August 13th List
Meaning of work, chance, chaos, AI (again), country western music, and swear jars.
Here are a handful of the readings, viewings, and listenings that have recently caught my attention and left a mark on my thinking.
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I have read very few books these recent weeks (romance laced with peril aside) .
Instead, the dogs and I have been wandering around our recently moved to neighbourhood chatting with old friends and new neighbours, testing all the ice cream flavours at the local shop (me, not them), snooping at gardens, and learning to act casual every time a prairie hare crosses our path. But I do have a book list that I am eager to start exploring. Here are two titles from the list.
Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work, by Christopher Wong Michaelson and Jennifer Tosti-Kharas
Sometimes folks to reach out to me when they wake up one morning and can no longer feel or grasp the meaning of their work or because their team is in need of a fresh take on the meaning of their work. They ask questions like:
What is purpose?
Is passion necessary?
Is it okay to like rather than love my job?
My position and salary say I’m successful, why don’t I feel it?
Where is the meaning in what I do?
Now what?
As a coach and facilitator I don’t have answers, I have process and questions. I read books to enrich my understanding and to broaden the context in which our conversations take place. Given the praise this book has received from the likes of Amy C. Edmondson, Adam Grant, and others I have high hopes for this to be a worthwhile read.
Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, by Brian Klaas
Chance? Chaos? Everything? Oh yeah, I’m looking forward to this read.
Some of you may be familiar with his other books, or his writings in the Atlantic, or maybe you met him near his home in the south of England as your Cathedral tour guide. If you haven’t yet encountered him and enjoy being exposed to ideas and lines of thinking that may not be regularly found in the standard “leadership and management” literature, I recommend starting with his newsletter (one of my favourites) The Garden of Forking Paths .
To whet your appetite here is a quote from his July 21st “The CrowdStrike Debacle is a Warning” which resonated with my thinking on hyper-efficiency and the shiny as compared to resiliency and sustainability.
Centuries ago, the philosopher David Hume wrote that we can never be certain that the patterns of the past will remain the patterns of the future. As I argue in my book Fluke, this is especially true in the 21st century. We are gambling more and more of our world on unstable, volatile systems. Worse, we’re gambling with higher stakes in a time of social upheaval and structural change. Can we really trust our species to flawlessly govern unimaginably complex systems—systems we don’t always fully understand—that can be brought down by a single screw-up?
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Talk about serendipity!
I was looking up the podcast Decoder Ring for a road trip. It and 99% Invisible, are my go-to podcasts for learning about things I didn’t know I needed to know and delight in learning about such as the “Cabbage Patch Kids Riots” and “Automats”.
Anyhow, this isn’t about those, its about this podcast episode from Decoder (no Ring), “Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda says it’s okay if we end up marrying AI chatbots” where host Nilay Patel asks questions (with a better set-up than I’m quoting here) such as:
Where do you think those boundaries are with an AI companion?
If it’s not supposed to replace your friends but, rather, complement them, where’s the beginning and end of that complement?
Do you think LLMs can do everything people want them to do?
Across the board, not just for Replika, are we projecting a set of capabilities on this technology that it doesn’t actually have?
When I think about AI I tend to think about two things.
One is about market risk and the other, more pertinent to this newsletter, is about relationship building risk.
There is an unease in navigating the uncertainty of AI and job security or changes, of AI and online fakery and treachery, and of AI utopia and dystopia narratives while building a career, leading a team or whole organization, or exploring one’s own purpose and leadership journey.
When that unease is layered onto the growing distrust of leaders, management, and organizations in general, there is a risk to our relationship with our sense of self at work and to those around us, which in the end harms our well being and the work of the organization. It is vital that our workplaces have resilient trust-based relationships and a culture of psychological safety.* If this conversation about AI, trust, and relationship building isn’t happening in your organization, what are you waiting for?
A bit more:
“Reid Hoffman, AI, and What It Means to Be (More) Human”, On Being with Krista Tippett (not surprisingly, my favourite so far).
The AI Daily Brief (Formerly The AI Breakdown): Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
How AI Companions Are Redefining Human Relationships In The Digital Age,
Neil Sahota, Forbes.
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Just received and started flipping through the lates issue of Harvard Business Review. My work tends to focus on organizational culture so this issue on “Build a corporate culture that works” and “How to ensure that your organization can execute on strategy” has piqued my interest. Folks, corporate or not and intentional or not, you all have organizational cultures and too often they are being neglected while energy is put towards plans and goals. As I wrote last week,
Peter Drucker may have never said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. If we don’t understand why and how we do things (culture) we too often find that our attitudes and behaviours undermine our plans and goals.
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Extras
I’m listening to country western classics. All that lonesome heartache and humour (Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton are brilliant lyricists) is good to touch base with and I can’t resist the twang, high notes (Dolly yodelling on “Mule Skinner Blues” - wow!), and a touch of blue grass.
Speaking of country western and blue grass, I have been in love with Emmy Lou Harris since I was a kid and am thrilled to be setting time aside, with a big bowl of popcorn, for the PBS showing of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska: A Celebration in Words and Music on which she makes an appearance.
I’m watching A Man in Full and do dearly hope that the story comes to some sort of point about morality, ethics, and leadership. If I watch much more of this I may need to put a swear jar on the counter.
Rereading, with gratitude, Richard Wagamese’s Embers and One Drum.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Find out more about my work as a facilitator and a coach at the Courageous Leaders Project - all about doing leadership differently, one conversation at a time. While on the website book some time with me to chat about how we might work together.
*That’s right, here I am again promoting the need to purposefully cultivate a workplace culture of psychological safety. It is so important to my work and yours that this year I received a Master Certificate in Mental Health and Psychological Safety at Work.