Productivi-Tree: The Human Side of Productivity

Thor Hesselberg screened eight candidates for a remote role in Poland. Four of them were not who they claimed to be: forged companies, polished LinkedIn profiles, and identities built to pass a background check that never happened. Thor built WorkID.ai to catch that before the interview starts, and he walks Santi through what fake candidates cost a hiring team and what verification actually looks like.

**Key Takeaways:**- Four of eight candidates in one real screening round had fabricated identities and work histories.- As many as 64% of job seekers admit to lying or padding their CV; AI has made fabricating one at scale cheap.- A North Korean operation behind 167,000 applications got 76 people hired into remote roles.- Verification does not replace judgment. It removes the fake candidates before a human has to waste time on them.

**Guest Links:**WorkID.ai: https://www.workid.ai/WorkID for companies: https://www.workid.ai/employersThor Hesselberg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thorhesselberg/

Key Takeaways
Guest Links
Chapters
0:00 Four of eight candidates were not real
1:10 Who Thor Hesselberg is
2:19 Picking up the resume debate from Sameer Ranjan
3:04 What recruiting forgot about trust
3:46 The Ghana pivot that shaped how Thor builds
4:49 Inside the Poland screening round
7:06 Why hiring hasn't changed in 50 years
9:01 CV padding versus full fabrication
13:17 The North Korean operation: 167,000 applications, 76 hires
15:36 The 45-minute avatar interview
17:56 What WorkID actually checks
21:27 Verification, endorsement, and reference: three different things
23:30 The 50% time and 80% effort savings
25:46 What's in it for the candidate
28:19 GDPR, data ownership, and tamper-proof records
29:58 Who is adopting this and how fast
32:27 Why Thor won't take humans out of the loop
33:48 Flipping the script: candidates verifying companies
36:50 Quickfire round
39:15 The best hiring advice Thor has
40:09 How to get started with WorkID
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Buy the tool, train the team, wait for results that never come. Chris Carolan has spent years inside the plumbing of companies, first fixing HubSpot rollouts and now rebuilding how work gets designed, and he says AI dropped onto a broken process just moves the friction faster. This episode goes after what leaders avoid fixing before they buy software, and what happens to the person whose whole job was holding the context once a machine holds it instead.

Guest Linkshttps://www.chriscarolan.com/https://www.valuefirstteam.com/https://ainativeshift.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-carolan/

Key Takeaways
Guest Links
Chapters
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🧭 Find Your Weakest Productivity Vector in 5 Minutes (Free Assessment) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
🎓 Productive, Not Busy (live cohort on Maven) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/productive-not-busy

Senior leaders in one organisation were spending forty hours a week deciding who works on what. Preston Chandler flipped the staffing model in a couple of months and the resourcing meetings disappeared.

Preston runs global strategic operations at WPP, a holding company of around 100,000 people, and co-owns Centered. He has spent two decades pulling decisions out of committees and handing them to the one person who should own them. In this episode, he explains why a slow decision that turns out right costs an organisation more than a fast one that turns out wrong, why the lag never shows up in any report, and what empowerment theatre looks like when a leader says "you own this" and then asks for the work to come back for approval.

You will hear what happened when one creative leader told his teams to stop bringing him work for sign-off, why Preston thinks RACI charts should be retired, what leader-to-doer ratios reveal about an organisation that has stopped moving, and why pouring AI into a company that cannot decide creates a traffic jam rather than speed. Santi closes with where decision making sits inside the four productivity vectors and the sixteen elements, and why it is the element that matters for medium and large companies.

Take one decision your team made last quarter, trace every step it went through, and ask whether one person could have made it on day one. That single exercise is the whole episode in practice.

Key Takeaways
1. A slow decision is still a decision. You decided not to change, and the opportunity passed.
2. Companies that decide faster also learn from their decisions faster.
3. Decision lag is a real cost that no leader volunteers as a metric, because it makes them look bad.
4. Empowerment with a mandatory approval step at the end is not ownership. It is a delay with a nicer name.
5. Decisions by committee have no owner. Name the one person on the hook, or stop the effort entirely.
6. Responsibility and accountability cannot be split, which is why Preston would retire the RACI chart.
7. Leader-to-doer ratios of roughly one to two signal an organisation protecting itself rather than shipping work.
8. AI adds options at speed. An organisation that cannot choose gets slower, not faster.

Guest Links
Preston Chandler, Centered: https://centered.work/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prestonchandler/
YouTube, Breakthrough Innovation: https://www.youtube.com/@BreakthroughInnovation
The Agile Code (free PDF): https://46125168.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/46125168/Site%20Documents/TheAgileCode_R5.pdf
Earlier appearance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPrmv9LF6q8
Books mentioned: The Agile Code, Breakthrough Innovation, ADAPT (forthcoming), The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
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🧭 Find Your Weakest Productivity Vector in 5 Minutes (Free Assessment) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
🎓 Productive, Not Busy (live cohort on Maven) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/productive-not-busy

Your process documents describe one company. The workarounds, the chasing and the four-day approvals describe another. Point AI at the second one and it copies the mess at speed.

David Dean spent 20 years in enterprise technology, 10 of them leading AI, automation and data programmes across healthcare, insurance, hospitality and regulated industries. In this conversation he explains the gap between the official contract of a job and the unwritten contract that keeps the work moving, why he puts 79 percent of the workforce in a group he calls AI survivalists, and what the inbox already records about how a company behaves.

By the end of the episode, you can do three things. Name the undocumented behaviours your own role depends on, so a tool decision stops being a guess. Spot an AI project that will fail before the budget is gone, using one question about who was asked. Start a work diary this week with nothing beyond the notes app on your phone.

Listen now if someone is about to roll a tool out across your team and nobody has asked the people who do the work.

Key Takeaways
1. Every job description ends with "other duties apply", and that line is where the real work lives.
2. Workarounds come from a need for control or a need to survive the week, and they outlive the reason they were created.
3. David puts 79 percent of workers in a group he calls AI survivalists, people who are neither for AI nor against it.
4. AI copies and industrialises human behaviour, including the dysfunction, which is one reason projects stall.
5. Lived experience and lived consequence stay human, so risk decisions stay with leaders.
6. The first sign an AI project will fail is that nobody spoke to the people who will use the tool.
7. A dictated work diary on your phone turns invisible behaviour into something a team can actually read.

Guest Links
David Dean website: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/
About David: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/about/
An Inbox Between Us: AI and the Reality of Modern Work: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/book/
Media: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/media/
Appearances: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/appearances/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidchristopherdean/
The AI Mirror (David's newsletter, published on LinkedIn)

Chapters
0:00 Why AI and people both have to earn trust
0:52 Find your weakest productivity vector in five minutes
1:15 Meet David Dean, business AI realist
2:37 Twenty years in enterprise tech, and what it taught him
5:10 Why AI pilots run on assumptions and stall
7:17 The official contract and the unwritten one
8:54 "Other duties apply" is where the real work hides
12:54 Control, survival, and the workarounds nobody wrote down
16:39 The 79% nobody is designing the rollout for
21:16 Why pushing tools at people never lands
25:14 Four behaviours that keep work moving
26:33 Risk, lived experience, and what you give up
31:14 Output above quality, and where that ends
32:45 How AI industrialises dysfunction at scale
37:42 Quickfire: the AI use with no business value
39:07 The meeting costing twenty four thousand dollars in payroll
40:29 The slide every company puts up and nobody believes
41:16 The first sign an AI project will fail
41:55 What to put on your calendar before Friday
42:34 The frontline worker who felt replaceable
46:46 Where to find the book and the audiobook
47:31 Double down on human capital, differently

Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
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🧭 Find Your Weakest Productivity Vector in 5 Minutes (Free Assessment) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
🎓 Productive, Not Busy (live cohort on Maven) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/productive-not-busy

Your team has good software and the work still feels heavy. Nobody wants to say it out loud, because the tool was approved, paid for and announced.

Mike Toguchi has spent 25 years inside that exact room, in universities, nonprofits, foundations and corporates, and he has a blunt diagnosis: the technology is rarely what broke. He walks through a nonprofit scholarship programme that put AI on top of a convoluted review process and got "continued mess, faster mess", and he explains why a team that cannot say what is working has no feedback loop, only a sign-off.

By the end you will be able to spot survival mode in a team whose tools are running fine, test whether you have approval or alignment before a project goes sideways, and run a readiness check before you sign the next renewal.

Listen before your next software renewal lands on your desk, because the cheapest version of this lesson is the one you get secondhand.

Key Takeaways
1. A tool amplifies the workflow it lands on. Mike: "a lot of times the technology ends up being the thing that exposes the fissures in your workflow as opposed to fixing them."
2. Survival mode looks like smooth technology and overwhelmed staff. The signs are unclear ownership, incentives pointing in different directions and no line back to the mission.
3. Automating a convoluted review process gave one nonprofit richer summaries and worse decisions. Mike: "It's not making the process cleaner."
4. Approval is a signature. Alignment is a shared understanding of the problem, the success criteria and the tradeoffs, held together by a feedback loop people can actually use.
5. Every organisation runs two processes: the documented one and the real one. Mike calls them prescriptive and descriptive, and the gap between them is where the workarounds live.
6. Low adoption tells you something about leadership. Mike: "I think adoption is a leadership issue."
7. Readiness takes three things and none of them takes a year: strategic discovery, stakeholders bought in, due diligence done. Then hit the gas.
8. AI gives time back only when leadership decides what the time is for. Otherwise it scales the same busywork at higher volume.
Guest Links
Mike Toguchi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miketoguchi/
Tectonic: https://www.teamtectonic.com/
Orchestrate: https://onlineapplications.net
Orchestrate AMS: https://www.orchestrateams.com/
Mentioned in the episode: Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Mike's book pick), Slack, HubSpot.

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Free Productivity Test: https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
Productive, Not Busy (live cohort on Maven): https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/productive-not-busy
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.