Dimitri Boylan
Welcome to another episode of the Talent Transformation Podcast. Today, we have Sean Morris, a principal at Deloitte Consulting and the firm’s US talent transformation leader. Sean, welcome.
Sean Morris
Thank you. It’s nice to be here with you today.
Dimitri Boylan
It’s good to have you here. You’re a busy man, so I’m glad I managed to snag you. And, so, Wow. There are a lot of things that I want to talk to you about. Great. So, you know, first of all, you’re in the middle of this really large-scale talent transformation at Deloitte. I want to talk about that.
But also, you have really been doing human capital-related work for the US government and for governments around the world for, I don’t know, I’m going to say, 20 years. Is that right, or?
Sean Morris
Yeah. So, you know, I’ve been in the consulting world now for, it’s now my 28th year.
Dimitri Boylan
Okay.
Sean Morris
And I started, in traditional sort of what I would call process re-engineering and operational improvements. And I would say the first two-thirds of my career actually were there. I spent a lot of time in the federal space, particularly with post nine over 11 with the Department of Homeland Security. Right. And, as is quite the case often in Deloitte, my colleagues at the time said, why don’t you consider getting out of your comfort zone and going in to lead our human capital business?
And to be honest with you, this was probably 12 years ago. I really did not have a ton of experience. Doing that, I thought, okay, I’m going to give that a go. And it’s actually probably the best decision that I’ve made or one of the best decisions I’ve made in my career. Because it really moved me into a different aspect. We’re in a consulting perspective.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. So when you were doing Homeland Security stuff, you were doing you were doing all types of things. Not specifically human capital like you were doing.
Sean Morris
That’s right.
Dimitri Boylan
Everything that they would be dealing with.
Sean Morris
Yeah. Large transformations. Technology. You know, back in the early days, it was the stand-up of a brand-new organization. And you can imagine all of the integration work, right, that was taking place. That period in time was a unique one for our nation, right. Because of what had happened on 9/11. We then saw the proliferation of conflict in the Middle East.
And so it was just a very interesting time. And we worked on everything from border security type situations and immigration and a lot of work in the immigration space, all the way through to operational efficiency, across that agency. And so it was just a really interesting time to spread your wings from a consulting perspective in a very unique way. These organizations don’t stand up very often.
Dimitri Boylan
Almost never. Yeah. Right. But then you come into Deloitte Human Capital, Deloitte, probably one of the leading, if not the leading human capital practices, you know, in consulting. Right. That’s already a big ship running. And it was a multi-billion dollar business, right? And what’s it like coming into that? I mean, did you come in thinking you were going to change it a lot? Were they looking for change?
Sean Morris
They were. They were. Yeah. Okay. We were. Well, look, this was back in the day when our government business was still our federal government business, at least, was still sort of in its infancy. It’s since grown to be quite significant—a big, big piece of the broader Deloitte network here in the US now. And the human capital practice was actually the smallest of what we at that time called our service areas.
Part of the focus in bringing me in was to expand not just our footprint but our offerings and think strategically, maybe a little bit differently than we traditionally had about what human capital is, who it serves, and where it should be engaged. And so, you know, I worked with a really talented group of leaders.
We put a new strategy in place, expanded our offerings, and moved into, particularly, the technology side of the house in a much more significant way. And so, you know, the rest is history.
Dimitri Boylan
Right. And i want to go through that a little bit more. But let’s just stay on this, moving through these roles. You then left that practice to head up this digital transformation, in Deloitte. And it’s a big digital transformation, right? So you might step back and say, well, Deloitte has helped other companies do digital transformation. Right. And I’d say it’s probably a substantial part of Deloitte’s business. And Deloitte, being a consulting company, has always been a people-centric company. Right? So, why does Deloitte need to digitally transform?
Sean Morris
Well, look, Deloitte has to be agile and constantly evolving, just like any of our clients. Our business space is changing on a regular basis, both in terms of the talent market and in terms of our efforts to attract, retain and grow the best people in the market. And so that market is not static.
So we have to constantly challenge ourselves to think and evolve that talent experience. The market is not static for our clients, and so their needs change on a relative basis. Obviously, our competitors and our teaming partners change and evolve on a regular basis as well. So we don’t live in a vacuum, and we’ve got to constantly evolve and change.
And that’s actually one thing that we’re very good at. And I think it’s a big piece of our success. We’ve been around for a long time at this point, and we are not uncomfortable in challenging change internal to Deloitte.
Dimitri Boylan
Right. And practicing what you preach because you are out there preaching right. Engine the ability to change. It would be disingenuous for you to not want to change all the time, I suppose.
Sean Morris
And I by the way, I like telling the story about what we practice to our clients. Yeah, because that is a very genuine way to share what’s working and what’s not working and how we’re learning from that, and then how we take that to many of our clients’ situations as well. It’s all part of the same approach and system that we have.
The way we think about talent is from, the entirety of the talent life cycle. So the recruiting all the way through to the retirements, and we redesigned and rethought how we utilize the technology and face off to our clients within Deloitte from a talent lens. And so it was a large transformation of our processes as well as our technology and a significant change journey, as you can imagine, not just for our talent organization, although certainly, that was the largest piece of the change, but also for our customers, those individuals serving our clients on a day to day basis.
Dimitri Boylan
Well, you had it. You had an advantage really, because you have been putting out these digital transformation-type ideas into your customers already on a regular basis before you actually had to consume your own ideas. That’s that’s pretty good, right? Most of our customers don’t have that opportunity. You know, they have to go out and start it up, you know, cold cold start. And get it right the first time. And your digital transformation is what? I want to get the scale.
Sean Morris
It’s actually the largest, transformation we’ve ever taken on as a firm. Yeah, because, I mean, we’re in the professional services business, right? So what we do are people. Our people are at the very center of our strategy. They are our key enabler asset because they face off with our clients. And so if you think if you look at it from a data perspective if you look at it from a complexity perspective, it is it represents the largest transformation we’ve ever taken on.
Dimitri Boylan
Right? Okay. So it’s pretty substantial. That’s right. Like, like a typical large company, in America. And so, do you bring people over, how are you creating that transformation process here now internally? Because you’ve got a whole group of people that are out there doing it, you know, for other companies helping other companies do it.
Do you try to redirect the consulting expertise inside, or do you decide how to approach that?
Sean Morris
This is similar to what we do with our clients. We obviously have a significant functional level of expertise in our internal talent organization and our internal IT organization. Then, we bring the frameworks and best practices of our consulting business right to the table. We marry those together to drive the change in the transformations that we’ve been going through.
And it’s interesting because, what I like to tell that combined team is that, we are a unique internal client to our consulting business, but we also carry the same badge. Everybody on that project is carrying a Deloitte badge. And so that makes it unique. And when you’re thinking about the culture of the team and how to continue to move forward. So, it’s a little nuanced. But many of the same approaches we use for our clients, we also use on ourselves.
Dimitri Boylan
Okay. So you’re sort of resetting your foundation. That’s right. For a higher level of agility, going forward, what are the big objectives of the transformation besides laying the foundation for being more agile as you go forward? Is is the firm looking at that and saying, well, this is great because we’re going to be more profitable.
This is great because we’re going to be more efficient. This is great because our service capability is going to go up. What are the biggest outcomes that they think they’re going to get, or is it is it retention of the workforce? What are you thinking of? Is the material medium-term outputs of a successful transformation?
Sean Morris
We want to be the very best in the market from a talent experience perspective. Our talent organization is obviously an incredibly important ingredient in that talent experience. So, first and foremost, are we continuing to be at the forefront of that talent experience? I would say the efficiency and effectiveness piece—we’re always going to want that.
We are management consultants at the end of the day. So yeah. But that was very secondary. It was we want to be able to continue to invest in that talent experience. Right. And be the very best that we can do. And certainly, automation and technology is one way to do that. Another way is to help your talent professionals in how they advise, both our leaders and our broader talent, groups and individuals on the talent lifecycle that I referenced a little bit earlier.
So moving from, we’ve seen this in the industry quite a bit. You and I were talking about it a little bit before. 20 years ago, where HR was versus where it is today. HR plays a much more advisory role, I believe, today for some really unique situations and, and needs for a world-class talent experience than it was maybe able to do previously. Yeah. And so bringing that talent set of professionals on that journey was the most important thing. Yeah, that we honed in on as part of this talent transformation.
Dimitri Boylan
Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah. So you knew where you were going? Yeah. Pretty clearly. And obviously, that’s important. But how do you get everybody else to know where you’re going? Do you, do you do this massive communication beforehand once you get this, this, this this vision, do you then go around to make sure everybody has bought into it fully before you start, or do you not worry about that? Let them figure it out as they go along.
Sean Morris
Well, certainly you want your stakeholders, your stakeholders, starting from the very, very beginning with you at Deloitte. You know, we’re a partnership. We’re not publicly traded means you’ve got to have all of your partners and principals and managing directors, as we like to, to reference, our core leaders, our key piece of our stakeholders. And they need to be on that journey from the very beginning to understand why are we spending our time and resources to do this.
Dimitri Boylan
So that’s in your DNA consensus among the leadership? Yes, absolutely.
Sean Morris
Because we very much try to keep that as as central to our DNA. And so I love that term actually. And then you want to bring your talent professionals, those groups that are going to be most affected by this transformation on that journey in a continuous way. So very, very, standard and structured maybe is a better word of sets of communications and not just one way.
Right. So we’re going to say what we’re going to do. And we want our talent professionals to be super hands-on as part of that transformation with us in this instance because, at the end of the day, they are truly the functional experts, and they’re the ones closest to their clients.
Dimitri Boylan
Yes. And there’s the one whose service is supposed to become better exist. So they need to know. That’s right. They need to have an aspiration, okay? They need to aspire to that higher level of service before you start explaining to them how you’re going to help them get there. That’s because otherwise I guess they wouldn’t they wouldn’t be excited about what you’re talking about.
Sean Morris
So that change journey starts, you know, really early on in the transformation. I’ve seen some failed transformations over the years, and one of the reasons that I’ve seen them fail is because they weren’t adopted by the individuals that were being affected by them. And I think one of the major reasons for that is the change, the organizational change management approach was flawed and it didn’t go far enough upstream and then stay consistent all the way along.
It typically waited until the end or right near the end before the implementation dates. Right. Is that we’re going to put some training out. We’re going to, you know, we’re going to do some good communications. It wasn’t there. But people are surprised and they don’t see their fingerprints on a transformation. Right. As you would if you’re further upstream, making them part of the solution.
Dimitri Boylan
But that’s a big job in big transformations. It is. Right. So if you are talking to a client that hasn’t even begun, you know, a transformation, what are the things that you tell them are the fundamental building blocks that they need to have in place before they begin?
Sean Morris
So I always like to start with a strong vision and strategy. And I know probably a lot of people say that, but what I really mean by that is a vision. And strategy that has gone through multiple times across your organization, and across your stakeholders to really beat it up. Right. And to make sure that’s hardened, right, because it will be challenged on that multi-year transformation journey.
Yeah. And you need to make sure that everybody agrees with that can get behind it. Right. And it will be the North Star, so to speak. Yeah. For which you drive through the good times and the bad times. And they will be both on any transformation. There will be twists and turns in the road that you will have to adjust to.
And so having that vision and strategy set and hardened on the front end is a major, major piece of getting everybody to coalesce. Yeah. And to stay on target. And the last thing I will say is, is that it has to be, in my opinion, my experience, not so broad that, it can be distracting and we can allow lots of other pieces to come to the table as part of that transformation. Okay. Very specific. And people understand where the guardrails are on that transformation.
Dimitri Boylan
Right. Yeah. So it can withstand the stress that is inevitable. That’s right. Right. And there’s, there’s, there can be a fair amount of that. And do you think when you’re doing transformations, you did a lot of transformations for government? Okay. And I want to just get a little bit into government because you’ve done so much in it, we can’t let you get out of here without talking about it.
How how, is it night and day, the transformation state government has to do compared to the commercial sector? I mean, is it just just are they just two totally separate podcasts? You know, I mean, like.
Sean Morris
You know, I think there are definitely differences. Yeah. That’s clear. The scale of government transformations is it eclipses anything really that you’ve seen. You know, there are some very large global commercial clients. But, you know, if you’re looking at particularly federal transformations, that the scale and complexity of the missions and the people they serve in our country.
Yeah. And other countries, actually, yeah. It’s very unique. So those are certainly differences. There are a plethora of different stakeholders, some political stakeholders, and some can-situate stakeholders. So that makes it a little bit unique as well. The change journey and the technology, though, have a lot of similarities when you peel away those unique aspects of a government transformation versus a commercial transformation.
And honestly, you have to get the technology right. You have to get the solution right. Yeah, no question about that. You have to get it right all the way from the beginning of the requirements, all the way through to the build, the test and the go live in the HyperCard. That is classic. And if you have the right level of rigor in that, that helps a lot.
What is very similar, though, is how you work with hose unique stakeholders comprehensively on the journey from the very beginning to the very end. Right. And that’s where, I see the most similarity, even if they’re different types of stakeholders. Yeah. How you apply, the, you know, your art, so to speak, you know, change perspective. Yeah. You know, is still challenging, but there but there’s some real similarities between, those two sides of commercial and governance.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. So you start looking at, a pie chart of how much time, effort, and money you’re going to spend doing a transformation. And you’ve got to create a couple of pie slices to that pie. Yep. And, you know, I think some companies get those slices wrong. And, you know, do you see that? I mean, when you, when you and obviously when you advise companies, you know, you probably you’re talking about this, but that upfront conversation, is a.
Sean Morris
There’s a lot of work. I think that’s the case. I don’t know that there’s a perfect answer to this. There’s a range. And the reason I say that is every organization has a slightly different culture. Yeah, an operating model. Right. So start with the operating model. We have a heavily matrixed operating model. We have a large base of leaders that I referenced earlier.
And we are in many ways quite a decentralized organization. Yeah. Right. Yeah. We’re also a culture that wants to be engaged and has a voice because we’re made up of owners.
Dimitri Boylan
Right.
Sean Morris
And that poses its own, unique situations. Now, juxtapose that to a much more centrally run organization, maybe a publicly traded one. Yeah. And maybe one that’s quite regulated, although we have some aspects of our business that are regulated as well. But you know, maybe it’s quite regulated. That’s a different culture, that’s a different operating model. And so, you know, you have to think about that on the upfront piece of planning for this and really walking those senior leaders through what it’s going to take to be successful here.
And, you know, not all of our clients, want to start in that sequencing of events. Right. And so you have to be agile and adapt to any transformation. And that could be, one of the reasons that you’re doing that. And so, you know, just because you don’t follow a sequence or a playbook doesn’t mean you’re not going to be successful, but you have to figure out how to come back to pieces of that playbook, right? At some point. Yes. To re-emphasize them to be successful.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. Okay. So you have to get there somehow. But you could there are some different paths. That’s right. And so you take a big manufacturing company. It’s been around for, you know, 100 years, okay. Top-down product-centric, you know, with product lifecycles that are very long. Okay. Maybe six, seven, eight, ten years. Therefore, but not change a lot on a regular basis.
Those people didn’t go out of college and become consultants. They hope they go into a different kind of organization. Okay. And they bought into a different experience. The company wants to transform. Now, do you say, okay, let’s narrow the scope and win? Is there is it is one of the other paths this very incremental start somewhere small?
Do some little thing, you know, is that sometimes what you do when you, when you talk to, a company that wants to transform. So don’t don’t do what we’re doing. Absolutely. Okay, well, let’s do something different for you.
Sean Morris
You have to prove that you’ve got the fortitude in an organization to take that on. I’m not sure that we would say that to a client, but sometimes the clients will say that to us. I mean, I start from a pilot perspective and prove to maybe some skeptical stakeholders here. Yeah, internal or external to the organization that we can do that, and prove that we can do it and prove the results of it.
And then that will create the momentum for us to go a little bit bigger in the next incremental step. That’s not a bad strategy at all. It depends what the forcing function of the transformation in the first place is.
Dimitri Boylan
Okay, yes, it could be urgent.
Sean Morris
Yeah. I mean, your competitors are eating your lunch. Then you may not want to be quite as incremental. True. If you are if you are a visionary in your space and you, believe that the horizon that you’re looking at is, you know, multiple years out, that maybe you can be a little bit more incremental in it. So it just depends.
And yeah, that’s why understanding and really diving deep into a client becomes really important. It’s another piece of the recipe for success for our clients. Right. You have to understand their operational structure, and what makes them tick. I mean all of this sounds obvious. Well, yes.
Dimitri Boylan
Obvious, but also often not done. Right. Right. So, you know, the root cause of disruption. What? Why are you really being disrupted? Is a big question. And sometimes you can talk to a company and you can get a couple of different answers just from, you know, senior people. That have different, you know, they’re coming from a different perspective inside the organization.
And, you know, sometimes, isn’t it just fear, you know, fear of being disrupted, and you’re not even being disrupted yet?
Sean Morris
But we certainly will take a step back with them. We often do an early set of sprints with them to put together the different—I like to think of it as Lego blocks—to get to where they want to go. Have we thought about this piece? Have we thought about that piece?
Where are you from a maturity perspective on this particular piece? And they’re an integral piece of that conversation. Right. Because you want to take them on that journey so that they can understand what the what is the foundation or components of what they have today. And is it a leap to go to where they want to go, or do we build a bridge there?
Right. Okay. And it depends on the situation, you know, depends on, whether they want to be a first mover. In a particular space and in some instances some industries. That’s a good bet, right? And others, you know, we know there’s the road is strewn with first major disadvantage.
Dimitri Boylan
Yes that’s true.
Sean Morris
Right. So it just.
Dimitri Boylan
Depends. So it’s really an industry and company-specific.
Sean Morris
Yeah. What we want to do at the end of the day is look at it holistically. Because we want it to be successful. We want to be we, we want it to be as successful as we want our clients to be successful. And to do that there’s no it’s not a commodity transformation is not a commodity.
Sean Morris
It’s a journey. And so you have to be on that journey together. You have to build the trust with the client. You have to build trust with the stakeholders. And that’s a nice way of saying and creating that foundation so that, you know, you’re moving in the right direction. And oftentimes we find there’s sort of eureka moments, both for us and for the clients to say, well, we were originally thinking we go in this particular direction, but we’ve got a couple of things we need to shore up, so let’s move in that direction and then go there.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you adjust as you go along. That’s right. Let’s talk about that. Getting a little deeper into the transformation processes. When you’re running big projects. Okay. We’ve already got the North Star. You found out, you know what the root cause of disruption is? And you figured out that the company wants to be a second mover.
They are the first mover. A little too risky for them. Too much regulation, you know, trail back a little bit on some some things. But they want to be com fundamentally an agile organization. And you know, how do you you know, how do you explain to them what technology needs to be able to do, not the technologies itself, but like what is what do you need out of technology to be that?
Sean Morris
Well, you may often have to redesign the way you operate today more and more often to the technology that you’re implementing. You and I, I’m going to guess, right, that we’re of a quite a similar, generation. We were used to, cua stom, environment that was built to the environment that we had today.
And I think one of the unique and I believe, positive aspects of where we’ve moved from a transformation and certainly a technology transformation, perspective is that adapting to the technology or at least meeting in the middle by doing a service delivery redesign in our instance, is an obvious inflection point when you’re starting to think about these technologies, and that brings those individuals, that are affected by that, who have their fingerprints on that service delivery, redesign, on the journey with you, and more likely to adapt and adopt, to the technology going forward. There is a tendency that I’ve seen, even in our own, organizations sometimes that technology is going to fix everything.
Sometimes it could sometimes, but not at the scale, the transformation scale that we’re talking about today. That’s not.
Dimitri Boylan
Very common. Right? Right. How are you dealing with, it are you noticing a difference? We were talking about generational, differences in people. And, when you go into these projects, do you see a generational difference in how people embrace them or how people respond to them?
Sean Morris
I think there are, yeah, you can see some uniqueness there. I’m personally not a huge fan of models boxing people in a particular gen generation. I think that there are some gross generalizations to be had there. I think what’s more interesting is to look at how has a particular generation grown up with unique technologies, right? Yeah. And environments. Yeah. And that typically is a more interesting way to think about their adaptability. Right. And propensity to accept change.
Yeah. And so there’s some value in breaking that down there. But it, but but not everybody is going to fit every piece of those right groupings that we often want to throw out there and say that that is that group and they’re, you know, homogeneous to that particular group. True.
Dimitri Boylan
But they are, they’re, they’re they are different. They’ve had different educational experiences as well as different technology experiences. And so, you know, your expectation about your, your career now is really different than it was. And so you take the technology aptitude very high. You take the educational background differently. You take the expectation about the career being very different as well.
And then you put that person into a transformation process for some of them, it might seem like just they won’t even know why we say transformation. They’ll just be like, what do you mean transformation?
Sean Morris
No, actually. Just work. Yeah. I haven’t found that. I don’t think we’ve reached that transformation. Utopia. Quite.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, they’re not at school. They’re not really working yet anyway.
Sean Morris
Well, they’re they’re just entering the workforce. The reason I said that, though, is, that they say my experience and again, this is going to be a little bit of a generalization, but what I’ve witnessed is they have a stronger voice than previous generations. Had. They ask more questions, and they have stronger opinions, which I personally think is really helpful. That tells me they want their fingerprints on this transformation. They don’t.
Dimitri Boylan
Work if their fingerprints aren’t on.
Sean Morris
Things. That’s right, that’s right. That’s been my experience.
Dimitri Boylan
So my experience too, so far.
Sean Morris
And the the generation up one up from them similar actually.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. But beyond that, you could get away with this has been done for you, right. You were part of this thing. So okay.
Sean Morris
Honestly, from a change journey perspective, that’s that’s a gift if you’re leading a transformation. Because the worst thing around change is ambivalence, right? The ambivalence will bite you on the back end when you go live. So you want them to be we want them to be engaged. Yeah. That’s interesting because.
Dimitri Boylan
That’s that’s you know, you you mentioned earlier, you know, dealing with the people that aren’t on board, you know, that the resistance and that’s you’re right. Ambivalence is a dangerous one because the resistance, you can identify them and you can focus on them. And you can convince them and bring them over. But the ambivalent people are not so easy to identify. Yeah, just nothing happens and you don’t know why. Yeah. Okay. That’s a hidden risk in a big transformation. So how do you scope how do you smoke that out. You know, how do you figure out if they’re just going along with you. Because you’re there. You’re not. They’re not.
Sean Morris
Yeah. Well there’s a number of techniques that you want to bring in along the journey. One is having embedded, I’ll call it, change leaders in different aspects of the organization that are much more closely connected to different populations, that maybe you don’t have the most immediate reach into. I am a huge proponent of data, a huge proponent of data.
Get out there and ask and listen and calculate that data on what the sentiment is about a particular process or a particular move that we’re contemplating. Measure that constantly and look at it constantly because, over time, you start to see the patterns there. And you can actually start to pick out some of the ambivalence from that if you structure it correctly.
Data is our friend. Yeah. And that’s the beauty of technology and automation. You know, over the last twenty or so years, there have been some really great tools out there to help us do that, that aren’t distracting but really give us some key insights about key populations that maybe are further on that change curve than others.
Dimitri Boylan
So I can see how that can work in your model where you have the big ideas in the North Star. And then when you go into the transformation, you kind of identified, we’re getting a digital part right, to facilitate the additional transformation journeys that you will be on. And is that because obviously if you get that platform story right, you actually get to the data.
If you if you don’t have the platform, if you’re just in the middle of a transformation and you don’t have some tech in place, you are without data, basically.
Sean Morris
That’s right. Right. I mean, there are old-school ways of doing it that maybe aren’t automated. They are slower, more complicated, and honestly more of a distraction from the groups that are part of your transformation and you don’t want it to be you want it to be embedded. This is what we’re used to today, right? So think about it, every time you buy something from whatever your favorite brand is, you’re going to get a follow-up.
They know not everybody will reply to that, which is a nuisance. Some will, some will not. So it’s embedded in our environment and our community these days, which is why you see it so much.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. The engagement phenomenon is a managed process based on data. Feedback is something that you give to get a different level of engagement. I think people now have really gotten around that idea completely. Right. So let’s talk about that platform now, let’s go back into the tech.
Is your tech strategy changing a lot now because of large language models? I, you know, and if so, you know, do you know in what ways it’s going to change yet or is it still too early?
Sean Morris
Well, we’re at the very beginning of this journey. Right? You know, my son came home about this time two years ago from college, our middle guy, and started talking about generative AI and ChatGPT. Right. And I had heard about it. I’m great. You know, I’d like to think I’m kind of a geeky technologist, too. Yeah, but I hadn’t thought about it from an application perspective because he was sharing what his friends were doing with their writing their papers in college that way.
Right on. Years ago. Yeah, right. It was only a few years ago. And so, the AI journey, we can talk for a long time about the AI journey, and I’m happy to answer questions on that and have a chat about that. I think, I’ll use an example, though, before we go down the AI.
Dimitri Boylan
I don’t want to go too far down that rabbit hole here, because we could run for hours on that. And it’s really.
Sean Morris
Well, let me so on AI, there is no I believe this. There is no better place in an enterprise structure than your talent organization to be in the middle of AI. Yeah. And the reason for that, and you know, this, right, is you have, lots of use cases that you can apply. You have to, increase a very innovative set of individuals that sit in this important and increasingly important function of any enterprise.
And then they also, play an important role from a Guardian perspective of our people and their data and the rules that we are required and should follow, for to protect our, our individuals and follow the right rules and regulations of, city or state or the federal government. Yeah. And so I love that balance. Right. You’re not going to jump out of the guardrails when you do that in talent.
Dimitri Boylan
Right. But if you’re a CRO this is a huge opportunity and a huge critical risk at the same time. You know you’re getting sort of both. I mean, I think as a CFO, you certainly think I’m going to apply a lot of AI, but, you know, when you’re in HR, AI is just it’s the type of thing that can allow you to deal with the complexity of human behavior, okay.
At a level that you haven’t previously been able to do with technology. Right. And now it’s so early that it is hard to imagine exactly what that’s going to look like. You know, so I think the way I look at it, anyway, as I say, you have to get this digital transformation and this digital framework together.
Okay? You have to do well along that road before you’re on the other road, you know because just throwing ChatGPT on top of everything is a no-brainer bad idea. And placing AI inside the organization strategically to add high value where it’s high value and, low risk where it is low risk. And understanding that matrix requires you to have some kind of organized digital set of platforms and experiences. Otherwise, the context is not there. That’s right. You know.
Sean Morris
You know, one of the things, while we’re on the topic of AI that we chose to do from a strategic perspective in our talent organization was to double down on the AI community within talent. Okay. And the reason for that is, which I think is reasonable. There are healthy skeptics out there. Yeah, there are people that, you know, are certainly pioneers and want to run at 110.
While we were analyzing what are the right digital AI platforms for us to implement as a firm, we were going to go with vendor platforms. We were going to create some of our own, and we’re primarily with vendors, but we do have some of our own. We wanted to create for those small examples where we’ve got our own, a community of people that are just interested in what I could do to their day-to-day.
Yeah. That community, by the way, us is about 20% of our total talent population at this point, probably 25 very large. Okay. We have the largest, percentage of people that are coming back to some of these tools that we have put in place of anywhere in the firm. And so the theory of this was, let’s create a community that can apply it to some aspects of their day-to-day.
Let’s put guardrails around it so that you know what we can do and what we can’t do. But let’s see what innovative approaches they can come up with. In doing so, let’s build the trust level up and share that as a community. I think that’s been a game changer for us.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah, yeah.
Sean Morris
Huge game changer.
Dimitri Boylan
That’s interesting.
Sean Morris
Now, everybody else wants to go down the technology road, and I think that’s great. But at the end of the day, your culture has to accept and embrace something as big as AI. And I think we’re on that journey. Yeah. They’re coming up with some wonderful ideas and approaches, which we’re then sharing. And then you have.
Dimitri Boylan
Time to analyze them. And yes, right. If you ask the whole organization to do that, you’d be flooded, you’d be distracted. And you might not even find the good sort, the good out from the bad.
Sean Morris
As voluntary, by the way. Yeah, they are volunteer volunteering their time to do that because I’m genuinely interested. Yeah, yeah. So go back to your question really quickly. On machine learning. And some of the unique, you know, when you, when you have this digital platform that we just went live, what do you do. Right. What are some of the things that you can do with that?
The one that I’m most excited about. And I’m excited about a bunch of them. But this one really has my attention right now. And we’re moving out on and at speed is skills. Yeah, sure. So we’ve thought about skills. And the value that having a comprehensive skills approach can do for decades. And the reality is, you and I both know has been that, the technology just hasn’t been there, never got to the complexity of the data that you’re talking about.
Right. And we’ve just had, you know, leaps in that technology. Certainly, machine learning is a big, big piece of that. But there’s some AI in there as well, which now enables us to think about skills as a currency within an organization. Exactly. You know, take that down. The life cycle, a big piece of, our business is we have our team members that are moving from one client to another on a pretty regular, very regular basis, right?
Dimitri Boylan
Evolving their skills, constantly being.
Sean Morris
Called out deployments. Right. And if you can increase the speed and accuracy with which you can deploy an individual because of this new currency, which is much more predictive of success, we believe, then that’s a substantial positive from a bottom-line perspective. And honestly, from a talent experience perspective. Yeah, because it’s not just about us.
It’s both sides as a business wanting to, you know, increase our bottom line. It is the person actually having the right talent experience for a particular client. Yeah. And again you lead with that. But the outcome is.
Dimitri Boylan
Is another thing that’s very valuable to you. And we could stay on that for a minute because.
Sean Morris
That which you are.
Dimitri Boylan
Doing, which is sort of a basic part of your business, right? Getting the right people to the right customer, with the right skill set at the right time, okay, is what most companies do in their digital transformation, certainly, there are parts of their digital transformation to try to emulate internally, right? With their internal mobility programs. They’re trying to have the right employee on the right project at the right time, and then later on another project and to increase output for those individuals and for the groups that they move in and out of.
And of course, low retention. Right. So they’re trying to do exactly the same thing, except they don’t have a commercial practice that is mandating that you have you have a practice that says clearly were more profitable. And clearly our customers are happier. If I have the right consultant there.
Sean Morris
They are.
Dimitri Boylan
They have the idea, but it’s not as strong as it would be if they didn’t have an exterior force forcing them to try to get to that optimization. So you’re in your big projects, okay? Right now, Deloitte’s biggest project is right here. You’re trying to set the stage for the Deloitte of the future. Okay. And the firm is on.
You have consensus. Okay? You have a lot of experience. All the people in your company are well-adjusted to change. You’ve practiced this transformation process with your customers over many years. So you have a lot of, experience with it. You sound very excited about what you’re doing. I logic sound really? Yeah. I love a good and interesting.
What do you do when I mean, when when you’re done with this big digital transformation? Do you personally go back to going out there and and, doing stuff for the customers? Do you go back to do you go back to government? Government has huge challenges and, you know, and huge challenges around skills and around labor and efficiency that comes out of doing all of those things better. Do you go back there or do you keep working on the things inside of Deloitte?
Sean Morris
That’s a really interesting question, and I’m not sure I really have the answer. I’m actually starting to have that conversation with my performance manager or client of a performance manager right now and some of our senior leaders. I’ve been jokingly using the analogy that over the last two roles, I feel like I’ve gotten my PhD in Deloitte. Maybe I’m into the postdoc season at this point, I don’t.
Dimitri Boylan
Know. Well, that was kind of my point, though, because that’s the skill you’ve kind of now, how do you want to take that more in Deloitte, or do you want to move that out and pass that on to?
Sean Morris
I think look, at the end of the day, there are two things that we are fundamentally, focused on. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the talent experience. We’re focused on our people. Yeah, first and foremost, and we are very focused on our clients. And so there is no bigger calling for us than to be with our clients at the end of the day.
Yeah. That’s where the real beauty of, consulting happens. And, you never want to be too far away from that, right? Right. Right. I’m still in the market. I’m still helping teams with clients. Right. I’m just not at the level that I used to be at. So, you know, you could move back in that direction.
And certainly, that would not be unappealing to me, in any way.
Dimitri Boylan
Right? Yeah. I wasn’t expecting a definitive answer. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, but I’d like to I’d like to see what what happens. Listen, it’s been fantastic. I’m so glad you could take time. You’re a very busy man, as I said. I’m really glad you could take time to to chat here. And I’d love to talk to you when you get this done. About what you’re what you’re going to take on next. Well.
Sean Morris
Thank you. I’ve actually really enjoyed this. It’s been a great conversation.
Dimitri Boylan
So thank you. Fantastic. Sean.
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