Do your diversity initiatives promote assimilation over inclusion?
In this episode of Fearless Thinkers, the BTS Podcast, Lacee Jacobs, Head of DEI at BTS, and Mac Quartarone, PhD, Director at BTS, reflect on their Harvard Business Review article of the same name discussing the critical differences between inclusion and assimilation.
Most of us want to lead in a way that matters; to lift others up and build something people want to be part of.But too often, we’re socialized (explicitly or not) to lead a certain way: play it safe, stick to what’s proven, and avoid the questions that really need asking.
This podcast is about the people and ideas changing that story. We call them fearless thinkers.
Our guests are boundary-pushers, system challengers, and curious minds who look at today’s challenges and ask, “What if there is a better way?”If that’s the energy you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place.
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Masami: Welcome to Fearless Thinkers, the BTS podcast. My name is Masami Cookson, and our host is Rick Cheatham. On today's episode, we have Lacee Jacobs and Mac Quartarone from our DEI Center of Excellence.
Rick: Hey, Masami. DEI has been one of those things that seems like it's on everybody's priority list for a couple of years, and [it’s] not only important and urgent to folks, but it also one of the most difficult things to solve for because the process of creating equitable policy - while at the same time dealing with people's very personal beliefs and perspectives - can be quite challenging.
Masami: Absolutely. Even with the dedication and resources from our own leaders at BTS, there have been many moments that were incredibly challenging.
Rick: Right… In the spirit of full transparency, as a leader of BTS… You'll hear about even some of the moments that I've had in struggling to get this right. So, we might as well just jump in. Lacee, Mac, thank you so much for sitting down to chat with me today.
Lacee: Oh, happy to be here, Rick.
Mac: Same, really glad to be here.
Rick: Cool, well, I think, in the interest of time, we just dive straight in from the beginning. It seems like, right now, DEI is one of those things that so many of our clients are either wanting to explore or understand, or they've already actively got programs in flight. I'm curious, as you've gone out and had the opportunity to visit with some of the best and brightest — what are some things that you see that make DEI programs particularly great, and possibly, what are the common stumbles?
Lacee: Well, Rick, one of the things that we're seeing more of — which is absolutely great — is that we have organizations that are willing to commit to longer periods of investing in this work. For example, we have a client currently that decided to do a three-year journey with us. And this work is a journey. In fact, we would recommend any organization that wants to do this work to fall in love with the journey… Because, as you commit to DEI initiatives, things may seem like they [get] worse before they get better. For example, a lot of organizations want do work around psychological safety. And as you are making your environments, the culture, more psychologically safe for employees to speak up, you're going to hear people sharing things that they may not have shared originally, and it may be uncomfortable in the beginning. And that's actually a great thing — for an organization to start to hear people speaking up, and sharing, and having those hard conversations.Another thing that's great that we're seeing is people are recognizing that you can't just do the one-and-dones; you can't do the unconscious-bias training. It's not enough. You need to practice this work. We need to be willing to get it wrong, to mess up, self-correct, and actually grow in the process. Some of the things that aren't working is that we still have people come to us and say, "Hey, you know, we have some things that we'd like to accomplish here. We have five different topics. Can you please create something? Five minutes each for these five topics?" And that's just the opposite of what I was talking about. That absolutely is not going to get organizations where they want to be — it is really checking a box. Your people know when you're doing that, and they are going to feel like, “If you're not committed, why should [I] commit?” Those are just a few things. I know Mac might want to add a couple more things.
Mac: Yeah, in addition to everything that Lacee said, one thing that stands out is sometimes we'll get requests from a client, or even our colleagues, who want to go about doing this work. And so, you end up with someone who just wants to design a program on their own, either, you know, for the client or one of our colleagues, and it's just something you cannot do on your own. It has to be a group effort, has to be a team effort, has to be a partnership. 'Cause if you think about inclusion, that's all about bringing people together and partnering on this. It just requires a certain amount of partnership in order to be successful.
Rick: Well, and I think kind of tying those two things together there is... You know, when I think about traditional initiatives within organizations, this work has a huge[ly] organizational, possibly policy[-related], possibly legal component. It's deeply personal and personally challenging, and sometimes uncomfortable, as you just said, or threatening. So, when you all think about this, and, Mac, I think you were just kind of starting to touch on it when you were talking about “It's gotta be inclusive, as the work's even being performed in the first place,” but how do organizations kind of walk that tightrope of getting deep into people's minds and hearts and trying to manage policy at the same time?
Mac: That's a good question, and I can see how it'd be a big concern. The main thing is that, if you think about diversity-equity-inclusion, it doesn't have to conflict with the regulations or the laws. It's all about ensuring that everyone has an opportunity to be a part of the work, a part of the conversations, and making sure that you're not creating an unfair environment. And more than that, that you're actively inviting and welcoming people in to be involved. So, I don't see it as much of a conflict with any legal issues or, you know, company policy. It's not doing DEI that's really in conflict with the laws and with company policies.
Lacee: To Mac's point, I believe that… This, again, because it's a journey… Organizations, when they start to do this work, they have to be willing to see what gets revealed in this process — to see where there's a gap between policy and people feeling like they're being treated equitably and even equally and fairly, in some cases. I mean, equal doesn't always mean equitable, and that's a challenge for a lot of people: making sure that they understand what the difference is. And, like you said, with human beings, we are deeply triggered when things aren't fair. And so not only are you dealing with something that could be legal, you also are dealing with emotions, which impact performance and someone's ability to work in a way that feels safe and healthy for them. And that's a big deal right now, especially based on what everyone's been through in the past couple of years.
Rick: Yeah, that has definitely added another layer of complexity, I think, to all business life. Suddenly, now we're talking... We've all got to be concerned about health and safety from time to time. So, let's go just a tiny bit deeper into the concept of assimilation. And within that, there's an assumption (and even a belief within our own organization — just being completely transparent) that culture matters, and being part of a community and having a clear identity as a company is going to get us significantly better results. And how do we walk that tightrope of making sure that we're building a great company culture without asking too much of people, from an assimilation standpoint?
Mac: Well, the thing that stands out to me in what you said was that culture does matter. It just doesn't always matter in a positive way. And I think that's important to remember because culture can support success. It can support health and happiness. It can also cause unhappiness and pain and frustration and failure. So, I definitely wanted to call that out first. But before I go on, Lacee, did you want to talk about any of that?
Lacee: Well, I agree with you, Mac. It's something that we need to be completely aware of, and mindful of, and respectful of, because the organization has a culture, and you have individuals [who] are bringing in all of their cultural backgrounds. And so, how does that get integrated? And that's a lot of what we're talking about when we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. There is a process, again, that happens. And without that awareness, we are trying to force people to fit into a box, and that's not always going to work, especially when people feel very strongly about their cultural backgrounds.
So, you asked [me] to explain some about assimilation, and there are good examples and then there's some really not-so-great examples of assimilation. There are absolutely ways in which, when we step into an organization, there's not only gonna be an expectation to assimilate — there's going be a benefit to assimilate. You know, this is what belonging feels like — when we are part of something. So, there's value in recognizing that, "Oh, when I work here, here are some of the values that this organization has, and I align with those values, and I'm really excited about participating." And that's where you'll see people...For example, we work with organizations where they may have something that's representative of that culture that everyone has. It's almost a show of respect for the organization. For example, a hat. It could be some kind of symbol, or, you know, some of the language that you see organizations use. Some of that becomes challenging when you are new to an organization and you're walking in for the first time and everyone's speaking in a way that sounds absolutely foreign to you. It's confusing. And because they're so accustomed to operating in that way, then someone else could feel easily excluded. So, without that awareness, it becomes very problematic — the impact, [that is]. So, while some of these things that we do when we talk about assimilation are incredible, and [do] make us feel good, there are those times where it doesn't work. And there are some examples. I'm going to let Mac share a few, and I have some more ideas.
Mac: Yeah, the thing that stands out to me in what Lacee said about the hat being part of the culture and assimilating to that, is — pretty much anyone can get a hat and join that culture and feel like they fit in. But when you have cultural elements that are about personality or about your own personal background, that's when it gets really difficult. So, for instance, if you work at a place where the culture is very focused on showing yourself off and promoting yourself — being on stage all the time, or being a big sales personality — someone who isn't as outgoing and almost aggressively, confidently extroverted, there's not much that they can do to change who they are to fit that culture.
And the fact is, that when you get a whole bunch of people who all fit the same culture, you get this monolith, where everyone becomes more identical; more of the same experiences, more of the same knowledge and understanding, and it just narrows that background to where you have a very limited scope of what you can contribute. But, when you open up that culture and you make it welcoming for people of all sorts of different backgrounds — and you're bringing in people with all sorts of different experiences, education, knowledge, personalities, et cetera — then you're opening yourself up to new ideas, new contributions, and different ways to think about things. And that's where innovation happens.
That's where, you know, more success happens. I mean, there's all sorts of research that shows that… it all comes from not having everyone who's exactly the same. Now, granted, that group that's exactly the same because they think alike, they have the similar experiences, similar language, similar, references, they can operate very effectively and efficiently. But will they be successful? Who knows?
Lacee: A lot of organizations are, right now, hiring for diversity, and they're onboarding for conformity. And that really creates a problem, to Mac's point, because when you create an environment where everyone is thinking alike or expected to be alike, to have the same types of skills and present them in the same way, then you do miss out on the diversity. And it's proven that, when we're on diverse teams, we do walk away feeling more uncomfortable, because all of us know what it's like to have someone just high five us when we have an idea because they think like us, and it's like, "Ah, that's great," versus someone challenging our ideas. If we wanna get to a place where we're innovative, and really create an environment where there's growth, too, we're going to have to have people in the room that bring something different and unique than we do, and that challenge us. That's the way we want to go.
Rick: It makes a ton of sense, actually. Well, I, so, so, so much appreciate you taking so much time with me today. Every time I have the privilege of sitting down with you, I see the world in a slightly different way, which is incredibly valuable to me. So, thank you so much. And we'll probably need to talk more soon, because as things continue to evolve and we continue to learn, I'm sure that there's much more that our audience will want to hear about. So, thank you.
Lacee: Thank you, Rick. This has been fabulous.
Masami: If you'd like to stay up to date on the latest from the Fearless Thinkers Podcast, please subscribe. Links to all of the relevant content discussed in today's podcast are in the show notes, or you can always reach us at bts.com. Thanks again.
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Hace unos meses terminé una sesión con un equipo de ejecutivos comerciales de una institución financiera mediana. Dos días intensos: cómo prospectar, cómo estructurar conversaciones centradas en el cliente, cómo crear valor en cada interacción. El grupo salió inspirado del taller.
Tres semanas después le pregunté a uno de los mejores participantes sobre cómo le había ido aplicando las nuevas herramientas. Me miró un segundo y me dijo, con total honestidad:
“La verdad... la semana siguiente fue igual que siempre, volví al viejo sistema”
El entrenamiento de capacidades es necesario. Pero sin una cultura comercial que lo sostenga, es un esfuerzo poco rentable para las empresas.
1. Las capacidades sin contexto no sobreviven al día a día
Un ejecutivo de ventas puede salir de un taller sabiendo exactamente qué preguntar, cómo estructurar una conversación de valor, cómo posicionarse como asesor estratégico en lugar de vendedor de productos. La semana siguiente, el peso de las métricas de corto plazo, la presión por resultados y las urgencias del día a día terminan arrastrándolos de vuelta a la rutina de siempre.
McKinsey (2024) encontró que más del 70% de las iniciativas de transformación comercial no logran sus objetivos — y la principal causa no es el diseño del programa, sino la falta de condiciones organizacionales para sostener los nuevos comportamientos.
El problema no es el taller. Es lo que existe o no existe en la realidad de la estructura comercial.
2. El cambio requiere alinear seis pilares
Lo que diferencia a las empresas que realmente transforman su modelo comercial de las que solo capacitan, está relacionado con seis pilares que operan simultáneamente.
1. Patrocinio de la alta dirección que empodera en lugar de solo exigir
2. Disciplina en gestión de cuentas/clientes estratégicos, con metodología y seguimiento
3. Conversaciones centradas en el cliente, no en el portafolio de productos
4. Cada interacción con relevancia estratégica, preparadapara crear valor medible
5. Nuevos comportamientos integrados al ritmo operativodiario y la cadencia del negocio
6. Líderes comerciales presentes que sostienen la cultura, no solo la expresan
Cuando falta uno, los demás no escalan y terminan provocando un círculo vicioso.
3. El liderazgo que sostiene vale más que el que exige
El patrocinio de la alta dirección y la presencia de los líderes comerciales sonlos pilares que más frecuentemente fallan. No porque los líderes no crean en el cambio, sino porque el día a día los jala de vuelta a revisar resultados, no a construir comportamientos.
Gartner (2024) señala que los equipos comerciales cuyos líderes hacen coaching activo y visible tienen hasta un 28% mayor probabilidad de adoptar nuevos comportamientos de manera sostenida.
El entrenamiento define el rumbo y entrega el mapa; el liderazgo es lo que realmente ayuda a navegar y sostener el cambio.
Conclusión
Si tu empresa está invirtiendo en transformar la forma en que sus equipos comerciales se relacionan con los clientes, la pregunta ya no es si el entrenamiento funciona. La verdadera pregunta es: ¿qué tan preparada está la organización para sostener el cambio?
Porque el talento existe. Las habilidades se desarrollan. Pero la cultura no se improvisa; se construye todos los días, con liderazgo, alineación y consistencia.
¿Cuál de estos seis pilares es hoy el más débil en tu organización?
In Part 1, I told you about the three decisions we made two years ago and the simulation flywheel that produced our first Applied AI diamond.
Here’s the field-notes version.
Over 80% of our global business have now adopted a new Applied AI approach for doing simulations in the first eight weeks, across 24 countries and every practice.
The flywheel didn’t stop with simulations. It moved into finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Teams started building agents and bringing them onto their own org charts. We didn’t plan for any of that. We built the conditions for people to find their own breakthroughs.
What it felt like inside the flywheel.
When the simulation team went live with their first clients on the new way of working, the lead person hit a wall. Their words:
“You’re asking too much. You’re making me be a full-stack developer. Up until this point I did a small part, and I sent it to the team, and they built off the back end, and they brought it back. And now I have to end-to-end soup to nuts, basically alone.”
There was graphic UI work nobody had been trained for, the fear of delivering quality below what BTS expects of itself, and the weight of not having a playbook. This was not the joyful adoption story most consultancies tell.
Then something shifted. Six members showed up for product testing, where the usual was two or three. The work created teamwork I hadn’t seen at BTS in years. The breakthrough was not an instantaneous change from skepticism to celebration. It was a breakdown in confidence, then rally, then bonding. If we didn’t make room for the breakdown, we would have lost the rally.
The other breakthrough was global teamwork; not yet a BTS core strength. Our culture is beautiful: high-freedom and entrepreneurial. But people’s first identities are to their countries. Almost every prior attempt we’ve made at a global initiative has failed. The one exception was Covid. So, when I say what happened next surprised me, I mean it.
I asked to join the simulation team’s Slack channel rather than pulling them into status meetings. What I got to watch in the mornings was someone in South Africa waking up, posting “I tried this and got stuck,” then London adding on, then San Francisco weighing in, then a surprise breakthrough overnight from Tokyo. We didn’t engineer that. Curious and determined BTS’ers did. The problem was interesting enough that the org chart didn’t matter. It was amazing to see and a glimpse into the next evolution of the BTS culture.
The pattern: Explore, expand, institutionalize, renew.
What we’ve now seen play out, both inside BTS and with clients, follows the same four-step pattern. Each step asks a specific decision of the leader.
Explore.
Stay stubborn on the aspiration and fluid on the path. Our breakthrough wasn’t the path we originally took. We changed tools and approaches. Nobody could have foreseen that. And if the team had taken the first six months of learnings from AI as their definitive “this is the detailed path we will follow,” we never would have gotten the disruption. Five different tool combinations were tried before we found the one that worked. Companies that lock into a single path or tool too early are betting against compounding capability that doubles roughly every seven months. That is not a bet I’d take.
Expand.
Run the old way and the new way side by side. When the simulation team’s breakthroughs got real, the instinct was to retreat into more internal testing. We did the opposite. They ran old way and new way in parallel on 6 or 8 live client projects across all three geographies. Every single one ended up going live the new way. The backup was always there. They didn’t need it.
Institutionalize.
Burn the boats. The simulation team committed that no new client work would be done the old way after January 1. The other practice leads then committed to dates within Q1, even though most of them had not yet experienced the new way themselves. They had to trust their colleagues. If you can do it for the most complex thing, you could probably do it for the less complex ones. By February 15, we had approaching 90% global adoption across 24 countries, across all practices. I was shocked and proud. We had spent years failing at exactly this kind of global rollout.
Renew.
Treat your agents as contractors. People on our diamond teams are now managing 30+ agents they built themselves. Our teams give agents performance feedback. We terminate their contracts when they don’t deliver. We expand the responsibility of agents when they outperform. The frontier question we’re wrestling with now is token budgeting. Two friends of mine running engineering-heavy companies believe that within 6 - 9 months, their token cost per engineer will exceed the cost of the engineer. Whether that’s the right framing is open. The question is real, and every CEO will be asked some version of it within the year.
What had to be true for this to scale.
Once we achieved this amazing global innovation, the leadership sat down to figure out what made it work. We named five things. None of them were about the technology.
Real pain points as the starting point. We had so many people frustrated from those ways of working, all the back and forth and all the wasted time, that this was gold for them. The old way was already painful. The new way wasn’t a forced disruption; it was relief. Find the workflow where the pain is loudest and start there.
The diamond unlocked creativity, it didn’t constrain it. This was the most differentiated insight, and the one most leaders miss. It wasn't "here's the new tasks and rules." It was, "once you learn how to do this, the sky's the limit. You can be even more creative." If your rollout feels like a new set of rules constraining your people, you’ve built the wrong thing.
Pair deep expertise with fresh eyes. The disproportionate share of our breakthroughs came from a tenured tinkerer with total command of the work, paired with someone new to the role who hadn’t yet built the muscle memory of how it had always been done. Without that pairing, you get incremental improvements to the work you already know how to do, instead of a reinvention.
Refuse the “people are too busy” reflex. When I brought the rollout to the global leadership team, the excuses came fast. “Our people are too busy. They’re burnt out. Q1 is going to be busy. No one’s going to have time.” My response: “This is a chance to eliminate the tasks you dread and expand what you love. I know it is a short push of extra work, and I think after the fact you and your team will feel joy and pride and say it was the best time we ever spent.” This is the moment most AI rollouts die.
Senior leaders must lead by example and do the work themselves. This is not middle manager’s job. This is not something you delegate. Even though you don’t build simulations anymore, you must know what this is. One of our partners proactively put time on senior leaders’ calendars and forced them to do the work. Once they started building, the excitement grew, and they could advocate for the rollout because they understood it. If your executives haven’t put their hands on the keyboard, you don’t have a rollout. You have a memo.
What we’re seeing across clients.
We’re now running this play with client organizations across industries and geographies. The companies whose flywheels are accelerating paired their A-players with their early-career talent, pulled IT and legal into the working sessions, refused the “too busy” reflex, and put their senior leaders’ hands on the keyboard. The companies whose flywheels are stuck almost always have a leadership pattern at the center of the stall. Not a tooling pattern. Not a governance pattern. A leadership pattern.
If this resonates, let’s talk.
If you read Part 1 and asked yourself whether your flywheel was turning, the question I’d add now is sharper: do you have the conditions in place for a diamond to appear? If yes, you’re already moving. If no, the technology will not save you.
Here's where we're starting with clients: a working session, half day to a full day, with a small group that owns one of your highest-friction processes. Together we map where your first diamond is most likely to land, how to set up the side-by-side trial, and what your version of "burn the boats" should look like.
The destination, if we do this right, is a self-reliant culture of applied AI inside your company. 5, 10, 15 diamonds compounding into a fundamentally different way of operating. From what I have experienced this is a once in a career opportunity for dramatic shareholder value creation if you get that muscle going. I say that because I'm watching it happen, in real time, inside our own company and across our client base.
If you want to get your flywheels spinning and map your first diamond, start here. Bring your hardest workflow. We'll bring the playbook.
At BTS, we’re constantly challenging ourselves to innovate at speed. And right now, it feels like we’re standing at the edge of something massive. The energy? Electric. The velocity? Unprecedented. For many of us, the current pace feels a lot like the early days of the pandemic: disorienting, high-stakes, and somehow exhilarating. And honestly—it should feel that way. Our teams have been tinkering with AI, specifically LLMs, for the past 2.5 years and it has really been in the last eight months that I can see the profound impact it is going to have for our clients, for our services and our operating model.
The opportunity isn’t about the technology. The world has it and it’s getting better by the minute. The issue is people and people’s readiness to adopt it and be re-tooled and re-skilled. It’s about leadership. AI is deeply personal, it’s surgical. In fact, that’s its genius. So, getting full scale adoption of AI, re-tooling everyone in the company by workflow, so that they can invent new services, unlock new customer value, unlock new levels of productivity, even use it for a better life, is the current race. The central question I’ve been wrestling with, alongside our clients and our own teams, is this:
What does AI actually mean for leadership and culture?
And the answer is clearer by the day: AI isn’t just a new toolset. It’s a new mindset. It demands that we rethink how we lead, how we learn, and how we build thriving organizations that can compete, adapt, and grow.
The productivity paradox revisited
Let’s start with the elephant in the boardroom. There’s been a lot of buzz around AI and its promises. But many leaders have quietly wondered: Will any of this actually move the needle? A year ago, we were asking the same thing. We had licenses. We had curiosity. We had early experiments. But the results were modest, a 1% productivity gain here or there. But by April, we were seeing:
- 30–80% productivity gains in software engineering
- 9–12% gains in consulting teams
- 5%-20% improvements in client success and operations
Just as importantly, the innovation unlock and creativity across our platforms due to vibe coding along with new simulation layers, is leading to new value streams for our clients. This isn’t theoretical. It’s not hype. It’s real. The difference? Adoption, ownership, and a shift in how we lead in order to energize the AI innovation within our teams. The challenge now isn’t whether AI creates value. It’s how to unlock and scale that value across teams, geographies, and business units—and do it fast.
Two Superpowers of the Agentic AI Era
In working with leaders across industries, I’ve come to believe in two superpowers (there are more as well) that will unlock the potential of this AI era: Jazz Leadership and a Simulation Culture.
1. Jazz Leadership
Forget the orchestra (although personally I am a big fan.) The successful team cultures that are innovating with AI feel more like jazz. In jazz, there’s no conductor. There’s no fixed sheet music. There are core bars and then musicians make up music on the spot based on each other’s creativity, building off of each other’s trials, riffs and mistakes, build something extraordinary together. This is how experimenting with AI today, in the flow of work, feels like.
For each activity across a workflow, how can new AI prompts, agents, and GPTs make it better, codify high performance, drive speed and quality simultaneously? How can we try something totally different and still get the job done? How might we re-invent how we work? That’s how high-performing teams operate in the AI era. The world is moving too fast for command-and-control leadership, a perfect sheet of music with one leader who is interpreting the sheet music and directing. What we need instead is improvisation, trust, shared authorship, courage and a playful spirit because there are just as many fails as breakthroughs.Jazz leadership is about creating the conditions where:
- Ideas can come from anywhere
- People see tinkering and testing as key to survival and AI failures mean your team is at the edge of what’s possible for your services and ways of working
- Leaders say, “I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll go first, with you”
- People feel “I’m behind relative to my peers in the company” and the company sees this as a good sign because the pace of learning with AI means higher chance of success in the new era
At BTS, we recently promoted five new partners who embody this mindset. They weren’t the most traditional leaders. But they were the most generative. They coached others. They experimented and are constantly re-tooling themselves and others. They inspired movement. They are keeping us ahead, keeping our clients ahead and driving our re-invention. Jazz leaders make teams better, not by directing every note—but by setting the stage for breakthroughs. It is similar to the agile movement, similar to how it felt in Covid as companies had to reinvent themselves. It’s entrepreneurial, chaotic and fun.
2. Simulation Culture
The ability to simulate is a super-power in this next agentic, AI era. Simulation has always been part of creating organizational agility, high performance and leadership excellence. But AI and high-performance computing have transformed it into something bigger, faster, and infinitely more powerful. It means that building a simulation culture is within all of our grasp, if we tap its power.Today, companies simulate:
- Strategic alternatives - from market impact all they way to detailed frontline execution
- New business, new markets and operating models
- Major capital deployment e.g. build a digital twin of a factory before breaking ground
- Initiative implementation
- Workflows current and future
- Jobs to assess for talent and critical role readiness
- Customer conversations and sales enablement motions
With a simulation culture, where you regularly engage in scenario planning and expect preparation and practice as a way of working, billions in capital is saved, cross-functional teams are strengthened, high performance gets institutionalized, win rates increase, earnings and cash flow improves.
Where to get started
Below are a few examples of what leading organizations are doing. Consider testing these in your own organization:
- Conversational AI bot platforms used to scale performance expectations and the company’s unique culture.
- Agentic simulations built into tools so people can prepare and practice with 100% perfect context and not a wasted moment.
- Digital twins of the job created so that certifications and hiring decisions are valid.
- Micro-simulations spun up in hours to align 50,000 people to a shift in the market or a new operational practice.
Final Thoughts
- Lead like a jazz musician. Embrace improvisation, courage and shared creativity.
- Build a simulation culture. Because in a world that’s moving this fast, practice isn’t optional—it’s how we win.
This is a brave new world. Not five years from now. Right now.Let’s shape it—together.
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Brandon Hall Group, the leader in Empowering, Recognizing and Certifying Excellence in HCM, recently announced that BTS is certified as a Smartchoice® Preferred Solution Provider, confirming BTS's leadership in transforming strategy into measurable human performance.
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When things go wrong, efforts to hold people “accountable” in an organization rarely produce what leaders actually want. Instead, they see compliance without commitment and weakened performance over time. The core issue is: Accountability cannot be mandated; it must be chosen.
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BTS proudly announces that Jessica Skon, President and CEO, has been named one of The Top 25 Consulting Firm CEOs of 2025 by The Consulting Report.
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