#03 From Technical Skills to Conversational Mastery with Dave Van Bennekum
Hello, Unconventional Founders, and welcome to The Founders' Truth, a conversation with Carlo Mahfouz and guests. Episode three takes the dialogue across disciplines and domains with the author of the first self help book on national security, Dave Van Bennekum, as we dive into the double edged role of technology and AI and the difficulties of navigating change and how to communicate novel ideas. Today's high quality recording and editing of this episode were made possible thanks to Riverside FM.
Dave Van Bennekum:Hey, Carlos. It's great to be here with you today. I I've actually been tracking what you've been doing for some time, and it really does speak to my own personal journey as I've kind of what I call, go from like technical chops to conversational knowledge, and this is really kind of tough journey to kind of get there, right? It's just really challenging you personally, kind of stretches your relationships a little bit, makes you feel a little exposed, a little isolated. But it's also a really rewarding journey to take.
Dave Van Bennekum:So, are a couple of things I want to throw at you right away. Okay. One, was kind of watching some other videos that you've done, and you've mentioned that, I think it's in the founder's truth that you mentioned that you divide the book into sections where if you are analytical, I mean, you obviously want to encourage people to read the whole thing, but if you're analytical, can go to one part of the book. If you're creative, you can go to another. If you're philosophical, you can go to that third part.
Dave Van Bennekum:And again, it really spoke a lot to me because I've kind of gone through that journey myself. Know, there wasn't a I didn't have a part to go to. I started off with writing law papers and policy papers in the Pentagon, did something creative by writing a self help book, and then had to figure out how to be more conversational, engaging, and then those kind of things along the way. Again, it was just really tough. What was kind of interesting is as you kind of talked about how you divided the book into those three sections, you also kind of talked about how technology, in particular AI and how it can, you know, write emails for you or those type of things, also bring analytical people out of their shell a little bit, right?
Dave Van Bennekum:And, maybe bring them into the more creative or into the more philosophical. And I wonder if you can kind of expound upon that a little more because I'm not a 100% sure that's right. Because I think it it it actually it does do you a favor by helping you to engage, almost like Rosetta Stone. Right? So you can actually go talk to people who talk in different languages.
Dave Van Bennekum:But I also tend to think that it it also encourages us to to stay in our shell. In other words, without that technology, do we really ever change?
Carlo Mahfouz:Interesting. Okay. That's that's quite you know, it covers a lot of breadth, so I'm gonna try to chop it up and, like, see where I can go. So first first off, I think, the idea behind, like, going through this analytical journey and and creative and, like, you know, I would say spiritual slash philosophical, like, kind of tracking on all of these dimensions? Because I think in in reality, we need all of those dimensions even if we end up categorizing ourselves or society categorize us in one versus the other.
Carlo Mahfouz:I think we don't necessarily tend to escape that too much. And then and part of the that split making it more visible and like now, you know, the new edition of the Reality Check, the first book, is because some people even didn't notice that that was the thing. I I do believe it's hard to sometimes engage. Like, you know, I designed it in that way, but it's easy if I told you that that's the design, so it's easy for you to track through. When it comes to technology playing a part and kind of bridging the translation layer, I would say it's less so about bridging and more so about exposing what you already probably were uncomfortable in engaging with.
Carlo Mahfouz:I'll say that because know, as an engineer, like, I am an engineer as background for the most part before being an author or a speaker or any of those things, I can recognize that those things lived in me, but I was very uncomfortable in, like, bringing them out. So it was very uncomfortable for me to actually recognize them or admit that I had probably spiritual or philosophical or even poetic to a certain extent. Like, I write much more prose and poetry these days than I write actually nonfiction. And and part of it, I think, is you holding back because there's has been an environment that probably has shaped you and that kind of puts you in that bucket and said, this is where you need to sit, like, sit there. So what I feel technology and AI could do, yes, I do believe, I think your concern is valid.
Carlo Mahfouz:I think, you know, technology and AI can amplify where you are and basically make you get stuck in your own corner even further. I think it actually does an amazing job at that. Yet, that given, it can as well open up other doors if you know how to engage with it. So if your idea is to go and tell it, give me an answer to this or that, then what it's going to do, it's going to amplify all your biases. So you're going to basically go down these rabbit holes where if you're an analytic mind, you're just going to love more of the analytical kind of logical explanation and like the causality and all of those things.
Carlo Mahfouz:And you're going to like kind of it's going to reinforce those things. Where it becomes the trick is not search for it as an answer, but use it as an education tool, recognizing that you want to amplify the discomfort almost rather than amplify the comfort or agreeing with it or like seeing that that's good or bad. And I think that's where it becomes really fascinating tool and how can easily it can create those connections for you. Let's put it more tangible. I I I think I've given this example before, and I give it like, you know, writing an email for someone who's an engineer is is probably too complicated just because actually, why is it too complicated?
Carlo Mahfouz:Because they're trying to be, one, a little bit creative, but a little bit as well touching on the human side. They're trying to basically convey the message nicely, package it in a way that it's approachable and all of those, not because they don't know what do they need to say. Right. And and a certain and that's not because those components are not part of them either, but makes that communication layer, that translation layer much easier. Vice versa, you know, when I wrote Reality Check First, I think I had a lot of philosophical topics, I had a lot of paradoxes, I put a lot of high level, if you want thinking into it rather than down into the weeds.
Carlo Mahfouz:And you realize like if you take a high level concept, a lot of people actually can dance with high level concept, but a lot of people actually can't. And actually what we have optimized with these days is not high level of abstractions, if I wanna put that, but more low level, which is more the direct thing. So for example, instead of the concept being, you know, tease the extremes, the first question is like, how do I do that? Like, give me tangible concrete examples, which scenario, how, etcetera. And AI can do an amazing job with that type of content.
Carlo Mahfouz:It can make and bridge that gap for you much easier.
Dave Van Bennekum:No, that's great. You know, one of the things, know, my, you know, just personal services, you know, whether you're a founder or you're an established company and you're facing change, right, the hardest part of change or the hardest part of progressing forward is just having that first conversation. And one of the stories I always like to tell is like after I had left the military, I landed at a big financial services company in Connecticut, and it was going through a big change. And they brought me on not because I knew anything about financial services, but because they just wanted to figure out some way to break through their stalemate. What they realized, to your point, to those engineers or in this case to those financial modelers, those PhDs, is that they were they couldn't just communicate with each other.
Dave Van Bennekum:They couldn't talk or, you know, what it may you know, or just figure out how to ask questions. Like just simple questions, like what format you want your data in, or you know, what, you know, what IT system you're going to kind of ride your model on, you know, those kind of things. And what I tell people all the time, they I I came to the company and they threw me right into the middle of models development. And it wasn't because I knew anything about models development. It was just to have that first conversation.
Dave Van Bennekum:And and maybe the the biggest contribution I made the entire time was just because I was in charge of lunch. So I so and and it sounds weird, but, you know, so one of my jobs was just to order lunch for the group and and but as they were coming through to get a little slice of pizza or or piece of sandwich or whatever it is they were doing, I had the opportunity to chat them up and make fun of them. Or not make fun of them, but make, you know, or laugh with them or, you know, a joke or just get them to relax. I got the chance to play my little marine corps drill instructor role. You know?
Dave Van Bennekum:Because there's always that one guy that comes back for the extra slice of pizza. You're like, you can't do that. But the whole idea was just to kinda lower our guard, you know, to to bring down the obstacles. And once they started feeling more comfortable, you saw them start coming up with just these basics, you know, kind of solutions to how do I communicate better? You know, how do I tell the data guys that this is the data I need, this is the format I need it in, those kind of things.
Dave Van Bennekum:It's also real challenging because it could have failed miserably. You know, I could have gone down there and just tanked the whole thing. I think there's a lot of courage in the people that put me in that position and it kind of worked out well. And it sounds to me though that, you know, from maybe the benefit of AI and the technology that you're champion is that you can take some of that risk out of it. Like, don't necessarily have to hire a marine to come in into your models development section because you can actually leverage.
Dave Van Bennekum:If you're leveraging AI in the right way, if you're leveraging technology in that right way, you can kind of manage those breakthroughs.
Carlo Mahfouz:I think that, you know, you bring up a lot of interesting points, which I think some of them AI will solve for and some of them AI won't solve for, for example. Right? Because I really like that because the foundation or the ecosystem that you create and you're fascinated just by that, you know, probably absurd example of like bringing lunch or etcetera, is as well very important. And we've kind of started ignoring a lot of these things. We've tried to optimize everything for efficiency, but not realizing that there is certain conditions that us humans flourish on.
Carlo Mahfouz:And actually they're quite inefficient in their nature if we want to categorize them. Yet they actually create the environment for us to be more comfortable with probably dealing with questions which are uncomfortable or things like that. And this is probably the part which I believe technology can't solve for yet or probably won't solve for because it's really not about the efficiency, it's not actually about finding something, but creating the environment that allows those things to happen. Right? And this is where probably the marrying both starts becoming really strong.
Carlo Mahfouz:Like in the third book and the installation, I talk about the culture of AI and the rise of AI. And really, it's really about what are the pillars in our culture that are necessary, that are really the intangibles, the inefficient, the soft things which are require a lot of courage, have high a lot of risk in them, which are necessary ingredient for an efficient organization and a productive organization. It sounds extremely paradoxical, but it's the truth. And we always we kind of want to always ignore that fact and instead say, no, you know, we are working so well together because we optimize this process and we optimize this thing and etcetera. And the reality is actually probably a lot of the inefficient stuff that we run like, you know, happy hour or whatever, like today has become, I don't know how even it works in the context of not being in person if you are digital or remote, we've kind of started losing.
Carlo Mahfouz:And this is where we start need to see technology in a different times, because right now we're having this conversation from remote different location when having this dialogue. How can you bring back some of these inefficient kind of elements while technology is present and not necessarily trying to optimize them out? I think there is something really interesting here that we not necessarily didn't know before, but we just kind of forgot about. And I think that it's important to highlight it again.
Dave Van Bennekum:Yeah, I agree. And I think one of the hard things, or one of the things I've really noticed is that as we've invested more as businesses and, you know, invested more in technology as their solution, right, saying, look, you don't need to talk to your employees. Right? You don't need to understand what's going on in the different departments because what we'll do is we'll collect all that data for you and then you can just have a dashboard. And then as the dashboard kind of indicates that, oh, well, maybe there's a problem here, okay, then you can start asking some questions.
Dave Van Bennekum:So, you end up, almost think you end up in some cases knowing less about your business because you're kind of in your room, you're in your office, you're managing your spreadsheet, you're looking at your dashboard, but you don't know two, you know, kind of two stories down what that recruiter or HR person or someone working in operations, whatever they may be doing, is struggling with day to day. And you kind of see problems maybe in a different way. You look at things, well, there's a problem with the numbers, well, must be efforts or, you know, those kind of things. It's the employee problem, you know, that kind thing. So, we got the systems, right?
Dave Van Bennekum:We got all the technology into all the stuff, so it can't be us. And I think and this kind of leads me into this next question, but I wanted to get you kind of your thought here is it almost seems like the technology is driving the personalities that end up in the C suite. And the personalities to your kind of your your three, you know, kind of section, you know, book there tend to be more analytical. Right? So now, they're more on the analytical side, and then you're losing touch with the creative, and you're losing touch with the philosophical, and you don't see the problem coming until it's too late.
Carlo Mahfouz:I think I think that's you know, it's interesting that probably my starting point for this is we measure what can be measurable. So if you can't measure something, you're discounting, that's the loss of the data. And a lot of the times the creative dimensions and the philosophical dimensions are much harder to measure. And thus we start to calling about the intangibles are not necessarily that measurable, because we have no way of extrapolating that information from the dataset. A very good example of that, and this is something I've done in my work and other areas, is try to measure impact.
Carlo Mahfouz:You have the theory of change and you have some models, but trying to measure impact of a problem and an impact of it, especially in the context of helping others save lives or helping basically different variations of that, it's very hard. Right? Because the impact usually you can only observe like at a distance much farther and it cannot be encapsulated in short term, like outputs or short term data points. It doesn't work. You can look at it at a three years advantage point or over a large data set, but you cannot look at it in Q1 and Q2.
Carlo Mahfouz:It just doesn't work. And what ends up happening in that relationship, if we follow that model, we start optimizing for short term things, and we miss the long term. Yet sustainability sits in the long term, but you've already optimized your And that's why this is where the conflict between technology is like technology is not necessarily the problem as much as well how you've optimized it to work, Right? If it's quarterly or yearly, then you're only optimizing for what can be measured quarterly and yearly, but things which probably takes three years or five years actually to play out and a lot of the things which the higher The interesting thing as well, I think, which people Analytical is very hard, very easy to measure on short term. If you move to creative, it's a little bit harder.
Carlo Mahfouz:If you move to philosophical, the abstraction level on philosophical is so wide. So, it has to be projected on longer periods of time. It requires different You can still measure it. You measure it on bigger datasets at longer time intervals, and then it becomes Because it's overarching, It covers so much like space or like so much criterias. And I think we've kind of forgot about that.
Carlo Mahfouz:Like, we kind of ignored that and said like, no, okay, we're optimizing the analytical is happening, man. Because that's where the analytical comes back to the philosophical because once you spread it over time and big data sets, then it becomes as well again analytical, then you can reason about it from an analytical point of view, but still not losing the philosophical dialogue. And I think this is where AI probably will make a difference because AI is really good at like large datasets, reductionist, almost a kind of reducing the information to its kind of lesser set of details and probably making it even more real time, but the thing is we need to always remember the three, five year timelines, the level of data that you need to have is a lot. So, a company was just started, for example, and have only a year data worth, most likely they're all optimizing for short term things, like right, which usually is revenue, how to stay in business, how to cover your costs, like as you're optimizing for those, you're not optimizing whether everyone wants client, you know, the client to be happy, but are you really optimizing for your client?
Carlo Mahfouz:Not really. Like, you only see the value of that solution is delivering to your client over a two to three years time. What you see today is they like this feature or they don't like this feature. They like this or like you see very your scope is very restricted.
Dave Van Bennekum:Yeah. I mean, they're either don't have the data or they're buying data that maybe doesn't really reflect their business. Right? They're trying to get some sort of grasp on it, but it's not really, really kind of narrow in terms of what they're trying to achieve, I guess, or may kind of stumble through that a little bit. But the thing about it is that you make a great point, right?
Dave Van Bennekum:And this idea that you're collecting this data gives you a very short view. As you kind of go through this process, right, to creative and philosophical, what you end up competing against in that philosophical range are things that aren't so easy to quantify in my opinion, right? Yeah, identity. For sure. It's It's the brand.
Dave Van Bennekum:And you have this constant struggle between, well, I've got, you know, I started this company for a reason. Right? And these are the values I wanna put forward, and this is what I stand for in the world. You wanna make a connection with your customers. But that data is telling me that I gotta change.
Dave Van Bennekum:I gotta do something different and that you have this competition. And that leads me to this kind of next question for you is you mentioned that, and I really like the way you put this, is that, you know, everybody sees a need for change, but we underestimate the length and the challenge of the onboarding process.
Carlo Mahfouz:And
Dave Van Bennekum:so, and it's something I've I've, you know, struggled with as well because for me, you know, I I became the most unlikely self help author by bringing self help to national security. But and I thought at first, well, everybody would see the need. Right? Of course, you need to broaden audiences and invite people in and you need to have better ways to communicate because, you know, people are really interested and they want to engage and they wanna have ownership in their own futures. But what I ran into was, well, it's weird, right?
Dave Van Bennekum:I mean, self help and national security don't go together very well. Yeah, yeah. Even more importantly, I think I've run into these big almost maybe psychological or even cultural hurdles where, you know, I'm not dealing with PhDs in economics anymore. I'm dealing with PhDs in international relations or people who work in think tanks or work for the government. And they don't necessarily see the need for change.
Dave Van Bennekum:I mean, they might see it in terms of like, I can read the newspaper articles and stuff like that, but maybe a more better way to put is they don't see the need for them to change. Yeah. And and that's kind of this journey that I've been on. And I kinda wonder when you talk about the length of the onboarding process, and how to kind of affect change, like, no. Like, how do you actually frame that, and and how do you talk about that?
Carlo Mahfouz:That's a great question, Dave. And and and I think I think in a way, probably what is is really key in that is people are changing regardless whether they think they need to change or not. The problem is if whether you notice it and what is your perception around it. And I think a great way usually to kind of set the stage is really be very real. What ends up happening in a lot of the times is even whether people want to change or they don't want to change or they're changing, what ends up happening is people sit too much in their expectation or sit too much in their assumption and actually take those as truths rather than what's actually happening.
Carlo Mahfouz:Why in some cases? Because what is really happening is almost always very tough to deal with. It's like a very fragile truth almost in a way. And the way I put it is the best way to kind of break that is to really just say what is happening. Where are you now almost?
Carlo Mahfouz:To a degree where it doesn't have it always will have a degree of judgment and bias, but to a degree to not like sit in the assumption of what you'd like to change. But what is happening right now? Like what is the change that you see or what is the state that we are in in this exact moment here? And a lot of the times what ends up happening, either people will talk about the why and the things of their assumptions of it or the expectations of it, but they never talk to the truth of it, positive and negative. Like, I'm not saying about negative, know, I'm not saying like to judge it even just as it is.
Carlo Mahfouz:Like, right? Today we're able to do this and we're not doing that and etcetera, like as simple. And that's a very hard exercise actually, much more harder than most people expect. But what that surface is surface a little bit your starting point. And that gives me usually a lot like when I bring that up, just by bringing it out in this way, I'm like, okay, this is where we are.
Carlo Mahfouz:And you're telling me we want to be there. Okay, great. So let's kind of break down from here to there what's going to happen almost. Even like simulating it doesn't I am in the simulation field. So simulation comes to mind all the time.
Carlo Mahfouz:So if you just simulate and be very playful and in a very fuzzy way, like not concrete at all, like almost absurd, very fuzzy way. You know, people want to, for example, to 10x their business. Right? Okay. 10x ing your business.
Carlo Mahfouz:So it means in the next, what, one year you need to every three months, like two, three times. Okay. What how many people that it needs? Like, whatever you need a 100 new customer. Once you start, like literally kind of playing with it, you just rely on how absurd it is, like how absurd that transition is almost and how unrealistic it is at the same time.
Carlo Mahfouz:That's not a problem, but usually when we surface these things, that starts creating a much better dialogue for people to understand what the change truly is. And that's why I come back to this onboarding process because I think the onboarding is all of these foundational elements that allow you kind of set you up to get to a point where you realize really what this change requires and why it's a need almost. And that doesn't happen overnight either. Like you just don't wake up and flip a switch and automatically you're like, I'm going to get this. You have experience in this intersection of national security and self help for like more of twenty, thirty years almost.
Carlo Mahfouz:And this person has an experience of like three minutes on Instagram. Like that sometimes is the reality as well we're engaged. I'm coming at this and I'm talking about ambiguity and leveraging uncertainty and all of this conversation. And I've been reading about this and researching and almost experiencing all of this these this kind of in front center in my life. And then I come to someone and today they're having to worry about picking up their kids and basically doing x y z.
Carlo Mahfouz:That's the whole task list, and they will never get to it, and they haven't slept three hours last night. And then I'm telling them, oh, you need to all of the read all of this and, like, think about it philosophically. And then once I, like, just lay it out like this, you're like, oh, this is it's not gonna happen. Like, even if this so this will make their life much easier and prioritizing and making better decisions, they just don't have the bandwidth for it. And automatically that shifts the conversation, and I think that's really where we need to get to, whether we're talking about national security or whether we're talking about, you know, personal development or no matter what we're talking about.
Dave Van Bennekum:Yeah. I've you know, being honest with you, I've kind of gone down this road. I'm gonna ask about this in a little bit, but I've kind of gone down this road where I almost model myself now after comedians. Because I realized that oh, two things. One is just being able to kind of get up and articulate and connect with an audience and those kind of things and connect with your teams work and those things.
Dave Van Bennekum:It's challenging. It really is. I mean, I almost think that in this kind of progression, you call kind of analytical creative philosophical, I typically call technical chops to creative expression to conversational knowledge, is that it is so much harder. It's almost better to be, to have the communication skills learn the technical than it is to try and go from the technical and then get to the conversational. And that I think is just such a hard, much harder journey and that's why it's just taken me so long, it's been so frustrating to like, you know, kind of do that myself.
Dave Van Bennekum:And what I've kind of found is that it's, you know, again, when we just kind of we take that punch in the gut, Right? We we realize that always don't work anymore. Our customers are demanding more from us than they used to. There's a new competitor out there or what may be. We tend to just retreat back into what we really one of those three groups that we really excel in.
Dave Van Bennekum:So, you know, like you said, it's like the analytical guy is gonna retreat back to the analytical. Right? The, you know, the creative person is gonna be like, hey. I don't know what's going on, I'm gonna kind of stay in my creative space. And you start to lose that communication.
Dave Van Bennekum:Right? We start to become a little more concerned about ourselves, we feel a little exposed, those kind of things. And maybe, I don't know, maybe AI is is a way to kind of or technology as a whole is a way to kind of if you can work it, it's a way to overcome that, you know, kind of initial instinct to just retreat.
Carlo Mahfouz:Thank you for listening to this episode. If there's one takeaway I'd like you to think about or one question is even, how can you deploy this shifting between or bridging between different disciplines or domains of ways of thinking, whether from analytical to creative philosophical? How can you look at problems in the sense when you move it from one to the other, but at the same time how you can improve your communication. And you can definitely use AI for this to translate from your deep expertise into something which is probably communicable to a five year old or something which is a joke or be more creative about it. So explore with that thing because I think there's a lot of opportunities right there.
Carlo Mahfouz:Next episode, we will continue the conversation with Dave. And if you didn't hear enough about change, you're gonna hear even more both on the challenges and difficulties and some of the ways that you can go around, make the future happen and drive that change that you're looking for.
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