Hosted by Jeff Walter, Founder and CEO of LatitudeLearning
Some companies are founded around a market opportunity. Others emerge from a problem that refuses to go away.
For Vujade, the story began nearly thirty years before the company itself existed.
In this episode of the Training Impact Podcast, Jeff Walter welcomes Monty Miller and Doug Breckenridge, co-founders of Vujade, for a conversation that is as much about human relationships as it is about technology. What unfolds is the story of two organizational development professionals whose careers crossed paths in India during the late 1990s and whose shared passion for helping organizations perform better eventually led them to create the Vujade platform.
At the time, Miller was pursuing a doctorate in Organizational Change at Pepperdine University. As part of his doctoral work, he traveled to India to support a business transformation initiative. The organization was attempting to reinvent itself and needed support in driving change throughout the company.
Searching for local expertise, Miller reached out to an organizational development consultancy in New Delhi. The owner of that consultancy was Doug Breckenridge.
Neither could have predicted that a meeting intended to support a single project would become a professional partnership spanning decades.
The project in India proved highly successful. The organization expanded rapidly, significantly exceeded growth expectations, and achieved its goals years ahead of schedule. More importantly, the experience reinforced a lesson both men would carry throughout their careers.
Organizations succeed when people succeed.
Over the following decades, Monty Miller and Doug Breckenridge pursued different paths while remaining connected professionally. Miller focused on consulting and helping organizations align people development with business strategy. Breckenridge built and operated multiple companies throughout Asia, working with organizations such as Apple and Motorola while helping multinational companies navigate growth, transformation, and cultural change.
Despite their different career journeys, both found themselves repeatedly encountering the same challenge.
Companies invested heavily in strategy. They invested in technology. They invested in leadership development. Yet communication problems continued to undermine performance.
Teams struggled to collaborate effectively. Leaders struggled to align people around common goals. Departments often operated in silos. Even highly talented individuals frequently found themselves working against one another instead of with one another.
The problem was not a lack of intelligence or effort. The problem was understanding.
As organizational development professionals, Miller and Breckenridge had extensive experience using traditional assessments and behavioral tools.
Like many learning and development leaders, they found value in instruments designed to increase self-awareness. Personality assessments often generated meaningful conversations and helped individuals better understand their own tendencies.
Yet something was missing.
Organizations would spend time discussing personality profiles and behavioral styles, but translating those insights into meaningful workplace improvements proved difficult. Teams gained awareness without necessarily gaining better collaboration. Managers learned about differences without always learning how to leverage them.
Over time, both men began asking the same question. How can assessment data become actionable?
How can understanding human differences lead to measurable improvements in communication and performance?
The search for answers eventually became the foundation of Vujade.
The Vujade team approached the problem from a different angle.
Instead of focusing on placing people into categories, they became interested in understanding what makes individuals unique.
Traditional assessments often group people into broad classifications. While these classifications can be useful, they can also oversimplify human behavior.
The philosophy behind Vujade is that every individual brings a unique combination of strengths, perspectives, preferences, and experiences to a team. Understanding those differences creates opportunities for better communication and stronger collaboration.
This philosophy drove years of research and development.
The founders describe spending multiple years developing analytical models capable of identifying differences at a far more detailed level than traditional approaches.
The goal was not simply to describe people.
The goal was to help people work together more effectively.
As the Vujade platform evolved, one theme consistently emerged. Communication sits at the center of organizational performance.
Every major business initiative depends on people sharing information, aligning expectations, solving problems, and making decisions together. When communication breaks down, performance suffers regardless of how strong the strategy may be.
The Vujade platform helps users understand how they process information and how they communicate with others. Some individuals naturally learn through visual information. Others prefer hands-on experiences. Some rely heavily on verbal communication.
None of these approaches is inherently better than another.
The challenge arises when people assume everyone communicates the same way they do.
By helping individuals recognize these differences, Vujade provides a framework for improving interactions and reducing misunderstandings.
One of the most compelling aspects of the discussion is the founders’ belief that differences should be viewed as assets rather than obstacles.
Organizations often talk about diversity, but many struggle to fully leverage diverse perspectives.
The Vujade platform encourages teams to recognize that different approaches to thinking and problem solving can create stronger outcomes when properly understood.
The founders use their own partnership as an example.
While they share many goals and values, they often approach challenges differently. Those differences could create conflict. Instead, because they understand how each person processes information and contributes to decision-making, those differences become complementary strengths.
This perspective transforms collaboration.
Rather than attempting to make everyone think alike, teams can learn to appreciate the value of different viewpoints.
The conversation repeatedly returns to trust.
Trust is one of the most important ingredients in any successful organization. Yet trust is often difficult to build because people naturally make assumptions about one another.
Those assumptions can create misunderstandings, tension, and unnecessary conflict.
Vujade helps reduce those barriers by creating greater understanding between individuals.
When people better understand how colleagues communicate, learn, and process information, they become more willing to extend grace, patience, and empathy.
The result is stronger relationships and healthier team dynamics.
The founders also emphasize the importance of vulnerability.
High-performing teams are often characterized by a willingness to openly discuss strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and challenges. This openness creates the foundation for trust and enables more authentic collaboration.
One of the most fascinating moments in the discussion involves work with a NASA team.
When the Vujade team analyzed the group’s data, they discovered something unexpected.
Very few team members fell within average ranges.
Instead, most occupied the outer edges of the assessment spectrum. These individuals approached problems from highly unique perspectives and demonstrated extraordinary levels of self-awareness.
Rather than creating dysfunction, those differences contributed to innovation.
The team had developed enough trust and understanding to leverage diverse viewpoints effectively.
The lesson was powerful.
Innovation often emerges not from similarity, but from the productive integration of different perspectives.
Although the Vujade platform already provides significant capabilities, the founders view it as only the beginning.
The underlying analytical framework has been designed to support additional instruments, organizational metrics, and performance data over time. Their broader vision is to create a platform capable of helping organizations understand people with greater precision while providing actionable insights that improve performance.
Rather than positioning Vujade as a replacement for existing assessments, the founders see opportunities to enhance and complement other tools.
Their goal is to help organizations move beyond awareness and toward action.
For learning and development professionals, the Vujade story offers an important reminder.
Training programs, leadership initiatives, and organizational development efforts ultimately depend on human interaction.
Knowledge matters. Skills matter. Technology matters.
But communication remains the mechanism through which all of those elements create value.
The Vujade platform focuses on helping people communicate more effectively, collaborate more productively, and build stronger relationships. In doing so, it addresses one of the most persistent challenges facing organizations today.
The conversation with Monty Miller and Doug Breckenridge demonstrates that the journey behind Vujade is about much more than creating another assessment tool.
It is the culmination of decades spent studying organizational performance, helping companies navigate change, and searching for ways to improve human collaboration.
At its core, Vujade is built on a simple belief: when people understand themselves and understand each other, they work better together.
For organizations seeking stronger communication, deeper trust, better collaboration, and improved performance, that belief may prove to be one of the most valuable insights of all.
To learn more about Vujade, visit: https://vujade.ai
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Jeff Walter (00:00)
Hi, I’m Jeff Walter and welcome back to the Training Impact Podcast, where we explore scaling channel performance through training infrastructure. My guests today are Monty Miller.
And Doug Breckenridge from Vujade. They’re the co-founders of Vujade Guys, welcome to the podcast. And I’m sorry, and one other thing I add, we’re coming to you from the floor of the ATD conference, and we’re and they were gracious enough to spend some time with me at the conference. So thank you guys for that. Thank you, Jeff. And welcome. Thank you, Jeff. Likewise. And so as my listeners know, ⁓ I’m really very interested in the autobiographical.
How people got there, you’re co-founders of Vujade, congratulations. So how did you guys get there? Where’d you meet? How’d you get to Vujade? What’s the journey that brought you together to say, hey, let’s start this company? And then also what is Vujade Okay, okay. Well that’s a really great story. Because up the road here at Pepperdine University, I was doing a doctorate in 1995, 96, 97.
And there was an element in the ⁓ syllabus to do an internship. So I had connections in India who were running a business and I sent them an email and said, You need some help? And they said, Yeah, come on over. So I went to India to basically fulfill this portion of the doctoral program at Pepperdine and Organizational Change. And it was a transformation project to take this organization from
A old business to a new new business. Okay. And we needed boots on the ground to basically drive this change initiative, this transformation. I went to the the former what used to be AT ASTD and looked in their directory to see if there was anybody in India that was members of the or organization and lo and behold in Delhi there was an organization called the Business Workshop.
Invited the owner of the business workshop to meet with us in Mumbai to talk about how they could help us basically be the boots on the ground and create the materials and content and everything that goes with the transformation project. And that just happens to be Doug. that that’s how you guys I was based in New Delhi. I I I had served in US Air Force. Uh-huh. ⁓ I was a ⁓ US Air Force officer, ground launch.
missiles. So ⁓ that weapon system went away with the end of the Cold War, watched the Berlin Wall go down, that kind of stuff.
And India was just liberalizing, and I just finished my master’s degree in London. And so I consulted for a year in London. India liberalized. I moved to India and started a firm there. Started an organizational development consultancy firm. my lord. So you guys been you guys go back a while. this is 1997. Yeah, we’re pushing 30 years. That’s where we first met. Yeah. Okay, so then so you met there. Yeah. Yeah. And but but you you you know, so you’re working together. That project went incredibly well.
I had 35 people on my team, instructional designers, web developers, graphic artists, and we put together the content to move that organization from 25 people to 500 within three years. They actually hit their profit goals within three years when they had five years planned for it. So it was an incredibly great project. We came back to ASTD, spoke about that project a couple years later. And then like 2000, 2001? Yeah. Yeah, at just around the time.
That the SCO, yeah, really the LMSs were taking SCORM. Yeah, we were moving from into blended learning. Just moving from the Yeah, just starting. I was like, it’s just right at the ground floor there. Yeah. And what he was doing in India was just totally novel. So what were you doing in India? Well, I mean, ⁓ we we did organizational development, and everyone thought we were crazy for going there. But ⁓ I ended up having three companies in India. This is my fourth startup. Okay. ⁓ and the first one I we just happened to meet, went there.
said who do we want to work with? He said, well let’s let’s talk to Apple. So we wrote Apple and said, you know, if this is you know this is what we would do with the Indian market. We have these great master’s degrees in international management, our team and I. And so they claim they came and met us. The power of the the the the Mac notebook it’s just coming out. So I had one of the very first ones. So on their media so that right there was like you’re using our technology. Yes we do. And they said well how did you know? And we said what do you mean how do we know?
I said, how did you know our plan? Who told you? I said, we had no idea. We just thought, this is your market. This is the way you should be attacking it. So we worked with them, they introduced us to the Motorola University. Uh-huh. We did a lot of work with Motorola throughout all of Asia. Designing training. We were the very first company in Asia ever to design for Motorola Motorola University. Yeah, that’s well. That’s really interesting. So if we go back to
Our old history, Motorola was a client of our predecessor company, and ⁓ they used our platform to deliver their greenbelt certification. I was a lean six at one point I was doing lean six sigma training for Bangalore facility. Yeah, yeah. but you know, one of the very first people into Vietnam helping them, you know, set up paging and cellular. very cool. Literally I landed in Vietnam. I was sitting in Bangkok Airport, landed in Vietnam when the US diplomat
⁓
Team which just signed it. ⁓ I was there within three hours of them signing it. Because everybody else was ahead, Nokia, Siemens. They didn’t have the restrictions working with Vietnam. So I walked in the next day, I’m doing a three-day session. teaching on cellular technologies in Vietnam. So so okay, so you guys did an initial project, yeah, that went on for about three years, and then there were follow-up projects. I did a lot of projects with with that that organization throughout Asia. But but your your work
working together but you’re not part you’re you weren’t part of that startup. We’re collaborating we’re collaborating right absolutely. Okay so okay so that goes on and then you’re over in Vietnam. I’m still in India. You’re in India basically I’m back here in the US you’re back in the US. I get the doctorate finished. Yep. Doctorate in what? In organizational changes changes he even shows up for graduation. Yeah I actually came over and was at his graduation. We just connected really, really quick. Very cool. Yeah and
Then we presented what we did in India, South Asia at a AT at AST then at AST that’s So we’ve been working on this for a while. And then we’ve been connected. So we’ve been connected throughout, you know, pr different different projects. You know, it’s nice to have a peer who you could just kind of, hey, what you think about this? How’s it going? I was into my third startup at that point, which was a legal process outsourcing firm. Okay. my second startup was ⁓
all in the call center business. So I brought over sixteen Americans. We trained over ten thousand agents, brought up three American Express call centers. you know so that was and that was running at the same time as the OD work. So it was crazy. Two so you were you were over there when that that whole shift occurred. I was helping facilitate that all the things and getting them up to speed. So yeah exactly. that’s so cool. And the and all the IT people coming over working with Wipro Spectrum Whipro and ⁓ bringing you know
helping them understand American culture and how do you actually integrate into it and work with Americans. So we’re doing a lot of cross-cultural work as well. So then okay so then you so you finish up that first collaboration, you presented A ASTD at the time, now ATD, and then and then you finish up your PhD and then what do you do? So I have a consulting practice that I’ve basically helped organizations for years strategically figure out where they want to go, what they want to accomplish and then what’s the plan for developing the people
To achieve the strategy. Okay. So I had a c have a practice called International Performance Solutions and basically did that for
until COVID. Yeah. Alright, so so and and you’re you’re obviously in touch with each other collaborating. Yeah I I came back in twenty twelve from India. was in the back home in Detroit, family with father wasn’t doing well. Yeah, grew up in Detroit. we’re in Ann Arbor. okay, so yeah I’m ⁓ I came back I was living in Novae. yeah, yeah yeah. So ⁓ for two years. Love you know love the people but but you know it just wasn’t
right culture for you know I’ve got these ideas, crazy ideas. Well you don’t have an engineering degree, but but I I’m not an engineer, I’m an organization of elephants. So I came out and I said, you know, where have I worked? Where are ideas accepted? I said let’s go to Silicon Valley. And so I’ve been on the the West Coast for what fourteen years and consulted for a while. Monty and I reconnected and and we started working on a a predecessor and that that tool
Nice first ever but really had some faults with it. So we started from scratch and one of the things that you know frustrated me, I took my first job at 56 with NetApp. Okay. So I never worked for anybody else as a US Air Force and managed OD for half of NetApp, which was the engineering side, seven and a half thousand people worldwide. And walked in and said, okay, show me data. Because data’s important and kind of got blank stares and from the
TRT, but we’re touching on one of my pet peeves. I’ve been doing this for 20-something years and like I well I was raised like you know if you gotta spend a buck show me how I make two. Right. Exactly. Like where’s the return? Show me the data. And I I my my I’ve been being in an L and D for over 20 years and ⁓ listeners that’s like that’s where I’m at and my pet peeves like guys until we do that as a as an industry, we’re we’re
We’re not core to any business. Exactly. We’re just the cost of doing business. Exactly. But knowledge and learning is the competitive differentiator for every business nowadays, right? Like, even even if you’re pumping oil, even if you’re like, you know, like e if you go to over to the Middle East and you’re and you you’re or anywhere and you and you’ve got like natural resources, it’s like.
It’s all it’s all n it’s all knowledge. Like that’s where you get the economy. I mean the quality of stuff is great and that’s important, but if you can’t
match up with quantitative you you can’t make the business case. Exactly. So that’s that’s exactly that’s that’s where I’m at. And so you know I was we I looked at this predecessor and said this is a nice tool. And I used it before in some of my consulting. I was just doing some independent consulting at the time before I I joined in this case this was NetApp. Great company. But and you know the thing that I struggled with is I started looking at all these assessments is that they were just too broad. It’s not that they were they didn’t have value
So I’m you know talking about disc and Myers Greggs and all of them. But
How do you how do you actually operationalize it? How do you use it? I have to kind of guess my style and your style. But it’s it’s not a very direct path on that. And if you try to plot people, you know, the way you take a test and the way I take a test, there’s bias in the way we do it. There’s bias in the way it’s actually put together. Because they’re all additive. You add it up, and whichever you’re the highest, that’s your style. And I thought that just doesn’t have you know the granularity that’s really needed.
can’t really measure and compare what’s the change someone has. So I sat down for about four years and I started working on the algorithms. Started working on the algorithms based around initially standard deviation, realizing relational. And this was nothing new. Direct marketing’s done it, finance has done it. Right. Why not bring that kind of at least thinking to into HR? Right. And and so started working with that was not easy. There’s a lot of things we had to do to make it to normalize.
And take the bias out of testing. One of the things is, for example, any data we do, we do against a larger population. So now it all becomes relational. I can measure our distances between people. And that’s what Kabo, which drives Vogier, does. It allows us to get down to 56 decimal points by building out a quality survey that allows that kind of analysis. So we’re a disk has basically four reports. I know there are 12, it’s not.
Boujade has that’s just individual reports. They don’t really do team reports. They kind of try to put the data together and it’s it’s good effort. But we’re going down the wrong path. If you’re just using addition and subtraction, you’re not really using the analysis, the math you have. So Bouchide
Has 9.85 trillion individual reports. And we can slice and dice it, we can look within a construct, within the same side of the construct, and there are differences. We spent three to four years validating the difference in first standard deviation, second standard deviation, third standard deviation. So Monty’s outcome and I’m outcome. That’s that’s the middle piece of Oujer. But so let’s back so you’re collaborating for
decades literally. It sounds like you both ⁓ from an organizational development standpoint are like there’s a missing piece here. That the tools to do the to to get collaboration going. Because everything that you were talking about and you were talking about you it was all about how do you get the teams to collaborate better. How do you how do get, you know, for the same input more output, right? Yeah. ⁓ and get that and you take that by better collaboration, right? And so
sounds like you looked at the ex existing tools and it I hear what you’re saying ’cause
is I I I’ve always found them interesting from a self-reflection standpoint, you know, whether you’re doing you know disk or or or doing a big five an hour or any of that, it’s interesting from a self-reflection standpoint. But I always struggled with how do you make it actionable in an organization. That’s exactly the question we asked. You know, it’s like it’s like, okay great, you’re you know, this, I’m that, or I’m this, I don’t know what you are, but I think you’re this because of my interactions
with
you. But I you know, and I always like it was like, well, how does that help the organization? Other than self-awareness. I mean self-awareness is is is is very important and it’s a good thing. We’re all on our journeys and so self-awareness is a is a good thing. But it it it it didn’t I never saw how it was actionable. So it’s really interesting. So what why let’s talk about Bouja Day, what the idea, because you it’s you you did all this analysis for years. So
So what when did the idea of Bouja Day and what is Boujat Day? So just to sort of set that piece up, what Boujad Day does that nobody else does is it identifies what makes people unique and special. Right. So as Doug indicated, we got 9.85 trillion different possible reports.
So in the past people have been sort of labeled and put into boxes for the lack of a better word. And we are able to basically show the vast
expanses in terms of people’s capabilities. Right. And it really goes back to what’s our core traits? What makes us super gives us super strength in terms of being able to get the work done and leverage our true strengths. So as a result
What we are in essence doing with Boujade is we’re helping to identify each individual in a team and what they bring as super strengths to the team such that they can do even more of it and be recognized for it and be appreciated for what makes them unique, what makes them special, all with the intent of helping to build trust in the team. And then basically providing the systems to help figure out how to basically bridge to each other.
to better connect, communicate, and collaborate. And as a result, speed up the process of basically working together, collaborating together to achieve the desired outcomes. So what
So what does that look like? Like I understand what you said. So we chose, so to your original question there, which is why what why choose Vouger Day and what what was the piece of it? What we realized is the very first thing you do with any organization, and there and there are some tools out there that are okay is you gotta be able to communicate. If you can’t communicate, how are you ever gonna solve any other problems? And so the three constructs we have right there are really the first steps on if you’re building a team.
Back to Tuckman’s model of forming, storming, norming, performing, how do you get people to communicate faster and build trust but not have things that it were biased with? Okay. As you put together too, there are, you know, I’m bu people, whether they like it or not, were culturally biased with gender, race, age, all those things.
But if you could introduce something that’s non-threatening, and that it genuinely explains some of the conflict that people initially have. That’s interesting. You’re kinesthetic and I’m visual. okay, we both take in information different. That’s not threatening. I just need to know. I I’ll show you, we’ll do it together. You need to show me pictures. Right. And that that that’s the first little seed of saying, it’s okay to be different.
Yeah. Yeah. Well you know, it’s y y you said something interesting, because you know, like the biases and and and we all have, but it goes back to, you know, just from an evolutionary standpoint, it’s like friend or foe, friend or foe, friend or foe. And you take whatever limited information you have about the other and you take all these heuristics and you go friend or foe, friend or foe, friend or foe. And that’s the biases, right? And we had to have that, because we don’t survive without that. Exactly. But then the interesting thing is you you
Now you we a as a as a species, as a civilization, we’re we’re we’ve evolved to very high trust environment, right? Like you’ve got you know eight billion people on the planet and you can pretty much go anywhere you want. Yeah, exactly. Like I mean, that we weren’t evolved for that environment. But the interesting thing is I r you said something that I I d when we were talking earlier, I I I didn’t pick up on. So you look at all this data and then
It sounds to me Boujade went, well the single most important thing we can do is just communicate better. And respect and appreciate each other. Well well and And that’s what it needs to And in order to communicate better, I need to understand you better. Exactly. And you need to understand me better. And then whatever whatever opinions I might have based on whatever information, it gives me additional information about you. Right.
And so now my
my opinion or how I communicate with you changes because now I’ve got additional information. Well I start to understand how you go about basically the communication process and what you need to basically better connect. So the outside ring here on the radios is what we call them from Beijade is how I experience the world. And I’m hugely visual. And Doug is a lot more balanced. I’m integrated I’m integrating kinesthetic audio visual. So to me, I learn by doing.
I remember it if I do it. But if I want to be creative, if I’m thinking and designing, I will actually start pacing.
That’s my kinesthetic, pushing the noise out of my head. okay, interesting. And then I and then I start drawing flow charts, diagrams, pictures, maybe one or two words. But I’ve learned that through the process of Lou Juday and everybody’s different. But now that I I know how I work, I can literally if I need to be creative, I just stand up and start walking. And I immediately I can jump into that flow my own flow of being creative. And I lay on the couch and watching. I just keep walking back and forth.
The visual. I mean we don’t want to create a traffic jam here. Yeah. Well so so that’s really interesting ’cause the it’s the focus on the communic yeah well, ’cause humans are very complicated. But but the focus on the communications and how do ⁓ from a like I’m just thinking of the other diagnostics in in my head and one of the things I mentioned to you is I was married to a psychologist for thirty years. So you know
I yeah.
I’ve absorbed some of that over the years. I was yes, yeah. I told you that story, yes. I don’t think I told Doug that. No, but I understand. Well no, no, when when my my my wife was in grad school, I I came home one day and there was a paper on the table. You and I’m I’m like, ⁓ it’s wonderful papers for class. I go through it, it’s like, my god, it’s a behavioral she was more of a behavioralist. There’s a behavioralist study on me and changing my behavior.
girlfriend. Well and then I talked to her about it and she’s like, yeah, it feels like your entire family is a is my model. You were convenient. Yes yes. So yeah, it was it was something like you know she would kiss me every time I did something and over the course of several weeks, you know, because I got this positive reinforcement, I did more of whatever it is that she was wanting me to do. Yeah, it was an experiment. I was like and I was like well you know it wasn’t so bad. I got a lot more kisses. So it worked out well. No but
interesting on the communication side, but and and it I can understand, okay, so you you focused on that dimension of communication and all the different aspects when it’s a thing that’s Well there’s actually three things. The second one is temperament, which is introvert, ambervert, extrovert. Right. It’s where you get your energy from. So for example
I’m introverted. Monty’s much more introverted than me. That’s why I’ve been quiet. And and and and once again I think I I might be on the other side of that. That’s why I’m a host. But but you know, it’s interesting just watching that dynamic between us. So for example, when Monty and I were first really collaborating, ⁓ I would be I even though I’m introverted, I would act a little extroverted ⁓ in the fact that I would say, Hey Monty, because I want to know what he thinks. And I would say, Monty, what do you think about this?
Monty would pause, and I would pause for a moment. And after like three seconds, I would start to get nervous. This is very extroverted. Kind of be a maybe you didn’t understand my question. Let me ask it again. And then I realized all of a sudden. Because Monty’s clock, ting, starts over again. He starts thinking. Because Monty sees the world in a very different way and he’s trying to bring all those pieces together in his head. So I finally, after like a couple weeks, realized, let me just ask the question and shut up. Right. And I got
The
response a bit faster, what I wanted to hear from Monty, and it was brilliant. But I it took it it it was me giving him the grace to actually do that. If Monty has to think about it all at him says, Doug, go get a cup of coffee. But but once again, that’s a that’s a dynamic that’s that’s very different. We actually changed the way our team works because we’re introverted. So our Wednesday meetings we have as our kind of our all-call.
Initially we were like, let’s get a decision, let’s do this. But 90% of our team’s introverted. So we change it and said a little bit more prep, here’s what we’re gonna be talking about. This is the way we’re meaning in the meeting. And we say, go away, sleep on it. Well, let’s reconnect tomorrow morning. And invariably, someone comes back to you, we forgot about this. we should do this. And they’re buying it. I mean our team is just amazing. And so our solutions get better because now we’ve changed the way we work.
to to actually let other people be more authentic. Yeah, so so I understand it on the c well, focus on communications ’cause that that’s the lifeblood or the grease of organizational performance. And then I understand okay, I can understand myself better, but how does it
How does it scale within the organization? And what do clients bring, you know, it’s always good to get better self-awareness, and so I can see clients bring you in for better self-awareness. But I think you how do you go beyond that to the operationalization that you brought up earlier? That’s the math. So if you if you ever do any other kind of thing, you basically get like a PDF report. It talks about you. And it says, if you deal with this type of person, do this. Right.
The math allows us now to plot people. We’ve normalized it. We can compare people. So if we’re within one standard deviation, we
don’t have to do much. We’re pretty much aligned. Right. If we’re one to two, we need to start thinking, okay, I need to remember this is your style. Just a little bit of focus on it. If we’re more than two, I really have to concentrate on. Now how do I know that? Because you have a score. I have a score. You have the data. All this data’s right here. And it’s not just one section of our app, which is my Vuji Day. We have one-to-one connections. You can build unlimited teams, plot those teams on quadrants. We have effort charts.
They literally tell you.
You got these three things. Don’t focus on this because you’re aligned. Don’t focus focus on this one thing in this relationship. Okay. And that’s what’s gonna get you to first bridge. Right. Because that’s where the big gap is. That’s where the effort is. And then once you once you understand that kind of relationship, it becomes actually a superpower. Because now that you’re different and you’re now understanding that, you honor that person’s differences, that’s where synergy, innovation, creativity, I can I can share.
One team consultants works with NASA and we were fascinated by the team at NASA, their scores. Most people fall within that one standard deviation. That’s 67% of the population. Right. Basic statistics. Nobody on the NASA team was in there. They were all around the edges. Which was really unique. my goodness. That’s why NASA thinks out of the box. It’s phenomenal. That’s really cool. Yeah. That’s so cool.
That’s what Vouger shows because you’re you’re measuring. And it it it well what’s it taken ten years to get there. Well and I think it’s also very much from the standpoint that these people understand themselves. Right. They have done enough work on themselves. Yeah, please. ⁓ we’re done.
So so NASA, outside the edges, I mean they’re there are two, three and three standards. Nobody’s in the nobody’s in the sixty-seven percent. Exactly. But but it it told me very quickly that they had done on as a team a lot of work on themselves. Right. They knew themselves really, really, really, really well. And they were also willing to be vulnerable. Right. They were willing to sh share not only their strengths, but those areas that they can shore up and areas for growth and so on and
so forth. So they they were just a very vulnerable group of people who just sort of laid their cards on the table. Well you know it’s interesting because when we were talking earlier, ⁓ what’s interesting about this is you said you can share your scores or you can not. And but
It’s a cultural shift and you ha and it creates that h humbleness, the vulnerability, but but also then that builds the trust. Exactly. Right. And so it’s it’s it’s interesting because you turned it into a whole system. And we know when leaders are willing to be vulnerable and open to other people and just, hey, this is me. Yeah. That’s when you all of a sudden go to a new higher level of basically appreciation, respect and trust. And people then start to rally and that kind
of a culture in that kind of an environment. So when folks like NASA or other clients when they engage you guys it sounds like they’re trying to
Not sub, but improved communications amongst the team. What and what have these they seen as results or what have they experienced as an organization? Like you said, there’s some of it is like just the openness and the trust. But what what other things have you experienced as so so th there’s one more c component to the yeah we got two out of the three. Okay. So the inside ring here that looks like half moons, quarter moons, third moons, this is the ⁓ the cognitive piece. All right.
And it’s a good example between Doug and myself. I have a lot of Lilac here, which is the big picture, the outcome. He has Lilac, but not to the degree that I am. And on the other side is the process piece. So the outcome people are the people who are thinking about the desired outcomes. What are we trying to achieve? Where are we trying to go? Where do we want to be three to five years out? So on and so forth. Those people over on the process side, they’re thinking about what’s step one.
Step two, step three, what’s the methodology? How logical is this? Does it make sense? And basically, Doug and I are very unique from the standpoint of how we get work done, but historically, these types of instruments would say you’re both outcomes, therefore you’re the same. And the system Boujade has the capabilities to basically differentiate within the construct, to say Monty is hugely different than Doug.
And in this relationship, Doug is gonna take more of a process role. Yeah, so my my preference with Rouge is to be outcome.
so in our relationship, my preference is to be outcome as well. But I realize in that dynamic that while my preference is outcome, that’s my happy space, we all have to have competency. So I will put on the process app. Because if I don’t, then we have a huge blind spot in a relationship. We’ll talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, and just come up with the great ideas and then say, yeah, but we didn’t figure out what we were gonna do about it. So every time we actually finish talking, what are our next action steps? Right.
wear that process hat a lot because it which which says Monty great idea how are you gonna do it. You know we could do this, this, this, but that doesn’t make sense. How do we get to that point? And and so that’s the wonderful thing about Vouche as well, you realize this is where I can be authentic. Well people have competencies. I can be processed, I can be extrovert, and I can be auditory. Right. And just realize now I know when I have to do it and I’m playing that role in my team. So so if I when I’ve
What I’m taking away is it’s a a a different assessment type of tool, but it’s really focused on communication. And collaboration. And and and therefore that
facilitates the collaboration and communication. And I can share and we can scale. Exactly. Unlimited connections, unlimited teams, which why there’s an app. You don’t have to remember the style. That’s really cool. 15 minutes before meeting on my Google Calendar, we’re connected, meeting comes up, it says, ⁓ there’s Jeff. Click. I see Jeff’s style.
And I can just yeah, just this, this, this and you like them. And I can actually so we just have a more productive meeting, it’s more efficient. And it gets it to have more information about the other person, so I so I have more information to make in out of how to engage you. Exactly. So so what’s the what’s the future of Boujade? Where are you going in the future? So good question. So put Boujade is the first instrument.
We have rail cars going by. All right. So I say what’s the future for Foujade? So Fujade is the first instrument on what’s called the Kabo platform.
Okay. And the Cabo platform is designed to have multiple instruments as well as analytical systems like collection of key ⁓ performance indicators, so on and so forth. And using our to-be-patented algorithms, we received allowance for patent on April 1st. Congratulations. Thank you, thank How many people in HR get patents? Not a lot. We do, yeah. So those those algorithms will basically tie
through the data to make the data even more precise, granular, to understand what makes people unique and special. That’s good. I mean to give you to just kind of all the other assessments that are out there, we don’t actually look at them as competition. We look at them as collaboration. Because we do just this one little piece, but they they’re great assessments. We want to help them get down to our level of detail because then another circle goes around. You get a much more distance.
And we improved the entire all the we’re improving the industry. That’s really cool. The water raises for all of us. This technology is now here. We figured it out. Let us may help you be better at doing what you do. Because it’s, you know, for us the journey’s been fantastic. You know, all these assessments are kind of like a magnifying glass. Gives you insights on yourself. But what happens when you have a microscope or an electron microscope? So much more detail. You start asking different questions. Yeah. And that process has just been
I mean amazing for us. Yeah. So ⁓ we’re almost up on time here. Sure. So if somebody wanted to get a hold of you guys, what’s the what what should they do? So go into www.bujade v uj a d e dotai. Okay. And you can go in there, register, get your information in there, and we’ll be in touch with you to basically give you an opportunity to do experience the system. Exactly.
Alright. There’s if if you could just, in fact, in the bottom right corner of everywhere, there’s a little blue button, click it, gets into our 24-hour customer support. We fully support if you don’t understand something, we’re there to answer those questions. So you can just say, I want to talk to Doug and Mont. All right. And and we will respond. Alright. So I got another thought. Yep. Another thought. And the other thought is anytime anyone is in any type of an educational opportunity.
Do not resist from opening the doors to see what’s on the other side. Because this relationship would not exist had there not been that quote unquote internship 31 years ago after died. Or ASTD. Or AST. Or ATT. Well ATD, of course. Well yeah, well, it’s what’s also I find fascinating about that is, you know, I mean congratulations on Vujade and and the successes you’ve had. People look at something like that and it’s like, it’s an overnight success.
And it’s like 10 years overnight. It’s like, well, it started 31 years ago. It did. And then 10 years ago we put we thought about this and then we studied this for four years, and then we took the leap. And then we had COVID in there. And then we had COVID. And we knew the world was changing when COVID occurred because the world all of a sudden became more virtual. And how can we build a system to even work more effectively, more productively, and build better organizations and teams in a more virtual world?
So one last thought? Yeah, yeah. I was going to ask you if you have any other thoughts. Yeah. Is if you want to do a sequel, we’ll do a sequel with you and take you through your data. Yeah, I I signed up. I haven’t taken the assessment yet. But let’s do that. That’d be fun. That’d be fun to do. And if there’s other team members you want to have do it, we can make it a ⁓ live. As long as you’re happy to share that. What’s good, we would respect that privacy. I’m happy to share mine. Okay. I’m an open book, but I
We are too. Yeah, so but ⁓ that’s great. Thank you. We’ll we’ll do that. Okay. And my my guests today have been Monty and Doug from Bouja Day. Guys, thank you so much for spending time with me, taking time out of your day. I really appreciate it. And we appreciate like buttons, we appreciate this opportunity. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you next time. Take care. Okay. That easy.