1005 Sarah Deane:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP1005 – Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Sarah Deane

Melinda Wittstock: Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Sarah Deane: What happens is when you don’t actually have the capacity, but you show up and you perform anyway, basically the demand is greater than the energy your brain has to spend on it. It borrows, and that is essentially going to a loan shark, right? You get the energy you need in the moment, whether that’s from stress or adrenaline or it falls back to some autopilot, or it does what it needs to do for you to keep performing. But there is a tax that comes. You are borrowing and there is an interest. And if it doesn’t get paid back quickly, it accumulates. There’s an accumulated burden and you slip down that capacity continuum until there is no more borrowing and something happens.

Melinda Wittstock: Every founder knows this slippery slide: clear thinking inspiration at 9am, great in the 10am meeting, and by 2:30pm wondering what on earth you’re doing or overwhelmed by everything on your plate, and you’ll put out all the fires. Sarah Deane has a name for it and a number for it. Your brain runs one bank account, and when you show up to perform without the energy in it, you borrow from stress, adrenaline or autopilot, and the interest always comes due. Sarah is a former AI engineer who ran workplace experience for 320,000 people at HP, teaches at Stanford, and spent nearly a decade following the data until human energy could be measured. Today she shares the formula for sustainable high performance, why the wrong hire is worse than no hire, and why AI demands exactly the resource people are running lowest on.

Melinda Wittstock: Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I believe in paying it forward, so as a five-time serial entrepreneur, I started this podcast almost 10 years ago to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb. Please take a moment, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode, tell your friends and colleagues, and we appreciate it when you help this wisdom get discovered with a 5-star rating and review.

Melinda Wittstock: Today we meet an entrepreneur who quantified something the rest of us just feel. Sarah Deane is the CEO of MEvolution, a researcher, educator and author with a master’s in computer science and artificial intelligence, who led the worldwide employee workplace experience program at HP, teaches at Stanford Continuing Studies, and has been featured in Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. Her first company built data models for hard-to-measure human outcomes. In 2017 it started asking what a person needs to perform and feel their best through a day, followed the data through hundreds of people and years of iteration, and in 2021 she founded MEvolution to do only that. Her model: sustainable performance is capability times culture times capacity to execute. Knowing how, being allowed to, and having the cognitive and energetic resources to access the brain systems the job needs. Capacity sits on a continuum, and about 80 percent is the line between resilient and fragile.

Melinda Wittstock: We talk about the three kinds of founder Sarah sees, and why the difference between burning out and staying intact is not talent but whether the account is being paid into. We get into why the wrong hire is worse than no hire, how MEvolution’s EMQ assessment matches a person’s capacity to what a role will demand, the research showing a 4x lift in profit and performance when leaders are positively energized, and why AI, in the year Gallup first found more American workers struggling than thriving, needs humans who can still think. Plus, the math Sarah lives by: net capacity equals energy gains minus energy drains, accept reality first, and keep your own time every night, dishes or no dishes.

Melinda Wittstock: Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Sarah Deane.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock: Sarah, welcome to Wings.

Sarah Deane: Hi, Melinda. So good to be with you here today. Thanks for having me.

Melinda Wittstock: I’m excited to talk to you about this. And I want to start with the basics. What is sustainable high performance? I guess it’s different for different individuals, right? But when we’re thinking about it in the workplace, how would you define sustainable high performance?

Sarah Deane: Yeah. So it’s really interesting. Of course, there is lots of factors that are involved, right? But what we found in our journey, which we’re nearly a decade in now, is that sustainable performance comes down to 3 things. Think of it as capability times culture times capacity to execute. And in really simple terms, this is like capability is, do I know how to do what I need to do? Culture is, does the environment I’m in support me doing it? And capacity to execute is, do I actually have the cognitive and energetic resources to access the systems that I need to do it, right? So if you think about a growth mindset, you can ask many leaders, what’s a growth mindset? They know, they know what it is. They have the capability, they’ve learned the skills. Culturally, maybe they do lessons learned and they encourage failure. But if you don’t have the actual cognitive resources for those systems that put you in a state where growth mindset is accessible, then it can’t really happen.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah. Most entrepreneurs innately, either innately know this or they learn this because entrepreneurship makes you learn it. Like you can’t succeed without learning this. But when you come to hire people, I think a lot of entrepreneurs expect that their employees will, will have this. But most people don’t because they’re not taught it in school. There’s not really much cultural, like, the only cultural thing is just like work hard and do well.

Sarah Deane: Yeah, exactly. Just keep going until your capacity runs dry. And that’s pretty much what got us in this problem, right? The human indicators aren’t trending well for a reason.

Melinda Wittstock: Exactly. So, when it comes time to build like this part of giving people the resources that they need, that’s a huge topic because, you know, we get into company culture, we get into allowing people to fail, how to make sure it’s sort of a management issue of how to cultivate the circumstance in which people can, as you said, access this ability. Like, you sort of learn it as an individual, but you need the environment in which to put those skills to use.

Sarah Deane: Exactly. It’s so interrelated, right? Like, if you think about it, you can be in the best environment and be highly capable, but if your individual resources are not there, then you can’t perform. You can be with high capacity and high skill and be in an environment that is bad enough for long enough, and you are going to be drained out, right? So it’s like they all interrelate in such a fascinating way. And that’s part of the reason I love so much of what we do.

Melinda Wittstock: So what got you into this to begin with? You were a former global leader in employee workplace experience at HP. And I imagine that you learned a lot there that is informing your work today. But you, you’re also a computer science and artificial intelligence specialist. You teach at Stanford. So how did all these different things come together to spark the creation of a company that actually does this?

Sarah Deane: Yeah. So I’m only laughing because we absolutely did not plan to measure human capacity as a company. It was kind of a follow the data story, which is kind of the same as my whole career, honestly. So yes, I started out in AI over 20 years ago now. I’d done my master’s in AI and stayed in that for a while. And then I moved into workplace experience and then I started my first company and we’re creating data models because I wanted to change how we measured things, particularly for very nebulous goals, you know, try to quantify those really hard to measure human experience kind of outcomes. And then we started looking into what was needed to perform and feel your best throughout the day in 2017. And that journey was the start of where we got to today.

Sarah Deane: We kept going with it. We created data model, we used it with real people, and it took us years and years and years, but we ended up being able to map all these inputs and outputs that contribute to your level of capacity. And we found that, you know, capacity is on a continuum. So there are modifiable patterns that could push you up and you can get pushed down. And there’s a compounding effect both ways. And we just kept following the data until we got there and we saw the outcomes were really impactful, not in just one area. It was across many areas. When people started managing their capacity, they had better relationships.

Sarah Deane: They were more productive, they felt better, they slept better. Like there was all these other things happening that we realized it was kind of the underlying component, right? And so in 2021, we said, this has got to be our only thing because this is, it’s too impactful not to. And that’s when we started MEvolution. And we’ve just been researching and validating and building ever since. And for me personally, it’s, I’m a practitioner of everything just as much as it is a business. And for me, it’s been personally very, very, very life-changing.

Melinda Wittstock: So talk to me about the data. Where’s all the data coming from? Let’s just start there.

Sarah Deane: Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock: What is the data?

Sarah Deane: So my first company was a data model company, and I’d created a technique to create what I call ecosystem models. So it’s basically what’s the definition of the environment in which this goal is most naturally likely to manifest as a byproduct of this environment, right? And so that’s what we’ve done first. We started off with the question, what’s needed to perform and feel your best throughout the day? And we set off and got loads of, loads of data sources, you know, research, practitioner models, expert articles, all kinds of data sources. And that question took us everywhere from ancient wisdom traditions all the way through to the modern sciences. Really fascinating. Took us about a year and we got to the first model. And then we started using that with people and customers around the globe, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. And different patterns became clear and the data started clustering up.

Sarah Deane: And that’s when we got to, well, there’s a set of patterns that show someone is really managing their mental, emotional, physical energy really, really well. And what was interesting was it’s measured on a continuum, right? But you don’t have to be at 100%. Once people get to about 80%, it looks like they have enough energy reserves to really be resilient, keep going, handle a lot. Kind of the brain can effectively keep all their systems on, right, in tough moments, under pressure and over time. But that 80% could look different for you, and it could look different for me. what’s contributing and what I need to do to shift up. So there’s lots and lots of data.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. So, this podcast is very much focused on entrepreneurs and founders who are under tremendous pressure. I mean, the grit, the resilience, the relentless focus, and yet also being able to pivot.

Sarah Deane: Yeah. Many pivots.

Melinda Wittstock: Just like all the stuff that comes out of left field. So, let’s talk first about the entrepreneur in that circumstance because some folks just like you, I don’t know, like you get comfortable. I’m speaking for myself. You get comfortable with uncertainty. You get comfortable with change. Like all these things just become less of a crisis. 

Melinda Wittstock: I’ve seen entrepreneurs react in all kinds of different ways. So, what do we know about the entrepreneur and that sort of peak performance, being at your best performance through all the seasons of a business?

Sarah Deane: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, and you’re right, you know, how does our brain learn? It’s through experiences, right? It’s through experiences where we do something and we have a positive feedback loop or a negative feedback loop. And so, you know, you go through those and you’re learning each time. You’re like, okay, it’s kind of like having kids, right? You have your first one and you’re all this way, and then you have a second one. You’re like, yeah, that’s not that important, right? So it’s like, you know, you learn as you go to build those things, but they’re also— you can proactively build them. Now, what’s really interesting about entrepreneurs is that they tend to fall into 3 categories. One is, you know, they are steamrolling, they’re being successful and off they go. But honestly, they’re a little burnt out.

Sarah Deane: They get to a point and they’re just so burnt out and exhausted. And that’s the slip down the continuum. Then you’ve got the ones that are going and they could even be pretty successful on paper, but they’ve given up so much to be there that they get to a point where they feel like something’s missing. Something’s lacking, something’s— there’s a gap for them. And then you’ve got that third group that, you know, they’re going, they’re successful, and they’re feeling good and things are intact. And what happens is, as we slip down this continuum, if we are not managing our capacity well, and think of the day of the entrepreneur, right? You feel great after a meeting at 10 and by 2 you’re like, oh my God, what am I doing, right? If you’re not managing your capacity well, what ends up happening is think of it as like one bank account for your brain, right? It shows up somewhere. Whether that is a moment where you’re overly reactive, a poor decision, putting off your own self-care because you’re trying to fit everything in, a strained relationship.

Melinda Wittstock: It’s got—

Sarah Deane: the debt comes due somewhere. And so that’s why it’s so important for them to manage it because, yeah, they do get accustomed to it. But are you accustomed at a level where you are accumulating a deficit every single day? Because at some point that shows up, right? Or are you sustainable?

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah, I mean, 1,000+ episodes of this podcast interviewing female founders and like more often than not, there’s a story somewhere in the journey about burnout or like a health crisis or something, or something bad happens that makes an entrepreneur have to recalibrate at some point and change some things around. So like if they’re not aware of it, life has a funny way of making you aware of it.

Sarah Deane: Very true. And that’s kind of what we found found to be the case, right? So as I said, capacity is on that continuum. What happens is when you don’t actually have the capacity but you show up and you perform anyway, basically the demand is greater than the energy your brain has to spend on it. It borrows, and that is essentially going to a loan shark, right? You get the energy you need in the moment, whether that’s from stress or adrenaline or it falls back to some autopilot, or it does what it needs to do for you to keep performing. But there is a tax that comes. You are borrowing and there is an interest. And if it doesn’t get paid back quickly, it accumulates. There’s an accumulated burden and you slip down that capacity continuum until there is no more borrowing and something happens.

Sarah Deane: And that is normally the point. People don’t really manage their capacity proactively. They don’t really, really notice it because they keep performing and then they notice it because they— your brain can’t borrow anymore, right? You notice it because it becomes visible enough. And that is what we are hoping to change, you know, active management so that we don’t have to slip down into that point. But it doesn’t surprise me that you say that because so many people sit in kind of the middle of the continuum. And that is very functional, can even feel good, can be very high performing. But it’s a fragile state. There’s not enough reserves.

Sarah Deane: So that slow burn just keeps coming until it shows up in life, right?

Melinda Wittstock: Well, it’s especially true for women as well. Like, I, you know, being, being the type of person that launched a business when my daughter was 6 weeks old. And like, I managed to like grow the company and like deal, you know, and, and be a mom and like do all these things. But like, I don’t know, like a year in, I was exhausted, and I, I had to recalibrate. But, like, I did it, you know?

Sarah Deane: Mm-hmm.

Melinda Wittstock: So, so women, we, we can sometimes get spread too thin.

Sarah Deane: Mm-hmm.

Melinda Wittstock: I think society has taught us to want to please all people all the time. We, we’ve got to look good. We’ve got to, like, you know, we’re growing a business. We’ve got a, you know, partner. You know, husband or a wife, we’ve got kids, we’ve got friends, we’ve got all these different competing pressures, and we’re less linear than men, right? So when you add all of that to the mix, it becomes a slightly different question for women. And I’m curious whether your data shows a difference in terms of the, you know, women being at their peak performance and men being at their peak performance. Is there any real difference, or is it mostly the same?

Sarah Deane: So it’s interesting. So the data model holds across all human experiences and human conditions. So the thresholds are the same for everyone. However, the different patterns— there’s over 100 interrelated patterns that influence our capacity on a daily basis, right? And so the patterns and how they show up and their intensity, that can change as well. So there are some patterns that tend to show up more in different ways for women. And some for men. But it is also very individual. It’s very individual.

Sarah Deane: Your mix is going to be different to my mix for what can change our banks. But there are some overarching themes, and I think it does come from a lot of the times just carrying a lot across the board everywhere, right? Like, life doesn’t stop because, you know, you’ve got a cold, or, you know, if your kid’s got a cold and you’ve got a cold, you’ve still got to show up. right? And do things. So life doesn’t stop for all these bumps along the way, and there’s all these things to tend to, care for, whether that’s like you said, children, partners, aging parents. It tends to fall on the shoulders, right? It tends to fall on the shoulders of the woman. So there’s so many more demands than maybe the capacity to handle them, and that tax can accumulate over those because it’s just not mathematically possible. No matter how hard we want to give 100% to every single role, it’s just not Possible, right? And so we have to recalibrate the expectations.

Melinda Wittstock: Right, there are trade-offs. There was a certain point where I decided, okay, so the house was not going to look great, you know, and just be okay with it.

Sarah Deane: I mean, really, is the world going to crumble? No, right? Like, I, you know, it is what we have to make the choices, right? We have to make the choices. Which ones really matter? Which ones are really urgent? Which one actually has an impact? Or is it like the stories that we’re telling ourselves? in our own head, right? And when to lean on support and take the support, right? And when to say, no, sorry, I just can’t do that, right? And that’s okay too.

Melinda Wittstock: Well, this is an interesting pivot into how an entrepreneur manages a team and makes sure that their team members are operating at their best capacity, right? Because that’s what’s gonna make the company succeed ultimately. So in that phase of going from like, okay, it’s like your idea, it’s a thing on paper, it’s just you to begin with, or maybe a co-founder. And then there’s maybe a couple of other people, like anyone you can get persuaded to do anything for you. And then, you know, and then you have some money, and then you’re hiring, right? And, and a lot of entrepreneurs have a hard time there delegating. Okay, so say we get past that, but also like hiring people and setting the right expectations, creating the culture, all of that. comes from sort of the top in a way, right? Like you set the tone. So I think a lot of folks go wrong there, both men and women. It’s really a specific skill to be able to create this great culture.

Melinda Wittstock: And sometimes it requires going slower to ultimately going faster. And that’s something that impatient entrepreneurs sort of sometimes skip over, right? But ultimately, you’re going to make it, I assume, easier on yourself as the founder if you have invested the time and the thought and used your data, for instance, or every tool available to you to create the circumstances where your employees can flourish.

Sarah Deane: Yeah. And we see that a lot too. You know, we’ve got some that move fast and they scale, scale, scale. And sometimes it’s like, hey, am I even ready for that level of scale? And the culture gets lost along the way, right? They, the initial few employees, they’ve got high access to the person that started the company. And then you fast forward and that access goes and the culture takes a shift. But I mean, whether I’ve been working in a corporate or working my own company, honestly, the wrong hire is worse than having no hire at all.

Melinda Wittstock: Oh my goodness. Oh, I can relate to that. And I’d like to say I learned it only once. I had to learn it a couple of times, right? Like different circumstances, right? In each case. But that’s so true. And even if you have someone who is not like catastrophically bad, but just kind of meh, that also has a real impact on your high performers.

Sarah Deane: Yeah. And especially those first few people, right? The work, the type of work, the hats you have to wear, it’s very different there. They have to be okay with several different things, like lots of gray, taking off one hat and putting on another one really quickly, like all kinds of things, especially those first few, right? Before you end up scaling bigger and having a little more structure in place and a little more Like they have to be okay with a lot of things and they have to have the capacity to meet it, right? And keep going with you because they’re also going to be such a critical part of keeping the culture intact as you grow even more, right? And so I think, yeah, I couldn’t agree more. It’s just sometimes it feels like, you know what, I’m overwhelmed, I’m exhausted, I’ve got so much to do, let me just hire. Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah. Like, let’s just like hire someone to do something and not really thinking about, okay, so what’s this person, what return is this because hiring is an investment, right? You’re investing in somebody and they need the tools. They need to be— well, first of all, they need to be the right person, but they also need the right tools and circumstance. So tell me a little bit about how your data helps with this. I mean, are there insights in there that can help people figure out at different stages of the growth of their company how to assess people for the right sort of flexibility, the right, at least the openness? To, you know, the openness to be open to personal growth, if you will, right?

Sarah Deane: Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock: Right? To what extent does your data provide insights for, say, the companies you work with to help them figure out the types of people, like the character, the The intrinsic abilities of people to be able to grow in a job, the type of people who actually do want to maximize their performance.

Sarah Deane: Exactly. The assessment is called EMQ, the Energy Management Question, and essentially it will place someone on the capacity continuum and then tell you the exact modifiable patterns that will give them more capacity. And so then what we do is we match that with the demands of the role. Right? Like, if this role requires that you are going to have to operate in the gray, have a growth mindset like every day, because there’s gonna be some beatdowns every day, like these things are not— these things are blocking your ability to access that state. And these things are the things you can work on. It’s a map that covers the full force of the human condition. So we can correlate different things like, does someone take accurate accountability? Where’s their locus of control at? Like, what is the likelihood that they are going to take something in one way or run with something in one way? And so, we can look at an awful lot of different aspects and then also correlate that to what that means from a relational energy standpoint.

Sarah Deane: So, their collaboration, the ideas they can bring to the table, how they are likely to respond in a situation. And then there’s another way to use the data, which is to say, well, What does that mean for how we work together as a team?

Melinda Wittstock: Oh, interesting.

Sarah Deane: Like, if you’ve got a set of people and they show high on the scale for certain things, well, that changes how we probably need to communicate with them, right? That changes how we need to support each other as a team. That changes some of the language. One of the interesting things that happened that we didn’t really plan for or expect was teams that do this together end up with like a common language to explain the blockers that they feel. together. They might show up differently in their lives, but they have this common language now and they started using it together. And some really great things come from that, right? Which we didn’t plan for, but we’ve seen it team after team after team. And they’ll say to us, you know, we had that conversation and we referred to this and it just all made sense and we were able to work through it. And so there’s a lot of good reason to do these types of things individually.

Sarah Deane: Yes, but also as a team, right? Because it shows up differently in people’s lives. Like expectations might show up differently in my life to your life, but we can have a conversation about it. and raise how we work around it with each other, how we understand it, how we communicate to each other about it. It’s just a lot more harmony, right? How do we achieve success together by remaining steady even in amongst all the uncertainty? Because that’s what capacity gives you. All the stuff still happens. The stresses are still there. The chaos is still there. But there is an underlying steadiness and calm.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. That is invaluable. Like, I just think I’m thinking about this, a company that actually masters that is just so much more likely not only to succeed, but it’s actually like a valuation accelerator.

Sarah Deane: Yeah, exactly right. Actually, you’re right because there was that research that came out from Kim Cameron and Emma Sappeler, and they found it was a 4x on profit and performance if your leaders were positively energized, right? And you can believe it. Right?

Melinda Wittstock: It’s obvious. I mean, if people are really happy in their jobs and they feel really self-fulfilled and they like are enjoying their work and they’re open to learning and all of that and everybody comes, you know, and there’s sort of a joy to it all, right? People are just going to do better work. You know, they’re invested in it and they’re going to enjoy their life. Like, this just seems like such a no-brainer and actually a really wonderful use case for AI. Like you’ve mentioned AI in the context of the data and helping you really understand all these patterns and have all these insights and such. So, a couple of questions on the theme of AI. When you’re working with your clients and you’re presenting sort of data to them, talk to me a little bit about what that process is like and how open they are to actually implementing the insights that you’ve unearthed.

Sarah Deane: Yeah. Normally speaking, they’re pretty open because they’re open enough to learn it in the first place. But then we give them the option, right? Hey, you can use the insights and go map it to your own solutions because many organizations have already invested in solutions for their employees, right? But now we can make sense of it and get prescriptive on what people can do based on their results, or they can use our own platform. And that’s fine. That’s great too, right? Because really it’s that precision that gets the fast outcomes. But we also talk to it about them in like, look, what are you trying to do? Like, look around at your employees. Is this— do you think they are going to be able to achieve that? And if they do, at what cost, right? So, you know, a lot of companies are focused on AI. Well, guess what? AI requires people to be high on the capacity continuum.

[PROMO CREDIT]

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Melinda Wittstock: And we’re back with Sarah Deane, CEO of MEvolution.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Sarah Deane: The very things that you want from them, sound judgment, high-quality thinking, orchestration, like all these things, They require your brain to actually have access to those systems, which means you have to be higher on the continuum for it. Otherwise, you don’t have access to it. So a world in which we accelerate with AI is demanding the very resource that people are running low on in the moment. In fact, this is the first year in Gallup’s tracking that American workers, we have more that are struggling than thriving. We have been dipping down for a long time. So fast forward a year from now, if you don’t make those changes, Are they, are your employees really gonna be able to do what you need them to do? You can trace almost any AI mishap back to a decision that someone made somewhere, right? And if it wasn’t consciously, like it was due to quality of thinking or rushing through, stressed, busy, missing a detail, you just, you have to raise quality of thinking as you accelerate AI. And that’s speaking as someone that started off as an AI engineer.

Melinda Wittstock: I’m thinking back to something I read about Jeff Bezos in the relatively early days of Amazon where he would make people write some sort of 3 to 4 page document, like no PowerPoints, but it had to be written and reasoned and like really had covered all the bases, like really thorough, right? And so, to an employee, that must have seemed like, oh my God, I can’t believe he’s making me write. But on the other hand, the quality of the thinking, like you would have had to have really thought it through before you even—

Sarah Deane: Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock: presented it, right? Yeah. So I don’t think too many companies do that, or if they do ask employees to do that kind of thing, to what extent is that even taken in?

Sarah Deane: Yeah, yeah, it becomes a checkbox item, right? Because the thing is, you can ask someone to do it, but if there’s a difference between doing something and what systems your brain actually has access to, right? Like, as you go down that continuum, it’s like you’re seeing the world in lower resolution. Your brain is operating in lower resolution. So Yeah, I can create a document, but would I actually have the capacity to do it well? And so we need both sides of the equation. Look, there’s pros and cons to that. But the biggest pro is what you said, like just slowing down and really thinking something through and thinking the connections through. And it doesn’t always take a bunch, right? Some of the worst decisions have been made, but they were not like, oh, an unexpected outcome. If you sat in a room with like a neuroscientist, a psychologist, and the other person, and said, hey, here’s what we’re planning to do, they would have probably come back with some feedback and said, if you do this, the likelihood is this is what will happen to the human. Like, it doesn’t have to take that much more, but you do have to have the capacity to access that level of thinking and even to think to, hey, here’s the people I should have a conversation with, right? And all of that takes capacity.

Melinda Wittstock: So, right, it does take capacity. And if you’re rushing through the day like that, the classic issue for entrepreneurs, are you working in your business or on your business?

Sarah Deane: Mm-hmm.

Melinda Wittstock: Right? Because if you’re all caught up in the minutiae, you’re really not going to be able to see a lot of these things. Just the awareness of what’s actually going on around you. So I’m curious what you think about the impact of AI. Like, there’s just, you know, for the past couple of years, as companies have been struggling to figure out how to implement it, how to train their employees on, like, AI tools, how to implement AI within their businesses, what their AI policies are, all these sorts of things. And the take-up has been patchy. And it’s been to varying levels of success or not. It’s been— I think a lot of employees find it a little bit alienating. Some people love it, like they’re just all up in Claude.

Sarah Deane: Right? Okay.

Melinda Wittstock: So, what have you found in terms of the impact of AI on capacity? Because on one hand, the narrative is, oh, it’s going to make us all be able to thrive because it’s going to take away all the busywork so we can really do the things that allow us to be at our most creative and all this stuff. Or we can be working for the machine, right? So, I mean, there’s a wide spectrum of views on this topic. Like, what are you seeing in your own data? In terms of companies adopting it and the impact on people? Who’s thriving? Who’s not? What do we need to do differently?

Sarah Deane: Yeah, we see so much. It’s such a big question. I feel like that could have been the whole— Or it could be the whole interview.

Melinda Wittstock: I know.

Sarah Deane: The whole chat, right? Because the thing is, it comes down to so many different components, right? Like, why is it even being used? Like, for what value creation? Right? Have they considered the ecosystem in which it’s being deployed into? It’s not just a thing that gets pushed out there. There’s so many touchpoints, and have they even thought about it, right? How are they treating adoption, right? Is it just like, hey, take this training, hey, experiment, and then they’re like, oh no, we don’t have the outcomes? Well, did any of that map to the actual business value creation you were trying to create, right? There’s so many elements to it. And the thing is, look, AI can absolutely give you time back. It can be used for tons of great stuff. But there are parameters around it, right? What can you use it for? What are you handing over to it versus where are you keeping the human in the loop? Like, all of these things need to be considered. And then you see the same trends again, right? We overestimate the technology sometimes, right? It performed really well here and, oh, we’re gonna go and do it for all of this, but it’s not quite ready yet, right?

Melinda Wittstock: Right.

Sarah Deane: For that level of primetime, or it done really well in this pilot. Yeah, but in the pilot you had really clean data, perfect conditions. Then you let it loose in the natural environment and guess what? It didn’t perform as well, right? And then also we’ve been here before, right? Yes, it’s faster and far-reaching and whatever. But we make the same mistakes with adoption all the time, right? And I’ve done worldwide employee experience. We make the same mistakes with adoption all the time with the way that we train, with the way that we measure, right? Take in the introduction to AI training. Oh, good, 80% done it. And then wondering why you’re not getting AIR or why the 2 things didn’t even link, right? So there’s so many questions to answer underneath that umbrella.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. How much of your business do you think is going to end up being focused on this exact question, right? Like where the human begins and ends and then the AI, you know, you know, like, sorry, let me, let me ask this again in a different way. So I can imagine your business being really pulled into this area because it’s the sort of existential question of our time, of the human and the AI and how these two, the human and the AI collaborate, is the way I like to think about it, right? Where does one begin and end, right? How to allow humans to flourish in a context where AI could replace them. How, when you mentioned the mistakes that people are making, Tell me how your business helps companies deal with these issues and get it right and avoid those mistakes in the adoption of AI.

Sarah Deane: Yeah, I mean, so the part that we are— there’s multiple parts to this, right? There’s like the cultural element, there’s your supporting infrastructures, there’s those things. But the part that we work in is, do your humans actually have the capacity to even access the quality of thinking that you need? Like, if you are relying on them for sound judgment and not reactive decision-making, like, where are they on the capacity continuum then? Because that is not something you could override. If your brain cannot access it, it cannot access it, right? And so we need to develop that in the people that are making decisions. In fact, it shows up in the whole AI lifecycle, right? If you are creating the AI, if you are using the AI, if you are trying to adopt it, if you’re making the strategic decisions, like, The quality of thinking needs to be there. Even if you’re someone that uses the AI, you still need to be able to have the judgment on that output.

Melinda Wittstock: Oh gosh, I think about that all the time because when I come into AI and such, I’ve got 6 companies behind me, an award-winning journalist career, right? And a very significant critical thinking capacity. So, and with a lot of knowledge, so I can collaborate with it and question it and push back. A younger person without that level of experience or knowledge, just even life experience, or who haven’t read as many thousands of books as I have, or whatever it is, right?

Sarah Deane: Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock: You’re starting from a different place. And so without the critical thinking skills, that’s the thing that Kind of, you know, it’s one thing to have a session with Claude where you’re able to, whether it’s Claude Code or Cowork or whatever, you know, whatever the context is, if you have the knowledge, say, as a software developer to say, oh no, that’s, that’s really crappy code, do better, right? Like if you don’t have that knowledge to begin with, it can be garbage in, garbage out, right?

Sarah Deane: Yeah. Which is the same rule that we learned in computer science over 20 years ago.

Melinda Wittstock: Exactly. It’s like, it’s still, it’s a tool.

Sarah Deane: It’s a technology. I’m not saying that it’s not, you know, faster and more far-reaching and has big impact, of course. But at the same time, like, it doesn’t exist without humans somewhere, right? Like, it doesn’t. Someone had to create it. Someone had to make some decisions. Someone had to set parameters. Someone had to— someone has to decide what to upload into it, right? Someone has to decide what to do with it. And if we offload all of those, I mean, people just stop making decisions and asking it what to do.

Sarah Deane: Like, that’s a bit concerning. It is. It is.

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah.

Sarah Deane: It’s great to get advice, but you’ve got to be accountable for your— the accountability can’t live in that piece of software, right? The accountability lives with the human that made the decision. And people say that, you know, they’re scared of AI, they’re scared of all this, they’re scared of that. It’s like, I get it. But are we really scared of AI? Because AI can’t do that much without a human involved. Or are we saying that we don’t trust the humans making the choices?

Melinda Wittstock: Right, right, right.

Sarah Deane: Like most things, they can’t do without, like, they can’t do much without a human making a decision, right? So the quality of that decision matters, right? The quality, I will tell you, when we used to be doing our algorithms and, you know, doing things, I would have to wait weeks for my test set to come back just to tweak my algorithm slightly, right? Right. We didn’t have the compute power back then. But, you know, and it used to be incredibly frustrating, but you know what it forced us to do? Really think about what we put into that algorithm.

Melinda Wittstock: Right.

Sarah Deane: You played it forward, you thought about it, you were like, I don’t want another test cycle. Let me think how this is going to play out. And I’m so grateful for that because the algorithm that we created for EMQ is highly complex. It is actually the craziest one I’ve ever worked on, but I’m so thankful to have had that quality of thinking behind it to understand how to put it together. Even in today’s day and age where things are fast and things are like, and it, like I said, it doesn’t have to take long, right? People are under this perceived urgency that just honestly, like, they’re like, well, I can’t possibly do that. It’s like, but really, really, 60 seconds, 5 minutes is making that much difference. Like, we work with some people in high-stakes environments. Sure, right? Sure, right? You’ve got your 60 seconds.

Sarah Deane: Here’s what you do. Um, but the majority of moments you can slow down a little. And the moment you give yourself even a small amount of capacity back, you give your brain at least a chance to go access some of those systems that it needs to make a good choice. Right?

Melinda Wittstock: Right. Well, this is, this is one of the things that I’ve learned along the way as an entrepreneur. My best decisions come when I’m not working, like when I’m not in front of the computer, like when I’m out walking my dog or sitting on the beach… 

Sarah Deane: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock: …Meditating. I don’t know, whatever I’m doing where you have that space to just let this pause because that’s where the inspiration comes. That’s where you have an idea like, oh, let’s try this. You know, it doesn’t come when you’re in the busy work.

Sarah Deane: Exactly. And that’s exactly right. You have capacity. So your brain’s not freaking out that you don’t have any and start switching systems off. It says, no, I’ve got, I’ve got capacity to spend. Let’s keep all the systems on. think clearly. Let’s join dots.

Sarah Deane: Let’s come up with ideas and see patterns. Right. And you can invite the same thing in your daily chaotic life. Right. Like everyone’s got chaos around them. We, like I said, we carry so much on so many levels and it doesn’t have to be hard to just think about injecting some capacity back into your day. Right. It just needs to be intentional.

Sarah Deane: Right.

Melinda Wittstock: I think people are going through something right now, though, in any time in history where there’s been such monumental change, like the uncertainty. But you’ve also got like a political situation that has people pretty freaked out. You’ve got, you know, you’ve got all kinds of strains, you know, fears, whether it’s climate or AI, all these sort of existential things. And people do seem a little like at their end of their rope. Like, it’s just a feeling. Like, I just— this— you just have this feeling. That feels pretty omnipresent. Yeah, at the moment.

Melinda Wittstock: And so, you know, you know, juggling all of that with your own personal, you know, optimization, I suppose, um, is an interesting one. It’s an interesting time right now.

Sarah Deane: Yeah, it’s— that’s, that’s exactly it, right? I mean, if— I mean, on every level, whether it’s you personally, your family, your community, your workplace, Your country, the world. Like, there are so many things to drain energy right now. A lot of it outside of our control, direct control, right? Yeah. And so many draining sources on a daily basis.

Melinda Wittstock: Oh, just social media. Yeah. If you want to burn out, just get all the— Oh yeah.

Sarah Deane: I’m not really that present. But like, because you know what? Like, look, you have to make choices how to to spend. And I will tell you, this journey in the last year and a half, we’ve dug really deeply into the science, the biology behind what we’re doing. And what we found is if you are in that loan sharking mode constantly and getting that tax, you increase your risk of cardiovascular disease, you accelerate the aging process. There is all these other outcomes. So it just— it’s just not worth it. It’s not worth wasting your precious, precious resource. Right? It’s just not worth it.

Sarah Deane: The outcomes are too great. Like, if you want to keep performing at the level you’re performing at and showing up, at some point you’re going to have to take care of that capacity, that bank account, right? We treat it like a bank account in our MEvolution world. You are going to have to do it. Like, if your actual bank account was running down and you saw it running down, at some point you stop and you say, oh my gosh, where— what can I stop spending on? I’m going to make these different choices in how I spend, right? Most of us would do that if we saw it just running down and going towards zero and going into the overdraft. But we don’t do that with our actual asset that actually funds everything that our mind and body does, right? We don’t do that with our energy. We just carry on letting it deplete going, oh, I’ll have a rest on this day, or I’m going to do all of these first and then I’ll rest. Well, that rest never really comes, right? Or I’m going to spend 3 hours worrying about this thing that I can’t change.

Melinda Wittstock: Why?

Sarah Deane: To what end?

Melinda Wittstock: So in terms of energy management, like managing your own energy personally, what do you suggest for people? Is there sort of a routine, you know, just creating quiet time for yourself? I mean, this is the obvious things like make sure you get exercise, don’t doom scroll, eat properly.

Melinda Wittstock: Tell me more about that, the, the energy management and like perhaps your own, uh, practice.

Sarah Deane: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s obviously a lot to it because there’s over 100 interrelated patterns, right? And your own pattern is different. But the biggest thing to remember is it’s like a formula, right? So your net capacity is your energy gains minus your energy drains. So you’ve got people that wake up, they meditate, they eat well, they got their 7 hours sleep, but they still end up in a depleted state because their daily life was draining enough that it just like overtook it, right?

Melinda Wittstock: Yeah.

Sarah Deane: And so that’s the key thing to remember. And the biggest source of a lot of drain is what’s going on in your mind. What are you thinking about? What are you actually thinking about? And is that moving you forward anywhere or is it just wasted energy? Misaligned expectations, biggest, a big source of drain, right? Big source of drain. And then so I always check in on that, like what’s the expectation here and does it match my perception of reality? Like just accept reality first. It doesn’t mean that you don’t care and you’re not going to strive to change something, but accept reality first so that the choices you make are very clear and they are built on absolute reality, right? And then, and yes, so time for yourself is very important every day. And I do do that every day without fail, even in the most chaotic time of my life where we had experienced multiple tragedies, multiple events all in the span of a few weeks. I kept in my Sarah time every single night without fail. And it did not matter if there were dishes in the sink and emails to write because they would still be there.

Sarah Deane: But what I knew that would do was pay back into the bank. So my next day I didn’t have to start quite so deep into the deficit. And that makes all the difference. Right. And it doesn’t have to be long, but you want to do something that isn’t stimulus. Right. So reading a good book is great if it lets you numb out a little bit, but not if it gets you thinking and worked up and like, even if it’s good and you enjoy it, you still want some time Where there’s not really so much stimulus, right? Um, so watching comedy or something, you know, listening to music or meditating.

Melinda Wittstock: I think everybody, everyone needs a dog. Seriously, like my dogs over the years have been that, like, like literally I’ll just get down on the floor with the golden retriever and like roll around. Yes, it’s amazingly helpful because there’s something about dogs that remind us to be in the present. Like if we can be more like dog, so you think of a dog and a dog’s just very just in, in the present moment, just happy just to be.

Sarah Deane: Yeah, just be. That’s the way to say it, right? Just be for a little bit. Just be. And it can feel really uncomfortable, especially like entrepreneurs. There’s always something to do, right? There’s always something to do. There always is. It’s your business, right? That same thing will be there in 20 minutes for you to do.

Melinda Wittstock: Right. Right.

Sarah Deane: And not much would have changed if you’d done it then or in 20 minutes. time, right? And that’s not to say that you don’t work hard and you don’t do it. No, all of those can be true, but you’re being smart about how you do it because your journey is gonna be a tough one and it’s gonna take time. I mean, we’ve been in this for nearly 10 years building, right? Learning, pivoting, reiterating, all to get to this point where we have a validated measure of this. We know it works. We know the results hold and scaling out just now. At nearly 10 years. So you’re in it for the long haul.

Sarah Deane: Most people, most people, you know, don’t have an immediate overnighter, right? Most entrepreneurs, right? There is going to be a depth to your journey. It’s gonna go up and down within a 24-hour cycle. Like, if you want to do that and not lose part of yourself or lose out in other areas of your life, then you’re gonna have to start getting to terms with where am I leaking energy? How am I optimizing my energy? How am I making sure I pay into that bank? And how am I investing in good relational energy? Right? Because that’s the way that you do that journey and feel good.

Melinda Wittstock: 100%. And this is the other reason why entrepreneurs need to have really good people around them, right?

Sarah Deane: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Your support network, so important.

Melinda Wittstock: It’s vital because if you have the wrong people on your team or you have the wrong investors or you have the wrong, you know what I mean? All that, right?

Sarah Deane: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Being able to embrace it and ask for it and not think like, oh, I asked for help, so people are gonna think less of me, right? Like vulnerability, honestly, it makes us completely limitless, right? Like, I’m not saying you air everything out all the time. It’s like, you know, you choose when asking for help is necessary and it would actually expand your capacity. And the other thing that I found really important is just knowing your personal core values.

Melinda Wittstock: Right.

Sarah Deane: So important as your guiding structure. It is so important when you have values conflict, your brain responds as if it’s fighting an internal war, like releases the cortisol. It’s so draining. It’s such a waste of energy. And just living your values, it means, you know, you can have a bad moment. But if you showed up in alignment to your values, you leave it feeling okay. The residue is not so bad, right?

Melinda Wittstock: Right.

Sarah Deane: So that’s the other really helpful part, I think, just steering you. And it helps you with choices too. Like you were saying, you know, right people, are they aligned with your values? Investors, are they aligned with your values or not? Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock: It’s so important. So as we start to wrap up, Sarah, I want to make sure that you describe your bit, like, who are your ideal clients? Who do you work with? You’ve got, it’s mostly B2B, um, but you do have, uh, a new B2C aspect of your business. So, so tell me a little bit about who you work with and, and, and, and how all of that works.

Sarah Deane: Yeah, so we work with, um, teams and organizations if they want to do this for their team. So we have We have the assessment that we could do for individuals or for group reports too, to really understand where the capacity is and what’s impacting it and what the opportunities are. And then we have a series of programming for B2B, and then we’re about to have our Explorer Pass go out. So basically, oftentimes people are like, okay, how do I get started? How do I start building some of this? And so we’re gonna have an Explorer Pass available to everyone. They can go in, they can spend 3 months just at their own pace exploring the skills that will help them build and sustain the capacity. There’ll be on-demand classes, there’ll be short 60-second videos, there’ll be worksheets you can download and keep. And just really for those people that are ready and wanting to, it will be there for them. So we’re really excited about that.

Sarah Deane: And we launch certifications soon as well for coaches and other people where this layer of data, this layer of intelligence would really help them. That precision would help them understand what’s going on for people so that we can get some acceleration here. Let’s, let’s go change these human trend lines that are just dipping awfully, right?

Melinda Wittstock: Amazing. And people can find you, of course, on LinkedIn. You’re Sarah Deane on LinkedIn, and they can go to your website, join the MEvolution. Yes, Instagram too, join the MEvolution. So I encourage everybody to check that out. And Sarah, I just wanted to thank you so much for all the amazing work you’re doing. I, I can’t wait to check it out myself. And, um, thank you for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Sarah Deane: Thank you so much for having me, Melinda. This has been fun. 

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock: Sarah Deane is a researcher, educator, author and founder advancing the science of human energy and performance. As CEO of MEvolution, she develops evidence-based systems that combine behavioral and cognitive science with artificial intelligence to help individuals and organizations measure, master and sustain peak human capacity.

Melinda Wittstock: Please subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode, and share with your friends and colleagues. We also appreciate it when you give the show a 5-star rating and share your reviews on Apple and Spotify—it helps more entrepreneurs like you find the secret sauce to support and grow their businesses.