"A LeAIder looking at electrical wiring."
Fellow Sacred Workers:
I’d like to extend an enormous welcome to you, a welcome into an exciting new era of Insights Experiences.
As we’ll lay out below, after a long, arduous journey we are finally breaking into a new dawn. And it is thrilling, isn’t it?
I’m so glad to hear that! I knew you would!
I want to begin by pointing out just how much progress we’ve made, collectively. In the beginning, when we all arrived – we can be honest about this, now, candid even – what we found was a dumpster fire of hot garbage. Let’s just name it and claim it, ok? There simply were no Insights. No Excellence. People were lumbering around, with rocks in their hands, looking dim, wondering how to sharpen them or tie them to sticks. Except: not really because they were so dim and devoid of Insights they didn’t even have concepts of “sharpen” or “tie.” We shudder at the thought.
Am I kidding a little bit? Sure. They didn’t even have any sticks.
But then we arrived on the scene. And got down to brass tacks. Rolled up our sleeves and did the real work, the sting of sweat in our eyes, of laying out a Bold Strategic Vision. It was not easy! Boldness never is! There were a lot of sleepless lunches. But we were committed. Together.
We kept at it. Year after year. The strategies got bolder. But things weren’t perfect! What are we, magicians? Were we supposed to clean up all that hot garbage in a single day, in which not even Rome was built that fast? Heck no! There is no Easy button. It’s been a journey. And when I look back on that journey, and map it, our hearts swell with pride at how far everyone has come with the benevolence of our guidance.
To get a little Biblical on you here: in the beginning there was only Knowledge. This was fine, so far as it goes. Man would go about his daily affairs, and stub his toe, or run from a saber tooth tiger, or get bitten by a snake, and hey presto, learn something! Knowledge. If they even made it back to the cave they could share that knowledge with others, but only, like, one at a time. And probably only imperfectly through a series of grunts and pointing motions. Unbelievably inefficient, to have to gather knowledge at the speed of your own life.
But, then, skipping ahead a bit here, Knowledge begat Research. And it was ok. People figured out they could go looking for knowledge ahead of time, in batches, before bad things happened, and store up a bunch of knowledge for later, or for some big thing they wanted to do, like siege a city (there were cities by then) or avoid a plague. But still, wow, this was slow. People had to go collect knowledge the old fashioned way.
As specialization of roles increased, there were classes of people who needed to use Knowledge but could not possibly find the time to digest it all. They had decisions to make. Getting a bunch of knowledge into your head, even if people were out there collecting it for you, still took too long. So Knowledge begat Insights. And that’s when we really started cooking with gas. If Knowledge was giving you stepping stones to what to believe, Insights was a helicopter that just picked you up and set you down where you needed to be. Way more efficient! There were drawbacks of course, nothing is free. The people who just got Insights didn’t really understand things the same way as the people who gathered Knowledge, but that was ok because by this time knowing things and making decisions about those things were separate jobs. This is how we got airplanes, and Zyklon-B.
This has worked out well, until now. But as we can all attest, the Speed of Business has changed. The idea that people would still need to go out and collect Knowledge has become unsustainably slow, not to mention, the fields have been so mined that it’s actually getting harder and not easier to find new Knowledge. In fact there is so much Knowledge, stored up in vaults, stuffed into the closets, piled up in the corners, that we can hardly turn around while making decisions anymore. So much we all want to shout, Stop! It’s too much! We don’t want to Know any more Things!
We have worked out the central problem: while people love the feeling of Insights, the amount of blood and treasure necessary to produce them and keep them all is no longer acceptable.
The operation of an organization such as ours is now so complex and convoluted, with so many inputs and outputs and contingencies and subcontingencies, macrostrategies and microstrategies of wondrously decreasing size that fit intricately into each other like so many nesting dolls; with roadmaps and playbooks of such detail that one metaphor can simply not contain them, and they sprout pillars; so complex that we long ago blew past the event horizon where any one choice or decision has any meaningful effect on the whole enchilada at all. And yes, there are those who look on what we’ve bolted together here and despair.
Our therapists tell us this is natural. People hate feeling uncertain! It feels good to know! It feels even better to be sure you’re doing the right thing.
And, so, sure, even we have felt the panic coming on like the chill shadow of an eclipse at noon when the suspicion leaks in that our actions no longer matter. Even we sometimes cling desperately to some scraps of wood while being tossed in an angry ocean of meaningless data.
But that is not Leaning In.
By making it this far you’ve really shown you are one of the few capable of doing the Sacred Work we’re about to embark on.
Here’s the good news: Rigorous analysis and experimentation have led us to the conclusion that there really is no difference, at least in our short term trials so far, between Insights and the feeling of Insights.
In this Bold Future, we will finally break free from the tedious tyranny of Knowledge. We have amassed a training set of enough times when people gained Insight and felt good about it to know how to reproduce that feeling divorced from any grubby mining. Think about it: if the feeling of Insight comes from looking at the perfect slide, on a video call, with a great, compelling speaker, then that euphoric sensation of finally understanding something hard isn’t really connected to the work it took to know anything. How many times have you felt like you had a mind-blowing revelation that turned out to be wrong? Because you listened to a podcast, or took Freshmen Philosophy, or tried mushrooms? You experience it as insightful whether it's true or not.
Let’s use that!
We have new leadership from every corner of the Marvel cinematic businessverse. These are not your 1.0 wild grown executives that have to spend 20 or 30 years doing the same Knowledge over and over and over again. These are Professional Executives, lab grown, who have spent their whole lives with one goal in mind: be executives. Professional Executives spend their entire day doing two things: looking at slides and talking to each other about the contents of the slides they’re looking at. We’ve arrived at a place where all that matters, literally, are slides.
We mean, obviously, "all that matters to be a leader." Haha! Can you imagine if the people who made our food or did open heart surgeries thought all that mattered was slides! That is not a world we want to live in. We want to live in reality, which is led by real leaders, who understand what leadership is and the hard truths about what makes us different.
So the real heart and soul, the magic, if you will – and I know you will – the secret sauce of Insights Experiences is: Slides. In the past, slides had existed as a kind of necessary evil, and we were underselling them. A long long time ago, just after smartphones were invented, when people would go out and do the grindingly slow work to try to determine something that people did not already know, with no real guarantee they would in the end, they needed to develop a technology for capturing the few really great gems they did find so they could be easily given to the people who really needed them, the leaders, who had paid for them, by the way, thank you very much. Without slides, someone starts talking, and oh, my God, there’s nothing to look at. You get distracted. It’s like thousands of words. No way. Insights are best experienced on brightly colored rectangles with as few words as possible. Like books for children.
But Slides can be so much more, and will be the cornerstone of Insights Experiences. I invite you to imagine with me a world in which the Slides Are the Work. Now, through a combination of deep thinking and AI, we have developed a way to make slides that feel like you’re learning something important from them, every time. What matters is not the Insights, it’s that the Experience of the Insights makes you say, “Huh!” or “Wow!” so you will confidently go forth and make decisions with them.
So, here forward, we will be
We will not stop here, of course. The march of progress must not be impeded. Even as we implement these exciting changes, we look forward to the Next Next Big Thing.
And boy are we excited about this.
You may have noticed, candidly, that even leaders are not perfect. No, no. It’s ok. We must name it and claim it. There are times when leaders falter. When they’re inefficient. When they are tired, or hungry, or fevered with Imposter Syndrome. When they are snippy, or admit wrongdoing, or when their Pillars lack the necessary girth to hold up the weight of their critical endeavors. We’ve seen it ourselves. Asking basic, tactical questions like “But is that true” and not big strategic questions like “Is it robust enough?”
Let’s fix it! Yes we can!
So we are teasing, today, some early and very encouraging results of the LeAIder program. Through the magic of AI, we’ve created a new class of leader that will always do the right thing.
Are you sitting down? Because you’ve already met some of them! It was relatively trivial to make the LeAIders appear like humans in video calls. It took a little longer, but now we do sometimes dress the bots up in Human costumes and have them walk around and look at things. A real leader needs to be among the people and listening to them. The early prototypes have been a huge success.
The tuning has been hard work, we won’t lie. But hard work builds character. Kidding! Not in chatbots mimicking humans of course. What builds character is trial and error. A/B testing. And we’ve put in the hours! Because believe us the initial versions were not quite passable as people. They said things like “I want to share my story with you authentically” and then went on to detail ludicrously improbable stories like “I was the ruthless savior of a major company during COVID and then they took all the credit for my amazing work and iced me out while my loved one was in the hospital and I simply could not believe how poor her experiences were there, and then a bright light fell unto me from on high and it was revealed that my True Calling was to save all these doctors and nurses from the eternal damnation that is poor consumer experiences.” Or they might say “Boy do I learn a lot from that Simon Sinek.”
Yikes!
That was cringe, sure. But that was merely Beta! We’ve improved the model. Now they say things like “Team I am just so proud and honored and humbled by the way you have leaned in and crisply delivered an exciting roadmap for a plan that was so good it got me into the own personal house of our CEO, which really is just a reflection on your work and how wonderful you are, that he and I had lunch, at his own personal table. And he looked at me, in the eyes, deeply, and he said, ‘You know you should come here more often and have lunch with me personally so we can discuss how brilliant you are,’ and my heart was just so full because when I’m important really it’s just you all who are important enough in your caring for the poor and vulnerable that it’s really you who are getting invited to fly to a ski resort town and have lunch with him and have him look you in the eyes (deeply) and tell you how wonderful you are. Yay! Go team!” And then for good measure they will even shoot some vertical video of themselves walking around the Neighborhoods of Power. Proof of life. A nearly perfect onslaught of meaning-free positivity. Just try finding any kind of handle or foothold to grapple with that. It’s like smoke! All the feeling and none of the meaning, we’ve taken to saying around here. We are finally asymptotically approaching Perfect Leader.
There are still some bugs to work out. The most obvious one is, like all chatbots, they don’t yet have persistent memory. They’re very good at reproducing sentences that look like beliefs, but since they can’t be made to recall what they said last time, they will still come up with new beliefs each time you talk to them. They’ll all sound great! In live conversation this isn’t usually a problem, because people don’t really care much what they say as long as they make you feel good. As Maya Angelou pointed out. But we’ve noticed that when their statements are recorded anywhere that people will have to look at again, they can become a problem. This is colliding in unfortunate ways with the Slides Strategy. You will probably have been annoyed that comments in slides directing you to make changes will, once you have addressed them, then lead to new comments asking you to do the total opposite thing. No one is defending this. Just know that the LeAIders don’t actually have any firmly held beliefs in the traditional sense, so they can’t really be accountable for this yet.
For the moment we’ve discovered a workaround: when you notice this and bring it to the bot’s attention, it will, still, thank goodness, produce convincing facsimiles of good answers. “Yes, well, the iterations are the real work,” and “Super appreciate you and all the work you’re putting into this!” So just keep telling them when it happens and eventually we’ll find a way to train them out of this.
We know the work continues!
"I am hesitant to embrace change even when it is good for me."
The enemy in all this is inefficiency.
There will be people, there always are, who resist. Who are mad when the cheese gets moved. Luddites and saboteurs who demand we abandon exciting breakthroughs and go back to making shoes by hand. They will say things to you like “Maybe how we do the work matters?” and “I’m not comfortable with this.” But what they are really saying is: “I am hesitant to embrace change even when it is good for me.”
In the spirit of radical transparency, we are opening the kimono to reveal that there is, so far as we can tell, only at this point one single way our inevitable victory over the inefficiencies of reality can fail. It was discovered, as all terrors are, entirely by accident. While pressure testing, kicking the ol’ idea ball around the table, where no question was stupid and there were no bad ideas, this one poor fool said, “What does this tell us that we didn’t already know before?”
Turns out there are stupid questions and bad ideas! Whoops! Boy was there egg on our face, because the prototype suddenly stopped working. Just bricked, right there on the table. No one was Experiencing the Insights feeling after that. And I think we all learned a valuable lesson that day, which was:
If ever you see anyone looking sideways at this new model, be suspicious. If you hear them ask “Didn’t we know this before?” or say “But that’s just an arbitrary opinion,” R.U.N. Because that person is a terrorist. That person is trying to obscure the Vision. That person is, and you’ll have to excuse my language here, leaning out.
But not you! Thanks for your leaning in with us. It’s been emotional.
- Management
This brings you to the end of the introduction.
From here on out, our success is all on you!
"A LeAIder looking at electrical wiring."
"A LeAIder looking at medical staff."
"A LeAIder looking at surgery."