Below is our recent interview with Lisa Duerre, CEO & Co-Founder of RLD Group:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: RLD Group is a WBENC-certified leadership consulting and coaching collective founded in 2017. We help organizations align the leadership systems connecting people, strategy, and execution so investments in AI, transformation, and growth produce meaningful business value.
Our point of view is direct: AI scales what is already true. Alignment determines whether it scales value or fragmentation.
When priorities, decision rights, leadership practices, and cross-functional collaboration are aligned, AI can accelerate productivity, innovation, and customer value. When those conditions are fragmented, it can amplify rework, delay, risk, and costly activity without sufficient return.
Our collective brings experience across AI, technology, engineering, cybersecurity, organizational strategy, change leadership, and executive coaching. Collectively, our experts have reached more than 50,000 leaders. My own background includes more than 20 years in Fortune 500 technology leadership at Synopsys and Applied Materials.
We bring that experience to AI Leadership Alignment advisory engagements, executive coaching, leadership forums, off-sites, and interactive workshops.
Q: What makes you the best choice? How are you unique?
A: We combine lived leadership experience, active client work, applied research, and practical implementation.
Our AI Leadership Alignment applied research grew from patterns we were seeing with clients. Informed by interviews with 25 cross-functional senior executives, it identified three interconnected drivers of fragmentation: organizational silos, a reduced explorer mindset, and under-designed conversations and collaboration.
Silos create duplicated effort, slower decisions, wasted time, added cost, and risk. Cognitive load and relentless pressure reduce people’s capacity to challenge assumptions and reconsider how work gets done. Under-designed conversations allow both conditions to continue by leaving assumptions, risks, ownership, and decision rights unclear.
When pressure leaves no room to reconsider how work gets done, organizations risk using AI to automate inefficiency and scale existing risk.
Alenka Žnidarsič, PhD, one of my primary RLD Group partners, played a leading role in our applied research and brings experience as an AI researcher, engineer, consultant, and Conversations Worth Having® practitioner. Together, we translated our client experience and research into the AI Leadership Alignment Jumpstart Diagnostic, which helps organizations identify where progress is breaking down across our I | WE | US lens.
RLD Group values bringing together diverse perspectives, expertise, and strengths, and that commitment shaped the next evolution of our work. Alenka and I were thrilled to join Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres, co-authors of Conversations Worth Having and co-founders of CWH Institute, Inc., along with Toni Racco Benner, to co-author the CONVERSATIONS WORTH HAVING®: The Human Accelerator for Artificial Intelligence QuickStart Guide. Together, we created a practical resource with four conversation practices people can apply to real AI opportunities and challenges.
This progression from client experience to research, practical tools, and implementation reflects how RLD Group works. We help clients identify what is getting in the way and strengthen the conditions for responsible adoption, coordinated execution, and business value.
Q: Who is your ideal client and why?
A: Our ideal clients are organizations making consequential investments in AI, transformation, growth, or organizational change where misalignment could delay value, increase risk, or weaken return on investment.
They see AI as an opportunity for people to reconsider how work gets done, where human judgment matters most, and how people and technology can contribute to greater value together. They recognize that the people closest to the work hold essential institutional knowledge, customer insight, and professional judgment.
Activity alone is not adoption. Experimentation contributes to business value when learning is captured, shared, measured, and connected to strategic priorities.
We work with executives and leaders responsible for technology, IT, engineering, operations, strategy, transformation, product, revenue, and people. We also partner with HR, talent, organizational development, and learning leaders who are supporting change and building leadership capability.
Clients often bring us in when AI activity is not producing enough coordinated learning or value; a reorganization or executive transition is changing how work gets done; cross-functional execution is slowing an important initiative; or highly skilled leaders need support expanding their enterprise impact.
Q: What can we expect from you in the next six months? What are your plans?
A: We will continue helping organizations lead through disruption, accelerate responsible AI adoption, and reduce the avoidable risk and rework that consume time, money, and organizational capacity.
We will continue our applied research, listening to leaders across functions and translating what we learn into practical tools, strategic guidance, and client experiences. We will also expand the reach of the CONVERSATIONS WORTH HAVING® AI QuickStart Guide through interactive workshops, executive forums, off-sites, and advisory engagements.
The CTRL+ALT+DELETE with Lisa Duerre™ podcast will feature candid conversations with leaders, researchers, and practitioners navigating AI, workplace change, leadership, and the human realities of transformation.
Across this work, we will help leaders assess readiness, clarify ownership and decision rights, involve the people affected by change, and create learning loops that allow organizations to adjust as conditions evolve.
Change readiness affects how quickly a strategic investment moves from intention to adoption, the risks encountered along the way, and its potential to produce value.
Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: At our core, RLD Group is strengths-based and grounded in appreciative inquiry. We look for the expertise, relationships, capabilities, and momentum already present in an organization, then help people build from them while addressing the conditions getting in their way.
That perspective matters in the AI era. AI creates an opportunity to redesign work so people and technology can each contribute where they add the most value.
Organizations often misread alignment gaps as resistance, fear of AI, lack of urgency, competing priorities, or another department’s failure to follow through. The consequences are human, operational, and financial. They show up as cognitive overload, delayed decisions, duplicated work, low adoption, preventable risk, and missed opportunities.
Conversations become infrastructure when strategy depends on people making better decisions together.
Technology can increase capability and speed. People still determine what matters, where to go, what responsible action looks like, and how value will be created.
