The Storycraft Adventures: Mapping Way Ahead with Fibonacci and Dragons

The Storycraft Adventures: Mapping Way Ahead with Fibonacci and Dragons Can stories be the driving force behind change and guide us towards a clear path forward? This question was at the heart of my recent workshop with the European Trainers Network. Our goal was to explore the potential of storytelling in finding solutions for pressing challenges, such as improving internal communication and achieving results with diverse teams. Using a guinea pig of a fictional scenario crafted from three real stories, we embarked on a three-step journey. We delved into telling the stories, leveraging the power of Anecdote Circles, mapped possible solutions in the complexity space using the Cynefin framework, and employed the technique of Planning Poker to prioritize our solutions.

A fragment of Carta marina, the public domain image.

Playing Planning Poker turned out to an immensely insightful exercise. For those who are not familiar with the Planning Poker—it is a gamified technique for estimations. The members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table, instead of speaking to them aloud, to avoid the cognitive bias of anchoring. A typical deck has cards showing progressing in non-linear manner (e.g. 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100), as it better reflects the nature of the world. We played in Zoom White Board using a shortened deck by Redbooth—only 1, 3, 8, 100 and Dragon “Here be dragons” to mark dangerous unknown areas.

Our participants were tasked with estimating the level of effort required for the proposed solutions that we had mapped in the previous step. After the initial round of assessments, a fascinating picture emerged. Some ideas received similar estimates, while others, including seemingly straightforward solutions, garnered disparate cards—like a combo of 1, 100, and the enigmatic Dragon. Rather than seeking immediate consensus and convergence, we embraced the divergence and initiated conversations. This exploration uncovered a wealth of stories and nuanced solutions. For instance, the idea of having a dedicated communicator to facilitate dialogue between different teams was split into two parts. The first part, selecting a dedicated person to facilitate communication, received a score of 3 and was placed in the complicated domain—there are good practices how to do it. However, organizing the communication process itself, was considered a project itself, requiring expert knowledge and scored 100, and placed between complex and complicated dolmans—as it requires experimentation. Similarly, a seemingly simple idea to partner with an electronic company to provide travel adaptors for the US market was met with a dissenting Dragon card. This unexpected response raised important considerations related to legal requirements and the need to thoroughly assess market demands before proceeding.

The Storycraft Adventures workshop helped me to realize three things. First, stories has an immense transformative potential. Second, estimations, similar to Planning Poker, could highlight important deviations in views and dissents—promising unexplored territories and a fresh perspective. Third, in embracing the divergence and exploring the stories behind the different estimates, we uncovered a treasure chest of insights and valuable perspectives. By combining storytelling techniques with collaborative estimation methods, we gained a deeper understanding of the challenges at hand and charted a way forward that encompassed the complexity and nuances of our goals.

European Trainers Network is serving club members of any Toastmasters club in Europe. ETN facilitates development of skills needed to create and conduct training sessions using adult learning theory.

Horror Then vs Now

Do you notice the ever-changing landscape of horror? Back in the day, we were terrified of those old cursed houses, with their eerie vibes and creaking floorboards, featuring known horrors, whether mythical or real. But fast forward to today, and what do we have?

Haunted smart homes! Forget the ghostly moans, clinking of chains, and transparent figures in white. The menace is unknown and ubiquitous. It could be a thermostat running amok, controlled by hackers who think they can mess with our lives. It could be a peeping web camera, broadcasting publicly due to the nonchalance of the person who installed it. It could even be a fridge ordering a hundred packs of toothpicks as the hallucinating AI recommendation system decides these mini swords are an absolute must for an epic battle between the condiments.

Remember the days when we were scared of the idea of big machines going haywire, giving us the heebie-jeebies? HAL9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey” would say things like, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.” Well, now we don’t have insanity in the mainframe; instead, we have an army of tiny WiFi ghosts haunting our routers, watching our Netflix, chuckling at our WhatsApp messages, and making us guess who is truly behind that black box during a Zoom call. It’s like living in a digital haunted house, where even our own devices have a mischievous spirit.

So, remember to keep your devices secure and your sense of humor intact. After all, what’s scarier than a haunted smart home? Trying to get tech support on a Monday morning!

Meaningless vs Meaning-loss

Today I got an email, which read like the following (I scrapped boring non-essential parts):

Hello Mihail PELEAH,
Thank you for your interest in null, and applying for [...] Please note that [...] 
Sincerely,
Recruitment Team
null
Picture from "Vovka in a Far Far Away Kingdom", 1965 animation https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213309/

One of many machine-generated messages, one could say, cheap, fast, ubiquitous. Seems nothing wrong with it—in the end, Bloomberg has been using automatically generated news since the 90s or 80s. But this email is meaning-loss. 

It brought no new information to me—the scrapped part […] highlighted some info, which had already been in the application. But someone decided to send this email, and prioritized speed over quality, and checking how it will look like for recipients.

Automatization—epitomized by buttons “Make it nice!” or “Do it for me!”—giving raises the attitude “I don’t know and I don’t care” and desire to outsource decisions. According to the Oracle Decision Dilemma Report 2023, 64% of people and 70% of business leaders would prefer to have a robot make their decisions. However, this is meaning-loss, it distracts from the question WHY we make these decisions, and focuses on miniscule hassle of WHATs of decision making. 

Meaningless could be useful sometimes, meaning-loss—never. Meaningless mingling at parties could be fun and camaraderie. Meaningless slam and mosh-pit can help us shed negativity. Meaningless sitting in silence in a corner is called meditation. 

(Oxford dictionary defines meaningless as “without any purpose or reason” and adds “and therefore not worth doing or having.” Many artists would not agree with the latter statement) 

In a world plagued by speed and efficiency, it is easy to fall into the trap of meaning-loss. Maybe by embracing the meaningless could help us to slow down, focus on quality and ask ourselves WHY? to reclaim our agency?

P.S. Just got another email:

Congratulations! Job requisition [...] was canceled and has reached the Open - Canceled status.

Breaking down the wall to reach your audience

Invisible wall exists between every speaker and their audience. You need to break down that wall to reach your audience, it’s the art of getting to “them.” To move from an experienced speaker to an engaging speaker, you need to understand that how you’re connecting is just as important as what you’re saying.
🧙‍♂️ Tell great stories. What establishes trust? Authenticity, simplicity, and creativity. All elements of a great story. An insightful story can persuade people from any walk of life.
🤹‍♀️ Ask powerful questions. Rather than pretend to be a know-it-all, ask questions to get them thinking, invite them to analyze how they think, provide food for thought, to make their own thought-based decisions.
🤗 Tap into empathy. Build your presentation around their needs. What subject really matters to them? What challenges are they facing? What do they need to make themselves successful?
🌜🌞 Use contrast and variety. “Serve” viewers a buffet of brief stories, contrasting a serious, investigative piece, delivered with intensity, with a fun human-interest story, sprinkled with banter.
🤷‍♂️ Embrace mistakes. Mistakes happen. No matter how much you plan, something unexpected and unpredictable is bound to occur. On the improv stage this fact creates magic. For an improviser there are no mistakes, only opportunities. Any communicator can practice this with any audience.
💯 Be real. Let them be real. Authenticity is the currency of a real engagement from an audience.

Listen podcast and read full article “8 Tips for Engaging Your Audience” 👉 https://lnkd.in/eYC96Nzk

Bringing the ‘punk’ in Cyberpunk!

As the bustling city streets filled with pedestrians, a peculiar sight caught the attention of a curious onlooker. A delivery robot, with its tiny rollers and glowing LED eyes, stood patiently at a pedestrian crossing, waiting for the green light to signal its safe passage.

Meanwhile, humans rushed past the robot without a second thought, jaywalking and ignoring traffic rules as if they were mere suggestions. As if guided by some divine hand, cosmic irony intervened, arranging a perfectly synchronized sequence of events.

The traffic light turned green, signalling the robot to move forward. Just as it began to step forward, a delivery boy with a bulky square package appeared beside it. And just like that, the robot and the delivery boy moved in a stunning display of synchronized dance, as if they had been rehearsing the routine for weeks.

The robot blinked its LED eye and muttered to itself:

[{  "image_id":"I0ZyaWRheUZ1bkZlZWQ=",     "label": [{
          "label":"class_name_human", 
          "prob": 0.9871635, 
          "text":"Meatbags, what a bunch of morons. . . Bringing the 'punk' in Cyberpunk!", 
    },]
}]

What’s Wrong with ChatGPT? A view from Economists

Renowned economists—Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson—are concerned about ChatGPT. More precisely—the way how AI deployed by corporations in the US. Their analysis points out that it could displace workers, harm consumers, and bring losses to investors. The crux of the issues is focusing on cutting labour costs (in a short run), with little regard for the future of spending power and workers earnings, as well as neglecting the potential benefits of AI.

🤖 AI arms race, funded by billions from companies and venture-capital funds, bringing in a technology that can now be used to replace humans across a wider range of tasks. This could be a disaster not only for workers, but also for consumers and even investors.

👨‍🏭 The workers are facing clear and present danger. The job market is shifting, resulting in a decrease in demand for positions that require strong communication skills, ultimately leading to a decrease in higher-paying jobs. This trend is particularly challenging for younger people, just starting their careers, as there will be fewer entry-level positions available. AI powered tools could help in legal research, but deprive novice lawyers of learning techne through hands-on research.

🛍 Consumers, too, will suffer. Although they may suffice for routine inquiries, they are inadequate for addressing more complex issues—flight delay, household emergency, or dealing with a breakdown in personal relationships. We need understanding and actions of qualified professionals, not eloquent but unhelpful chatbots.

💸 Investors could also be disappointed as companies invest in AI technology and cut back on their workforce. Rather than investing in new technologies and providing training for their employees to improve services, executives are more interested in keeping employment low and wages as low as possible. This strategy is self-defeating and could harm investors in a long run.

🐙 The crux of the issues is that the potential of AI is being overlooked as most US tech leaders are investing in software that can replicate tasks already performed by humans. Contrary, AI-powered digital tools can be used to help nurses, teachers, and customer-service representatives understand what they are dealing with and what would help improve outcomes for patients, students, and consumers. The focus is primarily on reducing labor costs with little regard for the immediate customer experience and the long-term spending power of Americans. However, history has shown that this approach is not necessary. Ford recognized that there was no point in mass-producing cars if people couldn’t afford to buy them. In contrast, modern corporate leaders are utilizing new technologies in a way that could have detrimental effects on our future.

Read full article https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/chatgpt-ai-big-tech-corporate-america-investing-in-eliminating-workers-by-daron-acemoglu-and-simon-johnson-2023-02

P.S. I am currently reading “In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power” by Shoshana Zuboff. The book published back in mid-1980s explores impact of the first wave of smart machines on labour relationships and future of work. There are a lot of similarities and lessons learned for current wave of ubiquitous AI-fication.

The Rise of the Data Elite: How AI Research is Re: inforcing Power Imbalances

The rise of AI-powered tools is transforming our everyday lives. We use the magic of ChatGPT and Midjourney and more mundane AI-powered credit profiling and email completion tools. However, the democratization of AI use is accompanied by global power disparities in AI research. A chart from the “Internet Health Report 2022” shows that the landscape of AI research papers is heavily skewed towards a few countries and elite institutions. The map reveals that more than half of the datasets used for AI performance benchmarking were from just 12 institutions and tech companies in the United States, Germany, and Hong Kong (China).

This map shows how often 1,933 datasets were used (43,140 times) for performance benchmarking across 26,535 different research papers from 2015 to 2020.
Reduced, Reused and Recycled: The Life of a Dataset in Machine Learning Research, Bernard Koch, Emily Denton, Alex Hanna, Jacob G. Foster, 2021.

This major imbalance in the discourse about how AI should be used and who should benefit from it reinforces existing power imbalances. A discussion piece from Data Pop Alliance called “The Return of East India Companies: AI, Africa and the New (Digital) Colonialism” explores various aspects of AI colonialism in Africa. For instance, there is under-development of natural language processing (NLP) technologies for non-Western languages. Computer vision of self-driving cars relies on low-paid human workers to label hundreds of hours of data. Lax ethical standards and “data dumping” in countries with less stringent data protection regulations effectively renders local people and society—AI guinea pigs. Despite the decreasing cost of training machine learning systems and greater availability of data, the power dynamics in AI research and development continue to reflect the dominance of a select few.

While machine learning models and datasets are being developed in other parts of the world, their use in research papers and performance benchmarking is still limited. We have the power to seek greater diversity and inclusivity in AI research, and to advocate for ethical standards that address data inequalities–as consumers and as researchers. For example, the UNDP and UNICEF regional Eurasia platform STEM4ALL to promote women and girls, share knowledge, raise awareness, and break gender stereotypes in STEM. Another way is by promoting collaboration across borders and develop own datasets to contribute to the global conversation.

The Hidden Benefits of Commuting: Finding Serenity in the Space Between

A stray dog named “Boji” has become a local celebrity after using buses, subways and ferries to travel across Turkey’s metropolitan city of Istanbul.

I used to hate mornings. Istanbul is a very anisotropic City. Commuting from one neighborhood to another, just two blocks away, could take everything from 5 to 55 minutes. However, I start valuing this commuting time as a “liminal space” between personal and business realms. It helps me to transition between home and work life, to kick start the day, and to finish it.

There are three elements of this transition ritual. First, is physical activity, which fuels my internal engine. I have to walk 10-15 minutes either to the bus or the subway stop. This walk makes me energetic and improves my mood–oxytocin proved to have beneficial cognitive and behavioural effects. Second, I use  walking and commuting time to learn something new, to push my creativity for the day. Podcasts are great, I have some business related–Anecdotally Speaking, Talking About Organizations, or Re:Thinking.  Some pure fun on the bun–Friday Night Comedy or Something Rhymes with Purple. Other good options are Coursera and LinkedIn learning apps, which allow you to save videos to watch off-line.  Third, I use this time to reflect and think things over. I always have a notebook and pen with me, and Google.Docs on my smartphone. (Full disclosure: I drafted and edited this post while enjoying views of Beşiktaş from DT2 bus). This helps me to kick start day or unload business thoughts at the end of the day.

This ritual works very well while working from home or while on a business trip. You could use  a treadmill for a 15 minutes walk, or simply walk around a block–I often enjoyed cities at 6am, empty and quiet. Podcasts are always with you, as well as a notebook and a pen.

Don’t hate mornings, instead embrace an opportunity. By incorporating a simple morning ritual–such as a short walk, listening to something new and interesting, and reflecting on your goals and intentions–you can prioritize your well-being and kick start the day; or close the day, avoiding business spillover to home life.