Want to know what your trusted friends, colleagues and relatives candidly & honestly think of you?

It's a hot day in New York City today, and we have a hot show on the Doctor Podcast. We're talking about something new, a new piece of software called Know Thyself 360. Did you ever wonder what your colleagues and friends and neighbors and coworkers think about you, but you're afraid to ask them and they're afraid to tell you? Well, Know Thyself 360 solves that problem and we have a great guest today to discuss. So thanks for tuning in once again. Our guest today is Doctor Kerry Sulkowitz. Dr. Sulkowitz is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine here in New York City.

He's the past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a very prestigious association. He's the founder and managing partner of the Boswell Group, which is a leadership consultancy based in New York, advising CE OS and boards on people and culture. He's also the founder and CEO of Know Thyself 360, which we're going to talk about in great detail today, and I predict this will be the next TikTok. Did you hear that? I heard that. I hope you're right. Yeah, I'm. I'm sure I'm right. This is Know Thyself 360 is an AI enabled, psychoanalytically informed 360 feedback tool, which is incredible.

I've heard about it and now you're going to hear about it as well. He's been developing Know Thyself 360 for the past year or so, and it launched it in recent months, and we'll find out about it in great detail now. So, Doctor Sulkowitz, Carrie, thanks very much for taking the time from your busy schedule. Thank you for having me. Yeah, to talk about Know Thyself 360. I'm really excited about this. This sounds like an incredible software tool. So tell us what Know Thyself 360 is about? What is it?

At it's heart, what it is, is a simple, easy to use tool that allows people to enhance their self-awareness by getting feedback from a trusted group of friends and colleagues, whoever they invite, who they feel can give candid, constructive feedback to them. So the person who wants this information about themselves decides who to ask to use the software. Is that? Correct. Yeah, that's right. Someone who wants feedback on themselves. Picks anywhere from 6 to 20 people, and maybe in a minute I'll explain the rationale in those numbers, but it's a manageable group.

Picks 6 to 20 people. The software then does the rest. It sends out an invitation to those people, inviting them to participate in someone's journey towards self-awareness, an important path. And then it takes them through the process of providing feedback in a very user friendly way. And then AI comes in in anonymizing and synthesizing the feedback to provide a feeling of safety so that the people who are invited are more likely to be extremely candid, which is obviously important. Feedback isn't very useful unless the people are entirely candid.

Right now you use the term self-awareness. Can you tell us what that means and what the importance of that is? Self-awareness is critical and it's really the reason for being. For Know Thyself 360 there, there are different kinds of self-awareness. The traditional psychoanalytic view of self-awareness has to do with an understanding of how one's own mind works. That's what 1 gains from being in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. But there's a second kind of self-awareness that in my view is equally important, which is understanding how one is perceived, how one is experienced in the world.

And that's if you think about it, what could be more empowering than that to have some sense of how you come across in the world? Right. I'm always dying to know what people think about me, but I'm afraid to ask. Well, you shouldn't be so afraid. Right now I'm going to use Know Thyself 360 and I'll find out. You know, if I can add, Robert, that the well known writer at Harvard, Arthur Brooks, who writes a lot of these about social psychology and and other things, published A terrific piece in the Atlantic just a couple of months ago on the value of self-awareness and how important that is to happiness.

And I agree with him. He's spot on in that piece. I highly recommend it to everyone. That self-awareness is really key to living a happy and more fulfilled life. Right now, once you get this feedback, you can use that information to possibly adjust what you do in the world and how you interact with other people. That's exactly right. There's there's no substitute for having that kind of self-awareness, what one does with it. Hopefully we'll have a chance to talk about that here this evening, but it's up to you.

It's up to the recipient of the feedback to do. Of course, you're free to do nothing with it, but that would be a shame to not take advantage of that kind of insight. And one can use it to, to deepen one's understanding of oneself, to make some realistic adjustments in how one conducts themselves in the world. One can talk to trusted others about it too. And that's actually the best thing to do is to not just take it, take it in, but to to discuss it with somebody who you trust to help you figure out what to do with it.

Right, sounds like it'll make a better world for everybody. Now where'd you get the idea for this and and why did you decide to do this? Sure. Well, you know, I've been as, as you mentioned in in your kind introduction, I've been in the business world for nearly 30 years working with CE OS and boards and senior leaders in a wide range of organizations. The idea of a 360, so-called 360, which really refers to the idea of getting feedback from a group of people above at at the same level and below, hence 360 all around you.

That's, that's been an established part of the business world and the organizational world in general for for a long time. The idea of getting that kind of feedback on one's performance. So I've been doing those myself the old fashioned way for all this time. By the old fashioned way, what I really mean is literally with a pen and paper and interviewing. And a CEO will give me a list of a dozen or so people to interview and I'll do that. I'll take notes, I'll think about it and I'll generate a report.

And more important than the report actually is the the debrief, the discussion about the feedback. So it's an established practice in the in the business world. There were two aspects of it that gave rise even more acutely to the idea of know thyself 361 is the idea that I was like so many of us, learning about what AI could do and wondering whether or not AI could assist in that process of synthesizing the feedback and anonymizing it. But the other thing is I, I really had this this idea, and you can call me idealistic if you, if you want, it would be appropriate, probably is to to democratize feedback.

360 feedback. Why should that be limited to senior business executives who would pay a lot of money to to have one of these done? How about feedback for everyone? That was really the the enlivening idea. Right. That's why I think it's going to be like TikTok. Everybody's going to want to know what everybody else thinks about them. And so I think it'll be extremely popular now. Does your background and experience in psychiatry and psychoanalysis help you create this? Absolutely, absolutely. It informs everything I do in my work.

For starters, one it it, it helps me understand and appreciate the value of feedback. It's this is certainly not a substitute for any kind of therapy or coaching, but but self-awareness is really the key to any kind of personal growth and change. That's one thing. The the other thing to get into a bit of the finer points of how this software works is that a lot of these standardized 360 tools, I should mention that there are a lot of 360 tools that exist already in the business world primarily that aren't the old fashioned way of interviewing people that I was mentioning a moment ago, but but their attempts to to gather feedback in a more systematic way.

Unfortunately, in my experience, a lot of those instruments deliver, at the risk of sounding overly critical, what I think is kind of pseudoscience. They attempt to, to quantify aspects of human behaviour that really don't lend themselves to being quantified. It'd be like if I said, you know, you know, Robert, and I'm not just joking with you here, but you know, if I said to you, listen, your, your, your ability as a podcast host is an, is an 8.5 out of 10, that would be useless information. I'm going to walk out.

Well I mean that would be like that means that you're better than some guy with a 7.5, but other than that it doesn't really tell you anything. Right, I know, Joe Rogan. I think you're better by the way, but the point is that what really matters if you were looking to get feedback on how you are as a podcast host, it's the qualitative descriptions and the nuances of how you conduct the podcast that really is useful, not some kind of numerical, you know, measure of that. It's the it's the verbal subjective descriptions of what you do that is most valuable.

And that's what I'm trying to create it with. Know Thyself 360. The other thing that I've found and, and goes back to your interesting question about whether or not my psychiatric and psychoanalytic background informs what I'm doing. Another way that it does that is that I found when I did three 60's the old fashioned way, that rather than asking 50 questions, I usually just ask 22. What does the individual, what does Robert do well? And then I just kind of shut up and listen. And the same thing with the other question, which is where's the room for improvement?

And then again, if I just step back and listen, I kind of trust the, the, the unconscious process between US or between the, the, between me and the person that I'm interviewing about you to, to naturally gravitate to what's most important, what's most salient about you. And if I don't interfere too much and I create an atmosphere of safety for that person, they will get to, to the heart of the matter really quickly. And so it's it's that that I've tried to replicate with know thyself 360. So that's where your psychoanalysis skills come into play, and you've incorporated that into Know Myself 360.

It comes in handy and it's really kind of marrying A psychoanalytic interviewing approach with some of the wonders of AI. Right. So that's different than just an average performance review or personality assessment using some of the tools that psychiatrists and psychoanalysis psychoanalysis app. Yeah, well, there's an important distinction between a performance review, what we're doing with note SL 360 and personality assessments. It's important maybe for your listeners to understand the difference.

What we're talking about here is a bit closer to a performance review, but it's, but it's, it's more than performance, performance being hugely important. And if that's what's most important to those who are being interviewed about you, then that's what they'll talk about. But it's also about your, your interpersonal interactions, your relationships, how you come across in the world for better or worse. That's what Know Thyself 360 does. Performance review, as the term suggests, is more geared towards your work performance specifically.

And we're interested in a more broad appraisal of an individual's strengths in areas for improvement. A personality assessment, the third category that you mentioned is, is really entirely different, that there really isn't much similarity at all that isn't based on feedback from others. That's based on an individual completing an assessment, an instrument answering a lot of questions, and then based on presumably a large database that the that, that, that the company that runs that assessment has access to.

It comes up with various descriptive measures of different ways that your, your mind works and the way your personality interacts. But that is more based solely on an assessment of the individual without asking other people. I see. So that's that's it's a big difference. Yeah, big difference. How did you come up with that name? Know Thyself 360, which I loved. I loved that name. Thank you. I, I, I, I like it myself. I mean the we rather shamelessly borrowed it from Socrates, the the, the great philosophers, Socrates being one of them.

Aristotle another talk very much about the value of knowing thyself, that it's a path to enlightenment. And this is what Arthur Brooks talks about in this article in the Atlantic a month or two ago that I was referring to as well. So the the idea of valuing self-awareness as as an enlightened way of living one's life goes back to the to the great philosophers hundreds and hundreds of years ago. That's interesting. So. You stole it from Socrates. Stole it from Socrates and added 360 to the end of it.

Future and and the present. That's great. Now how can people use Know Thyself 360? Is there a website they can go to? It's very easy. It's the the the URL is know thyself 360 dot AI. Dot AI. Dot AI know thyself 360 dot AI and this is a piece of software that you can access from any device. Of course, it's optimized for the phone, for the mobile device and the iPhone in particular. But any mobile device or laptop just go there. And we've designed it in a way that I hope is really fun and user friendly and non threatening because there is something that is perhaps inherently a little threatening about finding out what other people think of.

So we wanted the user experience to be engaging and to take into account the range of possible feelings about getting 360 feedback. On one end of the spectrum, there are people who, you know, can't get enough feedback and see it as a gift, which is frankly how I see it, that the feedback is empowering and it's really a gift to get this. And so they, you know, they take to it like a fish to water. That's one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is people who, you know, that's the last thing I want to know is what people think of me or I'm, I'm afraid of it for whatever reason.

And then people in between who have various concerns about things like, and they're legitimate concerns. You know, what, what will I do with this feedback? What if the feedback tells me that I should be a foot taller? I can't do that. So, so, so how, how, how will I know that the feedback is actionable? And in fact, some feedback is harder to take action on, and some it's actually rather easy to make a small tweak that can make a world of difference. So we try to upfront ask people why they're motivated to seek feedback, what their concerns are, if any.

And then we try to walk them gently but clearly into the process and give them instructions on how to pick a group of people who they feel will be be honest, will be forthright and constructive. This is not a free for all. It's only people that you trust and that you that are specifically invited to give you feedback who will be part of the process. So you determine or the person who's using this determines who gets to tell the information about them basically. So that's. You you invite people you want.

It's not just. Random people. It's, it's only by invitation. Sometimes it's useful. And, and in the corporate world, this is fairly standard practice. The individual who is about to get 360 feedback creates the initial list. And the best practice is for them to then to show that list to their boss or to somebody in human resources or, you know, somebody that they trust to take a look at the list. Never to subtract anyone from it, but often to add a few names to it, particularly if as human nature sometimes leads one to do.

If you've if your initial list is a group of people who you know loves you, it's fine to include those people. But you also want people who who interact with you in in a range of ways and who might have had some difficult experiences with you, or who are more prone to be constructively critical. Right, so if I go to Know Thyself, 360 dot AII can enter names and e-mail addresses of of people that I'd like to invite. Yeah, that's the way it works exactly. You go in, we ask that you pick anywhere from 6 to 20 people.

The reason for those numbers, just to to be clear, is that in our testing, we did a lot of testing before we launched it officially earlier this year in February. We found that to create this atmosphere of safety that's so important to giving people the comfort to, to, you know, get 360 feedback that it was harder for the AI to effectively anonymize the feedback if there were fewer than six people contributing. And so we, we've, we have to have a minimum of six people. 20 is frankly rather random, but people don't generally don't know more than 20 people that they're going to ask for feedback anyway.

And it's sort of diminishing returns after that. So, so 6 to 20 people, all you do is put in their names and e-mail addresses and the software pretty much does the rest. It generates a very nicely written e-mail that will go out to the people that you would like to invite, or you can customize that e-mail. If you'd rather do it yourself, that's fine too. You have a choice. It sends out an e-mail explaining the process, asking them to be as candid as possible, and it gives them two weeks to respond.

They'll get a reminder after a week if if they don't respond. And we really want to strive for 100% participation because it just makes the feedback so much richer. And, and then after two weeks, as long as more than six have responded, the process is closed. And it literally takes the AI, you know, just moments to generate a very readable, usually around A2 page narrative report. No numbers, no charts, no graphs. It goes into, you know, what does Robert do? Well, where's the room for improvement?

It summarizes a few points to concentrate on and it's and that's it. I've found in my experience doing it the old fashioned way, that if I try to give somebody too many points of feedback, I might as well give them a hundred. It just gets lost. And the, and if you can't boil it down to generally two or three really important points, particularly the constructive criticism part, then you kind of lose your audience. And so the AI does a good job of synthesizing it down to usually two or three, maybe 4 oints, but not more than that.

Right now, that's where the AI comes in, and in order for the AI to anonymize it, you need at least 6. But you can go to 20. Can you go over 20 if you wanted? To the way we've built it so far, you can't go over 20. That's the, that's the maximum. But it's more than enough, right? It's more than enough. That's plenty. Now, do you find your experience that most people first verbally ask the person, look, I'd like this anonymous assessment from you, so you're going to get an e-mail message from know Thyself 360 dot AI asking you to fill out this form.

Or do people just kind of send it and the recipient is surprised by? It we've been sort of studying that the way different people use it. My recommendation is to do the the first thing you said, which is to, to make it more personal. First of all, you want to make you want to make it clear that you really want it and to thank the people in advance for their willingness to participate. And also, if you get a, a personal invitation like that, people are less likely to get this e-mail and think that you know, this must be spam, even though it doesn't really look like spam.

But we've tried to personalize it as much as possible and we encourage people to to personalize it. Now, who comes up with the questions that are asked by this? There are only two questions, just two questions, That's it. What does the individual do well and where's the room for improvement? And then you get 1000 words to answer each question. You can either type it or really I think to make this even more user friendly, you can dictate it into your phone. You can speak it. And then once you're, you can read it over before you, you know, you input the the feedback.

It's very easy. One of the other things about three 60s is that some of the instruments that are out there, I talked to some of my CEO clients about this and I've had quite a few who've tell told me that they like know thyself 360 for a lot of reasons. But one of them is that compared to these other standardized instruments, when, when, when, when ACEO gets a request and CEO is because of their role, they get lots of requests to do 360 feedback for others. And they're usually filled with dread when they get one of these requests because it takes so long.

It sometimes takes half an hour, sometimes even an hour to type all their answers. And what we like to say, and it's true is that you can respond to know thyself 360 feedback requests in five to 10 minutes. So it's a much more streamlined, user friendly process for the for those who are invited to provide feedback. So it's more likely that you'll get the feedback. Yeah, yeah, it's so much easier to give. Now, if the person who's doing this wants to add a third or fourth question, is it possible to do that at this point?

Or not yet, Not yet. At this point it's not possible to do that. Do you think my clothes are, you know, good or old fashioned or inappropriate? I think you're very well dressed, by the way. But if that's something, if you really want feedback on your clothes when you make the invitation, you can customize it up front to say, please, by the way, when you're giving my feedback, could you include something about my clothes? Right, I see. So you can include other things in there depending on how you customize.

It exactly right. Now this is not an app in the iPhone store or or the Android store. This is the the actual website right? It's that's right, it's. 360 dot AI and all the tools are there to do that. That's exactly right. It's at some point, maybe in the future, we may try to turn it into an app, but right now it's software that's optimized for the phone. So it's but it's it's software that that people just log onto and use it. Now you start out, you mentioned your Boswell group works with CE OS and boards of major corporations.

Is this for those people, or do you see this as something that's going to be used broadly by the entire population and therefore become the next TikTok? Well, I want to stay firmly grounded in reality. I think that the TikTok is very addicting. If you've used it, once you get into it, you really get hooked on it, right? I don't think we've created something that has that kind of potential, although I'd like to see this widely used. I think you. Think this should be or could be used by anyone. Yeah, that's really what I'm referring to when I'm talking about democratizing feedback.

And I love the fact that people not only in the companies where I'm advising the CEO, but in companies more broadly, small to medium sized businesses as well as large ones are starting to to test this out and to adopt it. And the feedback that we've gotten from our corporate customers has been fantastic actually. And some of this is on the the LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn page which I would direct your listeners to know thyself 360 dot AI LinkedIn page. And we've got a lot of testimonials from from corporate customers there.

But I must say the part that also really excites me is the non corporate customer. The idea of somebody who is working with a coach individual, somebody individually, somebody who's in therapy, for instance, and wants to bring that kind of feedback into their therapy relationship. Or just some individual who thinks that, you know, that Arthur Brooks was right and that self-awareness is key to happiness and that this is a way to to gain greater self-awareness. People who are using dating apps is another interesting audience that I'm fascinated by.

If somebody keeps going out on dates that for whatever reason aren't working out well, it's not that you ask the people who you've gone out on dates for feedback, although you could do that, I suppose. But just ask your friends, people in your social milieu, to give you some feedback and maybe they'll tell you in this context things that they've been reluctant to tell you before about whether it's your clothes or, you know, your breath or more likely, something about your personality. Of course, it's usually about personality more than these other superficial qualities.

So you've found that people are happy to get this feedback and that it's been helpful for them? Well, look, you know, it's such a, it's a crucial question that you're asking. I was describing before the range of upfront reactions, you know, in terms of openness to feedback from very open to not all that open at all and fearful of it. I would say that really good feedback, what regardless of where you are on that spectrum, really good feedback should sting a little bit for everybody, including those who see it as a gift.

If, if I just, if your feedback just told you how smart and good looking you were, I mean, it might be nice to hear, but it's not that helpful, right? So. I like that the stinging. Yeah, it's stinging. It shouldn't hurt. It shouldn't be insulting or injurious, but it should sting a little bit and it there should be a little bit. Yeah. Oh really? That you want that reaction? And so people should read carefully the feedback, both all the good things about the individual, but also where there could be room for improvement.

The the part that stings is naturally, again in everyone going to evoke a little bit of defensiveness. That's OK too. Best thing to do with that is nothing initially besides just thinking about it and sleeping on it. If it's subjectively felt, then it is real, even if you disagree with it, even if it's if it bothers you. But in addition to sleeping on it and reading the report a few times. And it's also so important to talk to somebody else about it, to share it with somebody who you really trust, a close friend, a spouse, a colleague at work.

And and and really let it, let it simmer for a little while before doing anything with it because it it, it's, it can be a little bit uncomfortable, as it should be. Right, right. This thing is important. So that's where the anonymous component of this comes in, the fact that the person receiving the feedback doesn't know who said what is important. And also the people providing the feedback don't have to worry that they're going to antagonize somebody or make them upset. Exactly. We that that's one of the things that that the AI has been so effective at is in anonymizing the feedback so that none of the the feedback in the report is attributable to anyone.

And of course, that's not the purpose of the exercise anyway. If somebody gets this report and tries to, to figure out, you know, Gee, I wonder which people said these things that led to this constructive criticism. That is a complete, you can try to do that, but it's, it's really missing the point of the entire exercise. It's a, it's, it's a misuse of the of the process. The point is not to figure out who said what. The point is to take it seriously, to take it in. If one person said it or if everyone said it, it doesn't really matter.

It's valuable feedback. Right now, have you tested the AI adequately enough to know that it's really anonymizing it and also making an assessment of of what was said that's accurate? We've done a lot of testing of it. We're continuing to do that. I mean, as you mentioned, we've just launched a few months ago. And so we're constantly getting feedback from our users. Frankly, if we're in the feedback business, we should be interested in getting feedback ourselves and we genuinely are. So we're constantly getting feedback from users, including on the, the way the reports are written and we're making tweaks as we go to get it better.

But but so far we're really, we're pretty satisfied with with the quality of the the, the feedback itself, the way these reports are written and their ability to to anonymize it. That's very interesting because I've read recently some articles where a large percentage of of AI use is people actually asking AI for psychological advice and relationship advice. So AI is really getting involved in that very heavily, and you're using that as well. It is, you know, everybody is, is aware of the, the potential dangers of AI gone mad kind of thing.

But, but there are a lot of fantastic use cases for, for AI and it, it's, it's transformed from the world and we'll continue to do that. And I think this is 1 fairly straightforward use of AI that that's so far so good. Right now, as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, you can probably already sense that I'm a little paranoid. So I'm going to ask you, how can people be sure that this is 100% anonymous? Because if you say something and somehow the the recipient finds out what you said, it could be a problem.

So are you certain that this is 100% anonymous? I'm as certain as I can be based on our testing. It has really worked out well. One of the things that that we did in the development is I took some 360 feedback reports that I had written myself again the old fashioned way. I'd redacted them, fed it into the AI model to the LLM and and it did a good job of doing what I used to do, which is to to massage the language in such a way that on the one hand it's not revealing or attributing who said what, but manages to stay true to the essence of the feedback and it's able to derive really the key themes.

You don't need a direct quote from someone to do that. But, you know, one of the first people that I tested it on, I might add, is myself. I asked my colleagues in the Boswell Group, the consultancy, to, to give me some feedback and it did what I was saying before. It stung a little bit. Some of some of it made me feel good, but some of it made me think, you know, I really got to think about these things. It was very helpful. Very helpful. That's great. You tested it on yourself and and it worked.

That's great to know. Can you? That's a great example of how it works. Can you share some other examples of of what you've found out or what kind of insights you've gotten from using this when it's in the corporate world? Sure. The kinds of feedback that that that that comes back, that can be useful. I was talking to a client recently who did use Know Thyself 360, who again, the feedback about him was largely great and deservedly so. But but but he got a little dug in morally when he felt that somebody was disagreeing with something that he felt so strongly about.

And, and, and would take on a little bit too much of a little bit of a sanctimonious, you know, high horse kind of stance, which had the, which in turn had the effect of, of discouraging people from disagreeing with him. And, and in fact, that kind of disagreement led to better thinking. And so if he was inadvertently unaware, he was unaware of this himself until he got the feedback that he was, even though he was asking for, for lively discussion and debate and meetings, for instance, that he was behaving in such a way that it actually sent the message, I don't really want this.

So that was really useful feedback to to to adjust the way that he was responding to, to anything that he perceived to be a challenge. And the only way you could get that is with this Know Thyself 360 because it is anonymous. Right. Or with or with interviews. And you know, there there are multiple ways of getting feedback. We've just tried to make it easy and accessible. Right now, what if the recipient gets information that they totally disagree with? Have you had people get angry at at the software?

People sometimes get angry. In fact, sometimes the feedback maybe that the person gets angry with, with feedback and then and then they kind of live it out with, with this kind of process. If somebody gets angry about it, the best thing to do is calm down first of all, which might happen in a few days. You don't have to do anything with this immediately, you know, think about it. Let let your emotional reaction subside over time. Talk to a trusted friend who said, well, you know, it must have touched a nerve if it got you so angry.

If it was a simple unemotional point, what are you so angry about? Let's, maybe we should take this seriously. Maybe, you know if somebody feels this way about you, even if you don't see yourself that way, there may be something that you're doing that is happening largely outside of your awareness that it behooves you to at least recognize. Right. Self-awareness comes in again. So that's very important. What's your hope for this tool in in the future and helping individuals grow individually and in teams as well?

I I'd like to see it adopted of course in a range of domains from the corporate world to the the so-called self improvement world. You know, individuals looking to enhance their self-awareness. I think my idealistic hope is that over time, this kind of tool can affect the culture in a in a subtle but but meaningful way by normalizing the idea of getting feedback. We live in a time, of course, of great polarization when it's hard for people to talk about, it's hard for people to hear feedback. There's such, it's so easy to just react defensively and angrily.

And this is ultimately very intimate kind of experience, asking trusted people to comment on you. And, and I think that if more people were open to genuine constructive feedback, not the kind of shaming free for all that exists in social media, that, you know, maybe it can do a little bit of good in the world. Yeah, I think this is great because social media is now everybody's fighting and calling each other names and antagonizing people. This will neutralize that to a great degree. Well, I'd hope so in social media that you have a free for all here by by still being anonymous.

You can be anonymous on social media too, but you don't have to. You don't need anybody's permission to give them what you really think of them. And it's often nasty stuff here. It's only people you know and and that ensures a kind of trusted environment. It's it this is a constructive process rather than a destructive process, right? Now, I mentioned several times, you're a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst. How? How did you manage to create this software? Well, I had this idea while walking on the beach in the in, in Dorset, actually in the UK one day.

And I was, I've been reading a lot about AI and first got me thinking about whether or not AI could be, you know, used in this sort of way. And, but I knew nothing about software. I've, I've worked with a number of startups. So superficially, I've been around the startup world. So you were. A consultant to people who were creating startups. Yes yeah, I've I've done that for years and in fact, I called some of the founders of startups that I knew when I first had this idea and the name occurred to me on the 1st day.

I think know thyself, but clearly I on my own, I would have gotten nowhere fast. And so I, I initially hired a software engineer and a product designer. I got really lucky. Both of them have been absolutely spectacular and in in brainstorming with me and helping develop the initial prototype and getting it to the point last fall of actually testing it. We now have a team of five. In addition to those two, we've got product designer, somebody helping me with the financial aspects of running a startup and, and it's really been a great team that I have learned a ton from.

And what I really like about the process has been it's iterative nature and it kind of parallels the whole idea of feedback, because that's what we're all about, is getting feedback from people who are using the software and then trying to constantly improve it. Right. That that's it's a brilliant idea. Now is there an expense to use no by self 360? There is, it's $60.00 per 360 and. And that's whether you pick six people or 20 people. That's right. That's right. So it's three $360.00 for the entire 360 process from start to to end, which is really inexpensive.

I mean, to, to have someone do it the old fashioned way privately often cost thousands. And, and a lot of the instruments that are out there are considerably more expensive. A lot of them are embedded in expensive suites of human resources software that big companies use, for instance. So as a stand alone tool, we're, you know, we're not cheap, but we're not I, I don't think we're expensive either, $60.00 is, is a reasonably affordable amount. And we're also giving discounts to groups that use it in, in larger corporations.

So that's that's the cost and the no hidden costs, no subscription, it's just a one time fee. Right. And what about if you invite 10 people and initially only two or three people answer? Yeah. What happens then? So if you invite 10 people and, and only two or three people answer after a week, the, the software will send another e-mail reminding those to, you know, to please answer. If after the two week period, you still haven't gotten the required minimum of 6, then the person seeking the feedback will get a, a note from know thyself 360 saying, you know, you haven't gotten enough people.

Would you like to extend the time period by two more weeks? And most, most people will say yes to that and no, no additional cost. And, and usually by the, the end of the additional two weeks, they will have gotten, you know, they have a, they'll have a chance to have made a, a personal request again to, you know, to kind of urge people to, to complete it. And, and by that time, most people have responded. And I think it's really important to try to get 100% participation. Right. Yeah, especially since you picked the people, so you value what they're going to say about you.

That's right. That's right. I'm just curious how AI would handle, let's say you invite 15 people and they all rave about you and make great comments and so on. And then one person says, oh, you're this guy's a real jerk and he's doing this wrong and that wrong. How does AI handle that when 14 people say you're the best and one person says you're a jerk? That's a good question. There are a couple of possibilities that might account for that. First before I I don't know how AI would handle it, but probably it would find a way to to to change the language of the one guy's comment saying you're a jerk to disguise the language but still find a way to incorporate it in the in the feedback.

AI can do. That AI can do that. But I, but I think, I think what might have happened in the circumstance that like this hypothetical situation that you're asking about is that the, the person probably didn't invite a good enough cross section of people in the 1st place to respond. Because if, if one person thinks you're a jerk, my guess is that others do too. And you know, and either the either the other 14 didn't feel comfortable saying that or there or there you've got you've, you've picked your 14 member fan club and one person who might be a little bit more objective.

Right. What if it's CEO of a company and they get one or two bad responses? It's in the report they get. Are they during lunch the next day, going to question everybody who wrote that bad review? Me. Does that happen? Well, in our instructions to recipients about what to do with it, we make it very clear that that is exactly not what to do, right? That that defeats the purpose. And if you think about it as a leader, if if the people that work for you feel like you're on a witch hunt to find out who made those two negative comments, then what effect will that have in terms of your leadership?

It will have a chilling effect. It will basically say that you don't want to hear the bad news, you know, about yourself or about other things too. It'll really shut down communication. One of the things about leadership that we know about and certainly that has been an important part of my work over the last nearly 30 years, is that there is an inherent authority dynamic that exists even with the most open receptive leaders. That the nature of power dynamics is such that it, it inhibits the upward flow of information and it, it behooves leaders, the best leaders do this very intuitively to, to 1st realize that that is a truism that, that there is something inherently inhibiting about their role.

But then if you factor in the effect of personality and behaviour, you can, you can shut down communication upwards pretty quickly. So it behooves the, the most enlightened leaders do this naturally, which is to invite feedback to, to, to not just passively wait for it to come your way, but to invite it and reward it. Actually just to really thank people who have given you the the tough feedback and to to make them exemplars so that other people see that that this is good for the leader and good for the organization.

Right now, this is totally opposite from Ray Dalio, who has meetings with all the people he works with and forces everybody to reveal in public what they think of everybody else. What do you think of that versus Know Thyself 360, which is totally anonymous? I don't want to comment on Ray specifically, but what I will say is that in an ideal world, we wouldn't need anonymous feedback tools at all, that people would just be candid with everybody. And and you know, and you know, hey, Robert, this is this is what I think of you warts and all, but that's not realistic.

Some people may do that and you're lucky when you get that kind of feedback from somebody. But most people are going to think, oh, am I going to hurt his feelings? Or if I give him this critical feedback is, is that going to affect my career? If, you know, if you have some kind of authority in relation to me. So in the real world that we live in as opposed to the ideal world that we might wish for, it's not so easy for people to give candid, constructive feedback. It's much easier to, again, talk about how wonderful you are, right?

So I think the the the purpose of anonymization of feedback helps adapt to a real world in which we want to make it as easy as possible. And more honest. And more honest, yeah. Right, honest feedback. Well, I'm sure everybody out there is going to rush to the website know myself 360 dot AI because that's what I'm doing right after the show and I'm going to invite you to tell me about me. I will look forward to that invitation. All right. Sounds great. Thanks for taking the time to join us today on the Doctor Podcast Cycle file Show.

We really appreciate the time and I think this will be huge. Thank you so much for inviting me to talk about this. Thanks.

In this episode