Day 2 - One Short Story on How it Could Happen

Day 1 is a goal not a promise

At Amazon, the mantra was that it’s always Day 1. I mean this is the same company that got started with Jeff B driving physical books to be shipped to the UPS store in his station wagon…and then invented the Kindle. Nothing sacred right? No program, product, or service that couldn’t be evaluated for whether or not we should still be doing it. So one day during an ALL Hands (kids, in the pre-COVID times, All Hands were physical gatherings - like 15K people in Climate Pledge Arena), someone asks Jeff what Day 2 looked like. The crowd half groaned and half chuckled. Then Jeff said (without looking at a note) “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

Stasis > Irrelevance > Decline > Death.

This story, “Hollywood Nightmare? New Streaming Service Lets Viewers Create Their Own Shows Using AI,” really reminded me of one way that Day 2 can come creeping for #learninganddevelopment. People are focused on what AI can do and how companies are going to use it to compete with other companies - they’re missing another road to irrelevance - users.

AI and tools like the one mentioned in that story are democratizing access to levels of technological power like never before. What does that mean? That means that individuals who have little to no technical know-how can create content and experiences that a few short years ago would’ve taken teams of professionals to crank out. While that might not spell doom for people and companies at the very top end - that’s not where it starts. It starts when your org has a creative, engaging, person in it - maybe someone like Kat Norton. This person isn’t on your L&D team. They’ve never heard of Bloom or a learning objective. What they have is a job to do and no time to waste and now they have access to technology that lets them create content on a scale and at a level of sophistication that’s impressive - all while you’re struggling with your roadmap.

So this person starts cranking out content and maybe putting it up on the corp intranet. By the time you notice it, this compelling, engaging content is a fan favorite within the company. Now you look at your LMS engagement numbers and they’re falling off a cliff - nobody in senior leadership ever touched the LMS or its content anyway, so you’ve got no champions there. Now the CFO is looking at productivity numbers and you’re asking for more headcount and you’re getting peppered with questions about why productivity is up and they’re hearing about and have even checked out some of this new content themselves and they point to falling numbers on the LMS and you have to defend your team and budget.

This is not a tough course to chart. Money, often like water, tends to follow the path of least resistance (or lowest cost). So now it’s Day 2. You haven’t been overthrown by some organized competitor - you’ve been made irrelevant because someone who wasn’t bound by legacy thinking and/or systems had access to powerful technology and had the will to create what they needed and shared it - and the market (the employees) - responded. Change is inevitable. Adaptation is not.

“This is the way the world end,

Not with a bang but a whimper.” ~T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Of course, I could be wrong.