Shownotes
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
Join the Leading Visionaries Community
Transcripts
LVP 134 Kylee
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Ad: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Leading Visionaries podcast, featuring stellar conversations with emerging and established leading visionaries. Thanks for joining us today as we celebrate and spotlight the leading visionaries who are thinking differently, seeing new possibilities, have the courage to dream big, take inspired action, and create conscious change all around the world.
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.
This is your host, Angel B. Hartwell, and today we welcome our special guest, Kylie Ingram. Kylie is a storyteller, technologist, and [00:01:00] entrepreneur who has built a career at the intersection of media and innovation, directing television broadcast across 100-plus countries, founding a production house whose documentaries reached global audiences, and creating digital platforms used by the world's leading sports and brand franchises.
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.
Anjel: Well, I wanna start our conversation today, Kylie talking about vision, because clearly you [00:02:00] are somebody who has had multiple visions. So I am curious about your visionary journey. Were you always visionary?
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.
Like, I don't see re- my friends will say to me- You don't seem to be bothered by risk. So- Mm-hmm ... I think maybe that, [00:03:00] that lack of worried about risk makes, makes it seem like I'm a visionary. But then, you know, you do wake up at night with ideas that just have to be, have to be dealt with, you know?
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?
[00:04:00] Or do you get the idea and be like, "Okay, I gotta go try this right now"? You know, tell us a little bit about your own process for taking these ideas and trying them to see if they work.
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."
And I just... And I got up and I wrote up a presentation, and I made all the staff sit in there and they're like, "Oh God, Kylie." And I, I presented it to them and they go... And, you know, I think, think there's something in there in the next thing too. You have [00:05:00] to be open and show people- Mm ... or you don't really get that feedback.
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.
And we did surveys with kids and blah, blah, blah- But then we get to the next phase is when I was sitting in Boulder, Colorado for a couple years watching these accelerators and, and filming them, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, there's this process." There's, like, a process that, you know, [00:06:00] Stanford's very big on it that, you know, agile design.
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-
Kylee: I [00:07:00] don't think there's a lot of that, "Oh, it just happened and I was Snapchat and made whatever." It... I don't... I think that's one in a whatever. I think it takes, you know, all your guts and glory to, to get something to,
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?
But because you were willing to be outside the box of the institutions, you know, your success happened a- a- and you surprised everyone with that. The second [00:08:00] thing is this idea of being open and showing people. I think most people who do have big ideas, most people who are starting something new, most people who are ingenious don't always understand that you also have to enroll people in your vision.
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.
I have... You, you can't even believe how many ideas I have. You know what I mean? Like, there... And I have my notes on my phone, and I have notebooks here and there. And so, you know, I think it's important to remember that you don't have to bring every idea into reality, but when you get an idea, it may be worthy of writing down, [00:09:00] and it may be one of those ideas that comes later.
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...
You know, you can keep the slate ticking over. Or something might happen in the world, and all of a sudden that's relevant and you've got it sitting there and you can pull it out and you're like, "Here we are." So I, yeah, I think you've got to listen to the market, but at the same time [00:10:00] you can still be, you know, still be working on things.
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.
Do you know what I mean? Nobody tells you... There's nothing about being a good [00:11:00] manager at school or in university. Or maybe there is if you do an MBA, but I certainly didn't. So I think, you know, you can see how people react to you, and I think I've got enough emotional intelligence to, you know, to know when you're bringing people along.
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.
I just won't stop, and I, I, I try not to be the hero and take other people's work, but [00:12:00] I try and lead by, "I'm so into this, and this is why" kind of thing. I, I don't know whether it's always good. But now that I'm in decision science, one of the s- one of the key bits of research we look to is Dr. Juliet Bourke's, um, w- workings, and she was at Deloitte.
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.
But right now, listeners, are you a leading visionary or in the role of leading other visionaries? [00:13:00] Consider joining our community and sharing your feedback and takeaways from each episode. And if you are interested in finding out more about how you can receive support for getting your vision out of the air and onto the ground in a way that's both impact and income producing, the best support is found in collaboration with other leading visionaries, which is why we've created the Creative Age Leader Lab.
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.
I wanna say a huge thank you to all of our listeners who are downloading, rating, and reviewing. We're welcoming thousands of downloads from all over the world. I wanna shout out now to our listeners in Australia. We might as well shout out to our listeners in Australia, as well as our listeners in [00:14:00] Pakistan and let's see, Botswana.
And we'll be right back with Kylie Ingram.
Ad: The Leading Visionaries podcast is brought to you by the Creative Age Consulting Group. Are you the one who thinks differently? Who is called to create a significant conscious change in the world? Who is seeing and dreaming of a better way for your industry, your community, humanity? Creative Age Consulting Group is hired to guide leading visionaries just like you, who want to break through the static in order to clearly express and confidently enroll support for their vision in a way that makes it inevitable that it will come to pass.
Your word is your wand, and as the leader, your ability to articulate and communicate your vision is essential to its materialization and monetization. Please enjoy, with our compliments, a free copy of the book Be [00:15:00] Heard by Millions and Live Your Destiny, which was a number one new release in three categories to get you started.
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Anjel: back with Kylie Ingram. You can find out more about Kylie and about Decision Science at Wizer, W-I-Z-E-R, .business. That's wizer.business. We will have that for you in the show notes. So before we went to the break, we were talking about leadership. So tell us, Kylie, about Wizer and where did the vision come from, and your decision to say yes to [00:16:00] yourself to step in to co-found and CEO this initiative?
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."
Obviously I never said that to them. And then, uh, we did a wise cr- we did wise- Still right now. Yeah. Well, hopefully they're not, they're not watching. They don't know who they are. Some of them were all right. And then so what we did was we did crowd TV and used wise crowd science to create a documentary, and it [00:17:00] went...
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.
And then at the same time we're introduced to Dr. Juliette Berk's work, and also in the US you have Scott, Dr. Scott Scott Page, who is a mathematician out of Michigan who also collabor- you know, who corroborated Juliette's work. So, there was a whole lot of science there that had not been put into anything technical, so we were given the opportunity to codify a lot of this research and make a platform that'll tell you whether or not you've got a wise crowd, so you try [00:18:00] and, try to make sure that you've got the right people in the room.
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.
Don't just say, "Oh, I know." So we have tools that scientifically tell you whether or not you've got a good decision room for that particular decision. [00:19:00]
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.
And it's hard because, you know, a female founder, we get 0.7% of that early stage thing, so sometimes it doesn't feel very worth it. But one of the things that we built out of Wisr is we've got seven decision archetypes. Juliette showed that you come at a [00:20:00] decision in a certain way. So some people are worried about outcomes.
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.
Mm-hmm. It's not a personality thing. It's not anything like that. It... This is what they're looking for when they make a decision. And part of Dr. Burke's work was she found that in Western society, 75% of our CEOs are either looking for [00:21:00] outcomes or options, and so they're achievers and explorers. And so since we made this tool, we've been helping the not-for-profit sector with their outreach, and we...
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.
Personalization is not... Like, you might like it that I say, "Angel, how's the dogs and cats and your, you know, budgerigar?" But that's, at the end of the day, not how you will make a decision. It'll be based on these cognitive... The cognitive way you think. Mm. And understanding that takes you a long way to understanding how you need to frame your ask.[00:22:00]
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.
And I think there's three things we do differently. We have that, that piece that can work out the cognitive diversity, but then also when you're in a decision room, it'll go from red to [00:23:00] green. It'll say... You try to dehomogenize things. So even if you had a group of women, it'd say, "Hey-" you might... So it's looking at three things.
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.
Anjel: Beautiful. Well, so when you are looking down the road yourself at, like, say, the next five years for Wiser, what's the [00:24:00] big vision for you? Do you have a dollar vision? Do you have a, you know, market saturation vision? Do you see yourself exiting and starting something else because you like to start things?
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.
Anjel: [00:25:00] Beautiful. So when you think about yourself and your business, where do you go for support? Do you go to Wiser, or do you also bring in outside, you know, eyes, voices, decision-makers? Always. Yeah. Yeah.
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.
Juliet found you can only sit in that space for a little time, so you really do need those other thinkers around you to get the most out of it. So no, I have a board that beats me up all the time. They're very honest with me. I try and surround myself with honest people, too, [00:26:00] and I think when you're not defensive- They really do give you honest feedback about what you're doing, so, and I've got a great te- small team, so we're- Beautiful
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.
Kylee: Well, y- I think there's a few things in the sense. Be kind to yourself and others. Like, you know, and humor does get you a long way. Like, just don't... Life's a bit of a game. Don't take yourself too seriously. I've also sat in a lot of [00:27:00] accelerators seeing a lot of different founders, and I've also seen it in production.
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...
Do you need venture capital? Like, be smart about who you're partnering with and what kind of relationships you want, because they can make you very miserable. And, you know, I think one- another thing I got out of that podcast therapy is, you know, these people that do exit for big numbers, because [00:28:00] that's what we see as success in this, they're some of the most miserable people because they've forgotten how to have fun because they've killed themselves along the way, so- Mm-hmm.
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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