Alex Ribeiro

Hi, everyone. It is an absolute pleasure to be here with you all today. Hope you have had a wonderful conference. It has been an incredible couple of days. I did hear Gene say that they saved the best for last. Hopefully that is, I am kidding. There have been some wonderful presentations, and I hope you have enjoyed the last few days in Vegas.

It is actually my second time in Vegas in as many months. I was here a few months ago for a friend's 30th, and safe to say it has been a very different trip. Three days of vibe coding, of course, is much more enjoyable. I will share a story about that trip later on in the presentation. Unfortunately it is not about that. Today's talk is all about something even more exciting: corporate planning.

It is a little bit different to some of the more technical talks that we have heard over the last three days. More specifically, I have broken down this talk into three sections. The first is sharing some of my learnings, which have evolved into principles, having spent the last five years and hundreds, if not thousands, of hours focusing on quarterly planning in organizations at scale. Next, I will talk about how quarterly business reviews and traditional quarterly business reviews are evolving from slides to signals, and I will explain what I mean by that. Finally: planning for human AI teams. What the heck are they, and how do we actually plan for them in this new age? How does your QBR need to change in order to accommodate agents in your workflow?

Before I get into it, let me introduce myself. Hi, I am Alex. I am originally from Sydney, Australia. If you have not already picked up on that from my accent, maybe my resemblance to Chris Hemsworth. I do not know, that is what some say, maybe my mum. I like to think that I am a typical Australian. To help you, I have created a little chart. Who does not love charts? Here is how much I like things. Traveling: absolutely love traveling. Most Aussies love traveling. Earlier this year I relocated from Sydney to New York, and I am having an absolute blast. On a similar vein, I would say tied is running. Love running. I think there is no better way to start the morning.

Cycling, any cyclists in the room? Great. I like cycling. The only thing is, the more you get into it, the more money you spend. It is a very expensive hobby. If I follow the theme of triathlon, swimming is where I start to probably be a little bit less Australian. Unfortunately I am not the best swimmer, or love it the most, and there is a good reason for that. It is because of sharks. I do not like sharks. Growing up on the east coast of Australia, you hear stories all the time. I am sure they are great animals, but you can see the correlation.

From a work perspective, I wanted to do something similar, how much I liked my previous employers. My current boss, who is here today, said that may have been inappropriate, so I have changed tack. Over the last 10 years, I have actually spent the last 10 years working in two of Australia's largest organizations: Australia's largest telco and Australia's largest bank. The telco I describe as a telco at a crossroads. For context, the telco used to have a monopoly over Australia's fixed line until the government bought that back in an effort to increase competition. The implication of that was $3 billion wiped off its balance sheet.

On the flip side, I worked at the highest-performing bank in Australia. It did not have a burning platform, but it had a vastly different culture, which drove a lot of velocity. That bank was actually referenced earlier on in this conference. It is top 15 globally in market cap, and it is recently recognized as one of the leaders in AI maturity in financial services. So, two contrasting experiences.

Over those 10 years, I had the pleasure of working in a number of different roles and functions. If I was to draw my experiences together, the common thread would be around operating model, ways of working, and transformation. Most notably, for the topic of this conversation, I had the privilege of leading the design and implementation of QBR on two occasions. A lot of learnings, and a lot that I am very excited to share with you all today.

Now, after those 10 years, I have moved on to an organization that I am super proud to work for called TeamForm. If you have not heard of us before, we are a SaaS-based platform focusing on team management, and in particular now accelerating the path to human AI teaming. I will talk a little bit more about that later on.

So, I am keen to share some learnings and some of my principles based on my experience leading quarterly planning. The first is: you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. I read this in Atomic Habits by James Clear, and it really encapsulated one of my frustrations that I have had over the years. For context, in my team we used to roll out goal-setting frameworks. You may have implemented, let's say, OKRs in your organization. Too often I have seen leaders and even coaches focus heavily on polishing their goals. The consequence of that is spending hundreds of hours refining your goals to little or no avail.

There are certain behaviors that drive this. For example, I have seen leaders want to make their goals look good for their boss. Another common use case is you might have a business case and you need to make those OKRs look great to necessitate the resourcing that you are requiring. But the fact is, your goals do not need to be perfect. They need to be sufficient. You hit a threshold. Are they sufficient enough that you know where you are going? Can you communicate to your teams? Can you measure them? The answer is sufficiency.

What is more important is working in the systems around you that pull you in the right direction to realize those goals: your process, your tools, your organizational culture. I have seen this happen countless times, focusing effort and time in the wrong place. I always couple this principle with one of my favorite Deming quotes, which is: a bad system will beat a good person every time. I fundamentally believe that to be true.

Coupled, or complementary to goal setting, is one of my personal mantras: dream in years, plan in months, and ship daily. What does it mean? Dream in years reminds us that strategy is about continuity, and dreams take a really long time and effort to accomplish. Plan in months reminds us that we need to break down those dreams into sizable chunks so that we can demonstrate incremental progress. Ship daily, my personal favorite, means go to bed every night knowing that you have delivered something, big or small, as long as it is in service of your mission.

I love this because it is a universal structure to realize your personal and/or professional organizational goals. I have been asked the question in this fast-paced moving AI environment and AI market: do these time horizons still hold true? Maybe in 12 months, if you ask me, I would be saying dream in months, plan in weeks, and ship hourly. You saw some examples. Josh from Capital One created an app literally in front of my face in a matter of hours. So I might change this, but I think the underlying principles hold true.

Finally, the last principle that I was reflecting on in preparation for this talk was: with great power comes great responsibility. This is probably the most notable reference from Uncle Ben in Spider-Man. The reason I wanted to reflect on this is because I have seen a lot of leaders try and sidestep, evade, and weasel, whatever word you want to say, their way out of their corporate planning responsibility. I understand because mechanisms like QBR drive a lot of transparency within an organization, and that transparency can be quite unnerving for the average person. But the fact is, your leaders hold a lot of power in an organization: power over budgets, power over priorities, power over people's careers. It is really important that we instill those responsibilities in your leaders because of the value that QBR and setting direction drives for the organization.

Okay, so let's move on in terms of how quarterly business reviews are evolving. If you have not participated or have not heard of a QBR before, here is a quick overview. Historically, they are strategic leadership or management-level forums, although I do appreciate some organizations run them at multiple levels. The general intent is to reflect on the past, align on the goals ahead, and set direction for the organization. They are oriented towards outcomes as opposed to outputs. It is not about breaking down the work and sequencing it into your detailed sprints; that is more around bigger planning. It is about defining what matters most. Again, outcomes over outputs.

Finally, one of the key roles of QBR is as a set cadence and a set rhythm for the organization. You may have heard it referred to as the organizational drumbeat. It is a really important point because it helps set accountability in the right places and also gives you an opportunity as an organization to adapt.

As for the why, I have to credit John Smart for this one ahead of this talk. He reminded me of the quote from Alice in Wonderland: if you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there. That is exactly why quarterly business reviews are so valuable. They point the organization in the right direction so that your teams can choose the roads to get to that destination. It is all about unlocking the critical mass.

Quick show of hands: who here has regularly participated or has participated in a QBR? Excellent. I think 70, 80%. For those who have, here is a very generic template that might look familiar. For those that have not, here is a free template. Essentially I put together a generic flow of a quarterly planning process, and a QBR is the forum within the broader quarterly planning process.

We would start with some level of direction setting: aligning on macro conditions, aligning on your higher-order goals, company objectives, whatever nomenclature you are using. That is followed by some level of preparation, so you might have some artifacts to produce, risk issues and dependencies to capture, and collaboration across the teams. We move on to the forum itself, a discussion between leaders, and then finally at the bookends some sort of finalization: wrapping up the output you produced, a memo, a game plan, whatever you want to call it, as well as following through to detailed planning.

That is the generic flow that most organizations at scale would apply. We like to pride ourselves and say it is short and sharp, two to four weeks. I have presented something like this hundreds of times, and I can say with confidence that this is like the Instagram version of the world. I popped this into ChatGPT to bring it to life and asked it to give me an infographic of what this would look like. It spat out something very harmonious: the goals are achieved, direction is set, all the senior leaders are clapping. One lady in the middle, I did not even prompt this, has three hands. I am sure she is juggling all the priorities that her boss committed her to.

Then I asked, give me the real version. Give me the chaotic version that we normally see in an organization. This is what I am a bit more familiar with seeing play out, of course with organizations at varying levels of maturity. Step one: the direction is set, but your boss just comes back from a conference with big ideas. Of course, not this conference, but other conferences. It is meant to be a discussion, but you see presentation over conversation, and there are hundreds of slides read by someone. The two to four weeks that leaders like to pride themselves on as short and sharp often gets elongated by the time you engage up and down the chain, left and right, and the angst that sometimes gets created in producing these artifacts. The process gets elongated. It is a stark reminder that sometimes it is important to appreciate the chaos, and that not all organizations and processes are rosy.

So what can we do, and how are quarterly business reviews evolving? The key message here is they need to evolve from static reporting and playback sessions to dynamic, AI-augmented decision-making forums. I am going to talk about three key shifts in order to get there.

The first is moving away from slides to signals. Rather than coming every quarter with a slide-heavy deck that gets presented, and of course with PowerPoint there is a lot of bias that can be input into those slides, we need to move to real-time metrics and signals that you monitor ongoing. Effectively, QBR should become a checkpoint in an ongoing feedback loop. I appreciate that is easier said than done because in an organization at scale, you will probably have hundreds if not thousands of metrics to choose from. Aligning your leadership team on a common set of metrics and signals is very difficult. It is very important to distill between what you think is a signal versus what is noise.

That takes me to my second point: retrospective to real time. My controversial take is that I think gone are the days of the retrospective, the pre-mortems, and even the post-mortems. I completely appreciate there is a lot of value to be learned from the past and from reflecting. However, the analogy I like to give is like a health tracker, like an Apple Watch, a Whoop, or an Oura Ring. We need a freaking Whoop for business. Imagine getting a PowerPoint deck today saying that you needed to hit your steps three months ago. It is completely obsolete. You need to be able to understand what your signals are in real time so that you can make your changes in the forum itself and set that direction for your organization.

Finally, something that I will double-click on is moving from constraints to human AI capacity. Of course, organizations will continuously be constrained. However, what happens when your capacity increases tenfold overnight? How do we actually plan for that? How do we set direction, and how do we have sufficient visibility within an organization? Before I get there, it is worth noting that there is also a lot of application of AI in your QBR itself. If you are struggling with ideas, because I know some quarterly planning processes have a lot of overhead, or they might feel like they have a lot of overhead, there are a lot of things you can do: co-authoring your planning artifact, executive-level decision support, minute taking using things like Granola, and automated risk assessment. There is a lot of stuff out there to help simplify and streamline your forums.

Home stretch: planning for human AI teams. What the heck are they? Human AI teams, I like to think of them as agents joining as teammates, digital teammates that get spun up for a task or for a sprint and embedded into a workflow. They can be decommissioned just as quickly. From a strategy and planning perspective, this raises a lot of questions. I feel in the next few years we will be having a lot of these discussions in an organization: things like role accountability and collaboration capacity.

I am not even talking 12 months down the track. I am not talking two years. Before this talk, I happened to stumble upon a LinkedIn job ad. I will not name the company, but there was a role advertised that I thought was quite fascinating: human AI collaboration lead. I read the role description. I would have applied if I did not love my current organization. The role is literally a sense maker, an individual employed to make sense of how humans and agents collaborate and work together most effectively. I thought that was very good reassurance to everything that we have been researching and studying. There are companies right now actively hiring for human AI collaboration leads and trying to make sense of this new way of working.

What can we do? I thought I would leave you with two key things. I want to talk about the shifts in teaming that we are seeing, and then how we plan for the transition so that you can help get prepared ahead of your next QBR.

The first shift in teaming is fluid teaming models. I remember reading Team Topologies, and I love the quote: teams should be stable, not static. More and more we are seeing missions being stable and a lot more fluid membership of individuals into teams, and agents as well. More and more, increasingly, we are seeing fluid teaming models emerge in organizations.

The next is human AI collaboration. Humans are moving from simply understanding AI to working alongside it. Role reconfiguration: agents and AI as analysts, humans as sense makers. It is going to be a big shift that we will see across organizations.

Finally, I think the most important: context. Context is becoming more and more critical, both organizational context and customer context, with agents starting to get embedded into workflows. The risk of waste multiplies if we do not provide sufficient context. Particularly from a technical perspective, you do not want that tech debt to accumulate. Context is key, and there is a lot of research out there that supports this.

So what can we do? I thought I would leave you with some practical tips in terms of planning for this transition. The first is build awareness. I know that sounds very simple. At TeamForm, we are firm believers that you need to understand and visualize your human AI teams, similar to how we have supervisory obligations for our human teams. We will need some level of supervision and visualization for human AI teams. Where are your agents being deployed? How effective are they? These are questions that I really do believe organizations will be looking inward and asking over the next few years in order to understand what is working in the AI arms race, because sometimes it feels like we are throwing spaghetti at the wall. Building awareness, understanding, and visualizing your human AI teams is a key way to plan for this transition.

Organizing around outcomes: I would not be doing my job as a planning practitioner if I did not emphasize this and double down on organizing around outcomes. In this context, one of the questions that I always reflect on is whether we will get to a point where we need to reflect on the goals of our humans versus the goals of our agents. It makes for a fascinating conversation. What are the outcomes that we want our human AI teams to rally behind?

Finally, review workflow. Fundamentally, many organizations will be reconfiguring and redesigning their workflows, obviously given new technologies. Go beyond productivity. One of my biggest fears is that I can see organizations get very caught up in AI through the lens of cost-out and capacity gains. I never thought I would be quoting Mark Zuckerberg, but I remember watching a video of his not too long ago where he spoke about the importance of AI in augmenting customer experience. Looking at it through that lens, as opposed to cost-out, I think we need to go beyond productivity or reframe productivity with the technology that is available.

Finally, play and learn. The principle of experimentation holds true. I have to shout out John Smart's breakout session yesterday. One of the key points was that some of the principles we were talking about 10 years ago when I first started doing ways-of-working transformation, even in 2017, hold true. Call it DevOps, AI, whatever: agile principles of experimentation really do hold true. I do not have a technical background. Early this year, I created my first app, and for me the penny dropped. I had never coded before. With vibe coding, I created my first health and fitness tracker, which was amazing. I have not published it, I have not gone as far as Josh, but maybe one day.

I did promise a story from my last trip here in Vegas. For context, there were about 10 boys. There were four people turning 30, and we went to Vegas. I told them what happens in Vegas gets presented at ETLS. It is nothing rogue. We actually went to a magic show, Penn and Teller. If you have not been to Penn and Teller, it was an amazing show. Their closing act inspired my closing act, because I was thinking, how do I close this talk?

They introduced a concept that I had not heard of before called entropy. Entropy is the notion that chaos and disorder increases in a system, or within a system, over time. If you think about a deck of cards, when you purchase a deck of cards, there is low entropy. It is neatly stacked. As soon as you shuffle, chaos accumulates. I thought this was the perfect analogy and metaphor for quarterly planning. In an organization, over time, entropy increases. Projects drift, priorities scatter, chaos accumulates. I really do think cadences like quarterly planning and QBRs are that magic moment where you take a step back, you reorganize, and you create clarity out of the chaos.

I wanted to leave it there, and I wanted to leave you all with an invitation as well. At TeamForm, as I said, we are really doubling down on human AI teaming and helping organizations accelerate the path to human AI teaming. We want to write the playbook on it. If you would like to join us, I think this is an amazing community, so much knowledge within this community. Please connect with us. We would look forward to working with you. Thank you so much for your time today.