Appropriate AI

I coach early- to mid-career people working in project settings. These young professionals generally want to add value for their current project teams and company, and, at the same time, to develop know-how pertinent to their career and ideals long-term.  

About how to go forward in these directions, they typically bring their own initial goals. I usually find that these are very good, and so our work together tends to begin with them. 

In these initial goals, I have seen an enormous change over the last three years. The change suggests that young professionals (YP) today are facing a new world, one of great excitement and of great concern. Let me explain. 

c. 2013 - 2023 Project Management via Project Discourse

 Starting about 2013, the initial goals that young professionals (YP’s) in project settings were coming to achieve typically fell under 2 or 3 of these rubrics

• Become PMP certified

• Initiate a Project –  Create vision, business case, value proposition, charter, life cycle

• Manage Waterfall Projects – Phases, Processes, PDCA, risk, scope, schedule, budget; WBS, CPM, EVA KPI’s 

• Contribute to Agile Projects  –  Roles, Iterations, Scrum, MVP/User Story/Product Backlog constructs, skills

YP’s seemed to envision a future of managing activities to achieve project team purposes.They expected to be using discourse – connected text – about projects, produced by themselves and by human co-workers, past or present, synchronously and asynchronously, mediated by IT, e.g., by internet services and proprietary enterprise process assets in the form of CRMs, ERPs, etc.  Of course, any specific project required that discourse be co-created in turns, threads, groups, and networks by performing and client organizations and project team members. PMI’s PMBOK was a useful guide to the general vocabulary, semantics, and pragmatics of this project discourse, while a YP’s general proficiency in it could be demonstrated by a PMP. 

c. 2023 -> Career Collaboration via Meta Project Discourse

Over the last three years, YP’s have come with initial goals very different than project management. They want to

• Leverage AI Appropriately

• Get a (Better) Job

• Improve Relations with Boss (e.g. initiate, repair, enhance, exploit)

• Facilitate Joint Design (with external stakeholders)

The initial focus of YP’s wanting coaching today seems not at the level of projects. It is, rather, at the level of relationships and organization.  Of course they are interested in projects but what they prioritize is collaboration and relationship in organizations doing projects. They seem more concerned about  about their collaborations and memberships.

As suggested by their AI initial goal here, they know that the discourse they’ll need to collaborate in will not be produced only by humans. They will now have ongoing conversations, direct and indirect, with LLM’s, AI agents, and generative A,I with access, very often, to networks both global and proprietary. 

 In effect, for YP’s today, these AI interlocutors are new partners, co-workers, and advisors. YP’s know that these interlocutors can often, in effect, become colleagues, friends, and co-intrapreneurs. By relationships with these interlocutors, YP’s can grow their own competence, their team’s productivity, and their professional contributions. 

 At the same time, YP’s know that these interlocutors exist for the purposes of the organizations that instruct and train them.  Thus, they can become, in effect, YP competitors and YP bosses.They may even play the role, around most any organization, of spy, gate-keeper, or saboteur. These are the dimensions of their new neighborhood that YP’s often fear and feel up against. Thus, their concerns about privacy, social networks, cybersecurity, transparency, personal branding, and online reputation management. 

Their deepest concern may be, as they say, to “leverage AI appropriately”. Of course, they want to be able to converse fluently with these new interlocutors, at work, in other organizations, and privately. These conversations are not just in the form of natural language text, they are not just about temporary projects, and they are not just among humans. This discourse is, instead, meta-media, meta project, and meta discourse. It is meta project discourse. 

For this kind of talk, there is no PMBOK guidebook. As yet, there are no globally recognized certification of proficiency with the stature of PMI’s PMP. However, as a “meta” discourse, meta project discourse can talk about, draw pictures and make maps of itself; moreover, it can do so in ways that can be adjusted specifically to any individual YP.  In short, meta project discourse can be looked at as a bespoke tutor in meta project discourse, and leveraged in that way. This is one way that AI can be leveraged “appropriately”, at least from the standpoint of any individual YP at a given moment.   

I will be posting on this and other ways of looking at “Meta Project Discourse” in this blog. These are ways that real YP’s today are finding useful “to leverage AI appropriately” in their collaborations, organizations, and careers. I coach or have coached some of these “real” YP’s; others I have collaborated with long term. These are my heroines and heros here. I aim to be their conscientious student and scribe, much like an ethnographer immersed in a new culture. Without disclosing names or piii of any of my sources, I aim to share lessons learned in appropriate AI. My purpose is to support other YP’s and their coaches, human and cybernetic, in any organization that means to do well and to do good, in our turbulent new world.