website: https://www.agilemeridian.com

#EnergyTransformation #SolarPower #BatteryStorage #GridParity #CleanEnergy #Disruption #Texas #ElectricVehicles #AI #DataCenters #ClimateChange #Abundance

The Meridian Point Podcast

Guest: Reha Malik
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
Episode Date: February 2026
Duration: ~45 minutes

Watch on YouTube 

Lucrative CTO offer. Swedish company. Work from anywhere. Great compensation.

Then Reha read the fine print: Hubstaff—employee monitoring software that tracks screen time, takes screenshots, monitors everything you do.

She asked the CEO directly in the final interview: "Do you actually use this tool?"

"Yeah," he said casually. "The previous guy liked it and we've kept it. We only use it where performance becomes an issue."

Reha walked. Turned down the money. Returned her Amazon signing bonus to take a different role instead.

Because six years into her career, she figured out something most people never do: money stopped being the motivator. Autonomy became everything.

From basement database admin working night shifts to VP of AI & Machine Learning—Reha's built a 20-year career on one principle: solve the problem you were hired to solve, then move on. Not when you're bored. Not when it's convenient. When the mission is complete.

The Swedish CTO offer: Why she walked away from great money over employee monitoring software—and what it taught her about non-negotiables

"Stop sending people to Google": Her bosses told her to stop "losing" talent. She kept pushing interns to top-tier companies anyway. The international student story that proves why.

The certification trap: Accumulating 12+ Agile certifications (CSM, CSP, SPC, IC Agile) before realizing they were pulling her away from what she actually loved

Capital One near-miss: The best career move she almost didn't make—and how a rejected VP interview led to her most important mentor

Discomfort as compass: Why she hated basements, night shifts, and Sybase databases—and how knowing what you DON'T want shapes better careers than chasing what you do

Skill density vs. headcount: Fighting to hire one superstar instead of three people you'd have to micromanage—and why efficiency beats utilization every time

Teaching GMU students: Bridging the gap between what textbooks say and what actually happens in American tech workplaces

Outgrowing mentors: The conversation nobody has—why you need different mentors for different seasons and it's okay to move on

The 2-3 year pattern: How to know when you've solved the problem and it's time to leave (hint: not when you're bored)

On career strategy: "I don't leave because I'm bored. I leave because I've solved the problem I was hired to solve. When things become status quo, that's when I know I'm done."

On autonomy vs. money: "You're trying to maximize utilization—focused on getting a seat warmer whose utilization you can maximize instead of focusing on efficiency. I can't do this. It's very against the principles I stand for."

On developing talent: "I wanted to hire really smart, driven, motivated people and just push them. If you decide to stay, that's great. If you don't, that window is still open. My CTO said 'Reha, we need them here, not there.' I said, 'They deserve it.'"

On discomfort: "Discomfort became my compass. I knew very early on that while I didn't know what inspired me, I really knew what I needed to eliminate. I hated basements. I loved people."

On the certification trap: "I had 12+ Agile certifications. Then I realized they were pulling me away from tech toward pure coaching. I didn't want that. I wanted to stay technical."

On mentorship evolution: "You don't need the same mentor for everything. As you move in your career and your aspirations change, your mentors also change. Nobody told me this. I had to figure it out for myself."

On AI: "This generation has lived through a pandemic, a possible World War III, Y2K for the folks who remember. AI is nothing. We'll live through it."

20 years of technology leadership spanning Freddie Mac, Comscore, Fannie Mae, Capital One, and Alpha Omega Integration (VP of AI & Machine Learning). Started as a Sybase DBA working night shifts in a basement. Built a career on choosing principles over paychecks.

2024 WashingtonExec Pinnacle Awards Finalist for AI Executive of the Year.

Current: Independent technology consultant specializing in AI/ML strategy, leadership coaching, and organizational transformation. Adjunct faculty at George Mason University teaching data science and big data analytics.

Philosophy: Solve problems and move on. Develop people beyond organizational boundaries. Efficiency over utilization. Principles over paychecks. Discomfort as compass.

Lives in Gainesville, VA. Currently based in India doing flexible consulting work. Daughter attending high school in India (10th grade boards—a critical year). Military family background (father and both grandfathers served).

Advocates for Women in Technology and wrote influential blog post about outgrowing mentors that challenges conventional wisdom about mentorship relationships.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/reha-malik-48701361

Available for:

If you're an early-career engineer or international student feeling stuck—reach out. She might just push you to apply to Google when you think you're not ready.

View Full Playlist: The Meridian Point

The Disruptor Method™ Assessment Find out how your leadership team actually collaborates (or doesn't). Discover where silos are bleeding your revenue and innovation. https://thedisruptormethod.com/quiz

Subscribe to The Meridian Point New episodes every other Tuesday at 12:30 PM Eastern, live on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. Real conversations with people who've turned disruption into competitive advantage.

#CareerStrategy #Leadership #AILeadership #TechCareers #Mentorship #WomenInTech #OrganizationalTransformation #DisruptorMethod

Guest: Ron Healy, Founder of EPAL Global
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
Episode Date: January 27, 2026
Duration: ~40 minutes
Watch on YouTube

Ever see a massive business opportunity hiding in plain sight—in the last place anyone would look?

Ron Healy found one. In regulations.

While most executives spend millions trying to comply with cross-border tax rules, Ron built a company solving a problem that affects 2.4 billion transactions per year. He did it by cleverly combining three separate regulations into one streamlined solution.

But this isn't just a startup story.

Ron spent twenty years as a bus driver, sign language interpreter, computer science lecturer, and product innovation consultant. He coined the term "Minimum Compliant Product" in 2016. He calls himself an "anarchist with a small A." And he's brutally honest about agile fundamentalism: "I don't want my brain surgeon learning on the job."

This is about reframing how you see constraints—whether they're regulations, methodologies, or the status quo everyone accepts without question.

Most organizations panic when regulations change. Ron gets ahead by 3-5 years. You'll hear how one of his clients became the market leader by building products years before the regulation hit—while competitors scrambled.

In 2016, Ron coined this term to fill the gap between MVP and reality. If your product isn't compliant, it's neither viable nor marketable. He explains how teams chase shiny features while ignoring the foundational requirements that actually create competitive moats.

"If it's not Scrum, it's not Agile." Ron calls BS. Agile is a continuum, not a methodology. Some situations demand waterfall (brain surgery, Mars missions), others demand pure agile. Most need something in between.

Ron explains exactly how he combined EU import rules, "reasonable method" standards, and German compliance definitions to create EPAL Global—solving the UK post-Brexit nightmare where businesses simply stopped selling into Europe.

Instead of accepting "that won't work here," Ron reframes it as an innovation opportunity. This single mental model shift changes everything.

Ron's working with Ireland's National Railway—an organization that doesn't care about profit, only public service. He shares how to drive innovation when traditional business metrics don't apply (Bluetooth beacons helping blind passengers navigate stations independently).

Twenty years. Ten different careers. From London Transport driver to sign language interpreter to computer science lecturer to startup founder. Ron shares what finally made him go back to college in his thirties—and how being in the "real world first" gave him an unfair advantage.

On Regulation: "I've always believed that if you understand the rules and you can apply them to your advantage, nobody can complain, particularly the regulators."

On Agile: "Agile is not a methodology—it's about adapting to the real world, to the environment, to the outcomes, to the values."

On Minimum Compliant Product: "If a product is not compliant, it's neither viable nor marketable."

On Opportunity: "When everybody else is panicking, how do we sell them our product? Because change is going to happen."

On AI: "It's not about what AI is going to do. It's about what can we do with AI that we couldn't previously do."

On Status Quo: "If you have a thought in your head that's like, 'why is this this way?' Explore it. If the question still nags days later, that's an opportunity for innovation."

On Corporate Innovation: When building an innovation lab at a conservative pension fund firm, Ron created a Jira status called "It's Ron's Fault"—removing the fear of failure by giving people a place to put blame. It became a company-wide joke that unlocked experimentation.

Q: Coffee or tea?
Ron: "Italian coffee. Straight black."

Q: Most overrated agile practice?
Ron: "Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)—not because it's wrong, but it's oversold."

Q: Next big regulatory change creating disruption?
Ron: "Customs duties on digital products, and AI compliance regulations."

Q: Decision that shaped your approach to innovation?
Ron: "Going to college in my early thirties. It opened my eyes to how much I already knew from the real world, and how much could be innovated using technology."

Q: Daily habit for spotting opportunities?
Ron: "Never assume the status quo is right. If a question nags you for 2-3 days, explore it as an innovation opportunity."

Ron splits his time between Dublin, Ireland and Como, Italy. He's a product innovation consultant with a twenty-year career spanning bus driving, sign language interpretation, computer science academia, and product management.

He coined "Minimum Compliant Product" in 2016. He advises Ireland's National Railway and Fortune 500 companies on regulation-driven innovation. He's self-described as an "anarchist with a small A" who believes the status quo should never be assumed correct.

In 2025, he launched EPAL Global—a cross-border e-commerce tax calculation platform serving 2.4 billion transactions annually. It solves the problem British businesses faced post-Brexit: many simply stopped selling into the EU because compliance became too complex.

Ron's philosophy: If you understand the rules, you can apply them to your advantage—and the regulators can't complain.

🌐 Website: https://www.epalglobal.com
🎥 YouTube: @ePALGlobal (explainer videos)
📝 Sign Up: https://app.epalglobal.co/sign-up?ref=RH
🎁 Launch Offer: First €10,000 worth of cross-border transactions fee-free

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronhealy/
📧 Email: [email protected]

If you're managing cross-border e-commerce, facing regulatory changes, or looking for product innovation consulting—Ron's your guy.