Have you jumped on the AI bandwagon?
I have to admit that I'm a bit late to the party because I didn't really find it all that useful for the kind of work that I do. My writing is typically my analysis and thinking on a topic and for some reason I've resisted getting "help" with that. It felt disingenuous, fake, and maybe even a bit like cheating.
But I've found a way to use it that has really become quite helpful for me.
First of all, let me acknowledge that there are other tools out there similar to ChatGPT but I haven't had the time or inclination to research them. I also spent a good amount of time asking others about their experiences with paid vs. free versions and I've decided that, again, for my purposes, the free version does the job I want it to do.
I would say that the "TSN turning point" came for me when I read an article where someone suggested that you ask ChatGPT to come up with a strategic plan for your business. Essentially, the article proclaimed, that for small businesses that may not have the desire to do off-site retreats or have big processes in place to create the strategy for the company, then ChatGPT might be able to replace all or some of this.
This suggestion in itself was a bit disconcerting for me because, after all, facilitating these types of retreats is what I do in my consulting practice. It was reading this article that jolted me into asking if AI could ultimately take over my job?
I, Robot and Westworld also make me wonder if I should be contributing to artificial domination... but I digress.
Part of my reluctance came from the fact that I just didn't have the same experience as other people who claimed that they were getting output that was 80% or 90% there and just needed some tweaking. Perhaps for some applications that may be the case, but I typically got something that was 40% ready and required more than just a few adjustments.
So my use of the tool up to now has primarily been one of editing.
I'd write something and ask ChatGPT to summarize it or make it more clear or suggest a more compelling way to make my point. But I felt I was missing the boat on really getting huge value (not to insult all the great editors out there).
So for those of you also feeling as though you may be missing out, let me share with you the one suggestion I have followed and as a result, I can now confidently say that ChatGPT is a welcome member of the team:
Have an exploration conversation
What do I mean by that, you might ask? Well, I now use ChatGPT to help me solidify my thinking on a topic.
For example, I followed the advice of the article I mentioned earlier and asked my new companion to create a strategic plan for me to expand my boutique consulting firm to another province in Canada. I told it where I was, where I wanted to be, what I wanted to do, the key results I desired, and the type of client where I could give the most value.
The output was a rather generic strategic plan and from there I started a conversation. I asked it to tell me how exactly it thought I should go about doing some of the things it suggested. I asked it why I should do things in a certain way. I gave it parameters about the geography and demographics in the new location and asked how it would change certain things based on those restrictions.
Essentially, I had a conversation with it like it was a member of my team and we were actually in a room brainstorming together.
How do I know this worked? Because it gave me different ways to think about things and helped me to explore areas and ideas that I may not have thought about. It helped me hone my questions and drive down to the key issues and root causes of what I thought issues would be. In this particular case, I had a conversation with it that took on a premortem context when I asked about the things that could go wrong with the plan.
And how did I know I had fully embraced this tool as a member of my team? When I found myself feeling weird about constantly referring to it as "it" and not Sonny, or Sally, or HAL 9000. It has truly become a virtual thinking companion.
P.S. After writing this post, I plugged it into ChatGPT and asked it to make it better. The initial response was good, but lacking. So we went back and forth, mostly about the tone I wanted to portray. In the end, I did make some minor adjustments, but this post is "more-than-significantly" generated by just good-ol me.
P.P.S. The image for this post was created by Bing image creator. Maybe I have arrived after all.
