Connections from My Media Consumption

“Murder at the End of the World”

We are watching this TV program. Don’t panic. No spoiler alerts because we aren’t that far into it yet. It’s a murder mystery and a near timeline science fiction show. It was produced by FX but we are streaming it on Hulu so we have no commercials and we could binge the entire series at once, but we can’t watch that much TV at one time. Think back five or ten years and contemplate what has changed to make this paragraph possible even for a late adopter like me.

The story takes place at a hotel built by a tech mogul, Andy (Clive Owen), in Iceland. There is a “conference with a group of tech people and alternative thinkers, artists, hackers and the like there to reconceptualize life in the new climate reality.. Oh, and people begin getting killed, a sort of “Ten Little Indians” updated, (look it up).

All the attendees have been invited by Andy’s assistant Ray, who is an AI mating of scheduling and security aps such that you can actually see him. “We prefer alternative intelligence actually.”

The plot doesn’t really stretch the science fiction imagination much. There are tech giants building bunkers and cities from the ground up on California farmland today. Andy may be a little megalomaniacal, but not really compared to some of the tech moguls alive at the moment, and Ray is, a little dorky but nice. “I’m a good listener.”

But the show is stretching my brain a bit more than the usual whodunnit, I think because of some non-fiction reading I’ve done lately:

• The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology, by Juliette Powell and Art Kleiner
• Unthink: All You Have to Do is Nothing, by Dr. Erik Zabiegalski
• Fluke: Chaos and Why Everything Matters, by Brian Klaas
• Becoming Unbelievably Successful, By John Knotts

These books are seemingly unrelated. I didn’t pick them because of a single line of research, but I think that together with the picture of the near future in “Murders at the End of the World” they connect with ideas for leaders to cope with the chaos of the twenty-first century.

The AI Dilemma     

This book is really about how we, leaders in business and government,  and just regular folk, need to get a handle on artificial intelligence before it gets a self-organizing learning-machine control mechanism on humanity, our institutions, and the world. It may not be the SkyNet of the Terminator movie series, but AI might mess up our life if we leave it alone to be “developed because we can” without enough thought and oversight.

The seven principles that Powell and Kleiner propose would seem to be a solution, if anyone is listening:

1. Be Intentional about risk to humans – Loss of privacy, defamation, medical procedures, or nuclear missile responses run without human oversight.
2. Open the closed box – algorithms that people don’t understand before they start learning might be unpredictable
3. Reclaim Data Rights to People – control over what information we share and to what purpose (opt in or out) may not be enough to stop the AI juggernaut but it’s a start.
4. Confront and Question Bias -There are almost 200 known human cognitive biases. Are we just programming AI so that we can make Belief Bias, Confirmation Bias, Reactive Devaluation Bias, Gambler’s Fallacy Bias decisions (etc.) infinitely faster.
5. Hold stakeholders accountable – there may need to be different defamation law, or negligence law, but it starts with confronting tech developers, politicians, and just poor users of technology before damage is done.
6. Favor loosely coupled systems – I did a lot of work in my career encouraging leaders to build “aligned organizations,” where systems, procedures, culture and leadership practice aligned with and supported strategy. This is critical to get things done, but doesn’t allow opportunity to challenge, rethink and pivot. When we’re talking about systems without human oversight, too much alignment is problematic, thus loose coupling.”
7. Embrace creative friction – bringing together multiple points of view, (Like Andy has done in my TV show) means that conflict will ensue. There is a lot of evidence that managing this kind of conflict leads to better decisions

Sound principles all, for managing the progress of artificial intelligence, but also for leadership in chaotic times.

 Unthink

 Zabiegalski outlines two different thinking processes, “exploitation: doing the same thing over and over again, improving the process by eliminating waste and distraction, and “exploration,” gathering new data, researching seemingly unrelated topics, asking “what if?” or “in what ways might we?”

 He recommends that as individuals we stop periodically and ask what kind of thinking is required. He suggests that leaders build ambidextrous organizations capable of both kinds of thinking. This process of “unthinking” is what Powell and Kleiner suggest for managing development of AI.

 Zabiegalski was very influenced by the work of David Bohm about how things are interconnected at a subatomic level. Quantum entanglement, the demonstrated connection that Bohm demonstrated by changing spin between two particles at a distance, show that our actions have consequences that we may not ever imagine.

 Fluke

 First let me confess that I’ve only bought this book; I haven’t read it yet. I read an article that Brian Klaas wrote in the Atlantic. In the article Klaas gave several examples of how world event were shaped by completely random events.

• Hiroshima was bombed, not Kiyoto because a general and his wife had had a great vacation in Kiyoto twenty years earlier.
• The Arab Spring started because a Tunisian vegetable vendor set himself on fire.
• An oscillation in the Ohrt Cloud in distant space threw a big rock our way and wiped out the dinosaurs and somehow micro-organisms were left in the sea, which grew into fish to amphibians with legs and through an incredible accident to live birth in mammals or people might have laid eggs.
• Covid came from a bat or some other source and one person carried it to the United States prompting a two year lockdown and changing the way people viewed work for the immediate future.

Chaos theory studies the impact of randomness in complex systems and show that small changes in initial conditions can have immense effects. This has been called the “butterfly effect,” a butterfly flapping it’s wings in Hong Kong can cause a tornado in Oklahoma. This is presumably illustrative, not factual, but you never know.

Becoming Unbelievably Successful

John Knotts wrote what is a book about self-leadership. He advocates becoming successful by first determining what success means for you and determining your purpose. This book is like many others except for the fifteen Universal Laws that Knotts includes in these self-analyses. The Law of Vibration sounds like the Bohm principles that Zabiegalski quotes. Knotts emphasizes the power of thought that Klaas points to in understanding the potential impact of seemingly random actions and that Zabiegalski alludes to with his prescription for “unthinking your way to a balance of exploration and exploitation..

One of the universal laws Knotts quotes is the Law of Gestation, life, ideas, technologies take a while being born. Like fine wine matures in fermentation, but must age till the time it is ready, some things must bubble and steep longer than others.

Connections

We live in a turbulent time. Look at any aspect of life right now – world geopolitics, technological innovation, weather, business, communications, attitudes towards work post Covid. What you see is Change and not just small improvement tweaks, huge potentially life altering step change. What do these four perspectives teach leaders about coping with and thriving in this level of change?

From Eric Zabiegalski’s  Unthink  I learn that we must stop and examine our thinking. What aspects of our lives require exploration? What parts of the problems we face do we know roughly what to do, but we need to use exploitation, act measure improve and act, measure and improve again?

Brian Klaas’s Fluke, counsels us to prepare for randomness for anticipating unforeseen consequences. When I worked with clients on strategy and when I worked with clients on improving safety, I always recommended building in some redundancy, a buffer, a contingency plan, something to give you time to deal with the unpredictable.

John Knotts writes about planning your career, purposefully, but one could easily apply his principles to starting and building a business. Knotts emphasizes learning, building new capability and connections as a path to success. He includes a chapter on volunteering, giving back to others as a requisite for success.

Powell and Kleiner’s book, The AI Dilemma, is about how we should react to one particular technological change, but their seven principles require very little rewriting to be a prescription for leading in turbulent times.

1. Be Intentional about risk to humans – Shouldn’t this be applied to a peace, process, actions on climate change, healthcare, financial inequity?
2. Open the closed box – Should transparency and the opportunity for input from those affected by any change be foundational?
3. Reclaim [Data] Rights to People – rights to privacy, visible fair process, equal opportunity, basics for survival -access to food, shelter, and safety.
4. Confront and Question Bias -While Powell and Kleiner discuss decision bias, shouldn’t leaders also confront “Otherism,” that demeans any individual or group such that it justifies mistreatment of those viewed as “less than?”
5. Hold stakeholders accountable – Leaders should start by holding themselves accountable, but stand up for these values, “speak truth to power, and refuse to follow leaders who violate a human centered view of change.
6. Favor loosely coupled systems – and plan for randomness and unintended consequences.
7. Embrace creative friction – “none of us is as smart as all of us.” IT is a truism that bringing together people with radically different points of view produces a better solution, but believe me it ain’t easy. Managing creative friction, takes a strong process that ensure that everyone is heard. In my experience that requires leaders and all participants to put a damper on their egos and follow some agreed upon ground rules.

Now that brings me back to “Murder at the End of the World.“  Andy has assembled a group of radically different thinkers, but someone is eliminating the diverse points of view. That isn’t what I mean by “managing creative friction.” I know, it’s a TV show, but all too frequently, “in order to move ahead,” or because we ‘must sing off the same hymn sheet,” leaders belittle the disagreeable,  and stifle dissent.

That won’t work for solving the problems facing us today. For that we’ll need to Unthink, plan to Become Unbelievably Successful,  prepare for Flukes, and follow 7 Principles for Responsible Leadership.