I never really got the Sunday scaries, and I still don’t. I’ve got quite adept at switching off these days, or rather better at compartmentalising work and home. Some of this is because I’m less invested in the politics of a situation. I do the work to a high level and work with others to ensure their own work is the best it can be. Or rather, that *our* work can be the best it can be.
Today I’m doing the work that no one sees. The research and thinking that enables the best work to happen. It’s not boring but it is mundane in that the inputs are not something that people appear to care about, they only see the output and put all the value on that. The use of ai is only making that worse – the inputs are ‘ask an ai bot’ and the outputs are just a copy&paste transaction.
Tomorrow I will sit down with some humans and chat through what I’ve learned, what I think it means, and gather their inputs. I’ll use these to shift my own thinking. I’ll write it out in words and share that with everyone again and have them feedback. Finally, I’ll create some slides to show the client so that we have an agreed and shared starting point for the actual work.
That’s the process.
Now, I say that the thinking bit is mundane. It’s obviously not. What I mean is that telling people where you looked, how you put it together with a bunch of other inputs (some decades old) and how reading a blog post about sheep farmers helped you think about how to frame a question for a large, global financial institution… well, they’re not interested in that at all. Which is their loss.
To me, this part is the most interesting thing about thinking. Gathering a set of data and information and turning it into knowledge and insight. That data and information is there for everyone and anyone to gather up. The bit that cannot be replicated is the transformation of that into something novel or an angle that swiftly turns everyone’s perspective on its head and allows new paths to be opened up and explored. Or an answer that seems obvious when you see it but was hidden from view becomes crystal clear.
That’s the process.
I love the process. No way I’m outsourcing that to a prediction machine.