Jen Hamilton (00:01.132)
I am so excited today to welcome Brian to our podcast. Brian, thanks so much for being here today. this is going to be good. This is gonna be good. Well, Brian, I love to get started right away and like dig in so we can get to know you. I want to ask you a little bit of a fun question, maybe tricky question, but what would you say is your fractional COO motto or mantra?
Brian Munroe (00:07.278)
Thank you. It's gonna be good.
Brian Munroe (00:25.474)
My model or my mantra would be, let's get humans back to doing smart human things in our operations. It's something that is kind of a passion for me. So yeah, let's get humans back to do smart human things in operations because of the fact that in operations, we're starting to look at AI. We're tooling up with software and things like that. But let's remember that we have smart humans in the mix, too.
Jen Hamilton (00:36.934)
I love that.
Jen Hamilton (00:54.328)
Absolutely. I love that that honors the people, but also doing human things. think that's part of what we're forgetting nowadays with technology is that there are humans still involved and a human to human cannot be beat. Human to technology is not going to be as great. That's awesome. I know we're going to dig more into a little bit of that later. Okay.
Brian Munroe (00:55.501)
Yeah.
Brian Munroe (01:12.046)
Right. Absolutely.
Jen Hamilton (01:19.056)
know more about who you love to work with. So what ideal clients do you love to keep safe at night as that hero that you are?
Brian Munroe (01:27.182)
As the hero, the ones that keeps yeah, I like well, first of all, the clients that actually recognize that they may have a challenge or that they're struggling or they've now recognized that in their business. They're stressed and they're bringing that stress home with them. And so those are the people that really I like to work with because in that realization, they're open to new ideas. They're coachable. They're teachable. They're like just, you hey, I
You know what you know, so please help me. And a lot of times, I'm looking at them going, you know stuff that I have no idea about, and you're an expert in that lane. So absolutely, there's that mutual kind of admiration of what we do. And those are the ones I really like to work with, the ones that just know that they need and are looking forward to the help. absolutely. Absolutely.
Jen Hamilton (02:16.484)
Yeah, it's a much better partnership that way. And then it's way, it is more like that sidekick and superhero. When you bring together your superpowers together, magic happens. You can really solve some big challenges.
Brian Munroe (02:25.687)
Yup.
Brian Munroe (02:30.784)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Jen Hamilton (02:32.742)
Alright, well let's talk about who you're trying to save them from. What sneaky villains always try to slow progress and how do you fight back?
Brian Munroe (02:42.766)
Oh, you know, one of the sneaky villains that pops up all the time is the villain that runs around and says, but this is always the way we've done it. And I'm like, wow, OK. Because that villain pops up with, this is always the way I've done it. Because that tells me that they just kind of closed minded a little bit, and we need to expand that mindset.
That's a fun one. I love it when that villain pops up because it's often fun to work around that. It's like, OK, I understand that's the way you've always done it. So now what we're going to do is we're going come up with three new ways to do it. You can still have your way, but I want you to hear me out. We're going to come up with three new ways, and then we just get into this exploration thing that usually turns into a lot of fun learning. And ultimately, a lot of times, it's like, you know what?
Jen Hamilton (03:22.352)
You
Brian Munroe (03:35.992)
They either change completely or they adjust their methods to something that's a little bit more maybe modern or making a little bit more sense for the business or where the business is at today.
Jen Hamilton (03:47.472)
I appreciate your approach of seeing where they're at and not taking it and saying that's a bad idea. think a lot of people who meet that kind of villain, that resistance, just try to push away instead of saying, okay, I can appreciate it. Let's add to it. Let's try something new and partnering with them in what new could look like. I also like to think if you are listening to this and you're like, hmm, I kind of like the old way.
Brian Munroe (04:07.992)
Yep, absolutely.
Jen Hamilton (04:14.586)
Well, it wouldn't be very effective getting to where you wanna go these days if you're still riding a horse. I mean, sometimes we just have to move on. If you said no to the car, you were in trouble.
Brian Munroe (04:22.68)
That's a great point. That's a great point. And even just the people that say, I really still like the old way, what I'll do is I'll start asking them a little bit of questions about what does the future look like for them? What does your organization look three to five years down the road? And I get them really into that visual headspace and ideating and all that great stuff. And then you say, is the old way going to actually still work?
Is the old way still gonna serve? you know, even down to like their leadership team and things like that. Is this leadership team today, the people that you still see leading in that future vision of the organization you have, do they need some training? Do they need some coaching to get up to that? So usually you can break out of the old way of thinking when you start doing the futuristic thinking.
Jen Hamilton (05:14.342)
I like that. Do you think that works with team, not just the leadership to have them see where their future is within the organization too?
Brian Munroe (05:22.944)
absolutely. Yeah, I do. I still do a lot of training on with project managers and program managers. And one of the things that I stress is that if you're going to be a good programmer project leader with a team, they need to see the vision. They need to see it just like everybody else. Just because maybe they're focused on one particular area or a set of tasks doesn't mean that you rob them of that vision of where things are going to go so that they can start to see in their mind.
put together, well, this is the piece that I do, but this is how it works with the project. This is how it affects the program. This affects the department and the organization as a whole. So yeah, absolutely.
Jen Hamilton (06:02.85)
that vision together with their role and their impact in it is it's very attractive for people to see themselves in that so I can appreciate how powerful that is to move them into thinking differently. Absolutely.
Brian Munroe (06:14.646)
Yeah, and it motivates them. It's like, I see it. I get it. wanted so I want to do good. Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (06:19.546)
I love it. I love it. And it makes them feel important, which is part of our human needs. need to be seen. We need to be understood and we need to be valued. It sounds like you do a great job of that when you're coaching and training them. How awesome. Okay. Well, that is not our topic today, but it sounds like it's a really good topic we could go into. Our topic today is really around, and you were the first person I heard this term. It's really around AI sprawl.
Brian Munroe (06:29.262)
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Brian Munroe (06:35.822)
I'm
you
Jen Hamilton (06:47.638)
And this is now happening as people are starting to catch on, right? This is the new thing. This is the, my gosh, you know, let's drive a car instead of just Google search, right? And instead of the horse that is Google search, let's use AI. can get answers faster and better. But there is something that is happening around organizations called AI sprawl. So let's start with you explaining what this is.
Brian Munroe (07:12.62)
Yeah, AI sprawl, the best way that I can describe it is you're an organization. You're starting to embrace AI. You've kind of let that known throughout the organization. And therefore, what ends up happening is people within the organization, they take some of the things that they've been doing at home, maybe with AI. They bring it into the workplace. And you've got all these little pockets of people that are sampling an AI.
you know, an AI tool, maybe somebody over here is working with a large language model, someone over here is working with some agentic AI, but they're sampling all these tools, yet nobody's talking about it amongst themselves. So probably one of the classic examples I can give is I've been working with a healthcare firm for most of last year, and only to find out that at one point, across their multiple clinics, there was about three different physicians that were testing three different
transcription AI services. It's like, OK, time out. This is an example of AI sprawl. so that basically highlights what happens. It's just sprawling in there to the point where you lose control. You can't figure out, which agent are we using? We're paying for this one, paying for this one, paying for this one. And all three of them are doing the same thing.
Jen Hamilton (08:32.986)
can hear some of the risks around that. For one, you're exploding your expenses when you don't need to, because you've got more than one tool doing the same thing. Tell me what else can break in a business or cause problems in the business if they ignore AI sprawl.
Brian Munroe (08:48.494)
Well, if they ignore AI sprawl because the businesses and the organization that are kind of ignoring it, obviously they're ignoring it because they don't have anything in place like an AI steering committee, like something that's going to evaluate the product. And when that is missing, you don't necessarily know, has that person actually read through all the terms and conditions and the usage of the data that they're putting into that AI. So with the work we do in healthcare, as an example,
We have to be super sensitive about where AI is used for compliance reasons and things like that. Well, if you've got three or four or five physicians, as an example, and they're out testing some things, have they really spent time doing the due diligence to make sure that what's going into the AIs is protected? That's probably one of the bigger risks besides just spending too much money on AI agents that are doing exactly the same thing.
Jen Hamilton (09:45.638)
There's another risk. I'll start off with this, but I want to hear what you think too, which is one of the things with all kinds of companies is having different processes for the same thing. We lose that consistency and efficiency. Maybe you can speak to how AI sprawl actually can impact their way of actually being consistent and efficient.
Brian Munroe (09:50.563)
Yeah.
Brian Munroe (10:07.854)
Well, yeah, because if you've got multiple locations and multiple departments all testing out AI, you have a tendency sometimes to decide, well, it's going to be easier for me to change our process and our workflow to match this particular tool. Well, now all of a sudden, a defined process, a defined workflow, something that there's an SOP written again, something that the organization has been using for 10 years has four different flavors.
that are working across different departments because they've decided to tweak that to match a tool that nobody else really knows that they're using those tools. So you've got that.
Jen Hamilton (10:49.222)
also hear in that, thank you for sharing, I also hear in that silo-ism, I don't know if that's really a word, that it's almost causing more people to work in their own world because they're like, I got my tool, we're doing it our way. And that takes away and erodes that teamwork and cross-team collaboration.
Brian Munroe (11:01.335)
Alright.
Brian Munroe (11:09.442)
Yeah, that's exactly it because all of a sudden now I don't necessarily need to go out and talk to other people or communicate with other people. I've just, you know, just me and my AI and away we go and we're just doing our thing and leave us alone. Yeah, do see that the siloism, that's a great way to explain it. Where, you know, we've been trying to break down silos for years and years. AI has a potential to build it back up again if it's you know, brought into an organization in a collaborative manner.
Jen Hamilton (11:23.418)
Yeah, thank you, sir.
Jen Hamilton (11:39.878)
And it can pit people against each other unintentionally because, my AI said this, well, mine said this, and it's doing that, and I'm doing this. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, how can we bring the teams together? How can we work together? It's challenging enough, and AI is making it feel like you're being more productive, but you actually could be pulling away from the efficiency and productivity as a team.
Brian Munroe (12:06.006)
Yeah, yeah, pulling away from the connections too. Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (12:09.542)
True, true. Well, let's actually dig into that a little bit. You had talked about that villain of not having smart villains. mean, smart humans, not smart villains. Smart humans do human things. Let's talk a little bit about that as it relates to AI or any sort of technology.
Brian Munroe (12:17.166)
Yeah.
Brian Munroe (12:26.926)
Yeah, well, that's kind of come from my work with AIs that I realized that there's a lot of great things that AI is good for, like repetitive tasking, like as I'll tell people, the data clicking stuff, the click this data, cut, paste, end to end over here, all of that stuff, AI is just poised to take care of that and take that off our plates. I liken it to the person that would go into an organization and for the first,
Maybe they're in the finance department. So the first two hours of their day is scouring an inbox, looking for all of the emails that came in with attached invoices overnight. They have to open the invoice, grab the data from it, enter it into their system. They do that every day for the first two hours. Well, what if AI was doing that and now this person for the first two hours of their day gets to take the top 10 clients of the day and gets to reach out and have a connection with those clients just to see how
customer services to see how they're doing. So now you get them back doing that smart human things that we do, like talking like connecting with people, and let the bots take care of the clickety clickety click click stuff.
Jen Hamilton (13:35.718)
So powerful and so important. think that one of the things that is happening in AI is certainly making it much more client experience or customer experience pulled away from the human. Your example you just gave is like, no, no, no, let's have it do the hum- the things that are mundane and data entry and where a human wouldn't even notice or care and put that human back into that connection. So I love that you're adding.
to that role, some parts of the role that often gets missed because they're so busy in the mundane. It's truly opening up a whole new way to do that. What are some other ways that it can free up humans to do human things?
Brian Munroe (14:21.262)
Well, one of the, you know, a couple of the workflows and use cases that we look at, I have what's called human in the loop as far as this workflow. And so let me get, let me give you, let me give you a healthcare example. So a lot of times clinic clinics are they're seeing patients.
And when they're done, there needs to be some charting and some billing that takes place. And depending on the insurance program that that particular client has, there's billing codes that go in and get entered. And then that's sent off to the payer to pay that. Parallel to that activity, the physician or whoever it was that took care of that person, they're then paid. So the clinical organization has money going back out to the physician for the services done. They're waiting for their money to come back from the payer.
there was a billing error. There's a coding error. And so what ends up happening is these clinics are chasing tens, if not hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars a year in what they call claims denial. Well, the AI has stepped in and really taken over. You can put a claims denial agent in place now that will suggest, based on these services, based on this payer, these are the codes you use.
Make sure you use these codes, not these codes, because the last time you use those ones, you got a denial, and prepare it to send off. But I still like to add that human in the loop component, where the human just takes one last verification look before basically the send button is clicked. And this then allows that human, instead of being, again, pushing data, making sure that they're entering codes and numbers and all of that stuff.
they're now focusing on more on quality control in this example. So that's one spot. And then again, in marketing side of things, content creation, especially in social media, we know that AI can create amazing content and the AI agents can push the content out to our LinkedIn, our Instagrams, our Facebooks as much as we want. I still say there should be some kind of human in the loop to do the final evaluation. But even in the beginning steps,
Brian Munroe (16:31.406)
There needs to be a human there to kind of ideate the creativity and the vision that's going to go into a particular ad. So it's almost like I come up with the idea, the AI sketches it, I then finalize it and then send it. So it's that tandem.
Jen Hamilton (16:38.64)
Mmm.
Jen Hamilton (16:48.174)
I do think it's... Go ahead.
Brian Munroe (16:51.596)
Yeah, that human is still retaining that creative component to it. And again, just the tactical or the logistical push, send, stuff like that, the AI takes care of
Jen Hamilton (17:02.982)
I like what you're saying on that back into that quality control because part of that quality is the human experience. What is that other person on the other side of this bill or this email or whatever it is, content, social media, anything, is their experience of it? How would I feel if I received it? And that's the piece that isn't always going to be picked up by AI. In fact, they're just going to be very robotic in
Brian Munroe (17:06.552)
Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (17:30.212)
And that's great, but we need to go back and add that human. I appreciate you say too, that there's the human connection before to the idea, bringing their ideas, making sure that the overall intention, the outcome that they're looking for is part of what's considered, whether again, a social media or a task, then let the AI do its magic where it is best, getting those manual pieces that can be fraught with errors, like you're saying the billing codes.
get that out of the hands of the humans that are going to potentially cause more problems and then they have to fix their problems by chasing the denials. And what can we do then to free them up to be more engaged with folks? I love the type, the bookends of humanity and with it. Very, very cool. Tom, I want to get into a few more examples. Going back to the overall idea.
Brian Munroe (18:16.77)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (18:27.32)
You had given a good example around AI sprawl within a client. Do you have other things where you could say maybe it's within a department or an overall organization? What are some other ways that clients have struggled? may not even be AI, it could just be technology in general. How did that happen? What happened? What started to fix it for them?
Brian Munroe (18:48.588)
Yeah, we're you you're starting to see a lot of because of AI people are paying attention to tools more and and the mistake that a lot of folks are making is they think that they can tool themselves out of a problem or a challenge. I just need to we just need the latest and greatest tool, you know, and that's, know, think about like a meat grinder, if you still put rotten meat in the front of it, you're getting rotten meat out the back of it, just because you can grind it up, do things faster, you know. So there's there's that and
Jen Hamilton (19:12.356)
Not good.
Brian Munroe (19:19.082)
Again, because of all of the stuff that's out there now, like every day there's a new tool coming out there. So people are so tempted just to latch onto this one and latch onto that one and try and apply it. And they're burning cash by trying all these different things. They're losing focus on what the real issues are. Like tooling is like oftentimes a bandaid. If I've got a symptom of something that's not
quite working right and I haven't done the root cause analysis on why that symptoms flaring up and I just apply a tool to it, I'm not taking away the underlying problem. And now with AI and with all of the advancements in the cloud-based services and that, there's so much out there that people are just grasping at what they think they can get. And within larger organizations, if there's no real control over that, you have multiple departments grasping at multiple tools.
You've got one department that's using one tool for their work management system. You got another one that's using another one. I have a client right now that basically has two departments using two completely different work management tools because somewhere down the line, someone decided to make a switch. Nobody knows why. So that's kind of that sprawl that happens.
Jen Hamilton (20:31.472)
Hmm. Hmm. Well.
What would you say for that client to help ratify this? If you start to see, my gosh, I have more than one of these things at play, what are some of the steps they can take to try to bring the team and the tools back together?
Brian Munroe (20:52.984)
Well, can take a look at if you're comparing two of them, tool A and tool B, well, how many people are actually using A? How many people are using B? What does the quality of the work in A and B look like? Because you might find that a lot of people are using one, but they're just kind of casually using it, whereas the ones using the other tool have dug in and they're using a lot of the features and it's giving them a lot of good data or good workflows or things like that. So I would just challenge them to say,
Jen Hamilton (20:57.222)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Munroe (21:22.818)
You know, what do you want your corporate standard to be? Pick one. Please, don't use two. If you move from one to the other, well, why did you move? Who made that decision? What were some of the factors involved in that? And are they even still relevant today? Because a lot of times, people will flip a tool, move a software, because of a feature that six months down the road, that feature now shows up in the new product. Or sorry, in their existing product.
And had they just stuck it out, it shows up.
Jen Hamilton (21:55.718)
That's a good point. I have clients who are like, can I have AI do this? Can I have AI do it? And what I'm encouraging them is that I'm thinking of a client that does recruiting and they're trying to find different, as you can imagine, they're trying to find a match between the candidate and the jobs that are out there, right? And so the software that they have is a little cumbersome, but the last time they asked of it,
how can I find things faster? Because they were trying to use a database to be like, I really want to know in this area where this specialty, like trying to do a much more detailed pull out of a database essentially. But I said, when was the last time you asked them about how to do the search? Because they were just said, it doesn't work. The search is limited. And they said two years ago, was like, well, guess what? A lot has happened in the last two years.
Brian Munroe (22:37.326)
Mm-hmm.
Jen Hamilton (22:52.164)
Before we go and try and work around an existing system, let's have you go back and challenge their help desk and say, hey, when I talked to you two years ago, you said you couldn't do it. Anything change, anything new coming on the horizon? Because we can hold out and wait. Like you said, if we know, gosh, that's in development. They're using AI to be able to find things much more dynamically. Great.
Brian Munroe (23:01.538)
Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (23:18.662)
Otherwise we would have spent all this time in the trees. What the team was like, can we just see what we can get AI to help do? I'm like, hold on. Let's, cause that's the thing. I'm seeing a lot of programs and things that was like, Oh, I didn't know you now have this AI component. paying attention to what you already have could answer those questions.
Brian Munroe (23:38.798)
Absolutely. And even the software companies that they don't mind telling you what's on their roadmap. And that one thing that you didn't think they had two years ago could be in development and could be almost ready to be released in the next three months. Whereas you would have spent six months retooling something new to move ahead. it's just digging in and finding out a little bit more about it.
Jen Hamilton (24:02.244)
Yes. I'm just curious if an organization can't tackle this area, what's one thing they might start noticing or watch out for? So in other words, what are some of the symptoms if they're not really paying attention to this AI sprawl or technology sprawl?
Brian Munroe (24:20.43)
If they're not paying attention, going to all of a sudden see inconsistencies in deliverables. So the things that we normally produce may look different. There'll be human challenges, like team challenges, like team A and B will be talking about something that they should be doing exactly the same, yet they'll start to realize that they're not doing the same thing anymore because over here we're using one thing, over here we're using another.
the consistency is going to start to drop off. You'll start to notice a little bit about that. And then if you're in the IT department, I would hope that you would start to notice logins to software and stuff like that from an enterprise level. Say, hey, why all of a sudden do we have people using this app or logging into this app or spending time in this app? I hope that most organizations have that level of monitoring in place because of the fact that even when you use AI,
As an organization, you've decided we're going to go ahead with it, you still have to do it in a very smart manner. You still got to make sure that the compliance and the security and the checks and balances are all in place before you just dump all your intellectual property out online.
Jen Hamilton (25:34.886)
And you're up some good points and I'd to have you step back for a little bit and talk about what are some of the good practices that a small business or a growing business can have in place. So I heard you talk about your IT person keeping an eye on logins. That sounds like a good accountability to it. You mentioned something about like an AI committee. What are some of the other things that organizations can do to kind of catch this and keep on top of it?
Brian Munroe (26:01.058)
Well, I think for one, it starts at the very top. If you're the leader, CEO, founder, at the very, very top, let me tell you, AI is here to stay. It is growing. It is expanding. And as I explained to my 84-year-old father, who was trying to understand it, I said, Dad, this AI burst, this AI generation, I said, do you remember when the first battery-operated drill came out? He goes, yeah.
I said, now think of all the battery operated tools that are out there now and the different flavors. And I said, this is what AI is for folks like me. He goes, OK, I got it, So as an owner, you cannot decide that you're not going to learn this. You cannot just outsource it to the smart intern that just came into the company. Well, these are going to be my AI person. Because that person will go and take all the intellectual knowledge and that with them.
you have to basically understand it. So it has to be from the very top and then the culture of understanding, organizing it and keeping us safe and compliant that can also push down and permeate into the management levels. So committees, I think the committees are a great idea for any organization to start with. We're basically not gonna talk AI as a company unless this committee talks about it first. And the representation from the different departments in the committee,
Basically take a look, an intake form. Hey, I want to test this. I saw this ad on Instagram. And I think this app could really help us. I want to test it, submit it in, have the committee look at it. Take a look and say, this is why we can use it. This is why we can't use it. So I think it starts at the very top. Don't basically put your head in the sand if you're a leader and say, this AI thing's going to blow over. It's not. It's here.
Jen Hamilton (27:52.292)
It's well, no, it's here. It's already been here and you want, and even if you're not looking at it, your team is, which is part of that whole reason for this sprawl. One of the things I hear in all that you're saying is it boils down to what is your decision making process around approving some new process with or without AI? What are we doing to make sure this is something we approve or not approve of?
Brian Munroe (27:56.783)
absolutely.
Jen Hamilton (28:18.694)
And whether it's your committee, whether I would actually even have on that committee, the IT person, like have them be able to look at or someone who can see, oh wait, we might already have that. Just having it be a diverse, I love your idea of diverse members of the different departments, but include some of those administrative team members on that committee or as part of that decision so that they would have a view of who else might be using something similar or we might have something else similar to Paws.
before we run into a good idea realizing, we already had something like that.
Brian Munroe (28:53.058)
Yep, exactly. And it's also to look for the risk to like, you know, what's a great idea in one department could break something in another.
Jen Hamilton (29:00.666)
That is a really good point too.
Brian Munroe (29:02.05)
So that's the reason why you have that representation there is fantastic idea. But if you implement that over here, our workflow is going to suffer in these ways. So now what do we want to do? Do we still want to do that? Do want to change? At least now it's open. We all know. We've all heard it. We've all heard it. Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (29:17.2)
And it's collaborative, right? What I think too is really powerful when you're having those conversations, whether it's, I love your idea of an intake form or getting approval for it, but to step back and say, why? What is the case, the reason we need this? And that can help us look at maybe there's another way or to understand, well, I need this to be more efficient so that if someone else says that's gonna break me,
we can look at other ways to maybe still answer the same reason. And it's not about a no to you who wants to be more efficient. It's no to that solution and we can find a different one. Very cool. All right, let's start to move into what our listeners can do. What's like the first step that someone could do to take in the very next week to strengthen this area or maybe get control of their sprawl?
Brian Munroe (30:12.664)
So very first step is for control the sprawl is just see if you're in it to begin with. Take a look at your credit card statement. What are all the software licenses that you're paying for now and what do they do? So I have a running spreadsheet. These are all the products that I use. This is why I use it. Do I pay it annually, monthly? What email account do I use to log into it? All of that stuff is there and the cost. And so I'm always looking because sometimes,
I may be using a piece of software that is now a feature of one of the other ones, a newly released feature of one of the other ones I like, and I can eliminate one of them. So take an inventory on what you're doing. The second thing that I basically tell people to do is spend a few moments back in your creative side. When we were kids, an author I'm working with had
taught us this concept that when we were kids, we were all very, creative. And it's only as adults that we learn not to be so creative with all this stuff. Get back to creativeness again. Actually take a pen and paper and draw your process. Draw your workflow. Actually draw it. I go and I got a whiteboard. got the iPad. I'll draw it. Then ask yourself, where can I use AI? Or if I'm looking at a particular AI piece, an AI agent or software, will that
Jen Hamilton (31:26.949)
Yes.
Brian Munroe (31:37.804)
work in every step of this process I just thought. So I really have them start to do that. And a lot of my consultant work, it's like, you know what? We're going to spend some time drawing for a few minutes. So let's go.
Jen Hamilton (31:50.202)
the visual because that makes things more real and so it's getting stuck in your head. I would add to it, I'm inspired by your other conversation. Maybe you can also look at the process to say, where are we dragging our humans down and where can we have maybe technology replace it? And then where can we up level the human connection side of it as you look at that process?
Brian Munroe (31:53.059)
Yeah.
Brian Munroe (32:11.948)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if you took if you were to draw a process and then draw a line through and say that up, up tops the human component down below is the AI component. What are the tasks that are driven down with a test with tasks are elevated up? That's a great idea. Like, yeah.
Jen Hamilton (32:25.926)
combination of our brains. All right, Brian, now it's time to flip the mic so you get to ask me anything.
Brian Munroe (32:27.456)
There we go.
Brian Munroe (32:32.499)
yeah. In the work that we do, we go into organizations and we spend time with the leadership team. We're coaching, we're mentoring, we're that trusted advisor. But at the end of the day, I know myself, I know others in this industry, and I know probably you as well. I'd love to hear, how do you keep yourself from getting kind of
sucked into being that delivery resource. You're now the, you you're coming in as the superhero, as we've been talking about, and you've saved the day once. You know, yeah, the opening scene of the movie, Incredibles, where Mr. Incredible just says, you know, I wish that the world could just be saved for one day. Like I didn't have to save it again and again. How do you work around keeping delivery versus
Strategic Advisory Center.
Jen Hamilton (33:33.638)
That's a good question. One of the things that I feel when you end up in a fractional COO role, you often get there because you like getting into the weeds, creating a process, making the magic happen more in the detail area. Yet as we grow in our careers, we realize, okay, that is great, but you're being called to do more. You're being called to lead, or you're seeing where you can...
fix things that break instead of being the one who's doing the making, you're starting to fix the things. And so as you evolve, and I see this in a lot of fractal COs and even in my own career and being a fractal CO pretty much since it started, I saw myself evolving out of the desire to spend the time in the weeds and what helps me now and helped me see that there is a more fulfilling option.
is mentoring and training others. I love this concept of teaching others to fish. And if I'm in there doing the delivery, I am fishing. And one of the things that is the most rewarding to me is when I am working with a client, with a team member, and the light bulb goes off and they can go run with it. They can do the delivery. They can go, maybe even the leadership side. They can go.
and have a difficult conversation that they felt they couldn't before. When I see that light bulb goes off, as much as I get a nice little hit of excitement when I'm like, ooh, this process works great, I get a bigger hit when I see others having that experience, when their light bulb goes off, when they feel their impact, when they feel important. That helps keep me as a reminder of where I'm best at is empowering and leading and training.
others on my client's team to step into their next role, step into the evolution of that role and being able to bring their best self to what they're doing in their work and not be stuck in the middle, but helping them see, there's a whole nother way I can do this work or I can learn how to do something. So building their business acumen, building their skill set.
Jen Hamilton (35:50.082)
It's pretty rewarding. know you are an educator at heart just like me. You love to teach and see them. I bet you can feel that that light bulb moment is so rewarding.
Brian Munroe (36:00.814)
It is great, yeah. And also, I do have to be careful, that especially in the AI realm, that I don't decide to get into it. Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (36:11.29)
yeah, I find myself there sometimes and I will say there's value every once in a while. You just don't want to do it all the time. And usually I do it within my own business, but I'm doing my best to take my own medicine and to delegate and have others. Sometimes it's almost like having dessert, right? I just have been strategically thinking and leading and having challenging conversations all day. Give me something simple. And to us, the easy...
kind of sit on the couch, I could do this while I'm doing it, might be just getting into the data or creating something on an AI agent or creating a process. You're like, oh, okay, I just needed to do that. And then if you did it every day, you'd be like, okay, I'm done. That's enough. Give me something more challenging.
Brian Munroe (36:57.614)
Exactly. No, and I like the fact that you used the fish analogy too, because I use that one as well too when I explain to folks that I sometimes call of us a consulting training, consultive training organization, because yeah, we're teaching and mentoring growing as we work through these kind of thing, because you're absolutely right. Doing what we do, you have to be prepared that ultimately if you've done your job really well, you're
you basically work yourself out of a job. And you're on to you know, you need to be on to somebody else that needs saving kind of thing from the superhero perspective. You're you're saved. So I got to go chase down this other villain for this other person over here. Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (37:31.854)
Yes. Someone else has a villain they need to
Jen Hamilton (37:40.302)
Yeah, you know, Brian, I've never heard that before of training and consulting. That is actually one of the best definitions of what a fractional leader, fractional COO I consider as chief outcomes officer. That is what makes us different than traditional consulting or traditional training is they were in there doing it with you, but all along the way, your team and yourself, if you're the owner, are growing and learning and being better.
Brian Munroe (37:53.326)
Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (38:08.93)
all along the way. It's like learning through doing and it's better than just going to class and it's better than having a consultant just hand you a plan and you have to figure it out. It's the combination that I love the work that we do and the special place we fill within these organizations.
Brian Munroe (38:27.246)
I love it.
Jen Hamilton (38:29.04)
We're hooked. We're hooked.
Brian Munroe (38:30.858)
we are. Absolutely.
Jen Hamilton (38:33.91)
Well, so if you listeners are out there wondering where can I find one of these amazing chief outcomes officers or an operations consultant, someone who can really help you with this work, you can always come to Hamilton CO's. We're going to give you a great people. But if those listeners are like, gosh, I would love to know where I can meet Brian. How can I find him? What can you say is the best way to connect with you?
Brian Munroe (38:59.114)
Well, you know, we can can start with with LinkedIn as far as the LinkedIn name. It's I am Brian Monroe. So that's that's easy to remember. Our company, company, we're MTI Global Groups, mtiglobalgroup.com. So it's it's pretty I said to folks, that's pretty easy to to remember as well, too. And then my name takes me to my LinkedIn profile, Brian Monroe.com goes straight to the LinkedIn profile, because you got to keep it easy.
Jen Hamilton (39:09.168)
We'll put it in the links too.
Brian Munroe (39:28.81)
I keep it simple for simple for folks. So yeah, I I would love I just love chatting about this and this. I like hearing about the challenges that people are facing, give little ideas and that. And because there's a lot every day, we're talking to people that are just, hey, something's not right. And as I said at the very beginning, there are so many people out there, so many great business owners, great business leaders that are out there. And they're just
Jen Hamilton (39:32.293)
on this brand.
Brian Munroe (39:57.71)
grinding at it and they're trying to see their way through these challenges and through these systems and through these organization. And ultimately though what's end up happening is the anxiety and the stresses are going up. And while that's detrimental for a business, it's also detrimental for these people when they go home and they take that stuff home with them. And so that's one of the missions that I'm really on is if I can get to a leadership team and reduce the stress and anxiety by overcoming a few initial challenges.
Well, now when our anxiety and our stresses go down, our resourcefulness and our creativity goes up, and we start thinking of our ways that we can then expand and grow and make sure that that never happens again. So that's kind of my mission.
Jen Hamilton (40:41.87)
It is at the heart of it. We are impacting families. We're impacting individuals. It's that smart humans doing human things, including having the space to be able to not only do the things you love in your business, having that innovation, but also to go home at the end of the night and be really present and connected with the people in your life that mean the most to you. Beautiful mission. Thank you for sharing with us.
Brian Munroe (40:45.272)
Yeah.
Brian Munroe (40:59.47)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Munroe (41:03.466)
Absolutely. Yep. Thank you.
Jen Hamilton (41:07.33)
on all of these great ideas, but including your mission and Brian, we're gonna have to have you back. We've got much more I'm sure we can dig into and talk about.
Brian Munroe (41:14.678)
I'm sure we can come up with a dozen good topics. Thank you, Jen. Thank you.
Jen Hamilton (41:18.202)
Thanks for being here, Brian.
Jen Hamilton (41:24.966)
learning.
