Risk of AI Sameness

Everyone is racing to adopt AI tools.  Most people are using AI to create “speed”.  Faster emails. Faster proposals. Faster code. Faster content. And yes, faster is good.  But here’s the quiet risk no one is talking about: if everyone in your company uses the same AI the same way, you may slowly start sounding exactly alike.

Are you ignoring “AI sameness” risk? Without intention, standard AI tools can homogenize your messaging, flattening distinct perspectives into one generic voice. The danger isn’t bad output. It’s average output at scale. AI isn’t going to replace your team. It’s going to standardize them, but not in a good way.

When everyone uses the same tools, trained on the same data, prompted in the same way, you don’t get divergence, you get convergence. Everyone will sound the same, with the same sentence structure and tone, and with the same “polished but generic” voice. Then there is the further danger that over time, unique thinking gets flattened into safe, average, AI-shaped output. Not because your people aren’t smart, but because the tool defaults to the statistical middle.

AI should amplify your edge, not sand it down. AI should sharpen your thinking, make it more opinionated, and more differentiated. If you’re not intentional about how your teams use it, it can lead to this sameness.  What can you do to avoid this sameness?

• Craft your own perspective before prompting AI.  As it relates to the topic, what do you actually believe? What do most people get wrong about this? What would you argue in a debate?
• Use AI to provide you with a draft, not the deliverable. Within that context, establish one strong opinion. Provide one specific example from your world. Craft your own voice so that sentences sound unmistakably like you.
• Add Friction to the output. AI will often be a people pleaser, so challenge your output. Ask what’s missing. Determine if it feels too safe. Consider if it sounds too predictable? If it reads smoothly but doesn’t make you think, that’s a warning sign.

AI naturally drifts toward the statistical middle. Avoiding sameness requires intentionally looking for differences. It must include injecting strong beliefs, specific context, and human judgment layered on top.  And honestly? The companies that figure this out won’t just use AI faster. They’ll use it to amplify their uniqueness.

How to Experiment with ChatGPT

As ChatGPT continues to make waves, is it time to learn more about it? One way to approach this is begin experimenting with ChatGPT within your context.  Learn where ChatGPT can help and where it can benefit you. In other words, what do you want to get out of ChatGPT? This allows you to test your hypothesis and the surrounding assumptions to provide knowledge and insight into whether (in this case) ChatGPT can help you or not. Here is an example.

Start with the question: Can ChatGPT help my team improve? Validate this question. Conduct preliminary research to gauge if this is relevant for your team. Start by finding out if team members are interested in using ChatGPT. This can also help you identify assumptions and if there are any other variables in play that can impact the direction of the experiment. It can also help you narrow down an area that you think ChatGPT can help.  After discussion with the team, team members believe that ChatGPT can help in retrospectives

Craft a hypothesis in a clear sentence on what you expect to find: Include ChatGPT in the retrospective can lead to better root cause analysis.  Some team members had an assumption that ChatGPT could provide root cause analysis capabilities. A hypothesis can help you validate whether ChatGPT can provide better root cause information. You can also use the “if… then” form: if we use ChatGPT during our retrospective, it will provide better root-cause analysis results, leading to more effective actions for improvement.    

Craft the experiment. Now that you have a sturdy hypothesis, it is time to craft your experiment. Describe the steps through your experiment. To do this, consider how long the experiment will run and who will be involved.  In this case, you decide to include ChatGPT in the next three retrospectives in order to get a more meaningful set of results and to have time to determine if the actions are leading to more effective results. Determine who will use ChatGPT during the retrospective and how the questions and statements will be written. Also consider the metric you will use to validate your result and what success criteria you will use to determine if the hypothesis was true (or not).  At this point, it is time to run the experiment. 

Run the experiment. An experiment should be considered as recognized effort and categorized as real work to track in your backlog.  Enact the steps listed in your experiment. Capture observations along the way and results upon the conclusion of the experiment. Get together with those who are involved in the experiment and determine what you’ve learned. Ask the question, did what we learn validate the hypothesis (or not)?  Then determine what decisions you will make as a result of this experiment. In this case, should you to continue using ChatGPT for retrospectives (or not)? Determine if there are any next steps. 

In conclusion, if you are thinking about ChatGPT, the key is to experiment. ChatGPT is a tool like other tools that may benefit you. Brainstorm where ChatGPT can help you in your context. Use the experiment to see if it does. Consider multiple experiments so that you build working knowledge of ChatGPT in your environment and working context.

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If you are interested in learning more about ChatGPT in relation Agile, Teamwork, or experimentation, consider reading the following articles:

• A Discussion with ChatGPT about Agile 
• Are there Dangers with ChatGPT for Agile? 
• Are there Benefits for adding ChatGPT as a team member? 

Are You Experiencing Modern-day Acedia?

As the pandemic continues, is the social isolation and restrictions in movement causing a feeling of melancholy and unmotivated? Are you losing interest in posting selfies, attending web conferencing events, and streaming shows and movies? As the news gets worse, do you find yourself devouring negative news and getting sidetracked by social media, yet have a number of home projects to do? 

“You're bored, listless, unmotivated, afraid, and uncertain. What you have may be feeling is 'acedia'. This occurs when you have spatial and social constrictions that a solitary life necessitates. Acedia is combination of listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate.” Having similar attributes to seasonal affective disorder, Covid is lasting much longer so it provides a greater sense of undirected anxiety as there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.  

With the next wave of Covid occurring, if this feels like something you are experiencing, it could be acedia. The novelty of adapting to the first wave with restricted lifestyle was fun or at least interesting in the initial wave as we adapted to this new way of living. However, in this second wave, it is no longer novel and may be a bit vexing as we stare at our screens in dreariness. Those things that we did to pass time are no longer amusing or even interesting. Are you starting to have the feeling of acedia?

As leaders, it can happen to us and it can happen to our employees. What can we do? The first thing is call it by its name. Having a name to what you may be feeling connects it to something real.  Once it is recognized as something real, you can more easily do something about this. What you may have is “acedia”. How that we recognize it by its name and that it is a real thing, we can try to put actions in place to minimize it. Here are some things we can do for ourselves.

Establish a routine. It’s not uncommon in this pandemic that we have let our schedules slide a bit.  However, while this may be good for vacations, it has been proven that having a routine can be helpful in times of uncertainty. Providing a routine to our day can give us a sense of control, reduce stress levels, and improve our focus and productivity. 

Find a new non-screen interest such as a hobby, sport, or outdoor activity. The advantage of this is these types of activities are absorbing and encourages you to take some time for yourself. Focusing in on an interest can relieve stress by keeping us engaged in something we enjoy.

Initiate an exercise regimen. As the pandemic can make it challenging to participate in a health club, setting up a home regimen with minimal equipment can be beneficial. This can include a walking, jogging, or cycling regimen. The benefits of regular exercise are that it can improve our mental health and mood, and boosts your energy level. 

Finally, allow time to celebrate. This includes personal events like birthdays, anniversaries, graduations and work-related events like releases into production, retrospectives, work anniversaries, and other employee’s personal events. The act of celebrating can relieve stress.  Remember, acedia is often a result of being drawn to negative news. Taking the time to celebrate breaks the negative cycle and changes the focus to something more positive.

If you are feeling bored, listless, unmotivated, afraid and uncertain, what you might be experiencing is acedia. If you think you are, put a name to it so you recognize it as some real. More importantly, put actions in place to mitigate the effects. This may include establishing a routine, finding a new non-screen interest, initiating a new exercise regimen, and allowing time to celebrate.

References: Acedia: the lost name for the emotion we’re all feeling right now 

Are you a Leader that Serves?

Last week, I had the fortune to enjoy the benefits of a concierge lounge at a prestigious hotel.  As I was enjoying hors d’oeuvres, I initiated a game I like to play called “observe the people”.  As simple as it sounds, it allows me to discern how people interact with each other and identify any interesting traits. I noticed and talked to people who were travelling for business, those that may be considered leaders in their respective industries.  Most of those in the lounge could be considered a bit privileged in their expectations of both service and amenities of the lounge, not at all unreasonable in the context.

I noticed the host who was checking-in the guests into the lounge at his desk.  He was busy registering people and providing information about the lounge.  He was doing this continually for an hour as I was working on my computer getting some odds and ends done.  As guests were getting drinks and food, I saw that the host had nothing to refresh his palette yet he was the busiest person in the lounge.  With that awareness, I walked over to the host and offered to get him a drink and some food.  He looked at me with surprise and said, “You are the first guest in 5 years who has offered me a drink.” That caught me by surprise.  How could that be?

Have we gotten so invested in our privilege that we forget that part of our responsibility as leaders is to serve those that help us?  If you are reading this and thinking, “Why should I serve those that I lead when they should be serving me?” you may have a learning opportunity to help yourself and your team, group, division or company.  A major part of your job as a leader is to help maintain and improve the health of your employees.  This takes a page from the concept of Servant Leadership.

Robert K. Greenleaf coined the term “servant leadership” in the 1970 essay, “The Servant as Leader”. Greenleaf takes the approach of “the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived.”

While there are various key servant leadership attributes, the ones I find important are an ability to listen; capability to empathize with people; aptitude to heal others (both mentally, physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually; an awareness of your surroundings, ability to persuade and conceptualize, have foresight, be a steward to stakeholders, customers, partners, and employees; a commitment to grow people encouraging innovation, self-initiative, and learning; and a need to build community.

As a leader, your first response should be to greet your employees (aka, those you serve) and then ask if there is anything we can do for them and ask if you can remove any impediments in their way.  Understand that by being that servant leader, you make your employees feel known and important. You should also remove their impediments helping them deliver products and services quicker, which has the benefit of making you money earlier than later. Remember, employees or those that are helping you.  They are the engine to your success. Serve them. Remove their impediments, listen to their needs, and get them a drink. Is it time to get serious and sincere in helping them? 

Woven Together - A Practice to Build Authentic Connection and Psychological Safety

By Jody Gold with Mario Moreira

The game is changing. Hierarchies are flattening out. Companies are re-organizing to profit from the agility and collective intelligence of smart, flexible teams.  The concept of “leadership” itself is changing—from individual leadership that devises strategy and drives troops into battle, to relational leadership that catalyzes the creativity and commitment of all team members.

The good news is that there are constructive frameworks from the isolation, frustration, and disengagement that reduce collective learning and performance, to fully engaged, highly coordinated, innovative and agile teams that increase learning and performance. Matrix Leadership is one such framework that helps you successfully navigate this transformation.

Woven Together is an early practice and part of Matrix Leadership that helps strengthen the fabric of your team. Icebreakers and team-building exercises are often fun but their value fades.  Woven Together builds authentic connection, curiosity, and care among team members that last. People who’ve worked on teams together for years often rarely know about each other as people.  They may not know that John has a baby girl, and fills up with love when he talks about her getting her first tooth, or that Jennifer gets lit up by the smells, sounds, and tastes of street food when she is in another country. 

Woven Together raises energy in the room and can be used as a stand-alone activity.  It’s also a tangible introduction to core concepts like seeing relationships as first class entities that Mario Moreira describes in his article (part 1 of this series) and the entire network of relationships within a team as the relationship infrastructure that Jody Gold describes in part 2 of the series.  You can practice Woven Together with your team, right now.

Set-up

The ingredients include your team, a ball of yarn, 20-30 minutes depending on the size of your team, and enough space to stand in a comfortable circle.

Determine if each person in the circle will say just their name or their name, role, years in role, years at company, years doing agile.  This will depend on how well the facilitator and team members know each other.

You are person A.  You will explain the activity and model the two most important components: 1) forming a connection with one person—person B - and speaking to that person only, instead of scanning from person to person as we’ve all learned to do, and 2) telling person B 'something that light you up' in a way that is genuine and concise.

Steps 

1. Person A wraps the end of yarn around a forefinger and loosens enough yard equal to the distance between person A and B.  Person A throws the ball of yarn to B.  A speaks directly and only to B.
2. Person A says their Name.  Person B says their Name. 
3. Person A shares, “Something that lights me up is…”
4. B responds in a few words to complete the connection, “Cool. Thanks for telling me that. I want to know more about that. Etc.”
5. Person B chooses person C.  Repeat steps 1-5 (figure 1)
6. C chooses D and repeats steps 1-5.  Iterate until all people steps 1-5 and the ball of yarn is back at A  (figure 2).
7. After the yarn is back at person A, ask people to share what the experience was like and how things feel different now than before the activity.  

Final Thoughts

If Woven Together is used to introduce other practices, you may invite observations about the structure itself and its capacities.  Participants will name many characteristics of distributed leadership before they’ve learned about them formally.

Woven Together almost runs itself.  It’s amazing how much authentic connection, trust, and psychological safety arise from sharing ‘What Lights You Up.’  As the one leading the activity, be prepared for someone to say that speaking to only one person feels rude, exclusive, or uncomfortable.  Of course it may—scanning from person to person is a deep cultural norm.  Others may describe a sense of ease staying in connection with one person, like talking one-on-one with a friend.

Woven Together is also a good way for everyone to hear everyone else’s name a couple of times, and to quickly know who’s in what role and for how long, and/or how long they’ve been on the team or in the company.  It’s a great activity for a new team, a team whose membership has changed, or a new cross-functional project.

You have everything you need right now to turn thirty minutes into gold.  If you would like more information, consider contacting Jody Gold to discuss Woven Together or to learn more about how to equip teams to think, decide, and act as effectively as they can together.  

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Read Part 1 & 2 of the Relationship series:
- (Part 1) Importance of treating Relationships as First Class Entities 
- (Part 2) Strengthening the Relationship Infrastructure to Build High-Performing Teams

The Forgotten Agile Role – the Customer

Many Agile implementations tend to focus on the roles inside an organization – the Scrum Master, Product Owner, Business Owner, Agile Team, Development Team, etc.  These are certainly important roles in identifying and creating a valuable product or service.  However, what has happened to the Customer role?  I contend the Customer is the most important role in the Agile world.  Does it seem to be missing from many of the discussions?

While not always obvious, the Customer role should be front-and-center in all Agile methods and when working in an Agile context.  You must embrace them as your business partner with the goal of building strong customer relationships and gathering their valuable feedback.  Within an Agile enterprise, while customers should be invited to Sprint Reviews or demonstrations and provide feedback, they should really be asked to provide feedback all along the product development journey from identification of an idea to delivery of customer value.

Let's remind ourselves of the importance of the customer.  A customer is someone who has a choice on what to buy and where to buy it. By purchasing your product, a customer pays you with money to help your company stay in business.  For these factors, engaging the customer is of utmost importance.  Customers are external to the company and can provide the initial ideas and feedback to validate the ideas into working products.  Or if your customer is internal, are you treating them as part of your team and are you collecting their feedback regularly?

As you look across your Agile context, are customers one of your major Agile roles within your organization?  Are they front and center?  Are customers an integral part of your Agile practice?  Are you collecting their valuable feedback regularly?  If not, it may be time to do so.  

Agile Executive Playbook

Imagine that you are an executive of a company (and quite possibly some of you reading this are or have a direct line to an executive).  You’ve heard about this thing called Agile and some of you have experienced it.  However, Agile is still a bit confusing because in many cases, it appears to be occurring only at the development team level and can occur in many different ways.  Some of you believe that Agile is a set of practices and tools and may be surprised to know that it is nothing-more-and-nothing-less than a set of values and principles.   Maybe some of you haven’t seen the connection between applying Agile and gaining the business benefits.  What exactly is your role and responsibilities in moving your company toward Agile?  Here is guidance on what you may do to support Agile and more importantly increase your chances of deriving the business benefits of Agile. 

Strategic Shifts           

The key responsibility for the executive within the organizational scope is to become the sponsor of the Agile initiative.  This highlights to the employees that Agile is important and increases the chances of buy-in.  But simply proclaiming “make it so” isn’t sufficient.  The executive must continue to be a key player in this on-going sponsor role.  Here are strategic shifts that are beneficial:

• Study the Agile values and principles.  Knowing this language helps you become more conversant in Agile and to the teams and organizational players that are involved.  Studying the values and principles will also help you ascertain if you really believe in them (or not). 
• Move away from the iron triangle of schedule, cost or scope and move to a framework focused on value.  Prioritizing ideas via cost of delay will provide a much better value-driven pipeline of ideas.  These ideas can be decomposed into increments that can then be validated with fast feedback loops. 
• Measure and adapt the flow of your end-to-end concept to cash pipeline.  There is a tendency to focus on just development, but it is often other parts of the pipeline where ideas wait much too long.  Consider value stream mapping to better understand waiting states and no or low value steps. 
• Adapt the organization from a hierarchical organization to more of a self-organizing organization.  When employees feel that they have more ownership and decision-making of their work, they will apply much more brainpower and bring passion to their work.

Key Sponsor Activities

Now let’s take a look at the more in-depth activities that you as an executive should consider playing and why.  These are more tactical, but since becoming Agile doesn’t happen overnight, they help keep the engagement and interest along the way. 

• Treat your Agile initiative as a journey.  Because this does take time, it would benefit you to build an adaptable roadmap.  This may be best handled with a small local team of Agile champions who are committed to adopting Agile and an Agile consultant who has experience in this area.  To get a good understanding of what an Agile roadmap may look like, consider reading the book Being Agile: Your Roadmap to Successful Adoption of Agile.
• Build a learning culture.  Consider establishing an education vision on how to best educate your organization. Infuse the education with experiments and experience. I suggest starting with the Value, Flow, and Quality materials that provide the reader with great insight into many of these new concepts and ideas, along with case studies and activities.
• Build the foundation for a Customer Value-Driven Enterprise.  This is a company that is explicitly looking for the highest value ideas, applying an incremental mindset, and applying feedback loops to validate value along the way.  Learn more by reading The Agile Enterprise.
• As an executive, examine your own behavior and align it with the Agile mindset of Agile values and principles with a focus of delivering customer value.  Are you speaking the language of Agile and the strategic shift that you are looking to achieve? 
• Provide funding for the Agile initiative.  Funding should include meeting education needs, bringing in talent (coaches) as needed, and providing tool support. This may occur incrementally or per the budget cycle.  
• Periodically provide public support for Agile. Establish an Agile communication plan, of which portions can be executed over time to keep employees aware of the progress and accomplishments of the deployment.  This may also include providing 'air cover' to the Agile deployment team and the coaches and champions and mitigating the risks that could prevent a move to Agile.  
• Consider your staff.  Ask yourself, “are they Agile minded and aligned with the cultural shift that is needed?”  You may need to be involved with making adjustments to staff members who cannot make the switch away from command-and-control. This can be hard to do, but if they don't, then those around them will not take the change seriously.
• Learn how to read agile metrics and measures of success. Gaining an understanding of the lagging to leading metric path, sprint burn-downs, release burn-ups, value capture, release frequency, Agile Mindset, Values, and Principles (MVP) Advisor, and other Agile-related metrics can help ensure the organization is moving in the right direction.
• Adapt the employee compensation model toward agile behaviors being sought and away from rewarding command-and-control attributes. To change behavior, recognize the behavior you want to change, evaluate the reward system, and adapt it to the behavior that is needed for Agile. Without aligning the reward system to Agile, you will not get to behavior you want.
• Attend the Sprint Reviews of your top products within your organizational scope. This will give you a genuine sense of progress and see actual working functionality of your products.

The intent of this article is to provide highlights of what an executive can do to get the most business benefits from their Agile initiative.  There can be other perspectives and further details.  As an executive (or those who have supported executives), what have you found helpful in your Agile journey?