When it comes to connecting, changing, and growing, APQC’s keynote speaker, Tucker Bryant, reimagines how these actions have been pivotal in both his poetry and professional background in the tech space.
APQC’s Cindy Hubert sat down with Tucker to dig into the inspiration behind Tucker’s highly anticipated keynote session at this year’s APQC conference, “The Poet’s Keys: A Guide to Unlocking Innovation.”
While the keynote's title stands out at first glance, Tucker explains in this Q&A the inherent shared connection between the poetic and professional experience.
Cindy: “The Poet's Keys” is probably one of the most interesting topics and titles I've heard to be a part of innovation and change. Tell us what led you to name it or adopt that. And what do you consider your most important components in it?
Tucker: I asked myself what do the tools that poets use unlock? Not just as a poet, but as a professional. And it occurred to me that the common theme and all the tools I explored unlock some form of growth. That's a broad term on purpose because growth can be applied to things someone cares about in their personal life, or it can be used to their creativity. It can be applied to what matters to them in their work. I’m excited to share a few keys that poets use to push their craft forward that professionals can use as well.
Why Leaders Need to Promote New Ideas
Cindy: Can you put leadership in the context of just the poet's keys? How might you think about leadership, and how do we work with them?
Tucker: It can be tempting for a poet, when sharing their work, to share the stuff that feels safe or that feels more palatable to the audience, based on the kinds of material they might have received in the past, as opposed to simply pushing new ideas forward. But there's much that we lose out on when we don't take those opportunities to broach new conversations with the audiences that we're working with internally. If we are interested in making organizational change, we will have to be willing to get on stage and say the quiet part out loud a little bit, as it relates to the changes that we recognize either need to happen or should happen. As leaders, we need to be bold in taking the stage and sharing ideas that may be new to the folks that we're serving and working with.
The Power of Curiosity in the Era of AI
Cindy: Having worked for Google and other prominent tech companies, you probably have more insight on this than I do. With an increased interest and focus on AI, there are tons of postings for prompt engineers to know how to train their AI. Can you say a little bit about what you think is going to be needed and how poetry helps?
Tucker: I think the biggest foundational one will always return to two things. One is curiosity and the willingness to continuously question what new pathways we might be able to take in the work that we're doing. And the other one is, I mean, call it like an appetite for failure. Honestly, it's such a volcanic moment with the rise of AI and the organizational transformations you've been describing as well as the organizational change you've described. We are going to make many missteps, but that's the only way we're going to be able to take up a first draft and turn it into a masterpiece or a finished piece is by having an appetite for the failure we are inevitably going to run into an as we try new things out. And that experimentational experiment is making up for the worth.
Hear more from Tucker Bryant and Cindy Hubert at APQC's 2024 Conference in Houston, TX, May 1-2.