Humans + AI

Natasha Vita-More, a pioneer of the transhumanist movement, discusses topics such as transhumanism, increasing neuroplasticity, and beneficial AGI. She explores the potential of AI as a tool and emphasizes the importance of emotional and psychological growth alongside technological advancements. Natasha also delves into addressing cognitive biases, fostering brain health, and practical advice for enhancing cognition and mental well-being. The podcast covers the significance of brain plasticity, the concept of uploading minds and transferring memories, and the principles of transhumanism for creating a better future.

Dave Snowden, creator of the Cynefin Framework and SenseMaker®, explores topics such as abductive reasoning, AI's impact on human cognition and energy demands, collective intelligence, innovative approaches in physics and strategy, estuary metaphor in complexity, and leveraging complexity principles in AI. The dangers and opportunities of AI are discussed, along with recommendations for enhancing cognition through broad reading and open information sources.

Byron Reese discusses humans as a superorganism, Agora as a marketplace for collective intelligence, technology in shaping human evolution, potential of AI, and power of storytelling.

“Those who are so afraid that they don’t want to touch anything related to AI are the ones who, A, are probably going to lose their jobs, or, B, worse, could create some unintended damage.” – Heidi Lorenzen About Heidi Lorenzen Heidi Lorenzen is Executive Producer and Director of The Humanity Code. She comes from an extensive background as a go-to-market leader for sector leaders such as Accela, Singularity University, CloudWords, and GlobalEnglish, working in a number of countries across three continents, as well as an executive advisor to fast-growth startups. Heidi has been named one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology. Website: www.thehumanitycode.ai LinkedIn: Heidi Lorenzen Twitter: @hlorenzen  What you will learn Generative AI: introduction and impact (02:58) Introduction of “The Humanity Code” – a documentary on AI and its human impact (04:46) The essence and goals of “The Humanity Code” (07:05) The need for a collective vision for humanity (10:05) Integrating vision, governance, and long-term thinking in AI development (11:59) Exploring key pillars for AI development and corporate strategy (18:14) Reflecting on diverse perspectives and governance challenges in AI development (22:39) Exploring AI’s role in enhancing humanity and work (27:00) Role and responsibility in the age of AI (32:43) Episode Resources BusinessWeek MagazineSingularity UniversityGenerative AIAthena AllianceOpen AIDall-EMidjourneyThe Humanity Code PeopleEthan ShaotranJoe DispenzaSam AltmanIlya Sutskever Transcript Ross Dawson: Heidi, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Heidi Lorenzen: Thank you so much for having me, Ross. I know we have a vision match on a lot of topics here, so looking forward to digging in.  Ross: You’ve had an illustrious corporate and related career making things happen in organizations and recently felt the need to go beyond that. Tell us why.  Heidi: Yes, that’s exactly right. That’s how we first met. I’ve had a 20-year career in tech as a go-to-market executive, CMO – Chief Marketing Officer, and the like. Before that, I was in media, in BusinessWeek Magazine for several years. One of the stops on my career tour, recently, about eight or so years ago, was at Singularity University which is renowned for educating entrepreneurs and executives on the crazy pace of technological change, that we are experiencing right now. Since then, I have been doing a lot of reflecting on what technology means for humanity’s future. As I’ve reached, it’s called a later stage in my career, with lots of experience, I’ve been thinking about the impact that I can create. Ever since the introduction of Generative AI just a year ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about Okay, AI is in everybody’s hands right now, at this point in time. What we had been teaching people about at Singularity is basically here. There’s so much unknown, so much risk and so much potential. I just want to ensure that we’re focused on the potential and make the best happen.  Ross: One of your initiatives is a documentary. Tell us about that Heidi: Yes. I didn’t just wake up and say, I want to make a documentary, it was more around this concept, this issue, that people must understand that, A, AI matters, they need to be thinking about it, and B, we have a window of time. There’s variance among researchers in how much time, whether it’s two years or 10 years. Some other friends say it’s too late, but not many believe that. There’s a limited amount of time for us to be intentional about how we’re shaping AI. I wanted to make sure that people understood that, also wanted to raise the awareness that AI, it’s not artificial, it’s actually very human because it has learned and is learning from us as humans. We haven’t necessarily done the best job in creating the optimal outcomes for all of us. How can we be more intentional about taking the best of humanity and encoding it within AI? I’m currently calling this project The Humanity Code. Within it, I’m producing a documentary. I felt that was one of the ways to get the broadest and most visceral, invisible reach. I’m also just curating conversations around it, because literally, no one has the answers and the best thing to do is get all the brains on deck to work this through.  Ross: Let’s dig into that name. Words are really important sometimes. It took me months and months to land on Amplifying Cognition as the name for the podcast and my theme. The Humanity Code, I think a lot has gone into that as a frame. I’d love to hear what The Humanity Code means to you.  Heidi: It’s a bit of a double entendre, obviously with the word Code, referring to the fact that AI is coded. However, The Humanity Code speaks to what is the essence of humanity. What is our code that we want to encode into AI? What is the best of us? A lot of thought did go into it. I thought about Humanity Encoded, but that sounds scary, it sounds like you’re coding us. But the intent is, human beings, humanity, this species is pretty special and pretty beautiful. If we can take the best of that, and extract it, and be intentional about putting it in AI, then we’ll all be better off. Otherwise, to oversimplify it, AI will learn from the various incentives we put in place, the various systems we put in place, and our negative instincts. All of that is very human. We sometimes get in our own way, though, of creating the best lives for ourselves and others. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had a partner who had all the best of us and not the worst of us? I’m not saying that we can actually get to that beautiful, amazing point. But we can and we have to get closer to that with AI so that it, again, produces more of the better outcomes. It’s very, very capable, and it’s already doing a lot.  Ross: Absolutely. I was at this very interesting AI event in San Francisco, where Ethan Shaotran, a researcher and leader in the space, basically said that it is our role to be examples to AI, to teach them what the best of human behavior could be, as opposed to the obvious examples where it’s not the best it could be.  Heidi: That’s exactly right. I heard somebody also say, We are the prompt. We have to be the prompt. You twist on Gandhi’s Be the Change, not to be the prompt.  Ross: That’s a great frame. To get almost tactical, how can we put the best of what humanity is into these models and their behaviors? It’s a nice concept. Are there things that we can specifically be doing to be good examples or exemplars or guides to the best of what humanity can be?  Heidi: There are so many layers to that. That’s the creative challenge with this documentary; how to bring that out, because it touches everything from how we show up as humans, the inner guidance that we have, to the systems that we’ve put in place, the constructs, let’s call it, that we put in place to run societies, to run businesses, to run governments. Then, of course, there’s the technological component, the physical coding, and just the intentionality of what’s being done there. All of those are huge. It’s something like, okay, take out the playbook here and we’ll do that. That’s quite the problem. We literally have no playbook right now. There are a couple of things that I’m thinking about, and having conversations with folks about. Thinking about ourselves, we don’t even have a collective vision for what humanity wants. If you think about the typical corporate world, companies have their mission, vision, and values, even people will do that work personally thinking these are my values, this is what I want to accomplish this year, this is my purpose in life, and we don’t have an extrapolation of that for our specie just to get really grandiose. To the degree that we can move closer to that is key. I think it’s a combination, again, of having conversations, and even doing collective visioning exercises.  I hosted a dinner not too long ago, where it was a room full of over 20 women envisioning what an ideal future could look like. I think collecting a lot of that input and just having people ponder that, as basic as it seems, I think it really makes a difference because as Joe Dispenza says, where you put your attention is where you put your energy. That really is true at a collective level as well. I think that’s key. That’s the softer, but maybe, really important piece because a lot of people don’t recognize the connections between what we feel inside, and then the actions that we take externally. Another very practical area is around governance or regulation. There’s a lot of talk around that. That’s more in the vernacular today, and that’s regulation at the corporate level, at the government level. It is a key to it, but I think it’s, again, important to understand that regulation is what’s holding it in fact, but you still need that other side of the possibility and the potential of what AI can bring, so that as you’re regulating it, you’re building toward what you want, you’re not just clamping for the sake of clamping it down. On that, there was this recent debacle, a roller coaster ride here in the Bay Area, with Sam Altman being ousted as CEO, and that essentially, was a major corporate governance debacle and shortfall. Companies are really struggling with what to do with AI because they’re motivated by commercial incentives. They want to leverage AI to increase productivity and efficiency and create new products and all of that. Yet, they also should recognize that the decisions that they’re making will have long-term implications for society. This isn’t just your corporate governance 101 type stuff, it’s something that governing bodies need to be thinking seriously about. I’m working currently, within an organization called the Athena Alliance, on an AI governance playbook. There’s a group of about six of us women who are working on that. The idea is to focus on the things that, again, aren’t governance 101. One of our first pillars is long-term thinking. If companies are thinking about the implications of decisions on the planet, climate change, long-term value creation, and all senses of the word, the literal value creation for shareholders, customers, etc., but also just value creation for the betterment of society. That’s something that has to be taken very seriously now, because, again, AI will only amplify and accelerate what we’re doing now.  Ross: One of my frames for the last dozen years is around governance for transformation. It’s an idea that governance is not only about managing risks or downsides but also being able to amplify positives. Any governance system that stops change is broken, and it’s going to destroy organizations or society as a whole. That’s one thing where, both at the corporate level and supranational level. There’s a lot of rhetoric now in the supranational initiatives around AI governance, which are talking about the positive potential, and getting that balance between how it is we contain any risks or downsides, whilst opening up the possibilities of positive changes. It’s a very delicate and challenging one.  The pragmatic for the organization. If you have an organization and a leader who is looking at setting AI governance, what are the steps? You talked about that partly and you said firstly, is to have some long-term vision to be able to have some clarity or long-term thinking around what are we creating as an organization or what is happening from this. But what are some of the other steps or processes that a leader should be going through in establishing an AI governance framework?  Heidi: Another key pillar which, again, is very broad but high impact, and that’s just a strong degree of curiosity around learning everything. Those who are either waiting until this all washes out or those who are just so afraid, that they don’t want to touch anything related to AI, are the ones who A, are probably going to lose their jobs, or B, worse, could create some unintended damage. By just learning, being just super curious about keeping up on what AI is, what governance issues are, that is really key; and including the social implications of that. Another is to think through the talent strategy for an organization. As an example, several organizations are now creating a chief AI officer to ensure that someone is keeping their eye on that ball from all angles, whether it is product development, internal efficiency creation, or positive impact on the community, someone’s got their eye on that ball. That’s one piece of it. But failing that, there’s recognition that this really needs to be part of every employee, especially leaders and the executive team’s ability to understand and to be adaptable. Because with this exponential rate of change right now, tomorrow can look very different from today. People have to pivot and adjust. Having that as part of the talent strategy, looking for those key attributes that may not have gotten so much attention in the past, but are now mission critical for good corporate governance. Then, of course, there is risk mitigation overall. That runs the gamut from the basics, which I think is the bread and butter of this general security, security of company data, and security against cyber attacks. Also, the externally facing view of risk mitigation that what are, again, maybe some unintended consequences that could happen as a result of these decisions that we’re making as a company. It should go without saying, but another theory is just generally being compliant when those regulations come out, and the ones that already do exist, making sure that, again, somebody is keeping their eye on that ball to ensure that they are staying compliant.  Ross: We are speaking a couple of days after the famous Sam Altman weekend and without trying to draw any perspectives that will endure as opposed to be irrelevant a few hours from now, I think it does speak to some of the governance structures we need to have in place. We’ve pretty clearly established that governance structures there were not that effective. Are there any high-level lessons that we can learn around governance structures from AI early on from this extraordinary weekend?  Heidi: Yes. First and foremost, it just underscores, again, that no one has the answers, no one has a crystal ball of where AI is going to take us. More importantly, there isn’t a single point of view on how to achieve safe and ethical AI. Even within a company like Open AI, you’ve got various camps. Those are the camps that ultimately fought, let’s call it. But if you were to peel back the onion, both sides are coming from the same place of ‘we want the best for humanity’. You’ve got the Sam Altman side thinking the best for humanity is that we continue to develop, we continue to evolve AI so that it can better serve us, it can solve our problems, it can improve education and improve health care, it can create more economic equity, just to name a few, and on the other hand, you’ve got Ilya Sutskever and other members of the board, who are a little more on the Doomer side, and they too want the best for humanity, in their minds, they don’t want humanity to somehow become extinct because of AI. They feel Okay, we’ve got to slow down, and maybe even pause. The current focus for the Open AI management team right now is that they intend to pause and slow down. They’re both coming from this same desired outcome of creating the best for humanity and yet, there’s a different point of view. That just underscores how incredibly hard this is. From a corporate governance standpoint, what it does mean is, again, just being very, very transparent, staying grounded in the core values, talking through the pros and cons of the different options, and making decisions, as you were saying before, that create positive outcome while dampening the worst risk. It can’t be one extreme or the other. I don’t have a pollyannish view around what AI can do, but I am very impressed when I see some of the things that AI can do. I, for one, would like more of that and so would others whether they are the tech leaders or just the general population. But there has to be the balance. We can’t go guns blazing to support that because then you may literally have done. Ross: Taking a bit of a sidestep. The theme of Amplifying Cognition is, in a way, amplifying humanity. That was probably number two on the list of names of the podcast – Amplifying Humanity – which was probably just a bit misleading title. But that’s really what we want to do. How do we amplify our best thinking as individuals, or collectively as humanity? Getting down to specifics as much as possible, what are ways where you see that we can use AI to amplify who we are, in terms of just our work, our intent, or our values? What is that path to amplifying humans through AI?  Heidi: Again, many, many answers that are deep and below the surface and those that are more external. But what comes immediately to mind is I actually saw Ilya Sutskever. He’s the Chief Scientist at Open AI. I saw him present. Just to underscore that even though he has a different point of view, he still is coming from the right place, when he was a little boy, and he would play with technology, he got this intense sense of who he was compared to the technology. That really stuck with him. Now he thinks a lot about how AI can help us understand more about ourselves. Just as we’ve been talking about right now, it’s causing us to reflect on what is it that really makes us human. What is different than what we’re teaching AI? What’s the sustaining component of the essence of who we are that’s there? I think just that in and of itself can help us reflect and learn more about who we are both individually and collectively. Think about the wonderful things that humans do, take creativity of any sort, and think about how AI can amplify that. A lot of people are afraid it’s going to take it away. But if we focus on the amplification As an example, writing. There are amazing writers and AI can also do very good writing. It’s an amplification of our ability to do that. Those who aren’t such great writers can get better and can learn. For those who are great writers, that can increase their output, so more of their works get out into the world. As you know about art, we’ve seen the beautiful pieces that Dall-E and Midjourney are putting can be used to create art. A neighbor of mine has been creating the most amazing pieces. Early on, as a little girl, she always wanted to be an artist, and then she too went into the corporate world and did that. Now this is just allowing her to go back into her passion without having gone to art school or having all sorts of training. She’s just totally delighted by the experience, but she’s also feeling really guilty, like, is this really art? If I’ve asked the AI to borrow, to merge Dall-E and Matisse, or something like that. Is that her art or not? It’s really conflicting, but it’s amplification, nonetheless, it’s human expression. Then you talk about work. The definition of work is going to evolve and change. I think the jobs that we hold now, in a decade or so, will seem very odd and quaint. We’ll look back and think, why did we have people doing those things? What a waste of time. But AI, whether it’s through, again, helping with coding, helping with writing, or helping doing data analysis, can just accelerate the grunt work that nobody really ever did want to do, and allow the potential to focus on other areas. Another event that I was at, I won’t name names, but it was a fairly senior product manager from a pretty renowned tech company, and there was a question around how he was thinking about AI and its ultimate impact. Her response was, of course, it’s all about efficiency. That was a complete answer. If that’s really all we’re fighting for, that would be a pretty sad state. There’s so much more that you can do with AI. Yes, some efficiencies are created in the work environment, but again, toward what end ultimately? Toward what end for the company? Toward what end for the customers it serves? Toward what end for the employees and other stakeholders? These are just a few things that popped into my mind.  Ross: To round out, what are your suggestions to our listeners on what they could or should be doing now in terms of being able to play a role or to participate in being able to create a better future through the extraordinary times we live in?  Heidi: I would just say you do play a role, whether you’re aware of it or not, by any interaction with AI. Of course, there’s a lot of AI already running underneath the surface that we’ve been for decades now. But particularly with generative AI, because that’s where we are, unless you’re working for a company and coding, Generative AI, which is the writing and the art creation, those types of things that actually create things as an extension of humans, amplification of humans, with those interactions, again, just be thoughtful about what it is that AI is going to be learning from you as you do that. Then secondarily, I’d stay really smart on what governance and regulation is going on and ensure that that does exist. Currently, again, at this moment in time, the EU is about to determine what they’re going to be deciding on voting on for their AI constitution. They’re ultimately a regulatory body. Stay abreast of that, and if people aren’t happy with where things end up, make sure to be vocal about that. Then lastly, I would say, two more things. Within your company, help raise awareness as well as a lot of things that we’re talking about, and particularly if you’re a leader, some of the things that we talked about before. Then lastly, just do some of that reflection of what is it that makes you human. What is special about us? What is it that we want AI to co-partner with us in creating? What is the vision that we have? Share that with as many people as you can as well.  Ross: Absolutely. We need to have that. Know what it is we want to know to be able to create it. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Heidi. It’s been a true delight.  Heidi: Thank you, Ross. Real pleasure. The post Heidi Lorenzen on encoding humanity in AI, regulation and possibility, amplifying creativity, and collective vision (AC Ep22) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Doing less allows you to increase the cognitive space you have for what’s actually important.” – Eliot Peper About Eliot Peper Eliot Peper is a novelist, author of 11 successful books including Bandwidth, Reap3r, and most recently Foundry, with praise from New York Times Book Review, Seth Godin, Kim Stanley Robinson and many others. He also works on special projects for startup founders, and has worked as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at a venture capital fund. Website: www.eliotpeper.com LinkedIn: Eliot Peper Facebook: Eliot Peper Instagram: @eliotpeper What you will learn Insights on the interplay between technology, literature, and society (03:26) Future of digital services and the integration of programming ideas in writing (11:40) Exploring the feed as a meta-system that encompasses the entire internet (13:50) Emphasizing the importance of simplicity (17:20) How ‘caring’ can be a differentiator in business and personal life (20:56) Exploring fiction through detailed observation (24:22) Drawing inspiration from personal anomalies (27:00) The importance of good sleep (30:28) Boosting mental capacity by spending less than you earn (31:37) The role of having a community in enhancing mental health and cognitive function (33:05) Enhancing life’s journey with consistent habits and patience (34:43) Episode Resources Resources Google+ChatGPT+AppleAmazon Book Foundry by Eliot Peper Reap3r by Eliot Peper Bandwidth (An Analog Novel Book 1) by Eliot Peper Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2) by Eliot Peper Breach (An Analog Novel Book 3) by Eliot Peper Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0 (The Uncommon Series) by Eliot Peper Uncommon Stock: Power Play (The Uncommon Series Book 2) by Eliot Peper Uncommon Stock: Exit Strategy (The Uncommon Series Book 3) by Eliot Peper Cumulus by Eliot Peper Veil by Eliot Peper Neon Fever Dream by Eliot Peper Short Stories True Blue by Eliot Peper Victory Condition by Eliot Peper Human Capital by Eliot Peper Transcript Ross Dawson: Eliot, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Eliot Peper: It’s wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me. Ross: I’ve very much enjoyed your science fiction novels. They’re both very engaging and also have compelling views of possible futures and are very much information-focused. It verily evokes a lot of ideas which I’ve explored around how we make sense of a world when there’s an unlimited amount of information. One of the ideas in several of your books is “the feed”, so tell us, what is “the feed”?  Eliot: You can imagine the feed like Google Plus, ChatGPT+, Apple, Amazon, and all your favorite big internet names stitched together times a thousand. There is a ubiquitous digital membrane right there with you, alongside your experience of the physical world, acting as a piece of almost invisible infrastructure to modern life. One of the interesting things about writing science fiction is that when you imagine a new technology or a new thing that is very normal to the characters in the future the story takes place in, you have to figure out, how do I reveal this to a reader in my own time in a way that makes sense? There’s a set piece in the Analog trilogy, and it’s a social club called “Analog”; it’s actually where the trilogy gets its name. At this social club, everything is immediately off-grid. It’s basically as if you walk through the door, and the feed entirely drops away. It’s fun to write scenes there but it also provides me, as a science fiction writer, with a useful tool, which is that sometimes technology is most visible when it breaks. In this case, when you have people living their lives, and their work, I feel like everything is permeated by this digital layer to your physical existence, and having that torn away from you is a very new and strange experience. A reader in today’s world can read that character’s experience of having that digital veil held back, and only then do you realize the extent to which the feed has influence in everyone’s lives, not just in the plot-specific moments in the story, but in their day-to-day lives; everyone living in that future’s lives. That was one thing I thought about a lot while writing those books. In some ways, it’s funny; one of the most common questions I get asked from fans of those books is, what does the feed actually look like? What’s the physical instantiation of it? I, very intentionally, never gave a very granular description of, for example, the human-computer interface that people are using in the books. I did that on purpose, and the reason is twofold. One is that most of the technologies that are most important to us or that provide a basis for the lives we live, most people don’t think about at all. I don’t think about plumbing very often, but I use it every day, and boy, would life be different in a modern city without modern plumbing. When I drive to get a burrito for lunch, I’d never have thought about the functioning of the internal combustion engine in my car that gets me to the Mexican restaurant and back. There’s a bit of a trope in some science fiction novels where the author is interested in imagining new forms of technology, but the characters, unless they’re dealing with a problem like that right now, why would they be thinking about it? How I approach writing stories set in the future is by trying to think like the people living their lives in that future. This is one of those aspects. I went into it thinking from the character’s perspective about that. But there’s also a cool thing that comes out the back, which is that, because the feed is ubiquitous and plays a large role in the story in the world the story is set in, but it’s never described in specific detail, it actually invites the reader to be a creative participant in the story, that when you read these books, you’re seeing the human impact of technology, and you yourself are imagining the form factor of the technology. One of my favorite things as a writer is hearing from readers who all have their own ideas about what the feed literally looks like, and they’re all very different from each other, and all totally fascinating and useful. I just think that’s a special thing that science fiction can do because it gives us, now, in our present, new metaphors for making sense of the accelerating technological change we’re living through. I often think, how could you ever have had a useful conversation about state surveillance before 1984 came out? Even to just get the idea of ubiquitous state surveillance, you’d need to spend hours just getting on the same page. What are we even talking about here? But that novel created a cultural anchor that allowed people to have conversations about real-world state surveillance much more quickly and much more deeply because you just have this simulacrum of what things might look like that you can use as a reference. That excites me a lot as a writer and as a reader. That’s why I love reading books like this, to get access to those. That’s part of what the feed is there for. Ross: Absolutely, more broadly, reading is a highly creative act. That’s one of the great things about reading as opposed to more immersive entertainment that, as you say, for science fiction writing, if done well, can be like a palimpsest for the reader to create their own worlds and imagine those. I love how you get that feedback loop of what people make with the blank spaces you’ve allowed in your writing to imagine that. If we think forward to the feed, one characteristic of that is that it is deeply used for everyone. It is also ubiquitous and it is monolithic as one organization. I’m interested in a couple of things. One is, where we’ve got now is many organizations attempting to provide feeds to us in various guises. All of them with, let’s say, vested interests, financial and otherwise. Supposing one of the ideas or one of the pathways, how is it that we might, from here, be able to get to a place where we have feeds that are truly, completely focused on creating value for the user? They don’t need to be essentially monopolies, what is the path to where we can get these feeds that are completely focused on creating value for the user from where we stand today? Eliot: I can think of two pathways. I live in California, and on the internet I inhabit, there isn’t an everything app. But if you look at WeChat in China or something like that, that’s almost a lot closer, in some ways to what the feed is just because you can do everything from chat to transactions to just a million different things, all in one app. An easy answer to that question would be, as some of the internet political economics plays out over the next 20 years, there’s going to be a lot of aggregation of currently independent services into larger companies. Look at the energy industry or something like that, on a longer time horizon, it had tons of consolidation and only has a few major players in the world today. But that’s the easy answer. The more interesting answer is to take one step back. I’m sure that some of your listeners are computer scientists, programmers, or developers. One concept, one metaphor that I love from my friends who write code is the idea that you’re always reaching for new levels of abstraction. There’s a problem, you try to solve it, but you try to solve it in a way that could be used to solve any problem of that category rather than only that problem. That’s what makes the code useful. Now you’re dealing with a new layer of abstraction above what you’re originally thinking about. I tried to do that with my fiction. If you read business news today, or tech news today, it’s all about Apple did this or this new AI tool is doing something cool or isn’t this scary, it’s all focused on the players, it’s not focused on the game. The feed is the game, not the players. Rather than thinking about Google versus Apple versus all those consumer brands that you associate the Internet with, think about the Internet itself as a system, where there are just different people building stuff on it with different incentives and different reasons and they’re trying to create value in their own ways, often failing, often not being successful. But overall, it’s the system of all of that code working in conjunction, all of those processors working away in the service we never see, and not just that but all the people who work for the institutions that develop that stuff. If you’re an employee of Google, you’re part of the feed. You could make an argument that you’re working for the Internet, or you can view your employment in different ways. All the laws that are written about how the internet is used, all of that is part of this meta-system and I look at that meta-system and call it the feed. It is in the novels, yes, you’re right, that feed is controlled by a single very large institution. But I think that’s less important than it appears upfront because the reality is that even if you did have a huge institution that somehow shepherded all of that infrastructure, in reality, the people doing the work have their own incentives, and they’re trying to provide value in different ways that often conflict with each other. You could make an argument that that just wouldn’t even work very differently. You could almost just look at today’s internet computer ecosystem, call that the feed and we’re almost there. Ross: Exactly. This goes to my next question. You’re a science fiction writer, you keep up across the edge of change and be ahead of that. As you say, essentially, we all have access to our own feeds, and the way I put it in Thriving on Overload is that we are shifting our mindset from overload to abundance as in we have all of the information we could possibly want. But the onus is on us individually to be able to piece that together and use it well to be able to make it, not one of overload but one where just the right information comes to us. How do you piece together what you have to create your own feed in your life? Eliot: Okay, so not how did I come up with the idea of the feed? Ross: No. What is your day-by-day? Eliot: There are a few things that I think about a lot that helped me with that. Readers probably can notice if they read that trilogy, the arc of that trilogy is like me coming to terms with the question you just asked, me trying to figure out some of that stuff for myself in my life, and obviously, that’s externalized and dramatized in the story, but everyone struggles with this. There are a few things that I try to do, that I find helpful, and they seem really simple. I feel the most important things in life are really simple but them being simple doesn’t mean they’re easy. That’s the problem. They’re simple, but they’re difficult. One of them is just, do less. If you don’t want to feel overloaded, don’t be busy, just choose not to be busy. I’ll give you a personal example from my life right now. I just had a new novel come out last month and when you publish a book, it seems like you should be doing a lot to promote it, you should be going on podcasts like this, you should be writing essays for magazines, you should be on social media, and thinking about how can I help spread the word about my book. But the weird thing that I’ve only learned through trial and error is the thing that a book’s success depends on, are readers who love it telling their friends, that’s how I discovered my next favorite book. Everyone I know, someone they trust recommending it, is how they read a new book. That’s how I read new books, and how other people read new books. Then what are all these articles and blogs, what is all this extra ephemera that I’m investing a significant amount of time in doing when I very much know because they tell me and because I feel this way as a reader about my favorite authors that I want one thing from my favorite authors, and my readers want one thing from me, which is the next book. That’s what they liked, that’s what they want more. Sure. It’s cool that you published an essay in the Atlantic, but where’s the next novel? That’s the overall vibe. All of that activity that feels really crucial can destroy your calendar. Time is the one really crucial zero-sum game and if I am investing a bunch of time in all of that stuff, it means I’m not writing the next book. Doing less lets you increase this cognitive space you have to do what’s actually important. That’s something that I think about a lot. I also think about it in conjunction with caring more. A few years ago, I visited Bordeaux for the first time with my wife, it’s a medium-sized city in the south of France, and something that struck me walking around the streets of Bordeaux was all the little neighborhood shops that have window displays on a sidewalk, all of the window displays were amazing, whimsical, and evocative. If you ever had to make a diorama in school, where you made little figurines, the shopkeepers were winning gold medals for their shop window, equivalent to a diorama, and I’m like, this is not what San Francisco looks like. You walk around San Francisco, it either feels thrown together like an afterthought or like it’s some lame template that some marketing consultant came up with and it’s very generic. But walking around, there’s so much personality in each of these shop windows, which then makes you want to go in. You’re like, “Wow, this is just magical, what is in here?”. They care so much that it becomes a competitive advantage, actually caring is a competitive advantage. There are so many opportunities in our lives, both our personal lives, our work, and all that stuff, to take the easy path, to say, “Oh, well, I could do X, but that’s going be a lot of work so I’ll just settle for industry standard, or “This seems like it’ll get the response we want so let’s just do it” rather than thinking, “wait a minute, who are we serving here? What matters to them? How is this a gift? How is this a generous act rather than a selfish act?” That takes a lot of emotional labor, and you can only afford to care more if you’re doing less. That’s why those are all looped for me if that makes sense.  Ross: In terms of just information inputs, do you have any habits or structures to not just your sources, but also how it is you pull that together into your cognition, into your thinking, into your sense-making? If you’re looking out to the edge, how do you see the signals? Where do you take in and how do you discern what it is that is meaningful and useful and gives your insight into where things are going? Eliot: I have a friend who’s a photographer and he is very annoying to go on hikes with because we’ll go on a hike, and you’re away from any cars, you’re in nature, you’re getting into a rhythm, you’re talking about something, it’s beautiful, and then suddenly, he stops and he spends five minutes taking a detailed photograph of a fern front, of a single macro thing, and you’re sort of standing around. Then you walk for another 10 minutes, and “Oh, look at this ladybug”. I love him to death. I love going hiking with him. But it’s like a funny experience because you just don’t make much progress. But what he does with photography is what I seek to do with fiction, where when I’m writing a novel, the way to see the edge is to inhabit it. There are many kinds of ways to write stories and some of them are entirely fantastical, which are amazing, I love reading stories that are set in fully imagined worlds, and some are completely grounded in today’s reality. My books are somewhere in between. They’re very grounded in the world we inhabit, but they play with it, they twist things, it’s like a jazz musician who’s riffing on a standard, where you’re like, “Okay, this is our world but there are these different ingredients, this evolution has happened”, and that invites the reader to have this gap between the world they inhabit, and the world of the story and that gap is delicious. That gap invites you to imagine what might be possible and how fragile the status quo is. For me, when I’m trying to invent the status quo of the story, when I’m trying to think about the story and its ingredients, and how that world looks, I’m just trying to pay really close attention to weird anomalies in my own life. That might be like, I read something, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s odd!” or it might be a personal experience. Here is a good example. This was in 2016, and in the US, this is when it was the Trump-Clinton election. The election coverage was totally overwhelming, you just couldn’t escape it. The media landscape was overflowing with election coverage. I was so sick of it, not because I don’t care about democracy or something, but because reading who sneezed on the bus doesn’t matter to democracy. That’s what most of the coverage was, hot air. At that time, I made a very conscious decision where I was going to cut 90% of the time that I was spending reading the news and being on social media, and I was going to read more books instead because they aren’t covered in this one silly, over-reported event. I found that to be enormously useful; I was happier, I had better ideas, I had different ideas, and it led to much more interesting and productive conversations with the people I love and my friends. Suddenly, you’re immersing yourself in different worlds, and you can come back and share what you learn. That was a very striking experience for me and made me think about the power of algorithms, feeds, the information landscape that we are all living in all the time, and the feedback loop with culture. That’s where the feed began, was me experiencing that. I was just paying a lot of attention to my own experience, then thinking, “Oh, wow, what if you turn this up a notch?” Ross: There’s probably some follow-on from there. Your simple but difficult advice was to do less and care more. Eliot: Yes, I could keep going. Ross: To round out, what are the other things… were just simple, difficult, but people, we’ve got to sort that out for themselves. But what are the simple things that people can do to make better sense of the world? Eliot: Okay, I’ll just go through this quickly as a hit list. This is just based on my experience as a writer, and seeing friends who make other things, whether they’re writing code, whether they’re inventing new products, whether they’re scientists, whether they are activists, whatever. What helps make the most of the only life that we get to live? I was thinking of this in conjunction with your prompts of what it means to amplify cognition, what can actually help you think differently or think better? One of them is to get good sleep. It’s amazing how much not getting good sleep sabotages everything else in your life. If you don’t sleep well, you’re much more likely to get a cold. If you get a cold and your toddler gets a cold, now they can’t go to daycare, your whole week just got nuked. That’s a funny example. There are so many people who sacrifice sleep because they think that they’re doing something that feels more urgent than sleeping, and in doing so, they really undermine what’s important, and frankly, their own enjoyment of the things they do as well. Get more sleep. Another one is to spend less than you earn. These are all so silly but it’s amazing. If you are experiencing financial stress, it is really hard to have additional cognitive capacity because all of your background thoughts are, I need to be able to pay rent, there’s always this question, this pressure on your thinking. One way to overcome that, which a lot of people think about is, “I need to make more money” but another way that is not mutually exclusive is to spend less. One of the amazing under-talked-about things that technology has done in the past 50 years is make most things much cheaper. Yes, there is dramatic income inequality, especially in the US, and even if you account for that and inflation, most of the daily things that we need to buy are much cheaper than they used to be, and if you live a moderate lifestyle, that allows you to have some savings, Boy, did those savings help your cognition because it just means that you don’t have that background routine running where you’re like, “Oh my god, what if?” That’s another important one. Another one is to build your community of friends and do that in really literal ways. I feel one of the tricks that the recent internet companies have pulled on us is it’s not that you can’t make friends online, the internet is a great place to get connected to people, but you need to go deeper than that. So much of your thinking is influenced by the people you surround yourself with and the depth of the connections you’re able to form with them. My wife and I spend a significant part of our annual free time arranging and then participating in group events. We literally just got back from a five-day camping trip with 30 people that I organized. We do that multiple times a year, and other friends do that too. Then you build this really rich, dynamic set of relationships. The internet has allowed us to live much more lonely lives because we always have a phone. The feed is always there for you. If the feed is always there for you, you have to make the effort to say, “That’s cool. I like the feed being there for me, and we can do more than this.” That’s a crucial one. Then the last thing, I would say, which is a meta thing that you can apply to all the things I just said is people get motivation in different ways. For some people, it is, “I want to run an ultra-marathon so I am going to do this training routine, I’m going to do all of the things,” and they’re motivated by achieving the goal of the ultra-marathon. They go from goal to goal. It’s like you do that, and then you climb the higher mountain. If that works for you, that is awesome, keep doing it. For me, I approach it almost in the opposite direction where what I do is I try to think about my daily habits, the things I do every day, and I try to optimize that. As an example, there are breaks between books but when I am writing a new novel, I try to write more or less every day, and I’m not super strict about it, totally fine if I miss a day, but because it’s a daily habit, if I miss more than one day, I don’t feel great about it. Then, if you miss two days, now I really need to get back into it. I make it easy. I don’t need to be productive. I can write one sentence and I’m happy. That counts. But what is important is that it’s just part of my daily ritual, part of my daily routine. For me, another big example is exercise. I surf. I try to get in the water every day. Do I surf literally every day? No, but it feels like that’s part of my routine where I basically surf every day, I write every day, and I eat with my family every day. I try to think about my days more than I think about my weeks, my months, my years, or my decades. I’m not saying it’ll work for everyone but the reason why it works for me is because all of those things compound. It’s compound interest. Think about the things I work on. I’m writing novels, these are multi-year, creative projects. You can’t write a novel as a heroic act of just extending yourself to the max, you have to write a novel in one sentence at a time, one page at a time over a really extended period of time. Sometimes you feel excited about doing it that day, sometimes you don’t, but you do it anyway. But because it’s a habit, over time, those add up. Even though I’ve maybe only written one sentence, last month, my 11th novel came out. That’s how I’ve written them. That applies to so many aspects of life that if you do small things that feel insignificant, but you do them consistently, then what you’re doing is you’re inviting time on your side. If there’s one skill that few people have developed in our modern world, living in the feed, it’s patience. If you choose to be patient, if you choose to just take advantage of that simple concept of compounding interest with whatever you’re working on and care about, that’s so differentiating, no one else is doing that. It’s something ridiculous, 99% of Warren Buffet’s net wealth accrued after his 65th birthday. If you were talking to him 20 years ago, he would have been totally unremarkable. He wasn’t famous, he was just another private equity investor. The reason why he is famous is that he started investing when he was 11 years old. He’s had compounding interest. He just has an extra 15 years on his competitors because he started as a child. You don’t need to aim for that. I don’t know how many 11-year-olds are listening to us right now, I’m not saying that you’ve lost but I do think that is extraordinarily powerful, and because it’s not dramatic, people just under-invest in that in their lives all the time. Think about these daily habits. Ross: Some of what you’re saying there, I wrote a post on one of my big themes around Zen and the Art of creating the future, which is about living in the present but creating the future, and they’re entirely reconcilable. But if you ever think you want to write a nonfiction book, what you’ve just laid out could very readily make a bestselling book. Eliot: That’s very sweet.  I’ll know who to send a copy to if I were you. You heard it here first, folks. Ross: It’s been delightful, Eliot. Part of the insights there is also around this creative act, the act of creating novels and working and being able to pull the ideas into something concrete as well as how you’re taking the information. Thank you so much for your insights. I’ll be reading more of your novels and recommend them highly to everyone listening. Thank you so much, Eliot, and have a wonderful rest of your day. Eliot: Thank you so much for having me. Your questions are a pleasure and I really appreciate it.  The post Eliot Peper on writing science fiction, information feeds, inhabiting the edge, and habits for better cognition (AC Ep21) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Everything you do takes place at the nth order. You cannot simply draw your line of responsibility at the edge of first-order action. It goes far beyond that.” – Nora Bateson About Nora Bateson Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, and President of the International Bateson Institute. She wrote, directed, and produced the documentary, An Ecology of Mind, on her father, Gregory Bateson, which won awards at the Spokane and Santa Cruz film festivals. Following her 2016 book Small Arcs of Larger Circles, her new book, Combining, will be released shortly. Website: www.anecologyofmind.com LinkedIn: Nora Bateson What you will learn The dynamic interplay and shared learning among diverse species in a complex ecosystem (03:00) Rethinking human communication and relationships (05:50) Exploring the fluidity of identity in different social contexts (08:22) Understanding warm data and its role in perceiving complex systems (12:24) Exploring warm data through describable experiences and creative expression (17:27) Intergenerational learning and systemic thinking (21:27) Nurturing intergenerational relationships (30:12) Integrate intergenerational and indigenous wisdom into our common sense-making processes (32:21) Episode Resources Resources International Bateson Institute Warm Data Lab Gregory Bateson Book Combining by Nora Bateson Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through other patterns by Nora Bateson Transcript Ross Dawson: Nora, it’s a pleasure and privilege to have you on the show. Nora Bateson: Thanks. It’s really good to be here. Ross: One word that has been a very common one through you and your family’s work is ecology. I think people come with this idea of ecology which only captures a fragment of the way in which you mean it. It’d be a lovely starting point for you to frame this idea of ecology, the ecology of mind or ecology of mind and nature. Nora: Yes, thank you because this new book that I have just published called “Combining“. It is called “Combining” because of exactly what you’re saying. One of the things that happens in a world that is looking for the code, the hack, the model, is that this idea of ecology becomes somehow static, and it isn’t. The trick to thinking in ecological ways is to recognize that there is an ongoing movement, and ongoing responsiveness between all of the organisms in an ecology and that those organisms are in fact, mutually learning to be together, which means that there is the continuation of whatever it is, the species, the meadow, the forest, the oceans, and that continuation means that some of the relationships need to be in continuing patterns. But in order to do that, there must be discontinuing because of all the other change, and responsiveness that’s taking place. Very often, one of the things that happens in the nonverbal assumption of the noun ecology is that there is this set of relationships that create a functional vitality. I would say, let’s get rid of that word functional and even be careful with vitality, that we keep it into vitalizing, that it’s’ ongoing. It’s this ongoingness that is tricky because it’s so nth order. It’s never just one organism. It’s all the organisms in a context and beyond. Our habit is to identify a tree as a tree and say that tree is treeing. But that tree is only possible because of millions of organisms, trillions maybe, that are in ongoing, shifting, responding relational communication. Ross: Life is not something that stands alone, it is always in relationship to others; and so the relationship is the heart of what that ecology is, is that right? Nora: But what makes relationships? This is where I find the field of biosemiotics interesting because they don’t refer to the biosphere, they refer to the semiosphere, which is recognizing that relationships are made in communication. It’s in the communication between all the organisms, and you may think that communication is just a signal in response, but communication is also there in the way that the nutrients for trees are moving through mycelial processes or the way bacteria poop, and make it possible for trees to grow. These are all communicative processes. What’s possible in the communication? What’s being communicated? What’s possible in the communication? Working with human systems, the tendency then would be to say, “Okay, we’ve got to fix the communication. What we have is a failure to communicate, right?” But that tends to push the attention then to what’s on the transcript, and what’s on the transcript is not what happened in the communication. Ross: Yes. Nora: This is a good way of pointing to those areas where systems change is most needed and most elusive because you can’t actually point to it. What I’m getting at is that there are ways in which we are in communication that are defined by various limits of what we can communicate. Those limits are not directly expressed, they’re implied. They’re in the meta messaging of the context, they’re in the tacit understanding, the complicit recognition of context that we share. Ross: The limits to how richly, how deeply, and how much we can communicate? Nora: Or even what we can say, or even who we can be. With some people, you are different. You’re really funny, you’re the slacker, you’re the cool dude, and with other people, you’re the nerd, and with somebody else, you’re the grown-up, you’re the old person, and with another person, you’re the apprentice, so who are you? And the way you are with some friends evokes the possibility of just being in your whole self in another way. When you walk into the Tax Office, who can you be? When you are with your best friend maybe at the pub, who can you be? When you’re in the woods, who can you be? It’s this recognition that relationship changes communication, communication changes relationships. Where are those limits? What I see as the issue most deeply is creating stuckness, is the way in which just as people, we are keeping each other stuck in the same pattern. We can run around talking about transformation and systems change, and how we’re going to change the parts of the system, or we’re going to change the scripts or change the relationships but actually, one of the biggest sticking points is how we hold each other in the way we value each other, the way we think about credibility, lovability, sexual attractiveness, etc. These processes are located in physiological ways in our communication. We’re sticking each other in the very thing that we’re working to change. Ross: One of the beautiful phrases in your book is “I shall always act to increase possibility.” You’re describing some of the ways in which we are constrained in who we are and who we could be in our relationships. A very pointed question is, what are the things that we can do to increase possibilities? Nora: I’m so glad you asked. When you’re trying to approach these processes that are taking place, not necessarily at the first order, at the first level, where you might point to a symptom and say, “Okay, there’s the issue, we have to solve that issue” but in the way we’re looking at nth order, so the relationships that make relationships that make relationships, the communication that makes communication that makes communication. As I was just saying, a lot of this stuff is tacit, it’s implied, it’s meta-communication, it’s living in a realm that’s very real, but very slippery, it’s gaseous, it’s hard to grab hold of it, and it’s not like changing the distributor cap in your pickup truck. Changing the possibility of communication means another thing. This, for me, is where warm data has been really exciting because after many years of working with various sorts of systems change, various kinds of modeling, and this-es and thats, and also coming from my history, which I guess we’ll get to in a minute. Ross: Could you explain warm data as a concept? Nora: Yes, Warm data as a concept, there are two ways of looking at it. Warm data as a thing is information. But it’s a way of recognizing information that’s taking place between multiple contexts, so it’s trans-contextual information. In that example of who is Ross, who is Ross in relationship to your microbiome, in relationship to the tax agency, in relationship to your lover, in relationship to children if you have any, or your dogs, or your childhood friends, or your professional relationships, or your parents, your ancestors, the grandchildren that are not here yet, the great-great-grandchildren to be—who are you? And in each one of those contexts, you are not the same, so who are you? There’s this way of recognizing that information moves in different contexts, and this is a necessary practice for perceiving complex systems. Another way to describe warm data is that it’s information that’s alive. I could put you in a box and I could say, “Oh, Ross, he’s got a podcast.” But that would be a huge reductionism of who you are. It’s not that it’s untrue that you have a podcast, and I could study all your podcasts, but I would still know very little about you. I could deduct and I could make correlations, and I could do this and that, but I will not have a sense of your vitality from that. My suspicion is that because there’s basically so much information missing, that many of the responses that are attempted are responses to reductionist information, information that’s been decontextualized from its living processes and re-contextualized into a mechanistic, more industrialized set of understandings. How do we respond to a living world if our information is not itself alive? And that’s at the core of what warm data as an idea is about. The Warm Data Lab is a process that I work with groups of people in practicing this perception. It’s a practice and a practice in which the trans-contextual perception, and cognition, you’re interested in cognition, is able to shift in ways that are not necessarily explicit. It’s recognizing that many of the things that are blocking us epistemologically are things that are habits that we don’t even know we’re doing, ghosts of industrial assumptions, that are so deeply lodged in our language, in the way we went to school, in our understanding of how you define something or strategize something or solve something or even identify a problem, that these capacities are infected with ghosts of industrial, eugenics, control, mechanistic ideas, colonial, notions, that these notions will justify exploitation, decontextualization, devitalization and take out the possibility. Okay, so where I’m saying “I want to always act to increase possibility” what I’m really saying is I want to be able to perceive those possibilities that the complexity in the process brings that may not be the ones I think I’m looking for. That’s the catch. Ross: There used to be a lot of talk about data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. I suppose very crudely, you could say that data and information are things that can be digitized or captured in some forms, and knowledge and wisdom, presumably not. The question is, can the warm data that you talked about only be understood in our thinking, in our living, in our communication? Or is there any way to be able to capture…but is there any way to be beyond or something that becomes part of a describable system? Nora: It depends on what you mean by describable. Let’s say you walk into a room. Now, just in the walking into that room, without recognizing you’re doing it, you will be attending with your attention to the temperature, the smells, the atmosphere of the space, and what the atmosphere allows you to be. Okay, is this a cozy bohemian space? Is it a rigid, sterile hospital place? Is it an algebra room? Are we stepping into a classroom that is full of art supplies? Who are you going to be in that space? Okay, this is information, and in those two versions you gave, it’s neither. It’s neither wisdom nor are they data points. It’s living processing. It has to do with all the other places you’ve ever been, all the other ways you’ve ever been, and who you’re there with, etc. How do you capture warm data? Why don’t we say “express” instead of “capture”, or make room for it? That’s what I have done in “Combining” is that I’ve put in all these pieces of writing, artwork, different ways of expressing, and perceiving, and just put them next to each other, and given the reader the opportunity to make the connections. This book is full of poetry, it’s got 30-page essays that are pretty crunchy theory, there are stories, and there’s all kinds of artwork. I would say the book is not in any of the pieces. It’s in what you create between them. You can start anywhere and let them speak to each other through you. You see, there I’m making room for this living information to take place. Ross: Yes. We chatted before about the idea of systemic change. Part of the framing for me is that your father, Gregory Bateson, is one of the most influential people in my life, in my early reading and thinking. Nora: Me too. Ross: One of the things that we’re talking is about was intergenerational learning. When you’re describing all of the ways in which we communicate, learn, and relate, one of the very important ones is through generations, or a particular family, and also from all of humanity or living beings. How is it that we can manifest intergenerational learning? Nora: This is one of the places that are most important to be paying attention to. For all my friends out there who are systems thinkers, it’s one thing to be able to do it in the office and it’s another thing to do at the breakfast table. This is not just a professional approach to somehow creating policy change, this is a complete life change that starts with how it’s possible to be in mutual learning across generations. That’s not easy. It’s really in those moments when you start to see these assumptions come into play in ways that can be quite painful and confusing and filled with resentment or anger, or even attachment in ways that are somehow twisted up. One of the most important recognitions for me has been the way in which my father, who was one of the people who helped bring systemic theory into the world through cybernetics and his work in multiple different fields, the way he was with me when I was little. He was six foot six, so two meters, a larger-than-life character of science and charisma, and people came from all over to sit at his feet. I was born when he was quite old, he was 64 when I was born. Ross: Wow. Nora: People would ask me, didn’t you feel insignificant with all these people focusing on your father? The answer is no, I didn’t, because I was always welcome in that conversation. I knew that I was welcome because when all the people were gone, the conversation still included me in the same way. He would do these things where he would invite me to perceive his learning. If he was doing something in the day, and he noticed something he hadn’t noticed before, he would verbalize that for me. “I noticed this thing for the first time today and I used to think it was like this, but now I see that there’s a difference.” Sometimes it was with me, and he would say, “Oh, gosh, I was wrong about that.” What was important was that I knew what it looked like to be in an intergenerational relationship, that where there was learning. So often, you get this sense that authority or elder generations have this field around them in which they must not be questioned, they must not be wrong, even if they’re wrong, they’re not wrong. That was simply not the case. In our household, there was no currency of being right. The currency was around learning together. That changed how we could be together. It did not make any holes in my respect for him. On the contrary, it meant that…my respect for him is I’m still working with his work so I guess I don’t need to say any more about that. But what I learned was one, what it looks like to learn, two, I learned to learn, and three, I learned to be in a relationship intergenerationally in which that was possible so that I could repeat that with my kids. I want to read you a piece from my book that illustrates this and illustrates the urgency of it. Ross: Please. Nora: Because when we’re talking about what’s it possible to say, who is it possible to be, what’s in the ecology of communication between us, which is, where the possibility is? It’s in there. This is a piece that I wrote for my kids. It’s the why, why the rest of this book is about possibility. It’s called “Mama now.” Your eyes will see the derailing of assumptions, Your hands will hold the crumble of the old matrix. I do not have any authority to lean into. I have empty pockets where parents used to advise their children. I don’t have any maps, myths, or mother wisdom for you. I can fix your breakfast, but not the culture. When you ask about how to be a good person, I cannot lie to you. Everything you touch in a day is in some way bloodied. You’ve been born into an edgeless violence. But I will not judge or measure you against a bygone metric. I am here too, ready to learn with you, unsure how to be or who to be. I can only read fragments of your worry, As the future is a horizon of confusion, I cannot protect you, And yet it is my only job. Aching as I witness from this side of the hourglass, other generations of parents’ new outlines, school, career, family, and retirement, but your life will be another shape entirely forming in the fractures. When you say you need a goal, I offer you an expired ticket. Superficial memes roll off the tongue right into your bullshit detector. Success in the existing system is not gonna do you much good. Your integrity is your rage, and I will nourish it. Your dignity is your curiosity and I am tiny beside it. Your courage is your pain and I will sing to it with you. We will riot together. We will notice the nuance of small graces in the day, we will wash the grip of loss for each other. I am your mama and your future is the story of a storm. I am your cabin, your boots, your rucksack. Ross: That’s beautiful. Thank you. There’s a lot there about who we could be, who we can be, who we are, which goes to our today, in a sense. If I was asked to name wise people, I would mention your father. You are part of that intergenerational learning here today. Today is a world more complex, more challenging in many ways than the world of the last century. In terms of changing the systems in which we live, which we are part of, what are some of the lessons that we should be taking into account to change the systems of today, drawing on this wisdom from across generations? Nora: Across generations, across cultures, this is ways of knowing that indigenous people have had from all over the world since forever. In my family, this has been entering into the Scientific Academy of that way of knowing. For me, the lesson of the last couple of years that’s been most profound has been in recognizing that if the premises of our, let’s say commonsense, not as in that practical thing, but as in the sense-making that we do that is common between us. If that common sense-making is premised on what’s in it for me, or how do I get ahead, or what’s the solution, or these deep assumptions of control, then those ghosts are going to guide everything we do. One of the ways that you will see that is in how you raise your kids, how you treat your elders, or what is in that intergenerational soil. What can grow there, and what can’t grow there? One of the challenges at this moment is to, for lack of a better term, tend to that soil. This is where evolution happens, in between the generations. We’re running all over creation trying to make all this externalized structural shift and keeping in place those assumptions that reproduce the same structural possibilities. If the basis of that common sense is symbiosis, and the difficulty of symbiosis, and what that means to partake in communication with your child that is not just about “Get your shoes on, it’s cold outside” but extends into relationships that make relationships that make relationships, recognizing that everything you do is taking place at nth order. You cannot just draw your line of responsibility at the edge of first-order action. It’s far beyond that. For me, that’s the big one, tending. You might say, oh, that’s impossible. But, it isn’t really. What it takes is an acute and vigilant attention to the ghosts that are trying to sneak out. Then that’s uncomfortable because they’re locked in strategy, control, and the things that we are all commended for in the world that we live in. What did you produce? What did you achieve? How do you measure it? How do you define it? The thing that we’re talking about should, by every expression, be outside of those means of description. Ross: This comes back to today, creating more possibilities for us, and the life in which we’re embedded. You have a new book coming out. Tell us about the book, and where people can get it, or find out more about it. Nora: The book is called “Combining“. It’s an exploration of this idea of the ecology of communication, and possibility, and really making some pages between which this…Possibility right now is probably the most precious expression of life that we’ve got to work with especially when you look at all of the double binds, we can get into that another time, but there’s a whole chapter on that, of war, the ecological crisis, the economic crisis, the cultural crisis, the poly crises that we are in. Looking back at how these things came to be, it can feel very impossible to come up with a solution or a way forward; the impossibilities are ringing so loud right now. I took the opportunity in this book to make space where the weirdness, the unexpectedness, the detours, the living, composting, moldy green fur of possibility can emerge. It’s amazing that it actually got published. Because this book is not about what it’s about. What it is, is what it becomes for you. It will be available in all the usual haunts online within the next few weeks, pretty much all over the world. I hope you enjoy it. There are entire chapters with nothing but pictures. Ross: I read an excerpt, and it’s beautiful, both visually and in terms of the richness of the tapestry of ideas and relationships in there. It’s something to dive deep into. And just to quickly round out, probably the other major reference, correct me if I’m wrong, would be the Bateson Institute just to see what that does and how to find that. Nora: The International Bateson Institute is located here in Stockholm, and we do all sorts of things. We are working with school systems around the world, we’re working with various nature programs, and we host the warm data work around the world. There are 800+ warm data hosts out there doing that now in all sorts of places as well as various research projects, and so on, all based on this idea of the trans-contextual process, essentially ecology but not in the easy sense of the word. Ross: Never easy! Nora: Never easy. Ross: Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Nora. We’ll have all of the links to that and much more in the show notes. Congratulations on the book. It’s a wonderful contribution. Nora: Thank you. Ross: Thank you for all of your work and that of the people around you because the ways of perceiving are fundamental to getting the system change that we need today. Nora: That’s the tricky bit. It’s where perception shifts. We’re used to seeing the familiar; it’s difficult to see unfamiliar things, to perceive that which has not been perceived before. It’s tricky because you don’t have receivers for it. Ross: It’s a journey. Nora: It’s a journey. Ross: Thank you, Nora. Nora: Thank you, Ross. Thank you so much.   The post Nora Bateson on ecology, increasing possibility, warm data, and intergenerational learning (AC Ep20) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Our persistence guided us when we shifted from being defensive to adaptive. We recognized that in all that swirl, being courageously persistent would ultimately lead us to where we needed to be.” – Graham Winter “Many think of taking a pause as an indulgent use of time. It’s probably one of the best investments in time you can make as an executive leader.” – Martin Bean About Graham Winter and Martin Bean Graham Winter is founder of the Think One Team consultancy. He was Chief Psychologist for three Australian Olympic campaigns, and is the bestselling author of six books including Think One Team . Martin Bean is a highly experienced chief executive who was leader of the major Australian university RMIT 2015-2021 and the Open University 2009-2015. He is currently CEO of the Bean Centre. He was named Commander of the British Empire in the 2015 UK Honours awards. Graham Winter and Martin Bean are co-authors of the new book Toolkit for Turbulence: The Mindset and Methods That Leaders Need to Turn Adversity to Advantage.   Graham Winter Website: www.grahamwinterpsychology.com LinkedIn: Graham Winter Twitter: @graham_winter Amazon: Graham Winter   Martin Bean Website: www.thebeancentre.com Wikipedia Page: Martin Bean Amazon: Martin Bean   What you will learn Adapting leadership strategies in response to unprecedented challenges (03:31) Importance of understanding and managing emotional reactions in leadership (07:54) Persisting through adversities as key strategies for success and personal growth (10:22) Confronting fear, aligning individual values with team objectives, and instilling a disciplined operational rhythm (12:10) Emphasizing a feedback culture and reflection in team dynamics (17:02) Revamping team operating rhythms for agility in a turbulent world (18:00) Challenging of feedback vs. seeking of insights (20:40) Creating a culture of learning and discipline in teams (22:15) ‘Decompression stops’ for realignment and reassessment (24:44) Importance of teams clarifying their unique roles beyond just executing strategy (28:37) Development of partnering relationships and creating synergy in decision-making (29:38) Importance of team leaders transitioning to a coaching approach while prioritizing their own self-care (30:46) Align, collaborate, and learn team canvas (33:39) Shifting away from traditional, linear industrial models of performance (34:40) Episode Resources Toolkit for Turbulent times Paul Doughty   Books Toolkit for Turbulence: The Mindset and Methods That Leaders Need to Turn Adversity to Advantage by Graham Winter and Martin Bean Mindful Cricket.: How to create the mindset you need to be the best cricketer you can be by Graham Winter First Be Nimble: A Story About How to Adapt, Innovate and Perform in a Volatile Business World by Graham Winter The Man Who Cured the Performance Review: A Practical and Engaging Guide to Perfecting the Art of Performance Conversation by Graham Winter Think One Team: : An Inspiring Fable and Practical Guide for Managers, Employees and Jelly Bean Lovers (Jossey-Bass Leadership Series – Australia) (16pt Large Print Edition) by Graham Winter Think One Team: The Revolutionary 90 Day Plan that Engages Employees, Connects Silos and Transforms Organisations by Graham Winter (2015-12-21) by Graham Winter Think One Team: The Essential Guide to Building and Connecting Teams by Graham Winter High-Performance Leadership: Creating, Leading and Living in a High Performance World by Graham Winter Mindful Cricket: How to create the mindset you need to be the best cricketer you can be. by Graham Winter Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson   Transcript Ross Dawson: You have a marvelous book just out by the time this podcast is released on Toolkits for Turbulent times. Part of the Genesis story began in March 2020. Martin, you have been a leader for some time at RMIT, a very large university with 11,000 employees and 80,000 students. In March 2020, the world changed. What was that experience like in terms of your readiness or how you changed through that? Martin Bean: Yes, it was quite the time, and I’m sure many of your listeners remember what they had to do to respond. But if everybody remembers, it was particularly difficult for universities. We weren’t allowed to receive any of the job keeper funding, and our students and our international students were cut off because of the border closures. In my context, Ross, it meant that to survive, we needed to reduce the expenditure of the university by well over $200 million, almost overnight. Luckily for me, Ross, I had already been doing a lot of work with my team for the prior couple of years with Graham as our coach, really putting in some performance psychology techniques to make sure that we could be a great team. But when those borders closed, Ross, I remember sitting there, having a moment of pause, gathering myself, inviting Graham to a Teams meeting, and quite humbly in one way, but also I was in a bit of shock at the time, admitting to Graham that I knew that the leadership playbook that had served me incredibly well for decades just was not going to be the playbook that I was going to need for the next 12 months to lead my team through the turbulence and all of the challenges that we would have ahead of us. Graham, A, agreed, and then B, gave me some very, very sound advice that I’ll let him elaborate on. Ross: Graham, of course, you’re not working just with Martin, but a whole team. No doubt. Many of us had different frames of mind around the situation. In a nutshell, what tools or frames did you bring to the situation? Graham Winter: I think having spent a number of my working years in the performance psychology area, I’m always very mindful that the first thing to do is to understand what your aims are, but particularly what the context is in which you’re operating. We talked quite a lot about technical challenges, and adaptive challenges, and linear and nonlinear environments. We recognized that from a team’s perspective, the amount of thinking we had, well over half of your team were professors, it was also a large team, three of them were running sub-parts of the university with 25,000 plus students, bigger than many Australian universities. You had that high level of complexity and scale. But you also had people in an incredibly human position as well. I remember one of the first things I said to Martin was, let’s break this up into three simple pieces: functional, social, and emotional. Let’s just have some pretty regular conversations about each of your individuals. Where are they functionally? What are they trying to do? What are their relationships like? Where are the conflicts? Where are the difficulties they’re going to face? And emotionally, where are they at? We pretty much tic-tac on that, we covered a whole lot of other things. But that was almost the first tool, also many others, but Martin found it pretty handy because it gave us a quick reference point to know where to invest our time. Ross: That’s interesting. You mentioned this idea of linear to nonlinear. It’s probably a long time since we lived in linear times as it were, but they are, of course, complex. Part of the thing is the human brain is not well-suited, or we need to continue to evolve to think that way. You’ve provided, in that case, a very simple framework that enables us to pull out the complexity there. What are some of the other ways in which we can, in this incredibly nonlinear, essentially beyond the ability for humans to grasp easily, how can we break it down into elements? What is the mindset in which we approach breaking these things down into elements that we can work with? Graham: I think one of the critical elements, Ross, is to normalize the natural human emotional reaction. In very simple terms, we are wired for negativity. We wouldn’t have survived from an evolutionary biology perspective if we weren’t. But that doesn’t necessarily serve us well because when we’re placed in these nonlinear environments, we like certainty. Now, there’s some good research out of University College London where they talk about that as uncertainty increases, stress increases. Hence, they used a simple example, but a pretty compelling one: people who are fearful of some form of serious illness, their stress level is actually reduced once they get the diagnosis, even if the diagnosis is particularly dire. We love certainty. To me, one of the first things to do is to have not just one conversation, but a norming conversation, if you like, with the team around that human reaction to go toward defensiveness, to go toward protection. Then how do you do that? Do you do that in an aggressive way? Do you take control? Do you become perfectionistic? Do you become more passive, more dependent? What are those elements? Then how can we, in a sense, go, ‘Okay, I’m recognizing the squirm, how do I now lean into that?’ But to me, that’s the first point. It’s not that I’m invincible or whatever, I’m sure we’ll talk about this. But as we’ve interviewed leaders for the book, the prevailing theme throughout it has been this discovery of greater vulnerability, and that emotional vulnerability as a strength. To me, that’s that recognition that I’m human, I’m experiencing this. But it doesn’t mean that I can’t then choose to put my focus on certain things and move forward. But I’m going to have to deal with that first. Martin will share an experience there. We ran a session very early on in COVID. Martin called it ‘Going towards the fire’. It was a pretty compelling one. But we were looking at our plan B and C, Scenario B and C, which actually ended up coming into fruition, which was the ideal months for a two-year lockdown. Martin: Ross, I remember as if it was yesterday when we ran that exercise, and I remember it personally because I could feel myself moving defensive. What Graham helped us do was to recognize those feelings, understand them as perfectly natural, and then give us some very practical ways of moving more towards opportunity, Ross. We landed on three Cs: it’s about being constructive, courageous, and creative. If we could get ourselves to be that way, if we could have a clear intent and go towards the challenge rather than back away from them, but also give ourselves almost the permission to iterate and experiment, expect mistakes, and realize that as we would make those mistakes, we would learn from them. But also persistence. It was the persistence once we unlocked ourselves from defensive into adaptive. We recognized that in all of that swirl, being courageously persistent was going to ultimately get us to where we needed to be. But I just remember because it was deeply personal for me, Ross, that sense of ‘run away, this is all too hard,’ but actually very liberating when I leaned forward into the opportunity. Ross: I love that frame of constructive, courageous, and creative. That seems very useful but I’m always interested in where the rubber hits the road. Those are nice words, wonderful words. But working with your team, how is it that you shift people’s frame of mind to be constructive, to be courageous, and to be creative when it’s a very, very confronting situation? What’s the reality of it? Martin: I’ll give the reality of my team and then maybe Graham, you can expand on your other observations. But there are probably a few rubber-hits-the-road moments. First of all, you’ve got to openly discuss the fear and the defensive mindset, Ross. It can’t be unspoken. We had some very confronting, open, candid conversations about the fear, about what we were going to have to do together. The second thing that Graham helped me construct was to link my deeply held personal values, Ross. What are those things that, in my case, as you would have seen in the book, took me back to very early times in my childhood, of those key underlying values that fueled me to want to be with the team to get through this? There was a moment, literally hours before we locked down, where I shared those values with the group; they, in kind, became very vulnerable and reflected theirs. We used that as an anchor point to give us the courage and the persistence that we would need to hold us together through what was going to be our most challenging year in business, Ross. We fell back on those deeply held values as a way of fueling our conviction to get it done. Those were some of the things where the rubber hit the road we used to get people out of that defensive mindset and more into that creative, courageous, constructive mindset. But Graham, what would you add to that as you worked with other teams through it? Graham: What I’ve observed over many years, and this is just, borrowing from a number of other models, Deming talked about the plan, do, check, adapt. The scientific method is a loop. Over the last 15 years or so, to me, the critical issue is that when you’re in these high-demand environments, this is about Amplifying Cognition, but in those high-demand environments, the danger is that your cognition gets degraded. But the way to not derail it is, to some extent what Martin’s talked about, but it’s then to use the team, and a team is any more than one person. What we’re endeavoring to do is to form that ability to operate in teams. The question then is, okay, if you look at special military services, you look at emergency medicine, you look at fleets of yachts, agile software, and so on, there’s a natural characteristic that all of those teams operate with, and it’s a rhythm. It’s a disciplined rhythm. It’s a rhythm of alignment, of collaboration, of learning to deliver. What we’re then doing is, in a sense, taking almost the most powerful psychology tool, which is a short-term goal, and then guiding the team into that disciplined rhythm. Where are we at the moment? What can we do today? Let’s get aligned and collaborate. How do we do that? Then simple tools around collaborative problem-solving, tools around co-creation, very, very quick but effective debriefs, individually and collectively. To me, that’s the key. I’ve just spent the last two days in Canberra, working something for one of the new defense teams, exactly the same thing, setting up their align, collaborate, and learn loops. It’s the discipline then. We talk about the emotion, and we normalize that, but it’s a task to be done here. We have to get that done. We’re going to get it done through alignment, collaboration, and learning. In that loop, the critical one is learning. You get to learn right. It’s like a fleet of yachts. We can align, we collaborate, but it’s actually driven by learning. Because then we realign, we re-collaborate, we learn again. That’s the adaptive power, which I’m sure, Ross, will take us into that. How do you create the environment in which people can learn fast because you’ve all learned faster than the environment that’s coming at you. Ross: It is a critical, important point. Recently, John Hagel on the podcast, talked about scalable learning. How do we scale up our learning as individuals and organizations? Again, always want to go from their concept to their reality. You have your framework there, and they’re learning. I believe very much in learning by doing because you’re putting people in the situation, but what is the reality? We have to learn faster. The world is turbulent, the world is moving faster and faster, we have to learn more, and we have to be more inclined to learn. Again, in a very pragmatic, real-world sense, what do you do? How do you get people to learn more? Graham: I want to highlight one of the things. As you know my background is I spent a fair bit of time with Olympic teams, and so on. Then also in the corporate area. One thing you notice in the sports area is there is what I would call a feedback expectation. If you’re in an environment, in a sporting context, where you’re not getting feedback, where you’re not able to provide feedback, you’re going to get out of there. Because you know that’s not the environment in which you’re going to develop. That is not the environment in most corporate situations. A lot of it’s about developing the skill to debrief, to reflect, and to have conversations, that’d be point one. And then point number two is that often, the debriefs tend to be more about the task and not about the people and the dynamics. It’s getting the discipline of the debrief, the discipline of the reflection into the operating rhythm of teams, and into the operating rhythm of individuals. But not…I’m sure you’ll be able to explore a little more how you do that with your team. Martin: What I did with my team, and what I’m observing, Ross, with teams across Australia that I’m working with now, is they’re often trapped in an operating rhythm, a cycle of the way that they collaborate and learn, that actually no longer is relevant to the turbulent world that we live in. One of the things that we did with my team, and I work with other teams on now, is to actually get the operating rhythm up on the wall, and step back from it and say, ‘Is this any longer fit-for-purpose?’ and have the courage to revisit the operating rhythm and embed those shorter, sharper, debriefed ways of working. Stealing from agile methodology, we’re working in a series of sprints, rather than rigid quarters or annual cycles, Ross. The other thing, then that you’ve got to be prepared to do, though, is to get information from your people, your organization, your environment, your customers, your stakeholders, that is more timely and potentially less perfect. In other words, you’re better off bringing what you’ve got into the room that’s timely and reflective of what’s going on right now, rather than waiting six to seven months for something that has been beautifully manicured and polished. When I talk about information, often, it’s not just bringing data or information into the room, it’s bringing different people into the room who are closer to what is going on and can act as subject matter experts to speed your learning up, Ross.  Ross: This is the idea of feedback at the heart of it. Graham, when you refer to athletes need immediate feedback on performance to be able to improve on that. In your mind, you’re referring to accelerating that feedback loop, where you have something in order to be able to learn from. Are there ways in which we can make that feedback more explicit or more helpful in an organizational environment? Graham: I think a couple of things we have recognized, and it has come from some of the research. People are not necessarily wired to get up every morning and say, ‘Gee, I’d love to get some challenging feedback today.’ That’s not what we do, is it? It’s certainly not coming culturally, and it’s not what we do, either. One of the ways we do it is to flip that into gaining insights, seeking insights, rather than a straight-out conversation of, ‘How do I go and get feedback?’ For example, I’ve got a leadership team I’m working with at the moment. We’ve got to catch up next week. Their task over the last two weeks has been to have five-minute conversations with each colleague, three-point feedback: one thing that you’d like me to do more of, one thing that maybe I could do less of, and one thing that you value that I should keep doing. None of these things are rocket science, but they don’t get embedded. There’s an old rule in performance psychology that says the last thing you learn is the first thing that falls apart under pressure. One of the things I pride ourselves on in the way that we’ve gone about with Toolkit is you’ve got to work under pressure, so it’s not an exercise in trying to make things complex, it’s an exercise in producing insights. What you’re doing is trying to create that environment where you get more insights. I think one of the best ways to get insight is to help people seek feedback; people are more likely to give it as well if they ask for insights. Even just that language of insight versus feedback can be very useful as well. But at the end of the day, it’s building a discipline, it’s building a rhythm. We want to amplify cognitions in a team environment where there are high levels of turbulence. Discipline is critical. It is critical because it is the drumbeat of align, collaborate, learn is what happens around it. I find with executive teams when they start thinking about ‘We’re not like we used to be; we’re not like a train where everybody hitches their wagons and we know where we’re going to go and we’ve got a schedule,’ and so on. We’re like a fleet of yachts. We’re accountable for our own yacht; we’ve got a role in the fleet. We’re going to be experiencing difficulties at times, but they can simply take that back to, ‘How do we align? How do we collaborate? How do we learn? How do we do that in our yacht? How do we do it with other yachts? How do we build a culture of discipline?’ I’ve got an exercise with a group next week. It’s exactly what we’re discussing: what do you want your culture of learning and discipline to look like and feel like, and what’s going to work in your environment? It’s got to be comfortable; it’s got to work for them. There’s not a cookie-cutter approach to this. But it is about insights coming in, and as Martin said, one of the biggest challenges for CEOs is they don’t get insights. People don’t want them to know. They’ve got to go to the edge of their organizations to experience that. Ross:  The book ‘Peak’ by Anders Ericsson. He is famous for being the originator of the research of the ten-thousand-hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell popularized. But essentially, Anders Ericsson says, well no, it doesn’t matter. 10,000 hours, it doesn’t do it, what does is 10,000 hours of practice with feedback. When you do something, and every time you do it, you get some feedback on whether or not it’s the right thing and how to get better. You don’t even need 10,000 hours necessarily, but it is the feedback that enables you to improve your performance. That’s in a way the heart of it, so any way in which you can get that useful feedback. In sports, of course, you’ve got all sorts of wonderful data centers, as well as coaches. In a corporate environment, there’s far less feedback, as you say, for all reasons, Graham, including that people don’t like receiving feedback, and managers are often disinclined to go to that challenging territory of giving that feedback. Graham: Ross, I want to add a point and then pop to Martin. One of the things we observed a few years ago, it’s one of those light bulb moments. We looked at special military, we looked at emergency medicine, we looked at a whole variety of these areas, and we realized that all of these high-performance environments had natural pauses. There’s a natural pause in a sporting event, there’s a pause between a mission, there’s a pause between a critical incident. A big challenge for business leaders, and credit to Martin more than probably any chief executive I’ve ever worked with, he built the pauses into his team, to enable them to set, and it is that ability to get that poise that separates the effective teams from not so effective when they’re in turbulence. Ross: Yes. Martin, how did you design those pauses which give opportunities for feedback and reflection? How did those become part of the working process? Martin: It’s so important, isn’t it, Graham? Because feedback can only really be received appropriately if people are in the right mindset and they feel psychologically safe to deliver it openly and candidly, and for the receiver, to have the support around them to be able to hear it and process it. None of that can happen unless you create literally, I used to do scuba diving when I was younger, Ross, and you used to have those decompression stops as you came up, so I think of them as decompression stops. But when you hit the decompression stop, I then really anchored in one of the core tools in the book, which is the ACLs. You would take time in the pause to realign. Are we all still focused on the right strategy and the right direction? If not, what’s changed? What do we need to do to realign and pause there? We then paused around collaboration. Okay, we said these were the signature ways we wanted to work together, and there’s a great tool called the five shares in the book that helps diagnose where the team is at and develop their signature ways of working, so you’d do a debriefing and a feedback exercise, looking in the mirror to say, there are a lot of lovely words, but are we really living those, not just when we’re in the room, but when we scatter into the organization. Then perhaps the hardest one was to pause to learn because everybody’s so busy, particularly in turbulence, we make ‘learn’ that thing that we’ll get to eventually, but forcing the pause to learn, to bring the external voice in, bring the information in from the edges. But I increasingly find that unless leaders set their rhythm of the business up to have those decompression stops, once a month, once a quarter, things will go horribly wrong under pressure. Many think of it as an indulgent use of time. It’s probably one of the best investments in time I think you can make as an executive leader. Ross: Fantastic. More broadly, the book is largely around teams; it’s around leadership, organizations, the teams, and how those can work effectively is at the heart of it. We talked about amplifying cognition; cognition applies just as much to teams as to individuals. What are some distilled thoughts on how is it we can amplify the capabilities of teams? What’s the nub of it? Where’s the heart of being able to amplify that ability to make sense to work well together? Graham: There are a few elements to it, Ross. The frame we use, again, I will go ‘align, collaborate, learn,’ and we hone in on six building blocks or two on each side. ‘Align’ is, do we have a sense of direction and do we have a focus? Our data shows somewhere between 60-70% of the leadership teams do not have a clear purpose for their team. Now, that might sound ridiculous, but when you really pin an executive team down and go, ‘What are you accountable for?’ Very few can be clear about what that is. They’ll often say, ‘We’ll deliver on the strategy.’ I look at the CEO and go, ‘That’s you. That’s what you’re accountable for. What is this team accountable for?’ I think the first point is that you amplify leadership teams’ cognition and impact when they’re clear that their role is to create the environment in which success can occur. Then the environment has a whole lot of elements to it. Then they’ve got to provide the focus. The second part, if you think of it then is that ‘Collaborate’ really has got two pieces to it. It’s the development of partnering relationships because as much as we think organizations operate in teams and people are aggregated in teams, stuff doesn’t get done in teams, stuff gets done between people. It’s the partnering connections and relationships. Then, it’s the ability of the synergy to make the decisions effectively. Martin is exceptionally good at taking his team through some incredibly complex areas. The third part is ‘Learn,’ which is the awareness and the tempo, which are the elements. To me, it’s building. We use that as a frame with a team, and we’ve used that in the book, and we’re essentially saying, calibrate yourself against this. Do we have direction to our focus? Do we have the connections? Do we have the synergy? Do we have the awareness? Do we have the tempo? Where are we at? How do we need to move those forward? We can’t afford the investment to be good at and very good at all of them but if we like, as in a business, there’ll be one or two things in an apt context, we need to get really good. What is it? And then do you have any derailers? Martin: I’d just add to that, perhaps speaking to the listeners who are running teams, who might be the team leader, Ross, is to get the most out of the team. It’s shifting your mindset from being a manager or a leader or an executive to much more thinking of yourself as a coach, Ross, and thinking about what are those differences. A very powerful technique we talk about in the book is, first of all, you’ve got to dial up the pace of your interactions with your team members. But then you’ve got to reconstruct the conversation. Then we talk about if you move to conversations that are anchored in, ‘What have you achieved that you’re really proud of? How have you developed yourself in the last 60 days to learn and understand what’s going on? What brings you joy? What do you enjoy in your role? How, as I, as your coach, dial into that? But then also, how are you partnering with your colleagues in the team? Where have you got challenges? How can I help? How can I unlock the barriers that might be emerging or existing?’ And Graham mentioned, literally, every Friday afternoon, we would get together and go team member by team member. The onus was on me as the coach on Monday morning to adjust my interactions with them around that framework to help them bring their best to themselves and the team. A little bit of that was prioritizing self-care, Ross, that we talk about in the book as well. Self-care for me as the coach and being in my best space, but also caring for the whole person, not just how they’re achieving with the task. We talk in the book about how it’s got to start with the coach first and the leader first, and then bringing those new techniques to the team so that they can excel individually, and as one, Ross. Ross: Fantastic. Just to round out quickly. There are 25 tools, I tried to count them in the book, and I don’t think we are able to describe them in any detail right now. But just for each of you, what is the outline of one tool that you would offer as a gift, as a suggestion, or as something that could be useful to be able to take and apply immediately? Martin: Oh, sure. The tool that comes to mind for me, I’ll pick one, and you’ll see where you go, Graham, but we have a tool in the book, which is called the Align, Collaborate, and Learn team canvas, Ross. It talks about the building blocks of building a team. Graham touched on it already, where it’s got to start, and you can start anywhere with the blocks except we think you need to start first with what is the team’s direction and why the team exists. But if you get that up on a wall and you explain each of the six elements and have a great team conversation around where they believe the strengths and the gaps are in the team, it unlocks one of the most powerful conversations, Ross, around a shared understanding of where the team needs to build on its strengths or go after its gaps. It’s never failed me. It’s that tool that you can use multiple times because teams aren’t static. It is part of the debriefing process that I used with my team, and I now help other leaders take to theirs. What about you, Graham? Graham: I’m going to tackle the performance conversation, Ross. I think the vast majority of organizations have a linear industrial model for their performance conversations. I would encourage your listeners to redefine what they mean by performance. The tool we talk about there, and Martin mentioned it briefly earlier, if you want to sustain performance, there are four elements: you need to be achieving meaningful outcomes, you need to be developing and growing, enjoying what you’re doing, and partnering. You put that into a cadence with your team. I have achieved, developed, enjoyed, partnered, have a 90-day alignment around what we’re going to do, and then 30-day check-ins. In the book, we’ve interviewed 15 leaders, many of whom are leaders that we’ve worked with, and they use that. The chief defense scientist uses it with her team, Martin uses it with his team, Paul Doughty is using this, it’s used in a number of banks and universities and so on. It’s very simple because it just allows you to have a proper conversation about the four critical inputs to performance, whereas so many performance conversations tend to be just about the task and a little bit about maybe some training stuff. I’d shorthand this idea, achieve, develop, enjoy, and partner. Try that. I see that it worked, just the funnier side, when we first tested this out, a lady came back to me after about 30 days… a 60-day debrief. She said, ‘Oh my goodness, this idea works.’ I said, ‘How do you know it?’ She said, ‘I caught myself having a conversation with my eight-year-old daughter.’ I said, ‘It’s an ideal conversation. I’m asking you, who did she play with? What did she achieve? What sort of fun did she have?’ We need to make natural tools embedded in organizations so that the performance we’re bringing out is the best in people. That’s how you amplify cognition. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your insights, Graham and Martin. Where can people go to find out more about each of your works and find the book? Martin: We have got a website that people can go to, which is quite a simple URL. It’s just toolkitforturbulence.com, one word, and you’ll see everything that you need to know about the book there. Plus, we’ve got some tools that people can grab and start using right away, Ross. You’ll also find the links there if you’d like to order the book. We also have in the month of November, a masterclass that we’re offering free for anybody who wants to register and come along. The website has the link to that as well. If you would like to join us, it would be a pleasure to meet you and hear a little bit more about the book. Thank you for asking, Ross. Ross: Fantastic. All of those links to both of your other works will be on the show notes. Thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure having you on the show. Graham: Ross, thank you very much, and thanks for the podcast. I find it incredibly valuable and I refer it to so many of my clients, so thank you. Martin: Thank you, Ross.         The post Graham Winter and Martin Bean on vulnerability as a strength, collaborative learning loops, high performance cultures, and amplifying team capabilities (AC Ep19) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, philosopher, psychologist, poet, discusses embracing vulnerability, post-activism, societal disruptions, and Africa's potential to transcend progress narratives.

Dave Gray, a visual thinking expert, discusses the power of visual thinking in simplifying complex information. He highlights the importance of collective intelligence, collaborative sketching, infographics, and visual storytelling. Gray also delves into turning ideas into action and his perspective on education. The podcast explores visual thinking, visual metaphors, creativity, and overcoming fear.

“The beauty of life is dealing with challenges, not pretending that it’s perfect.” – Minter Dial About Minter Dial Minter Dial is a professional speaker on leadership and transformation and the award-winning author of four books, most recently Heartificial Empathy, recently released in its second edition. He hosts the Minter Dialogue podcast and is author of the featured Substack Dialogos, Fostering More Meaningful Conversations. He previously held senior executive roles including as CEO of Redken Worldwide. Website: www.minterdial.com White Paper: Making Empathy Count Books: https://www.minterdial.com/books/   LinkedIn: Minter Dial Facebook: Minter Dial YouTube: @MinterDial  Twitter: @mdial  What you will learn Developing empathy and emotional intelligence in leadership (03:16) Distinguishing between sympathy and genuine affective empathy (04:21) Understanding and practicing compassionate communication (06:44) Addressing empathy burnout in the modern workplace (08:38) Challenges in fostering organizational empathy (12:00) Role of curiosity, humility, and self-awareness in empathy (13:37) The impact of reading fiction on empathy development (14:20) Emphasizing the influence of one’s perspective on AI utilization (20:27) Exploring empathic AI solutions while maintaining authenticity and consistency in customer service (23:47) Clarifying intentions and ambitions before implementing AI solutions (29:33) Exploring the connection between societal disconnection and AI development and perception (32:26) Episode Resources Resources Digital Genius Replika Character.ai Book Heartificial Empathy, 2nd Edition: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence by Minter Dial We by Yevgeny Zamyatin   Transcript Ross Dawson: Minter, it’s a delight to be talking to you. Minter Dial: Ross, it’s always fun to chat with you. I’ve enjoyed following your work, reading about it, and having you on my podcast. Thanks for having me on. Ross: You have worked with leaders in all guises for many years now. Leadership encompasses cognition, its array of making sense of the world to be able to act effectively in it. It’s a very big topic but what are some of the ways in which we can, as leaders, enhance our cognition or to help leaders to enhance their cognition, breadth, and scope of their ability to think and act? Minter: Ross, it’s an interesting way to go into this topic by referencing empathy, which is a strong or very important skill that leaders of today and tomorrow need to have. Typically, we divide empathy into two different types. One is cognitive and the other is affective or emotional. To be a little bit out of left field, one of the things that leaders could do to improve their cognition would be to have better self-awareness and a higher emotional quotient. In other words, better understanding of their emotions, better acceptance of them, and eventually, a better showing of them. That’s where I’d like to start. Ross: Let’s dig into the theme of empathy. How do you define that? Let’s bring this idea of empathy to life. Minter: Essentially, there are many different schools of thought as to what empathy is, but broadly speaking, it’s about being in someone else’s shoes. More specifically, it’s about understanding someone else’s feelings, thoughts, and experiences. If you break that down, that means that I can understand what you’re thinking, I can understand what you’re feeling, I can understand your context experiences. There’s a second piece of it, which is affective empathy, which is actually I feel your feelings, which takes it to another level. If you’re sad, I feel sad, I don’t feel sad for you, which is sympathy, I feel your sadness. In the way I approach empathy, I believe, it’s much more reasonable to think that you can learn cognitive empathy, but much harder to imagine learning or improving your affective empathy because if you don’t feel stuff, I can’t make you do it. On the other hand, in the case of cognitive understanding, open questions, thoughtfulness, observation, and taking time, are things that you can control, if you wish. Ross: A lot of this happens in the creation of a prosperous workplace, but just to push to an edge case, if you have to lay off a bunch of people, does that mean you have to cut off your empathy? Because if you’re feeling the pain of many people, that’s a massive burden. Maybe you should be feeling that burden, but how does one manage in this kind of an example, when there’s no other path for an organization to survive, to be able to cause that kind of pain? Minter: Whether or not it’s the only thing, it is the thing you’ve decided. The reality is that empathy isn’t about being nice, which is one of the big misconceptions people have. Empathy is about understanding someone else’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences. I’m going to get back to the emotional side of it in a moment, but let’s say that I have to deliver to you, Ross, some bad news. For example, I might have to cut your salary, or maybe I have to demote you or move you to a place, you’d go rather than stay with me. If I understand your context and the impact it will have on you, not just at work, but maybe in society, with your family, then I might be more suitably arranging the way I express it. “Hey, Ross, this is going to be hard. Please, do you have a moment here? Take a seat. This is going to be some bad news for you. I know It’s going to be bad news because of your situation.” By trying to do that, by showing that you’re considerate about the situation, it obviously doesn’t take away the pain of the final mandate, which is, “I’m firing you”, however, what I’m going to do is, because I know your situation, I’m also going to think about having thought about that, what impact it’s going to have on you. Considering your situation, Ross, and this bad news that I have to give you, here’s what I’m going to suggest, or here’s how we can position it. For example, with regard to your family, you will keep your title for another six months while you’re searching, or I don’t know. There are different ways to land the news in a way if you can be considerate about the person’s situation. I just want to get back to the affective side. Because surely, feeling everybody’s pain is difficult. There is a pathology called being an empath, where you are constantly, totally sensitive to everyone’s feelings all the time. That is hugely draining, it’s a real problem. It can make you unable to make any decisions or act because you’re fretful about making someone unhappy. That said, in business, we tend to make a separation between professional status and this other area, which is personal, which includes emotional status. In today’s world, there is much evidence to show that a lot of people in human resources are suffering empathy burnout. This comes from two things. One is a hugely difficult economic situation and business environment, except for a few lucky ones, but on balance, a lot of uncertainty, whether it’s war, economics, global climate, whatever. It makes everyone nervous. People are having difficulties and strapping down, so a bad news environment, fear factors, and bosses are saying, “You better batten down the hatches.” The people who are the intermediary, generally relaying the information from the executive suite into the employee workforce, for example, letting go of people, are the HR team. They are also having to deal with, for example, the movement from or not whether to have flexible work hours, or work from home, and how all that is supposed to happen. They’re trying to do that with humanity, all the while being whipped and pressurized because performance is difficult, and the outlook is uncertain. Ross: I want to get to the theme of your book “Heartificial Empathy” and some of the ways in which technology plays a part. But first, in the short time we have in a podcast conversation, how is it that people, leaders, and anybody can move to have more functional empathy? Empathy is enormously valuable for all sorts of reasons. You can’t sell anything to anybody unless you really understand the situation, you can’t engage, you can’t motivate. These are very powerful and pragmatic capabilities but also ones that give us a richer life. Are there any ways in which we can develop our empathy? Minter: They most certainly are. If someone’s listening to this, they’re kind of nodding their head already, “Oh, it’s like Ross said, it’s great for business, it’s helping management, it’s going to allow you to sell, it’s going to be great for customer interactions, and so on.” Then you’re drinking the Kool-Aid. But the challenge and reality is that a lot of businesses struggle to have, let’s call it, organizational empathy. Part of that is the culture, but also the people in the C-suite. Are they modeling the behavior? Wherever you sit in the organization, is your boss, is the executive team, modeling empathy? Or are they struggling to deal with the pressures? Because there are two things that kill empathy in organizations. The first is stress related to performance issues, in large part, and and lack of time; because I’m running from meeting to meeting, I don’t have time to listen to you, park that for another time, and ultimately, never allowing that time to happen. If you’re interested in becoming empathic, I’ll get to the concrete methods in a moment. But first of all, understand why you want to be empathic, because empathy is just a tool, and it can be used for good and bad purposes. Ask a sociopath; that’s their primary tool. Why do you want to become more empathic? How truly aware are you of your and your organization’s empathic levels? Some say, “Oh, I’m already empathic.” In the studies I’ve done, year after year, between 72 and 80 percent of individuals will describe themselves as being above average in their level of empathy. Problem! This issue of self-awareness is genuinely important, especially in the higher ranks. One of the key qualities of being empathic is being curious. One of the key elements of being curious is having the humility to absolutely wish to understand or learn from somebody else. Because if I know it all already, then I’m going to start cutting you off, I’m not going to listen, I’m going to be thinking about what I’m going to say next, and that doesn’t allow the other person to feel heard. Having that self-awareness is important. Then understanding, genuinely, where you are as an organization. Finally, just to come back to your question, Ross, the things that can help you generate or be more empathic? Assuming you’ve got the self-awareness, one lovely idea is to start reading much more fiction. I don’t know about you, Ross, you and I write nonfiction for the most part. But fiction, when it’s well-written with great dialogues and the development of personalities and characters, allows you somehow to get into the minds of other people, people who are not like you. For example, it can be a woman, or it could be someone of another race, religion, or country. If it’s well-written, it allows you this nuanced, complex understanding of how other people are. That’s one very lovely, and easy thing to do. There are, of course, many others. Ross: I’ve always been an inveterate reader of fiction. There are times when I’ve not read as much fiction, but I’m still reading as much fiction as non-fiction these days. It’s a delight in its own right. We are a part of the human race, and amazing writers make us see things, and tug on our heartstrings in wonderful ways. Minter: One of the things I’ve been reading most recently is a couple of dystopian novels. They also have their place, all the more so in today’s world, where there seems to be this huge divide. In that divide, I see the do-good, positive intention version of the world, and on the other side, highly fearful, highly compartmentalized, and worried about the future, maybe more tribal in thought. If you look at the book that I encourage everyone to take a look at, which is about to hit its 100th anniversary in 2024, it’s Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We“, which was written in 1924, first published in English, and finally came out in Russian sometime in the 80s. It is a tremendously interesting read because it fundamentally looks at this idea of who are ‘we’. What is ‘we’? When we belong, we belong to what? Where’s the place of ‘I’? Are we allowed to have ‘I’? Is ‘I’ good? Is ego appropriate? Then you have the narcissism on the other side. It’s a really interesting discussion. Part of the biggest paradoxes that we have to resolve or just live with, in business, and life, is learning this paradox between the need to feel different and yet belong. Ross: That’s fascinating. This echoes my own quest over life, the role of ego, and how we create a world together. But to your point about the value of dystopian fiction, Margaret Atwood explicitly says that she writes dystopian novels to help us avoid the future she describes. She already has played a role by helping people recognize things that are happening, which echo some of her themes which have led to people being able to express themselves more clearly about what it is they don’t want. Minter: It brings up the notion, Ross, of history. Margaret Atwood being rather well-endowed in history. I’ve had her nephew, Dan Snow, on my show a couple of times. The thing is, we’ve kind of lost the plot as far as studying history is concerned. If you don’t study history, how are you going to avoid repetition? Frankly, what I’ve been talking to professors of history, in universities here in England, as well as in the United States, their commentary is disheartening. We no longer wish to study history as facts and events that happened in a context; we only want to criticize it depending on today’s evaluation or more as of today, which is not going to give us a good understanding of what happened. Ross: A very apt turn of phrase, I lost the plot, as in…That’s the plot that we have, which we’ve lived through as a human race, which can potentially inform our path forward. Minter: Absolutely! Storytelling has a great value. Ross: To switch on to the themes of “Heartificial Empathy“, your recent book which you’ve revised with the rise of generative AI, amongst other points, machines can express or engage us with emotion to evoke empathy, to express empathy in various guises. In a world where artificial intelligence, AI’s, can be empathic, or to evoke empathy in us, what are the things which we need to be thinking about the most? Minter: I love your group about humanity and AI, by the way, Ross. I’m enjoying just the beginning of that. The first thought is that how you think of AI will inform how you use it. In other words, are you worried about everything, in which case, you’re going to be operating from a place of fear? Or do you have a positive bent? Then are you a little bit idealistic about what its potential is and putting your head in the sand as to what could go wrong? It’s important to have that as a beginning piece. My approach would be to think about what is strategically important for you and your business. Then, how can AI supplement and augment you and your human intelligence? That’s the general piece. It’s amazing how many things are out there. Then you have to think about your ethical framework. How do you want to bring that in, in a way that’s appropriate? Are you going to be kind of too goody two shoes about it as in expected to have a higher standard of operations than we as human beings are? Or are you going to have a more realistic understanding of what you’re trying to achieve? Are you prepared to experiment, fail, test, and try again? You’re going to need a lot of that with humility, because, by the way, life is tricky moving along. Then basically, consider that a lot of employees are probably going to be worried about the impact of AI, so positioning it in a way that they hopefully, won’t sabotage, and they are willing to work with it and work with you, think of it as a skill acquisition, and do it. Several organizations are considering how to use empathically and say, formatted, and coded artificial intelligence to help certain functions in business concretely, such as marketing, communications or CRM, and customer service. But it doesn’t mean removing the human being; it’s trying to augment, facilitate, and take out some of the nutty, silly tasks, making them better, and eventually, more effective by being sometimes graded for being more empathic in the way they are approaching their communications. Ross: My framing around this is “humans plus AI,” as in how can humans and AI be better? How can AI amplify humans and humanity? Looking in our customer service context, of course, we can just have a human interacting with the customer, we can have AI interacting with the customer, or we can have the AI supporting the human, either way, some combination of them. Firstly, a lot of customer services are now automated. I’d like you to address that idea of to what degree should the AI express empathy? Whether that’s really felt or not? How can humans and AI together be more effective in expressing or living empathy? Minter: I hear this regularly. This is like a consultant’s answer, but it depends. For example, if you’re in a B2B or B2C, and how B2C are you? Are you millions of millions of people? The need for some kind of scalable response system becomes all the more evident. What are you trying to achieve? How real are you as a human being? Then, how can you create a copacetic, or consistent with your culture, type of AI service? The reality is we are very far from having empathic AI. What we’re getting better at is trying to tag or identify more empathic responses. There’s a very important distinction that’s worthwhile bringing up, which is within empathy, there is the giver of empathy, the one who’s being empathic, and the one who’s receiving it. I like to make this distinction because, in essence, sometimes someone can be the giver and be empathic, but the other person doesn’t feel it. That’s not necessarily bad; it might be just that the other person is there to be empathic, and maybe, for example, I’m a product manager thinking of a new product for a person like Mr. Dawson. What would Mr. Dawson really like? I think he would really like this, this, and that. That would fit into his day and really be useful for him. If it’s a pen, he’d like to have a nice click when it closes because that’s satisfying. There’s little user experience element to it. But when you use that pen, you don’t know that I was being empathic; you’re not going to say, “Oh, Minter, that pen designer was really empathic with me.” You might say, “Oh, this is a freaking great pen,” but you’re not going to associate it with the quality of empathy. That’s sort of an example of a case. But other times, you might try to be empathic, but the other person doesn’t feel it; maybe that person is in a deeper or worse space. This notion of giving and receiving depends on what you’re trying to measure. In the case of customer service, which you brought at first, when you are responding to somebody, the question here is how much data you have on your customer base, and how much of the work that you’re requiring your customer service to do can be improved. For example, if a call comes in, oh, I can identify the call; that’s this customer. That’s the profile of this customer; this customer likes to be treated really quickly, just short sentences, wants effectiveness, and doesn’t do any niceties like “How are you doing, sir?” Go straight to the core and answer the question. Alright! That’s great. I’m informed as to how I should operate with this customer. If the customer comes in as angry, oh, I didn’t expect that. The software can help me, Minter, relax! because this is how you’re going to deal with this. Here are four options for how you can reply to this. The first one is highly empathic but not very good for business. The second one is less empathic and a little better for the business and so on, so you can have different measurements. You’re not necessarily always going to take the most empathic option, depending on the culture and what your objectives are. Then you have these four answers, and they’re all pre-typed, you, as the customer service agent, have the agency ‘keyword’ to choose which of the four you think is best based on the criteria and valuations that you as an organization want to set up.  This is something concretely that people are doing at Digital Genius, which is one organization that does that. By helping the agent to be more informed about the customer incoming, giving some tips on how to be a little bit more empathic, just attitudinally, because when the other person is spitting fire at you, it’s hard to be empathic at that moment, necessarily, and then come up with a pre-typed, so you don’t have to worry about typos or mistakes. Ross: Pushing a bit further, one of the things that is fascinating is the degree of AI to engage us emotionally. We have Replika, and some of the characters in character.ai, and many others. I’ve forgotten the name of it, but there’s a Chinese service which has hundreds of millions of virtual boyfriends or girlfriends on it. In a way, that goes beyond empathy. Perhaps that’s one of the things that makes us be emotionally engaged… is the other person is empathic, probably a very important part of it. But it is essentially one of the frontiers that we need to explore and discover as in what happens when we become emotionally engaged? People are already falling in love with AI chatbots in various guises, and that will certainly continue. Where are we? What are the opportunities and challenges of these deeply emotionally engaging AI conversationalists? Minter: We are moving along, and my quip would be to say that we’re in a very lonely society and people are very willing and desirous of having emotions because, heck, we’re not just lonely, we’re sad. The levels of anxiety and depression in the world are huge. People are very quick to run into no one has the time to hear anybody else, it’s all about me. On top of that, not only is it all about me, but it’s all about what I feel. Forget the facts. My feelings are the truth. My truth is better than Trump’s and yours. That’s a level playing field. But when it comes to organizing this thought, I have a three-part version. One is what are you trying to achieve? What is your ambition? What is your intention? The second is, what is your ethical framework that supports that? The third, which is important, is what is your business model? You need to combine those three things as you look at what you’re trying to do with AI, whatever business you’re doing because you can make perhaps your AI better than you as an organization is, you can make it, perhaps more empathic than you as an organization is because there’s such a thing as organizational empathy. But is that going to make it for a better experience overall for your customer, or maybe you’re just looking to make a quick dime and sell the company in 18 months? In which case, the ethical framework is usually thrown out of the window. This takes into consideration what is your intention and what is your business model. I look at those three things as being important when you look at AI. Ross: To round out here on this idea of artificial empathy, where machines, in many cases, will be effectively better at expressing empathy than many humans, or at least that’s a premise I would make, where does this go? In broader society, in terms of all of us, and how do we engage with that? What are some top-of-mind thoughts on what’s coming and how we should be thinking about this world where we do literally have artificial empathy in a very real way, as well as human empathy? Minter: Here’s where I’m going to go with this, Ross. There’s a lot of artifice in general, not just AI or artificial empathy. I feel as a society, we tend to live through avatars. I use the word avatars as a metaphor for an alternative reality. We generally believe that my reality is the right reality, and we’ll promote everything to make me better and make me look good. In this idea of virtue signaling and looking good, I feel we’ve lost the plot again as to what is reality. The things we’re looking at, in certain cases, it’s all about making a quick dime, making a lot of money, flipping the business to some VCs or whatever. But worse than that, as a society, we are so grotesquely egotistical that we think we deserve to live forever, that we are the first generation that deserves to have immortality. There are people in the transhumanist department who are thinking this, and they’ve completely detached themselves from reality, which is that we are mortal, highly fallible, imperfect beings. The beauty of life is dealing with challenges, not pretending that it’s perfect. As human beings, we’re disconnected from one another – loneliness. We’re disconnected from reality. As such, we’re making sense of things that are disconnected from reality. Have you ever heard of apophenia? This is a beautiful word, which means making sense of things that actually don’t have any rational sense underneath them. You invent sense out of the stars, “Oh, I see the stars; that must mean that tomorrow, I’m going to make money.” We’re in a world where we lack true sense, with sense being the idea of rationality as well. We’re in this high-feeling mode, highly detached from reality, and desperate for sensing connection for true sense. We’re so desperate that we’re prepared to go for anything to have meaning. I would like us to focus on being a little bit more real, being a little bit more self-aware, not being so self-indulgent, and thinking more about community and thinking about actually what we mean by “we”, not in a naughty world where everybody is beautiful, and everybody deserves to belong because I think that’s a beautifully idealistic idea that has no base of reality. We have to learn how to find our limits, to say that good intentions can lead to bad outcomes, and be a little more realistic about the way we approach things, including, of course, the way we encode AI. Ross: Yes, the nature of society is changing rapidly. There are some fundamentals to humanity, many humans with, as you say, human fallibilities brought together. Now we’re amplifying that in many ways with the technology we’ve created which, in a way, comes back to who we are in this world. Minter, what are the best places for people to find you and your work? Minter: Generally speaking, it’s on a paddle tennis court because I’m a nut for Paddle Tennis. But if that’s not the way you work, I also like to write. I get up pretty much every morning and write about 1,000 words a day. Most of my writings, my hub is minterdial.com. There’s that little company over in Amazon that carries a few of my books. I’ve just released a white paper called “Making Empathy Count,” which looks at this notion of how you evaluate and measure empathy. That’s also available on Amazon. Otherwise, I’m out there on social media, still drumming but also listening. If you talk about mental models, spend more time listening than ranting. I’ve been ranting on this podcast with you, Ross. Thank you for listening and indulging me. But we should spend a whole lot more time listening with curiosity and with genuine humility, and not necessarily thinking about how I’m going to make the world better, but at least, putting effort into making your world, a little part of the world, a little better. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and your insights today, Minter. Minter: It’s been a pleasure over a glass of scotch in London, but, thank you very much for having me on, Ross.   The post Minter Dial on organizational empathy, augmenting with AI, empathic curiosity, and connecting to reality (AC Ep16) appeared first on Humans + AI.