The downside of change; manipulating LLMs; publishers blast book bans: Newsletter 4 September 2024
Newsletter 60. Why our culture fetishizes the new and what to do about. Plus, little free libraries take on book bans, the FTC bans fake reviews, why everyone should write a book proposal, three people to follow, and three books to read.
Change is Seductive, But It Creates Cognitive Conflict
I want you to think for a moment about the experience you are bombarded with online every day. It’s is completely focused on what’s new and different.
“News” is the plural of “new.” Every news site is focused only on what is changing. Kamala’s poll numbers increased by 3 percentage points; 42,000 bridges are structurally deficient; two-thirds of supermarket baby-foods are unhealthy. A hurricane is coming. A drought is coming. An earthquake is coming.
Meanwhile your social media is focused on change, too. What’s trending? Who commented on what what you posted? Which friend just appeared, who changed jobs, who died, who had a baby, who got married? Who went apple-picking, kayaking, whale-watching, golfing? If it isn’t new, you won’t pay attention, so it’s new, new, new all day long.
Corporate managers and executives, primed for the experience of newness from their first day of work, are constantly scouring business trends for an edge. Should I incorporate AI into my customer service? Move all my software to the cloud? Change the way I evaluate and manage teams? Reorganize around customers, around products, around geography? Managers need to innovate to get an edge. Strategists need to pivot to keep their companies relevant. There’s a constant focus on what’s new, because what’s old is clearly going to become out of date soon, and Lord preserve us from being stuck in the past.
In Jurassic Park, we learned that Tyrannosaurus Rex can only see things that move. That is all of us, now. Evolutionarily, we only notice what is moving. So we are drawn to change, and the purveyors of news — and new strategies — serve up a constant stream of new and shiny objects for us to focus on. After all, change is the only constant, right?
Stop frantically swallowing all this change and think a moment about how you feel about change.
Workers’ resistance to change is well documented. HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter has eloquently described where the resistance comes from. We fear a loss of control as the skills we have mastered become irrelevant. We are uncertain about the purported benefits. We are being forced to live in an unfamiliar reality. We need to do our jobs and learn new ones at the same time, which is more work. We will lose hard-earned status. And we might be perceived as irrelevant and laid off.
I’m just spitballing here, but I think this may be the most fundamental conflict workers face today. Constantly bombarded with the new, they’re clinging tightly to the old. Managers and leaders resist status quo, since they can’t get credit for it. The constant tug-of-war between what I know how to do and what you want me to do now creates anxiety. Anxious workers are not just resistant to change. They’re worried, so they’re less productive doing their same old jobs.
There’s a whole body of research related to change management, to motivating people to want to change and organizing so that they will. But before you circle your strategists around it and embrace it, ask yourself one question.
What won’t change?
Will you still be reaching the same customers? And will they still have the same problems?
Your products and services solve customer problems. Will you still have the same products and services?
Your salespeople sell. Will they still be selling in the ways they’ve mastered?
What technologies will remain the same (are we still communicating by email, for example)? What parts of your organization will be organized in the same way? Will people still get the same paychecks and the same bonuses? Will they still have the same bosses and the same leaders?
Start with what your customers like, what you are good at, what your people are good at. Not everything needs to change. Build up from what’s working. And if nearly all of it is working, maybe leave most of it alone.
Wouldn’t that be nice for a change?
News (yeah, news) for writers and others who think
Forget SEO; AI chatbots are easier to manipulate with hidden text in your web pages (NY Times gift link).
On Jane Friedman‘s blog, Anne Dubuisson & Jon McGoran share how creating a book proposal can move the ball on many of the tasks you must accomplish to eventually write a book.
Major publishers united behind a legal challenge to Florida’s book banning process. (WSJ gift link).
The organization behind Little Free Libraries posted a map of where books are banned and where little free libraries might be able to help.
The Federal Trade Commission passed a rule banning fake reviews “by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services, or that misrepresent the experience of the person giving it.” Companies can’t pay people to post positive reviews or ask insiders to post reviews.
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) says AI is okay. That’s not okay with a lot of writers, though.
Three people to follow
Lisa Gualtieri , professor and expert on digital health technology.
Mark Sheehy , preternaturally talented writer at the massive nonprofit research firm NORC.
James McQuivey, Ph.D. , dean of technology analysts. Trust me, if he’s talking about it, you want to know about it.
Three books to read
The Reset Mindset: Get Unstuck, Focus on What Matters Most, and Reach Your Goals Faster by Penny Zenker (Amplify, 2024). A method to make sure you never get stuck again.
Flying in the Face of Fear: A Fighter Pilot’s Lessons on Leading with Courage by Kim Campbell (Wiley, 2023). An Air Force colonel with 24 years’ experience shares her insights on how everyone — especially women — can lead courageously.
Think Your Way to the Top: A Nine-Time CEOs 52-Week Journal for Getting Ahead and Staying There by Des Hague (Amplify, 2024). CEOs screw up daily. Maybe this will help them be a little wiser.
Re: change and new: We tend to dismiss the old, just because it is old, old-fashioned. What the panicked masses fail to remember is that there are some very good reasons for sticking with the “old” (at least some of it) – it is tried and true. It has met and overcome obstacles. It has a stable foundation. It has worked for (nth amount of time). Technology may or may not allow us to make improvements in our lives, but it is not the be-all-and-end-all that will turn the world into utopia. Let’s look at the new stuff, assess its pros and cons, use what is good, dismiss what isn’t, and get on with our lives.
Another aspect to consider, when comparing the old with the new is this: We humans don’t change anywhere near as quickly as our environment does. Human nature has not changed since we crawled out of the primordial mud millions of years ago. Despite the modern world’s efforts to mechanize us into human-shaped cyborgs, we still function with brains made up of flesh and blood, experiences and memories, loves and hates, etc.
I cracked up at an ad for hair restoration recently, when the actress stated, “Hair has always been central to my identity.” I haven’t seen it for a few months – I think the company soon recognized how absurd it was and replaced it with something more realistic. The centrality of one’s hair to one’s identity is definitely a cyborg view of the world. But the ad did entertain me.
Any idea why people say change when they ought to say improvement?
I help folks improve things. I do realize most folks sell change, but is anyone buying.