Adventures in AI

Adventures in AI is a series of fun activities to help people better appreciate the range of what AI can do for them and to provide them with quick and simple steps by which they can try them out and feel inspired by the possibilities it opens up.

AI is advancing all the time. Each week new tools are released and each can do more than it did the week before. This can seem daunting. The reality is that it is impossible to keep up with it all, and unhealthy for people to attempt to do so.

However, recognising that we’ll never map the whole jungle, shouldn’t prevent us from getting a lot out of exploring within it. Each pathway can offer us new insights and opportunities, if we adopt the mindset of an adventurer. The Adventures in AI posts are all about stimulating and developing that perspective.

Technical advancements from literacy in the fourth century BC, through the Industrial Revolution, computers, the internet, mobile phones, and now AI, each fundamentally change the nature of work. In the past that change, that evolution, took place over one or more generations – but there were still those who adapted and those who were left behind.

The AI revolution is different:

If we do not grasp the evolving potential of AI to augment what we do daily, or fail to support others in doing the same, our organisations may soon find they can no longer commercially support the same number of employees doing the same jobs, when AI is doing half of it for them.

It would be a tragic loss if we were making people redundant because we did not properly equip and encourage them to evolve themselves and their roles to find fully productive opportunities in the future of work.

AI has the amazing potential to teach us what we need to know about AI. The Adventures in AI blog posts are a regular set of very brief activities that serve to illustrate, through active engagement, new opportunities to engage with AI on different aspects of our thinking and our work.

These blog posts are intended to encourage experimentation and confidence, offer entry points into AI, and help people think differently about their work. Some of these will be about making our current work more efficient. But if our roles are to evolve, we need to make sure that some are finding new ways to add value through our roles. If all of our focus is about saving time, eventually we will not have a job left to do.

Follow these blogs on Linkedin – via the author, or via the Leading by Adventure group.

However, the blog posts will not work for everybody. Not everybody who works in your organisation will yet appreciate the points that have been made above. Furthermore, it is still a significant step to move from interesting illustrations and exercises through to strategically rethinking our roles in order to prepare those roles fully for the future.

For this reason, we have also created a one-day Adventures in AI workshop. This gives people practical experience of working in teams to break down their roles as series of tasks and then prioritise those tasks in terms of their readiness for greater efficiency or for increased value add. It is important to note that supporting people through this change is not so much a technical challenge, as a human one.

The workshop is highly participative. Within a single day, participants engage quickly through accessible framing, identify tasks in their role to focus on, use simplified design sprint thinking to generate prototypes, and test their ideas in practice. We have found from experience that this approach not only builds skills, but also confidence and a sense of shared purpose.

As a result, people develop their own vision for AI in their role, gain experience in the tools and techniques that enable them to do that work themselves, build relationships that help them sustain the journey, and demonstrate practical success they can replicate in future.

Will it work? How do we remove any concern you might have about trying it out?

We have developed a short (up to one hour) taster session to help people better appreciate how the workshop works and what it can do for them and their people without incurring cost or taking up much time.

If you are concerned that empowering a wide range of your people to embrace AI and change their roles in small groups or individually could lead to a different set of problems, then you could be right. Will it be anarchy? Supposing the changes conflict with each other? How do you maintain momentum?

While we believe that getting people started is the bigger problem, we do recognise that these questions need to be addressed at some point as the uptake of AI within your organisation grows. To help you think these questions through, we have created a white paper based on best practice thinking and strategies around the management of an AI environment. You can find out more about the Adventuring Environment here, or download the full whitepaper by clicking the image on the right.

Start with following the blog-based mini adventures and trying them out. Join one of our no-cost workshop taster sessions. Download our white paper to reflect on your options to accelerate your progress. Every step counts. Let’s begin.

Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics

Relevant Links:  Adventuring Environment  |  Adventures in AI Workshop  |  Digital Empowerment

Helpful Resources:  Adventures in AI Blog Posts

Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?