All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

Sometimes, analyzing a clever quote tells you what’s wrong with the idea it’s supposed to convince you of.

Want an example? H. Ross Perot, in whose company I once worked, said, “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.”

Clever, isn’t it? Persuasive regarding having a bias toward action, right?

Only … a lotta snakes eat a lotta vermin. Want less vermin? Cultivate environments that attract snakes.

Which isn’t to take anything away from Mr. Perot. He was a man of impeccable integrity, intense loyalty to his employees, and was possibly the best salesman in the history of the world.

And he had a fondness for catchy phrases, but not this one, from Voltaire: “A witty saying proves nothing.”

None of which has all that much to do with this week’s topic – the unfair reputation associated with the habitat in which committees live and breathe – the dreaded meeting.

Do some googling and you’ll find any number of write-ups that excoriate meetings as utter wastes of time and energy. You’ll also find screeds that explain how to make meetings more effective.

Rarest (excuse me while I pat myself on the back) are epistles that present a balanced view of when meetings are necessary and important vs when they’re wastes of time and energy.

When it comes to meetings, two problems emerge from the detritus. The first is that many meetings are poorly organized and facilitated. Attend enough poorly organized and facilitated meetings and you’ll be forgiven for failing to recognize that this is just another instance of Sturgeon’s Law: If 90% of everything is crap, 90% of meetings will be likewise, concluding that all meetings are wastes of time and energy and not that all badly run meetings are wastes of time and energy.

But then there’s the second problem: In many cases, a meeting is simply the wrong tool for the job, akin to using a driver to get out of a sand trap.

When the situation doesn’t call for a meeting, running the meeting more effectively just isn’t going to help anyone accomplish anything useful.

When do you need a meeting? Briefly, you need one when:

You need a group of people to reach a consensus – not a faux consensus but a real one, when everyone might not agree with a course of action but they all agree to it. Organizational dynamics being what they are, consensus by email chain simply isn’t reliable.

Often, though, the attempt to reach consensus is nothing more than an unwillingness to own a decision.

The unnecessary meeting is a symptom of organizational dysfunction, not a cause.

You’re running a project – not for the project’s day-to-day work, although there are times when different people each have a piece to a project puzzle but nobody has all of the pieces, so they need to meet to … well … puzzle it out.

But a necessity in all projects is the (usually weekly) project status meeting, in which each project team member reports their status to the team as a whole – whether the tasks that were supposed to start actually start, and those that were supposed to finish in fact finish.

These need to be meetings because the point isn’t to understand the project’s status. It’s to apply peer pressure to underperforming team members.

Bob’s last word: These are the guidelines for calling a meeting. Businesses that adhere to them will generally waste less time in pointless energy sinks than businesses that don’t.

But it doesn’t help you when you’re on the receiving end of the invitation.

What can? Recognize that in most cases you were invited as a courtesy. The convener figured the meeting is about a topic you have a stake in, and so you should have the opportunity to know what’s going on.

Getting out of these courtesy meetings is surprisingly easy. Just email the convener and ask, “Am I necessary for this meeting?”

More often than not the convener will happily email you the meeting’s presentation PowerPoint and breathe a sigh of relief.

Now appearing in CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “Brilliance: The CIO’s most seductive career-limiting trait.” You probably know this already, but it’s worth the reminder that for the most part, any executive isn’t supposed to have all the great ideas. Executives, and that includes the CIO, are supposed to be information brokers, finding and promoting the ideas that matter most.

Comments

|In: Digital|Last Updated:

Prometheus brought fire (metaphorically, knowledge about how to do stuff) to humanity, making him a mythical hero.

Lucifer (light-bringer) brought knowledge (of good and evil, no less), to humanity, earning him the mantle of most villainous of all our mythical villains.

Go figure.

Now we have ChatGPT which, in case you’ve been living in a cave the past few months and missed all the excitement, seems to be passing the Turing, Prometheus, and Lucifer tests while making the whole notion of knowledge obsolete.

You can ask ChatGPT a question and it will generate an answer that reads like something a real, live human being might have written [Turing].

And just like dealing with real, live human beings you’d have no way of knowing whether the answer was … what’s the word I’m looking for? … help me out, ChatGPT … oh, yeah, that’s the word … “right” [Prometheus] or false [Lucifer].

And a disclaimer: I’m not going to try to differentiate between what ChatGPT and allied AI technologies are capable of as of this writing from what they’ll obviously and quickly evolve into.

Quite the opposite – what follows is both speculative and, I think, inevitable, in a short enough planning window that we need to start thinking about the ramifications right now. Here are the harbingers:

Siri and Watson: When Apple introduced Siri, its mistakes were amusing but its potential was clear – technology capable of understanding a question, sifting through information sources to figure out the answer, and expressing the answer in an easily understood voice.

Watson won Jeopardy the same way.

The sophistication of research-capable AIs will only continue to improve, especially the sifting-through-data-sources algorithms.

Synthesizers: It’s one thing to engage in research to find the answer to a question. It’s quite another to be told what the right answer is and formulate a plausible argument for it.

Trust me on this – as a professional management consultant I’ve lost track of how often a client has told me the answer they want and asked me to find it.

So there’s no reason to figure an AI, armed with techniques for cherry-picking some data and forging the rest, might resist the temptation. Because while I’ve read quite a lot about where AI is going and how it’s evolving, I’ve read of no research into the development of an Ethics Engine or, its close cousin, an integrity API.

Deep fakes: Imagine a deep-faked TED Talk whose presenter doesn’t actually exist here in what we optimistically call the “real world” but that speaks and gestures in ways that push our this-person-is-an-authority-on-the-subject buttons to persuade us that a purely falsified answer is, in fact, how things are.

Or, even more unsavory, imagine the possibilities for character assassination to be had by pasting a political opponent’s or business rival’s face onto … well, I’ll leave the possibilities as an exercise for the reader.

Persuasion: Among the algorithms we can count on will be several that engage in meme promotion – that know how to disseminate an idea so as to maximize the number of people who encounter and believe it.

Recursion: It’s loop-closing time – you ask your helpful AI a question (we’ll name it “Keejer” – I trust the etymology isn’t too mysterious?) “Hey, Keejer, how old is the universe?”

Keejer searches and sifts through what’s available on the subject, synthesizes the answer (by averaging the values it finds, be they theological or astrophysical), and writes a persuasive essay presenting its findings – that our universe is 67,455 years old.

But, many of the sources Keejer discovers are falsifications created and promoted by highly persuasive AIs, and Keejer lacks a skepticism algorithm.

And so Keejer gives you the wrong answer. Worse, Keejer’s analysis is added to the Internet’s meme stack to further mislead the next research AI.

Bob’s last word: Science fictioneers, writing about dangerous robots and AIs, gravitate to Skynet scenarios, where androids engage in murderous rampages to exterminate humanity.

The unexplored territory – rogue ‘bots attempting to wipe out reality itself – hasn’t received the same attention.

But putting the literary dimension of the problem aside, it’s time to put as much R&D into  Artificial Skepticism as we’ve put into AI itself.

There is a precedent: Starting in the very early days of PCs, as malicious actors started to push computer viruses out onto the hard drives of the world, a whole anti-malware industry came into being.

It’s time we all recognize that disinformation is a form of malware that deserves just as much attention.

Bob’s sales pitch: Not for anything of mine this time, but for a brilliant piece everyone on earth ought to read. It’s titled “40 Useful Concepts You Should Know,” by someone who goes by the handle “Gurwinder.”

All 40 concepts are useful, and you should review them all.

On CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “Brilliance: The CIO’s most seductive career-limiting trait.” It’s about why, for CIOs, brokering great ideas is better than having them.

Comments