When technology communicates with us, Anthropology at work, & Seeing the change before others.
The newsletter that makes you smarter about the world, work, & life.
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Amy L. Bernstein writes, “We humans are hard-wired to communicate. When technology communicates with us in real-time, in increasingly realistic ways, we cease thinking about technology as an inanimate tool. Indeed, the tool morphs into a partner, a collaborator, a cleverly heuristic problem-solver.”
Generative AI has a long way to go but it’s already producing art, writing stories, providing counselling, and churning out misinformation. Bernstein warns that “The more we allow a manufactured intelligence to take the helm of intellectual creation, the more we may cede — consciously and then unconsciously — our inherent ability, if not our capacity, to think entirely organically and independently.”
Just look at how TikTok’s algorithm has turned reading into a performative act. Reynolds writes, “Just as fashion and lifestyle content on social media are curated for public consumption, so too, does BookTok encourage readers to curate their literary choices to project a specific image instead of letting your curiosity guide you.”
II. Observations and insights.
No matter how much I’d like it to be true, especially when I’m stuck between a hard place and a deadline, an observation is not an insight. “An easy way to distinguish between the two is to remember that a finding tells us what the users are doing while an insight can explain why the users are behaving as they do. As Marsha Williams states in Insights vs findings (2007): “while findings are free to be trivial and merely interesting (or not), insights bear a much greater responsibility. Findings are often nice to know; insights should be considered need to know”. (Stine Skotte Mikkelsen on Medium).
III. Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
Here's an example of how thinking like an anthropologist can help us understand ourselves and our organisations better.
In this article Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas explains how thinking like an anthropologist can help us understand our organisations better.
He writes, “[…] deeper observation and knowing the contexts and histories of events within your organisation could help develop a nuanced understanding of how knowledge gets created and shared, what are the unofficial and informal routes of power, how knowledge and power manifest through different technologies (e.g. documents, slide decks, instant messages), how people think about (and feel about) their decisions and behaviours, what constrains decision-making and what prompts a decision to be deferred, or when narratives and ideology trump evidence (and whether this could be desirable in some situations).”
IV. Stating and communicating your commitments to build accountability.
The best kind of accountability is towards yourself.
It’s also the hardest.
The best way to hold yourself accountable is to state and communicate your goals.
And there’s a simple way to build this habit: send yourself a weekly summary
In his article Jens-Fabian Goetzmann describes how he uses weekly summary emails to align with his manager and his team. He explains that “At its core, the weekly email has two headings with 3–5 short bullet points each: achievements this week and priorities next week. Under the former, you list the 3–5 most important things you got done this week, under the latter, the 3–5 most important things you want to get done the following week.”
If sending weekly updates to your boss feels daunting, then it may be a sign for you to two to sit do and align your priorities. If that seems far fetched then recruit a colleague.
Social pressure is a the best way to keep yourself accountable. But there’s no shame in starting with yourself.
The goal is to build a habit for self accountability, as Goetzmann writes, “At the end of each week, you can compare the things you wanted to get done with those you actually got done.
This also allows introspection: considering how good you are at both the right amount of priority tasks and focusing on them, as well as how effective you are at shielding yourself from distractions and carving our time for the things that matter.
Since the weekly rhythm allows this introspection frequently, you should get better at it quite quickly.”
V. Being able to foresee the change and take advantage of it .
Apple wasn’t the first company to invent a phone with a touch screen. But they were the first ones to invent one that millions of people wanted to use.
In her article Julia Blyumen explains that it takes a novel approach to solving wicked problems - a problem for which “both the product and the user is unknown,”
She writes that if “you only follow market trends, you will never get ahead of them”
Her advice is to “discover the latent trends in user experience bottom-up. You can say analysts study the shape of the trend wave, while we study what causes the wave’s shape, which I believe, is ultimately people. The deeper and earlier the insights, the bigger the competitive advantage.”
Thanks for reading!
Aliyar
P.S. Stay curious!