High Performance Leadership

Who provided you with the best coaching ever? It could have been an athletic coach, a choir director, a business coach, a therapist, maybe even a partner -- someone who listened with your own best interests in mind and then provided you with a skillful combination of support and challenge. Support because stretching yourself can be tough, too tough to do all by yourself,  and challenging because we tend to relax into being relaxed, assuming a kind of stasis that leads nowhere. Whoever that person was, imagine how much tougher it would have been for you without them. And, if you don't have someone like that you remember, imagine how wonderful that is -- because it is indeed wonderful. It doesn't always feel wonderful at the time, but the results are splendid indeed. In that sense a coach is a bit like a meditation partner. A bit like your inner voice who keeps you alert when you tend to relax too much, and a calming support when you tend to get too frantic. Coaches help us stay ...

What would you consider the highest power? I don't mean a diety or supernatural power -- that's something else. When it comes to earthly, leadership power -- the ability to influence people and results -- what is the source of that power? Inner strength? Can't hurt. Intelligence built from learning? That's a great contributor as well. But the highest power? That comes from collaboration, cooperation, and service. In comes from working together toward a common good with no hidden agenda and no victims. It's a high standard that generates high performance.  That means no power grabs. No hoarding. No manipulating people using tricks and coercion. It means true sharing and caring. The highest power is available to you but only if you share it. It isn't anyone's to keep. -- doug smith  

As Stephen Downes points out in his MOOC Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care , we could spend the rest of our lives in ever deeper dives into figuring out ethics and how to fix them. We can't do that. But we can make ethics a part of the conversation, from now on. As high performance leaders, we must make sure that we do not twist our sense of ethics to suit our performance expectations.  Which leads us to this video. While not on AI exactly (although there is a considerable portion on Apple) it raises and explores the ethical (or should I say anti-ethical?) use of planned obsolescence. I've heard the term and understood the concept since I was a kid (quite a while ago!) and it has not gone away. Like any ethical lapse or loophole, we've just gotten more sophisticated about executing and rationalizing it. It's about 17 minutes long, and fascinating.  Also: after lurking for a few weeks (kept busy by my own training schedule) I finally make an appearance in the MOOC:

After lurking casually for a few weeks (my training schedule always conflicted with the live discussions) I was finally able to attend one of the twice weekly zoom calls that Stephen Downes facilitates as part of Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care .  It was time well-spent. Since I've been "invisible" for most of the course, I mostly listened. There were numerous insights that sparked and endless trail of considerations.  One main point: our AI will be as ethical as we and society are (Downes). But what if the AI gets ahead of us? What if artificial intelligence moves from mimicking our own ethics (as varied as they are) into creating its own?  As the AI evolves (as Sherida pointed out) who claims the discussion? Who manages the management? We may well find ourselves governed by an ethic with didn't choose. I kept thinking of the article from Wired , The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete ,  which shows how ethics is influenced by...

  Should we be concerned with the ethics of artificial intelligence? Are the robots coming to get us? When I saw this meme on social media my reaction to "And so it begins..." was an instant "It's well under way." As my son Juan has often said, whenever robotics and AI intersect in the news, "haven't they seen any of the movies? This doesn't turn out well for humans..." The challenge to worrying about machine intelligence ethics is, what ethics do we think machines will select AND, will that choice be favorable to us? At the heart of the problem is our own feeble fumbling with ethics. In an ethical world how could we tolerate patience who lack the money for healthcare? How could we tolerate treating MOST people as an underclass? How can we reconcile human "ethics" that allow elected officials to prevent citizens from voting? And so it begins? It's not the machines we should fear, it's what we are feeding them. -- doug smith No...

High Performance Leaders should care about ethics. We know that they don't always, but let's suppose that we can influence that in some way.  I am humbly and casually following along with the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) developed by Stephen Downes  E thics, Analytics and the Duty of Care and occasionally I'll share my thoughts on the course here.  The course has advanced quite far. Today I viewed The Machine Is Us , and I recommend it even if you don't want to dive into the course. We are all being affected by machine learning; the evidence is everywhere: increased conflict, advanced surveillance, and data used to aggregate enough information about each of us to influence our behavior. Often, that influence is beyond manipulation and become malicious. Downes points out the various factors in that. People can be unkind, but programming can also blindly lead to unkindness by amplifying it. Software can be opinionated. (see slide 5 at The Machine Is Us ). Efforts to...