The doctor will see you now | Dr. Vivek Goel on Leadership and AI

Vivek Goel, guest · [01:39]Well, I appreciate the opportunity to be part of this, podcast. And, you know, I think the title is really, appropriate. leadership has become really messy over the years. You know, my own journey, as you noted, I, I went to medical school, I did practice as a physician, so seeing individual patients, and, I quickly came to a personal realization that I could do more for the health of my patients by keeping them from ever becoming patients, so that got me into public health. And, as part of public health training, I got to learn a lot about statistics and epidemiology, also, learned about organizations and, how they work. So public health is really about organizing ways to improve the health of the population, and you work at a popu- population and policy level. And so I think those two parts of my academic preparation have really served me well as a leader, because as a physician, as a clinician, I worked at that individual level, and so Got, you, how do you work with an individual patient, understand their issues, their concerns, what their family's concerns might be, and how you help address them, but also at a population level, how you work, with an entire group, community. And so in my work, whether it's been in, in the university or in the health settings or in other settings, you know, I think I've always come at it with looking at both the individual level as well as the group or population level, and always working to try to bridge between those two levels. And, and so that means ex-, you know, when you're making a decision at the population level, It's inevitably gonna mean that some people will be better off, but some people may not be better off. And you have to be able to explain to those people that are not better off, and, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're not better off in financial terms, but it could be that, as we saw during the pandemic, that everyone has to take on certain restrictions, in order to benefit the population as a whole. And you, you may not benefit from those restrictions, but you're benefiting the population whole. If you don't explain why everyone has to, incur those restrictions, you're gonna wind up with, grief as a leader. And so having that individual and population perspective, I think, is really critical, and that certainly served me well.

Vivek Goel, guest · [05:27]You know, I know the time that's being referred to, and it, it was a very significant period of time where it, within a matter of months, the university lost its president, its provost, as well as a number of other vice presidents. And, you know, I remember people in our community, as well as the media saying, this is terrible, the university's coming apart. and I know I said, I think in a media interview around that time, as well as at, at one of the university's governing bodies, when someone raised the concerns about the rapid transitions that had been happening at the leadership level, that, you know, the reality is the university Continues to operate. The students have been admitted, they're getting taught, research is being done, grants are being submitted, everything. The usual flow of the institution will continue on. And so, you know, it's not, the university's not coming apart today as a result of all these, unexpected changes in, in leadership. But I did note at the time that I think where we have the potential for things to go astray is when we take a long-term perspective, and that leaders do matter in, helping an institution like a university make decisions around where they're going to go in the long term, what programs are going to be developed, what fields of scholarship, what new emerging fields are going to be explored, what capital developments are going to be done. What that long-term vision is going to look like. And, and, you know, that's not like the tea-- students are going to continue to get taught and research will be done, but those long-term strategic pieces won't necessarily be happening if there's a vacuum in, in leadership. You know, I think reflecting over the last 20 or so years, I think, what's become even more important is it's not just about having the leaders for that long-term work. And I could say that, you know, it was a much more luxurious time as a leader. You could step back and really think about those long-term things while others took care of the day-to-day. But today's day and age, and I think that it is part of what's making things much messier, is leaders of all types, not just in universities, Are expected to be there every time something happens, whether it's in our own community or somewhere in the world that affects our community. And, you know, I think that's in large part driven by social media and the expectations for immediate responses when things start to, to float out. And, you know, I think again, for an institution like a university, if you don't have leaders, it's going to be very difficult for an institution to be able to respond in the kind of immediacy that is expected. So, so I think that would be a very significant change from when that, senior advisor might have made that point twenty years ago.

Vivek Goel, guest · [15:08]it really forced the question about, you know, where do we want to be as an institution? And, we can't continue to just Grow in the directions that, come at us. And so by stepping back and with the exercise that took close to two years with our community and engaged, really thousands of people in our community, our alumni, key stakeholders, around us, we developed the vision for the university. we just, you know, really it's about going back to our roots, understanding what our differentiators are. And then in parallel, we worked on, and it's something that we continue to work on, what we are referring to an integrated planning and budgeting process, where we move away from static five-year plans to rolling plans that we're constantly updating. And, and so every year we are looking at what our priorities are within the context of the long-term vision that we have set for ourselves. and the integration part is we look across all of our faculties and administrative units. We look across our operating and capital budgets. we look across, you know, planning for enrollments, planning for faculty complement, planning for spaces and infrastructure and IT. We bring it all together in an annual cycle. So, rather than doing these things in isolation, which certainly Waterloo is doing, and many institutions do, we look at them in a much more coordinated and cohesive manner, and we can assess our decisions, our, what priorities we set for an annual basis for how are they going to advance us. Towards the long-term vision that we have. So I, I do want to say it's not about wiping out or saying we're not going to do planning, but it's moving away from a very rigid and I would say archaic approach To five-year strategic plans, to a much more nimble and, cohesive, approach to planning that ties our budget process to those planning priorities.

Vivek Goel, guest · [25:08]As AI tutors continue to develop, what will that mean for how we teach, how students learn, how we do evaluations? Because if we're using teaching to provide instruction and students are using, AI to provide instructions and they're using AI to provide the answers, who's learning what? How do you assess what's been learned? Many respects, I think, we're going to circle back, many centuries, You know, if the original Oxbridge model was, an individual student went to Oxford or Cambridge, they were assigned a don or a tutor, they identified what areas they wanted to learn about, they were told, here's the things to go and read and come back and talk to me about them, and they had time to interact with their colleagues. but there wasn't a lot of structured instruction. People really learned by doing things, by being with colleagues, by having conversations. And at some point in time, the student came before an examining board, had an oral examination where a panel judged whether they were ready to earn their degree. And, and that's the way you knew that person had learned enough. And I think we're gonna Go back to probably very similar models where, you know, our students will be able to learn in all sorts of ways the knowledge they need to acquire. and our role will be to help guide them in what they should be looking at, and, and to then help in that assessment. And, and so I think it's going to be a very fundamental change in the kind of roles that, professors play.

Vivek Goel, guest · [28:06]And I think where we really have to start to put our minds to is what is going to be our role as institutions of knowledge generation, of knowledge preservation, knowledge transmission in the AI age. I think there is going to continue to be a very critical role, but we have to really get on with defining what that's going to be. And I will also hazard that that role will You know, we often have a focus from government on STEM education, you know, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and certainly AI has come out of those fields. But when we look at what's actually going to be required of humans, it will likely be to come from what we would have traditionally called the liberal arts, social sciences, and humanities. We're already seeing it in, in co-op job placements, you know, the entry-level work is being replaced by AI tools, but employers are looking for people to praise the output from the AI. So we have to prepare our students to do that work, and the kinds of skills that I think that entails are actually the skills that would have traditionally come in a humanities or social sciences type of preparation. And so, you know, I think there's going to be some very fundamental thinking required for us, as well as for those that govern us and fund us, because I think there might be a swing back to types, very types of education that have been devalued by our governments, by our funders in recent years.

Vivek Goel, guest · [30:40]You know, I, I think there's a few elements there. One is, and I don't think this is new, it's always been the essence of leadership, is you gotta take time to listen, to understand, and the messy part is there's probably many more voices to be heard because, again, as a result of social media and the email and all the tools we have for communications, you can get a lot more information in front of a leader. So it is gonna take, be messy, it is gonna take more time, but if you don't take stock Of all the different perspectives before you make a decision, before you set a direction, you're going to set yourself up for failure because you will not be able to explain to someone why their area or their direction has not been, chosen. The, you know, I think understanding the many different forces, like as a leader, you certainly have to look at everything happening within your organization. But I think, again, if I compare it to twenty to twenty-five years ago, you have to pay attention to certain elements of what was going on around you, but now you got to have a full 360 understanding of everything that's going on around you as well. So, you know, listening, understanding, making sense of everything that's going on around you. So to balance that, you know, I think it's all, my advice to leaders would also be don't let things consume you, right? You got to find balance in your life. you're not going to be a good leader if all you're doing is only focused on your leadership role, and you're just going to burn out very quickly. So, you know, it, it's a, it's a complex world. It's a difficult world, but as I've been finding with my work on the Waterloo at 100 vision, you know, the opportunity to really set direction, to work towards a common goal, to address the biggest global challenges is also the payoff of being a leader in, these turbulent times.