Slideshow with Dave Hayward

Your community wants impact, not your slides
Laz Csite has spent decades in high-end consulting. He chose to walk away from that and spend the next 10 years on something that actually matters to him: helping charities, social enterprises, and B corps use digital tools to deliver the change they exist for.
Produced by Europa Creative Partners (europa.nz).

In this episode of Slideshow, host Dave Hayward speaks with Laz Csite, founder of 360tuned, about why digital transformation keeps failing in mission-led organisations, and what it actually takes to get it right. Laz brings a rare combination: the rigour of a career at KPMG and PwC, and a philosophy shaped more by rice terraces and bamboo than by tech roadmaps.

The conversation covers the gap between board-approved strategy and the people who have to deliver it, why most nonprofits are nowhere near ready for AI and what to do first, the spaghetti problem hiding in almost every nonprofit back office, and the pizza framework for thinking about digital architecture. Laz also shares the "black Toyota Corolla" approach to choosing tools, a story about donor lifetime value that stopped a 15-year-old nonprofit in its tracks, and why boring, reliable systems beat shiny ones every time.

Links:
Laszlo Csite, LinkedIn
360tuned
Dave Hayward

A framework that is both actionable AND delicious
In this episode of Slideshow, Dave Hayward speaks with Laura Burkhauser, CEO of Descript, the AI-native video editing platform, about her practical framework for surviving the AI hype cycle without losing your ability to think clearly.
The conversation covers the sandwich bet technique for defusing doom-spiral conversations by forcing specifics (what exactly, by when, measured how?), the "work slop" problem and Laura's internal Descript memo on AI and human thinking, why generative AI is missing its "Finding Nemo" moment, Dave's audience sandwich bets from Bright Objects readers, and what the word "intrepid" means when you're running a company through genuine disruption.

Links:
Laura Burkhauser, LinkedIn
Descript
Dave Hayward, LinkedIn

Chapters

00:00 Cold open: intrepid
00:45 Introduction
02:00 Why AI hype exists: the cynical and good-faith takes
03:30 The AI political horseshoe: doomers vs hypers
05:30 Descript's AI-native origins (before AI was a discourse)
08:00 The generative AI problem: slop and the wrong conversation
09:00 Finding Nemo and what generative media is still missing
10:30 Human creativity will survive this moment
11:30 Vibe-coded briefs and the limits of AI in creative work
12:00 Work slop at Descript and the human collaboration memo
13:30 Writing as two acts: what you cannot delegate to AI
15:00 From hype to action: becoming a translation layer
16:30 AI hasn't reduced the workload: the rising tide reality
17:30 AI vs the internet: scale of impact and the 30-year problem
20:00 Non-linear careers: German literature meets tech
22:00 The sandwich bet: framework explained
24:00 Why sandwich bets shift conversations from fear to curiosity
25:00 Sandwich bets as an internal leadership tool at Descript
26:30 The Lisa Oakley crossover: depersonalising difficult decisions
27:30 Bread talk and Vogels toast
28:00 The Descript Slack bet: getting concrete on the labour market
29:30 From vague doom to specific, measurable hypotheses
30:30 Kahneman's system 2 and shifting from reacting to thinking
31:00 Optimism, the pandemic, and humanity's problem-solving capacity
32:00 Andrew Mason identified Laura as his successor within weeks
33:00 Intrepid: the leadership quality for a disruptive moment
34:30 Serenity prayer, Rumsfeld, and the limits of what you can control
35:00 The VP-to-CEO paradox: more accountability, less control
36:30 Wrap up

FAQ

What is a sandwich bet and how does it work?
A sandwich bet is a conversational technique for defusing AI doom-spiral conversations. When someone makes a large, fear-inducing prediction, you ask them to make it specific and measurable: what exactly will happen, by when, and what metric would prove it? If they're right, you buy them a sandwich. The low stakes lower the emotional temperature. The act of getting concrete forces rational thinking. Laura uses it at Descript both in team conversations and externally when AI discourse becomes unproductive.

How should business leaders think about AI's impact on jobs and the economy?
Laura's position: people consistently overestimate AI's short-term impact and underestimate its long-term impact, the same pattern that played out with the internet. The internet took 30 years to fully reshape the economy. AI likely works on the same horizon. At Descript, full adoption of AI coding tools has actually increased the urgency to hire engineers, not reduced it.

What is Descript and what does it do?
Descript is an AI-native video and audio editing platform that lets users edit footage by editing a transcript, the same way you'd edit a text document. Its AI co-editor Underlord executes entire editing workflows from a single text prompt. Used by podcasters, content creators, business teams, and marketers who want professional results without specialist editing skills.

Lisa Oakley has a private investigator's licence and a habit of walking into rooms where things have gone badly wrong. What she's found: the conflict usually wasn't the problem. The avoidance was.
Produced by Europa Creative Partners (europa.nz).
In this episode of Slideshow, host Dave Hayward speaks with Lisa Oakley, Director and Lead Consultant at People Associates, about why workplace conflict is best understood as data — information your organisation is generating, whether you act on it or not.
The conversation covers the three types of conversations that prevent most workplace friction from escalating (expectation, accountability, and repair), a practical, hard-conversation framework drawn from problem-solving science, and why formal investigations often make things worse rather than better. Lisa also shares what she's seeing on the frontier of workplace HR: AI-generated complaints that are genuinely difficult to authenticate.
Links:
Lisa Oakley, LinkedIn
Dave Hayward, LinkedIn
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Conflict is Data: The Core Reframe
03:00 Why Leaders Avoid Conflict (and What It Costs)
06:00 Intercultural Conflict in NZ Workplaces
09:00 The Three Conversations Every Leader Needs
12:00 A Problem-Solving Framework for Hard Conversations
15:00 Is This Relationship Recoverable?
18:00 Where Conflict Ends and Bullying Begins
19:00 What Leaders Get Wrong: Kindness Without Clarity
22:00 Delegating Conflict Upwards
24:00 PI Meets HR: AI-Generated Complaints
28:00 When Investigations Protract the Problem
31:00 The Art of a Real Apology
34:00 Conflict as Progress: The Boardroom Story
36:00 The "I Like, I Wonder" Technique
39:00 Wrap Up
FAQ
What is "conflict as data" and why does it matter for business leaders? Lisa Oakley's core idea is that conflict isn't a dysfunction to suppress — it's information your organisation is producing. The way a team handles disagreement, friction, or tension tells you something about your culture, your clarity, and your leadership. Treating it as data rather than a problem to eliminate means you can actually learn from it and act on it.
Keywords conflict resolution, workplace conflict, leadership, difficult conversations, HR, people management, organisational culture, conflict management, New Zealand business, team performance, mediation, psychological safety, accountability, leadership development, high-performing teams

Ed Ortega has spent 20 years in Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology, strategy, and how people actually work. He's a partner at Machine & Folk, and he's one of the clearest, most grounded thinkers on AI we've ever had on Slideshow. He's also, as we say in New Zealand, a bloody good bloke.
This episode went somewhere neither of us expected.
It starts in 1950, on a factory floor in postwar Tokyo, where an obscure American statistician named W. Edwards Deming was about to change the way the world makes things. It runs through the Toyota Production System, the Andon cord, a notorious GM plant in Fremont California where one in five workers didn't show up on any given day and thermoses of vodka were a workplace accessory, and a joint venture that transformed the same chaotic workforce into one of the best-performing plants in the country.
Then it lands squarely in 2025 — and why most AI transformations are failing for exactly the same reason GM couldn't take what they learned at Fremont back to their other plants.
The constraint is gone. The process stayed. That's the problem.
We also watched a tool called Pencil build a fully designed CRM interface from a single prompt. About ten minutes, start to finish. Ed's seen the future of the designer/developer relationship and it looks nothing like the briefs, markups, and JIRA tickets most teams are still running today.
And we talked about what happens to people when AI dissolves the bottleneck their entire workflow was built around — and why that's not a threat. It's the most interesting opportunity in business right now.

No "AI is coming for your job" panic here. Ed Ortega, partner at Machine and Folk, joins Dave to talk about what AI transformation actually looks like from the inside — and then builds a working CRM prototype live on screen.Ed has spent the last few years watching companies navigate this shift in real time.
In this conversation, he explains why the fear of job displacement misses the point, why the smartest leaders are using AI to multiply their teams, and why the biggest risk right now is standing still while your competitors speed up.Halfway through, we switch gears into a live demo of Pencil — a design tool where drawing and code are the same thing — and watch Ed build a fully designed CRM app from a single prompt. In about ten minutes.
If you work with designers, developers, or anyone trying to figure out where AI fits in your business, this one is worth your time.
In this episode:
The gap between AI fear and AI reality
The sandwich bet: a framework for specific predictions over vague anxiety
Why AI multiplies great teams rather than replacing them- The Cezanne vs Picasso theory of transformation
Case study: automating document data extraction (and what the team discovered halfway through)
The designer-developer handoff problem — and how Pencil solves it
Live demo: building a CRM in Pencil using Claude as the engine
Reverse migration: taking existing code back into a design environment
What the Toyota production line has to do with your AI workflow

Links:
Ed Ortega on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hellomundo/
Dave Hayward on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haywarddave/
Machine and Folk: https://machineandfolk.com/
Europa Creative Partners: https://europa.nz/
Bright Objects newsletter (AI, marketing, strategy): https://europa.nz/#subscribe

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Ed Ortega and Machine and Folk
02:00 Is AI going to steal my job?
04:00 The sandwich bet framework
05:30 Early adopter advantage
06:30 The rising tide: multiplying engineers
08:00 The learning curve before the rocket ship
09:00 Switching from ChatGPT to Claude
11:00 Cezanne vs Picasso: two types of transformation
13:30 Agile and lean as the AI framework
15:00 Data extraction case study
18:00 Liberating people from work they shouldn't be doing
20:00 How design sprints have evolved
23:00 Vibe coding and its limits
25:00 The designer-developer handoff problem
27:00 Introducing Pencil
30:00 Toyota, Kaizen, and continuous improvement
33:30 Setting up the live demo
34:00 Demo: building a CRM in Pencil
40:00 Iterating without breaking the code
43:00 Reverse migration
45:00 Generating the Next.js prototype
49:00 Out-of-body experience for designers
50:30 Wrap up
Slideshow with Dave Hayward is produced by Europa Creative Partners.
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