See lots of things, notice the good ones
Ever since starting Salmon Labs, I've been fascinated by the idea of strategy sprints. Part of me knows that meaning takes time to emerge. But we can also accelerate the emergence of meaning by having options faster.
The role of AI can be fundamental to this. It excels at giving you choices, fast. But then our job is to either craft those choices, or challenge them and request new, higher fidelity ones. This is one way for us and AI to co-exist.
And recently, I was part of an experiment that helped me test this idea. Working with Piotr from Adaily, we decided to give his new product, Adaily 2.0, seven big cultural challenges, and see how it performed.
The full experiment is documented here, but I wanted to share some observations about what this might mean to the future of strategists' jobs:
The tool was pretty useful at offering potential reframes. From 'trust in institutions' to 'intellectual wellbeing'. From 'work-life balance' to 'creativity with boundaries'. From 'men feel the need to impress' to 'the truly impressive thing is being vulnerable'. These are things we could all have gotten to. But it got there in 5 minutes.
However, the lead was often buried. We had to mine for where the good stuff was. This felt frustrating for like one second, and then it hit us. This is where we contribute. Our job, especially as we get more senior, is to look at a lot of things and notice the good ones.
This is often the dynamic between senior and junior strategists. Which presents the question: what do juniors do in this new world? Well, if the benefit for seniors is to get more choices faster, the benefit for juniors could be high intensity pattern recognition.
Meaning: these strategic interpretations by Adaily 2.0 could act as training material whereby juniors look at the results and are tasked to train their noticing skills. And this could help accelerate their taste, by simulating strategic choices in low-stakes environments.
This doesn't mean we can now stop exposing juniors to real live briefs, but it does mean they can come more prepared for them. If live briefs are like a half marathon, then Adaily 2.0 is the daily workout you do by yourself, or with AI as an intellectual PT.
You should read the full experiment that Piotr shared here. It has a summary of the challenges we fed to Adaily 2.0, video recordings of us two making sense of the results, and a bunch of other lessons learned.
Neither of us knows what's gonna happen, but this feels like a version of the future we can get behind. It seems to work with where the industry is headed, while preserving human value and a sense of professional dignity.
Futurism, with a pragmatic twist baked in.
Time will tell if we're getting it right.
(Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Adaily.)
