This year was my 30th college reunion. I didn’t go, but someone on one of our forums noted that, as folks who are 50+ years old, we have all born witness to 20% of the U.S.’s existence.
I found that to be a stunning stat, a visceral reminder of how young this country still is.
Overcoming nature blindness does a strange thing to you when you travel: You start to pay an inordinate amount of attention to the local plants, sometimes to the annoyance of the folks with whom you’re traveling. When I was in upstate New York last month, I couldn’t help but notice the forsythia.
They were everywhere. You couldn’t miss their abundant yellow blossoms amidst the mostly barren branches, as Spring was just starting to emerge there. I saw them by the Finger Lakes, off the sides of the roads, and in just about every garden I passed. Much to my partner’s chagrin, every time I saw one, I would point and exclaim, “Forsythia!”
It turns out that this was no accident. In the early 1950s, the Ithaca Garden Club embarked on a major campaign to plant forsythia all over the region. They planted over 10,000 of these beautiful shrubs, earning the city the nickname, “Forsythia City.”
Last week, I was in Southern California visiting my parents. My Dad asked me how my bonsai dabblings were going. I pulled up photos of some of my projects, including some cuttings I had taken from my parents a few years earlier. My Mom quietly listened to me talk, then asked, “Do you know what 개나리 (gaenari) are?”
I shook my head.
She started telling me about these shrubs that were harbingers of spring in Korea and how her father (who died when she was 11) used to plant them around their garden. As I listened to her stories, I looked them up on my phone, then laughed, “Oh my gosh. They’re forsythia!”
I told her about my adventures in upstate New York and pulled up photos from my trip to show her. Then I asked, “What made you think of them?”
She replied, “Listening to you talk reminded me of my Dad.” Then tears started welling up in her eyes.
Later, I searched for “forsythia” in my photo album to see if it would be smart enough to find my photos. It not only found several, it also pulled up a photo and video of a bouquet I had taken almost exactly nine years earlier with my parents at a coffee shop in Newport Beach.
My Mom had spotted the bouquet and asked me if I knew what they were. Her reaction to the flowers moved me enough that I asked her to let me record them on video. She even sang a Korean children’s song about them.
Apparently, I quickly forgot about this encounter and about forsythia in general. I don’t think I’ll forget this time.
Amanda Hickman pointed me to the practice of creating bingo cards for your goals.
One habit I struggle to help folks build is to actually look at their goals once they set them. This is a clever and fun way to encourage that. I might experiment with this as an exercise at my Collaboration Gym. Draft your goals first using the Success Spectrum, then pick some mixture of Minimum and Target (and maybe even Epic) goals and put them on a bingo board.
This past Saturday, my partner and I were in Point Richmond and spotted a bald eagle flying high overhead. The white head and tail feathers were unmistakable, and we stood there, staring in awe.
I saw my first bald eagle 15 years ago in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. I could not believe my eyes or ears. It is such an iconic bird, yet for the first three decades of my life, they were endangered. I was never sure I’d ever see one.
I can’t remember the first time I saw one here in Northern California, but they no longer surprise me. Heck, there was even a pair living in Piedmont last year, just a few miles from where I live. It still feels special, though.
The very next morning, two flew high overhead while we were doing our regular habitat restoration at Skyline Gardens. They were accompanied by a turkey vulture, a red-tailed hawk, and an irritated raven trying (and eventually succeeding) to chase the large raptors away. I couldn’t believe my luck as I stared up at them in wonder.
About ten years ago, I saw Corey Arnold give an amazing presentation at Pop-Up Magazine about how bald eagles were seen as pesky flying rats in Alaska because of how they picked through trash en masse. It muted my awe of bald eagles a little bit.
But not that much. This morning, I wondered what Matt Kracht’s The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, which my nephew had recently given me for my birthday, had to say about bald eagles. I wholeheartedly agreed with its assessment:
Is this bird flawed? Hell, yes — it’s a bird. But it stands for the promise of something good. Please, don’t even get me started, because this is the best motherfucking bird there is. Period.
My friend, William Neil, recently wrote an app. Rather, he convinced AI to write an app for him. And he recorded himself doing it!
If you’re technical, you might enjoy watching it. Or, if you find recordings of machines generating machine-y looking things soothing like ASMR.
William chose one of my collaboration workouts as the subject of his app. I host a monthly series of workouts called Staying Strategic as part of my Collaboration Gym. The first two workouts is something called Question Dumping — literally dumping whatever questions or top-of-mind for you at the moment, then doing a little organizing and answering. Participants do their work in Google Docs, and I prompt and coach them along the way.
William did the program earlier this year, and he asked me if I had ever thought of creating an app version of my workouts. As a matter of fact, I’ve often thought about this. So, he built one!
We had an hour-long conversation where I walked him through how I thought it should work, then he spent at least another hour refining the requirements using ChatGPT as a kind of secretary while he went on a walk (as he describes in the video). Building / testing / debugging an iteration of the app took about an hour total.
I haven’t done any serious coding in decades. I also haven’t played with coding using AI, although I’ve had some interesting conversations with friends, and I’ve been following musings from Jon Udell, Les Orchard, and Harper Reed. (I also enjoy Mike Hoye’s general commentary and critiques.) So it was fun to have William walk me through the process, and I’m so glad he recorded this and shared it with the wider world.
It’s a simple, non-production quality app. I think an experienced engineer could also build it in about an hour, with other potential benefits, such as higher code quality. It also would have cost at least an order of magnitude more. Maybe the benefits outweigh the costs in the long run. I wonder about things like maintainability and how easy it is for LLMs to refactor a codebase with minimal human intervention. And, I’m also conscious of the Bitter Lesson.
Now about that app…
For many years now, even before GPT-3, my friend, James Cham, has talked about the potential of AI replacing overpriced strategy consultants. If you look at the mechanics of what most traditional strategy consultants do, this is a no-brainer. But the dirty little secret of Big Consulting is that they’re rarely hired for said mechanics.
So I don’t think that AI will replace Big Consulting (although it may drive the cost down). But I do think that many groups legitimately want to align their people around good strategy. This is why I created Staying Strategic, which is an evolution of something I’ve been tinkering with for my whole career. And I think that AI could not only help scale workouts like Staying Strategic, but it could enable new and interesting possibilities. The fact that AI could help create the tools that would enable AI to help us be more strategic is just meta icing on the cake.