Open-Ended Sessions: How Are You Feeling?
A conversation about the anxiety many product and design leaders are feeling due to AI-driven changes.
In the second of our “Open-Ended” livestreams, we discussed the anxiety many design and product leaders are feeling from AI-driven changes. The intent wasn’t to offer suggestions, but to think out loud about what we’re observing.
That said, we surfaced a couple of important insights:
Organizational structures must change. How? Greg suggested empowering smaller (e.g., two-pizza) teams with enough agency to move and learn quickly.
In response to the “AI will replace SaaS” narrative, Jorge countered that for many products, information architecture is the moat.
We’d love to know what you think; please leave comments in the YouTube video.
Links
We referenced several articles and at least one book during the conversation:
The cognitive cost of AI by Giu Vicente
Why AI Adoption Stalls by Keith Ferrazzi, Wendy Smith, and Shonna Waters
The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived by Paul Ford
Welcome to the Intelligence Era by Craig Hepburn
Managing Priorities by Harry Max
Transcript
(AI generated.)
Jorge: Well, hello Greg. I think we are—let me refresh—yep, so we are live, sir. It’s good to see you.
Greg: Nice to see you, Jorge. Happy Thursday!
Jorge: Happy Thursday to you as well. I’m having a weird echo.
Greg: Well, anyway, we’re here today to talk a little bit about what’s going on with sort of this zeitgeist moment. It feels like there are a bunch of messages kind of moving through our communities. Jorge and I have been talking a lot about this stuff, and we thought we would get together and run one of our Unfinishe sessions—Open-Ended is what we call them—but I thought maybe we could start and talk a little bit about Unfinishe, and then we’ll get into today’s topic, which is really about the psychological tax of AI initiatives and how all of us are feeling. But before we do that, Jorge, what is Unfinishe?
Jorge: Unfinishe is an emergent practice that you and I have taken on to develop to help teams navigate this new era. I think that that’s kind of like the highest level description that I can offer. What teams might mean might be up for grabs; it’s emergent, right? But we are trying to be responsive to what we are hearing in our various communities and contexts. It’s very clear that everyone is cognizant at this point of the fact that we are in a different space. This technology is massively disruptive, and it requires new approaches and new thinking, so that’s clear. The other thing that’s become increasingly clear is that many of us—and I’ll put you and I in this—are trying to come to grips with how to navigate this time skillfully. You and I bring particular perspectives and life experiences to bear on this problem that we believe are helpful to folks. So that’s my kind of 10,000-foot view on what Unfinishe is. What would you answer? How would you answer that question?
Greg: Yeah, I mean, I echo what you’re talking about. I think part of it is the opportunity to disrupt ourselves and explore the meaning of these new tools and do it in a way where we can sort of be all in, but at the same time be intentional and try to understand what it might mean, and then share what we learn with folks. I think we named this endeavor Unfinishe with the ‘D’ missing on purpose because I think one of the things that we’re all experiencing is that the moment you feel like you’re on solid ground, the ground shifts, and we need to find an understanding of what to do next. I think the journey we’re on is to help organizations and teams navigate that. We’re taking the experience we’ve had in our careers, but we’re also super willing to experiment and adapt. We’re trying to be curious and mindful in the practice. So that’s how I might answer that. Maybe that’s a good segue for today’s conversation, which is, you know, there’s a lot of anxiety around what’s going on with these tools. We’re starting to experience it in our own work, but we’re also seeing it in the teams that we help. There seems to be a conversation bubbling up in the zeitgeist around AI right now about what it might mean. I think there are also some seminal moments that have happened recently that have demonstrated that we’re actually in a new place. You know, this isn’t the announcement of ChatGPT two and a half years ago. This is the arrival of coding tools, the rapid improvement of the models, and the fact that we’re now starting to see teams use these things. There have been some really salient conversations around that. So that’s what we’re starting for here today, and we want to help and have a conversation around it. Also, folks online, you’re welcome to come and ask questions. We’re going to try to be vulnerable and transparent, if possible, about our own insecurities and feelings. This is an experiment, and we’re glad that folks are here with us today.
Jorge: And for a bit of context for folks who, for whom this might be the first live stream of ours that they join, this is only the second one that we’ve done. Right. And in the Unfinishe spirit, this is a very open-ended conversation. It is very loosely structured. I would say there are not going to be any decks. There are no pitches. That’s not what we’re doing here. What we’re doing is we’re trying to think through the moment that we’re in, and we’re trying to think out loud. Because the time does require kind of fast responses, I think that we can’t be too precious about what we’re doing right now. So with that in mind, you said that we want to be vulnerable and that we’re both feeling a bit of anxiety. I’m going to kind of pinch and zoom on that. The live stream you titled it “How Are You Feeling?” How are you feeling, Greg?
Greg: Yeah, I mean, there have been a couple of articles that have encapsulated my experience lately. I would say I’m both super intrigued and excited and super freaked out at the same time. And what do I mean by that? I mean, I’m enamored by the capabilities that I have at my fingertips and blown away by the things I’m able to accomplish with the tools that I’m using. I’m also recognizing that I don’t have good boundaries with how I operate with Claude, which is the tool that I use, Anthropic’s AI. At the end of the day, my brain is like, I’ve gone through a lot of work, and I’m wondering if it’s sustainable. I’m mixed about all this stuff; it’s exciting, and I’m enabled to do some really incredible things. But at the same time, I’m trying to track if I’m being changed by this experience.
Jorge: It might be worth calling this out because some folks tuning in, this might be the first time they hear from you. I think that we have slightly different backgrounds. I would say that your background, your trajectory, and your career has been mostly around design leadership, very senior roles, managing teams and organizations, whereas my background is more as an individual contributor for hire. I’ve been a consultant for the bulk of my career, and I’ve been brought in to do very specific things. I’m just calling that out because I hear you talk about this being torn between excitement and apprehension, and I’m feeling like that too. But I think I’m feeling like that for maybe different reasons than you are. How does this tension show up in your work as a design leader?
Greg: Yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple of things. Paul Ford wrote something recently about feeling obsolete at some level and at the same time superpowered. Right? I have some of those feelings. I’m able to help a couple of companies right now from a design leadership perspective, and I can help them in really fast ways that would have taken weeks to accomplish, and I can do it in like days. That’s really great, but at the same time, it feels like the flattening of my expertise. It’s an interesting moment to see how we show up. I think there’s some anxiety around that. I might flip the bit for you, and you’ve been spending decades thinking about how humans navigate information. Does AI feel like an extension of that work or a threat to that work? How does that fit into how you operate in this moment?
Jorge: Well, the first thing that I’ll say here is that anything I say today, I say with more interest than conviction, meaning my mind is still exploring this, and I’m trying to develop my positions. What is very clear to me is that large language models in particular change our relationship to information considerably. I realized this; I’ve been working with AI—in general, what we call AI—for a long time with client projects. But when ChatGPT was released, I kind of went all in and said, “Okay, let’s see how this can help me do the work of an information architect.” It became very clear to me very quickly that the work I was doing needed to change and was going to change. You talked about acceleration as one of the things you’re experiencing in your design leadership role. I also felt that this is going to greatly accelerate certain processes. It’s also going to change how we interact with information. The object of the things that we design is likely going to change, but that might take a bit longer. I don’t know that I felt as threatened; I’ve felt more excited. I’ve been more excited than I’ve been threatened, I think, by all this stuff. There’s a flip side to it, which is the fact that there’s a lot more information being generated. Not all of it is useful, perhaps. These tools have the potential to generate a lot of misinformation. But this is the kind of upside bit. I might sound like I’m taking a very kind of positive perspective here. The more I worked with these tools, the more evident it became to me that their effectiveness is highly reliant on the information that you are giving the tool. Initially, there was this idea of prompt engineering, and then people realized it’s not just a prompt; there’s more stuff that you’re feeding the AI. The phrase became “context engineering.” To me, the upshot of all that is that language models are as useful as the information that they’re given to work with, and I suspect that people who do information architecture work have a big role to play in creating and structuring the information that gets fed to the LLMs. That’s going to have a very important effect on the degree to which the systems produce good results. So I’m excited. It is a time of great change, and great changes always produce anxiety, so I’m feeling anxious too, but I think I’m also feeling like, my gosh, there’s so much potential here—unexplored potential, right?
Greg: Yeah, and I think you and I did a consulting arrangement last fall where we helped an organization sort of organize their business information. I think you’re right that there’s this notion of understanding how work gets done and what content exists in an organization. Most organizations can articulate that very well; they just kind of tacitly know this is how they operate. These systems work better if you can be clear and crisp about the terminology. I’ll use a fancy word: the ontology or the model of information in it. I think for folks like you—who I love the fact that you called yourself an architect of information now versus an information architect…
Jorge: An architect of intelligence.
Greg: That’s right, architect of intelligence. I think there’s some truth to that because I think one of the things that we need to talk about—one thread that needs to be in this conversation—is to be intentional about how you use these tools. One way to alleviate anxiety is to understand the structure of the entity that you work for, the organization that you work for, or the thing that you’re trying to accomplish—so that you can make conscious decisions when you interact with these tools, and then you know your intent. That’s where these tools are actually really valuable. If your intent is clear, the quality of the answers that they generate or collaborate with you on improves, and that’s where you can start to have a conversation that leads you to new insights or new outcomes. That’s the part that I think is super fascinating. Every day I’m surprised by something. There’s something I’ve done, and I’m just sort of like, “Oh my gosh, how did I do that? Wow, how did it do that?” That’s part of it. Is there something that you’ve noticed about yourself, though? Have you changed at all in terms of how you’re operating with these things?
Jorge: I’ve always been very hands-on with the tools that I use, and one of my directions early on with this stuff was I did not want to learn about it or just learn about it in the abstract; I wanted to have hands-on experience. I think that I’ve been maybe more hands-on with code than I have been more recently in my career just because I’ve been really trying to lift the hood on this stuff to get a sense of how it works. You referenced the Paul Ford op-ed piece in The New York Times earlier. We have been having conversations with other folks and also reading stuff that people have been publishing. One of the things that I read in one of the articles that you and I were discussing on Slack over the last week or so is something that resonated with me, which is the idea that all of a sudden you have this tool that lets you do so much stuff that you tend to fill your day with stuff. It’s the kid in a candy store thing where, left unchecked, you end up with a really bad bellyache. I don’t remember which one of the articles it was. I think you shared this one where this person was saying, “You know, it’s taken over. Now I’m thinking about it during my lunch break and thinking about how I can prompt this thing.” Or, you know, “Before I go to sleep, I want to leave it doing something overnight.” There’s so much potential. All of a sudden, there’s an unlocking of so much potential that we want to—well, and then there’s the incentive to move very fast, to take advantage of that potential. We run the risk of not leaving enough space to be mindful about what we’re doing, to prioritize what we’re doing. I’m saying this because I am feeling that. I’m feeling like there’s so much that I can do. Let’s do it all! Now that we have these things that can do it for me, I’m feeling a little burned out by that. I’m suspecting that other people are as well based on what I’m reading.
Greg: Yeah, I think that, first of all, we’re hitting a cognitive barrier. I mean, humans can only process so much information. Individually, I think there’s a challenge. I’m feeling exactly the same thing. I generate, you know, I’ll take some information, I’ll process it, and I’ll work with Claude to tune it up in a way that makes sense to me. I’ll get a very professional document. Part of my process is I usually print them. I know it’s very old school, but I find that I don’t edit very well if I’m just looking at a screen. If I look at a piece of paper, I can distance myself for a second and read it, take some notes, and then go back, and that’s kind of the way that I operate. But I’m starting to build these very useful and deep content pieces for the customers that I’m working with that are highly valuable. But I’m filling my day with like doing that work. Earlier in our conversation, I was talking about how sometimes my brain is just like, “Oh, I’ve done… I can’t process it anymore.” One thing I’m noticing—I don’t know if others are noticing this online, but if you are, let us know. One of the things in organizations is the socialization of ideas. We’re used to operating, especially in product development teams, at a certain clock speed. There’s a group of people who start working on an idea, and they start building prototypes and making, and they’re learning in that process. Then they need to bring other people along as that idea starts to gain momentum to empower those people to contribute to or execute aspects of that idea or that project to move it forward. Part of that is human nature; you want to co-create and be a participant in it. Part of it is you need to understand the decisions that have been made so that you can operate and feel like part of something. I think the velocity that some of these tools allow you to operate at is not just about the individual’s cognitive ability to manage; there’s anxiety around it that fits the organization’s ability to grok or understand and then ingest so that they can focus on, “Okay, this is how I can contribute or I can join the conversation.” I worry about that because I feel like we haven’t learned good boundary skills with these tools. It’s a little bit like a version of doom scrolling where you generate an endless amount of stuff. How much of it is still relevant the next day? Maybe not as much as you think, right? I think that I have some anxiety about being in that. One of the things I’m anxious about is that we’re going to have to learn new behaviors to manage that. What does that feel like, and how does that change us? A lot of people talk about discernment; that’s an important skill. Anyway, it’s a long-winded way of saying I think we’re only capable of grokking so much in a day.
Jorge: Yes, and I think we’re talking about it kind of at the individual level, right? We can do all this stuff, so we’re doing it all, right? There is an organizational variation of this, which is we have this design or product team which maybe is not growing. I see some folks posting job openings on LinkedIn, but if anything, I think the tendency has been for teams to shrink. All of a sudden there’s an insurgent request for new features and capabilities. There’s this drive to AI all the things. You have AI, so it’s easy to do, right? It’s like, no, it’s not easy to do. Now we’re overloaded with stuff. I’m thinking you were talking about this and our mutual friend and my podcast co-host, Harry Max, wrote a book on prioritization, right?
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: What you’re pointing to is that we need to, on the one hand, move fast because this does indeed call for a fast coming to grips with the capabilities and constraints of the technology. But we need to do it in a way where we’re focusing our energy, our limited resources, on the things that matter most. It feels to me like right now, for a lot of organizations, at least from what I’m hearing, there’s not very good prioritization happening. It’s more like let’s throw everything against the wall and see what works coming out the other end. I’m kind of making a note here; that might be one practice that we could encourage folks to do to be more conscious as a team of the things that they are taking on and to take it on with the dual purpose of building useful things for people—obviously, we want to create value—but we have to keep in mind that part of what we’re doing here is also becoming competent with the new tools.
Greg: We have to create new skills, yeah. I think you’re—oops, I just unplugged myself. I can still hear you, though. Okay, I’m back. I think you’re right. One of the things that I think many teams are struggling with is that these tools also allow us to do each other’s jobs, right? So the notion of a product organization creates a lot of anxiety around that. You know, I’m a designer, but the engineering team can now write code for the UI. I’m an engineer, but the design team can now write code. I’m a product leader, and I can do both of those things. I’m a designer who can write a PRD, right? Those are very specific to the product development process. The notion of how we work is also in radical change because the boundaries between the disciplines are fuzzier. We need to be open and in a conversation around exploring it together versus in our disciplines; at least that’s my belief. I led a workshop with a client recently on who does what, how, why, and when? It wasn’t really to say that design only owns design and product owns product and engineering owns engineering; it was, “Hey, these tools allow us to be in each other’s camps.” There may be appropriate moments for us to be in each other’s camps. We don’t have the capacity to do something with the staffing we have, but as a team, we can use these tools to help us fulfill that capacity. We need to be in dialogue about that. One of the things I’ve learned is that discipline and having expertise still really matters, right? Discernment is a powerful thing. Just because someone can write code doesn’t mean the experience is a good one. Someone who has the ability to look at that and say, “Here’s how I might modify that because I have expertise in this area” is valuable. Similarly, on the product side, product market fit is still required—just because you can ask these tools to help you find product market fit doesn’t eliminate the need to have people on the team who have experience in bringing products to market, working with customers, and understanding how you create motion and market demand. All the things of modern product development or building things are still in play. But we have a lot of anxiety about whether our roles are still important. Going back to your central point, I think smaller teams are probably what’s going to be. Smaller, more empowered teams are going to be the future, and the smaller, more empowered teams can punch above, using a boxing metaphor, their weight. There are two reasons for that: one, because the tools allow you to do that, and the second goes back to my notion of cognitive dissonance and being able to communicate as a team. You need to have the intimacy of a small group to be able to share your thinking at the speed that this thinking is happening. It starts to break down if you’re in a larger organization that has organized people doing pieces of the work. I think the future is more empowered teams with more agency and clarity about what they’re about, and then just let them do their thing.
Jorge: And smaller—I heard you say as well, right?
Greg: And smaller, that’s right.
Jorge: Yeah. Do you have like, we all know about the two pizza team—the Amazon pizza thing. Do you have a size in mind?
Greg: Yeah, it’s not bigger than that. I think the notion of the two pizza team is that you all know each other, and you have a human relationship with each other, right? You have the ability to communicate and anticipate and complete each other’s thoughts and know who’s good at certain things. I think it breaks down once you go above that.
Jorge: I wanted to circle back to something you said because it made me shudder a little bit. You said something like designers are writing PRDs, and all of a sudden, we don’t need as much expertise because we can all do these roles.
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: One bit of caution that I would drop in here is that a common mistake that many people make is to confuse the outcome of a piece of work—the artifact that comes out the other end—with the value of the work. I’m thinking of an exercise that I was part of many, many years ago, which is something a lot of designers have done. We were part of this workshop where we locked ourselves in a conference room for two days and made this enormous wall-sized journey map, right?
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: The artifact that came out of that diagram was valuable per se because it informed a lot of important design decisions. But the artifact was only part of the value that the company got out of that. The other part of the value was the alignment that happened by getting a group of—I think it was like 24 people—to work together for two days building the artifact. If you could just prompt Claude to feed it a bunch of research and then say, “Draw me the journey map for this thing,” you might get a really useful diagram in the end. It might even be better than the one that the people put together. But you’d be missing out on the opportunity for people to use the artifact as a MacGuffin to have conversations that need to happen. It’s a little bit like the stone soup thing, right? The story about the stone soup that I’m sure people have heard. We’ve gone from having a bunch of basically stones to get important conversations to happen to now having the equivalent of the Star Trek replicator where you say, “Just give me chicken soup,” and you get the plate of chicken soup, but then you don’t get the collaboration that happens in making the soup, right? That collaboration is really important.
Greg: Just to build on that, I think one of the risks that we have is that we spend our day collaborating with AI and not with each other. It’s very easy to do. It came up in one of the workshops I recently led that folks were in a product team spending less time talking with each other and more giving each other things to read. Not all the things that they were giving each other were as tuned as they could have been, but they felt very clear to the person who had been participating with their AI assistant. I think we are at risk of finding our way into that relationship with the AI versus finding our way into a relationship with the cross-functional peers that we work with. Again, it goes back to the healthy boundaries. I think we need to find how we manage that, and I have anxiety around that because I spend a lot of time with these things. I think there was another piece of the story that we wanted to talk about today. There was an article that I really loved, and I excerpted part of it last week, and a lot of people responded to it by Hepburn on going fast and how this was a moment for generalists to be really successful. I felt seen in that article, and at the same time, I recognized that maybe it was a little bit of wishful thinking on my part. I think we’re all guilty of finding the things that reflect well on our own personal point of view that reinforce our vision of ourselves. There was a piece in that about moving fast—not about velocity, but it was more about, you know, one of the things I think we’re in this moment is, some people are using the tools effectively, and they’re using them with their teams and gaining a certain sense of momentum. They’re being intentional about it, learning how to do it, and course correcting. Others are not, and I think there’s some anxiety around that too because some organizations don’t enable teams to do that. Are you feeling like you’re left behind? I think for my own self, I have anxiety around keeping up. I know there are people who are way more into this than I am, and so therefore my keeping up is a worry.
Jorge: The article you’re referring to is a Substack post called “Welcome to the Intelligence Era” by Hepburn. What I’m going to do is, when we release a recording of this, I’m going to add links to these various posts in the description for the video. The metaphor Hepburn uses for this speed thing is learning to ride a bicycle. He makes a good point that one of the risks you run when learning to ride a bicycle is that you try to take it too slow. If you’ve ridden a bicycle before, you know that it’s not until you reach a certain speed that you can maintain your balance. He’s advocating for getting up to a certain speed to get your bearings. He doesn’t say this in the article, but there’s a flip side to this: if you’re learning to ride a bicycle and you strap a jet engine to the bicycle, you’re going to be really stressed out, right? You’re probably going to get in an accident. I think there’s a Goldilocks thing here; I’m trying to reflect back what’s emerging from this conversation. You’ve already said we need smaller teams that have greater agency. It also sounds like they need to focus; they need to prioritize the stuff that they’re working on. There’s the notion of speed—meaning they need to move fast. Maybe the phrase is they need to move fast enough, but it’s possible to move too fast. The organization, the team, the individuals might not be able to handle being asked to do so much so fast with such new stuff because, to your point earlier, there’s cognitive load involved.
Greg: Yeah, I think the velocity conversation has many vectors to it, too, some of which are super anxiety-producing. You hear a lot of leadership in the Valley right now talking about speed and how fast we have to deliver product outcomes. Now that Claude can write most of the code, we can go 10 times faster. I don’t think that’s necessarily what we’re talking about. By the way, I think there’s a huge risk in going faster; it doesn’t necessarily mean that you get to a good outcome. At the same time, I think what Hepburn is talking about is you need to dive into understanding how these tools work because they are changing the way that we work and, for each of us, they’re changing who we are and the roles that we have and the impact we can make. We can push back on it if it’s going too fast, but you really don’t learn how to use them unless you’re using them. The advice I have for folks is to get your hands into it and be using it. Then you can be intentional about how you want to use it. One of the opportunities I think in this space now is that especially in product development, a lot of time was spent on execution and not enough time on defining the outcome or the product fit. Now, I think we can use these tools to do a lot more discovery earlier and have more clarity about what problem we’re trying to solve, why that problem is valuable to the end customer or end user, and get validation that we’re solving the right problem. Execution—building that piece—should be something that can go much faster. This inverts how we look at the work that we do, and that part of it is exciting to me. But it’s different.
Jorge: I want to maybe pinch and zoom into the word invert. But before we do that, I want to circle back to the chat. We have a couple of comments in the chat, and I think the first one here is relevant to what you’re just talking about now. So RPUXD671 says, “I agree. We can’t be too precious. Yes, and we need to show up with calm and help the teams we’re advising through trade-offs they face.” Here’s the question: how do you hang on to and transmit that calm through teams?
Greg: Yeah, that’s right. I think a couple of things are important. One is being curious, right? Having a culture of curiosity, being conscious that you don’t know the answer, and being public about it. One of the challenges is when we think we know the answer, and then it pivots and changes—it just undermines team health. It’s a notion that we’re on a collective journey together, and we’re going to explore and find out where we’re headed. Those are some things I would consider. I think there needs to be—you said this earlier around how to prioritize the efforts you have because you can go everywhere all at once and not get anywhere. Practice some exercises around what are the experiments you’re going to do as an organization or as a team and create some space for evaluating the success of those experiments. This is something you and I did with one of our customers last fall, where we sat and kind of helped them understand how they worked, looked at the activities and workflows that were important to their success, and helped them stack rank the things that we felt AI could help them with. Instead of doing all of them, we said, “Let’s pick one and do that.” How did that work? Did we learn something? Okay, let’s go do the next one. I think a structured approach could help teams have a little bit more comfort.
Jorge: I think this question was framed around how do you, as a leader, communicate with your team? That’s the way I read it anyway. But I think what you’re saying also applies to how do you manage up, right? Because as a chief design officer, as a VP of design or product, you are reporting into the organization’s leadership. They have expectations—whether fair or not—that this stuff is going to change things quickly, right? It’s worth acknowledging that leaders need to manage their teams and the mood of their teams, but they also need to manage upwards, right?
Greg: Yeah, and there have been all kinds of crazy statements made in the last two years around the possibilities, role definition, and how product is going to be made based on the lens of where a leader might come from. I think we’re learning right now that those lenses are incomplete. You bring up a really important point; this curiosity and openness and adaptability need to be shared when you manage a team down or when you’re working with people collectively. It also needs to be flipped on the opposite conversation: what are we learning right now? What advantages is this giving us, and what challenges are we creating? There are challenges being created. Many teams are spending a lot of effort on AI, but their productivity isn’t improving. Many teams are spending a lot of tokens, but their costs are going up in the organization. Some organizations are letting people go because they think AI will fill the gap, but they’re letting them go before they figured out how to do that work. Those are the things that I think are building anxiety right now. The sad part is that we’re having the wrong conversation. People are talking about, “Here’s our current business model; here’s how we work, and now we can just do it faster and more simply.” The conversation I want to have in organizations is, “Here’s the community of people we serve. Here’s how we can deliver better outcomes for them. Here’s how we can grow our business, and here are the new things we can do with the people that we have that are valuable to that constituency.” I just don’t think we talk about that enough.
Jorge: We have another comment here. It’s not a question, but it’s a comment from Albie underscore G. They say, “I agree with Greg. Without intention, it’s easy to lose control of the output. Planning and guardrails are essential.” I will chime in here and say, even though your name is checked in this comment, I want to point out that when you talked about smaller teams, you did not use the word control; you used the word agency. That is an important distinction. As I hope is becoming evident from this conversation, one of the footballs that is being tossed around the field right now is precisely control—control over the outputs, control over the process—which is part of why there’s this anxiety happening. I think it’s going to be important to live with the—I’m going to use the word—discomfort that comes from not feeling like you have full control over the output. What you want, I don’t think that you want control; I think you want agency. That’s my take anyway.
Greg: My personal belief is that teams do better when folks have agency. I’ve always tried to build organizations where there’s clarity, and the gift you’re giving is, “Here’s where we’re trying to go. You figure out how to get there.” I do think where I’ve seen AI being used well is in groups that are willing to experiment and communicate and not try to own or control the process of how it works. Instead, they have a conversation with each other about how it’s impacting the way that they’re operating and how the outcomes for which they are responsible are improving or not improving by using the tools. That’s the part that I think is fascinating. My hope is that we’re responsible about it, and we have these conversations, but it’s not easy, and sometimes we don’t have the frameworks to have those conversations. I think you and I have talked a lot about this, and it’s part of what we’re trying to do here with Unfinishe: help people have healthy conversations around how they can use these tools in their environments and provide some structure that allows them to make progress.
Jorge: That makes a lot of sense. We have only about nine minutes left here. If folks who are viewing have any questions or comments, please do post them in the chat. Greg and I want to have conversations about this. We have been monitoring what people are writing, but we are also having conversations one-on-one with folks in organizations. If you want to talk with us, we would love to meet up to compare notes and have a quick meeting. I’m flashing on the screen a URL that you can go to set up time; we’d love to hear from you. If you are watching this now and have any questions, please do post them in the chat. Let’s start rounding the bend here. We are running out of time. Our intent here, as we said at the top of the hour, was not to offer a very structured conversation; this is really kind of thinking out loud. It does seem to me that there are a few points that are worth noting. The first is acknowledging that we are in a time of anxiety, and I keep tying this time to the early part of the web when the web first came out. That was a time of big disruption, a big new technology; it was clear to many of us that it was going to change things much like it is now. I don’t remember there being this level of anxiety of, “It’s going to replace my…” I mean, there are a few people who saw the writing on the wall that I wouldn’t be making any more printed financial reports for organizations because all that stuff is becoming digitized. That was pretty clear. For the most part, there wasn’t the level of replacement anxiety that we’re feeling now. It does feel like there is angst, and there’s an HBR article that I’ll include in the description that names it “AI Angst” and outlines what that means and why it might be caused.
Greg: I would just build on that. This is a moment where our identity is challenged. Each of us, no matter what you do, has made decisions in your life and constructed a story around your expertise. That is part of who you are. This moment can feel very unsettling because a lot of that narrative can be challenged. How do we manage through that? I think about this moment personally—I used to lead large teams, and my identity was a chief design officer. Now I’m not doing that anymore. Now I’m helping organizations as a fractional leader. I come in and support teams and do some work. You and I are doing this work for helping organizations prioritize. I’m coming to terms with that: what does the new version of me look like moving forward with these capabilities and tools? It’s not the chief design officer that I used to be. That’s unsettling. I spent a whole lifetime building that narrative. I have adult kids, and I have curiosity about how that happens. The attitude you have to have is to be curious, mindful, and intentional. I don’t know. What are you anxious about in these final moments?
Jorge: I’m smiling because this hits so close to me. I’ve been calling myself an information architect for almost three decades at this point. Information architecture is so deeply part of my identity. A few days ago, someone posted on LinkedIn saying, “Oh, I had a conversation with someone who was talking about getting into information architecture.” They asked where to begin, and I said, “Look at this person’s work. Look at this person’s work.” There were three references, and the third was me. It stated something like, “Look at Jorge’s website, but he’s more focused on AI and LLMs these days than information architecture.” I felt like, is that true? I immediately wrote back and said, “It is true that a lot of my efforts have been focused in this direction, but I don’t see it as a replacement of my identity. To me, it’s the contrary. I don’t think you can be an information architect and not be all over this stuff, because it’s so obviously important.” The way that I put it on my website is that information architecture changes as a result of AI, and AI is made better as a result of information architecture. With all these SaaS replacement narratives from the mainstream media, my canned retort is that information architecture is your moat. You can’t just replace a system that has a lot of carefully structured information; it’s not going to be replaced by a chatbot with no context. I’m seeing an evolution of my identity rather than a replacement of it, so I don’t feel as much anxiety there. Where I do feel anxiety is the question of, how do I make a living doing this? Because, to your point, if nothing else, the perception out there is that now that we have these tools, they can structure information for you. Yes, but there are a bunch of asterisks following that. My last three years have been about investigating those asterisks. I think that’s going to be true for a lot of knowledge work. That’s a big part of the anxiety here: the narratives out there say you’re going to be out of a job. I’m not entirely sold on that, because I think these are tools that will definitely change the work, but they still need expertise to produce really good results. That’s where I stand right now on that stuff.
Greg: I love that. I think this goes into, you are on the bicycle or not, like we talked about earlier. I think there are some things that, I don’t know if it will happen, but if the cost to deliver a software outcome reduces significantly which is where we’re headed—the amount of engineering required, the tooling that allows you to deploy something is lowering—does that mean less work for all of us? Or does it just mean that there’s a whole set of new use cases that were too expensive to solve before are now solvable? I don’t know that the equilibrium around that will be. My hope is that we’re intentional about the problems we’re trying to solve in this world and that these tools allow us to solve more of them. I think you’re right: the architecture of intelligence, the organization of the information, and the organization toward the outcomes that matter will be a skill set that’s really important in the future. Not everyone will gravitate towards that, but I think folks like you will be very valuable. You are very valuable.
Jorge: Thank you. You are very valuable too, Greg. We are out of time. I just want to acknowledge there are a couple of comments in the chat we can get to after we release the recording, but there’s one comment that speaks to this from RPUXD671 again: “It’s not going to be replaced, well, by a chatbot, but some organizations will try.” I’ll say this: we are living through the very early days of this, and there are going to be all sorts of really poor decisions made. We’re going to try all sorts of things that are not going to work, and we just have to go through it. This is the bicycle thing: you have to keep going, and you have to find stability. We are out of time, unfortunately. It’s been brilliant catching up as always. Thank you.
Greg: Awesome. Thank you all for joining us today. We’ll try another one of these soon.
Jorge: I’ve flashed the slide on the screen. If you want to set up time to talk with us, please visit unfinishe.com/connect, and you can set up some time. All right. Thank you, sir.
Greg: Thanks, Jorge. See you soon. Bye.