Adolfo Hernandez on Socratic leadership and transformation
The CEO of Capita believes that AI-led transformation is the art of helping people re-imagine what’s possible – and that requires an authentic, curious interest in people themselves.
What does a CEO do when tasked with leading their organization through rapid change? Plenty might reach for some inspiring slides or gather the organization for a particularly energetic sales kick-off. Some might point to lofty targets that they promise the business will achieve in the next 12 months. Far fewer would spend some time with the lessons of philosophers who walked the streets of Athens two and a half thousand years ago. Adolfo Hernandez though, is different.
Adolfo joined Capita as CEO following a challenging few years for the professional services and outsourcing business that plays a key role in the public sector. He’s grasping the opportunity that creates to lead of tens of thousands of people through an AI-led digital transformation. Adolfo’s long-standing interest in philosophy sometimes plays an unexpected role in his thinking as a CEO.
“Socrates was all about stopping people and talking, asking questions and inviting them to reason, and when a leader shows that kind of Socratic interest in individuals it makes a real difference,” he explains. “Every day is a special occasion for a CEO, because every day we get to interact with our teams, engage people, and invite them to think differently about what’s possible. When people think that you drive change through flashy PowerPoints and big leadership conferences, they miss this. Your opportunity to drive change is in every single interaction. That’s when you can really exert your influence as a CEO.”
Building organizational resilience through personal energy
It’s one of many insights that Adolfo takes from a profound interest in ancient philosophy. It’s a well of inspiration for challenging received wisdom – and one that he believes has very real value in a rapidly changing world. After all, the goal of early philosophers, from Socrates through Aristotle to stoics such as Epictetus, was to help people grow, develop – and build resilience. That’s something that Adolfo puts at the heart of the transformation agenda that he’s setting out for Capita.
“The resilience that you need as a CEO isn’t just on a personal level,” he says. “It’s the resilience that you need to be able to transfer to colleagues throughout an organization when it comes to navigating change. You need to act as this limitless source of energy and drive and push.”
For that to work effectively, Adolfo believes, it’s not enough for a leader to accept change as inevitable. It’s not even enough for them to embrace the challenge of leading through it. To build and communicate this type of organizational resilience requires a genuine enthusiasm and excitement for the fact that things don’t stay the same – and for the technology that’s so often the reason they don’t.
Learning to read the wind as a CEO
“You have to love change to be a CEO today,” he declares. “And when I think about it, change is absolutely fundamental to the things that I love doing. I’m an avid sailor and it’s remarkable how that parallels business when it comes to predicting change, reading the wind as I call it, and managing a crew to deal with that change. If you didn’t love that unpredictability in the wind, you would be overwhelmed by it. If change isn’t part of your core as a CEO, you’ll lose that ability to see around corners and you’ll lose that capacity to innovate.”
You might expect someone who’s so passionate about innovation to spend most of their time talking about technology. However, the conversations that Adolfo has about transformation keep coming back to people.
He talks excitedly about how Capita is injecting AI into every aspect of its business and governance model, how the business is leveraging the technology to build new capabilities, and how AI is a “motorway running through culture, customers, how we run our operations, how we run finance and how we communicate.” Adolfo is clear, though, that building this motorway comes down to articulating a view of AI that people can buy into. It’s true of Capita’s own employees. It’s equally true of the government departments and local councils that the business supports – and the many thousands of people that depend on them.
AI and the Art of the Possible
“AI is no longer just about vision,” he says. “You have got to show people the art of the possible. It’s something that Capita is really well placed to do, because we have such a deep understanding of our customers’ business processes. We can identify the use-cases for AI that will deliver a real benefit that our customers feel. We start small, run a pilot, help them to feel that transformative difference. It’s only then that we get into mathematical models of scaling: “this is what we can do for 10 agents, now imagine what would happen if it were 10,000 agents.” We’re able to show people the size of the prize and then build towards that.”
At the heart of this strategy sits Capita’s business development teams: AI-empowered humans who excel at empathy and understanding the outcomes that really matter to customers.
“You can only do that when you’re on the inside of organizations and earning people’s trust,” says Adolfo. “Our people are really important at the start and the end of this process. We create the automation, we deploy the solution, but the quality of the result really depends on that human in the loop. It’s one of the differentiators that we can bring to the market.”
Capita has established its AI Catalyst Lab as an invitation for clients to enter this kind of dialogue, ask themselves what’s possible, and explore possibilities in meaningful ways. It’s an opportunity for the company’s business development teams to exercise their own inner Socrates – and move the needle on the public sector’s adoption of AI in the process.
“It’s about giving government departments and councils, and local authorities and private companies, an actionable way to get started with AI,” says Adolfo. “It’s about being an accelerator and an enabler – and that’s exactly what we should be doing as a business.”
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