🎤 Quotable Quote
“Don’t forget to listen.”
— Jeff Utecht
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🎧 This Week’s Guest: Jeff Utecht
Jeff Utecht has been living at the intersection of education, innovation, and digital transformation long before AI showed up and turned everything sideways.
He’s an educator, speaker, and author of Human Still Required, a book that asks a deceptively simple question in a very complex moment:
How do we stay human?
After years of working with school leaders, organizations, and teams around the world, Jeff kept hearing the same concern:
How do we move forward with AI without losing what makes us… us?
And that question became the book.
Because while technology keeps accelerating, the real risk is not that AI replaces us.
It’s that we stop thinking for ourselves.
💥 Leadership Rule of the Week
Listen first.
Before the strategy.
Before the decision.
Before the response.
Jeff shared that the most consistent advice he gets comes from his wife, a longtime school counselor:
Don’t forget to listen.
In a world full of noise, speed, and instant answers, the leaders who slow down long enough to truly listen are the ones who understand what actually matters.
And that’s where real leadership begins.
💡 Other Topics We Loved
• Why “cognitive surrender” might be the biggest risk in the age of AI
• How easy it is to trust AI simply because it sounds confident
• Why judgment is the one skill AI cannot replace
• The danger of treating AI like Google instead of a completely new tool
• Why prompting well is a skill most people still have not learned
• How every major shift in technology has forced us to relearn what it means to research
One of the biggest takeaways?
AI is not thinking.
It is predicting.
And if we forget that, we risk outsourcing the very thing that makes us valuable.
📺 Learn More
🌐 https://jeffutecht.com
📘 https://humanstillrequired.com
🎧 Shifting Schools Podcast
More leadership musings
🍪 Biscuits with the Boss:
Try this with your team:
Where are we thinking less… because something else is thinking for us?
And the follow up:
Where do we need to reinsert human judgment into the process?
🌎 This week in Here - There - Every F’ing where
We did a podcast swap this week! So great to interview Jeff and thrn have him interview us. (Who can argue with someone who starts with our new favorite question - How can we get The Business of You into thew hands of every high schooler?) If you work in schools or have a teen or twenty-something in your house, listen in.
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Believe!
Nick & Marnie
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