If you read only one thing about AI/LLMs this week, make it this:
August 4, 2023
If you only read one thing about AI/LLM this week, make it this: Building Adaptive Teams for the Future by Lane Shackleton
• LLMs are causing leaders to radically rethink their teams and workflows. This affects all functions — product/tech/design have been early adopters, but sales, marketing, finance, legal teams should all be experimenting and discovering domain-relevant LLM use cases for themselves, rather than waiting for IT to give them permission. Let the makers make!
• “Learning rituals” can be a powerful way to educate and connect teams — the LLM space is moving too fast to have a single teacher or trainer who is an expert, so it may be better to surface an interesting concept to a group and learn about it together.
• This learning and reteaming process is messy - you may not get it right, at first or at all, and you may need to experiment with multiple models to figure out what works. Teams need to be fault-tolerant — able to learn quickly, rapidly change shape and optimize themselves for outcomes.
• Similar to last week’s link, we are again reading about organizational response to LLMs. If you want to take advantage, you can’t ban them, ignore them or control them, but you can channel them and empower your teams to discover new ways of working, and feed that knowledge back to the mothership.
• Many workers wait to be taught or trained on new technologies. When things are moving this fast, you can’t afford to wait! Leaders need to democratize the learning process to maximize the chance of a transformative insight, which could come from anyone and anywhere.
• Most team structures we use now are antiquated — if you were forming the same team from scratch today, you’d probably pick half the people and twice the chatbots. This is murderously difficult to manage! As leaders, we need to set a curious, supportive tone that encourages experimentation, provides psychological safety in the midst of disruption, and rewards flexibility and malleability, not just results.