Episode 66: “Navigating Change with a Mindshift Mindset” with Brian Solis, Author, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow

Matt: I'm Matt Swain, and you're listening to the "Reimagining Communications" podcast, where we discuss the opportunities and challenges facing companies on the road to optimizing their communications for the future. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Brian Solis, a digital anthropologist, futurist, nine-time best-selling author, keynote speaker, and head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow. Brian, thanks for joining me.

Brian: Thank you, Matt. Thank you for the invitation. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Matt: Certainly. And there's a lot in your bio that fascinates me. I'm not sure that my intro even did it justice but feel free to fill in any details about your background. But I'd also love to hear more about your current role leading global innovation at ServiceNow.

Brian: It is a dynamic role, to say the least. And it is an incredible company. I've been there for just about two years, and I joined under Bill McDermott's leadership, who's been there just over five years. And it's just incredible to see this 20-year-old company and how far it's come in those 20 years but also how far it's come in the last 5 years and then also how far it's come in the last 2 years in particular.

I joined as generative AI was really starting to take over the world. And to see the company transform into an AI-first business, an AI-first platform for business transformation, to extend its roots from ITSM and HR and all of its successful workflows into this business transformation story is incredible.

Sitting in the innovation office, it is nonstop opportunity. And there's two drivers for that. One is customers, executives, they need to know how to make decisions to maximize the opportunity with AI, to cut costs where necessary, to drive growth where possible. And if you think about all of the vendors out there, everyone has their story. But we often say that nobody has to lose for us to win. We just connect things across the organization to make work, work better.

And the other side of it is executives don't know what they don't know. Generative AI is pretty new to everyone. The mass consumerization of artificial intelligence and its evolutions from here on out open doors that haven't been knocked on before or even seen before.

So, this is an exciting opportunity where Dave Wright, for example, who's our chief innovation officer, we're building out a new innovation program this year to start looking into the unknown. How can we guide companies to cut costs, to scale, to automate? And how can we also, beyond efficiency, explore new horizons for effectiveness? How can we drive growth? How can we augment workers? How can we augment work to do the types of things they couldn't do before?

And then last but not least, in this incredible time we're living in, now 2025 is said to be the year of AI agents and the rise of the agentic enterprise. Now we're really starting to explore great opportunities for the known knowns and the unknowns to explore what the future of business could be. And so maybe you could tell in my enthusiasm, but this is a really exciting time to be in the innovation game.

Matt: Yeah, I love that. And I noticed that you have a tough travel schedule because you recently did a keynote address in Bali. So, again, sorry for the places that you have to go, but I did enjoy the commentary because you talked about the commentary around, I believe it was, you compete with AI. And I really liked listening to those insights and would love for you to share that with the listeners, expanding a bit on what that meant to you.

Brian: Yeah, I would love to take ownership for it, but I cannot. I was just a messenger for a good message. That is Dharmesh. He's the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. And he had posited a question to his followers. "You compete with AI." And it was in the spirit of just plugging into the zeitgeist that is, what is AI going to do for jobs? And his point was your natural response to that is, yeah, I know I compete with AI. I have to try to figure this out. I don't know what the skills I need are or what skills I should be looking at, what should I be thinking about. And he, kind of, came through again and said, "No, no. Read it again." You compete with AI, meaning that if you spend the time just even personally exploring these tools, getting comfortable with these tools, challenging yourself, and how to challenge these tools, his point is you compete with AI.

So, it kind of harkens back to that popular saying we've heard over the last two years that AI won't take your job but someone using AI will take your job. And so, the idea was go use this stuff. Be part of the solution. Be part of the new horizon. There is no playbook for this stuff. Even though there's a million people pushing courses and books about what to do with AI, that's going to change your life, yes, you can be that expert as well.

I'll give you an example, Matt. When I heard that, I thought, "You know what? As a former analyst, I used to have to track all of this stuff. It doesn't give me the excuse not to anymore." So, I forced myself to publish a newsletter called "AI Insights" so that way I could get my hands dirty, understand the trends and the tools, use them, and then report back at an executive level to say, "This is what it is, this is why it's important, and this is what it means to you as an executive." So, it keeps me in the game. And, you know, now, here we are, two years later, and I won't say I'm an expert, but I certainly have unlocked incredible things that I didn't know were possible, and that gives me confidence.

Matt: I love the accountability aspect of that, too, where you said, "I forced myself to publish this, and therefore I need new, relevant content for each issue, meaning I need to continue to learn."

Brian: Let's just be honest, though, Matt, it's not consistent. That's just because of the schedule but I'm sitting on five pieces that I have yet to publish. So, I'm ahead of the game.

Matt: All right. It’s a good start to 2025. I'd be curious, your take on customer experience. I know it's a topic near and dear to you and one that you've talked about in the past and one that's a familiar topic on this podcast as well. What are you seeing whether it's AI influencing the experience or other aspects of customer experience? How are companies doing? Where are they falling short?

Brian: Yeah. Actually, be right back. Let me get this. This was part two of a one-in-two book. This is called "X: The Experience When Business Meets Design." I have the other one, but it's too hard to get. And the other one's called "What's the Future of Business? Changing the Way That Businesses Create Experiences." And the reason I share that is this book came out in 2015, and here we are in 2025. And to me, it is still the quintessential book for customer experience because it doesn't matter about the technology trends. You have to start backwards from how you want someone to feel, what you want someone to think and remember, and what you want someone to do. Then the tools help you engage, scale, nurture, cultivate, etc., drive towards meaningful outcomes, building relationships.

And so, that part doesn't change, but we still can't seem to get that right. We really tend to put the technology first; we tend to put the measures first. And like any aspect of business, whether it's customer experience, customer service, employee experience, whether it's R&D, what we really need to do is think about what the measures we need to know, we need to have in a world where we know this is true, we know this is changing, we know this is important. So, with customers, we know their behaviors are changing. We know their expectations are changing. We know their use of technology is changing. But what doesn't change is that they want to feel important, they want to feel valued, and they want to have the best possible experience in the context in the moment that they're in.

So, for example, I wrote this two-part series for "Worth Magazine" recently that explored the convergence of the AI economy. We all know the attention economy, where we're glued to these things all day. And then this interesting post-COVID phenomenon called the introvert economy, which was when you're home for two years and you're laden in the technology all day, all night, you have things like TikTok vying for your attention. You have TikTok Shop. You have DoorDash, Uber Eats. You have Uber itself or Lyft. You have buy online pickup in store. You have these growing senses of conveniences that put you in control of your experience and what does that experience need to be. And then last but not least, when you also learn that one of the things that people learned over the last few years post-COVID is that not only do they want to be valued but they also want to align themselves with companies whose values are like theirs.

And I know we live in a highly politicized environment, and some people might say, "Oh, people's feelings," you know, whatever. The reality is as we each, in our own way, want to feel special. We want to surround ourselves with the people and the things and the environments that we have grown to value. And a lot of that has changed. I have done a lot of research over the last two years, in particular, in everything from luxury to homes to big purchases like automobiles. These things are coming into play in ways that you can't even imagine. But once you shed your, like, executive self and put your consumer self in that position, you recognize that you will align with a lot of these trends more than you realize. And I think that's the thing. You have to tap into the trends, tap into the subconscious at a human level, because that's the core of human-centered design. Because then whatever technology, whether it's AI, however you want to scale, whatever it is that you want to drive towards outcomes, then it's more meaningful, and it comes across that way.

Matt: I love it. So Broadridge is in the customer communications business, among other businesses. And we send seven billion communications annually on behalf of our clients. And that's statements, and bills, and confirmations, letters, other regulatory communications. I'd be curious your thoughts as a futurist and, thinking from a customer experience perspective, how the commentary you just shared applies to those communications experiences as well.

Brian: One of the things that we had experimented in the past, and by we, I mean me, myself, and I, I guess, were all different forms of understanding the mundane or the everyday type of comms that has to go out, the type of engagement that goes out. It doesn't mean it can't be meaningful; it doesn't mean it can't be human, can't be relatable.

So, for example, one of the experiments was if we knew some maintenance was going to happen in your area, if your particular customer of a service, whether it's cellular or cable, what have you, would proactive communications help in affected areas in a pleasant tone that's proactively, not apologetic, but just understanding that we're going to put you in an inconvenience, what could that do for the customer experience? And then also, could we divert potential inbounds? And everybody now knows this to be true. Like, this is a good practice.

And the other thing is if you think about DoorDash, DoorDash or Uber Eats, one of the things that they learned early on was people are inherently impatient and increasingly impatient. And so, when someone orders something and it's taking longer than they think it needs to take, the number one thing was to reach out to customer service and ask for, first, "Where's my meal?" And then they want a discount, or they want it to be completely free.

And the equivalent of that in the UX world... And I'm setting the stage for this because it's not always just about text, sometimes it's about imagery and visuals. UX, I say, is the new CX because everybody's digital-first. They put in the car tracker, kind of like the Domino's Pizza tracker, so you know where it is on its way to you. Even if it's late or taking longer, it actually would curb your desire to call customer service because at least you know it's going to be there.

And so just proactive form of communications is like life itself. The more proactive you are with communicating, especially bad news, the more ready you are to apologize or to use apologetic-like language ahead of something that's bad, the more often that people are willing to accept or forgive. And that is the important crux of what customer experience is about.

I often challenge people to describe to me what is CX. What is customer experience? And I'll get all kinds of stuff. You can imagine the types of answers you get. What was really interesting was when I was writing that book, I couldn't find one that wasn't jargony. I couldn't find a definition that wasn't... What's the right, like, nice way to put this? That wasn't self-interested, meaning, like, from the company perspective. CX was an inside-out thing.

So, I decided to take a crack at the definition. And customer experience is how someone feels in the moment that they're engaged with your organization, in that moment and every moment. To then take customer experience and then define the customer journey is just how someone feels when they're engaging with you and then how someone feels when they think about you.

And those things are emotional. And there's only two moments that a customer will remember – moments that absolutely are incredible, you will always remember those, and moments that suck. Everything else is absolutely forgettable. So, if I ask you, "What do you think of this company?" and it's a transactional relationship, you won't have an emotion either way, which is also not a good place to be.

So, the work that I've done in customer experience has always been to start with how you want someone to feel and then work backwards. So, even in something as simple as an email, a subject line, the first word in that email, the imagery in it, the colors, again, UX, a lot of these things will create magic in the mundane. And it's incredible. We don't normally approach it that way. In fact, in many ways we think about it as a cost center.

Matt: Right. I do want to talk about disruption, and its core to your latest book. I believe that this actually is the old jacket, and the new one says national bestseller now, so...

Brian: That's right, it does.

Matt: I don't have the new version. I got this before that.

Brian: Neither do I.

Matt: But congratulations. I think about in "Mindshift," you take aim at leaders and the importance of adaptation, trendspotting, pathfinding, cultivating innovation, and a number of other topics. There's great content in here. I'd just be interested. What are some of the highlights that you'd share to someone that hasn't had a chance to read it yet?

Brian: Oh, boy. All right. Well, first, thank you, Matt. Here's a fun fact. This book, I think, is 60,000 words. I turned in 160,000. And it was because I was really super passionate. It's my first book in five years. I took a break, but then I got inspired all over again because of what I saw happening during the COVID years. We saw years of digital transformation finally happen because it had to. You had to support remote work. You had to accelerate e-commerce. You had to accelerate things like buy online pickup and store curbside pickup.

And the thing that anyone who's ever worked with leadership will say is that there's never the right time to invest in something brand new. There are always a million reasons why you can't do something, and especially those who work in regulatory environments. But in reality, the world is changing, and it is exponentially changing.

You know, if you just look at the massive disruptions of COVID and the things that I'm studying as a digital anthropologist, like, what has happened to behavior afterwards, expectations, preferences? You know, here's a fun fact. Dinner reservations in New York shifted from 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., which is a big, big deal because people want to get home and watch Netflix, or people just want to be home.

We heard terms, for example, over the last several years from COVID then to generative AI and whatever's next. Say, Meta glasses, for example. Oh, these are just sunglasses with AI built in. Yeah, you just wait. They start to change behaviors, and then they start to change expectations. And then the next iteration of those glasses, you're going to see everybody wearing glasses at some point, and then they're gonna have augmented built into them. And this is just in the next maybe 18 months.

So, what you hear a lot is, "Oh, this is going to create a next normal or a new normal." And then what it ends up doing is just kind of... It's, like, elastic. It's, like, a rubber band. It just snaps. Okay, we got it. And we bring it back into the construct of how we make decisions, how we define success, etc., how we work.

The book was premised in the idea that, look, those are just some of the trends. There are tons of trends on the horizon, and they are not designed to go back to your business-as-usual construct. AI especially does not want you to just iterate using AI. For AI to thrive, it needs data. For data to power AI, it can't be siloed. For data not to be siloed, your operational construct has to change. You can't just maybe put everything in the cloud. I mean, we'll do that first. But what it's telling you to do is reimagine your business for an AI-first world, which will put intelligence at the beginning of things, which will then help you make better decisions now and for the long term, and essentially help you as a leader make decisions that are better for your stakeholders, better for your customers, better for your markets, that you're actually leading the way forward because you've looked forward, you've made sense of it, you decided what's going to be in the best interests of everybody, and you're going to move forward with those decisions rather than, "Okay, this happened. Now what?"

And that mindset shift, and hence the name "Mindshift," is a powerful opportunity for leaders to come from anywhere. It doesn't just have to be the CEO. It could be someone who circles the CEO's orbit. It could be someone like you and me, who are just passionate about something. And the book walks you through how to have an open mind, how to see things for what they are rather than dismiss them with our usual cognitive biases. How to put meat on the bone, how to make them valuable, how to tell a story to someone else to make them care so that they want to do something about it. And it’s essentially if a futurist, and a psychologist, and your best buddy walk into a bar, here's what happens. And it gives you the framework for how to give yourself a mind shift, how to track these trends, how to make them matter to people, and how to tell the story.

In fact, I tell a lot of stories with a buddy of mine, who's a Pixar or was a Pixar Disney storyboard artist, he's now at Netflix, on how to get people to see themselves in the story, how to make the story believable and relatable to them. And I try to do it in a way, because as you can imagine, when you're talking about the future and helping make decisions today against what could happen in the next year or 5 years or 10 years, it could become a heady topic.

So, I tried to keep it light. I tried to write it in an inspiring, motivating, fun way so that everybody could become a futurist, an everyday futurist, to help businesses make decisions that aren't just based on the past. How do we make yesterday better today? How do we make yesterday better tomorrow? To say, okay, like, sure, those are good practices to do anyway. We should always be improving.

But also, what are we missing? Because it matters now more than ever if we believe that artificial intelligence, just as one thing, is disruptive. What happens when we start to see AI-first businesses? Just like we saw digital-first businesses, just like we saw mobile-first businesses like the Ubers and the Airbnb's of the world, what happens when we start to see AI-first businesses?

And what I know is going to happen is that we're going to look at AI, we're going to automate stuff. We're going to build a linear growth line. We're going to cut costs. We're going to scale. We're going to make things more efficient, all good things. But we're also going to unlock things we couldn't do before. We're going to augment work. We're going to augment people. We're going to augment new lines of revenue, new business opportunities. And those companies that do both are going to create an exponential growth curve. And as AI gets more capable, that is going to accelerate.

So, the gap between the two becomes disruption. And I believe that the more we're looking at both, the more successful we're going to be in the future. And this book teaches you how to think about both and how to do both and how to bring people along to help you do both.

Matt: Well put. Brian, thank you so much for joining the podcast. I really appreciate having you on and would love to have you on again in the future as the world continues to unfold.

Brian: It's my pleasure, and I really enjoy this conversation. Thanks again for getting the book and I'd be curious, what do you think when you're done reading it? For everybody listening or watching, I'd be curious to hear what you think. If you'd like to learn more, my website is briansolis.com. The book is everywhere. It's on Amazon. The book website, if you want to learn more, is mindshift.ing. And then I'm @briansolis pretty much everywhere online. And don't forget that ServiceNow is gonna help you transform your business for an AI-first world. So, thank you, Matt.

Matt: Excellent. Well, I'll say that the theme of storytelling as I was reading the book resonated with me because that's what I try to do is help bring those stories out. So, again, thanks for joining.

Brian: Matt, thank you. I appreciate it.

Matt: I'm Matt Swain and you've been listening to the "Reimagining Communications" podcast. If you liked this episode and think someone else would too, please share it. Leave a review and don't forget to subscribe. And if you're ready to reimagine your communications experiences, consider the Broadridge Communications Cloud, an end-to-end platform for creating, delivering, and managing omnichannel communications and customer engagement. To learn more about Broadridge, our insights, and our innovations, visit broadridge.com or find us on LinkedIn.