Hello and welcome to Working It.
Question: What do you call a roomful of women who work in AI?
Answer: A rarity 🦄
So when I was invited to the She Shapes AI conference by the network’s founder, Julia Stamm, and UCL and Stanford professor, Angela Aristidou, I headed to UCL school of management, on the 50th floor in Canary Wharf’s original skyscraper, One Canada Square, to hear a bunch of inspiring and successful women talk about making better, more accountable AI. I loved their focus on “human-centred” projects, including developing school programmes that allow children to learn about AI tools while also developing critical thinking.
Follow She Shapes AI to keep up to date and access this network.
Read on for some tips on meeting etiquette when you’ve got uninvited AI, and in Office Therapy I counsel someone who finds conflict hard 😡.
Robo-gatecrashers: how to navigate the new meeting etiquette 😳
This week, I have mostly been preoccupied with the speed at which meetings are being disrupted by technology — and how that impacts the human participants. It started when I read an excellent Bloomberg article on the topic, and my LinkedIn post generated a lively debate about people’s experiences to date.
Some correspondents reported that note-taking and summarising bots are sometimes deployed without warning or permission. Many more meetings are being recorded than in the past. And we know that humans behave with more inhibitions when this happens, because when we are being “seen” or recorded, we tend to be less free with our thoughts 🤐.
And that reticence is a problem, particularly in workplaces where leaders are using meetings to try to effect change or have difficult conversations. The technology is running ahead of our human understanding and social norms.
I asked digital communication expert Andrew Brodsky for his advice on how we can navigate the emerging etiquette of the robo-enabled meeting🦾. Andrew is a management professor at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, and he’s just written an excellent book, Ping, about making online communication better.
Andrew has an unusual perspective on the topic. As he writes in the introduction to his book, he had cancer as a teenager and because of a life-long immune deficiency resulting from his cancer treatment has often found himself only able to interact with others from a distance. As a result, he says, “I understand the good and bad of virtual communication in a very personal way”.
When we talked (virtually) I was hyper-aware of the need to keep looking at Andrew throughout, although, as he reminded me, it’s fine to look away but you need to tell the other person on a call that you might consult notes or a second screen. Everything we do in a virtual communication setting has to be more explicit than we’d expect for an in-person meeting 📣.
As Andrew says, “one of the big things that comes across in the virtual communication research is that we’re always looking for reasonings behind other people’s behaviour”. If we don’t get that explanation, we will invent one, often to the detriment of the other person.
The new layer of AI-enabled meeting etiquette needs to be seen in the context of our timeless human need to know the motivation behind other people’s behaviour when they interact with us. Andrew suggests a way to proceed: “If you say something like, ‘this meeting is really important. I want to make sure that I can reference everything we say correctly and I’m not going to misremember anything. Is it OK if I do a note taker?’ — that’s a lot better than just jumping in with ‘do you mind if do a note taker?’, or just having [the meeting] start without saying anything whatsoever. So giving a positive reasoning can help remove the ambiguity that happens virtually.”
More broadly, automation may not always be helpful to us in terms of processing and taking on board what’s said in the meeting. So think twice before you switch on that summary. “On one hand, it can help you focus because you can listen to the conversation. You don’t have to worry about taking notes. But on the other side, often it can result in something called ‘cognitive offloading’, which is the idea that you let technology do something else for you. The problem with that is that you don’t absorb the information well,” Andrew said.
Here’s my blue sky thinking 🌥️: in the not-distant future, human-to-human meetings may end up becoming scarce, high-status events. Most meetings may not be needed anyway — our workflow will be handled by AI, or the bots may just talk to each other. So when people do choose to spend time together, that will be a big deal.
Are meetings doomed? Have you got a good tip for making sure everyone is happy with AI note-taking and summarising? Email me: [email protected].
In short: Digital encounters require us to communicate clearly about our intentions. Make everything explicit.
Want more? Andrew’s book Ping is out now in the UK and US, and I also rate digital communication expert Erica Dhawan
Office Therapy
The problem: I have a public-facing job and come into contact with occasional clients/customers who love to provoke. (There’s a lot of: “smile love, it may never happen”.) I don’t know how to react, so I “freeze” or “fawn” — try to be compliant — and the same happens in meetings when people raise their voices, even when it’s not at me. Can I change? It is stressful and this has been my behaviour my whole life.
Isabel’s advice: You’re aware of your own reactions, which is a big plus. Other people might react automatically to sudden “perceived dangers” — or so your mind thinks — with a “fight” response. Those people you see angrily escalating at work? They are fighting fear, or a fear of humiliation, with anger. All of these are survival strategies dating back to early childhood 👶🏽. And, yes, you can work on changing how you react.
Therapy that explores the roots of your reactions may help, but you can start now by not backing away. You don’t need to rise to anger. My favoured tactic is to ask a question — look curious and interested in the other person. (Anger and being provoking are attention-seeking strategies.) “That’s interesting, what makes you say that?” is a good question to ask — and turns the focus off you and back on to your customer/co-worker.
Further reading? HBR writer and podcaster Amy Gallo is great on dealing with difficult colleagues and managing conflict.
Got a question for Office Therapy? We anonymise everything, properly. Email: [email protected].
Chart of the week 📊
Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief of Charter, a US future of work media and research group, pointed me to this chart from a McKinsey report on AI in the workplace, showing that about half of US workers want formal training on AI tools. The demand is there, but “other research has shown that only a quarter of workers have completed such training”, Kevin told me. So there’s a big gap at the moment. There’s also a gender equality benefit to investing in these skills: “Training has been shown to help narrow the gap between men and women using AI, giving women, especially, more confidence with the tools.”
Five top stories from the world of work
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The human resources reckoning: HR professionals are caught between bosses who expect them to carry out their orders and staff who don’t trust them. Emma Jacobs surveys a complex landscape.
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Charting a new route for DEI: I have been a fan of Iris Bohnet’s work since her groundbreaking What Works (2016), which used behavioural science and data to show how to create fairer workplaces. Bohnet and a Harvard colleague have a timely new book, and Andrew Hill interviews them.
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Office attendance is becoming a performance metric: Emma Jacobs and Anjli Raval look into the latest “stick” being used by employers determined to get staff back at their desks. Neglect to turn up, and your pay and promotions could be stymied.
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Tom Burke is taking the lead: Baya Simons talks to the actor (best known for playing JK Rowling’s detective Cormoran Strike) about his craft and working methods — with a nifty fashion shoot attached.
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Innovation and the cult of the firestarter: Do we need reasonable leaders who work within existing structures — or something far more explosive? Andy Haldane writes persuasively about the need for disruption and new ideas.
One more thing . . .
I don’t normally recommend that you read nearly 30,000 extra words after ploughing through this newsletter, but the New York Times and Atlantic articles on the recent Murdoch family court case are must-reads for anyone interested in either business or family dynamics. (So that’s all of us 👀.) There’s a lot to be said for separating home and work life, especially when there are billions at stake.
A word from the Working It community
I got many thoughtful emails following the recent newsletter about navigating endings at work. Here’s my favourite, from Dan Sacker, director at Milltown Partners:
“When I stopped working professionally for the Rabbi Sacks Legacy, even though I knew it was the right time to leave, I felt a void not just in my professional career, but in my personal identity. I worked with Rabbi Sacks [the UK chief Rabbi, 1991-2013] for almost a decade until he passed away in November 2020, and then helped establish a legacy trust to perpetuate his teachings.
“In March 2022, I moved to Milltown Partners, a global advisory firm and it took me time to make the transition from a job that was so much about who I was to a more traditional consultancy role. But eventually you find ways to adapt and fill that void in different, but meaningful, ways. Outside work I became a trustee of the Rabbi Sacks Legacy, and I’ve been selected to join an inaugural cohort of the ‘Voice of the People’ project, run by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to think through challenges facing Israel and the Jewish people in a post October 7 world.
“Rabbi Sacks spoke about purpose as being ‘where what you want to do meets what needs to be done, that is where God wants you to be’. I deeply believe that, and it has helped in the career transitions and choices I’ve made. Whether you are religious or not, that sentiment of the intersection between those two criteria of what you want to do and what needs to be done is something I think everyone can connect with in some way.”
Before you log off . . .
I am a voracious consumer of newsletters and books, so I’ll recommend (non-work) links here every week in the hope that some of you might also like them. First up, a public service announcement for anyone who loved the novel All Fours by Miranda July: she explores a lot of the same themes and dilemmas around art, marriage, blowing up your life and more in her (relatively new) Substack newsletter, which already has 30k subscribers and a lively community around it.
Do you read/write a newsletter you think I should know about? Email me: [email protected]
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