Daria Rudnik (00:02.186)
Welcome to Built by People Leaders. I'm your host, Daria Rudnik, and this show is for HR and L&D leaders in scale-ups and fast-growing companies. The people building real impact from within and shaping AI ready organizations. Each episode, I sit down with people leaders to talk about how they build stroll cultures and shape organizations around them. It's about HR being seen as a true business partner by leaders and by HR themselves. So let's dive in.

I have a very interesting guest today. I'm happy to introduce her to you. Kylee Ingram is the co-founder and CEO of Wizer, a decision intelligence platform that helps organizations understand how decisions actually get made, mapping thinking styles, experience, and the perspectives that shape or narrow a decision. Her background spans documentary and filmmaking, television production, and entrepreneurship education before moving into decision science.

So she approaches organizational problems from both a human and a system perspective. Her mission is to improve the quality of decisions inside organizations by addressing the structural forces that quietly distort them. wow, that's so important. Welcome, Kylee.

Kylee Ingram (01:14.087)
Thank you very much for having me, Daria.

Daria Rudnik (01:17.122)
Well, I have so many questions to you and I'm I'm excited to kind of jump in. And my first question is you said something about that when organizations scale, and many of our listeners and scale ups, fast growing companies, some enterprise listeners, but when organization scales, decision making kind of drifts towards sameness. Why is it happening and what does it mean?

Kylee Ingram (01:43.057)
Yeah, so we call it cognitive drift actually. And the research that we have at Wiser is based off you know, some scientists and researchers that did looked at cognitive diversity and what you need in a decision. And different people come at decisions in different ways. They like some people like outcomes, some people like you know, to know evidence or whatever it is. And you can see those people, that's what they're waiting for to hear before they're making their decision.

And what happens is the research found that seventy-five percent of CEOs in the Western world are at looking for outcomes or options when they're making their decisions. So what you find in an organization is who's at the top of the tree then tends to become that way by middle management. So when you're in a startup or a scale up, you might have a lot of that cognitive diversity. But over time you start using less of it and become more of this sameness. These people realize they've got to behave like this to get up the scale. And our cognitive diversity likes like you know when you're in an echo chamber, people feel very comfortable with that. Well, same with the cognitive diversity. They're picking out the things that they like about themselves and the way they like to make decisions. Nobody likes that rub in a meeting, but that rub, and I'm not talking about something that's super difficult, just that rub can make you know, people would prefer it went away, but it actually is one of the key things to making good decisions.

Daria Rudnik (03:13.068)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, we had an episode like sometime before but constructive conflict, conflict of ideas, this kind of when people share something, they disagree and they they have this meaningful argument without just agreeing, Okay, I don't care, let's do let's do it your way or yes we all agree because we think the same way. So we we need to have that tension to create something new.

Kylee Ingram (03:35.281)
Yeah. And when they say when they're quiet or they say, well, whatever, they've checked out, which is kind of the last thing you want anyone to do.

Daria Rudnik (03:43.842)
Yeah. Well, tell us about like how did you come up with this work you're doing now now? What's your path?

Kylee Ingram (03:52.209)
Well, yeah, as you said, I was in television and I was doing documentaries. And you know, in TV there's a very small amount of broadcasters, the people within the broadcasters that are commissioning editors, and it can be feel very frustrating because you're like, Who is making these decisions? And you see what's on TV and you're like, I don't know, why what what is going on? And so I got into decision science then and crowd wisdom and I did a I did a project called Crowd TV.

Daria Rudnik (04:12.194)
Yeah.

Kylee Ingram (04:20.193)
and that went really well. We had so much fun building that with through the wisdom of the crowd, and I really got into it then. And I kind of moved out of TV into interactive about the same point and got a couple of nominations for at Cannes for the stuff I was building. So I was enjoy really enjoying that more interactive space. And so my co-founder did his research in wise crowds and came to me and said, Hey, I think you'd enjoy this.

And I think it's, you know, it's a bit of disruption using science of the system to say, hey, there's a way to design decision rooms that gets you better outcomes. But you know, are you willing to listen to it? And at the same time I met Dr. Juliet Burke and she was running a department at Deloitte, where she'd just finished.

And her research, she spent years with hundreds of organizations looking at decision. She found these decision frameworks. And at the same time, Dr. Scott Page up at Michigan University found cognitive diversity makes a lot of difference. So we knew wise crowds, and then this research explains that formation of that wisdom. And that you know, Scott Page, one of his books is called Diversity Bonus. Like, how do you get the the bonus from having

the right people in the room and how do you shape that. And so we built out a tool, and not to be confused with AI intelligence to just have AI bots deciding for you. We've really leaned into people, like how do you find the right people in your organization for each and every decision rather than just going to the status quo.

And I guess if you think about us trying to help people make better decisions, what it really is, is addressing those structural biases. You know, they're everywhere and everybody has them and every organization has them. So how do you remove them as much as you can out of your decision equation?

Daria Rudnik (06:16.504)
I wanna get back to the first question about the sameness. And w I'm curious. For me personally, it looks like when you have a small team, like a startup team, and you you get people that are like you because it's easier and you can very sh short hiring cycle. So you probably have the sameness in a small team more likely than in a bigger team when you have many people. It's very hard to

like keep the cultural and the values aligned. That's why some people get into the organization. Maybe they shouldn't be there, maybe they should. I'm curious, like why do you say about sameness happening in in big organizations what more than in small ones?

Kylee Ingram (06:56.497)
Well, but if you think like I also sat in an accelerator for a number of years and was head of production for one for six years. So I have seen you know, that most of the problems are teams. So I say this while sitting there looking at them. But say if you you know, if you look at the way the accelerator's looking for a team of people, not an individual, 'cause you'll get further and you're saying, Right, we need a developer

Daria Rudnik (07:02.051)
Mm-hmm.

Kylee Ingram (07:20.163)
a CEO type and a sales slash marketing work. That that always seemed to be the the main three. They're very different types then and there. Do you know what I mean? And it's really functional why they're there. And they might not be. And you see that rub with those people. But then they, you know, the hiring, the development team can be one of the most homogenized thinkers that there are, thinking sets that there are. Same with lawyers and with

Daria Rudnik (07:28.598)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, okay.

Kylee Ingram (07:48.369)
banking that kind of finance industry, they become very it can be very homogenized because that's what what they want. But as you're building your team, so there's probably somewhere between those three founding people and then the, you know, and then all the way up to scale.

Daria Rudnik (08:03.104)
Okay, I g Yeah, obviously the the first CEO, the the developer and and sales, they're very different. But when they when you hire a bunch of executives, they are executives.

Kylee Ingram (08:15.933)
Yes, and and you know what we see? We've mapped we've mapped a lot of people now. We've done seven thousand decision profiles and eighteen thousand external ones, internal, external, which we can or cannot go into. But what we see when we look at teams, because most companies come through and do decision profile mapping so they can see who they've got where, almost a

Across the board. I almost can't think of an example that's not this way. The team, so you've got a team, say marketing team, sales team, they only have if there's seven different archetypes of the way you come at decisions, they've only got two or three at the most. So, and that's in every team. So I think what it what ends up happening is it in a startup you might get them more, but as you start to grow, you start to get the clumps in teams.

Daria Rudnik (09:04.17)
Mm-hmm. You kind of have a homogeneous teams, like teams with the same decisions. Maybe they like finance and marketing, they think differently, but within the teams, inside the teams, they think the same. Right.

Kylee Ingram (09:13.947)
Yeah, but if you could say, look, I understand where we're missing, you just pull people in from other teams. You don't need to restructure. You can just say, hey, well this is what we're missing. We don't have anybody that's thinking analytically or with a risk profile on this.

Daria Rudnik (09:23.117)
Mm-hmm.

Daria Rudnik (09:29.75)
You mentioned CEOs like focused on outcomes and options. What are the decision making types?

Kylee Ingram (09:36.955)
Yeah, so we've got achievers that are outcome, outcomes focused. You've got collaborators that are perspective gatherings, so they're not necessarily people people, they just understand the the value of perspectives. An analyzer's looking for evidence, a deliverer's process driven, explorer is options, a guardian is risk, that risk profile, and a visionary was a seventh we added. Juliet found

six and we added the seventh because when we did some research around openness we found that visionary that visionary moves a little and Scott Page found he didn't really mask out who was who but he kind of said there's between six and nine. So we're all kind of sitting in in that same category of what we found.

And you know, we you can do decision profiles free on our website at wiser.business. So feel free to go and do yours as an individual.

Daria Rudnik (10:34.434)
Yeah, we'll have the we'll have the link in the notes to this episode, so we just go ahead and try it out. I had a question. About cognitive diversity. What is it?

Kylee Ingram (10:46.171)
Yes.

Well the cognitive diversity is how we come at something and you don't want how you process information and how you receive it and then how it comes back out. and

You know, a lot of people have looked at personalities in the past, but personalities are not as relatable to decisions as as as this that comes to culture in teams and different things. But with cognitive diversity, you want all seven in that decision group to have the best outcome because you're going to see different things and the gaps and f and fill in the gaps for one another.

and so it's how you're how you're coming at something and how you're receiving it. And one of the things that we've been leaning into a lot in the last six months is communication. We're also helping teams look at how they talk to one another and rewrite messages accordingly so they land.

Daria Rudnik (11:45.207)
Mm-hmm. So for HR leaders, people leaders, when, for example, we're hiring people for the team, when we form teams within the organizations or do some restructuring. Of course, it's always a dialogue between the hiring manager and the talent acquisition and kind of trying to understand what kind of people we want there. What's the best way to ensure this cognitive diversity? Or maybe overcome this

bias, the kind of group thing, bias, sameness.

Kylee Ingram (12:15.899)
Yeah, well I mean, yeah, obviously we could do it for you very easily by everybody doing their decision profile and mapping them across groups and teams and all of that. But you know, if you wanted to do it manually, you sit down and think, well, how does that person come at something? or ask them, you know, how are they coming at it? Is it an outcomes thing? So you can kind of start to see where you're over indexed and underindexed in different things.

You can see it pretty clear. Like when we do this with teams, when they talk about their leaders, they all know immediately when you give them the option of which one. Because one of the things, too, if we look at the biases, what we're trying to limit is there's three main biases in this too: the social bias, the information bias, and the capacity bias. So by understanding who's where, you start to limit that those things from creeping into that decision.

Daria Rudnik (13:13.486)
Well I'm still curious. It it's it's my question is more like, well, I probably not know what kind of decision making I want. Well, maybe I I know that I have too many of I don't know, risk averter averters, but I want more like options, people focusing on options, but I am I don't know in accounting, which is not ex exactly a department. So ha maybe with your experience, do you have any cases when you can help

Kylee Ingram (13:23.58)
Yep.

Kylee Ingram (13:31.153)
Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Daria Rudnik (13:42.284)
balance this understanding of this professional kind of background and decision making style and and skills needed.

Kylee Ingram (13:43.164)
Yeah.

Kylee Ingram (13:49.084)
Yeah.

Exactly, exactly. So what we've done with our tech is I think we've done three things that are very different. And so we can do all of this live. is that you go and do your decision profile and mapping so you can see who's where. Then you put on the live decision platform, you're all in there, you can see who's who, who's in what team. So you go and ask a decision about strategy. The system then does two things. You put in that room who you want to be in there, click on people.

Our system will say give you started a red a red flag to a green, you're trying to go red to green, and it'll say, look, you've got no one under 65 in here. So it's looking at the balance across three things. There's identity diversity that make does make a difference. And there's some really interesting studies, especially around jury studies on that.

That is super interesting about when you get homogenized groups and how if you de-homogenize, the group improves itself because it realizes, there's a different opinion here, and you become better dis decision makers just on that alone. So you got it's looking, the system looks on three categories. You got outward-facing identity, experience. If you're gonna launch rocket ships, have a rocket scientist in the room.

Daria Rudnik (15:04.35)
Yeah.

Kylee Ingram (15:06.361)
It sounds funnier than it should be, but Boeing, I think, have just learnt that lesson. The heart like taking people out of the room. And then you've got that cognitive diversity piece. So it'll tell you which pieces of what you're missing. And then you can just go and click on it and it's got a recommendation engine. It'll say, hey, you're this is the full accounting team.

Why don't you add Mary and Mark and you'll have a nice rounded team here. You'll have what you're missing there and they will bring this and that perspective to what the decision you're trying to make. So it's also one of the first things you tell it is what kind of decision is it you're trying to make and it's matching, it's matching across that.

Daria Rudnik (15:46.666)
Mm-hmm. Do you have any cases or stories that actually describe how this happens and what happened after that?

Kylee Ingram (15:56.133)
Y yeah, I mean, the first the first pilot we did was with the Sydney Children's Hospital Foundation and we tripled the amount of pediatric research funding. And what had happened there was this probably the same people were being put forward with their research projects and it had people weren't

Daria Rudnik (16:06.392)
Okay.

Kylee Ingram (16:16.945)
feeling that inspired by the sa the sameness of it. And once it was opened up, it, you know, it became half female, half male, people investing in one another. The fundraisers found different things to do. So it was quite, you know, it changed the dynamic of it.

we had an organization last week, so it's at the top of my mind. They did their board and executive team, and they realized just how far skewed they were

to the analyzer and the outcomes driven person, so the achiever. And they then went a layer down and found the people they needed for different decisions. So started to think up what were the decision trees they needed. So rather than thinking of it as like a permanent

advisory board, they realize they can pop things up more readily depending on what the decision was. And the other thing the research shows if even if I'm not in the room, but I see somebody that thinks like me in the room, I just know that they're like me. It's not, I feel more of a buy-in because I know that person was in the room. So I don't even need to be in the room, but if I see that part of the way I think in the room, I'm you get more buy-in.

Daria Rudnik (17:27.254)
Hm.

Daria Rudnik (17:35.052)
You know, like you mentioned something that I'm I'm curious about. So it's it's not so much about the orcshard, but it's kind of about decision making trees, how we are making decisions. You we don't need to change the orcshard to make sure, okay, every team has every profile on the team. Is that what you're saying?

Kylee Ingram (17:53.007)
Yeah, I think you just need to know where the talent is when you need it. you know, you can keep people in their teams, but if we go back to look at the biases that I think we're addressing, the social bias is who gets listened to and who doesn't. So certain voices dominate and that leads to groupthink. What information is valued is the information bias and what's ignored, and teams will overweight that data, and that's the blind spots that you get. And then capacity bias, how much complexity can it ever

Can people hold? And when the load is too high, once again they oversimplify, and that limits your creativity and quality of outcomes. And Dr. Burke found you get a 30% reduction in decision errors and a 20% lift in innovation if you are designing your decision teams. And I you can't even find people that really talk about decision design in team, you know, in their people. So they might have a framework, but

People are very hazy even on what that is you know, you you get you pay a big consultant to come in and do a decision framework. But by the time you've gone too far down, no one really and what we see, the other really great thing we're seeing, and we hope to have a study on that by the end of the year is language, decision language. Once you're all in that decision language, you start to understand and have a different perspective of one another

and the way the company make t makes decisions. So it changes, it's culture changing.

Daria Rudnik (19:26.51)
In terms of like speaking of changes that's happening like everywhere right now and AI, and I'm curious, like, do you have any information about how AI is actually influencing decision making? Because I I've I've read some reports that show that when teams working with AI, they actually start adopting AI language and AI framing. And even when AI is not around, they keep using this the same AI language, the same AI framing, kind of the same sameness we talked about earlier.

What do you think about how AI is influenced in decision making?

Kylee Ingram (19:57.159)
There's there's so so many different ways to answer that, but and I'll stay in my decision lane, I think. you know, a lot of the time when we're talking people like, yeah, I'm gonna get AI bots to make decisions. I'm like, that is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about finding the right people. And what what we found and Juliet found, Dr. Burke found in her studies were is you could get an AI bot to analyze, say, right, you act like that. It's not here, but just

I it can't become that human interrogator. Like you can only get so far. Like if I put on like Edward Dubone, I'm gonna put on a hat and I'm gonna put on the deliverer process hat. I can't do that for very long. I can go, I think this and this and this, but it's that interrogation and having that real lived experience in the room that counts more.

and I think, yeah, there is a homogenization, of course, with language and all sorts of things that we're seeing. But I've got to say I'm very happy that we are in the people space and not A AI is helping our tech in the analysing of it, but I'm I'm I'm fully committed to making sure you know who the people are in the room rather than the other way around and you get better outcomes.

Daria Rudnik (21:07.254)
Mm.

Daria Rudnik (21:15.342)
Well, I mean I do agree. All the decision decisions need to be made by people for sure. I mean, that's that's

Kylee Ingram (21:20.229)
And it can't just be you clicking there as it comes through and go, yes, yeah. And we've already seen what what disasters are happening there.

Daria Rudnik (21:27.222)
Yeah. But still, like if you have, for example, you have a a a a virtual AI advisory board with different profiles or personalities or decision making styles, kind of brainstorming human to a bunch of AI bots, would that help make better decisions?

Kylee Ingram (21:50.619)
Well, they can't interrogate long term. Maybe. I mean, if you got nothing, you could you could use that for a you know, a period, but it it's that deep interrogation that you need that you won't get from that pot. also just you should be finding it within your people. What we found with the recommendation engine is forty to sixty percent of people have never been asked into that decision room before. So it's it's finding it's finding people.

as well. And you know, some people use bots, have at it, but I don't know. It's it's a different proposition I think when you're looking at who you have and trying to unearth talent and and build culture. I think that's what that's what we're trying to do here.

Daria Rudnik (22:42.178)
I do think it can you can use it, but on top of like the people in the room, kind of making sure that everything is covered, finding some blind spots, and then getting back to human conversations. Well, like one of my final questions is well, it's okay, you know the decision making types, you know, like what you need, you know who you need in the room.

The next biggest question is how do we actually have those deep interrogations? How do you have this conversation, especially when people are different? And with people different, we want to make sure that our perspective is the most correct one, obviously. So how do you facilitate, how do you help organizations have those conversations and those deep interrogations?

Kylee Ingram (23:29.277)
Yeah, it's funny. One of our most read blogs is how to deal with difficult people and take the focus off their difficult and look at how they make decisions, like focus on that. And we have a communication tool now in the thing that'll say, I need to send an email to Daria and you know, I'm gonna say our teams are having trouble. And it'll say, Look, Daria is a process driven person, you can't write

email like that. You have to write it like this. And so, you know, that's another thing we see. And I think it comes down to that language. That language you begin to learn together. And I guess it's, you know, you want to be curious about your coworkers and under just understand they're just receiving communication and

They're looking for different things. And it doesn't need to take longer. Some people say, it'll take longer. It's by committee. It's not. You're just designing a room. You can give an undesigned room an hour and a designed room an hour and you'll get a better outcome here. Like it doesn't need to be more time. It's just about the design. And I think the other thing in there is leadership. You need a leader that doesn't want realizes there's more value in designing a decision room than making the captain's call the whole time.

And, you know, the last chapters of Juliet's book are all about the inclusive leader. You get the the best out of it when you have somebody that understands the value of people.

Daria Rudnik (24:51.478)
Yeah. I mean now when everything is changing so fast, there's so much uncertainty and complexity, you cannot expect one person a leader to make all the decisions. So you need to have all those people have those conversations, have those deep interrogations to come up with the with the better decisions. It's never one person. So like to all the leaders, please forget. You don't have to make all decisions. Get the right people in the room. They figure it out together.

Kylee Ingram (25:14.343)
Well, we get a lot of people talking to us about defensible decisions too, because that's, you know, part of it. No one lost their job for hiring a consultant, did they? But if you if they need to be more nimble and agile and they want to understand, they can also show the board we got a green light for this. We used our people, we came up with the best decision at the time with what we had. And

Yeah, that's another you know, you've got to when you've got to make a decision, you've you know, at least knowing that you have all the perspectives in the room is an important part of that.

Daria Rudnik (25:53.465)
Well, Kylee thanks. It was an incredible conversation. I learned so much about decision making and building the systems. What's your kind of recommendation for HR leaders in scale ups that are growing fast changes, like they they change a lot? what would you recommend to build those kind of systems?

Kylee Ingram (26:17.369)
in your people, you know, at least know who you have and believe in your the value of human intelligence and its ability to imagine the future and be creative and impulsive and all those things.

And no one person can make all the decisions. Like, I don't know. Double down on your people. Sure, have AI. Understand exactly though what you think the problem is that it's solving, but but make sure you bring your people along. If everybody turns out to be AI bots, who are we gonna sell to? Like who are we gonna talk to? I don't know.

Daria Rudnik (26:46.136)
Yeah.

Daria Rudnik (26:51.984)
AI boss talking to AI boss. No, thank you.

Kylee Ingram (26:53.743)
Yes, exactly. And I don't really know what we're all doing in that equation. But this is a but it's better outcomes anyway. It's n I'm not talking anti AI, I'm just saying you know, go for better outcomes.

Daria Rudnik (27:05.868)
Yeah. Well it's it's a fascinating field decisioning making, how people make decisions, how how leaders can build systems for the good for good decision making. Well thanks for joining the conversation. How people can find you, how can learn more about you, what you do and your platform?

Kylee Ingram (27:24.101)
Yeah, come to wizer.business have a play around or do your decision profile and you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is spelt uniquely enough that I should be trackable. Come say hi.

Daria Rudnik (27:37.698)
Well anyway, we'll have we'll have all the links in the notes for this episode. So reach out to Kylee, try this decision making tool, and thanks for watching till the end. If you like this episode, please give us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and stay tuned for the next episodes. Bye.