Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The passing of time is usually insufficient for a person to move from task to another. Sorry. Hopes and wishes are not plans.

I have seen this time and again. A person is hired for one job with the qualifications needed for that job. A few years later, that person is moved into another job. Other qualifications for the other job?

Two questions:

1. What did we hire this person to do in the first job?
2. What has changed in this person to qualify them for the second job?

Well, this person has matured five years and … or this person has watched me do the second job for five years and …

Sorry. Insufficient answers. This person is bright, teachable, willing to learn, hard working (don’t ya’ just love when that last one is tossed in?), has never been specifically trained for the second job, and is therefore unqualified for it and… What usually happens is lots of innocent bystanders are harmed (some irrevocably) while the person learns the second job on the job.

Hopes and wishes are not plans. We sure hope and wish this person has picked up enough to do the second job. That would sure make our lives easier if our hopes and wishes would come true. And, sometimes hopes and wishes come true. It is unfortunate that is about 1% of the time.

Sorry. We know better. Let’s do better. If we are “grooming” a person for that second job, let’s do it right.

by Dwayne Phillips

It is important to remember whose words we are discussing. If you mentioned something, we are discussing your words. If I mentioned something, we are discussing my words. There are ways to back away from our words.

I read the words from the PowerPoint. They were wrong. Simply wrong. 1 + 2 = 4. Wrong. When I questioned the words, arguments began. Finally, a third person said, “Wait. Those are your words on the PowerPoint. No one made you put them there. You put them there. We are merely discussing them.”

In that instance, the words originated with that other person. In other cases, the words originated with me. No one made me put the words on the PowerPoint. I put them there. They are my words. If they are wrong, I made the mistake.

It is possible to step away from my words. It is possible for you to step away from your words.

“You are correct. My words are incorrect. I was mistaken. Let’s find the correct words and move forward.”

It really is that simple. Own our words. Use them or toss them and find better ones.

by Dwayne Phillips

Someone is paid to lead the people and manage the work. They are paid to answer, “Yes, but how are they going to do that?”

Work can be difficult to accomplish at times. And there are times when you say, “This isn’t good enough. It must be better.”

A well-meaning person replies, “Yes, but how are they going to do that?”

The answer is simple, “So-and-so is paid to lead the people and manage the work. It is their job to figure it out and do it.”

Yes but, but, but…

Sorry. There are no “buts.” Figuring out how to accomplish difficult work is someone’s job. They are paid to do that job. If no one needed to figure out how to accomplish the difficult work, it wouldn’t be difficult and we wouldn’t pay someone to do it.

Sometimes this simple little exercise sounds trite. Sometimes it sounds mean. Sorry. This is the nature of human endeavors. Leaders of people and managers of work are called upon to do these things. Let’s get to it.

by Dwayne Phillips

There are things I don’t want to know. Knowing those things means I have to do some work that I just don’t want to do.

Life is full of headaches. There are more than enough headaches for each day. I don’t need any more headaches.

Then some well-meaning person walks in the door with, “I was just checking on the ABC regulations regarding ABC things, and we are supposed to be tracking something and filing weekly and monthly reports on something regarding ABC things.”

Huh? That’s six more headaches. I don’t need six more headaches. Can’t we ignore this?

“No,” replies the well-meaning person. “I’m lucky to have caught this early enough so that we don’t get into real trouble on ABC with the ABC regulations and regulators and investigators and …”

Lucky? Lucky to have caught this? No. That is not lucky. That is another big headache.

Now that I have been dutifully informed, I know a thing I don’t want to know. I know that I have another headache and another thing that must be done today. The day—and all the resources of the day—are the same. The list of things to do this day is longer.

There are things I don’t want to know.

by Dwayne Phillips

I think OpenAI did this before I get around to writing this blog post, but if you want AI to succeed, stop calling it AI.

There is a large part of society that doesn’t like “AI.”

First, how do you pronounce “AI?” Is it “A” then “I” or it some word that sort of sounds like “-ayiaiaiaiai?” Second, why doesn’t anyone expand that “AI” thing into a couple of words? What are they hiding? And another thing, “Why do you keep talking about the science behind something instead of just saying something. We don’t call it “liquid dynamics;” we call it plumbing.

Instead of calling it “AI,” let’s just have products that do something for us. Let’s have a product: I speak into my phone, “Get me plane tickets to Chicago for Tuesday morning coming back Thursday afternoon.” Boom. I got ’em and they’re paid for. We don’t need “a generative AI large language model with 17Billion parameters (what are parameters, anyway?) trained on travel data scooped off the Internet in privacy violating fashion…”

There are scheduling programs where I enter the names of everyone I wish to invite and the week I wish to meet them. Boom. Here is the day and time when everyone can meet. I don’t care if there is AI, IA, AAA, or a hamster running in a wheel. I just want a time that is open on everyone’s schedule.

OpenAI seems to have done this. They have ChatGPT. Oh, chat. I know what chat is. Good. I can chat to the computer and get real answers. “GPT?” That’s like a jeep, you know, that fun car. So I’m chit chatting in a fun way and getting answers. Good stuff.

Funny how that all became a super-successful product?

Want AI to succeed? Stop calling it AI.

by Dwayne Phillips

The systems we use at work are woefully behind what we use at home. This is especially true if we work in a government organization.

At the time I wrote this post, OpenAI demonstrated their GPT-4 with ChatGPT. That means I see how to summarize lots of things and understand what is in photos and save myself hours of typing well-known facts. Also, Microsoft has shown how all these things will appear in plain old boring Microsoft Word.

Anyone can use Microsoft Word and take advantage of all this writing and summarizing and looking really smart, right?

Wrong. I work inside a Federal government organization. We use Microsoft Word 2016. Yes, seven years behind. We will never see all these fancy AI Copilots and stuff at work. We are having a good day when the systems come on when scheduled and don’t crash during the day.

Okay, that’s our Federal government. But are most companies much better? Will all the companies have these new MS Word features on the same day that I have them at home on my personal account? Will their IT departments accredit them that fast? Will these things be deployed?

Accredit? Deploy? Well, all those things are important and they take time. I understand that. Big companies have a lot at stake and don’t want to mess up by moving too fast. Me at home? Whatever, just do it. I have a backup. I’ll be okay.

And that is why we hate IT at work. The Information Technology departments have a lot to do. They are worried about things I don’t understand. They have to move slowly. Sometimes laws require them to move slowly, and no one wants to go to jail.

Still, why can’t they just …

by Dwayne Phillips

A basic questions that managers should ask above the noise and bustle of the day.

Every group needs a person who asks a nagging question or two every day or week or month or two.

Is this working?

Of course this is working. What do you think? We are all busy; we are all working hard, and we are all accomplishing things.

Yes, but is this working? We gained 2% in efficiency last week, but how about over the last year? Have we lost weight? Have we gained salary? Did we help employees learn? What can we do now that we couldn’t do a year or a decade ago?

If you (me) are the person asking this question, expect bad things to come back to you. Frowns, scowls, derision, calls to “get a real job” and the like are coming your way. Folks are busy and working hard and don’t want extra questions to cloud their thinking.

Smile. With all due respect, directly and clearly ask, “Is this working?”

by Dwayne Phillips

In order to accomplish a desired goal, first gather the right people in the right forum. Otherwise, grievous vexation will result.

I have something to accomplish. How will I accomplish it? Perhaps I need others to assist. Who? How? What forum?

It is easy to have too many people in the room. Lots of ideas are good, but too many ideas and scatter-brained ideas may be more harmful than beneficial. Sometimes focus is required.

It is easy to be in the wrong forum. Presentation meetings are not the place for deep thought and critical examination.

I often work in discovering concepts. That requires stating a concept, examining it, asking,

• What are (at least) three things wrong with this?
• Do those wrong things preclude the use of this concept?
• What do those wrong things point us to?
• How can we use them for better ideas?
• What is next?
• Where does this lead us?
• etc.

A room full of executives wanting three alternatives so they can decide right now is the wrong people in the wrong forum for the above.

Questions, questions, and more questions. Thinking, thinking, and more thinking. White boards, butcher paper, markers, pencil and paper and lots of erasers. Again, a board room full of executives is the wrong people in the wrong forum.

What am I trying to accomplish? Who are the right people for that? What is the right forum for that?

Questions and thought. Wait, back to the top. Who are the right people and the right forum to decide who are the right people and what is the right forum? Wait, more questions and more thought.

I should choose carefully and thoughtfully.

by Dwayne Phillips

I don’t want to jump into the next book-writing project at home. Or do I?

I just finished a writing project at home. Done, wrapped up, self-published on the places where my friends and relatives can by it for 99¢.

Sigh. I don’t want to jump into the first thing that pops into my mind for the next writing project at home. I need to think a while, right?

Wrong. Start on whatever excites me this morning. What happens if I think of something better next week. I will stop what I am doing and write that project instead. Simple.

But, but, but… Okay, there are risks involved and bad things can happen and I can fret about this forever.

Consider this: I will not throw away what I started. I will merely put away what I started.

This put away for now concept is really easy with today’s computers and files and all that. It really wasn’t that hard in the day of the typewriter, manila folder, and file cabinet.

Just do it. It will be alright.

by Dwayne Phillips

AI has moved from interesting to actual work. This is much like the arrival of VisiCalc, which changed the home computer from hobby to actual work.

I was still in college the first time I saw an Apple computer. It was so new and odd that the Apple II just sort of sat in the corner of one of those odd stores that we used to have a block off campus. There was some sort of space game rolling on the TV screen attacked to a box that had a keyboard on it. Oh well.

Some of the computer science students had collected enough money to buy one or two of these Apple computers. I recall that the really good programmers didn’t bother with the Apple. The hobbyists who tinkered with this and that and looked at circuit boards but got Cs and Ds in the programming classes loved these things. Great hobbies for the lesser inclined.

Then, VisiCalc arrived in late 1979. Accountants raved about how this electronic spreadsheet saved them hours and hours of tedious drudgery associated with their jobs. With their jobs? Yes, with their jobs. The accountants bought that funny machine with an Apple on it because that’s what came with VisiCalc.

VisiCalc changed the home computer from an odd thing hobbyists played with to a necessity for accountants and others who wanted to move ahead by being much more productive.

And now with have ChatGPT et al. Nine months ago, the different AI research departments of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the other big tech were toiling away. They pre-published on arXiv and spoke at various conferences. The goal was to inch ahead of the other research labs on the standard benchmarks to achieve a new SOTA (state of the art) performance. Life was grand at these places. Good salaries. Independent work. Excellent facilities.

Then, almost by accident, some fella’s at OpenAI put ChatGPT on a website. Sign up for free and use this chat bot that held the world’s knowledge in it “memory banks” (an old term that us old folks used when we were much younger). Type a question just like you would ask a wise old person. Boom. There’s the answer. It would write an essay or an email or whatever you could imagine. The thing even wrote chunks of code in programming languages. Sure, it didn’t do everything, but it sure did a lot of things.

ChatGPT changed AI from an odd thing researchers played with to a necessity for everyone who wanted to move ahead by being much more productive.

AI had its VisiCalc moment. Right or wrong, for better or worse, expectations changed, and usage changed. It is no longer enough for AI researchers to work away in their labs to inch forward on standard benchmarks. We want a system that summarizes images and videos and tells us the meaning of the lyrics from Taylor Swift’s latest release and what she was wearing.

AI? Models? Benchmarks? The lesser inclined who are tinkering and not doing anything worthwhile can continue to tinker. The movers and shakers are spending $$$ on tools that move and shake them ahead.