Catalysts: The Leaders Shaping the Future of Learning and Growth

Designing for Change: Sean Bengry on Trust, Tech, and Transformation

Jacob Ratliff

What does real transformation look like in learning and development—and how do we design for it in a world defined by disruption?

In this episode of Catalysts, I sit down with Sean Bengry, Chief Learning Officer at Sablethorn Consulting and a global leader in educational innovation, to explore the intersection of human-centered design, technology, and organizational change.

With over 20 years of experience leading global L&D strategy, Sean shares why effective learning ecosystems don’t start with solutions—they start with curiosity, empathy, and trust.

We unpack:

  • Why falling in love with the problem is more important than falling in love with the solution
  • How to use the 5 Whys without triggering defensiveness
  • The difference between digital transformation and cultural transformation
  • What it really takes to shift mindsets inside complex organizations
  • And how AI might make us more human—not less

Sean also introduces the Bengry Paradox—his belief that if you try to automate yourself out of a job in a year, you’ll never actually be without one.

If you’re leading learning strategy, navigating AI disruption, or rethinking how change actually happens inside organizations, this episode is a must-listen.

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Hey there and welcome back to Catalysts, the leaders shaping the future of learning and growth. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, and this is the show where we spotlight the bold thinkers, builders, and leaders who aren't just responding to change in our industry. They're actually the ones driving it. And today I'm really excited to be joined by Sean Bengray. He's the chief learning officer at Sablethorn Consulting, and he's a seasoned L &D executive. with over 20 years experience leading educational innovation and digital transformation at the global level. Sean specializes in designing learning ecosystems that are not only scalable and tech forward, but tightly, tightly aligned with business strategy. So in this episode, we are going to explore what it looks like building learning systems that integrate technology and accelerate performance, foster change, and genuinely transform the way organizations grow. Sean, thank you so much for being on today. I'm really excited for our conversation. Thank you for having me, Jacob. Pleasure to be here. Thank So you've led learning transformation initiatives inside global consulting firms as well as at Sablethorn Consulting. What has been really the through line in your approach to designing effective learning strategies? Yeah, it sounds kind of cliche at this point in time, but to always start with the problem and to fall in love with the problem from a human-centered design approach. This is nothing new for your listeners out there who know this, but what I've discovered with a... with a lot of both clients and also seasoned professionals inside of learning and development, they tend to fall in love with the solution instead and try to find a problem for the solution to fit. In reality, if you dig in deep from a first principles approach. You can even use something like even the five whys to discover why and what is the crux of the problem and what type of performance someone is trying to change to achieve a certain business result. That is truly the throughput and to really catalyze transformation is to understand what's really tugging at the heart. And sometimes individuals and companies don't know that until you start asking those questions. Yeah, and when you're working with an organization or a client who may have that solutions first mindset, right? They've found the solution, they haven't found the problem. um What tactics or generally how do you go about helping them shift their mindset um accordingly? Yeah, it's asking the right questions and being very thoughtful and being very empathetic and knowing the vocabulary of their business, their industry. So you have to be prepared. So don't just think that human-centered design approaches are good enough by themselves, but understanding exactly how. they speak. For example, if you're working with a healthcare organization, understand what it means and how their business works, right? And understand even the specific models of kind of how they're making money or how they perceive value and what their brand is like in the industry. If you're working with a tech company, same thing. You know, what's driving it? Is it a product company? Is it a service company? know, understanding what really drives them and what's really keeping their people up at night. So when you know these things, and you've done your due diligence in terms of understanding the person and the business, asking the right questions and providing that level of comfort and that you're there for a partner as a partner, excuse me, is a much more successful approach than coming in thinking that you know it all and coming in and thinking that you don't necessarily like you are the expert and you're going to portray expertise. It's much more comforting and therefore trust is built very quickly and therefore people are willing to open up and sort of crack open that little egg, if you will, about kind of where the problem truly is that they may not have seen. So that's a very astute question that you ask and it is not one that is answered necessarily with a model or methodology, but it really comes down to understanding the person's business and understanding the person itself. I find it so fascinating because so often so many of those right questions when you're in that discovery phase, they can feel synonymous with dumb questions almost, The things that, you know, you're kind of maybe worried that they're going to judge you for asking, but are actually critical to you for you to understand to be able to even take it to that next level of really diving into the problem and developing a solution. that It's a fair assessment. Yeah, it is, and I think it's a good observation, absolutely, that they can sound like dumb questions to someone. I think also they can sound very antagonistic at times, too. Back to my example of just the one method of using the five whys. You know, you can imagine a child asking why why why why why? And that does sound kind of annoying simply because their their curiosity is driving those types of questions So if you apply that sort of approach to a business leader, you have to understand maybe have a little nuance to it to understand like the five whys will absolutely work but What is your tone? Right? What are you asking? How are you asking? Why? What are the questions? Do they resonate with the person? Do they understand? Does it sort of reflect an understanding of the person and the business? And then it doesn't come across as being necessarily ignorant, if I may use that word, or it comes across as being antagonistic, but it comes across as being curious. And it comes across as being just very thoughtful and very heartfelt. And that's where trust comes into play so much I see in that when you're asking the five whys, you're continuing to drill down deeper, you're inevitably going to hit upon some insecurity or some defensiveness of, know, well, why, like, this is the way we've always done it, or, you know, I don't have control over this piece. And so when you have that trust built, you're going to be met a little bit, you're going to be met... kind of halfway, they're going to meet you halfway as compared to them just kind of shutting down and saying, ooh, let's not go there. Because then I, the manager, the client, have to admit some sort of maybe incompetence or not even incompetence, but oversight or responsibility. Yeah, think that, I mean, again, good observation. are all, you're an L and D, learning and development, if you understand talent development and if you understand you wanna be a trusted advisor or a partner, you've met with these before and it's much easier to simply say you're in those moments to be a, to just respond. And just to say, yes, this is the solution we'll build, or this is the thing that we're going to provide, or this is because you reach a point of either frustration that you want to solve because you have that kind of, that client relationship, human empathy behind you, and you want to solve a person's problem. And therefore, the problem as it manifests sometimes is frustration. So if you don't dig deep, right, you want to solve the problem of frustration. upfront, which is not necessarily that's a symptom, right, to the greater problem. So I think that it's natural that we want to solve that. It's natural. We're talking with people that we want to solve that frustration and provide that solution immediately. But I think the challenge then becomes is that you're admitting to yourself afterwards that you're solving a symptom. And there is a broader underlying kind of performance that is trying to be moved. And I think also sometimes it's not a matter of... An uncomfortable truth of lack of control that you reach. An uncomfortable truth of sometimes ignorance. And ignorance not in a bad way, but just sometimes you don't know what you don't know, which is perfectly fine. But also I think there's also an uncomfortable truth that people, for businesses to survive, they either need to make money or avoid cost. And so, I mean, it's fundamental. People, mean, companies may come down to understand, relaying the fact that, hey, we're in it for people, or we're in it for the value or the mission, et cetera. But if they don't make money or they don't receive money from an external force, they will cease to exist. And then their mission becomes moot. And then whatever value they're providing becomes moot. So ultimately, it's a matter of we're trying to either do something to avoid costs or do something to provide another level point of leverage to provide either more money, more revenue or generate profit. And that's an uncomfortable truth that it gets down to people know. it's not what you're you are right. Sometimes it's about unconscious, unconscious and competence. So ignorance. Sometimes it's about frustration, lack of control. And sometimes it's about that uncomfortable truth that We all in business are in it to survive and therefore we need to make money to do so. It makes me think of a project I worked on a while back with a large financial organization who we went in and trained 1,500 of their customer service managers who were specifically working with their investors. the organization it became very clear was viewing this department as a necessary cost. That was it. We just know we're going to lose money uh from this business unit rather than a, you know, rather than an opportunity to actually increase revenue and actually be more profitable. Right. That contact point is a key retention opportunity. So I'm curious, have you seen any similar situations to that or worked with any similar situations that how did you kind of maybe go about transforming? how an organization perceives one of their own business units. That's a great question. It's very specific question too. No, that's a great question. It's happened before. think that's a larger, that's a different type of transformation. So there are different, as you can imagine, the word transformation is like innovation nowadays, right? It gets tossed around about kind of what it is and are you an innovation manager and do you provide innovation? Are you innovative? and transformation from a leadership perspective similarly, right? Are you transformative? What type of transformation kind of thing? I have to be just cautious before I go into answering this question about transformation, but also be very honest about it can take, that word can take many different forms. And the reason why I bring this up is because transformation of a specific, let's say, tech, how we do work, way of working around technology, let's say a business transformation around a new implementation for, we get a new learning management system or a new CRM. It changes the way you work. So there is a transformation that occurs around how people think about work that way. But ultimately, you're using technology to either grab more value or provide efficiencies and productivity to basically do the same thing you were doing before, but just better, faster, or more leverage, more affordances, do more things, in other words. What you're talking about is a transformation of the mind, a transformation of attitude, which is very different. It's a subset to the one I just mentioned, but if you're transforming culture, in other words, you're saying, hmm, we're treating this small call center as a cost center, is there an opportunity to reframe that and think about people differently and the idea of people differently instead of a cost center but a profit center in terms of understanding human capital in that way instead of it being kind of just a loss on the P &L, then that's very, very different. And I've seen companies do that. And to the answer your question, We've done that before, but that is a cultural shift in the organization itself. And that takes a large amount of time because you have business leaders who have not only transforming the business model, but about the whole psychology about how they do business. And so that's a very, very difficult one um simply because you're changing not only just hands on how you do things, but you're changing minds and hearts. as well. So you asked me how to do that. Every single thing is, every single person is different. So I'm getting a little philosophical here. So there's no right answer to this. There's no special sauce or you know what mean, or silver bullet, whatever kind of throw out your analogy or acronym you want out there. But the way that we approach it, you know, I'd say that I've approached it with my, the team that I've used before at Sablethorn and others is that if we are all unique people, right? We are all unique combinations of both competency, capability, attitudes, beliefs, et cetera, et cetera, experiences. Therefore, if you put unique people, unique combinations of people then together and form teams, and they become unique sort of flavors or ingredients and recipes. And then you mix them together again with other teams in that organization. Eventually what you come out to is a unique recipe for every single business organization out there. Even if they're competing, Coke and Pepsi, those two companies, right, kind of thing, they may try to deliver the same type of product in the end, but at the same time, they have very unique business culture, business. different personalities, therefore different ways to approach the problem. So what I'm scratching at is that every single organization, every single business unit, every single person that you interface with to change their mind, to change their heart requires a special sauce. It's custom work because everybody is different and what's going to be leveraged and what's going to be meaningful for them may be very different than the next one that you interface with. Thank you. And I know you've mentioned to me previously that your work really kind of sits at this intersection of human design and technology. And what we're talking about here is developing that special sauce ultimately to create a pretty significant shift in organizational culture. So my question here is how has that intersection of human design and technology impacted what it looks like to develop? that special sauce. I think going about human centered design, there is a matter of understanding, again, back to what I said before, even though that every single company has its own special kind of combination, then every single solutions company, yourself, myself, other consulting organizations have their own methodology and model to excavate that and figure out. What is that special combination of that person or that organization or that team that I need to find such that I can then provide services or products on top of it to change, right? So to answer your question around what is that special sauce of human-centered design and technology, every single organization has their own kind of method or model. You can call it. complex problem solving, you could call it hypothesis based problem solving, you could call it systems thinking, and then they'll have a name to it too, they'll throw an acronym on it, a model on it too. And you see this from uh IDEO, from the design thinking sort of brain work house in California, and other smaller shops as well. So uh to be honest with you, uh I take a very different approach, almost like an archetypal approach. In other words... There's not one method or that is the one ring to rule them all, right? It comes down to, this is so funny, I'm saying this now from a guy who is very design learning technology focused, but the more and more I grow, and this is what partners will tell you and managing directors will tell you and leaders will tell you and C-suite leaders will tell you more and more and more, it comes down to people. It really comes down to people. So the special sauce is understanding, is understanding the person and the people that you're working with at a deep level and building trust with them. And then using whatever model or method you want to, to go about solving the problem through human centered design principles if you want to. And then technology because those are force multipliers and providing more affordances, et cetera, et cetera. So in my mind, there is no secret sauce. It's understanding people. People, and to be quite honest with you, individuals who have people skills, who can build that trust, and then have the competencies on the side, domain competencies to provide solutions, and digging out those to really create a marriage of solution to problem. Those the people that are successful in today's world, in today's technology-driven world. We can talk about AI as much as you want. I'm sure we have a certain amount of time right now. We can go down that rabbit hole very deep, but deeply. honestly, the people who are going to be successful in solving the problems in what you said around what is that secret sauce are the people that truly do care. And what happens then is they will create the methodology or use the methodology or use the model. from whatever company they want. Stable Thorns, no different, right? I'm not gonna say we have a special sauce. We just care deeply about people, and that's what's most important. That's what it comes down to. Yeah, so let's dive into that AI rabbit hole a little bit, specifically when it comes up around the question of centering and focusing on the people. That's often one of the first objections people have is, but what does that look like? Isn't that the opposite of focusing on people? So I'm wondering, can you speak a little bit to that? AI has proven, especially over the last three or four years after, I mean, AI has been around for a bit, but I mean, the chat GPT moment in November 22, right? That was kind of the big thing where people were like, oh crap, this is potentially a thing. The answer is, I don't know, I think. And understanding, don't want to allow a Dunning-Kruger effect to happen with me right now, right? In terms of me understanding more about AI than I think I do, I do not. The more I understand about artificial intelligence, the more I realize I do not know. But what I have seen is that a recent paper called it metacognitive laziness. So I do feel we have to be aware of that. In other words, what does that mean? That means that we are using artificial intelligence right now. It's getting smarter and smarter. The law of accelerating returns is moving very quickly. and it's getting smarter and smarter every two weeks. A new frontier model change comes out. So Gemini's awesome this week and then chat, know, OpenAI is awesome this week, right? And then Anthropic just last week was like, boom, here, look at me, hold my beer, right? So there are all these sorts of things happening. So you don't know, it's moving that quickly. So you don't know which one to go to, but they're just all getting smarter and they're all competing against each other, which makes it even more so in a free market. They're getting smarter and smarter and smarter. And what's happening is that people are using these things to offload mental processes that they either don't know how to do or they know how to do but don't want to. Creative problem solving, uh AI is really, really good at creativity and being a brainstorm partner. In fact, it's been proven that it's like, humans by themselves creatively are less creative without an AI partner. It's been proven. So AI will jumpstart your creativity there. like, image, like, whatever form you might be in, video, you know, audio, imagery, or even just, you know, not even just creative problem solving, but just creating just new, new... Art, if you will. hate even using that word, but it is true. You can absolutely do it. And what I mean by art is I'm talking about like other things like books and you know, just articles and blogs and you know, even just research, etc. But people are getting lazy now because they don't, they aren't thinking through how to do those things when they realize how good AI is and they can craft a prompt to make sure that it gives them what they want. They're offloading that. offloading that piece of it. So I think we have to be aware of it too. So when you're back up the rabbit hole, right, to where you had a question around the human element, I do feel as if we're leveraging AI to get a little lazy with our thinking, but at the same time, this has been the way. Of every technology. It's we've leveraged technology through the dawn of man since fire right has been to sort of do things that we haven't been able to do before and and We get a little bit lazier. I mean, I remember we had the remote control of the TV, right? And you're sitting back, right? Kind of thing before when I was, you know, showing my age a little bit as five-year-old, six-year-old Sean was the remote control for my family, right? Kind of thing, please change the channel. And now we're just sit back and do this. And there's something so small, but if you think about kind of how, use that as an analogy to kind of how we use technology, that's the reason why we have technology. We always have used technology to make things easier for ourselves. And it takes away a little bit of kind of what made us quote unquote human from the previous generation. So again, big rabbit hole for you here, Jacob, but how does that work now? So metacognitive laziness is a thing. So I want to be aware of that too from a thinking standpoint. But how do we use AI to help us become more human? I think that is the challenge we have right now. And I really... I've really been thinking a lot about this. um There's two ways, two or three ways it could go. They're in the multiverse here in the next three or four years beyond that. One way is that we continue along this path and AI becomes a thought partner with us. So it's like this co-pilot with us and we don't become superhuman, we become humans that can do super things. And so that through AI. So that's how we can do one thing. So in other words, what does it mean to be human? How do we solve problems that way? AI is just a new tool. It's a copilot that goes with us and it solves these things with us. And we're able to solve and become uh a deeper level of productivity and efficiency that we currently have right now as a human. And that seems most similar to how we've approached the internet and how that's transformed business, more or less. No, I mean, that's a great analogy. use that often is that, you know, think about how we had life, how life was, excuse me, oh early 2000s, 1990s, if you were around that time, you know, it's the internet. We take it for granted now. And, but it's changed how we've done everything. And so AI will do the same thing. And so how we've used the internet, yes, has done things. Social media was never around, Cloud computing was never around. um Wi-Fi was never around. This ability to have something like a piece of silicon and glass in your pocket, go with you everywhere you go, right? To basically video chat with anybody in the world at a moment's notice. mean, these things are all changed. How we do life, how we actually do life, how we live life. to sort of respond to that around, yes, we do use that as a co-pilot. But it does beg the question, has it made us more human or less human? There's a little philosophical, right? And people can probably argue more and more. You see one thing like, wow, I can talk to my grandma. And a moment's notice in my... In my hand, at any given point, this has allowed me to communicate with people, know, Facebook friends, People that I just would never communicate with. I have the ability to do this and be more social. At the same time, how many hours do we spend every single day, you know, doom scrolling, either on TikTok or Instagram, right? So I would argue that that piece of it is all about kind of making us less human, right? We're not really truly connecting. We're lonely. think we are connecting because it gives us the... sort of feeling of connection, but in reality, we're sitting there alone scrolling through. uh So I think there, I mean, there's probably pros and cons to both. And I think it's back to my point now about kind of how does AI make us more human? One of the solutions, like I said, option one in the multiverse is that it's a copilot, right? And we are able to leverage it the same way we have been every other technology. just makes us more productive and more efficient. be our current selves. So that's like, we continue with humanity as it is, but just humanity gets smarter through AI, and it allows us to be more performative. That's one solution. The second one would be, and from a dystopian standpoint, the other two are dystopian, and actually the other two options. The one option is like, we become less human. ah Unfortunately, this is how people would use it, because we start to outsource everything to AI, much as we... do sometimes with the internet right now. We leverage it to get, you know, to sort of find a point where we are sucked into our own little world. And I think for people who probably do scroll a lot, and sometimes I do the same thing, but get caught up into that loop, I think that AI is the progenitor to things like uh virtual reality glasses that is gonna get really, really good, Jacob. It's gonna get really darn good where people are gonna be in their create own worlds that are specific to you people think that doom scrolling is addictive with that kind of dopamine hit when you see a notification people don't realize how good Yeah, they don't realize how good it's going to get it's going to get like you're gonna be able to literally Think about the one type of fantasy fiction whatever that you enjoy or even just real world life that you enjoy and being able in a world to replicate that real time and you getting inside of that and never being able, why would you want to leave? This is phenomenal, right? So I think there's the other risk about AI is that there is a point in time where we become less human because AI takes over some of lot of the tasks that we are currently doing now that we call human, but it's getting better at creative. And so why, it's good enough, right? uh As long as there is a handful of humans that can create some innovative ideas and then AI can quickly replicate those to the rest of the masses, right? That's fine. So I think that's option two is we become less human. And then finally, I would say the option three is the other side of the dystopian argument is that we are extremely more human because AI is able to replicate how you and I communicate with us and help us to become better versions of ourselves, not just, you know. doing superhuman tasks potentially, right? But also better versions of ourselves, because we're able to refine it. It's able to show me, for example, like ChatGBT has the whole domain of knowledge, let's just say, since I've been using it since 22. Now it has all of those records. It's been creating this kind of corpus of knowledge or understanding of who I am. So when I ask a question now, and you've probably seen this, it takes all of that into account. and it's responding accordingly. Hey, like I might be asking it, can you tell me about this market research? And it's like, well, it'll give me the answer and it'll say, well, it's something like your business that you started a year ago. What about this? And the completely just orthogonal complete, but it's made the connection between things. So I think it allows us to be more human in that way because it allows us to make deeper connections that we weren't able to see before about ourselves and about others. mean, to be honest with you, I've put... I think one of the cheat codes is you can put personality tests. You can put disk, Myers-Briggs, you can put Enneagram tests about you and about others inside of ChatGPT and other large language models. And it'll be able to sift through and be able to sort of find the points where you might not know about yourself and do an internal 360 right there. Have you thought about this to drive yourself a little bit further? Have you thought about this to learn this thing? Because you have a lot of skills over here, but I'm seeing a connection point over there, you know, where you might want to go. So back again to your question, three options there. AI to become just more productive, efficient versions of ourselves. And again, maybe metacognitive laziness there maybe. Other version is that we go down a deep dark hole and we become less human. And then finally, the third option is we become more human because we're able to see deeper things about ourselves that we weren't able to see before. And then we can leverage those types of. futures to solve not only our own internal kind of, let's say, conflict, but solve the conflict of others as well. And that's where trickling all the way back up the rabbit hole, how do we leverage AI to solve human problems that we currently have in business that you just said around sort of transformation that focus around human performance? And so I think those three options are the way we need to think about it. And I'm hoping that as AI I'll be using it as the number three to make myself more Absolutely. so every organization right now is, or virtually every organization is asking themselves, what do we do, right? In light of AI, how can we leverage this? How's this a threat? they're asking all the questions. So from what you've seen, the organizations that are the most ahead of the curve with leveraging and integrating AI. I'm not even as interested in what they're doing. I'm interested in what questions they're asking as they're considering the role of AI in their organization's future. Yeah, The two or three that I've seen, and again, it all depends on how you measure is, our head in AI, right? How do you measure that is even, I think the type of questions are is that they're coming at it from an AI first mentality. uh That is one question. So in other words, how do we solve this problem with AI? ah job opening comes up, don't want to, mean, people are already scared they're to lose their jobs with AI. But you're asking right now for companies that are thinking ahead, when a job opening comes up, they're not removing people, but when someone leaves the organization or shifts out of a role to another part of the organization, they're taking pause and they're looking at that and going, could this be, you know, this role, how much of this role could be done with AI in a year or now? And thinking about it that way. deeply, not just saying, OK, what's off the shelf right now? What can I grab with Copilot or Gemini or whatever? It's thinking deeply about that, thinking deeply about where reasoners and agents potentially will be in a year from now. So I think that's the type of questions they're asking is, uh how do we do this task with AI? we can't right now? OK, that's fine. Let's move forward, right kind of thing. But thinking also, well, if we can't do it right now, when will we be able to do it? and thinking about that future too. And then when someone does exit a certain position, they're looking at the processes, they're looking at that job role and thinking, can this be done with AI? it can't be? Not all of it can be, no problem. What could be? What percentage could be? none of it? Well, how long will it take for this to happen? So they're thinking about those types of things. They're not replicating humans at all. I'm working on a working thesis right now. called the Bengray Paradox, but essentially what I'm trying to get at is that what I've discovered is that if you try to automate yourself out of a job within a year, in other words, you go in thinking, okay, this is what I do on a daily basis, and I wanna find a way so that I don't have to be doing this job in a year from now. I wanna automate myself. wanna be either AI or bots or whatever you wanna call it, some other. digital tool or platform you can get. What I've found is that those individuals never lose their jobs because of the curiosity it demands, continuous learning it demands, as well as because of the skills you learn in attempting to automate yourself out of a job are so highly marketable that eventually people want people like that, that have that continuous learning mindset. and attitude and drive, as well as the technical knowledge to go and do it at another organization. So the Benger paradox is if you try to automate yourself out of a job in a year, you'll never be without a job. And that's where, when you're talking about kind of where are the organizations that are leading the charge, I think we have, I have found people with that mindset, at least a handful of people with that mindset thinking, I want to automate myself out of a job in a year. Yeah. And it's not a year, right? I mean, Law, right? Like, we tend to overestimate the change that's going to happen in a year and underestimate the change that's going to happen in, like, five or 10 years. So if you look back, back to your analogy, and I'll close on this, but if you look back to your analogy on jobs that, or what were job roles, let's just call them, back 20 years ago, nobody was automating themselves out of a job in a year. Nobody was. But if you look back right now, what is truly called, like if people will know, what is an instructional designer now, is very, very different than it was 20 years ago. It requires a lot of different job roles, and those were a lot of jobs back in 20 years ago. So in other words, there was a graphic designer, there was a media designer, there was a, let's call it a technical editor, there was an instructional designer, there was a, know, a SCORM packager, right? There were all these people that, it took to basically build a course and now the role of the job role of the instructional designer assumes most of those things. And so, mean, it doesn't happen within a year, but if you look back in 20 years, you know, it does happen. So moving towards the last part of conversation, I want to ask one more question, which is that generally speaking, what advice would you give to other learning and development practitioners who are really optimistic and curious about AI and the impact it can have, but they're not really sure where to start? What advice would you have for those people? I get asked that question a lot, a lot. I think the first one is going with the mindset of being curious. I think it's overwhelming and it's going to continue to be overwhelming. There is no stop to it. And just, that's the first step is to be curious and... assume that change is going to be constant now. It is the new normal. It is not something that is going to be an event-driven perspective. You should take it an event-driven perspective, excuse me. It's something that is just normal now. So the rate of change that's happening is just profound. So just embrace it, right? You're surfing. ah You're definitely surfing instead of just swimming anymore. You want to make sure you embrace that curiosity. So that's number one. This is a maybe a side piece to it, but don't be afraid. I think so many people are just like afraid this is going to change their jobs, afraid they're going to lose their jobs. They're wondering about how it's going to change their jobs. They're scared. And with that fear, sometimes comes stasis. And they're just like, all right, if I can just, you know, retire in about four five years, I'm good to go. Or if I can just, you know, duck my head and just keep on charging through my job, keep on doing those things, just nothing will happen kind of thing. And both of those things are unfortunately very not true. So embrace it, embrace that it's going to change everything, whether it changes your job role or not. It's probably so widely different, but... I mean, you need to get past the fear. So I think that that fear is you need to embrace it where you are right now. I mean, those three things, funny enough, it's nothing directive. It's just a matter of mindset and attitudinal change. Be curious, right? And you need to not be fearful. Those two big things I would just push forward on. Absolutely, thank you. And finally, for folks listening who want to stay connected or follow your work, where's the best place to find you online or to connect with you? There's only one of me in the world. You can find me at SEAN, Bengry Probably LinkedIn is the best way to get a hold of me right now. That's the best way to go. You can find other stuff too, but I mean, I think that and Twitter, which is now, or the app formerly known as Twitter, now Those two places I generally hang out the most on right now are both LinkedIn and Twitter. So feel free to join me there. Excellent. Sean, thank you so much for being on today and sharing your perspective and your vision. These are the exact kinds of conversations that I developed this podcast to spotlight. Leaders who are really shaping what's next for learning leadership and growth. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll throw the link in the show notes. And if you're an L &D professional or L &D leader, who really wants to build your own online presence and your own online brand to better reflect your expertise and the caliber of your work, definitely reach out to me because that's exactly the kind of work I help L &D leaders with. And if that's of interest to you, you can learn more or grab a time to connect at executivebrandbuilder.com. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time on Catalysts.

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