 |
|
|
|||||
In 1998, five kids met in a cafe in Belgrade. Still in their 20s, they were, to all outward appearances, nothing special. They werent rich, or powerful; they didnt hold important positions or have access to significant resources. Nevertheless, that day, they conceived a plan to overthrow their countrys brutal Milo¹eviæ regime. The next day, six friends joined them and they became the 11 founders of the activist group Otpor. A year later, Otpor numbered a few hundred members and it seemed that Milo¹eviæ would be the dictator for life. A year after that, Otpor had grown to 70,000 and the Bulldozer Revolution brought down the once-unshakable dictator. Thats how change works: in phases. Every transformational idea starts out weak, flawed, and untested. It needs a quiet period to work out the kinks. Through trial and error, you see what works, begin to gain traction, and eventually have the opportunity to create lasting change. If youre serious about change, you need to learn the phases of change and manage them wisely. The Emergent Phase Managers launching a new initiative often seek to start with a bang. They work to gain approval for a sizable budget as a sign of institutional commitment. They recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big kick-off meeting, and look to move fast, gain scale, and generate some quick wins. All of this is designed to create a sense of urgency and inevitability. Yet this approach usually backfires. Every idea starts out weak and untested. You might think that you have a sound concept. You may have even seen it work before and achieve impressive results. But until the idea has gained traction in your current context, you dont really know anything. Youre shooting in the dark. Thats why in the emergent phase, you want to move deliberately. For example, in his efforts to reform the Pentagon, Colonel John Boyd began every initiative by briefing a group of collaborators he called the Acolytes, who would help hone and sharpen the ideas. Only once the ideas had been subjected to intense scrutiny would he move on to congressional staffers, elected officials, and the media. The truth is that change is never top-down or bottom-up, but always moves side-to-side. You will find the entire spectrumfrom strong supporters to committed opponentsat every level. Thats why you need to go to where the energy already is, not try to create and maintain it by yourself. Find people who are as enthusiastic and committed as you are. Thats what was achieved in that cafe in Belgrade. They didnt have a movement, resources, or anything more than the rough contours of a plan. But they had a core team that was committed to shared values and a shared purpose. Thats where every change effort needs to start. The Engagement Phase Once you have your core team in place, youll want to start mobilizing others who might be open to joining your effort. The tipping point for change in most contexts is only 10%20% participation, so you dont need to convince everyone at once. You want to attract, not try to overpower, scare, or shame people into bending to your will. The first thing you want to do is to identify a Keystone Change, which has a clear and tangible goal, involves multiple stakeholders, and paves the way for future change. When we work with organizations, we always encourage the teams we work with to make it smaller, until their Keystone Change is laser focused on one process, one product, one office, or one . . . something. Another key strategy is to design a Co-Optable Resource that others can use to achieve their own goals, but also further the change you’re trying to build. A good Co-Optable Resource must be both accessibleno mandates or incentivesand impactful, meaning that it needs to deliver practical value and be scalable. For example, in a cloud transformation at Experian, the CIO didnt simply mandate the shift, which he had full authority to do, but instead started with internal APIs, which dont carry the same risks and wouldnt encounter much resistance. That was the Keystone Change. Then he set up an API Center of Resistance to help product managers who wanted to build cloud-based products. Whats key during the engagement phase is that you are working to empower rather than to persuade. By helping others to achieve things that they want to, you can build traction and set the conditions for genuine transformation. The Victory Phase Once you have shown that change can work with a successful keystone project and begun to attract a following, you will begin to gain traction. This is when you need to start planning for the victory phase, which is often the most dangerous phase, because thats when you are most likely to encounter vicious opposition. Once the opponents of change see that genuine is actually possible, thats when the knives come out. They will see that genuine transformation is possible and will seek to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded, and deceptive. Thats what you need to be prepared for, because it almost always happens. The good news is that these efforts are usually desperate and clumsy. They often backfire. Whats key is to not take the bait and get sucked into a conflict, although that will be tempting. When someone viciously attacks something we believe passionately in and have worked hard for, it offends our dignity and we want to lash out. Whats important to remember is that lasting change is always built on common ground. So you want to focus on shared values in how you communicate and how you design dilemmas. You will never convince everybody, nor do you need to, but you do need to create a sense of safety around change and show that you want to make it work for all who are affected by it. Protect Your Ugly Baby Pixar founder Ed Catmull once wrote that early on, all of our movies suck. The trick, he explained, is to go beyond the initial germ of an idea and ut in the hard work it takes to get something to go from suck to not-suck. He called early ideas ugly babies, because they start out, awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. Theres something romantic about the early stages of an idea, but its important to remember that, much like Catmulls ugly babies, your idea is never going to be as weak and vulnerable as those early days before you get a chance to work out the inevitable kinks. You need to be careful not to overexpose it or it may die an early death. You need to protect your ugly baby, not shove it out into the world and hope it can fend for itself. You need to resist the urge to jump right in with a big launch. Change follows a predictable, nonlinear pattern often described as an S curve. It starts out slowly, because it’s unproven and flawed. Few will be able to see its potential and even fewer will be willing to devote their energy and resources to it. Early on, you need to focus on a relatively small circle who can help your ugly baby grow. These should be people you know and trust, or at least have indicated some enthusiasm for the concept. If you feel the urge to persuade, you have the wrong people. As you gain traction, identify flaws, and make adjustments, your idea will grow stronger and you can accelerate. Large-scale change cannot be rushed. It is not a communication problem and wordsmithing snappier slogans wont get you very far. It is a collective action problem. People will only adopt it when they see others around them adopt it. Thats why you need to approach it carefully. Give it the respect it deserves, and it can work wonders for you.
Category:
E-Commerce
The job market is rough. So when candidates are landing interviews, theyre often cramming every skill, accomplishment, and experience they can muster into the interview process, hoping to edge out the competition. Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong. Hiring managers often tune out in such cases, causing the rapid-fire qualifications to backfire. Its what Marc Cendella, CEO of career platform Ladders, calls answer inflation. Answer inflation is when experienced professionals respond to interview questions with lengthy résumé recitations and meandering stories that bury their actual value, he explains. Take the classic: Tell me about yourself. Its the question that most interviews kick off with. And while it may seem straightforward enough, theres actually an art to delivering a strong elevator pitch to hook the hiring managers attention from the off. Many candidates think that the interviewer is trying to socialize or make small talkbut thats rarely the case, Cendella told Fast Company. This question can actually tell an interviewer a lot. When asked an open-ended question, do you take the chance to answer thoughtfully? Can you prioritize and organize your thoughts under pressure? Or are you rambling, caught off guard? Tell me about yourself is also not a chance to detail your entire life story. An answer filled with irrelevant details and outdated roles is more likely to lose the hiring manager’s attention halfway through than impress them with your decades of experience. While you may think the more information you can cram in the better, Cendella says the opposite is often true. Hiring managers see it time and time again: experienced professionals tend to assume their longer track record requires longer explanations, he explains. As a result, theyll respond to interview questions with long-winded stories that bury their actual value. Or, they merely list all of their past roles and accomplishmentslike a résumé reading. Instead, trim the fat and replace vague descriptions with quantifiable achievements. Think about those key challenges hiring managers are facing, and how your past experience could fill in the gaps, Cendella explains. Every response you have should ladder up to a clear, compelling narrative about why youre the solution to their current problem. He recommends taking two to three concise examples that demonstrate impact and let the numbers do the talking for you. Lets imagine you’re in the process for a project manager role. Rather than droning on about your years in project management, use this script as an example: In my last role, I inherited a project that was three months behind schedule and turned it around within six weeks by implementing clearer communication channels and regular team check-ins, he says. Its clear, concise, and not bogged down by answer inflation. Remember the golden rule: Show, dont tell.
Category:
E-Commerce
Police are getting a boost from artificial intelligence, with algorithms now able to draft police reports in minutes. The technology promises to make police reports more accurate and comprehensive, as well as save officers time. The idea is simple: Take the audio transcript from a body camera worn by a police officer and use the predictive text capabilities of large language models to write a formal police report that could become the basis of a criminal prosecution. Mirroring other fields that have allowed ChatGPT-like systems to write on behalf of people, police can now get an AI assist to automate much dreaded paperwork. The catch is that instead of writing the first draft of your college English paper, this document can determine someones liberty in court. An error, omission, or hallucination can risk the integrity of a prosecution or, worse, justify a false arrest. While police officers must sign off on the final version, the bulk of the text, structure, and formatting is AI-generated. Whoor whatwrote it Up until October 2025, only Utah had required that police even admit they were using an AI assistant to draft their reports. On Oct. 10, that changed when California became the second state to require transparent notice that AI was used to draft a police report. Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 524 into law, requiring all AI-assisted police reports to be marked as being written with the help of AI. The law also requires law enforcement agencies to maintain an audit trail that identifies the person who used AI to create a report and any video and audio footage used in creating the report. It also requires agencies to retain the first draft created with AI for as long as the official report is retained, and prohibits a draft created with AI from constituting an officers official statement. The law is a significant milestone in the regulation of AI in policing, but its passage also signifies that AI is going to become a major part of the criminal justice system. If you are sitting behind bars based on a police report, you might have some questions. The first question that Utah and California now answer is Did AI write this? Basic transparency that an algorithm helped write an arrest report might seem the minimum a state could do before locking someone up. And, even though leading police technology companies like Axon recommend such disclaimers be included in their reports, they are not required. Police departments in Lafayette, Indiana, and Fort Collins, Colorado, were intentionally turning off the transparency defaults on the AI report generators, according to an investigative news report. Similarly, police chiefs using Axons Draft One products did not even know which reports were drafted by AI and which were not because the officers were just cutting and pasting the AI narrative into reports they indicated they wrote themselves. The practice bypassed all AI disclaimers and audit trails. The author explains the issues around AI-written police reports in an interview on CNNs Terms of Service podcast. Many questions Transparency is only the first step. Understanding the risks of relying on AI for police reports is the second. Technological questions arise about how the AI models were trained and the possible biases baked into a reliance on past police reports. Transcription questions arise about errors, omissions, and mistranslations because police stops take place in chaotic, loud, and frequently emotional contexts amid a host of languages. Finally, trial questions arise about how an attorney is supposed to cross-examine an AI-generated document, or whether the audit logs need to be retained for expert analysis or turned over to the defense. Risks and consequences The significance of the California law is not simply that the public needs to be aware of AI risks, but that California is embracing AI risk in policing. I believe its likely that people will lose their liberty based on a document that was largely generated by AI and without the hard questions satisfactorily answered. Worse, in a criminal justice system that relies on plea bargaining for more than 95% of cases and is overwhelmingly dominated by misdemeanor offenses, there may never be a chance to check whether the AI report accurately captured the scene. In fact, in many of those lower-level cases, the police report will be the basis of charging decisions, pretrial detention, motions, plea bargains, sentencing, and even probation revocations. I believe that a criminal legal system that relies so heavily on police reports has a responsibility to ensure that police departments are embracing not just transparency but justice. At a minimum, this means more states following Utah and California to pass laws regulating the technology, and police departments following the best practices recommended by the technology companies. But even that may not be enough without critical assessments by courts, legal experts, and defense lawyers. The future of AI policing is just starting, but the risks are already here. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a professor of law at George Washington University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
The one practical career security no one can take from you is control. Ive built my career on five core mindsets that helped me transition to being responsible for my own career success. Its how I run my professional life. Careers are not just built. Theyre owned. That’s how you become indispensable. Your career isnt a ladder. Its a business. And you are in charge. Most people treat it like a job. I treat it like an asset. Every skill, every project, every task matters. If you want leverage, freedom, and a career that works for you, these mindsets can help you take your career to another level. They can determine your choices, growth, and freedom. And change how you see your own value. 1. The ‘company of one’ mindset You are the CEO of you. A one-person corporation. Your skills are your products. Your personal brand is your marketing department. Every project you take, every email you send, and every skill you learn is either an asset or a liability for your company: you. Think of meetings as pitches, tasks as investments, and mistakes as expensive lessons. When you walk into a meeting, youre not just a participant; youre a service provider. That mindset is how you change from what can my company do for me to what value did I provide today? And how does it strengthen my portfolio? Every action or decision compounds; every skill stacks in your favour. You cant outsource responsibility. Youre the company. Most people wait for promotions or recognition. Build leverage. Taking responsibility for your career success starts with becoming the boss of you. And treating it seriously, like your life depends on it. Thats how you create leverage. 2. The ‘permanent beta’ mindset The most dangerous phrase in the modern career is, Ive arrived. The minute you think youre finished, youre obsolete. Your knowledge has a half-life. Thats why Im always in a state of permanent beta: always testing, learning, and upgrading. You dont have to disrupt your career to do this. Micro-learning can help you adapt a permanent beta mindset. Listen to a podcast on a new industry trend. Take a weekend course on a topic that will still matter a few years down the line. Read books that challenge your present career mindset. Your value is directly tied to your ability to adapt and grow. Stagnation is a choice. A bad one. 3. The ‘philosophy for career’ mindset Without basic values for life, you are just pursuing the next paycheck and burning out. What does it all mean for you? You need to answer the why. Why do you do what you do? What are you working towards? What unique combination of interests makes you come alive? For me, its curiosity. The desire to learn from great thinkers, pass on that knowledge. And making a career out of it. It guides what projects I take, what I write, and who I work with. If you dont know your why, someone else will rent your time to serve theirs. When you have that anchor, rejection from one client or a bad day at one job doesnt break you. Youre not defined by your title. Youre defined by your life mission. You can lose a job, but you cant lose your purpose. Philosophy for your career decides the jobs you take, the people you work with, and the projects you walk away from. 4. The ‘investor’ mindset Your skills are assets. Treat them like a portfolio. You cant dump all your energy into one stock and hope it pays forever. Markets change. Industries collapse. AI eats jobs. The people who survive treat learning as compounding interest. They reinvest. And put time into skills that grow their skill range. They build optionality. You dont need 10 certificates. You just need to be the person who always has another card to play. Investors put their skills to work. Ship the side project. Take the stretch role. Risk a little. Test the market. Repeat what works. You learned faster than the guy hoarding potential in silence. A diversified career portfolio is built on experiments, not guarantees. 5. The ‘owner’ mindset This is the one that ties it all together. Owning means you stop hiding behind career excuses like, My boss never gave me the chance. It may be true, but owners play the hand theyve got and still find a way to win a round. Owners take responsibility for both career stagnation and acceleration. Owning your career path means you stop hiding behind safety nets. Owners stop blaming. No boss, no company, no economy gets the last word on your career. Owners keep evolving even in bad economic conditions. They own their mistakes, their choices, their pivots. When you own something, you protect it, you invest in it, you defend it. You dont just have a career. You run it. Big difference. If your career stalls, you find ways to adapt. No one can do that for us. Your career will always be yours, and yours alone. Own it.
Category:
E-Commerce
I just got back from a week on the beach. The water was crystal clear, the sky blue, and my butt was in a lounge chair all day. I certainly enjoyed myself and caught up on a ton of sleep. But did I return to work today bursting with ideas and fresh energy? If Im honest, not really. It feels more like I left my brain sunning itself on the seaside. Meanwhile, I need to dig myself out from under a mountain of work and complete my massive back-to-school to-do list. Where did I go wrong in my vacation planning? If I was looking to maximize floating time and the amount of tasty fish I ate, nowhere. But according to psychology, as much as I enjoyed my break, I also fell prey to one of the most common vacation myths. Like many people, I assumed that sloth is the most effective way to unwind and refresh. I would have been better off if I had swapped my swimsuit for a skillcation instead. Whats a skillcation? First, whats a skillcation? Exactly what it sounds likea vacation dedicated to either learning a new skill or improving an existing one. This could range from a low-key guided birdwatching getaway or a sweaty boot camp to a week of cooking classes in a bucolic setting. Consulting agency Future Partners has found that 39% of travelers are drawn to such trips, Thrillist reports. HuffPost claims skillcations are a trend thats gaining popularity. Ben Martin, of hospitality strategy firm HKS, told HuffPost that learning-focused travel satisfies a desire for personal growth and cultural engagement. And indeed one way to look at the skillcation trend is as yet another way the productivity and personal growth-focused ethos of work life is seeping into our off-hours. But theres another, more positive way to look at the rising interest in holidays that promise to teach you to learn to knit or sail or identify songbirds. Science suggests this type of travel actually satisfies a deep psychological need. This ultimately leaves us more refreshed than bobbing in the sea for a week. The psychological benefits of skillcations With the world and the economy feeling precarious these days, just about all of us are stressed. Recently, best-selling author Adam Grant had fellow psychologist Sabine Sonnentag of the University of Mannheim in Germany on his podcast Worklife to discuss the best way to reset and truly refresh our brains. When we feel like were low on energy and inspiration, its natural enough to think you need rest, Sonnentag explained. Relaxation is what many people think when they think of recovery, unwinding, maybe doing nothing. Just relaxing. And so in terms of more physiological processes, it means a low sympathetic activation. So, lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, she said. There is certainly nothing wrong with a little rest. Some is, of course, essential for health and happiness. But that is not the only avenue to becoming recovered, Sonnentag stresses. What often works better than rest to leave us feeling psychologically refreshed? Something called mastery experiences. These are activities that are challenging. So for instance, learning a new language or having a hobby that really asks to step outside ones comfort zone, Sonnentag says. Things exactly like what you experience on a skillcation, in other words. Why mastery experiences are so refreshing Signing up for a skillcation might help you improve your pickleball game or Italian cooking skills. But it will also get you physically moving and push your boundaries. Together that is likely to promote a deeper sense of refreshment for a number of reasons that Grant and Sonnentag explore together. Getting physically tired and then sleeping soundly after is often more physically restful than fitfully snoozing between reapplications of sunscreen. Its also likely to more thoroughly distract you from whatever is stressing you out in your life. You cant fret about work while youre learning to rock climb. But you can as you go through the pages of a trashy beach read. (My personal experience affirms this is true.) But perhaps more important, mastery experiences remind us just how resilient and capable we are. You take a suntan back from your average beach vacation. You return from a skillcation armed with a sense of achievement and competence. Which is more likely to give you greater energy and clarity when you get back home? Learn your way to real relaxation As time use expert and author Laura Vanderkam wrote in her book What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend: Other kinds of workbe it exercise, a creative hobby, hands-on parenting, or volunteeringwill do more to preserve your zest for Mondays challenges than complete vegetation. Whats true of weekends, its true of vacations, too. Far be it for me to say you shouldnt visit a tropical paradise for your next vacation if thats what you want to do. Ill always want some beach time in my life, personally. But if supposedly restful vacations somehow havent been leaving you feeling rested, maybe its time to try something different. A skillcation might be just what your brain needs to feel focused and fired up again. Jessica Stillman This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Category:
E-Commerce
Sites : [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] next »