In the Gaslit Nation interview with Cory Doctorow he describes a conversation he had with a screenwriter sharing that they (the creative writers) have been treated like large language models for a long time. My point being; that if we are acting, operating or working like computers already then no surprise if they replace us. We need to bring our creativity, curiosity, surprise and joy to work. Doctorow — ‘ “They already treat us like a prompting engine.” Like, make me ET [the 1980’s Spielberg movie], but the hero is a dog. And there’s a car chase in the second act.” And then they come back and they’re like, “Can you add a love interest?” Right? And this is just how you prompt a language model, right?’

Are experts over-emphasizing time constraints and realization demands over novelty leading to favouring incremental improvements to more game changing ideas? Are experts more likely to do this compared to non-experts? And is it good or bad? — “Domain experts exhibit a feasibility preference, focusing first on the feasibility of a solution as the primary indicator of its quality, while discounting riskier but more novel solutions. This results in a tradeoff in which highly feasible but less novel solutions are judged as being higher in quality, shedding light…

I assume there is a BIG customer data gap in most organizations: who are collecting sales / product data and skinny behavioral / channel data expecting these are helpful to understanding their customers. — But we need to be careful using something as simple as product sales and online behavior as proxies for something as complex as a human being. Behavioral data is skinny data, it doesn’t tell us anything about the customer e.g. we don’t know what questions they are trying to answer…

Your current job probably won’t change much because of artificial Intelligence (AI), but your next job will. … — Even without AI new jobs emerge all the time. I’ve had jobs as a web designer, UX’er, CX’er, service designer, business designer .. all jobs that where younger than 10, five or even brand new when I took them. We change jobs all the time. It’s not scary or disruptive…

Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos both talk/talked about the glittering lure of the business process and how it can easily become the focus instead of what it is there to serve. — “When they [companies] start getting bigger they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, well, somehow there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they start to try to institutionalize process across the company and before very long people get…

Does the organization produce outputs or outcomes? Does it describe itself as a factory floor or through its engagements with its customers? One way to find out is to simply ask colleagues: what does success look like to them? — If colleagues describe successes connected to their own processes of production or if the language is purely internal; they are in a factory floor model. …

A call to design for better data: when we put together Agile Customer Thinking a few years back the idea was that “any responsive organization needs something to respond to”. — And what they would respond to was the customer. We were looking at popular customer insights and design methods like Design Thinking and Market Research and saying: these might be good, but they are too slow, they don’t scale, they are not real-time nor continuous, they turn insights and ideas…

What is an important link between Business Design and Systems Thinking? — Donella H. Meadows opens her book “Thinking in systems” with a quote from Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” that links Business Design to Systems Thinking and dynamics: “If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will…

“.. there is so much economic value sitting in the new subjective needs of people that aren’t on the radar screen of the traditional system and when we hone in on those and figure out how to reconfigure to meet those needs masses of wealth are created.” — Shoshana Zuboff — This article is NOT mine. It is an adapted transcript from a youtube video recording of Shoshana Zuboff for The Management Lab published back in 2008.