Speaker 2 (00:00)
Jonas, welcome today on our Modern Comms podcast. Big pleasure to have you here. Came all the way to Berlin this morning. Maybe you can start off maybe doing a quick introduction, who you are, ⁓ what you currently do. And then we'll kick it off and learn a bit about internal comms, the technology aspect, how it's evolved. And also, Jonas will bring some extremely insightful case studies from some of your professional work.

Speaker 1 (00:05)
wedding.

Speaker 2 (00:29)
that I'm very much looking forward to. please, maybe you can give a quick intro.

Speaker 1 (00:33)
Thank you for inviting me to Berlin. I am Jonas and I have been working with internal companies I think all my career. So all the 20 years I've actually been a pro. I live in Copenhagen and I'm half Dane, half German. And I've been working in organizations like Danish Rail, Aalafruitz and Danske Bank.

big Danish bank, where I've been ⁓ running internet projects, digital workplace, ⁓ internal commons, heading up internal commons departments and so on. And since the last seven years, I think it is, I've been running my own consultancy and community, which is now called OnMute ⁓ for internal communication pros. Who would like to share knowledge and learn? ⁓

something about internal communications in Germany or in Denmark or Sweden.

Speaker 2 (01:30)
Okay, amazing. Unmute where the name come from.

Speaker 1 (01:34)
I mean, I like the name because OnMute says something about it, we should unmute our profession because sometimes we are a bit, you could say silent in the organization. So I think we deserve a bit more and we should do something to unmute ourselves. So it should not be understood as something where we should create a lot of noise, but we should just be more seen in the organization.

Speaker 2 (01:56)
Push forward. That's not very Danish. Not very Danish thing, ⁓

Speaker 1 (02:00)
That's true,

you've been there, right? Janteload, or the law of Jante, if someone knows. No, that's true. But actually, is from, the name is something that comes from Anton and Lara, who I do this community with, had the name in Germany. And we decided to move forward with this because I really like the name also. It was just...

Speaker 2 (02:03)
is

Speaker 1 (02:26)
I think it's a nice story about what we should be doing in Intel.

Speaker 2 (02:32)
By

profession you're an economist, I mean you went to Copenhagen Business School, you know, years of business brainwashing and then you went to a soft spot like communication. Is that an Did you choose that vocation with intent? What was this kind of thinking behind it?

Speaker 1 (02:48)
You could

actually say so because I thought that I was studying a strategy, organizational psychology and leadership. And I thought that I was now supposed to go out and do some strategy development and so on. when I became an executive assistant for Danish Rail, I thought that was my job. also, you know, working with the board and doing... ⁓

material for them and so on. But over time I figured out, I think there was one time especially where we were supposed to communicate a new strategy. So there was a new strategy that we helped develop and now we had to communicate it. And that was the, I would say that was the point where it kind of hit me that if you can't communicate the strategy, the strategy is not really important because then people don't get it, right?

And then we started working with how can we create a great story, a great narrative about the strategy, ⁓ simplify it, working with the executive team in terms of how to communicate it in a good way, how to be consistent in the way you communicate it, because we started out with like 50 slides, the classic one with a lot of numbers on it and so on. How can we actually manage to create a great story with a one pager that the CEO can, you know...

use all the time to strengthen the narrative about where we're heading.

Speaker 2 (04:09)
So you came from that very more analytical, do I deal with management start and then moved away and saw communication is a strategy for breakfast and deemed that important. How did the communication approach change material over that? Because we lived in a very different day back then.

Speaker 1 (04:20)
Say so.

I

think when I started in internal communications, it was actually basically a newspaper, if you could say so. ⁓ In Danish Rail, was, ⁓ you could say, I think there were 10 or 15 people who were working on creating this weekly newspaper that was being produced to the organization. So, naturally, I think it has evolved a lot since then. And you could say, in general, think we obviously still produce stuff.

But we are definitely also moving into the facilitation space where we need to facilitate a lot more. So I think that is becoming more more important to kind of rethink your role in terms of how can you facilitate communication instead of producing it.

Speaker 2 (05:16)
Has that role really changed because now we have mean front door intranets right now You have a train driver who has an app. Yeah, but the information is still the same It has it's still a newspaper character top-down. We inform you. Yeah

Speaker 1 (05:26)
I

think that's one of the sad things in interncoms right now, just to be honest, is that now we have all the opportunities, have all the channels, we have everything we need in order to create ⁓ better communication. the better communication is not about ⁓ us being better at communicating top-down, it's more about getting people to talk together, facilitating these conversations. ⁓

I had a presentation with someone called Howard Kreis who's UK based and he shared an analysis with us last year where he looked into what were the top five channels or he found some research of what were the top five channels for like 2008 and so on, 2009 and then compared to 10 years later or 13 years later it was pretty much the same, pretty much top down channels, everything.

So I think it comes back to the way we see internal comms, the way we define it. So we need to be better at kind of the limits to what's possible in internal communication.

Speaker 2 (06:33)
So you said that a lot of communicators right now, seem to be storytellers, right? Communicators. And they don't really have that sort of strategic, you what does the board care about? What does our shareholders care about? What do you think that is? Why are they cornered? Are they cornered?

Speaker 1 (06:50)
Yeah, think

first of all, ⁓ lot of the expectations for communicators is that we need to communicate something. That's the first thing, right? So that's our job to communicate. But I also think that there's an interesting, let's say, difference between being an external communicator and an internal communicator. It's not the same.

So external communicators, they obviously, you know, they have to communicate to the all the time and take day-to-day business and so on. But for internal communicators, it's a different job, right? It's not about informing all the time. It's also about, you know, listening to what's going on in the business, helping managers understand what's going on, helping them bring things to the table so that they can make...

the right decisions and so on. It's more about transformation, getting people to understand where we're heading and communicate in a relevant way. You do that by understanding the business.

Speaker 2 (07:46)
⁓ And do most communicators really understand their business? Do they have a seat at the table, at the board level? Do they really know what's going on? What's really driving top-down decision-making and what's the biggest issue right now on a given CEO's mind?

Speaker 1 (08:03)
So instead of saying that the communicators don't understand the business, I want to point the finger at myself. So every time you could say, every time I went out from the headquarter and visited dairies or dairiesides or trains and so on, I was always kind of, you could say, negatively surprised how little the stuff that I did, you know, communicating about the strategy and so on, actually meant to people.

who we're working with today.

Speaker 2 (08:34)
Okay, so mean like dairy, like, you know, producing milk, where for ala we are producing milk at the...

Speaker 1 (08:39)
So

I kind of you could say the conclusion was we were kind of over producing stuff because we're producing so much information so many things people wouldn't have either maybe they wouldn't find it relevant or maybe they would but they don't have any time to consume it. So I mean so what was the point so that was kind of my frustration point back then and I think that's the same today is that a lot of people they they feel that they have to do a lot of stuff and maybe the way they are rewarded the way they they they

they can, you could say, prove that they're doing something of value is by producing things. And I think that's where we need to kind of rethink our approach is that that's not necessarily where the value is. Even if the management team might think that this is where the value is, it's just more noise. And there was a very interesting story that came out ⁓ last, no, it's a couple of months ago, where from Swoop Analytics, where they looked into, I think it was...

kind of 20 plus intranets, SharePoint intranets, and they looked into how much content is actually being produced every week on these intranets. And they figured out that in order to read all the content that was being produced on average on these SharePoint intranets, people had to spend 23 hours reading it per week.

Speaker 2 (09:56)
a week.

Okay? And that is highly unrealistic.

Speaker 1 (09:59)
I would assume.

Speaker 2 (10:01)
So we're producing a lot as communicators, but very little gets read or even has an impact. You could even say you can have a wonderful career because your bosses are happy because you produce so much. You can have a wonderful career, get promoted, promoted, promoted. But actually the impact on organization revenue, people is nil. Is that something that you would undersign? How do we get out of this loop?

Speaker 1 (10:27)
Yeah, so I totally agree. That's something I say myself, is that you can have a wonderful career if you keep your stakeholders happy, but that doesn't mean that you create any impact. So that is one of the challenges. Also because if you are in this kind of situation where you have stakeholders that are happy with you, but you don't really feel that you create enough impact, then doing something else, that creates friction.

It means it creates conflict. then you would be more, you could say, reluctant to do that. Because why should you? Because people are happy with you. This is also the reason why I think a lot of change is not happening. If the narrative about internal comes, let's just assume there would be stakeholders who would be expecting you to deliver some top-down information.

communicating what they would like you to communicate and that's just fantastic. ⁓ That's fantastic for you, right? No, but you move.

Speaker 2 (11:29)
I don't move the needle.

Fair enough, but the organization's not moved, right? Yeah, that's true. So, you know, then now we add technology to this, we add AI to this. That makes it even easier to produce. So my immediate reflex is I produce even more. And we produce more bullshit that doesn't get read. And now we kind of enforce this negative loop. Is that true? ⁓

Speaker 1 (11:56)
If you're not really, you could say, reflective about how to use AI, would definitely think that could be the challenge, because it's so easy to create content right now. So we just add to the 23 hours a week, because it's so easy to do. And I think that is the first thing that's going to happen is that obviously we will try to create more with less effort. And then over time, we might think of, that really what we need?

what we need AI for. And then we might kind of figure out AI can actually help us maybe sort out what's relevant for you, what's relevant for you and so on. So we hopefully can reduce the noise in the organization instead. And that's at least what I hope for, that we will be able to do with AI. And also we can use AI to listen to what's going on in the organization so we can get these feedback loops as well. Because that's definitely also possible.

So, but I mean, it's again, as you say, it's about kind of rethinking the approach and take a step back and say, okay, if my role is internal communications, it's not, and you think it's about producing stuff, you might, you know, fall into the trap and thinking AI can help me produce more with less effort. But if you have another perspective, an internal comes to saying, how can I actually create the most impact, take a step back, think about what else can AI help me with?

So listening, would definitely say listening is one of the very important things you can do with AI.

Speaker 2 (13:26)
And now we're talking a lot about internal comms to produce impact on the organization. Is impact employee engagement? do we...companies think in either a revenues increase or cost go down because both of them drive profitability and in the classic sense, this is what a company does. How can corporate comms, especially internal comms, drive impact? How does this work?

Speaker 1 (13:51)
So I think employee engagement is a trap for us. if you think we can help the business best by creating engagement, we are kind of trapped because every time someone says engagement to me and I ask them what does it mean, I get different answers. So it can mean anything from likes, reads,

or retention or attrition or whatever we call it. So I get these different perspectives on what engagement is. So that doesn't really help us a lot. you could say engagement is an intermediary step towards something else. And we don't want to own this intermediary. We want to own or we would at least have some impact on, let's say, increased sales, attrition rates, or whatever it might be. So we need to be better at explaining how do we actually contribute to that.

Speaker 2 (14:41)
Okay, I think this is perfect moment. I would love to know maybe from your personal experience a concrete example where you as an internal communicator actually help drive sales or a real business impact which is not the intermediary bullshit KPI being engagement that nobody really can grasp.

Speaker 1 (14:57)
Yes, and I would like to share the example where I cannot take the full credit for it, but I can at least say this is an example of how you as internal communicator can help facilitating conversations that lead to something. So let's go to other foods where I was back in 2013 to 2018, and Yammer was a thing, now it's called Viva Engage, but actually,

What you would normally think as when you work with internal comms and you look into internal social media, what can you do about it? You kind of try to create this huge launch and what I always hear is that people want to share a lot of their stories. So internal comms will be sharing the same stories that they are sharing on the internet. That's it, To be a bit provocative. But what we figured out was that people can use this space to create small groups and share really important, insightful information.

So here we had the sales team in the UK, sales team in Denmark, who were sharing, for instance, pictures of sales displays. So instead of having a map with three or four pictures that was updated every month, they could actually have live pictures of sales displays and go to the store manager and say, look what your colleague in Aarhus is doing. Why won't you create the same sales display in Copenhagen? know, strawberries were on offer. Why don't you set

set the Matilda soft eyes on the side here to increase cross sales. That was another share. we just did that in all of us. Why don't we do that in Copenhagen and so on? And that was really convincing. And that can lead to increased sales, obviously. But that was not an internal comms effort as such, but it was, you could say, facilitated. Yeah, exactly. And that is the way I think we should think about when we talk about internal social media in general is how can we help these teams? ⁓

Speaker 2 (16:27)
in our product.

Speaker 1 (16:50)
understand that this is the real value of this kind of technology that if you can bring people together, talk about something that makes them better at work, makes them more ⁓ successful, that's when they're going to use it. They're not going to use it just because there's no more information. It's about, you know, what does it make for me? How can this help me in my everyday work? Then they're going to do it.

Speaker 2 (17:12)
So if you were to rethink or, you know, I'm thinking about this, then we understand internal comms.

as a channel for basically tackling business problems and bringing people together to tackle that more efficiently by a business partner. So why don't internal communicators make a map and say, you know, these are 20 levers to increase sales. These are 20 levers to bring cost downs. Now, how can I as an internal communicator help these people here? I help these people here. Yeah. Right. Is that not the natural logic?

Speaker 1 (17:43)
It would be. I mean, I would love to do that kind of exercise. think that we did these exercises in our latest sessions in Onnimut, where we did some business value mapping exercise. We tried to figure out what's the strategy, what's the problem that people have right now, the barriers. And then we came to the enablers and also the outcomes that we would like to see. And then we figured out, here are the business challenges.

Are there any enablers where we think that interim comes has kind of kind of stake in it where we can help and then we can link these things together

Speaker 2 (18:21)
Which, for example, from ALA, would you know which is the highest margin product of ALA?

Speaker 1 (18:27)
I can't remember if there's... I think my best guess right now would be something like Skua maybe. But I'm not sure if there's... It's many years since I've been there.

Speaker 2 (18:42)
What I'm asking from is, do you think internal communicators can actually know so much about their business that they could answer business critical questions that you might ask when you say I want to increase profitability? you think the average communicator has that sort of depth?

Speaker 1 (18:59)
No, I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (19:01)
But it would be important from what I understand to have that sort of business acumen to understand how I can use my profession in terms of comms to...

Speaker 1 (19:09)
So having this curiosity and also this, as you say, indirectly, this will to understand the business in its detail. So one of the things that people might think is crazy, which I also did sometimes, was to read through, let's say, customer service and so on, just to understand where are the problems in the business.

and how can internal incomes help them? For instance, is there a mismatch between, are people unhappy with the service that is being delivered by employees and why is that? Is it because they don't understand enough about our products or what is it? And then we can have a talk about and discussion about, can we do something? So now you're becoming a proactive internal incomes consultant, right? Because you can't...

Speaker 2 (19:56)
becoming a

consultant working in accidentally internal accounts. Yeah. And that also interesting role perspective is like what is my role and how do I understand my contribution? Yeah, true. Because it seems like you come from that sort of consulting background or advising boards, you know, working for, you know, C-level, kind of understanding this way of thinking and then becoming a communicator where most communicators are to our trained journalists, which have a different skill set just by default.

Speaker 1 (20:24)
completely true and that is also something where I sometimes have to be cautious because as you say I come from a background where I've been educated under the business school and then we have journalists who have educated in creating great stories and that is a different world so I naturally come with a different perspective on things.

Speaker 2 (20:45)
But

both 50-50 to the job, if we understand?

Speaker 1 (20:48)
But as I said before in the beginning that when I started out, internal comes with a newspaper. So I think it has also been dominated by journalists for a long time, for a decade maybe. And that has also created a strong narrative about what internal comes about. And then, you know, if we constantly kind of reinforce this narrative by creating more stories, by sharing KPIs about likes, reads and so on, we're just...

kind of reinforcing the narrative about what internal content

Speaker 2 (21:19)
about. Okay. I really like the example of Ala because it made a very concrete, you know, help sales through internal communications and providing the channels. Do you happen to have another ⁓ example where, you know, you or colleagues as an internal communications team really sort of drove, you know, business impact? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:38)
I mean, there are different smaller and bigger things. ⁓ if we go back to Danish Rail, now I'm going to sound like an old man, because it was back then when Facebook was just launched. I think Yammer was launched like three or four months before that. And we were thinking of we need something like that. We need something like that. And then we come back to internal social media again because we built a platform.

with a Danish startup and it was defined by, you know, you had batches. Now we would have tags, right? But we had batches and then we, the batches were aligned with our values and the strategy. And then we had some promotional batches which were topics we would like to discuss with people in the organization. And the whole idea was to reach people who were working in the trains. Exactly. So we wanted to listen what was going on out there.

Speaker 2 (22:30)
Go fund some stuff.

Speaker 1 (22:36)
And we succeeded in engaging, let's say, 30 % of the people in the front line staff, which some would argue that's not enough. actually, mean, it was 30%. So those who wanted to engage, they engaged. And they shared some interesting insights on what was going on, problems, success stories, and so on. And we could use that. So for instance, we addressed service, what's good service. ⁓

And we had some people sharing about how they deliver good service to the business. used that, took that, and amplified that in our other channels as such. Invited people in to share something. And even people were invited into the executive management to share some of their stories as well, to take part in executive meetings and so on.

Speaker 2 (23:23)
What do you think, what kind of impact drove that on the business?

Speaker 1 (23:26)
I think it enabled, for instance, the management team to listen more into what's going on in the business. And I think we managed to kind of become more focused on what's going on in the business rather than sharing our stories. We were sharing the people's stories instead and became more relevant to people. But I think in terms of real impact, that's not necessarily, you could say, you can't really say that this is a...

business impact example, But it's an example of how we can rethink our approach to internal communications. Another example was when we were working in, actually there was an intranet example where we developed a new global intranet and we tried to take the outside-in approach instead of the inside-out approach. So we tried to think of how can we create an intranet where people can spend as

as less time as possible. Because people don't want to get stuck on the internet, they just want to get something done on the internet. So we did actually create a top task internet where you focus on the top tasks that people have when they go to the internet. So instead of having this kind of classic navigation where you said, here we have the HR department, here we have the comms department, and then you click on this and, ah, hello, here's the welcome to the HR department site and so on. We developed this I need to navigation.

where we just focused on, you know, what do you need? I need to buy something. I need to register a vacation or whatever it is. All these different to-do's that we know people had and it worked fantastic. And I think we had ⁓ an ambition that people should get the task done within one minute. And we tested it and it worked out. So that definitely drove something for people in terms of... ⁓

know, saving time in terms of getting things done, which is, it's just boring administrative.

Speaker 2 (25:30)
Yeah, that just needs to be automated away as fast as possible.

Speaker 1 (25:33)
Yeah,

now we have chatbots.

Speaker 2 (25:35)
Now we have chatbots. Interesting. I think that's a very nice kind of way to my next question. if we now look at AI and internal comms, there's a discussion, will AI actually replace me as an internal communicator on my team? ⁓ Because I can do active listening very fast. I can do the data analysis part. I can understand my organization better. And I can map out different areas. And then I can have guided recommendations what to do.

and somebody needs to sit there and kind of steer that a bit. But I don't need five people. Do you think this is the future? Do you think you will have internal communication teams that are one-one at a multinational like OLAF?

Speaker 1 (26:20)
I think if the approach is that internal communicators, deliver value by creating content.

then that might be the case. But if you think of it as if you think of an internal communicator that can help the business understand what's going on, that can kind of orchestrate AI in a good way, design it in a good way, I think there's definitely room for more people. I think still, looking into where AI is right now, I'm not so concerned, but maybe let's see where we are in two or three years.

But I think we need to take a step behind and think of what's real value we create. So now we've been very focused on the output that we create. Obviously, looking into AI, the output is not the value we create. So what's happening before the output is created, that is what we create of value. And what is that? We need to think about what is it. It might be the business understanding, the context that we have.

So if we become strong, as you said before, business acumen, so understanding the business, if we are the best at understanding the business, gathering insights that we can give to the executive management about what people think what's going on right now, then we become more valuable, I would think. But if we are just creating output, that will be replaced by AI over time. Right now, we would still argue that AI content is not as good as what we can produce.

But in the end, if you have an executive looking at it and say that's 80 % or 90 % of what you can do and I pay you a full year salary compared to what is it, $20 a month for this kind of solution, that's a tough business case.

Speaker 2 (28:13)
Now, see, maybe you get promoted tomorrow to CEO of Lego ⁓ and you were tasked with staffing and internal communication teams. How would you staff a team nowadays with everything you've learned so far and what's your perspective on this ⁓ in terms of roles? What kind of people do you

Speaker 1 (28:32)
That's

a good question. I tend to ask the question to people who work with internal culture right now.

Speaker 2 (28:37)
You should

have the best blend after a flush.

Speaker 1 (28:41)
How many people can I...

Speaker 2 (28:44)
Well,

can, know, for now there's unlimited budget, but, you know.

Speaker 1 (28:50)
I think I would definitely have one who would understand what good content is, how to create good content. But it's not necessarily a journalist, something who understands multiple channels and so on, how they work. And then I need tech savvy people who understand a lot about AI and how that works in digital and in general.

Speaker 2 (29:16)
So engineers.

Speaker 1 (29:19)
I think it's more like a person who is kind of a hybrid between a tech savvy people and someone who understands something of communications as well. I need this person who understands both worlds. And what else would I need? I would definitely need ⁓ someone who is strategic in the way you approach communication.

and you approach stakeholders who understand the business and who can kind of rethink everything in terms of how can we use digital channels and how can we help people understand, help people achieve what they want in the business and get these things together. ⁓ But I don't, think, yeah, do I need, obviously I need communications people, but I need both sides, right? So I need...

I need someone who can understand both the tech side and the communication side. That's definitely something I would go for.

Speaker 2 (30:23)
Is this sort of like a trade exists in a good enough pace? Because I would argue that people really understand the tech side, but nerds. Most communicators are more of extrovert storytelling personalities, which in my mind is a conflict.

Speaker 1 (30:31)
No, think yes.

I

think it's a rare type right now, but I wish there were more. And actually, have sometimes, and it's not necessarily, you would say, a fantastic thing to say, but I've actually had some success in hiring people from the marketing space into internal communications, because they have this kind of understanding on how, know, also focusing on purpose.

how can we drive outcomes and so on and understanding how to use digital channels as such as a part of it. So that has been working well for me. Hiring people also from not from the internal income space but people who have different perspective on things and then they learn the internal income part as well.

Speaker 2 (31:27)
Yeah, okay. And for a setup like that to work, how do these people work together? If you say you have somebody who's extremely good at social media, like understanding at the end of the day, how to produce formats that people actually care about enough in an internal comm setting to actually watch. Because most people, they enjoy Instagram because it's highly polished.

extremely entertaining content. I go to my internet and I'm bored. Especially our generation now, it's like no chance I will ever read or consume this because it's just production value of what I'm used to. My private time is here. My production value of my internal comms is doesn't rank on the same scale. So is that correct? I understood you need somebody who like bridges this. It brings production value up a notch.

Speaker 1 (32:07)
No.

⁓ Yes, of course, that's definitely part of it. But you have to think about when to do what. So sometimes an instructional video or whatever it is might make a lot of sense depending on the situation. But in general, would say how to get people to work together as such is that you need to bring people together around an income strategy, obviously. What I would normally do would be to work with the business.

defining some overall topics that we would be focusing on that would be supporting the business in their strategy and what they want to achieve. And then we'd pin out focus areas and things to do. And based on that, we would figure out who collaborates on what. But you will not be the guy working with creating wheels or whatever it might be. You're doing it together with the team, focusing on the things that are important to the business based on what we agreed on with the executive management.

to you.

Speaker 2 (33:12)
And one thing that is at the moment very highly discussed is that whole personas of employees, right? And how to basically create communication assets in order to drive these people because you have very, very different people, right? mean, you know, normally people were thinking in terms of age differences or occupational differences, so very broad categories. Yeah. How do you think the persona of employees and how you think as a communicator of your target group has evolved over time?

Speaker 1 (33:41)
First of all, having multiple personas is better than having none. Because that's also a start. That's a start, actually. But yes, mean, the way you create these personas can be tricky, right? Because age doesn't necessarily have to mean a lot. Occupation doesn't have to mean a lot. So in general, I think they can be helpful, especially if you bring them alive with AI.

Speaker 2 (33:47)
So, the methods.

Speaker 1 (34:10)
can run simulations. I think over time we will see that personas will matter less because again back to AI you will get AI who can use a lot of insights to kind of personalize things in a better way in the future. What were you thinking?

Speaker 2 (34:27)
Hmm.

⁓ We had this discussion with lot of communicators and at the end of the day, ⁓ in an ideal world, you have different AI agents that emulate.

very closely different personas. So a grumpy old train driver who is ⁓ two days before retirement ⁓ sort of persona. If that actually is a sizable target group in an organization that is maybe quite old, that has a lot of change coming of new people, new employees needed because you know 10 % is retiring over the next five years. So these sort of like, you know, perspective.

and build agents that emulate and see actually, you can feed your communication assets to these agents. And they give you live feedback and see like, do I understand, do I care about this as a old grumpy train driver that retires next year and is nearly burned out. So building that sort of match between actually having agentic workforces that emulate that you can test your assets on in order to have sort of first feedback and actually see, does it resonate to what people click on this? Would that actually drive behavior? Yes or no? ⁓

to simulate work faults basically before launching. Because right now it's a bit of a hit and miss. There's five people sitting around the corner and say, I think this is very good, let's put it out there. And then you learn a bit from it and this feedback loop is either not data driven and or slow.

Speaker 1 (35:54)
And to be honest, think a lot of people, are so busy with doing their work is that once they've done this, they're already moving on to the next. So this kind of interest in did it actually perform well is not so big because we are so busy. But having this kind of help in terms of giving you some kind of insights ⁓ or advice on what would actually resonate with the audience would be extremely helpful.

Speaker 2 (36:20)
I

think there was a quite a lot of studies done on that active listening part, right? I know that actually I think it was at Danske Bank that they did a study on front line and asking front line staff to predict performance of Danske Bank. And it came out that they were more accurate actually than analysts because these people have a lot of tacit knowledge because they speak to consumers every day. They know before loan sales actually drop.

because they speak to these people on a daily basis and they get a sense quarter over quarter of the economy feel, know, people coming into my shop trying to get a loan for a house, how many of them are actually going through, et et before this information even ends up up the chain. So I think that whole notion of how can we use, and then, you know, that is just a process, this is a business process, how can you use AI to like speed this up, to get this information extracted, because I think that's quite interesting at least recently.

Speaker 1 (37:12)
That's

really interesting. I would really like to see that kind of insight because I'm really looking into listening right now and the value of listening.

Speaker 2 (37:20)
You can check out, I think it's Danske Bank on collective intelligence. There should be a paper on this.

Speaker 1 (37:25)
Danske Bank is a member in our community, so I have to...

Speaker 2 (37:27)
I

think it was some like Arena Hall in actually five six years ago But it was about crowd predictions and how they can help actually predict financial KPIs before any analyst and the accuracy level

Speaker 1 (37:41)
You're a huge argument for also engaging people in internal social media and dialing. Yeah, obviously. You're doing it for an obvious reason, to understand where you're heading as a business.

Speaker 2 (37:47)
Hello and so on. And doing this professionally.

Perfect, Jonas. I have one final question. What's the thing you've changed your mind about in last two years? Maybe there's some strong belief you held, especially when comes to communications, that you kind of are chucking out the window. Is there anything you can share? Three years. A recent development. mean, you have 20 years in the business, So you have a lot of experience. What's something that you maybe thought was valid?

Speaker 1 (38:11)
last two years. ⁓

Speaker 2 (38:22)
you back when you started, where you kind of come to the point now where you say, but like, it's something people believe, but I don't think so.

Speaker 1 (38:29)
I think it's, in general, let's say two things maybe, not the one thing. The first thing is what I learned over time is that you don't change things overnight. You change things when the opportunity is there. in order to change things when you get the opportunity, you already have to have things ready.

ideas ready to suggest when this opportunity occurs. So a lot of people who think they will be changing things by having the right strategies, purpose defined and so on and then we move along because first of all we need this and then we need this. It's just not going to work that way. So you have to be some kind of a pragmatic idealist if you want to change something. That's the one thing I've learned and I might have changed my mind about because I also came out

thinking that first we need the strategy, then we need this, and then we do all the right things that I've learned at school. But that's not the way it works in the real world. And the other thing is, I think I never thought that there would come a technology that could potentially completely take over what I'm doing right now in terms of analyzing stuff, producing stuff, and so on.

So this challenge of rethinking everything about what is it that you are offering to your clients, to people you work with, I think that's a huge challenge and a huge learning. I don't have the answer right now, still because it's constantly evolving. But we are right now in a situation where we are constantly forced to rethink what we are actually delivering of value to people.

And that is, think, I don't know if that's a learning, but I think it's something, if it's a learning, would say the learning is that I have to constantly learn more in terms of being relevant. And that is one of the biggest challenges I see that we are facing right

Speaker 2 (40:36)
Okay, I it's a ⁓ very honest perspective. Thank you very much for sharing that. I do share that as well. But yet, think quite a lot of people still are bit in denial. I speak to a lot of people and it feels like there is a certain number of deniers out there about that fact.

Speaker 1 (40:52)
And some people might even set up barriers and say this is not possible because it's illegal or whatever it is because they hope that it's not going to happen right. But there is a development out there that is going to happen that we need to think of, you know, how we cope with it. And that's one of the biggest challenges we face right now.

Speaker 2 (41:10)
Okay, Jonas, ⁓ thank you very much. Super good interview. Thank you very much for your contribution.

Speaker 1 (41:16)
⁓ inviting me again. Perfect.

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