We work so hard to have freedom and leverage and choice.
And then, as soon as a social network, boss or cultural force instructs us to do something, we fold our tents and go along.
Responsibility is scary. Sometimes it’s easier to find someone (or something) to blame.
Just because AI tells you to put your finger in a pencil sharpener doesn’t mean you should, said every mother ever.
When new creation technologies arrive, they make the best a little worse and the bad a lot better.
Desktop publishing made every local garage sale sign a lot more legible, but can’t quite replace the hand-kerned and tweaked typography of the era before.
A smartphone in your pocket takes far better video of the family cookout than a super 8 camera ever could, but it’s no match for Hitchcock shooting in 35mm.
Autotune makes an average singer much better, but a world fueled by autotune might not have room for Tom Waits.
Of course, all of this matters more than ever, because AI is the great smush.
Most forms of human expression are smushed by a decent AI. None of it is as good as genius-level human work, and much of it is better than what was average a generation ago.
The smush creates volume, volume that often redefines our understanding of quality. And that volume establishes a new standard, until it gets smushed again.
You would think that the smush creates more demand for distinctive, handmade, human work. And that’s true–remarkable works of genius and originality have a chance to do better than ever. But the smush harms the market for pretty-good or even very-good human work. Because there’s less of that, less genius slips in as well.
Avoiding the tools is optional. Pushing harder than ever for the top tier isn’t.
Organizations thrive on incremental improvement. They find a stable foundation and then build a feedback loop of relentless improvement.
This leads to great efficiency, higher productivity and more profits. It enables more throughput and builds market share.
Except things change.
Optimized offerings are brittle. When the foundation shifts, all of that incremental improvement breaks into shards.
When the dust settles, the optimized alternative is almost always surpassed by the resilient one.
For generations, the rules of Lego were simple: many pieces, all able to connect in many ways, led to many outcomes.
That almost drove the company into bankruptcy, though.
Lego kits saved the business. Each kit has just one way to do the work, follow the instructions carefully. Industrial indoctrination in a box.
While it made Lego plenty of money, it didn’t create a generation of creative thinkers. And following instructions is what most organizations want.
Now that robots and AI are here to follow instructions, though, we might need people who can draw plans, not simply follow them.
Built into the concept of “interesting” is the unexplored. The temptation of discovery and the new.
And so, by definition, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, it’s likely that there is something more interesting somewhere else. The people at the next table may be talking about something more fascinating than your date is… the only way to know is to listen in.
Part of the curse of the smartphone is that it brings the more-interesting chasm right into our hands. Being present and focused now takes Herculean effort.
As long as we choose to imagine it, the apparent insufficiency of here and now will be with us. Sometimes it even comes knocking.
Nailing it in the first take is a sign of preparation and professionalism. No need for two tries if you are clear about what you’re doing and how.
The next take is where hope lies. This one was pretty good, but next time, we’ll bring it.
And the last take is good enough. That’s why there are no more takes after that.
One of the best traditional bakeries in New York has a kitchen you can see from the counter. People wait in line for their handmade French baguettes, and the confirmation that they were made right here and right now is reassuring.
I noticed that the baker was using a mechanical gadget called a loader. It allows her to place and shape six baguette onto a board, and load them into the oven all at once.
It’s hard to imagine anyone being disappointed by this. It’s still the same loaf, still handmade, but like the electric mixer they use to knead the dough, it seems to be part of the authentic process, not an industrial one.
The challenge is in what happens next…
Mechanized scale brings productivity and certainty, but it also brings huge short-run rewards for cutting corners. Save a penny a loaf with a handmade product and it’s not big deal. Save a penny a loaf when you make 10,000 a day and it begins to add up to real money. So it pays to add a bit of stabilizer, change to a more reliable oven temperature and switch to a cheaper flour…
This is what people who care about quality are actually fretting about. It’s not the scale. It’s the shortcuts that sometimes come with it.
Quality, by definition, is meeting spec. If you don’t like the spec, make the spec better.
We can have scale and consistency and quality. But we can’t have all three at the same time when we race (or are pushed) to the bottom.
Bit by bit, we either make things better or we make them worse.
Compared to what?
98% of the time, the state champ loses at nationals.
Every billionaire but one isn’t the richest person in the world. Only one of the 300 people who direct a feature film each year will win an Academy Award.
And only one public company has the greatest share price growth.
Competition is often a useful source for fuel. In our scarcity-driven world, looking for external metrics might be a productive way to focus our energy or gather resources.
But it’s also a trap.
A trap that seduces us into accepting someone else’s priorities.
A trap that causes us to forget what got us here and to ignore our good fortune.
And a trap that takes us out of this moment as it pushes us to imagine another one, less likely, in the future.
When we’re captured by the death spiral of scarcity and dominance, we’re signing up for a journey that’s all about the destination, a destination we’re quite unlikely to reach.
Consider what made this worth doing in the first place. Why isn’t that enough?
It’s a dance between workers, bosses and the market.
The most stable quadrant happens when a thoughtful and consistent boss hires the right person, pays them fairly, creates positive working conditions and useful training. In return, the company gets extraordinary performance. That’s someone doing a good job who also has a good job.
A particularly unstable quadrant is the worker who gets all of the above, but because of culture, choice or lack of enrollment, simply doesn’t do a good job. That mismatch could last for a while, but it’s shaky.
Consider for a moment the boss who takes advantage of people (and the system) by creating lousy conditions and paying too little but still manages to enforce output that they consider acceptable. Once workers realize that they don’t have a good job, they leave, if the culture and the economy permit it. Government is critical in helping people doing a good job get unstuck once they realize they don’t have a good job.
And the last quadrant is all too common: you don’t have a good job and you don’t do a good job. It’s not clear which came first, but they often go together.
Everyone deserves to have a good job. And smart bosses show up to help make that possible.
Hank Green has an interesting take on the scientific method: We advance because scientists work to persuade others that they’re correct. Every paper, statistical analysis and experiment is nothing but an argument designed to persuade an intelligent critic.
The method of argument is determined by the audience–if they require double-blind studies and useful statistical models, then that’s what you’ll need to use to change their minds.
Priya Parker’s new book is about fighting. It’s useful to realize that signing up for listening to what works and then doing it more is an argument toward better.
Positive argument is the generous act of approaching someone on their terms to persuade them to move forward.
The upside of free market capitalism (and the marketing that goes with it) is that every product and every campaign is an argument. An argument to win over customers, to solve problems in a new and better way. Different cultures require different arguments, but that’s what we do to grow.
The most effective form of marketing isn’t an ad, it’s a better product.
And thus one of the key problems with monopolies: they don’t have to argue! The customer has no choice. The monopoly stops listening, innovating and working for improvement, because they don’t need to.
The same is true for democracy vs autocracy. The despot has no need to make an argument, so they don’t.
Find a place where positive arguments are welcome, and use them to make things better by making better things.
