John Marshall (00:32)

Welcome back to the Present Professional. Today I’m joined by Logan Yonavjak, co-founder and CEO of the Readiness Engine, a leadership intelligence company that’s focused on measuring the hidden drivers of execution risk inside growing organizations.

Her work sits at a fascinating intersection of capital leadership, adult development, and long-term value creation. She’s helped More move hundreds of millions across climate and natural capital strategies, and now she’s applying that same decision quality to one of the hardest questions inside organizations. How do we know who is actually ready for complexity?

Rather than relying on charisma, visibility, tenure, or past performance, Logan’s work explores how language, developmental capacity, and behavioral signals can help organizations make better decisions around promotion, succession, hiring, and leadership development. Logan, welcome to the present professional.

Logan Yonavjak (01:42)

So great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

John Marshall (01:45)

Of course, of course. Well, I’d love to allow the audience to learn a little bit more about you. So I’m curious, what was the through line from you know your work in capital allocation and investment into leadership readiness? How did this evolve?

Logan Yonavjak (02:06)

think if I look in hindsight, it’s a lot clearer. Obviously, like many of our paths, what I came across observationally was just that a lot of teams and leaders were not necessarily optimized for the tasks at hand. I didn’t have the language of the time, but they w didn’t seem ready for the level of complexity or the

multitude of tasks or relationship management or team management that they were assigned to. And often people were promoted because of their past skills or experience rather than their management abilities. You know, just these different observations from teams I’d worked on, both functional and dysfunctional. And for me, being someone who really cares a lot about positive impact through investing, I think

My bias became like, why don’t we have the most highly equipped leaders at the helm? Like how are we picking these people? Are we making the best decisions? It seems like a lot of leadership decisions are based on again past performance credentials, warm intros, your resume, not necessarily readiness or your level of capacity as a as a person. And so I think there’s just it’s a bit antiquated how we make

hiring and leadership development decisions. And so this was, you know, again, I was coming from mostly the investing world. I’ve worked in university endowments, I’ve worked at private equity firms, and I’ve also worked at smaller investment shops and helped develop investment vehicles and worked with startups. So I’ve kind of seen just a variety of different types of leadership and at smaller and larger companies.

probably the largest company I’ve worked at is Morgan Stanley. So just, you know, I think it was informal and then it became a formal interest.

John Marshall (04:09)

Hmm. Started off as this this curiosity and the patterns that you were seeing in not just the teams that you were a part of, but also the companies that you were investing in, right? And that your firms were investing in.

Logan Yonavjak (04:24)

Then I also made some investments

as an angel investor. and I would say that there’s one in particular where I I kind of grossly misjudged the leadership from the perspective of I was very persuaded by the charisma of one of the founders. And then once the check was deployed and they had my money, it was it really became a different conversation. really flaky behavior.

And a lot of problems ensued and I wish I’d had something more rigorous that I had deployed around like understanding the people who are at the helm. So that was a personal story that also kind of drove this interest. again, that didn’t all come at once, but it it definitely helped inform. So

John Marshall (05:09)

Mm-hmm. Developed out of necessity.

Logan Yonavjak (05:14)

Which is mu

you know, a lot of a lot of necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.

John Marshall (05:21)

Couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. It’s funny, we were just we’re just talking about that with the digital nomad family invention that exists.

Logan Yonavjak (05:30)

right. Yes. Yeah, we were.

John Marshall (05:32)

Right? That that need, that need. I search for it and it’s out there. But

in regards to this need, right, the need to

understand capacity, understand readiness, right, before we make hiring promotion decisions. So when I love the name to readiness engine, right? Like and even just understanding readiness. But when you say readiness, like what are you actually measuring there?

Logan Yonavjak (06:09)

Well, I’d like to start actually by speaking about toddlers because I have a two year old and I think a lot about her capacity with this framework in mind now. Obviously what we’re studying is adult developmental capacity. but I think there’s a good analogy because we’ve all spent time with small children and sometimes she will understand what I’m saying.

If I ask her a question. And sometimes she just is blank because she doesn’t understand my question and she’ll actually respond to something that she thinks I said. And my point in saying this is that when someone’s at a certain developmental capacity, they don’t necessarily even understand the next level up. Or they people at the next level up have a hard time remembering what it was like to be at the kind of a subsequent level down.

Because these patterns of development can actually occur over multiple decades, especially if there’s not coaching intervention. Like think about who you were. We can bring it back to being an adult. Think about who you were 10 years ago. You had a different developmental capacity, and we could probably have mapped it if we’d looked longitudinally. And so these are very much patterns that have been developed in the research of adult developmental psychology.

And there are markers of understanding where someone comes in in terms of their ability to hold complexity, for instance. And what does that actually mean? it means that you’re able to juggle many, many, many more balls than you did when you were at a lower level of development. And so, and you’re doing that objectively. So, when you’re at a lower stage of development, you tend to be more eye-centric. Your world revolves around you.

and what you’re experiencing. And as you grow in your developmental capacity, you’re able to see different perspectives and kind of build on those perspectives up until a point where it’s actually quite exponential. so people who are higher stages of development are actually modeling and measuring like thousands of data points objectively. And we think of it as the egocentric to the the world-centric to the like cosmic-centric almost.

And so some of the spiritual, you know, leaders of our society are probably at those much higher levels of development, which most most people don’t reach in in their lifetimes.

John Marshall (08:39)

Mm-hmm. This reminds me of is there any spiral dynamics work woven into that? Okay.

Logan Yonavjak (08:48)

Yes. Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (08:50)

I was gonna say as you were kind of talking through those different l levels of levels of consciousness, I was kind of visualizing the the pathway up that up the spiral. Right. Okay.

Logan Yonavjak (09:01)

Yes. And in fact you

as you go up, you’re also metabolizing from the lower levels. So you’re kind of taking what you need and continuing to grow. So it’s not like you’re just completely shedding what you’ve learned before. It’s very much building on an additive. But there are certain skills that you kind of let go as you as you move up the ladder. So it’s and I just wanna also frame this is not bad or good. There’s

no sort of assignment of

you know, good people are at this level or people who are incapable are at these levels. You know, it’s more just where are you realistically sitting and perspective taking from and then what kind of roles are those perspectives best suited for? And we haven’t really done

John Marshall (09:49)

Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (09:50)

much in the way of parsing that out in corporate or other settings. So it I think we are missing that.

layer of understanding in how we assess and develop leaders.

John Marshall (10:07)

So

I kind of got one element or one measurable out of that. And it’s a the like the ability to hold the ability to hold complexity, right? How many perspectives are you evaluating like as you take in information, as you develop strategy, as you make decisions? So it’s this less and it’s the funny how you say, you know, I centric to more like or other centric, cosmic centric.

other centered mentality. And you can even I can even notice it in some of my clients as well, just in in the language that they use. Right. In thinking I, I, like you said, I language, right? And like when you said that, it came, it would hit me. Now you’re good.

Logan Yonavjak (10:48)

Mm-hmm. Well, I think a lot of the value Yeah. Yes. And I think a lot of the value we’re adding. yeah. I’m so sorry. I keep interrupting you. I was gonna

say the I think one of the values we’re bringing is just creating a platform of shared vocabulary for some of these concepts that many of us are already tuning into, like you’re saying with your clients. It maybe just not has not been at the forefront.

of how you think about their developmental stage, but once it once you see it, you see it. You know, it’s kind of one of those things that now I see the l this through I see almost everyone through the lens of of adult developmental stages. So

John Marshall (11:31)

Yeah. Yeah, once you s once you see it you can’t you can’t unsee it. And and there’s a another another word that you said I think is really important is e able to see it objectively. Because I I remember even just from you know some of the research, some of the Keegan research in in w it was one of my one of my coach training schools I was in.

When we were going through the right, I think it was maybe his immunity to change work.

And we were going through the different stages of what you’re subject to, right? So it’s like you evolve from just like being subject to like the opinions or activities of your parents, and then you’re subject to your, you know, teachers, world, friends, etc. And then you your world expands, but you become subject to more. And then there’s like the switch to objectivity, right? You get to a level of maturity.

where you’re no longer subject to like the the opinions of your parents, if you will. There it’s more of a an objective like relationship.

Logan Yonavjak (12:44)

Mm-hmm. You see it as one piece of the equation.

John Marshall (12:47)

Right, exactly, exactly. And then you know, and then you become so you become subject to less so that you, you know, your your nervous system is

is less

is less subject to the will of outside forces so that you can inherently hold all of these objective pieces of of data to make an assumption there or to make not assumption to make a decision or develop a strategy from an objective place. So I think there’s you know there’s something there, but I’m I’m curious how do you evaluate like what people are subject to through an assessment like this?

Logan Yonavjak (13:33)

Well, we’re asking open ended and scenario based questions and we ask about fourteen of them for this assessment that’s focused on founders and and startups. we asked, you know, we have someone sit in front of a one-way video assessment and then they’re answering these questions and then for strategic complexity, which is the concept we’ve just been talking about, we are looking at how many perspectives they name.

In referring to experiences they’ve had or perspectives that they’re holding. So we’re able to trace using sentence basically sentence analysis and paragraph analysis, how many perspectives they’re holding objectively. And so that gives us a proxy for the stages of of development there. That’s just how we look at it from I mean, there’s other constructs that we’re measuring, but we’re talking about the strategic complexity one.

John Marshall (14:30)

Mm-hmm. What what are what are some of the other concepts or con constructs that you’re measuring? Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (14:37)

Constructs. Yeah.

Well, so we’re looking you you were alluding to this, so I’ll go into this one next. Coachability and identity flexibility. So we want to better understand how wedded someone is to their current identity. Because, you know, in in sort of everyday speak, we think about it as fixed and growth mindset. This was something that got brought up a lot in business school when I was there. and we all are

would like to think of ourselves as growth-minded. But in reality, a lot of people are very wedded to their perspective and their current identity. And that makes it very challenging to do innovation work. It makes it challenging when you take any sort of outside criticism and you take it personally. That becomes a real barrier to affecting change. So again, not that those individuals can’t play some sort of functional role

in an organization, but you probably don’t want to put them at the helm when there’s a lot of innovative decisions that need to be made and they’re gonna be receiving a lot of critique from the outside world on how they’re doing things, et cetera. So you just really

John Marshall (15:47)

Yeah.

Logan Yonavjak (15:48)

want someone with that growth mindset whose whose nervous system isn’t gonna feel attacked, who’s practiced that experience of staying objective and being open to that flexible kind of and and it helps you grow with a company too or a

or an entrepreneur grow internally with a department. It’s like you don’t want to stay the same person that you were when you started something. And so again, that’s but that’s a mentality that we can actually we have a micro score on that one in particular because people ask me all the time, what’s the most important construct in terms of if you had to to stack them

And I think coachability and identity flexibility because if you don’t have a growth mindset, it’s really hard to work on the other ones, which you can work on, but it’s just it makes it really challenging. So

John Marshall (16:41)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And do you find that that’s kind of just an an individual’s disposition, nature, nurture, or is that something that’s you’ve found people to actually experience a larger step change in?

Logan Yonavjak (16:58)

I would love to bring on like h have a podcast with an evolutionary biologist and then maybe a sociologist and someone else to help me explain this phenomenon because I do feel like there are there’s a significant portion of the population that tend to be more fixed mindset. And there is, you know, evolutionary rationale for kind of staying in tradition and

maybe being fearful about things changing and you know, maybe there’s there’s reasons why this kind of this fixed kind of calcified way of doing things sticks around with most people and maybe the innovators are kind of the ones that, you know, go out and and pioneer things and you kind of need to keep things stable for the population to continue to thrive. I don’t know. I would really love for someone to tease this out for me. I’m sure there’s people who have theorized on it.

It does seem to be both a biological and a cultural. I know certain cultures are more fixed mindset, more community focused, so less individuated in their kind of way of conceptualizing. So they don’t want to go out on a limb because they’re part of, they see themselves as more part of the group. So I think

John Marshall (18:14)

Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (18:14)

there’s biological, cultural, and then individual like reasons for it.

But I think it’s was one of the most fascinating questions. And that that’s why I don’t judge it per se. I think it’s sort of like, let’s just measure it. And then if it’s not present, you can still work with the person, but like maybe just again, they’re not the best fit for this innovative role. And that’s okay. Like, why can’t we just accept that?

John Marshall (18:42)

I I agree. Like sometimes but but sometimes that, you know, whether it be a hard truth or not, can be something that sets you free. Right? Like

Logan Yonavjak (18:53)

Yeah.

John Marshall (18:56)

And and that was a really great, great answer to that to that question. There’s because that’s why that’s why I asked it. Because right, because I

Logan Yonavjak (19:03)

I don’t have all the answers. It doesn’t make sense in some ways. It really doesn’t.

John Marshall (19:07)

see the same thing where it’s just, you know, an individual’s disposition towards I mean, and there’s so much that can go into where you lie on the spectrum exactly. I mean so much.

Logan Yonavjak (19:19)

Trauma could have been, you know, it’s and that’s why we don’t want to belittle

or judge it. It’s it’s but in coaching you can probably tease more of it out and try to understand it.

John Marshall (19:32)

Coaching and therapy. Right. I mean

Logan Yonavjak (19:34)

Therapy.

John Marshall (19:34)

I think I think there are I think like you said, I think there are some traumas that keep people fixed in their identity. I think there are cultural. I think there are even generational traumas that keep that keep you fixed in your identity. And there are language language barriers that

Logan Yonavjak (19:55)

That’s

true. Yes, great point on that.

John Marshall (19:56)

Right, like like

what you were saying about the the culture, like some cult some languages like don’t have words to express some individual individualistic concepts or contexts that others can. Right? So there’s been I I’ve I’ve read some things about how

how like the way certain cultures like even have the words for something changes the the mindsets that are that are available. So I mean there’s there’s so much work that that or there’s so much just background and like you said different schools of thought that could go into like is someone is someone fixed in their level of fixed versus growth mindset or

Logan Yonavjak (20:46)

yeah, yeah.

John Marshall (20:47)

Yeah,

Logan Yonavjak (20:48)

huh.

John Marshall (20:48)

or like what are the levers that you pull to help shift people towards more growth? Like that’s been a a a question I’ve been really, really interested in. Right. And I think there’s part of the healing trauma part of it. And then you bring in the evolutionary perspective and and I started thinking, you know, why would it be survival oriented to be in a fixed mindset?

The only thing that came up for me was by the perception of others. Like we don’t want to be someone new tomorrow that is unrecognized by your tribe. And they might wonder, like, who the heck has this

Logan Yonavjak (21:34)

What’s

John Marshall (21:34)

person become? Like, should we trust them? Like, who who are they?

Logan Yonavjak (21:38)

There’s sort of a because we’re such such social creatures, there’s a pressure to stay especially in small group units, like pretty pretty similar or to the the group or just make sure everyone’s comfortable in a way. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

John Marshall (21:55)

Yeah, just can consistency, I guess.

And I I’m basing this off of no

data or evolutionary biology background. This is just what I’m feeling.

Logan Yonavjak (22:02)

That’s why I’m sort of like I I think you I’m gonna I’m gonna voluntold

voluntold you to have a a series on fixed mindset and bring in different different perspectives on it ’cause I think it would be a really interesting it would be a really interesting conversation anyway.

John Marshall (22:20)

Definitely. Now

okay, bef so we we went down a little bit of a a mindset rabbit hole. What are what are the other what are the other constructs you’re measuring?

Logan Yonavjak (22:32)

So we look at relational intelligence and a lot of what we’re looking for there is how someone talks about empathizing, putting themselves in other people’s shoes. we actually look at network of how they build networks and how they interact with networks as well. That one we’re still kind of building out, I would say. but yeah, and and in all of these, something else I wanted to bring up is something

my co-founder exposed me to in as a concept is negative space analysis and really asking that question in every context you’re in. So one of the things I find valuable in what we’re doing is we are l you know we’re evaluating what people are saying, but also what they’re not saying. And so

John Marshall (23:20)

Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (23:20)

if someone is kind of completely devoid of discussing any sort of relational

experiences or pointing towards conflicts or good experiences they’ve had with people, that’s also something to pay attention to in kind of a lack of orientation towards relational exchanges. And again, that’s not doesn’t mean that the person doesn’t have a place or can’t be introduced or taught some of these these skills, but it does kind of beg the question should they be in a

business development role or maybe they shouldn’t lead a sales team, you know. So those are all just flags for consideration. sort of like risk factors or observations that you can make. So yeah, that that’s so relational intelligence. we look at the ability to pivot quickly. So we ask about past experiences where you’ve had to make quick decisions, how those decisions are made, like what resources you drew on.

What we’re looking for is someone’s ability to hold their goal in mind and pivot strategically. So you don’t want someone whose hair on fire all the time. You want them to be strategic about their movements, but you there’s a there’s an ability that some people have to make kind of quick, thoughtful decisions, whereas other people stall or are kind of like petrified or that’s petrified is not the right word. They are

kind of like deer in the headlights when they actually has to come to making a decision. So again, probably shouldn’t be an EMT or you know, something that requires really fast decision making, quick, quick switching, quick leadership switch decision making, maybe a slower kind of paced thinking role. And we’ve got two more and one of them is resilience. So how

How well does someone survive stress? And

John Marshall (25:26)

Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (25:27)

so, what does it look like for them to recover from stress? How does it affect them? how have they built systems around themselves to preempt stress? So a lot of people are reacting, and what the the extreme of that is burnout. But are there ways in which this person either has learned from burnout and decided to build systems around them to prevent it, or they’ve never burned out because they’ve

develop systems to prevent it. And what do those systems look like? It can be everything from qigong practice. It can be fr calling a close friend that you really can rely on. it can be a reflective exercise, breathing, you know, just like a c a combination of factors that work for you to stay,

John Marshall (26:13)

Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (26:13)

you know, ris robust from the outside stress factors. Managing your nervous system is how I would put that. And

So those any I I don’t know, I kinda wanna stop there ’cause there’s so much.

John Marshall (26:28)

Well, as you’re sharing, I’m thinking about all of the training applications that we have at Humescence and it’s like w we’re because I’m

And that’s why I asked the question about like developing a growth mindset is because like that’s really where we live is like developing the areas of this assessment that are that are coming up. Right. Our team resilience training, also something we work on with clients, like actually providing some of those structures that can be supportive for helping you bounce back from stress, right?

like helping people understand what are their practices, what are the things they need to be connected to to become more resilient. So whereas I I love that you’re measuring these things because it deepens my interest in how do we develop people in these areas. Like let them understand that their priorities to

developing their readiness, right, for the next level if that’s something that they’re interested in. Right. Not everyone needs to not everyone needs to want to be the CEO. Right. As a matter of fact, that would make for a challenging company.

Logan Yonavjak (27:51)

Well, I do think a lot more people think they want to be CEOs than actually in reality want to be. But but anyway, yeah, I think what we’re one of the things I’m I love to talk about is that we are developing baselines for people. So we’re actually developing a whole coaching training and it’s not to develop coaches per se, it’s to give them this tool so they can have a developmental assessment layer that they can then build on with their clients and be very confident that.

they’re actually going up the mountain, that there’s like clear steps for that individual to take along these different pathways. And that’s really, I think, at least from what I’ve experienced in the coaching industry, that is not really present as this developmental baseline component. And so while there can be an amazing coaches that are that get you there, why not have a bit more structure and third party kind of observational data?

instead of just relying on the coach to orient ver or the person to self report. I think self reporting can be a very biased experience for a lot of people. So not that people

John Marshall (29:00)

Certainly.

Logan Yonavjak (29:02)

might not understand they might understand

different aspects of self, but we all have blind spots and it’s a lot easier to see patterns when it’s a when someone else’s observation or AI combined with a human human scoring, which is what

John Marshall (29:16)

Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (29:17)

we do.

John Marshall (29:18)

Well, so before before I ask this question, I know that you I think there was one more area you had left, one more construct that you measure. What’s that what’s that last one and then I’ll and then I’ll ask the question on my mind.

Logan Yonavjak (29:34)

Okay, so we talked about strategic complexity, purposeful agility, resilience, coachability, relational

John Marshall (29:42)

relationship. Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (29:43)

intelligence, and then team we call team climate IQ. And what that means is your ability to create, in a nutshell, psychological safety for others to be there to work at their best to to perform at their highest ability. And so when we all know this when we’re around a toxic.

individual at work, it makes it, you know, what you think about is that person or your your nervous system is then attuning to that individual’s state of of being. And even if you have a strong sense of self and or it’s still it’s like a tax on your work. You aren’t able to

John Marshall (30:21)

Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (30:21)

really focus at your best because you’re always worried about this, you know, whether it’s neurotic or micromanaging or someone yelling at you. Like there’s all these different aspects that

kind of put a damper on what you’re capable of. And so a really someone who’s really high on this construct is really able to create a sense of safety amongst a team. And that sense of safety is sort of like the context in which you can build trust and respect and actually learn about each other’s communication styles and brainstorm and do the things that creative

we require to to solve problems and to and to execute. So it’s a real barrier to execution. you know, going back to your your intro of me, if you want to talk about business outcomes, to me, that’s one of the biggest obvious areas. I’m I’ve worked on so many teams where there was one sort of culprit leader who everyone was just when they came around, they just were frustrated. They didn’t want to

follow through because of this individual. so yeah, I think this is a really important area that’s often overlooked in terms of how do we measure that.

John Marshall (31:37)

Agreed, because that’s always measured from the outside in, right? A culture paul survey or an an engagement survey, et cetera. Right?

Logan Yonavjak (31:42)

And three sixties can be helpful. Yeah. Yeah.

John Marshall (31:48)

Which is which is what you know I think is really, really fascinating when it comes to the quantitative linguistics or th however you’re, you know, doing this with with AI involved to not just

To not just listen to like what categories these their answers fall into, but more how they’re responding, like the language they’re utilizing to respond says something about who they are and how they approach this area, as opposed to the response itself. Like am I following the i at the highest, at the highest kind of generalization of how this works?

My following.

Logan Yonavjak (32:36)

Well,

my dad would always say tone matters. It’s not necessarily what you say, it’s how you say it, which is I think a lot of it, you know. it’s amazing how you can have a c a message to communicate and then it’s like how that message is delivered and received by someone else, someone else’s nervous system really. And so it can be neutral, it can be positive, it can be negative. And so yeah, what we’re measuring and again, we’re getting better at this. I think there are and this is where

360s are a great complement to what we do. I I definitely don’t want to denigrate other approaches that have been taken. I think if you combined our team Climate IQ, which is the leader talking about their experience of building a team, that’s still self-reported from the team’s perspective. So then you bring in the 360 and you combine that and you get a better picture, holistic picture of how the person’s able to hold that psychological safety piece.

John Marshall (33:32)

Mm. Definitely. Okay. So there’s there’s an in in to out and outward in perspective that can be supportive to like not just the score but the like the development opportunities there.

Logan Yonavjak (33:46)

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, you want other people’s perspectives if they’re on team with them. I think you you know, we’d be remiss in leaving that out. But transcript, but with transcript analysis, which is what we’ve been able to do, we can do also team analysis, which kind of also points to some of those patterns. So we can take a team in a meeting and actually digest some of the ways those people are coming at their relationship.

from their different perspectives. And if we know their stages of development, that can also help inform the perspective they’re taking on the team and whether the team’s progressing as a team over time. So there’s just a lot of really cool stuff we can do.

John Marshall (35:15)

It’s so I feel like there’s this it’s like the amount of data that you have access to directly is directly proportional to the like usefulness, I guess, or accuracy of the results that that the readiness engine outputs.

Logan Yonavjak (35:37)

Well it’s I I mean the way I’ve tried to think about it is more more transcript data is good to a point. I mean at some point you see the pattern. so it’s like we need as much data as we need to see the pattern. And then once you see the pattern, you don’t necessarily need more d it’s always good to like back it up with more and more evidence. But we kind of we tend to pull in like several areas of evidence for each construct.

in enough enough to be significant. And AI or human scoring depends on the engagement level that we’re working with. But with the AI, it’ll kind of tell us if it has enough information. So s at some points we’ve been given, you know, four or five transcripts of a podcast or something like that. And it’ll only be able to run four just because it doesn’t have enough data to make those claims. So

Yeah, it

John Marshall (36:33)

Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (36:33)

it’s hard to answer that question like, we need five transcripts or we need it’s sort of like we need enough to see the pattern.

John Marshall (36:41)

Hmm. Okay. Okay.

Logan Yonavjak (36:42)

But it’s not necessarily

hundreds of transcripts. It’s s somewhere in the order of like five to twenty per person.

John Marshall (36:51)

Okay.

Okay. So this right, this is important, right? Understanding understanding who’s ready for the next level, the things that, you know, the things that companies should be measuring, right, to produce the best results, right? The best business results.

Now, I I agree with all of the areas that you’re measuring, and I’ve been sitting here trying to think of you know something else that should be included and I’m I’m I’m drawing a blank right now. So I feel like it’s right, it’s very

Logan Yonavjak (37:28)

We stumped you.

John Marshall (37:30)

it’s very comprehensive. And

Very comprehensive. And now so I guess from the from the actual application. So say, okay, I’m I I’m I’m in, like we need to understand how we need to understand who’s ready for the next level in our succession planning in my

I don’t know.

500 person organization. I’m sitting here, I’m an HR leader listening right now, who’s over our kind of secession planning, talent development process. how how do I get started with this? How do I get how do I understand how it works and what’s the process for I guess f what are the different entry points?

for the leaders that would be a part of this or potential leaders that would be a part of my succession plan? Is it like they all have to subscribe to having their meetings transcribed? Is it they all just take a 14 question survey? Is it like what like what kind of parameters do I need to have set before I can get some like real data to start making succession planning decisions?

Logan Yonavjak (38:53)

Yeah, I mean that’s a great question. There’s two routes in terms of acquiring the data. One is transcript data. And that just depends on the company. I mean, some some companies have people recording information. Some companies have more sensitive types of information that might not be as readily accessible or highly classified information. So we would have them take an assessment because with the assessment, we’re getting everything we need to run the an

analysis. So we would have people sit down and take that. And then we could run also team analyses off of either the assessment or the transcript data. So it just sort of depends on, you know, if it’s a succession planning exercise, it’s it’s like I think it’s important for those making the decision to identify what they’re looking for in the leader because we very much are augmenting you know, human wisdom as well. Like

We don’t want to just come in and say this and this and this and you should choose this person. It’s very much like if there’s something in specifically you’re looking for, we can also maybe help you tease that out in the data. Or if you just want to better understand the six areas that we identified, which are pretty comprehensive as you just alluded to, then you know, we’re probably gonna cover you with this this information that we’re giving you. So we we like to deliver

We’re building more even more interactive capabilities so that people can we’d like to get into simulations and

John Marshall (40:25)

Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (40:26)

just different ways. Like I have this vision of all of us having a second brain on AI, but that’s at our highest level of development. So what if we could train ourselves to be our highest version of ourself at different and these in these different constructs? And then if we have a problem arise or a conflict, we could

have that second brain inform.

how we think about the problem from a higher level of complexity or relational intelligence. So there’s just a lot we can do with like simulations and role playing, making this data like very interactive. But right now it’s we deliver a dashboard and a report. And then we also have online or we have coaching capabilities. We’re building an affiliate group of of coaching professionals that will team up with us.

John Marshall (41:16)

Hm.

So it sounds like there’s there’s a lot possible, but I wanna I wanna keep it simple for for people that are you know that might be thinking about, you know

implementing something like this. It sounds like, you know, once once the system is once the system has been integrated and, you know, you’re on year two, three, four of your succession planning and leadership development process using the readiness engine, right? you have all these other like capabilities that could be in mind. But for for someone like

just starting out again. They so there’s an option for their people to take the assessment. And then it’s almost and that’s like the baseline, right? And then there’s or they could do the baseline of transcripts, but

Logan Yonavjak (42:11)

Yes.

John Marshall (42:11)

I just I I just don’t know if that’s gonna be someone so I’m just gonna do it how I think that it would it would roll out. Being starting with the assessments, then they can choose like

kind of data quality enhancement add-ons and that be adding transcript data, that be merging team assessments and or team transcript data. And then the the next and then the next option is adding three sixty data to those assessments as well.

Logan Yonavjak (42:49)

Yeah, I mean it depends

if they’re already doing three sixty. We could probably just

John Marshall (42:52)

Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (42:53)

add that into the initial

reports, honestly. but

John Marshall (42:57)

Great. So you can

take what they’ve already been doing as well and integrate that into

Logan Yonavjak (43:02)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Marshall (43:04)

like into the assessment. Okay. Into the engine.

Logan Yonavjak (43:07)

Yes.

John Marshall (43:08)

Okay. Okay, great. So now I’ve integrated what we have into the engine. We’re starting to get our first our first results, right? Then then comes the question of okay.

When it comes to to bias, right, we always there’s there’s this whole movement, right, of just like reducing bias when it comes to promotion and hiring decisions and but

Logan Yonavjak (43:38)

Yeah.

John Marshall (43:38)

but ultimately this is an organization run by humans that have opinions and choices that ultimately someone chooses, right, who to promote. So we’re

Logan Yonavjak (43:51)

Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (43:51)

never going to completely remove bias.

Logan Yonavjak (43:55)

No.

John Marshall (43:55)

That’s just that’s just not realistic. But I think for those of us that, you know, understand that we need to make a hiring decision. We need to make a promotion decision. We need to make an investment decision, right, in, you know, X amount of companies vying for this capital. How are we evaluating right

these this person, this team’s level of readiness to step up to this next level of investment, this next level of leadership. And you’re saying that the readiness engine focuses exactly on answering that question. Like based off of this research and aggregating all of that in with today’s technology, you’re able to

determine based on these it was six six six

Logan Yonavjak (44:54)

Sex. Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (44:55)

factors who is who is ready.

Logan Yonavjak (45:01)

I think it’s yeah, I think that’s a good way to think about it in terms of I mean, I like to say it’s augmenting human decision making. And at the very least, even if you’re gonna make the same hiring or promotion decision, you’re forced to evaluate your own biases. or I think we should create more contexts in which people are are s need to voice why they made a decision about a hire or promotion to their peers.

even if the evidence points in a different direction. I think it just causes it’s like bringing in a straw man or bringing in something to push up against so that we’re not just kind of holding these biases more unconsciously. We’re we’re forced to make them more conscious potentially.

John Marshall (45:50)

Yes. I love you said it. That that hit that really hit with me. Augmenting human decision making. Because that’s really what it is. Like we’re not developing an an unbiased secession pipeline process. We are giving people the data to make more contextual dis objectively contextual decisions. Beautiful.

Logan Yonavjak (46:16)

I mean,

yeah, I I I’ve thought about this a lot because I’ve been the positive recipient many times of informal decision making, right? Like I was in the right room, I went to a Ivy League grad school. You know, I’ve had different contexts in which I was probably offered positions, there’s probably maybe arguably someone who was better better suited. On the flip side, I’ve applied for things cold and they already had someone in in mind.

internally and I’m not saying that these things are necessarily bad, but I think that people are often making really quick decisions or not really being very systematic about why they chose a person or not. Like in some cases I was a good fit. In other cases maybe someone else would have been. And it would have been nice to have s more of that third-party framework to better understand how I was being evaluated.

how others were being evaluated. And even if I got chosen or not, like it I think it gives me comfort, at least personally, to better understand, okay, these are areas in which someone else is being picked over me. yeah, so there was that too. I’ve just thought about my own career journey and how unfair or fair it was at different points as well. And I think I have an emp I have empathy for situations where people are really

coming into

scenarios and they may not have come in with a warm lead or they didn’t go to the right school, quote unquote. or they are there’s other biases going on that prevent them from getting a role. And so I think we just there’s been this whole movement of DEI. I think it’s called DEI J now. I I feel like the acronym has evolved past

John Marshall (48:05)

Yeah.

Logan Yonavjak (48:06)

me. I yes. But I think what we’re also really talking about is

other types of diversity in which things like how do you hold complexity, how do you relate to others, you know, again back to some of these factors that are really worth considering in decision making and s when in deciding on leadership decision making and team development. So yeah, I’m just I’ve become really passionate about this this subject. I think the DEI conversation is a good starting point.

But there’s a lot more to say about it and a lot more of types of perspective and diversity that we’re we need to consider in the mix as well.

John Marshall (48:49)

Hmm. I agree. Because there could be right, there could be someone that maybe at face value or based on the kind of r relational context in which they’ve, you know, developed their reputation in an organization or just their disposition, right? J maybe less less visible, right?

Logan Yonavjak (49:08)

Yep. Charismatic. less

visible. Yes, exactly. Yep.

John Marshall (49:13)

Well well

yeah, I’m say like instead of instead of the you know, the squeaky wheel getting the grease, if you will, like maybe these organizations are overlooking potential in areas that aren’t just

ev omnipresent

Logan Yonavjak (49:27)

A hundred percent.

John Marshall (49:27)

or overly present, right, when it comes to, you know, being visible or intentionally right, networking around the organization or advocating for themselves in a way that’s natural. I mean, they sh that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be advocating for themselves, but that could also mean that that’s potential overlooked that you want to be able to unearth.

Logan Yonavjak (49:51)

Yeah, no, and that’s there’s that’s just one of a multitude of reasons I think to have a third party assessment, or el analytics again to augment

John Marshall (50:02)

Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (50:02)

human decision making.

John Marshall (50:05)

Well, I I have to go here. So augment human decision making is is the start. But like do you see a future where AI is just making all the hiring decision making, secession planning decision making, where you just remove the human from the hiring decision entirely?

Logan Yonavjak (50:28)

Well, I mean AI it’s a good question. I don’t think it’s gonna happen anytime soon. I think that humans will want to be involved with leadership decision making for a long time. I actually have seen this I’ll take the VC space, which is being heavily disrupted right now. So a lot of VCs are relying on AI to make investment decisions. So and they’re doing a

John Marshall (50:52)

Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (50:53)

better job in some cases than

than humans. So I don’t know. Maybe we’re close to your reality, but I do think that we’ll have a hybrid for a long time. usually the truth lies somewhere in the middle, right? Like it’s not gonna stay the way it was, but it’s not all gonna be taken over by AI. So I could see in a scenario where people’s second brains are making decisions potentially. Like you kind of have versions of yourself making different decisions.

John Marshall (51:24)

Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (51:25)

But I still think the AI needs to be trained again with your developmental capacity in mind. Like most AIs don’t have this context that we’re talking about, developmental capacity, in the way that they were built or trained or the way that people are interacting with them. So I think that this adds to the decision-making opportunity set, whether it becomes a hybrid or whether A AI takes over, it should be based somewhat on this body of work.

So is that an is that a

John Marshall (51:56)

Got it.

Logan Yonavjak (51:57)

fluffy, squishy enough answer for you? I didn’t really answer the question. It was safe. Yeah. I don’t think I’m ready

John Marshall (52:01)

It was it was safe, for sure. It was it was it was for sure safe.

Logan Yonavjak (52:07)

for AI to take over all of my. Listen, my my husband started an AI grocery agent that was supposed to revolutionize the way we do grocery shopping and plan all of our meals. The last delivery it gave us was a

one pound bag of apples, a huge bag of rice, just stuff we literally couldn’t use and it didn’t even tell us why it used it and then it signed off of our group chat. And I just thought to myself, you know, my husband spent a lot of time programming this thing and like giving it specifications and it it still just could not grocery variability is such a huge like if you think about the way we purchased food, it’s actually in different quantities. It depends on the vendor.

There’s not a lot of standardization. And so if you just take that alone, like I don’t really still don’t want AI taking over my grocery b decision making. Like it really screwed up the last order.

John Marshall (53:08)

That’s that’s fantastic. now scale that to a multinational organization that’s choosing their next their next level of senior leadership. Yeah. You c you don’t wanna get the wrong order.

Logan Yonavjak (53:23)

You don’t wanna get that pound of apples that you’re not gonna eat. We have to make

John Marshall (53:25)

Yeah.

Logan Yonavjak (53:26)

an apple pie now, which is fine, but

John Marshall (53:30)

That’s that’s hilarious. But well

The AI has made this technology, I mean, has made this assessment, you know, into something that is like dynamic and can live and take in like so many different data points to support augmented decision making that you know, if so if you truly had

the AI built on these frameworks. And you were going to work for a company that was built by the Readiness Engine and use the Readiness Engine to make all of their hiring decisions and, you know, up to the most senior levels of leadership. And solely. Like the no human influence, but just based on

The readiness engine taking in all of their transcripts and the responses and everything completely built the hierarchy. Would you be excited to go work for that company?

Logan Yonavjak (54:38)

That’s great question. I think I would. so I know that goes back to your question of like, is AI gonna take over human decision making?

John Marshall (54:47)

A different way of asking.

Logan Yonavjak (54:50)

but I think I would be yes, I’d be really interested to see what it came up with, but it would also be good to have I don’t know, it reminds me of self-driving cars right now. Like they’re different stages of self-driving. But at and at the very I think it’s stage five, it’s fully self-driving.

There’s you know, you just sit in the back and do whatever, read a book. I like the version where there’s you kind of have to sit at the wheel, and if something goes wrong, you you have control over it. It would be nice to have some sort of assurance that there’s checks and balances, even if there’s multiple AI agents that are trained to be checks and balances for one another. So it would just be good to dig in a little bit more there, but and maybe

you could start with a type of company that was a little more standardized or like there was a way to kind of test the counterfactual of what had happened versus like what AI could do. But in theory, yeah, I would be I would be excited to to go work for that company. Why not?

John Marshall (55:56)

I agree. I agree.

Logan Yonavjak (55:57)

I mean,

if you look at the stats of corporate America, I’m gonna get some of these. I don’t wanna be like, you know, pinpointed in the citations, but generally in the range of I’ve heard as low as twenty percent engagement of employees of feeling engaged in their their their roles. high turnover, you know, that we’re experiencing forty to fifty percent of promotional decisions don’t work out within the first 18 months.

Seventy percent of MA deals don’t go through because of or fail because of cultural clashes. I mean, it’s not that we can’t do worse than that, but it’s not going great.

John Marshall (56:39)

Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (56:39)

So maybe that’s a way to think about it. Like, it would be interesting to have AI give it a shot. so I would definitely

John Marshall (56:50)

Right, little subset of data.

Logan Yonavjak (56:52)

experiment with it. I would be

willing to go into the experiment because I don’t see that we’re doing all that great in aggregate. there’s certainly like the great places to work in some of those metrics, but I I just by and large people don’t seem that excited or engaged in their work. And there’s a lot of disgruntled and dysfunctional teams, dysfunctional leaders. So yeah, I I think why not give AI at least a shot at like experimenting with it?

John Marshall (57:26)

I agree. Why not? Yeah, as l it’s as long as it’s trained on, right? Trained on the things that we that we actually want. Like trained on the things that are, you know, supportive of you know collective capacity and

just life experience, I guess, too. Yeah. No,

Logan Yonavjak (57:42)

And I’m allowed to quit if I want, right? Like I can quit the job. As long as I can quit if I want to.

John Marshall (57:48)

no, you had to stay like at at least at least two years.

Logan Yonavjak (57:51)

I have a contract for ten years. wow.

John Marshall (57:57)

be I’d be in. I’d be in for that experiment. I think it would be I think it would be fun.

Logan Yonavjak (58:02)

It’s a cool way to to ask

the question differently though too. I really like that. It’s a good way to think about it.

John Marshall (58:09)

Well

Being that you’re the co founder of Readiness Engine, I I would hope you’d want to go work for that company. It gives me it gives me more faith. Gives me more faith in the engine. But I also have a lot of faith in the the concepts that it’s built on. I mean, we’ve already touched on adult development and and spiral dynamics and I’m sure there’s a lot of other work that goes that goes into it.

I’d be really interested in the like the relationship piece and attachment thy attachment styles and attachment theory.

Logan Yonavjak (58:43)

yeah. Different

people. I have to ask my co founder about that. I haven’t we haven’t had that conversation. It’s a good point.

John Marshall (58:49)

Yeah, it’s just because a after going deep into attachment theory and and having kids and witnessing the development of other kids all all around us and you know, and parenting styles and all of that, it’s just so, so fascinating how it influences the way that you participate in relationships for the rest of your life. Like

Logan Yonavjak (59:15)

Wow. Yeah, absolutely.

So true.

John Marshall (59:18)

Unbelievable. That’s why so I mean we’ve talked a lot about the the measure the measurement piece and we could do I think we could do a whole other episode on its use and development. Right?

Logan Yonavjak (59:28)

Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (59:30)

Because like that’s

That’s the interesting part is, you know, how do we prevent the assessment just from becoming like a la a label of your readiness and make sure that it’s, you know, also used as a development tool, right? That we’re that we’re not by assigning this number fixing people to some level of readiness, but able to provide the coaching and training necessary, right, to develop the people that want to be more ready

Logan Yonavjak (1:00:00)

Right.

John Marshall (1:00:00)

for the next level. Right.

Logan Yonavjak (1:00:02)

Yeah,

I think that would be a good conversation with my co founder.

John Marshall (1:00:05)

Mm. Beautiful. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Maybe we’ll we’ll bring

Logan Yonavjak (1:00:08)

Thanks for inviting us back.

John Marshall (1:00:09)

I was gonna say, yeah, but we can bring we can bring her on too. That would be that would be great. Good,

Logan Yonavjak (1:00:13)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Marshall (1:00:15)

good. Okay. So

For the VP of people or the kind of culture champion leader that’s that’s listening right now, right? They know their organization’s growing faster than their leadership systems, or they just don’t have a system in general, right? What’s the first question they should be asking themselves about readiness?

Logan Yonavjak (1:00:42)

Yeah, I mean well, how is the current approach working for them? I mean, if you have something, is it does it feel like it’s meeting your needs? Or are people able to meet their quarterly goals? Is there any execution risk coming up? Are teams I mean I think a way to think about it is looking at what can happen when these

Constructs are not addressed. So if there’s low relational intelligence or people not getting along well, is there a lot of team friction? is the leadership sort of having trouble making decisions or feeling overwhelmed by, you know, the level of complexity that’s coming in? Like these are kind of indicators that that something like our tool would be really helpful to to weave in. And we think about it as developmental intelligence. So you’re probably

Most people are probably not aware of some of the limitations of the way they’re thinking about leadership development in this context. So yeah, I mean, I think maybe I would answer it as, are you seeing some of these friction points come up?

John Marshall (1:01:57)

Well said. There’s this just such a beautiful gap that you’re trying to address here. Like this gap between like talent and readiness. Right. And

you know, the usual ways that we see folks getting promoted based on right, delivering results and visibility or certain talent markers that you’ve identified versus like w what’s actually been shown in the data to produce better results. Right.

Logan Yonavjak (1:02:32)

Yeah.

John Marshall (1:02:33)

And I think you’re doing a a really great job with the technologies available today to help bridge that gap. I think it’s a really, really important body of work that every company should be thinking about. Right? Because

Logan Yonavjak (1:02:47)

Thank you so much. I agree. Yeah.

John Marshall (1:02:49)

These decisions, I mean, they shape they shape the experience of everyone in your organization. Because in that same data you’re referencing for, you know, current current state of employment, it’s like the vast majority of people that leave their jobs, right, leave because of their manager. Right? Leave because of exactly.

Logan Yonavjak (1:03:12)

Yeah. And how many managers are are

coached and how many are taught to lead people just on that dimension alone? Yeah.

John Marshall (1:03:19)

many. Not

many. It starts at a it typically starts at a very senior level, right?

Logan Yonavjak (1:03:25)

Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (1:03:25)

Let’s invest in executive coaching for our executive team, not our middle managers or frontline managers. And and I think this technology and you know the incorporation of AI having that second brain is going to make coaching available

to more people that, you know, from an investment perspective that,

Logan Yonavjak (1:03:45)

absolutely. Yeah.

John Marshall (1:03:47)

you know, wasn’t available in the past. So I’m I’m really excited for that when it comes to this technology. Do I think it’s replacing executive coaches or coaches in general? No, because the relationship dynamic like adds a whole different level of resonance that you can’t really get. Right. With this technology.

Logan Yonavjak (1:04:04)

Yes, resonance is a good that’s it.

John Marshall (1:04:10)

But like

Without the resonance, would it be helpful? Hell yeah. Like

Logan Yonavjak (1:04:16)

better than

the alternative, which is either people reading a book or people asking questions

John Marshall (1:04:20)

Nothing. Read a book. Yeah. Go to a seminar.

Logan Yonavjak (1:04:25)

of AI, not recognizing their own blind spots, or maybe they know how to ask questions of AI. You know, some people are really savvy, but I don’t know that many people even know how to be coached necessarily, like just by like talking to AI and dialoguing with it. So

Yeah, I think AI coaching serves a purpose and it’s not the be all end all, but it’s gonna add to the system and I’m excited about it’s the accessibility factor.

John Marshall (1:04:53)

Green. Well, so what does the process look like for this VP of people or HR business partner or something that’s that’s listening right now that wants to get involved with the readiness engine?

Logan Yonavjak (1:05:07)

Well, the best way to do something is go online and schedule a call on our website. We just could give you a demo, we could talk through and just hear more about your context and what might be a good fit for you. So usually those initial calls are with me and you can schedule them either using our contact form or there’s also my calendar link is on the website. It’s readinessengine.io.

John Marshall (1:05:30)

Beautiful. See, it’s like even the interaction with these technologies starts with scheduling the dang call. It starts with the human. Right?

Logan Yonavjak (1:05:39)

Just start to schedule the call. Just

John Marshall (1:05:43)

Exactly. So if you’re if you’re listening right now and you know this is something that you know your organization would benefit from, that your team could benefit from if you want to be able to be the microcosm in your organization and present a use case up line or something like that, act on it. Like stop listening and click the link in the bio or not the bio, the episode the show notes and go schedule a consultation. Right.

It’s as easy as that. Have a conversation. See where it takes you. Well, Logan, thank you so much for everything that we covered today. I mean, w we could have gone

Logan Yonavjak (1:06:24)

It was a pleasure.

John Marshall (1:06:24)

down many different rabbit holes and

Logan Yonavjak (1:06:27)

Absolutely. We did.

We did.

John Marshall (1:06:29)

I think

we’re gonna we’re gonna continue this conversation on the on the development side of things as well. I think we can go a little bit deeper there. But but for now, I thank you so much for all of the insights that you shared, the concepts that you’re making available to organizations today, like this kind of augmented human decision making is something that is very much needed in our economy today.

Logan Yonavjak (1:06:56)

Thank you so much. Yeah, I appreciate it.

John Marshall (1:06:58)

course. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in to the Present Professional once again.

Wherever you listen to this episode, go ahead and leave us a review, leave us a some some comments, rate and review us. It really makes a difference for the show and showing other people what they can experience listening to the present professional, the different people that they can connect with. So if you just take that little time for us, I would be greatly, greatly appreciative. So thank you so much. We’ll see you next time.

John Marshall (00:32)
Welcome back to the Present Professional. Today I’m joined by Logan Yonavjak, co-founder and CEO of the Readiness Engine, a leadership intelligence company that’s focused on measuring the hidden drivers of execution risk inside growing organizations.

Her work sits at a fascinating intersection of capital leadership, adult development, and long-term value creation. She’s helped More move hundreds of millions across climate and natural capital strategies, and now she’s applying that same decision quality to one of the hardest questions inside organizations. How do we know who is actually ready for complexity?

Rather than relying on charisma, visibility, tenure, or past performance, Logan’s work explores how language, developmental capacity, and behavioral signals can help organizations make better decisions around promotion, succession,

hiring, and leadership development. Logan, welcome to the present professional.

Logan Yonavjak (01:42)
So great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

John Marshall (01:45)
Of course, of course. Well, I’d love to allow the audience to learn a little bit more about you. So I’m curious, what was the through line from you know your work in capital allocation and investment into leadership readiness? How did this evolve?

Logan Yonavjak (02:06)
think if I look in hindsight, it’s a lot clearer. Obviously, like many of our paths, what I came across observationally was just that a lot of teams and leaders were not necessarily optimized for the tasks at hand. I didn’t have the language of the time, but they w didn’t seem ready for the level of complexity or the

multitude of tasks or relationship management or team management that they were assigned to. And often people were promoted because of their past skills or experience rather than their management abilities. You know, just these different observations from teams I’d worked on, both functional and dysfunctional. And for me, being someone who really cares a lot about positive impact through investing, I think

My bias became like, why don’t we have the most highly equipped leaders at the helm? Like how are we picking these people? Are we making the best decisions? It seems like a lot of leadership decisions are based on again past performance credentials, warm intros, your resume, not necessarily readiness or your level of capacity as a as a person. And so I think there’s just it’s a bit antiquated how we make

hiring and leadership development decisions. And so this was, you know, again, I was coming from mostly the investing world. I’ve worked in university endowments, I’ve worked at private equity firms, and I’ve also worked at smaller investment shops and helped develop investment vehicles and worked with startups. So I’ve kind of seen just a variety of different types of leadership and at smaller and larger companies.

probably the largest company I’ve worked at is Morgan Stanley. So just, you know, I think it was informal and then it became a formal interest.

John Marshall (04:09)
Hmm. Started off as this this curiosity and the patterns that you were seeing in not just the teams that you were a part of, but also the companies that you were investing in, right? And that your firms were investing in.

Logan Yonavjak (04:24)
Then I also made some investments

as an angel investor. and I would say that there’s one in particular where I I kind of grossly misjudged the leadership from the perspective of I was very persuaded by the charisma of one of the founders. And then once the check was deployed and they had my money, it was it really became a different conversation. really flaky behavior.

And a lot of problems ensued and I wish I’d had something more rigorous that I had deployed around like understanding the people who are at the helm. So that was a personal story that also kind of drove this interest. again, that didn’t all come at once, but it it definitely helped inform. So

John Marshall (05:09)
Mm-hmm. Developed out of necessity.

Logan Yonavjak (05:14)
Which is mu

you know, a lot of a lot of necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.

John Marshall (05:21)
Couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. It’s funny, we were just we’re just talking about that with the digital nomad family invention that exists.

Logan Yonavjak (05:30)
right. Yes. Yeah, we were.

John Marshall (05:32)
Right? That that need, that need. I search for it and it’s out there. But

in regards to this need, right, the need to

understand capacity, understand readiness, right, before we make hiring promotion decisions. So when I love the name to readiness engine, right? Like and even just understanding readiness. But when you say readiness, like what are you actually measuring there?

Logan Yonavjak (06:09)
Well, I’d like to start actually by speaking about toddlers because I have a two year old and I think a lot about her capacity with this framework in mind now. Obviously what we’re studying is adult developmental capacity. but I think there’s a good analogy because we’ve all spent time with small children and sometimes she will understand what I’m saying.

If I ask her a question. And sometimes she just is blank because she doesn’t understand my question and she’ll actually respond to something that she thinks I said. And my point in saying this is that when someone’s at a certain developmental capacity, they don’t necessarily even understand the next level up. Or they people at the next level up have a hard time remembering what it was like to be at the kind of a subsequent level down.

Because these patterns of development can actually occur over multiple decades, especially if there’s not coaching intervention. Like think about who you were. We can bring it back to being an adult. Think about who you were 10 years ago. You had a different developmental capacity, and we could probably have mapped it if we’d looked longitudinally. And so these are very much patterns that have been developed in the research of adult developmental psychology.

And there are markers of understanding where someone comes in in terms of their ability to hold complexity, for instance. And what does that actually mean? it means that you’re able to juggle many, many, many more balls than you did when you were at a lower level of development. And so, and you’re doing that objectively. So, when you’re at a lower stage of development, you tend to be more eye-centric. Your world revolves around you.

and what you’re experiencing. And as you grow in your developmental capacity, you’re able to see different perspectives and kind of build on those perspectives up until a point where it’s actually quite exponential. so people who are higher stages of development are actually modeling and measuring like thousands of data points objectively. And we think of it as the egocentric to the the world-centric to the like cosmic-centric almost.

And so some of the spiritual, you know, leaders of our society are probably at those much higher levels of development, which most most people don’t reach in in their lifetimes.

John Marshall (08:39)
Mm-hmm. This reminds me of is there any spiral dynamics work woven into that? Okay.

Logan Yonavjak (08:48)
Yes. Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (08:50)
I was gonna say as you were kind of talking through those different l levels of levels of consciousness, I was kind of visualizing the the pathway up that up the spiral. Right. Okay.

Logan Yonavjak (09:01)
Yes. And in fact you

as you go up, you’re also metabolizing from the lower levels. So you’re kind of taking what you need and continuing to grow. So it’s not like you’re just completely shedding what you’ve learned before. It’s very much building on an additive. But there are certain skills that you kind of let go as you as you move up the ladder. So it’s and I just wanna also frame this is not bad or good. There’s

no sort of assignment of

you know, good people are at this level or people who are incapable are at these levels. You know, it’s more just where are you realistically sitting and perspective taking from and then what kind of roles are those perspectives best suited for? And we haven’t really done

John Marshall (09:49)
Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (09:50)
much in the way of parsing that out in corporate or other settings. So it I think we are missing that.

layer of understanding in how we assess and develop leaders.

John Marshall (10:07)
So

I kind of got one element or one measurable out of that. And it’s a the like the ability to hold the ability to hold complexity, right? How many perspectives are you evaluating like as you take in information, as you develop strategy, as you make decisions? So it’s this less and it’s the funny how you say, you know, I centric to more like or other centric, cosmic centric.

other centered mentality. And you can even I can even notice it in some of my clients as well, just in in the language that they use. Right. In thinking I, I, like you said, I language, right? And like when you said that, it came, it would hit me. Now you’re good.

Logan Yonavjak (10:48)
Mm-hmm. Well, I think a lot of the value Yeah. Yes. And I think a lot of the value we’re adding. yeah. I’m so sorry. I keep interrupting you. I was gonna

say the I think one of the values we’re bringing is just creating a platform of shared vocabulary for some of these concepts that many of us are already tuning into, like you’re saying with your clients. It maybe just not has not been at the forefront.

of how you think about their developmental stage, but once it once you see it, you see it. You know, it’s kind of one of those things that now I see the l this through I see almost everyone through the lens of of adult developmental stages. So

John Marshall (11:31)
Yeah. Yeah, once you s once you see it you can’t you can’t unsee it. And and there’s a another another word that you said I think is really important is e able to see it objectively. Because I I remember even just from you know some of the research, some of the Keegan research in in w it was one of my one of my coach training schools I was in.

When we were going through the right, I think it was maybe his immunity to change work.

And we were going through the different stages of what you’re subject to, right? So it’s like you evolve from just like being subject to like the opinions or activities of your parents, and then you’re subject to your, you know, teachers, world, friends, etc. And then you your world expands, but you become subject to more. And then there’s like the switch to objectivity, right? You get to a level of maturity.

where you’re no longer subject to like the the opinions of your parents, if you will. There it’s more of a an objective like relationship.

Logan Yonavjak (12:44)
Mm-hmm. You see it as one piece of the equation.

John Marshall (12:47)
Right, exactly, exactly. And then you know, and then you become so you become subject to less so that you, you know, your your nervous system is

is less

is less subject to the will of outside forces so that you can inherently hold all of these objective pieces of of data to make an assumption there or to make not assumption to make a decision or develop a strategy from an objective place. So I think there’s you know there’s something there, but I’m I’m curious how do you evaluate like what people are subject to through an assessment like this?

Logan Yonavjak (13:33)
Well, we’re asking open ended and scenario based questions and we ask about fourteen of them for this assessment that’s focused on founders and and startups. we asked, you know, we have someone sit in front of a one-way video assessment and then they’re answering these questions and then for strategic complexity, which is the concept we’ve just been talking about, we are looking at how many perspectives they name.

In referring to experiences they’ve had or perspectives that they’re holding. So we’re able to trace using sentence basically sentence analysis and paragraph analysis, how many perspectives they’re holding objectively. And so that gives us a proxy for the stages of of development there. That’s just how we look at it from I mean, there’s other constructs that we’re measuring, but we’re talking about the strategic complexity one.

John Marshall (14:30)
Mm-hmm. What what are what are some of the other concepts or con constructs that you’re measuring? Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (14:37)
Constructs. Yeah.

Well, so we’re looking you you were alluding to this, so I’ll go into this one next. Coachability and identity flexibility. So we want to better understand how wedded someone is to their current identity. Because, you know, in in sort of everyday speak, we think about it as fixed and growth mindset. This was something that got brought up a lot in business school when I was there. and we all are

would like to think of ourselves as growth-minded. But in reality, a lot of people are very wedded to their perspective and their current identity. And that makes it very challenging to do innovation work. It makes it challenging when you take any sort of outside criticism and you take it personally. That becomes a real barrier to affecting change. So again, not that those individuals can’t play some sort of functional role

in an organization, but you probably don’t want to put them at the helm when there’s a lot of innovative decisions that need to be made and they’re gonna be receiving a lot of critique from the outside world on how they’re doing things, et cetera. So you just really

John Marshall (15:47)
Yeah.

Logan Yonavjak (15:48)
want someone with that growth mindset whose whose nervous system isn’t gonna feel attacked, who’s practiced that experience of staying objective and being open to that flexible kind of and and it helps you grow with a company too or a

or an entrepreneur grow internally with a department. It’s like you don’t want to stay the same person that you were when you started something. And so again, that’s but that’s a mentality that we can actually we have a micro score on that one in particular because people ask me all the time, what’s the most important construct in terms of if you had to to stack them

And I think coachability and identity flexibility because if you don’t have a growth mindset, it’s really hard to work on the other ones, which you can work on, but it’s just it makes it really challenging. So

John Marshall (16:41)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And do you find that that’s kind of just an an individual’s disposition, nature, nurture, or is that something that’s you’ve found people to actually experience a larger step change in?

Logan Yonavjak (16:58)
I would love to bring on like h have a podcast with an evolutionary biologist and then maybe a sociologist and someone else to help me explain this phenomenon because I do feel like there are there’s a significant portion of the population that tend to be more fixed mindset. And there is, you know, evolutionary rationale for kind of staying in tradition and

maybe being fearful about things changing and you know, maybe there’s there’s reasons why this kind of this fixed kind of calcified way of doing things sticks around with most people and maybe the innovators are kind of the ones that, you know, go out and and pioneer things and you kind of need to keep things stable for the population to continue to thrive. I don’t know. I would really love for someone to tease this out for me. I’m sure there’s people who have theorized on it.

It does seem to be both a biological and a cultural. I know certain cultures are more fixed mindset, more community focused, so less individuated in their kind of way of conceptualizing. So they don’t want to go out on a limb because they’re part of, they see themselves as more part of the group. So I think

John Marshall (18:14)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (18:14)
there’s biological, cultural, and then individual like reasons for it.

But I think it’s was one of the most fascinating questions. And that that’s why I don’t judge it per se. I think it’s sort of like, let’s just measure it. And then if it’s not present, you can still work with the person, but like maybe just again, they’re not the best fit for this innovative role. And that’s okay. Like, why can’t we just accept that?

John Marshall (18:42)
I I agree. Like sometimes but but sometimes that, you know, whether it be a hard truth or not, can be something that sets you free. Right? Like

Logan Yonavjak (18:53)
Yeah.

John Marshall (18:56)
And and that was a really great, great answer to that to that question. There’s because that’s why that’s why I asked it. Because right, because I

Logan Yonavjak (19:03)
I don’t have all the answers. It doesn’t make sense in some ways. It really doesn’t.

John Marshall (19:07)
see the same thing where it’s just, you know, an individual’s disposition towards I mean, and there’s so much that can go into where you lie on the spectrum exactly. I mean so much.

Logan Yonavjak (19:19)
Trauma could have been, you know, it’s and that’s why we don’t want to belittle

or judge it. It’s it’s but in coaching you can probably tease more of it out and try to understand it.

John Marshall (19:32)
Coaching and therapy. Right. I mean

Logan Yonavjak (19:34)
Therapy.

John Marshall (19:34)
I think I think there are I think like you said, I think there are some traumas that keep people fixed in their identity. I think there are cultural. I think there are even generational traumas that keep that keep you fixed in your identity. And there are language language barriers that

Logan Yonavjak (19:55)
That’s

true. Yes, great point on that.

John Marshall (19:56)
Right, like like

what you were saying about the the culture, like some cult some languages like don’t have words to express some individual individualistic concepts or contexts that others can. Right? So there’s been I I’ve I’ve read some things about how

how like the way certain cultures like even have the words for something changes the the mindsets that are that are available. So I mean there’s there’s so much work that that or there’s so much just background and like you said different schools of thought that could go into like is someone is someone fixed in their level of fixed versus growth mindset or

Logan Yonavjak (20:46)
yeah, yeah.

John Marshall (20:47)
Yeah,

Logan Yonavjak (20:48)
huh.

John Marshall (20:48)
or like what are the levers that you pull to help shift people towards more growth? Like that’s been a a a question I’ve been really, really interested in. Right. And I think there’s part of the healing trauma part of it. And then you bring in the evolutionary perspective and and I started thinking, you know, why would it be survival oriented to be in a fixed mindset?

The only thing that came up for me was by the perception of others. Like we don’t want to be someone new tomorrow that is unrecognized by your tribe. And they might wonder, like, who the heck has this

Logan Yonavjak (21:34)
What’s

John Marshall (21:34)
person become? Like, should we trust them? Like, who who are they?

Logan Yonavjak (21:38)
There’s sort of a because we’re such such social creatures, there’s a pressure to stay especially in small group units, like pretty pretty similar or to the the group or just make sure everyone’s comfortable in a way. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

John Marshall (21:55)
Yeah, just can consistency, I guess.

And I I’m basing this off of no

data or evolutionary biology background. This is just what I’m feeling.

Logan Yonavjak (22:02)
That’s why I’m sort of like I I think you I’m gonna I’m gonna voluntold

voluntold you to have a a series on fixed mindset and bring in different different perspectives on it ’cause I think it would be a really interesting it would be a really interesting conversation anyway.

John Marshall (22:20)
Definitely. Now

okay, bef so we we went down a little bit of a a mindset rabbit hole. What are what are the other what are the other constructs you’re measuring?

Logan Yonavjak (22:32)
So we look at relational intelligence and a lot of what we’re looking for there is how someone talks about empathizing, putting themselves in other people’s shoes. we actually look at network of how they build networks and how they interact with networks as well. That one we’re still kind of building out, I would say. but yeah, and and in all of these, something else I wanted to bring up is something

my co-founder exposed me to in as a concept is negative space analysis and really asking that question in every context you’re in. So one of the things I find valuable in what we’re doing is we are l you know we’re evaluating what people are saying, but also what they’re not saying. And so

John Marshall (23:20)
Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (23:20)
if someone is kind of completely devoid of discussing any sort of relational

experiences or pointing towards conflicts or good experiences they’ve had with people, that’s also something to pay attention to in kind of a lack of orientation towards relational exchanges. And again, that’s not doesn’t mean that the person doesn’t have a place or can’t be introduced or taught some of these these skills, but it does kind of beg the question should they be in a

business development role or maybe they shouldn’t lead a sales team, you know. So those are all just flags for consideration. sort of like risk factors or observations that you can make. So yeah, that that’s so relational intelligence. we look at the ability to pivot quickly. So we ask about past experiences where you’ve had to make quick decisions, how those decisions are made, like what resources you drew on.

What we’re looking for is someone’s ability to hold their goal in mind and pivot strategically. So you don’t want someone whose hair on fire all the time. You want them to be strategic about their movements, but you there’s a there’s an ability that some people have to make kind of quick, thoughtful decisions, whereas other people stall or are kind of like petrified or that’s petrified is not the right word. They are

kind of like deer in the headlights when they actually has to come to making a decision. So again, probably shouldn’t be an EMT or you know, something that requires really fast decision making, quick, quick switching, quick leadership switch decision making, maybe a slower kind of paced thinking role. And we’ve got two more and one of them is resilience. So how

How well does someone survive stress? And

John Marshall (25:26)
Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (25:27)
so, what does it look like for them to recover from stress? How does it affect them? how have they built systems around themselves to preempt stress? So a lot of people are reacting, and what the the extreme of that is burnout. But are there ways in which this person either has learned from burnout and decided to build systems around them to prevent it, or they’ve never burned out because they’ve

develop systems to prevent it. And what do those systems look like? It can be everything from qigong practice. It can be fr calling a close friend that you really can rely on. it can be a reflective exercise, breathing, you know, just like a c a combination of factors that work for you to stay,

John Marshall (26:13)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (26:13)
you know, ris robust from the outside stress factors. Managing your nervous system is how I would put that. And

So those any I I don’t know, I kinda wanna stop there ’cause there’s so much.

John Marshall (26:28)
Well, as you’re sharing, I’m thinking about all of the training applications that we have at Humescence and it’s like w we’re because I’m

And that’s why I asked the question about like developing a growth mindset is because like that’s really where we live is like developing the areas of this assessment that are that are coming up. Right. Our team resilience training, also something we work on with clients, like actually providing some of those structures that can be supportive for helping you bounce back from stress, right?

like helping people understand what are their practices, what are the things they need to be connected to to become more resilient. So whereas I I love that you’re measuring these things because it deepens my interest in how do we develop people in these areas. Like let them understand that their priorities to

developing their readiness, right, for the next level if that’s something that they’re interested in. Right. Not everyone needs to not everyone needs to want to be the CEO. Right. As a matter of fact, that would make for a challenging company.

Logan Yonavjak (27:51)
Well, I do think a lot more people think they want to be CEOs than actually in reality want to be. But but anyway, yeah, I think what we’re one of the things I’m I love to talk about is that we are developing baselines for people. So we’re actually developing a whole coaching training and it’s not to develop coaches per se, it’s to give them this tool so they can have a developmental assessment layer that they can then build on with their clients and be very confident that.

they’re actually going up the mountain, that there’s like clear steps for that individual to take along these different pathways. And that’s really, I think, at least from what I’ve experienced in the coaching industry, that is not really present as this developmental baseline component. And so while there can be an amazing coaches that are that get you there, why not have a bit more structure and third party kind of observational data?

instead of just relying on the coach to orient ver or the person to self report. I think self reporting can be a very biased experience for a lot of people. So not that people

John Marshall (29:00)
Certainly.

Logan Yonavjak (29:02)
might not understand they might understand

different aspects of self, but we all have blind spots and it’s a lot easier to see patterns when it’s a when someone else’s observation or AI combined with a human human scoring, which is what

John Marshall (29:16)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (29:17)
we do.

John Marshall (29:18)
Well, so before before I ask this question, I know that you I think there was one more area you had left, one more construct that you measure. What’s that what’s that last one and then I’ll and then I’ll ask the question on my mind.

Logan Yonavjak (29:34)
Okay, so we talked about strategic complexity, purposeful agility, resilience, coachability, relational

John Marshall (29:42)
relationship. Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (29:43)
intelligence, and then team we call team climate IQ. And what that means is your ability to create, in a nutshell, psychological safety for others to be there to work at their best to to perform at their highest ability. And so when we all know this when we’re around a toxic.

individual at work, it makes it, you know, what you think about is that person or your your nervous system is then attuning to that individual’s state of of being. And even if you have a strong sense of self and or it’s still it’s like a tax on your work. You aren’t able to

John Marshall (30:21)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (30:21)
really focus at your best because you’re always worried about this, you know, whether it’s neurotic or micromanaging or someone yelling at you. Like there’s all these different aspects that

kind of put a damper on what you’re capable of. And so a really someone who’s really high on this construct is really able to create a sense of safety amongst a team. And that sense of safety is sort of like the context in which you can build trust and respect and actually learn about each other’s communication styles and brainstorm and do the things that creative

we require to to solve problems and to and to execute. So it’s a real barrier to execution. you know, going back to your your intro of me, if you want to talk about business outcomes, to me, that’s one of the biggest obvious areas. I’m I’ve worked on so many teams where there was one sort of culprit leader who everyone was just when they came around, they just were frustrated. They didn’t want to

follow through because of this individual. so yeah, I think this is a really important area that’s often overlooked in terms of how do we measure that.

John Marshall (31:37)
Agreed, because that’s always measured from the outside in, right? A culture paul survey or an an engagement survey, et cetera. Right?

Logan Yonavjak (31:42)
And three sixties can be helpful. Yeah. Yeah.

John Marshall (31:48)
Which is which is what you know I think is really, really fascinating when it comes to the quantitative linguistics or th however you’re, you know, doing this with with AI involved to not just

To not just listen to like what categories these their answers fall into, but more how they’re responding, like the language they’re utilizing to respond says something about who they are and how they approach this area, as opposed to the response itself. Like am I following the i at the highest, at the highest kind of generalization of how this works?

My following.

Logan Yonavjak (32:36)
Well,

my dad would always say tone matters. It’s not necessarily what you say, it’s how you say it, which is I think a lot of it, you know. it’s amazing how you can have a c a message to communicate and then it’s like how that message is delivered and received by someone else, someone else’s nervous system really. And so it can be neutral, it can be positive, it can be negative. And so yeah, what we’re measuring and again, we’re getting better at this. I think there are and this is where

360s are a great complement to what we do. I I definitely don’t want to denigrate other approaches that have been taken. I think if you combined our team Climate IQ, which is the leader talking about their experience of building a team, that’s still self-reported from the team’s perspective. So then you bring in the 360 and you combine that and you get a better picture, holistic picture of how the person’s able to hold that psychological safety piece.

John Marshall (33:32)
Mm. Definitely. Okay. So there’s there’s an in in to out and outward in perspective that can be supportive to like not just the score but the like the development opportunities there.

Logan Yonavjak (33:46)
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, you want other people’s perspectives if they’re on team with them. I think you you know, we’d be remiss in leaving that out. But transcript, but with transcript analysis, which is what we’ve been able to do, we can do also team analysis, which kind of also points to some of those patterns. So we can take a team in a meeting and actually digest some of the ways those people are coming at their relationship.

from their different perspectives. And if we know their stages of development, that can also help inform the perspective they’re taking on the team and whether the team’s progressing as a team over time. So there’s just a lot of really cool stuff we can do.

John Marshall (35:15)
It’s so I feel like there’s this it’s like the amount of data that you have access to directly is directly proportional to the like usefulness, I guess, or accuracy of the results that that the readiness engine outputs.

Logan Yonavjak (35:37)
Well it’s I I mean the way I’ve tried to think about it is more more transcript data is good to a point. I mean at some point you see the pattern. so it’s like we need as much data as we need to see the pattern. And then once you see the pattern, you don’t necessarily need more d it’s always good to like back it up with more and more evidence. But we kind of we tend to pull in like several areas of evidence for each construct.

in enough enough to be significant. And AI or human scoring depends on the engagement level that we’re working with. But with the AI, it’ll kind of tell us if it has enough information. So s at some points we’ve been given, you know, four or five transcripts of a podcast or something like that. And it’ll only be able to run four just because it doesn’t have enough data to make those claims. So

Yeah, it

John Marshall (36:33)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (36:33)
it’s hard to answer that question like, we need five transcripts or we need it’s sort of like we need enough to see the pattern.

John Marshall (36:41)
Hmm. Okay. Okay.

Logan Yonavjak (36:42)
But it’s not necessarily

hundreds of transcripts. It’s s somewhere in the order of like five to twenty per person.

John Marshall (36:51)
Okay.

Okay. So this right, this is important, right? Understanding understanding who’s ready for the next level, the things that, you know, the things that companies should be measuring, right, to produce the best results, right? The best business results.

Now, I I agree with all of the areas that you’re measuring, and I’ve been sitting here trying to think of you know something else that should be included and I’m I’m I’m drawing a blank right now. So I feel like it’s right, it’s very

Logan Yonavjak (37:28)
We stumped you.

John Marshall (37:30)
it’s very comprehensive. And

Very comprehensive. And now so I guess from the from the actual application. So say, okay, I’m I I’m I’m in, like we need to understand how we need to understand who’s ready for the next level in our succession planning in my

I don’t know.

500 person organization. I’m sitting here, I’m an HR leader listening right now, who’s over our kind of secession planning, talent development process. how how do I get started with this? How do I get how do I understand how it works and what’s the process for I guess f what are the different entry points?

for the leaders that would be a part of this or potential leaders that would be a part of my succession plan? Is it like they all have to subscribe to having their meetings transcribed? Is it they all just take a 14 question survey? Is it like what like what kind of parameters do I need to have set before I can get some like real data to start making succession planning decisions?

Logan Yonavjak (38:53)
Yeah, I mean that’s a great question. There’s two routes in terms of acquiring the data. One is transcript data. And that just depends on the company. I mean, some some companies have people recording information. Some companies have more sensitive types of information that might not be as readily accessible or highly classified information. So we would have them take an assessment because with the assessment, we’re getting everything we need to run the an

analysis. So we would have people sit down and take that. And then we could run also team analyses off of either the assessment or the transcript data. So it just sort of depends on, you know, if it’s a succession planning exercise, it’s it’s like I think it’s important for those making the decision to identify what they’re looking for in the leader because we very much are augmenting you know, human wisdom as well. Like

We don’t want to just come in and say this and this and this and you should choose this person. It’s very much like if there’s something in specifically you’re looking for, we can also maybe help you tease that out in the data. Or if you just want to better understand the six areas that we identified, which are pretty comprehensive as you just alluded to, then you know, we’re probably gonna cover you with this this information that we’re giving you. So we we like to deliver

We’re building more even more interactive capabilities so that people can we’d like to get into simulations and

John Marshall (40:25)
Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (40:26)
just different ways. Like I have this vision of all of us having a second brain on AI, but that’s at our highest level of development. So what if we could train ourselves to be our highest version of ourself at different and these in these different constructs? And then if we have a problem arise or a conflict, we could

have that second brain inform.

how we think about the problem from a higher level of complexity or relational intelligence. So there’s just a lot we can do with like simulations and role playing, making this data like very interactive. But right now it’s we deliver a dashboard and a report. And then we also have online or we have coaching capabilities. We’re building an affiliate group of of coaching professionals that will team up with us.

John Marshall (41:16)
Hm.

So it sounds like there’s there’s a lot possible, but I wanna I wanna keep it simple for for people that are you know that might be thinking about, you know

implementing something like this. It sounds like, you know, once once the system is once the system has been integrated and, you know, you’re on year two, three, four of your succession planning and leadership development process using the readiness engine, right? you have all these other like capabilities that could be in mind. But for for someone like

just starting out again. They so there’s an option for their people to take the assessment. And then it’s almost and that’s like the baseline, right? And then there’s or they could do the baseline of transcripts, but

Logan Yonavjak (42:11)
Yes.

John Marshall (42:11)
I just I I just don’t know if that’s gonna be someone so I’m just gonna do it how I think that it would it would roll out. Being starting with the assessments, then they can choose like

kind of data quality enhancement add-ons and that be adding transcript data, that be merging team assessments and or team transcript data. And then the the next and then the next option is adding three sixty data to those assessments as well.

Logan Yonavjak (42:49)
Yeah, I mean it depends

if they’re already doing three sixty. We could probably just

John Marshall (42:52)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (42:53)
add that into the initial

reports, honestly. but

John Marshall (42:57)
Great. So you can

take what they’ve already been doing as well and integrate that into

Logan Yonavjak (43:02)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Marshall (43:04)
like into the assessment. Okay. Into the engine.

Logan Yonavjak (43:07)
Yes.

John Marshall (43:08)
Okay. Okay, great. So now I’ve integrated what we have into the engine. We’re starting to get our first our first results, right? Then then comes the question of okay.

When it comes to to bias, right, we always there’s there’s this whole movement, right, of just like reducing bias when it comes to promotion and hiring decisions and but

Logan Yonavjak (43:38)
Yeah.

John Marshall (43:38)
but ultimately this is an organization run by humans that have opinions and choices that ultimately someone chooses, right, who to promote. So we’re

Logan Yonavjak (43:51)
Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (43:51)
never going to completely remove bias.

Logan Yonavjak (43:55)
No.

John Marshall (43:55)
That’s just that’s just not realistic. But I think for those of us that, you know, understand that we need to make a hiring decision. We need to make a promotion decision. We need to make an investment decision, right, in, you know, X amount of companies vying for this capital. How are we evaluating right

these this person, this team’s level of readiness to step up to this next level of investment, this next level of leadership. And you’re saying that the readiness engine focuses exactly on answering that question. Like based off of this research and aggregating all of that in with today’s technology, you’re able to

determine based on these it was six six six

Logan Yonavjak (44:54)
Sex. Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (44:55)
factors who is who is ready.

Logan Yonavjak (45:01)
I think it’s yeah, I think that’s a good way to think about it in terms of I mean, I like to say it’s augmenting human decision making. And at the very least, even if you’re gonna make the same hiring or promotion decision, you’re forced to evaluate your own biases. or I think we should create more contexts in which people are are s need to voice why they made a decision about a hire or promotion to their peers.

even if the evidence points in a different direction. I think it just causes it’s like bringing in a straw man or bringing in something to push up against so that we’re not just kind of holding these biases more unconsciously. We’re we’re forced to make them more conscious potentially.

John Marshall (45:50)
Yes. I love you said it. That that hit that really hit with me. Augmenting human decision making. Because that’s really what it is. Like we’re not developing an an unbiased secession pipeline process. We are giving people the data to make more contextual dis objectively contextual decisions. Beautiful.

Logan Yonavjak (46:16)
I mean,

yeah, I I I’ve thought about this a lot because I’ve been the positive recipient many times of informal decision making, right? Like I was in the right room, I went to a Ivy League grad school. You know, I’ve had different contexts in which I was probably offered positions, there’s probably maybe arguably someone who was better better suited. On the flip side, I’ve applied for things cold and they already had someone in in mind.

internally and I’m not saying that these things are necessarily bad, but I think that people are often making really quick decisions or not really being very systematic about why they chose a person or not. Like in some cases I was a good fit. In other cases maybe someone else would have been. And it would have been nice to have s more of that third-party framework to better understand how I was being evaluated.

how others were being evaluated. And even if I got chosen or not, like it I think it gives me comfort, at least personally, to better understand, okay, these are areas in which someone else is being picked over me. yeah, so there was that too. I’ve just thought about my own career journey and how unfair or fair it was at different points as well. And I think I have an emp I have empathy for situations where people are really

coming into

scenarios and they may not have come in with a warm lead or they didn’t go to the right school, quote unquote. or they are there’s other biases going on that prevent them from getting a role. And so I think we just there’s been this whole movement of DEI. I think it’s called DEI J now. I I feel like the acronym has evolved past

John Marshall (48:05)
Yeah.

Logan Yonavjak (48:06)
me. I yes. But I think what we’re also really talking about is

other types of diversity in which things like how do you hold complexity, how do you relate to others, you know, again back to some of these factors that are really worth considering in decision making and s when in deciding on leadership decision making and team development. So yeah, I’m just I’ve become really passionate about this this subject. I think the DEI conversation is a good starting point.

But there’s a lot more to say about it and a lot more of types of perspective and diversity that we’re we need to consider in the mix as well.

John Marshall (48:49)
Hmm. I agree. Because there could be right, there could be someone that maybe at face value or based on the kind of r relational context in which they’ve, you know, developed their reputation in an organization or just their disposition, right? J maybe less less visible, right?

Logan Yonavjak (49:08)
Yep. Charismatic. less

visible. Yes, exactly. Yep.

John Marshall (49:13)
Well well

yeah, I’m say like instead of instead of the you know, the squeaky wheel getting the grease, if you will, like maybe these organizations are overlooking potential in areas that aren’t just

ev omnipresent

Logan Yonavjak (49:27)
A hundred percent.

John Marshall (49:27)
or overly present, right, when it comes to, you know, being visible or intentionally right, networking around the organization or advocating for themselves in a way that’s natural. I mean, they sh that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be advocating for themselves, but that could also mean that that’s potential overlooked that you want to be able to unearth.

Logan Yonavjak (49:51)
Yeah, no, and that’s there’s that’s just one of a multitude of reasons I think to have a third party assessment, or el analytics again to augment

John Marshall (50:02)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (50:02)
human decision making.

John Marshall (50:05)
Well, I I have to go here. So augment human decision making is is the start. But like do you see a future where AI is just making all the hiring decision making, secession planning decision making, where you just remove the human from the hiring decision entirely?

Logan Yonavjak (50:28)
Well, I mean AI it’s a good question. I don’t think it’s gonna happen anytime soon. I think that humans will want to be involved with leadership decision making for a long time. I actually have seen this I’ll take the VC space, which is being heavily disrupted right now. So a lot of VCs are relying on AI to make investment decisions. So and they’re doing a

John Marshall (50:52)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (50:53)
better job in some cases than

than humans. So I don’t know. Maybe we’re close to your reality, but I do think that we’ll have a hybrid for a long time. usually the truth lies somewhere in the middle, right? Like it’s not gonna stay the way it was, but it’s not all gonna be taken over by AI. So I could see in a scenario where people’s second brains are making decisions potentially. Like you kind of have versions of yourself making different decisions.

John Marshall (51:24)
Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (51:25)
But I still think the AI needs to be trained again with your developmental capacity in mind. Like most AIs don’t have this context that we’re talking about, developmental capacity, in the way that they were built or trained or the way that people are interacting with them. So I think that this adds to the decision-making opportunity set, whether it becomes a hybrid or whether A AI takes over, it should be based somewhat on this body of work.

So is that an is that a

John Marshall (51:56)
Got it.

Logan Yonavjak (51:57)
fluffy, squishy enough answer for you? I didn’t really answer the question. It was safe. Yeah. I don’t think I’m ready

John Marshall (52:01)
It was it was safe, for sure. It was it was it was for sure safe.

Logan Yonavjak (52:07)
for AI to take over all of my. Listen, my my husband started an AI grocery agent that was supposed to revolutionize the way we do grocery shopping and plan all of our meals. The last delivery it gave us was a

one pound bag of apples, a huge bag of rice, just stuff we literally couldn’t use and it didn’t even tell us why it used it and then it signed off of our group chat. And I just thought to myself, you know, my husband spent a lot of time programming this thing and like giving it specifications and it it still just could not grocery variability is such a huge like if you think about the way we purchased food, it’s actually in different quantities. It depends on the vendor.

There’s not a lot of standardization. And so if you just take that alone, like I don’t really still don’t want AI taking over my grocery b decision making. Like it really screwed up the last order.

John Marshall (53:08)
That’s that’s fantastic. now scale that to a multinational organization that’s choosing their next their next level of senior leadership. Yeah. You c you don’t wanna get the wrong order.

Logan Yonavjak (53:23)
You don’t wanna get that pound of apples that you’re not gonna eat. We have to make

John Marshall (53:25)
Yeah.

Logan Yonavjak (53:26)
an apple pie now, which is fine, but

John Marshall (53:30)
That’s that’s hilarious. But well

The AI has made this technology, I mean, has made this assessment, you know, into something that is like dynamic and can live and take in like so many different data points to support augmented decision making that you know, if so if you truly had

the AI built on these frameworks. And you were going to work for a company that was built by the Readiness Engine and use the Readiness Engine to make all of their hiring decisions and, you know, up to the most senior levels of leadership. And solely. Like the no human influence, but just based on

The readiness engine taking in all of their transcripts and the responses and everything completely built the hierarchy. Would you be excited to go work for that company?

Logan Yonavjak (54:38)
That’s great question. I think I would. so I know that goes back to your question of like, is AI gonna take over human decision making?

John Marshall (54:47)
A different way of asking.

Logan Yonavjak (54:50)
but I think I would be yes, I’d be really interested to see what it came up with, but it would also be good to have I don’t know, it reminds me of self-driving cars right now. Like they’re different stages of self-driving. But at and at the very I think it’s stage five, it’s fully self-driving.

There’s you know, you just sit in the back and do whatever, read a book. I like the version where there’s you kind of have to sit at the wheel, and if something goes wrong, you you have control over it. It would be nice to have some sort of assurance that there’s checks and balances, even if there’s multiple AI agents that are trained to be checks and balances for one another. So it would just be good to dig in a little bit more there, but and maybe

you could start with a type of company that was a little more standardized or like there was a way to kind of test the counterfactual of what had happened versus like what AI could do. But in theory, yeah, I would be I would be excited to to go work for that company. Why not?

John Marshall (55:56)
I agree. I agree.

Logan Yonavjak (55:57)
I mean,

if you look at the stats of corporate America, I’m gonna get some of these. I don’t wanna be like, you know, pinpointed in the citations, but generally in the range of I’ve heard as low as twenty percent engagement of employees of feeling engaged in their their their roles. high turnover, you know, that we’re experiencing forty to fifty percent of promotional decisions don’t work out within the first 18 months.

Seventy percent of MA deals don’t go through because of or fail because of cultural clashes. I mean, it’s not that we can’t do worse than that, but it’s not going great.

John Marshall (56:39)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Yonavjak (56:39)
So maybe that’s a way to think about it. Like, it would be interesting to have AI give it a shot. so I would definitely

John Marshall (56:50)
Right, little subset of data.

Logan Yonavjak (56:52)
experiment with it. I would be

willing to go into the experiment because I don’t see that we’re doing all that great in aggregate. there’s certainly like the great places to work in some of those metrics, but I I just by and large people don’t seem that excited or engaged in their work. And there’s a lot of disgruntled and dysfunctional teams, dysfunctional leaders. So yeah, I I think why not give AI at least a shot at like experimenting with it?

John Marshall (57:26)
I agree. Why not? Yeah, as l it’s as long as it’s trained on, right? Trained on the things that we that we actually want. Like trained on the things that are, you know, supportive of you know collective capacity and

just life experience, I guess, too. Yeah. No,

Logan Yonavjak (57:42)
And I’m allowed to quit if I want, right? Like I can quit the job. As long as I can quit if I want to.

John Marshall (57:48)
no, you had to stay like at at least at least two years.

Logan Yonavjak (57:51)
I have a contract for ten years. wow.

John Marshall (57:57)
be I’d be in. I’d be in for that experiment. I think it would be I think it would be fun.

Logan Yonavjak (58:02)
It’s a cool way to to ask

the question differently though too. I really like that. It’s a good way to think about it.

John Marshall (58:09)
Well

Being that you’re the co founder of Readiness Engine, I I would hope you’d want to go work for that company. It gives me it gives me more faith. Gives me more faith in the engine. But I also have a lot of faith in the the concepts that it’s built on. I mean, we’ve already touched on adult development and and spiral dynamics and I’m sure there’s a lot of other work that goes that goes into it.

I’d be really interested in the like the relationship piece and attachment thy attachment styles and attachment theory.

Logan Yonavjak (58:43)
yeah. Different

people. I have to ask my co founder about that. I haven’t we haven’t had that conversation. It’s a good point.

John Marshall (58:49)
Yeah, it’s just because a after going deep into attachment theory and and having kids and witnessing the development of other kids all all around us and you know, and parenting styles and all of that, it’s just so, so fascinating how it influences the way that you participate in relationships for the rest of your life. Like

Logan Yonavjak (59:15)
Wow. Yeah, absolutely.

So true.

John Marshall (59:18)
Unbelievable. That’s why so I mean we’ve talked a lot about the the measure the measurement piece and we could do I think we could do a whole other episode on its use and development. Right?

Logan Yonavjak (59:28)
Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (59:30)
Because like that’s

That’s the interesting part is, you know, how do we prevent the assessment just from becoming like a la a label of your readiness and make sure that it’s, you know, also used as a development tool, right? That we’re that we’re not by assigning this number fixing people to some level of readiness, but able to provide the coaching and training necessary, right, to develop the people that want to be more ready

Logan Yonavjak (1:00:00)
Right.

John Marshall (1:00:00)
for the next level. Right.

Logan Yonavjak (1:00:02)
Yeah,

I think that would be a good conversation with my co founder.

John Marshall (1:00:05)
Mm. Beautiful. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Maybe we’ll we’ll bring

Logan Yonavjak (1:00:08)
Thanks for inviting us back.

John Marshall (1:00:09)
I was gonna say, yeah, but we can bring we can bring her on too. That would be that would be great. Good,

Logan Yonavjak (1:00:13)
Yeah. Yeah.

John Marshall (1:00:15)
good. Okay. So

For the VP of people or the kind of culture champion leader that’s that’s listening right now, right? They know their organization’s growing faster than their leadership systems, or they just don’t have a system in general, right? What’s the first question they should be asking themselves about readiness?

Logan Yonavjak (1:00:42)
Yeah, I mean well, how is the current approach working for them? I mean, if you have something, is it does it feel like it’s meeting your needs? Or are people able to meet their quarterly goals? Is there any execution risk coming up? Are teams I mean I think a way to think about it is looking at what can happen when these

Constructs are not addressed. So if there’s low relational intelligence or people not getting along well, is there a lot of team friction? is the leadership sort of having trouble making decisions or feeling overwhelmed by, you know, the level of complexity that’s coming in? Like these are kind of indicators that that something like our tool would be really helpful to to weave in. And we think about it as developmental intelligence. So you’re probably

Most people are probably not aware of some of the limitations of the way they’re thinking about leadership development in this context. So yeah, I mean, I think maybe I would answer it as, are you seeing some of these friction points come up?

John Marshall (1:01:57)
Well said. There’s this just such a beautiful gap that you’re trying to address here. Like this gap between like talent and readiness. Right. And

you know, the usual ways that we see folks getting promoted based on right, delivering results and visibility or certain talent markers that you’ve identified versus like w what’s actually been shown in the data to produce better results. Right.

Logan Yonavjak (1:02:32)
Yeah.

John Marshall (1:02:33)
And I think you’re doing a a really great job with the technologies available today to help bridge that gap. I think it’s a really, really important body of work that every company should be thinking about. Right? Because

Logan Yonavjak (1:02:47)
Thank you so much. I agree. Yeah.

John Marshall (1:02:49)
These decisions, I mean, they shape they shape the experience of everyone in your organization. Because in that same data you’re referencing for, you know, current current state of employment, it’s like the vast majority of people that leave their jobs, right, leave because of their manager. Right? Leave because of exactly.

Logan Yonavjak (1:03:12)
Yeah. And how many managers are are

coached and how many are taught to lead people just on that dimension alone? Yeah.

John Marshall (1:03:19)
many. Not

many. It starts at a it typically starts at a very senior level, right?

Logan Yonavjak (1:03:25)
Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (1:03:25)
Let’s invest in executive coaching for our executive team, not our middle managers or frontline managers. And and I think this technology and you know the incorporation of AI having that second brain is going to make coaching available

to more people that, you know, from an investment perspective that,

Logan Yonavjak (1:03:45)
absolutely. Yeah.

John Marshall (1:03:47)
you know, wasn’t available in the past. So I’m I’m really excited for that when it comes to this technology. Do I think it’s replacing executive coaches or coaches in general? No, because the relationship dynamic like adds a whole different level of resonance that you can’t really get. Right. With this technology.

Logan Yonavjak (1:04:04)
Yes, resonance is a good that’s it.

John Marshall (1:04:10)
But like

Without the resonance, would it be helpful? Hell yeah. Like

Logan Yonavjak (1:04:16)
better than

the alternative, which is either people reading a book or people asking questions

John Marshall (1:04:20)
Nothing. Read a book. Yeah. Go to a seminar.

Logan Yonavjak (1:04:25)
of AI, not recognizing their own blind spots, or maybe they know how to ask questions of AI. You know, some people are really savvy, but I don’t know that many people even know how to be coached necessarily, like just by like talking to AI and dialoguing with it. So

Yeah, I think AI coaching serves a purpose and it’s not the be all end all, but it’s gonna add to the system and I’m excited about it’s the accessibility factor.

John Marshall (1:04:53)
Green. Well, so what does the process look like for this VP of people or HR business partner or something that’s that’s listening right now that wants to get involved with the readiness engine?

Logan Yonavjak (1:05:07)
Well, the best way to do something is go online and schedule a call on our website. We just could give you a demo, we could talk through and just hear more about your context and what might be a good fit for you. So usually those initial calls are with me and you can schedule them either using our contact form or there’s also my calendar link is on the website. It’s readinessengine.io.

John Marshall (1:05:30)
Beautiful. See, it’s like even the interaction with these technologies starts with scheduling the dang call. It starts with the human. Right?

Logan Yonavjak (1:05:39)
Just start to schedule the call. Just

John Marshall (1:05:43)
Exactly. So if you’re if you’re listening right now and you know this is something that you know your organization would benefit from, that your team could benefit from if you want to be able to be the microcosm in your organization and present a use case up line or something like that, act on it. Like stop listening and click the link in the bio or not the bio, the episode the show notes and go schedule a consultation. Right.

It’s as easy as that. Have a conversation. See where it takes you. Well, Logan, thank you so much for everything that we covered today. I mean, w we could have gone

Logan Yonavjak (1:06:24)
It was a pleasure.

John Marshall (1:06:24)
down many different rabbit holes and

Logan Yonavjak (1:06:27)
Absolutely. We did.

We did.

John Marshall (1:06:29)
I think

we’re gonna we’re gonna continue this conversation on the on the development side of things as well. I think we can go a little bit deeper there. But but for now, I thank you so much for all of the insights that you shared, the concepts that you’re making available to organizations today, like this kind of augmented human decision making is something that is very much needed in our economy today.

Logan Yonavjak (1:06:56)
Thank you so much. Yeah, I appreciate it.

John Marshall (1:06:58)
course. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in to the Present Professional once again.

Wherever you listen to this episode, go ahead and leave us a review, leave us a some some comments, rate and review us. It really makes a difference for the show and showing other people what they can experience listening to the present professional, the different people that they can connect with. So if you just take that little time for us, I would be greatly, greatly appreciative. So thank you so much. We’ll see you next time.