What if the biggest thing holding back your business, leadership, or vision isn’t strategy but the way decisions are being made behind the scenes? In this episode of the Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Kylee Ingram, CEO and co-founder of Wizer, a decision science platform helping organisations make smarter, more inclusive decisions by mapping expertise and diversity. From building television productions seen around the world to creating a platform designed to improve organizational decision-making, Kylie shares how bold ideas become reality and why the right people in the room matter more than ever.

If you are building something meaningful and want to make smarter decisions while leading with more confidence and clarity, this episode is packed with insight.

What You Will Learn:

How visionary leaders learn to trust and test their ideas instead of waiting for perfection.

Why innovation often starts before anyone fully knows what they are doing.

What cognitive diversity is and why it leads to stronger decision-making.

How inclusive leadership helps teams collaborate more effectively.

Why emotional intelligence is critical when leading people through change.

How understanding decision-making styles can improve communication and pitching.

What founders should know before seeking investors or scaling a company.

How to identify the right people to include in important business decisions.

Why many organizations unintentionally make poor decisions because of bias.

How successful leaders balance ambition, risk, and personal fulfillment.

FAQ:

Why is cognitive diversity important for leadership teams?

Cognitive diversity brings together people who think differently, solve problems differently, and approach decisions from unique perspectives. Teams with cognitive diversity are often more innovative, adaptable, and effective at solving complex problems.

How can entrepreneurs improve their leadership skills?

Entrepreneurs can improve leadership skills by developing emotional intelligence, listening without defensiveness, surrounding themselves with honest feedback, and learning how to communicate vision clearly to others.

What are common biases that affect business decisions?

Some common biases include social bias, information bias, and capacity bias. These biases can limit who gets included in conversations, what information is considered, and how decisions are ultimately made.

Connect with Kylee Ingram

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Now, here's your host, Angel B. Hartwell.

Anjel: Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries podcast, where we celebrate the ingenious, insightful, innovative, and inspired leading visionaries of our time, and provide our listeners with world-class examples of the kind of courage, clarity, and confidence it takes to bring visions into reality.

Her interactive work has earned nominations at South by Southwest, CAN, and the Sports Technology Awards. She is now CEO and co-founder of Wiser, a decision science platform helping organizations make smarter, more inclusive decisions by mapping expertise and diversity. A two-time entrepreneur in residence, startup mentor, and educator, she's driven by experiences that engage, connect, and drive real-world impact.

I'm so excited to have you here. Welcome to the show, Kylie.

Kylee: Thank you, Angel. Thank you for having me.

Were you visionary as a child, or did you end up having some kind of life-changing experience that woke you up and turned your vision on, or maybe even a life-changing mentor who came along and encouraged you?

Kylee: That's a very interesting question. I don't... I think I, I think what woke me to what you could do when I was young was sport.

Mm. I was lucky. I didn't even know I was good at sport until you start playing and then teachers start to tell you, and I think that sense of self it gave me-

Anjel: Mm ...

Kylee: is, was the underlying confidence that led me to... I don't know whether I was visionary or I just get things... I think I have a very low risk threshold.

Or they bother you. So I feel like sometimes I've just gotta get it out of the system, and some of them work and some of them don't. But I've- feel very passionately about creating.

Anjel: Mm. Yeah. I love this- Not all of them work,

Kylee: do they?

Anjel: Pardon me?

Kylee: Not all of them

Anjel: work.

Kylee: Not all...

Anjel: I love that. Some work and some don't.

I agree. And, you know, I love this idea of the ideas that bother you. So I'd love to have you speak a little bit to our listeners who may be having an idea that bothers them, that's bothering them. And how, when you've had one of those ideas, like, what do you do with that? Do you put it on the back burner and wait until it comes and knocks on the door two or three times for you?

Kylee: I think there's, there's three ways we can look at this. What I did when I first got them, what I did once I learned about the process of, uh, how to bring innovation to life, and then now with AI.

I think they're three distinct things. Mm-hmm. So I think when I was younger it, it was something like, you know, we ran our own production company, and Screen Australia offered... had a competition for producers going from TV to interactive. And I was in my bed and I was like, "Oh my gosh, we've gotta do, like, a Tamagotchi for climate change."

So I showed them and they were like, "Yes." And that was a, that was a really strong signal for, from them. And then I'd started to talk to other people about it. "Yes, yes, yes." And that was the first one we made up into a presentation and went to Cannes with that. And we were the only independent producers in that.

You know, you're up against BBC and Star and all of these, and there we were with, you know, little we're ready to go. But everybody that saw it went, "Wow, that's all..." It's... And it's in its simplicity. So then if you go from that not knowing what we were doing, just showing people and then building it from there.

I never knew any of that, whereas now I kn- know that and I choose to ignore it at s- or do it or ignore it, either way. And now there's AI, which... So I have a list on my board beside me with ideas, good and bad. I know some of them are absolute rubbish, but some of them absolutely crack me up that I just wanna do.

And now there's no stopping me, unfortunately for my development team. Every week I'm like, "Hey, guys." Like, so... But- Yeah ... but you gotta be careful- Well- ... because y- you know, I was listening to... Hey, are you guys able to listen to The Startup Therapist, the guys that talk about that? Once he- I have not ... one-- There was a story once.

He made his money, right? And then he goes- Mm-hmm ... "I've got all these ideas. I'm now gonna build a team around them and I'm gonna make them all." The thing is, I can go make those things, but I know none of them are gonna go anywhere because the only way it's gonna go somewhere is if I give it everything.

Anjel: Mm-hmm. I d-

Anjel: to- Yeah, beautiful. Well, there's some really interesting things here that I want to have our listeners pay attention to, and one of them is, you know, at the beginning when you're innovating, nobody knows what the hell is...

They're doing. Nobody knows what they're doing. They're just literally throwing spaghetti against the wall or darts in the dark. And you make it up as you go along, and that's what innovation really is, right? And it was simple, right? And then here you are, an indie up against all these institutions, right?

You have to actually speak about what it is that you want to do, and not just speak about it, but get other people on board, which in, in my world, we call that enrollment. And then the third thing- is that you, you aren't getting the ideas and throwing them in the trash. You're getting the ideas and capturing them, but putting them in your little holding container.

Sometimes I have found, I don't know if this is true for you, Kylie, but I have found I've had ideas two, three, four, five, six years ago. I stick them in my little, you know, containers, wherever those containers are, and then something comes around and there's another piece to it, and then all of a sudden I can see the puzzle pieces fitting together.

Is that something you've experienced?

Kylee: Yeah. I think in TV production, you know that... You know, you've got what's called a slate. Mm-hmm. And, you know, you have these production meetings with your business partner or, and the executives every so often, and you go, "Right, what's on our slate?" And that slate, we know that sometimes it's not right or a commissioning editor might change or whatever, so you need to keep...

But I think that's what I liked about tech. You can, you can work out a little bit quicker if it works. Whereas some documentary makers, filmmakers, it takes them years. Mm-hmm. Years and years with no testing whether or not this is g- You know what I... It's, it's, it's hard, that industry.

Anjel: Yeah. Well, now let's talk about leadership, because this show is called Leading Visionaries, so I'd love to hear a little bit about your own leadership journey and, you know, whether that's from TV or whether that's from, you know, what you're doing now as the CEO and co-founder of Wisr.

Like, tell us a little bit about your leadership journey, and maybe give our listeners one or two things that allow you to show up courageously every day for yourself and your visions.

Kylee: Well, I think that leadership's one of those things no one teaches you. Well, I don't know who teaches you, if they do teach you, until you're there.

And I think because, because you... Because I am somebody that tries to create something out of nothing that hasn't been done before, you need to bring people along and you need to be- You need to show kindness, you need to listen without defensiveness. And that w- that took me a long time from when I was young.

You'd be like, "Oh, why don't they understand what I'm trying to say?" Whereas you can always take away something from somebody, and most people are just being kind when they're giving you feedback. So, I think that was something. And now that I'm in, um... I think the way I lead is through I will just... I'm like the Energizer bunny.

And with decision, good decision-making, you can have the right room, but if you don't have the right leader, that room's never gonna appear. Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. So there's a lot you can learn about you know, what, what she writes in her book about inclusive leadership and, and part of it is understanding yourself first.

So that's been some good learnings there for me, for somebody that hasn't gone through, you know, a management course or anything like that.

Anjel: Yeah. Beautiful. All right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna talk a lot more about Wiser and let our listeners know, know where they can find you.

Discover more about this opportunity at leadingvisionariespodcast.com/creativeageleaderlab, or click the Connect with Angel button on the website to apply and qualify for a consultation for more personalized access and support. Be sure to share this show in your own spirals of influence with the people you think might benefit from our content.

And we'll be right back with Kylie Ingram.

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Kylee: Yeah, it does seem like it's a long way for production, but there is a link that I could give you. We were... You know, when you, when you're doing TV, you've gotta go and see what are called commissioning editors. And you can imagine in Australia there, there's a few of them, and they're, you know, they're the gatekeepers.

And it's frustrating because you see... I see things like Married at First Sight on TV, and, well, it's the most watched thing, and I think, "What?" Like, you, you... Whatever it is for you that you watch on TV and you think, "Who commissioned that?" So, what I did was I got into wise crowd science at that time and thought, "Gosh, a wise crowd would make a better decision than these people."

It was unreal. They were... People were choosing who was being interviewed, this, that, the topic. They had a huge competition around what it would be, and then the cinema was packed at the end of it, and everybody felt like they owned it, and that was really moving to me. And then my co-founder, he did his research in wise crowds and found you get wise crowd effects as soon as six, and then you need independence and yeah, and you also need diversity and expertise.

Mm-hmm. Because a lot of decisions we see being made, you know, less than 3% of the people in the company are making them, and it could be Bob's gut making a decision about who's in the room. And if we look at Wisr and we say Wisr exists to make better decisions, it actually is r- existing to address the structural forces that stop us making good decisions, and they're biases mostly, you know?

And, you know, Daniel Kahneman talked about it in Thinking Fast and Slow, and Juliette really picked out three biases in her book, social bias, information bias, and capacity bias, and they're the biases we're trying to reduce.

Anjel: Mm-hmm. And

Kylee: just think clearly about who you're inviting to the room. Use a bit of science.

Anjel: Beautiful. I love it. Well, so, you know, one of the things you said earlier about the commissioners kind of, for me, it overlaps with anybody who's listening who might be trying to pitch their business idea to investors, right?

In your case, you've pitched your ideas to commissioners, which is really investors who are investing in, in the production, right? I'm curious how Wisr could help somebody who is in that position where they are looking for investors to support their vision and their innovation.

Kylee: And it's... You know, we had to pitch Wisr to investors at the beginning and, you know, got some money to s- kick off that way.

Some are looking at the process which you take. Some are looking at risk. And one of the tools we just made- if you can't do your decision profile or get your investor to do it, you can go and look at what decision profile the investor has, for example. And we know that people are doing this. And it's called Wise Snaps.

It's w- just one of the f- the things on our site. But if you can find out what they want to hear, you need to make sure it's included. If they want to know about the risk that's involved, if they want to know about analytics, you can start to lean into that more. You know that you need to talk about those things when you talk to those particular people because that is how they make a decision.

What we've realized after h- analyzing hundreds of emails is they don't talk to analyzers who want evidence achievers who want outcomes, and the guardians who want... Are about risk. And so they're missing that in their emails. Mm-hmm. And now that they're adding it, yeah, the... Some of them have seen a, like, 15% response rate because they're talking to them in the language that they make decisions.

Anjel: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, let's talk about who this tool is best utilized by. Like, who do you... W- who are you here on this show talking to that you would like to come on board and work with you and your tool?

Kylee: We've found... Well, we've kind of, uh... You know, we wanna... We have a vision for, you know, if you think about decisions, Wiser will become something you think of.

So, you know, we've expanded a little bit into that communication piece that I just spoke about, Snaps. But the, the, the main product is great for teams, you know, teams and understanding who you have in your team. So we have a lot of consultants use it to take into teams, or people that are worried about their team internally or organizations.

It's looking at outward-facing diversity, and relevant to decisions, that's gender, ethnicity, and age. Then it's looking at experience. So if you're NASA and Boeing and taking engineers out of the room, it'll say, "Hey, you're doing an engineering decision. How about you don't do that?" And then there's that cognitive diversity piece.

So it's mixing all that together. You don't need more people, you just need the right people- Mm-hmm ... and it's helping you do that. So most of our clients start with decision profile mapping, which is just working out who they have in their organization. And a lot of times we're unearthing talent or people they'd never thought about bringing into that decision tree.

Tell us what you're, you're doing with yourself in the next five years, Kylie.

Kylee: I look forward to the point where I'm not doing so much of the, so much of the different roles in Wiser. You know, I look forward to, you know, I look forward to building something that we can see the impact of the understanding people have of not...

Of being s- being scientific about decisions. 'Cause we all know who gets left out of the room a lot of the time, and we see the effects of that. But I do... I would like... I wanna build Wiser into something where, yeah, people do know you're making a decision, Wiser's there to help you. Mm ... you know, we're a great decision tool.

We're great for comms. We're great, you know. We're just- Beautiful ... a great, helpful tool.

Kylee: Always. And I know, you know, from doing my, seeing my self work and, and understanding my profile and other things, I'm not great with process.

So the, one of the first people I always look for is somebody that's very process-orientated, because I usually see they give me so many things I don't have in my, you know, in my wheelhouse, and I can't even pretend for long. That's one of the things about these decision profiles, is it's not like, you know, you change your hat.

yeah, we're lucky. Well, in the,

Anjel: in the last minute or so that we have together here, Kylie, if you could speak to somebody like you, who you were maybe 10 years ago, right? Mm-hmm. And you could say to them anything either about bringing a vision into life, or enrolling people in your vision, or leading your team around your vision, anything at all that you would like to, like last little piece of wisdom for our listeners would be great.

Don't chase people into the bathroom for things, you know? To pitch. Like, you've gotta be cool. Like, be a little bit... You've gotta be... You've almost gotta ooze a bit of success as well as whatever till you get... Fake it till you make it a little bit. Like, remain calm. Have a good sense of humor about yourself.

Don't get defensive about anything. People are always gonna tell you their grandfather's already invented that. Just laugh. Like, sure. Like, don't worry about it, and just be kind to yourself. And just think about what does it actually mean for you to succeed. Like, you know, if you've got, uh, if you've got revenue in a million or two mil- Is that, you know...

Anjel: Yeah ...

Kylee: surround yourself with good people and, and be clear about what you want, because it can take you down some pretty dark trails if you, you know, you think that the only way to show success is m- money, I think.

Anjel: Mm-hmm.

Kylee: Yeah.

Anjel: Beautiful. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Kylie. That was powerful right there at the end, and throughout.

Really appreciate your point of view. Listeners, we do love feedback. Please let us know what you thought of today's show by joining our community, sharing your takeaways, asking questions, or submitting guest suggestions. You can weave your visionary thread into our fabric by opting in on our website at leadingvisionariespodcast.com or by interacting with us on social.

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