All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Sorry this is late. A travel day got in the way of my standard posting schedule. Assuming you like what follows, figure I made your Tuesday slightly worse but I incrementally improved your Wednesday.

– Bob

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So I was thinkin’ — a process my incipient grandparenthood triggered.

An epoch ago, more or less, I was the grandkid. We lived in Highland Park, Illinois. My grandparents, along with the occasional aunt or uncle, lived in Chicago. I had, as you might imagine, a non-virtual relationship with all of them.

That was the American norm back then. The parallels to today’s white-collar workforce are, I trust, obvious.

Back in my childhood years, people who worked together worked together physically, not just logically. As the workforce has become hybridized (no, not genetically, and shame on you for thinking that way!), our workplace interactions are becoming increasingly transactional and decreasingly based on relationships. Our colleagues are becoming more digital avatars than multidimensional human beings.

Nor is there just one, digital, driving force behind this. Before digital strategies claimed our attention, medium-size and larger organizations had … well, improvised isn’t too strong a word … how to manage branch-office relationships for a very long while.

Instituting the organization’s business culture while establishing the levels of trust and alignment needed for effective collaboration wasn’t easy even when everyone was expected to show up for work in their assigned cubicles at their assigned locations and schedules, when those cubicles weren’t located at corporate headquarters.

As my grandparenthood inexorably approaches I’m wrestling with an envisioned future in which the soon-to-arrive next-generation member of my family and I will be more digital entities to each other than flesh-and-blood human beings.

It’s parallel: Colleagues might not be family members the way offspring and offsprings’ offspring are, but their relationship dynamics have commonalities worth paying attention to.

For example: From what I’ve heard, read about, and experienced, managers of hybrid workforces who schedule regular one-on-one catch-up conversations with those they’re paid to lead … and who keep to that schedule … are in the minority.

This is ridiculous. For managers of in-person workforces, regular one-on-one meetings are routine, and for good reason: If trust and alignment are essential for effective team functioning, they can only be more so for managers and their direct reports to work together effectively.

So if trust and alignment are essential aspects of effective leadership, frequent one-on-one contact is a prerequisite.

A prerequisite, not a complete solution. Because as all of us recognize who have maintained business relationships via web conferencing tools, these tools are more useful for maintaining relationships than for building them from scratch.

It’s right about here that the grandparental parallels do break down, or had better break down: the bond between familial infants and adults is built far more on physical contact than the relationship between leaders and those they lead.

And so, I’m left to wonder how well a mostly digital relationship will go when getting to know my newest relative.

Bob’s last word: Please, please, please! Don’t start to explore how robot care givers might fit into the challenge. We can imagine technology that gives mechanical nannies and their charges animations of their physical-world faces and so on. I supposed it might work. But the potential for traumatization strikes me as far greater than for better relationship-building.

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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

Yeah, yeah, I know. I should stay out of politics and current events; certainly, if I do, I shouldn’t contribute to our current state of tribalism by affiliating with any political tribe.

But I have to, because (Warning: Breaking Political News follows) in case you missed it, the inmates really are trying to run the asylum. Only they’re failing; also, I’m not being fair to the non-metaphorical asylums, let alone their inmates.

Call me naïve; I can’t help thinking that if we could limit every inmate to statements that are factually correct, then our asylum’s governance couldn’t help but improve.

No, this isn’t a particularly novel sentiment. Worse, merely bemoaning that our public discourse has been polluted by Jewish Space Lasers and preposterous braggadocio about power poles and power lines. doesn’t accomplish very much.

Bemoaning is useless. Fortunately, I think I’ve just designed a way to leverage artificial intelligence technologies to improve the quality of our great nation’s political dialog.

It starts with an ankle bracelet.

But not just any ankle bracelet. This one wouldn’t track its wearer’s location to make sure they don’t violate the terms of their parole.

This one would track the factualness of its wearer’s statements. On uttering something completely or mostly false, the ankle bracelet would emit a deafening sound effect (ah-ooooo-ga!(?)) along with a loud voice yelling “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” or something equally pithy. And unless the wearer immediately retracted the statement it would be ‘posted (what used to be “tweeted”) along with a snarky and disparaging commentary.

The goal would be to humiliate any and every public servant who doesn’t respect basic honest discourse.

Who would have to wear one of these undecorative but useful pieces of information technology?

That would be anyone and everyone who holds or aspires to holding elective or high-level appointive office.

But … I can hear critics complain … wouldn’t this violate the office-holder’s first amendment rights?

I don’t think so, for two reasons.

The first: Nobody (and nothing) stops anyone from saying or publishing anything. The magic AI gadget would be responsive, not preventive.

And second: Very much like a driver’s license, we can define running for office as implied consent.

Now I’m the first to caution that machine-learning-style AI insights aren’t completely reliable. The KJR Honesty-Assessment Ankle Bracelet would only be as reliable as its training data.

A technology and process like this would certainly require an appeals process. We might even imagine that this appeals process would be fair, with published retractions when necessary, and with the cost of investigating the appeal paid by the bracelet manufacturer if the appeal is affirmed, but … fair is fair … paid by the offender if the bracelet’s assessment is upheld.

Bob’s last word: This week’s screed might strike you as satire. Satire was, in fact, my plan.

But as long-time readers know I’ve been warning about the dangers of intellectual relativism and the organizational importance of a culture of honest inquiry for a very long time now, and recent events just reinforce that we as a society need to do something, and the fact-checkers we have in place, no matter how good they are, just don’t scale up enough to cope with the scope of the problem..

I’m not yet convinced we need to do anything quite this radical. But a concerted effort to reinforce the importance of factualness in our public dialog? Absolutely. A process that ridicules, lambasts, embarrasses, and otherwise humiliates the propagandists who increasingly control our public dialog?

Sign me up!.

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