EP280 Faster Than a Generation - Ian Alden Russell on Change That Outruns Us
Release Date: 10/08/2026
EP281 Your Team's Nervous System Is Infrastructure - Sira Laurel on Load-Bearing Trust
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Most of the leaders Sira Laurel works with look like they're winning. Inside, they're exhausted. Sira is an executive coach and facilitator who works on leadership, organizational design, cognitive load, trust and nervous system capacity. She has watched organizations get very good at making work faster while getting worse at deciding what the speed is for. AI raises the stakes on that question. Her starting point is that capacity covers far more than time. It includes attention, decision-making, emotional bandwidth and creative energy. A tool can hand back hours on the calendar while draining...
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EP280 Faster Than a Generation - Ian Alden Russell on Change That Outruns Us
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
This episode skips the tools, the prompts, and the latest model release. It goes somewhere more philosophical. started out as an archaeologist and anthropologist. He was the kid who loved museums and Indiana Jones. Since then he has worked across history, contemporary art and culture in Dublin, Istanbul, Beijing, Hong Kong, Pittsburgh and Doha. Now he works as a strategist helping organizations make sense of complexity and line up around change. His starting point is that change itself is old news. Humanity has absorbed huge technological shifts again and again. The new part is the speed....
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EP279 How higher ed moves from AI interest to governed use with James Hutson
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
A previous president from Lindenwood University (a former IBM executive) stands up in town halls and tells people he uses Claude - that it helped him organize the financial report. HR follows and says they used Gemini for an employee questionnaire. Then James Hutson PhD. goes and asks employees whether they understood that as permission. The answer? 'No. The policy says I'll get fired if I use it.' That gap is the subject of this episode. James is Senior Professor and Director of AI-Enabled Academic Transformation at Lindenwood University, with two PhDs - the first in art history, the second...
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EP278 AI Governance in Higher Ed with Dr. Eugene Chan
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Most organizations govern AI the same way cities govern speeding. They set a rule, then punish people who break it. Dr. Eugene Chan thinks that's the least interesting tool available. He's a behavioural scientist - founder of the consultancy Behavieural and Professor of Business at Tyndale University - and his argument is that punishment is a lagging response to a problem you could have designed out. His analogy is a speed camera versus a speed bump. Both reduce speeding. The camera does it by fining you after the fact, and it needs maintenance forever. The speed bump does it by making the...
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EP277 Is AI Going to Take the Gift of Failure Away? asks Julie Cole
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Episode description Julie Cole and her co-founders started Mabel's Labels in a Hamilton basement 23 years ago, back when customers were still nervous about typing a credit card number into a computer. They figured out early that they weren't really running a label company - they were running a tech company that happened to make labels. Nothing off the shelf did what they needed, so they built it themselves. Which is why her read on this moment carries some weight. She's watched every technology wave since. She's not a skeptic and she's not a cheerleader. She uses AI, has a clear personal rule...
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EP276 Your AI Strategy Is a Hammer. Where's the Nail? - with David Cohen
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
"We need AI" is the most common brief in business right now. David Cohen's read on what it means: usually nothing in particular. David is the founder of Superposition, a consultancy for data and AI consultancies - a meta consultancy, as he calls it. He's spent his career inside both big and boutique consulting shops, which makes him refreshingly blunt about what's actually happening in the services world right now. His diagnosis is that we're still in the solution-in-search-of-a-problem stage. Everybody's curious. Everybody's excited. There's enormous movement, enormous hype, and very few real...
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EP 275 "Do I Trust Myself?" Grace Gravestock on the Real Reason AI Adoption Stalls
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Episode description Everyone's arguing about whether AI can be trusted. Almost nobody's asking the harder question underneath it. Grace Gravestock has spent more than twenty years leading change management on some of the highest-profile technology projects around - including the team that set the stage for the $67B Dell EMC integration. Her verdict on why AI pilots stall is unsentimental: it's the same reason ERP stalled, and CRM before that. People aren't using the technology the way it was intended. You can have the best tools in the world, and if people don't use them, it doesn't matter....
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EP 274 The Human OS - AI Adoption With Curiosity, Safety, and Monday Ease ft. Melissa Penton
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
In the final episode of the Podcast-to-Book series, host sits down with change leader and AI education lead (Sun Life) for a human-first conversation about what actually makes AI adoption work. They talk productivity vs room-for-life, why one-prompt culture is snake oil, the shift from prompt engineering to context engineering, and the simplest enterprise question that changes everything: “What would make Monday easier for employees?” Episode summary Susan closes out the Podcast-to-Book sprint with a conversation that feels like the point of the whole series: AI isn’t a tool problem....
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273 - Future-proofing your organization through continuing AI literacy
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Most companies do a few AI trainings, run some pilots, and then stall. In this episode, host argues the only real future-proofing strategy is continuous AI literacy. She breaks down what “continuous literacy” actually includes (skill, judgment, workflow, norms), the predictable failure modes of the AI literacy divide, and a simple flywheel you can run monthly so capability keeps compounding. Episode summary Susan opens with a familiar pattern: a burst of AI excitement, a deck called “AI Strategy 2025” a few clever workflows… and then reality hits. Tools change. Policies shift....
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EP 272 - Mindset, Sales, and AI That Actually Helps with Gazzy Amin
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Host sits down with sales strategist , founder of Sales Beyond Scripts, to talk about the real ways AI is changing revenue, planning, and scale. They cover AI as a thinking partner, how to use it across departments in a small business, why audits matter more than hype, and how mindset quietly determines whether you treat AI as a threat or an advantage. Episode summary This episode is part of Susan’s 30-episodes-in-30-days “podcast to book” sprint for Swan Dive Backwards. Susan and Gazzy zoom in on the selling process first. Then they zoom out to the whole business. They talk about three...
info_outlineThis episode skips the tools, the prompts, and the latest model release. It goes somewhere more philosophical.
Ian Alden Russell started out as an archaeologist and anthropologist. He was the kid who loved museums and Indiana Jones. Since then he has worked across history, contemporary art and culture in Dublin, Istanbul, Beijing, Hong Kong, Pittsburgh and Doha. Now he works as a strategist helping organizations make sense of complexity and line up around change.
His starting point is that change itself is old news. Humanity has absorbed huge technological shifts again and again. The new part is the speed. Transformations that used to take generations now happen inside a single career, so the people living through them have less shared ground than any generation before.
From there, host Susan Diaz and Ian cover why the big AI companies benefit from us picturing one all-powerful AI and why Ian expects the opposite. They talk about what email revealed about how we communicate, and why he thinks every skeptic in a room is right about something. Ian also explains why turning copywriters into editors is a promotion, and why freed-up time doesn't come with the skills to use it.
They finish with an argument for putting your C-suite and your dev team in the same room to talk about the stories they grew up on.
About Ian Alden Russell
Ian Alden Russell is a strategist working at the intersection of culture, commerce, technology and leadership. He helps organizations make sense of complexity and line up around change. He trained as an archaeologist and anthropologist and holds a PhD in history from Trinity College Dublin. He has led galleries and cultural programs at Brown University, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, K11 in Beijing and Koç University in Istanbul. He is currently writing about how cultural differences will shape AI regulation and business frameworks around the world.
What we get into
(01:15) From archaeology and Indiana Jones to strategy work
(02:50) Why the US, Europe and China will build very different relationships with AI
(04:21) Tangible and intangible culture, and why the same tool serves different purposes in different places
(06:25) Why the tech giants benefit from us picturing one all-powerful AI
(07:30) The 16-year-old who builds their own model in their spare time
(09:54) What email revealed about how we communicate
(10:50) The mirror was never black
(11:58) Look at your culture before you blame the tool
(13:22) Susan: the skeptics have gotten more confident
(14:44) Ian's approach: everyone in the room is right about something
(16:00) The real novelty is the speed
(17:30) Younger employees and "distributed personhood"
(18:48) When change happens faster than a generation, gaps open up where overlaps used to be
(19:29) Film photography and the things that come back
(20:49) Susan's refrigerator story
(23:41) Sovereign AI in a less integrated world
(24:30) How the US, Europe and China think differently about data
(28:03) Tech CEOs as the faces of their products
(28:49) Why every school needs critical media literacy
(29:44) There aren't enough adults modelling healthy relationships with technology
(30:30) Making it safe to admit you're anxious
(31:00) Terrified or exhilarated: the same response
(32:27) Don't blame the mirror
(33:31) Copywriter to editor is a promotion
(35:05) Reading for subtext, the humanities skill everyone needs now
(37:30) Why freed-up time doesn't come with new skills
(39:07) Star Trek, Ghost in the Shell and shared reference points
(41:00) The "watch these five movies" consultancy
(42:46) Where to find Ian
Quotes
"The fact that there's a change isn't new, but the speed is new." - Ian Alden Russell
"It's just a crystal clear mirror. What makes the mirror black is whoever you are." - Ian Alden Russell
"Everyone is right in seeing something. They may or may not know how to frame it yet." - Ian Alden Russell
"Distortions can be valuable, because if they're felt, they still impact." - Ian Alden Russell
"You might be taking someone who's a copywriter and turning them into an editor. It's like a promotion." - Ian Alden Russell
"We cannot make the leap to assume that just because you've freed up people's time, they're suddenly going to have the immediate capacity to critically analyze." - Ian Alden Russell
"Every single child alive on the planet today deserves a relationship to a reflective, caring adult who can role model healthy relationships to technology. The problem is we don't have enough of those adults." - Ian Alden Russell
"Don't blame the mirror." - Susan and Ian, more or less in unison
Resources
Ian's work and writing: ianaldenrussell.com
Ian on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/irussell
If this episode landed, read this next in Swan Dive Backwards: Chapter 12, Does AI Make You More or Less Creative?, for AI as a paintbrush versus a photocopier and why taste and editing now matter more than output. Chapter 8, Culture as the OS, for psychological safety and building rooms where people can voice their worries without risking their careers.
You can find host Susan Diaz's book, Swan Dive Backwards here: wearenorthlightai.com/swan-dive-backwards
Take the AI Archetypes Quiz to find out how you are geared to meet this AI moment: https://www.tryinteract.com/share/quiz/69cd787bde5b5fd533f2a4d6
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