Weekly Link Roundup #69
"We have no future because our present is too volatile." ~William Gibson
Thinking about skills. Dan Pontrefact, posted this note about a new job opening at Microsoft. If I wasn’t so happy at my new gig at Qualtrics, I’d be sorely tempted to apply. The job is for a Director of AI-Era Skilling Transformation. Sounds cool right? There are some cute bits like where they’d like “3+ year of experience leading AI first enterprise-wide learning or skilling transformations.” I get it but given that ChatGPT only launched in what, November 2022, that’s asking for an EARLY adopter. Dan doesn’t bury the lede though - the goal for this role is to “Build a Copilot-powered, real-time learning system that cuts time-to-competence in half and triples upskilling velocity at the company.” No mention of a course or an LMS or even the inevitable L&D ask for a seat at the table - nope - just learning and upskilling at ludicrous speed. Talk about something that will put tension on existing structures from tools to business models. Dang.
Then Matthew Daniel goes off and writes this great article on the nature of a “durable skill.” The whole piece is a solid read although some of his points, I think could be boiled down to “pattern recognition” in the spirit of William Gibson. The key point though is this “Durable skills evolve. That’s what makes them durable.” Dangx2. Love that! Remove the facet of being static from durable - humans are durable because we evolve. The challenge though is the same from Dan’s piece - these transformations and ideas are occurring inside structures that have been durable based on their ability to maintain a status quo. Now however, we happen to be living inside one of my favorite expressions - change is inevitable, adaptation is not. Time to evolve and find durability in our ability to adapt.
You ever hit something that just sends you down a really deep rabbit hole but like in a good way? So this paper, Smartphones: Parts of Our Minds? Or Parasites?, and this write-up by Prof Boymal, was that something. Sure, it starts off simply enough and with a great point - that while we can look at smartphones as parts of an extended mind, the apps on the device can actually run counter to the idea of a beneficial extension of our thinking by their very design. This OF COURSE got me thinking about notions of telepresence and about how technology can actually allow us to feel like we are quite literally, somewhere else.
The bread crumbs from that (obviously I know), led me back to Norbert Wiener and his pioneering work on cybernetics which is quite literally, the headwaters of the river of AI that we’re awash in today. And if we’re talking Wiener and first wave cybernetics including feedback loops between humans and their machine partners (back to the beginning and the extended mind) then we really need to get some McLuhan involved here.
I mean from the central precept of The Medium is the Message (yes, I know the other title but McLuhan has said that was essentially a typo and he kept it in because of the attention it got), which was that the way (the medium) in which a message is conveyed binds us to that format. McLuhan is a fav of mine and he did write that “All media are extensions of some human faculty psychic or physical. In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.” [Marshall McLuhan, Author of Understanding Media: Extensions of Man]
And that does make me wonder if these apps which can be designed to behave perniciously aren’t very much like AI in that they are extensions not of our minds but of the designers. Anyway, read the paper and thanks for the rabbit hole Professor. (and I didn’t even get to the Noosphere).
Microsoft Pledges $4 Billion Toward A.I. Education: “Microsoft, the maker of the Copilot chatbot, said the resources would go to schools, community colleges, technical colleges and nonprofits. The company is also starting a new training program, Microsoft Elevate Academy, to “deliver A.I. education and skilling at scale” and help 20 million people earn certificates in A.I.”
A comic book just grounded planes and decimated tourism in Japan – for real: How can you NOT love a story about a comic book that tells the future?! > > “The source of the panic was The Future I Saw, a Japanese comic by Ryo Tatsuki, first published in 1999 and republished in 2021 by Asuka Shinsha. It was a compilation of what Tatsuki describes as “precognitive dreams”, one of which is claimed to have eerily predicted the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami: the devastating real-life disaster that killed nearly 20,000 people.” > > Well now I want a copy.
Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning: I’ve been thinking about this one a lot. In the words of Dr Who, time is really “a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.” It’s more than that though - its also layers of time moving at different speeds. No, I’m not going on about time travel (although I could), but more about how we often fail to consider the different speeds at which different parts of our org experience time. Example - NO ONE in the Legal Dept EVER said “move fast and break things.” Why? Not out of a desire to stifle innovation but because they experience time differently. Innovation moves at a different speed than protecting the org against lawsuits. So when we think about change management or change mindsets, do we account for the different time speeds across the org? I don’t think so. I think we have a tendency to feel like everyone experiences time in the same way and for the same reasons as our home teams. That’s not the case.
Everyone also like to talk about ecosystems. Fine but do you think trees in an ecosystem experience time the same way as a moth does? No - so then why do you assume or ignore the idea that the the whole org is made up of parts, some of which are experiencing time very differently from each other? I love this > > “From the fastest layers to the slowest layers in the system, the relationship can be described as follows: Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.” I don’t have an answer here but that we need to consider the fast and slow parts of our org not in a competition where being the fastest is the ultimate prize, but rather add to our planning, how to understand and align those speeds.
AI, Writing, And The Importance Of Story Architecture: I think teaching people how to construct a story, how to build a narrative, is something that belongs in every onboarding package at any level in the org. The ability to build a cogent, coherent story seems to be one of those things that we take for granted people will just have - and its especially bad if we’ve hired them to do one job that doesn’t require it and the promote them into a role that does without any addtl. help. > > “It’s the discipline of seeing structure—of recognizing narrative principles and applying them to non-fiction in a systematic way. And it’s the skill that will differentiate real thought leadership from AI-generated noise.”
OK - there’s a lot in this issue and a lot of thinking for me anyway so I want to wrap up with one thing and for this, I’d LOVE it if one of you could help me find an example of this actually happening. Here’s the idea…one thing that I’ve NEVER seen done well anywhere I’ve been is how a new org will, after asking, ingest a new hire’s network. I mean think about it. If you’re hiring someone at the mid to senior level, you’re picking up someone who has spent anywhere from 10-20 years building a network. Now these networks and their breadth and depth will vary greatly between hires but how do you even know? What would you even look for as valuable bits? How do you know if you’ve brought someone into the fold with a huge following somewhere on some topic? How do you know who they might know that might be good for you or the team to know or get an intro to? How can you build each other’s networks? For hiring…for biz dev….for market intelligence. Look, I know you hired this person for one thing and maybe you checked their references but what about that network that comes to work with them every day? Anyway - got any examples? Have you seen this done well?
Mark’s Hiking Playlist: No good reason for sharing this except that I thought maybe some of you might like to hear what I’m usually listening to when I put this little newsletter together.