In this week’s 8020Info Water Cooler, we share tips on crafting prompts for generative AI, tapping into four types of luck, the impact of organizational fatigue, ways to lead across silos, improve customer service, and work around blind spots. Enjoy!

1. Tips for Prompting Better AI Responses

The beauty of generative artificial intelligence is that you can talk to it rather than communicate through computer code. But that involves learning how best to prompt the AI when giving input and asking for a response.
Microsoft chief scientist Jaime Teevan offers these tips in Harvard Business Review:

• Provide more context than you would with a person:  When you communicate with a colleague, you have a lot of shared knowledge. This new AI colleague, the large language model, needs to be brought up to speed. So, if you use AI to help draft an email to that person, provide the most important pieces of context about all that other stuff the technology might not know.
• Use ‘the wisdom of the crowd”:  It helps to tap into different perspectives, which you can do by asking for more than one reply to your query — for example, three titles for a presentation.
• Rely on recognition, not recall:  It’s easier for you to recognize something on a list than recall it from memory. Keep your best prompts and pick from the list.
• Make it a conversation:  Break down complex requests into multiple steps. “For instance, I’ve found that it’s best to first ask for a summary of an article I want to understand, and then separately ask for insights,” Teevan says. He might ask AI to outline an article in bullets, with a focus on what a Microsoft executive (with a particular focus on research) might be interested in. Next step: What questions should that exec ask of the article? And, what are the answers?

Learning to craft productive queries and AI prompts will take time, but the skill can provide ample rewards.

2. Four Types of Luck

Benjamin Franklin wrote “diligence is the mother of good luck”. Seneca felt “luck is where opportunity meets preparation”. Venture capitalist Sahil Bloom notes both quotes suggest that we manufacture our own luck.

To improve the odds, he falls back on neurologist James Austin’s delineation of four types of luck, three which we can influence:

• Blind luck:  This involves truly random occurrences of the universe such as who you were born to, winning a lottery, and “Acts of God.” These are out of your control.
• Luck from awareness:  Your depth of understanding in a given subject or sector allows you to position yourself for lucky breaks.
• Luck from uniqueness:  This occurs when your unique set of attributes attracts specific luck to you. When you are an expert in some field, opportunities arise.
• Luck from motion:  Doing things —creating motion and collisions through hustle and energy— can lead to beneficial results. In his newsletter, he gives the example of starting a new job with an attitude of saying yes to every opportunity that comes your way. If you meet two people starting a business and choose to become an advisor, when they do well, you make $1 million.

As a useful rule of thumb for your journey, he shares his “Luck Razor”: When choosing between two paths, always choose the path that has a larger “luck surface area”. Ask yourself: Which of the two paths is more likely to lead to me getting lucky? Act accordingly.

3. The Organizational Impact of Fatigue

If you think back a couple of months, you may remember a deep feeling of fatigue. It builds over the year. And it doesn’t impact just you.

“Fatigue — the combination of exhaustion and weakness — affects the performance of the entire organization,” executive coach Tara Rethore writes on Chief Executive.

“The executives I advise always want to accelerate progress. This requires energy, precisely the opposite of fatigue. Not only consuming energy, fatigue also creates a weakness in the business that may go unnoticed.”

With the risks of fatigue in mind, take time to evaluate the readiness of your organization to tackle new challenges.

• To what extent do you have sufficient capacity and flexibility — financial, human and operational readiness – to pursue and achieve objectives?
• What opportunities, threats, or circumstances may compel you to quickly set a new destination?
•  In what ways are you prepared to anticipate, mitigate, and manage the impact of these external shifts?

She advises you to keep in mind that not only equipment or machines benefit from downtime. People also perform better when they take time for renewal.

4. How to Improve Customer Service

Customer service consultant Micah Solomon says every service interaction unfolds in three stages: the warm welcome, delivery of the service or product, and the fond farewell.

“Far too often, we ignore stages one and three and focus all our effort on the middle one, what we consider the actual work,” he writes on Entrepreneur.

“But the pleasantries at the beginning and the end of any customer service interaction are key, considering how human memory emphasizes beginnings and endings in how it later reviews an event.”

Customer service, it should be remembered, can also be internal — within the organization. He urges you to view tasks in your inbox as requests from valued customers instead of just “those folks in the other department”.

5. Zingers

• Two Types of Persistence: Consultant Dennis Stauffer says there are two types of persistence: sticking with something despite setbacks, like a marathoner pushing past exhaustion and pain; and, alternatively, being creative and resourceful, like an athlete who adapts their technique to do better rather than just repeating the same routine approach. (Source: Braden Kelley.com).
• Two Types of Speed: There are also two types of speed in fast-moving companies, according to Suketu Gandhi, co-head of the global strategic operations practice at Kearney Consulting: one is speed of insights —the ability to quickly sense an emerging market need that it can meet. Another is speed of action — the ability to quickly marshal operations to capitalize on the identified trend or need. (Source: Harvard Business Review).
• Unmet Expectations: When we raise expectations for a colleague or friend, we open the door to possibility — we offer them dignity, trust and a chance to grow. But, entrepreneur Seth Godin adds, “if we become attached to those expectations, if the unmet expectation leads us to distress or unhappiness, then that attachment undermines the very reason we created the expectation in the first place.” (Source: Seth’s Blog).
• Engage Customers: Ruth Gotian, an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, asks us to consider what insights we might gain if we were to involve customers or end-users in the problem-solving process. What might they reveal? (Source: Psychology Today).
• Don’t Wait on Perfect Timing: It’s not too late to do what you want to do — if you stop waiting for the time to be right, says Atomic Habits author Jame Clear. (Source: JamesClear.com).

6. The Model: Leading Across Silos

Cross-functional management is the term used in business schools, but every week we hear clients use the term “silos” when describing their struggles to connect, coordinate and work with different teams, organizations, or community partners.

Here’s an approach suggested in the Harvard Business Review recently by Jeff Rosenthal and Molly Rosen. Their research identified patterns for leading well across silos:

• Leaders who thrive cross-functionally possess “lateral agility”, and spend as much effort and time working with leaders of other units as with their own teams.
• They have “expanded mindsets”. They think beyond their own interests with an enterprise-first or client-first perspective. They also find and use expertise from everywhere, rather than doing it all themselves.
• They have strong connective skills, proactively seeking to build trusted relationships by learning about the motivations and constraints of others. Then they find ways to win together, avoiding either-or thinking.
• They use simple practices to build bridges to other units or partners. They “make purple” (I bring red, you bring blue). They bring a “sketch” to open conversations rather than foist fully developed plans on others.
• They realize being trusted in relationships is key to problem-solving.
• They take inventory of how well they’re managing cross-functional relationships (e.g. identifying their 5–8 most important strategic partners and assessing their investment in those relationships).

With time, trust, focus, skill, the right attitude and effort, you can make progress in the battle to overcome the dysfunctions of working in silos.

7. Around Our Water Cooler

Considering Your Blind Spots

Recently we had occasion to take part in a fascinating conversation with local leaders about dealing with blind spots. They used different approaches to reduce uncertainty and avoid “being blindsided” — here are a few tactics mentioned:

• Take off the blinders: Sometimes we become “intentionally” blind to issues and situations that are distasteful, stressful or conflict with our values. It is a valuable skill to learn to look clearly at reality.
• Don’t be a turtle: Blind spots can emerge for lack of looking. Sometimes you have to move to see the lay of the land from a new angle. Instead of shrinking away from conflict, safe inside our comfortable shells, proactively seek out feedback and explore issues that otherwise would remain hidden.
• Use mirrors: Sometimes it is just impossible to see something directly, like the other side of the moon. It helps to have a mirror to look around corners. Often we can rely on other people who do have a better line of sight into a blind area or monitor indirect sources of information.
• Try different lenses: Many blind spots arise from the way we look at situations, warped by underlying assumptions, mental models or desired outcomes. Challenge those assumptions. Test situations with approaches that are different from your usual methods.
• Change the environment: It is easy for people to hold back information when a situation seems unsafe. Be clear about your agenda or motivations, and step by step, work at building a culture of trust.
• Know your limits: Finally, there is a limit to the value of eliminating blind spots. Sometimes it’s better to ignore that worry and focus on succeeding with what you already know.

A decade ago, in Blind Spot, Dr. Gordon Rugg noted that all people tend to make the same sorts of mistakes regardless of their field, how smart they are or even their level of expertise. Sometimes we fail to see issues right in front of us.

What We’re Reading:

• Harvey’s Pick: Michael Watkins, professor of leadership and organizational change at the IMD business school, offers an in-depth look at The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking — how to augment your pattern recognition, system analysis, mental agility, structured problem solving, visioning and political savvy.
• Rob’s Pick: In 2022, Harvey wrote about Building a Second Brain, by Tiago Forte. Here’s a project management bestseller by the same author: The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Life. This rubric —Projects, Areas of responsibility, Resources and Archives— is designed to align information with action goals and getting things done. (If this theme interests you, also consider The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul, which explores how our physical environment, relationships, and technologies shape our thoughts and behaviours.)

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8. Closing Thought

“The path to all great things passes through silence.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher