Just Thoughts #13: A template to run your organisation effectively.
I share the template for the Heart Beat Motion operating model for companies. Discuss AI product opportunities and share my Chat G-Poet, GPT.
The content in this article is “handwritten” and only co-piloted with Grammarly’s spell-checking and re-phrasing for the desired tone of voice. I’m dyslectic, so using it removes my cognitive impediments.
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I did not get feedback on my writing on my last piece. It is hard to improve or continue doing something without shared feedback. I want some feedback. What would you like me to review, amend, or consider?
I found this YouTube clip to help me write. It emphasizes showing by telling a story, as opposed to just telling. Instead of saying, “I fell asleep reading a book,” I could write, “My eyelids became heavier and heavier for each turn of every page, and soon enough, I found myself venturing into dreamland without even realizing it happened.” It’s been happening a lot, and I’m reading three books simultaneously, so it feels like I’m not getting through any of them.
Another thought I had about YouTube videos is that, with the right intrinsic motivation, the internet becomes a source of learning. Many hope to achieve wealth with just their laptop or phone, a dream Steve Jobs had for Apple—for the individual to be able to take on corporations. However, I can’t recall a single story of someone who pulled that off recently, do you?
This David vs. Goliath setting is also what Jyri Engeström admits to being a driver for him in yet another episode of Startup Ministeriö. I’ve been listening to these, thinking it’s so “Finnish” that you have a couple of the most accredited investors on a global scale talking to each other in Finnish. It reminds me of how one chooses to speak a language only one understands so that others around you wouldn’t know what you’re talking about.
To not “just tell you” their accreditation and to practice storytelling and using “the code,” as I referenced last week, I’ll summarize a story Timo shared about him and his venture partner Petteri. In a gathering of VC partners in London some time ago, most of all, the “who’s who” in European Venture capital, the icebreaker for the opening of the event was “Please stand up if you’ve invested in a Unicorn (a company worth north of 1B$)”, followed by “remain standing if you’ve invested in a decacorn (a company worth north of 10B$)”. With what I imagine being only a few 40+ white males standing alongside Petteri and Timo, Petteri couldn’t resist the opportunity to ask, “Who’s invested in two or more decacorns?”. After which only they remained standing. Lifeline is going for their third decacorn, with Timo proudly being an Investor and an Oura wearer for a decade.
Contrasting Jyri’s and Timo’s podcast content with what
If you translated what Jyri and Timo are talking about into English and dropped that to an audience in the U.S., you’d likely get 1000X traction. I don’t think most Finnish-speaking founders have realized that about the content yet. However, roughly 6 million people worldwide speak and understand Finnish; only a fraction are founders. Hence, you tend to take them for granted; secondly, you have better access to them statistically if you speak Finnish. I will acknowledge that there might be other barriers to accessing them that have nothing to do with your ability to speak the language, something I hope will change. In their defense, anyone sharing and documenting the knowledge the way they are doing it makes it more accessible regardless of the biases of the one sharing it.
Here lie a couple of significant blue ocean opportunities enabled by the rapid development of AI. One is the live translation of consumed content. The other is creating a marketplace for fine-tuning your LLM with specific training data from knowledge experts. Imagine UN general meetings with translators for everyone at the conference. That, but run with AI. Do you think we’re far from that being possible? Think again after you see what OpenAI plans to announce within 24 hours.
As for the marketplace, currently, if you’re a big enough player, you negotiate directly with OpenAI to access your content. However, what about the small players? How do you make it easy for them to monetize their content and be adequately compensated instead of the big players steamrolling over them with their war chests? Just think about what subscription-based streaming providers did for music.
You can make your own GPT, which I did again this week with my Chat G-PoeT (crediting the invention of the name to partner Rosalie). The link to the GPT is here (you need to have a paid subscription to ChatGPT). Here’s me asking it to mimic my poetry for the poetry collection we’re publishing soon.
Making your GPT is one way of leveraging this paradigm shift. It is essentially about augmenting your company or product's service interface with LLM functionality. I’m describing a world where GPTs are as common as web pages.
the bot is an excellent example of what “default” could look like when producing knowledge content that one can leverage for fine-tuning.We lack a platform or API protocol allowing you to call on training data in your own LLM environment to call on a specific GPT within the OpenAI environment. It is not a comparable use case, but Perplexity is doing this for search, leveraging all available models. What if we had something like Perplexity that indexes all available models and training data, having a paywall functionality that is how Substack hides paid content?
Say Lenny would like to add Slush’s entire media history with all the content Slush has ever created to his bot. A standard platform could facilitate that exchange with a process that automates the whole exchange without human interactions. That’s just an idea. Does it make sense?
As I discussed the second idea, more than the first, I’ll round out this part of the post by stating that the world will become much smaller and more inclusive when everyone can get any content, audio or text, on any platform, translated into the app, or in the ear, live in their native tongue. Wouldn’t you think so?
I share the Heart Beat Motion Operating model template this week, including deidei examples. It’s still a work in progress, but if you’re not embarrassed about your work, you’re launching too late. Also, discuss
Headlines this week:
The Heart Beat Motion Template
A Bedtime Story by my son and AI.
Movie Review: Terminator Dark Fate
A Dose of Hope: The Piece Index
Poem of the week
The Heart Beat Motion Template
I’ve shared the outline of an operating model. At deidei, we’ve taken the first steps to implement it and practice its action. As the team runs on the notion, I asked former colleague and friend Taina Perenniemi to set up a template for us. Taina is the world's leading notion consultant, who made a name for herself, streamlining business coaches' work with notions help. The team has grown, and demand is coming across the board for all notion projects.
The idea behind this is to have a live document to be shared publically the way Netflix shared its culture deck with the world, and Atlassian shares most of theirs.
You can find the template here; it’s available for duplication. For a description of the operating model, visit Just Thought’s 2. As highlighted in previous writing, the model lacks direction, which is now clarified, with the Northstar metric being:
Helping 1M organizations drive and sustain DEI change.
As Reid Hoffman, Chair and Founder of LinkedIn, has stated, “If you’re not embarrassed about your product, you’re launching too late.” When it comes to this template and its usage, we’re still working on;
If you want to hear more about Deidei’s services, reach out!
We’re still contemplating defaulting to your basic OKR model over the Outcomes & activities. Some outcomes lack the impact in the statements we’re looking for.
Be able to distribute facilitation activities effectively for “Beat” activities.
We must add a “ways of working” section to the Beat. That section should reflect our commitment to communication and collaboration with each other and our customers.
We are still asking ourselves: How do we know or test whether policies are equitable in practice? How do we know our policies align with our values?
Defining what we think is sustainable growth. Current thinking is that the goal should always be higher than the market growth rate (which, according to some studies, is 12.6%).
Furthermore, old habits die hard, and our CEO, Jasmin, still emphasizes” “We hope to see a world where our services are no longer needed.” Knowing it may take some for that to be true. Nonetheless, the current market conditions significantly impact inbound, and the DEIB market overall companies seem to be neglecting these efforts as soon as times are hard. Deidei has been affected; fellow dei-dreamer Fon inspiringly shared on LinkedIn that we are dealing with these challenges with an attitude of seeing a glass half full instead of a half-empty one.
Regardless of these challenges, we’re confident in our ability to overcome these hurdles, and amidst all the challenges, we recently celebrated our housewarming party. After a day of training at OP (the biggest bank in the country), 400 leaders were positively surprised by the training.
The case for DEI at companies is not dead. I’m still practicing the debate, reading about its nuances, and discussing it with family members and peers. One thing has become abundantly clear: Out of all the hundreds of books I’ve read about leadership and organizational theory, none include the aspects of DEIB. If leaders have been getting it right, it seems it has been more of an accident than following the teaching of any contemporary or historically accredited management theory.
A Bedtime Story by my son and AI.
My son was watching me write this weekend. He was curious as he just learned to write on a computer at school. I asked him to write a story. He got to three phrases before I got tired;
Det var en gång en hund som hette vofflan. vofflan var och simma. Plötsligt kom det en jätte stor våg.
English: Once upon a time, there was a dog named Vofflan. Vafflan was swimming when suddenly a huge wave appeared.
Luckily, we had a chance to finish the story in Swedish, which was flawless when writing stories as a seven-year-old. Here’s an excerpt;
Det var en gång en hund som hette Vofflan. Vofflan var ute och simmade. Plötsligt kom det en jättestor våg. Vofflan blev först lite rädd, men sedan insåg han att vågen bar på något speciellt. På vågens topp flöt en liten flaska med ett korkat meddelande inuti. Med sina vassa tänder lyckades Vofflan försiktigt fånga flaskan och simma tillbaka till stranden.
När han väl var på stranden, skakade han av sig vattnet och nosade nyfiket på flaskan. Med lite hjälp från en vänlig strandbesökare som såg honom med flaskan, fick de ut meddelandet. Det var en skattkarta! Kartan ledde till en hemlig plats på den andra sidan ön där Vofflan bodde.
Check the rest here. Having ChatGPT writing bedtime stories is nothing new
Goodbye, all subscriptions I use for putting my kids to bed. I welcome custom stories told in my voice that we come up with the kids as part of the nighttime routine.
Movie Review: Terminator Dark Fate
This one has been out for a while. It just happened to be one of the few neither my dad nor I had seen, so while hanging out in the countryside, we kicked back and opened a couple of beers for nostalgia.
The movie delivers the same story for the Nth time, with one particular twist that makes it worth all the money it took to produce. It retells the main narrative with a crucial iteration you’d want from any modern pop-culture work of art.
The CGI effects are what you’d expect. The acting is decent, but nothing out of this world. More than anything, it’s revisiting some old movie experiences best shared between generations.
I’m grateful to be still able to do so with my father, something some may take for granted until they realize how much more time they could’ve spent with their loved ones while they are still around.
A Dose of Hope: Positive Peace Report 2024
I scoured the internet for some positivity and found the Positive Peace Report. Its mission is clear, and its message is simple.
Peace is more than the absence of violence. Positive Peace describes the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. It is conceptually related to many aspects of social development and can be used in multiple contexts. In addition to being a transformative concept, it is also a social good. When combined with systems thinking Positive Peace is a transformational concept as it envisages new ways of understanding how societies operate and how to develop thriving communities.
Furthermore, the impact of positive Peace in countries is clearly articulated.
Positive Peace describes an optimal environment for human potential to flourish.
The benefits of countries with higher Positive Peace are:
are more resilient,
are associated with robust and thriving economies
Have better performance on ecological measures,
Higher levels of well-being and happiness,
more robust measures of social cohesion
greater satisfaction with living standards and more.
The good news about the latest report is that more countries have increased their index than those that have degraded over the last decade. Even if the worst about this is that “Attitudes” have degraded across the board.
In contrast, the Attitudes domain deteriorated by 1.3 percent globally from 2013 to 2022. Eighty-nine out of 163 countries deteriorated in this domain, reflecting increased polarisation of views on political and economic administration matters and a deterioration in the quality of information disseminated to the public.
The deterioration of attitudes due to polarization and misinformation is the reason platforms that support independent writing, like
are immensely valuable in the fight against this trend. In addition, it seems the latest report doesn’t give significant weight to the wars in Ukraine and Israel; they show in the scores.I didn’t dwell on the whole report, but I’m grateful that Finland is topping the charts, and I worry that America is plummeting. Nonetheless, one can only appreciate that someone has been able to quantify something as tricky as this. After all, if you can’t measure it, how do you know you're improving or even starting? I bet our friends at Upright Project would agree.
Poem of The Week.
I already dropped this one in my Chat G-PoeT example.
Choose to be you
Don't let anyone close, and you will never be two.
You can never choose who chooses you.
But you can always choose to be you.
Regardless of how close people get, don't try to push them away or give them neglect. But don't forget,
sometimes, what you need is just some self-respect.
It would help if you’re connected with your inner self
for a connection with others to be intimate.
This was written in between relationships, contemplating what it takes to keep one and how to approach new ones. Everyone carries scares from one relationship to another, but wounds heal. While it pays off to keep an open mind, one also needs to remember to stick to one's own values. Everyone deserves to feel loved for who they are, not for trying to be someone else.
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