Category: Writing

Tuesday, 9.18pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Are you stalking me? Because that would be super. – Ryan Reynolds

Too many of my posts recently have been about generative AI.

I’m sorry, this is one more. It’s an important topic after all.

In my last post, I wrote about the future for human work, in particular about writing and knowledge.

My blog is not particularly widely read. I don’t actively promote it. It’s a place where I work on ideas by working on sentences. If someone reads a post and finds it useful that’s a bonus.

So, after I wrote my AI post, I thought, why not ask ChatGPT to write an article in my style?

Here’s what it started off with.

“Karthik Suresh’s writing style is characterized by a lucid, engaging tone that often mixes personal insights with a deep understanding of technology, business, and strategy. His pieces frequently strike a balance between being informative and approachable, with a hint of philosophical reflection.”

My first thought was, “Ok, well that’s nice”.

Followed by, “Sh*t, ChatGPT knows my work”.

Now how should I respond?

Let’s review the basic options. Fear. Flight. Fight. Food.

Actually, let’s go with the motivational triad: pain; pleasure; and sex.

The last one is not an option, so let’s consider the routes to pain or pleasure.

GenAI is going to take jobs. There is no doubt about that.

Transcribers. Translators. Voiceover artists. Visual creators. Writers.

A whole lot of jobs are going to change forever. That’s pain right there.

But is there pleasure?

I think that if you learn how to use these tools it will make you better at what you do.

I’ve worked on a couple of technical papers that I believe are stronger because I used these AI tools to help me learn quickly about concepts that are quite tricky.

I asked a person for help, one time, and was told I should join their class and it would take three months to learn.

Or….

I could get an AI to help me write some code, explain how things worked and figure it out from there.

I chose the easier option.

I asked ChatGPT to tell me how I could make my writing better.

It told me that my work lacked boldness. It wasn’t provocative. I’m too moderate in my views. And I don’t provide enough detail.

That’s good feedback. Points to consider and work on.

That’s pleasurable.

Here’s the thing. Options can be both good and bad at the same time.

The way you react to your options delivers good or bad results.

Me… the technology isn’t going away.

If a robot has peeked through the window and read everything I’ve written and knows more about how I write than I do myself – what should I do?

Throw stones at it and drive it away?

Or make friends with it?

What would you do?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 7.54pm

Sheffield, UK.

I abhor averages. I like the individual case. A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live. – Louis D. Brandeis

I spent nearly three hours yesterday working and reworking a handful of sentences, trying to articulate what I had done between 2013 and 2017.

I wrote sentences. I wrote some more. I looked at them, shuffled them, reordered them. I put them aside. Later, I wrote new sentences on the same topic. Now I need to read, reorder and eventually type them into the computer.

What’s the point?

In five minutes between starting this post and writing the first paragraph ChatGPT wrote me a 1,759 word briefing note on logistics decarbonisation. It’s easy to read, contains what I need to know, and can be used virtually unaltered.

How can you be sure it’s correct? There are facts in there that I haven’t checked. But the weight of probability is on the side of the machines – literally – because it’s a statistical machine and the words are the most likely ones that would come up in that kind of writing. The last time I corrected the output from a generative AI, I introduced mistakes. It felt like a milestone, where I, the human, was the most fallible part of the system.

So where is the role for humanity in this? Do we just sit back and let the tide of AI generated material wash over us? How should we respond?

I think we do two things.

First, we recognise that knowledge is interesting and wrestling with data and information is part of the process of acquiring knowledge. If tools make it easy to do parts of the work then that simply means we can extend the edges of what we can learn about. When books first came out people complained that there were too many books being published to read in a lifetime. The Internet exploded our access to content. Now generative AI can spew out unlimited amounts of material.

In responds, many of us will pull down the barriers and restrict our reading to trusted material. How many news sites do you go to now? Our capacity for information processing has not increased with the technology for information creation. So we have to be selective – use our attention intentionally to gain the knowledge we are interested in and need.

Which takes us to the second point.

Statistics are good for showing what happens on average but not what happens to you in your particular situation. You can focus on your niche and figure out what you need to do to add value in a specific area. That area will be big enough to be interesting and valuable and too small to be able to be tackled with statistical methods. It will require human involvement, armed with tools like negotiation skills and constructive approaches – where you and others co-create the future.

In other words, where you look forward.

Statistics is about the past.

Human work is about what comes next.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 6.41am

Sheffield, U.K.

It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting – anonymous

I’m grappling with the concept of “theory” in Action Research.

I’m not alone, many students and researchers avoid Action Research because of the need to come up with theory – it’s not clear what theory actually is or how to come up with it.

We have to start somewhere when unpicking a concept, so let’s start at a beginning.

You think. We all think.

A thought could be as simple as “If I listen carefully and take notes, I’ll learn about the situation my client is facing”.

It’s easier in the physical sciences – if I drop this rock it will fall down rather than go up.

We then take action based on what we think.

And we observe what happens.

This step of thinking to action is repeated countlessly.

Imagine a therapists office. The theory behind therapy might be that you listen to your patient and help them work out how to improve their situation.

That’s one way of thinking.

If you watch the Netflix documentary “Stutz” and read some of the commentary online you’ll find some criticism that the celebrity therapist the show is about “tells” his clients what to do rather than following an established process.

He thinks differently.

He does so because of what he has learned as a result of helping his patients – from the action he has taken.

But how do we learn from action?

We need time to reflect. To wonder about what happened, to write down what we remember, to make lists, to sort them, to categorise the ideas in them.

We need to articulate what we’ve learned.

This can be painstaking work.

It’s easy to take action – to do something.

When you do something a lot you start to forget how it’s done, how you learned to do it, what’s actually taking place.

Slowing down and analysing what you did is much harder than it seems.

You need tools for that.

Like slips of paper.

Once you start to see what has happened you can start to package your ideas into a framework.

This is the start of theory building.

I recently attended a conference where I was talking about my research to a colleague.

I used a lot of words to explain something I was doing.

He nodded and said, “Ah right, you mean…”

And then he said a word.

For example, I talked about how it took time to get good at using digital tools.

He said, “Ah right, you mean ability“.

That’s the next step, encapsulating a bunch of words and ideas in a single one, or a succinct phrase, and it gets you started with theorising.

You start to think about “truths” in this step.

I think that perhaps the difference between thinking and theory is that theory is thinking smartened up and put in a suit.

It’s a polished version of what you think, that’s ready to go out and meet the world and stand on it’s two feet.

It’s a grown up version of thinking.

It’s the rich flavour that’s left when you boil away all the excess liquid in a stock.

Of course, none of these descriptions really help with saying what a theory is – or how to write one.

We muddle our way towards creating theory by writing and having it reviewed and criticized and writing again.

Theories gain importance when they are used and found useful by others, especially when it comes to the social sciences and Action Research.

They are the way we make sense of our worlds.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 5.32pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I feel like when you are really appreciative, it makes it easier to have a better outlook and perspective of life in general. – Miguel

A practitioner cycles between action and reflection; we do something and then we think about what we did, how it worked (or didn’t), and what we might do next or differently.

Sometimes it feels less like cycling between the two modes and more like vibrating, with acting and reflecting taking place constantly.

For example, any practitioner working with an organisation starts by asking “How can we understand what people in this organisation want or need to do?”

We need an answer to this question so that we can prepare an operational solution.

But what if people don’t know what they want?

In the 1980s, people used deficiency-based methods to address this problem, asking questions like “what’s wrong?”, “what’s your biggest problem?”, “what needs fixing?”, or asking about challenges, which is the the same type of question.

Such problem-solving approaches actually made it harder to improve some situations.

What if change really happens when people talk to each other, imagining and articulating what they think is possible and agreeing what to do next?

When people are passionate about something, you do not need to persuade, incentivise or coerce them into taking action.

How do you know what they are passionate about?

Well, you do this by talking to them using approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry.

There are five principles that underpin Appreciative Inquiry:

1. Organizations are constructed by people who talk to each other about what they believe to be true.
2. The questions people ask are not neutral — they reveal what they are passionate about.
3. The story of the organization is constantly being told and re-told.
4. What we do today is guided by what we think is going to happen tomorrow.
5. The good kind of change is positive, grounded in hope, optimism, and open minds.

Designing a workshop or engagement approach that leans into these principles is impossible unless a practitioner is willing to try approaches, reflect on what happened and try to constantly improve.

It’s a reinforcing loop that’s needed to develop your practice.

After all, isn’t that what you’re passionate about?

There are plenty of difficult obstacles in your path. Don’t allow yourself to become one of them. – Ralph Marston

I’ve just watched Jonah Hill’s “Stutz” again on Netflix, and it made me reflect on my consulting practice.

Stutz is a film by Jonah Hill about his therapist, Dr. Phil Stutz, and his unconventional approach to therapy, in particular using small drawings on index cards as tools, to help his clients address their problems.

A Stutz drawing is a tool that helps you take an action that moves you from a current negative state to a new, positive state.

We use these tools to help us understand what we do and what we should do next.

One of the tools is Part X – which teaches you to recognize an inner saboteur that tries to stop you moving forward.

These are the objections, the blocks that prevent you from making progress.

Could this Part X also explain obstacles faced when working in organizations?

Such obstacles include not being given the full picture, being pointed the wrong way, or not getting relevant information.

Obstacles slow progress and can stop it entirely – people give up and decide to work the system rather than improve it.

Perhaps we have to see past the blocking Part Xs and find a way through.

One way to do this is learn how to see the big picture and how the blockers you face fit into the larger organizational dynamic.

And then think about what action you can take next.

We should expect to encounter obstacles and wrong turns – we may need to tackle them or go back and try a different path.

We may be wrong, but we will be moving forward, in the direction we think is right.

The trick is to keep moving.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.26pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it. – Arthur Schopenhauer

CNN had a story this week that reported that we age significantly at two points in our lives, ages 44 and 60.

That is very precise. And perhaps correct, from my own experience of the first significant point.

Robert Kiyosaki had this story of life being like a football game – you started the game, you got a quarter of the way through. Then there was half time. Then there was the final quarter. And then you were out of time.

Do you remember what’s happened in the game so far?

I have a terrible memory. I know people who remember everything but for me the past is a blur.

Except when I read my journal entries.

I have kept journals, on and off, in different mediums, for several years.

Perhaps going on two decades now.

They are intermittent, interrupted by life’s events but they capture moments in time. In particular, the mundane everyday, where we went, what we had for lunch, what the commute was like, what I was listening to at the time.

I don’t know what percentage of people keep journals. Perhaps the modern form is the social media feed – that’s where people go to find out what was happening back then.

But I wonder about the persistence of media, whether we will still have all this when we need to remember something.

Many of us have tens of thousands of pictures. But do we have the stories? We have videos, we can relive moments. But is that the same as remembering?

Does text still have a place in this world?

I think it does. Text, the written word, is an incredibly compact way to hold a story. We can relive stories through video, we can see the world as it was in a picture – but we can recreate the world through text.

And this is perhaps important, because a moment frozen in time is different from a moment that made you the person you are.

Thinking back to a time and reflecting on the words you wrote, a message from a younger self, a different person, someone you barely remember, feels like growth, feels like something that helps you learn and develop rather than simply see again.

Too much of anything is a problem. When you take too many pictures, have too much video, you have to live your life again to process that material. It’s time consuming and exhausting and, when the clock runs down, will probably just disappear.

A memoir, on the other hand, a book, a package of print on paper – that has a chance to last.

If I were to advise my younger self I would have said, take a few pictures but write down as much as you can.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 10.36pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real. – James Salter

One of my favourite books is Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

So, I was quite excited when I came across a clip of a speed he gave in Minneapolis in 1974.

The speech is also included in a posthumous book that came out recently called “On Quality”.

In Pirsig’s second and less well known book “Lila” the main character, Phaedrus, has a collection of around 11,000 slips of paper that make up the ideas he’s been working on for several years.

These slips of paper have self-organized over time into the material for a book.

In his speech, Pirsig describes how he wrote Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance using a very similar approach.

Here’s an important paragraph:

“I sat down and had to devise a way of keeping track of what were now very rapidly proliferating thoughts. Normally for a small article or a small essay, you’d use an outline, but you find that when you start getting into something big, the outline gets crossed out so fast that it becomes unusable. What I did for this particular outline was something I’d learned to do in technical writing, and that was to put down each idea on individual slips of paper and then compare them and see which went first. So my outline was always in a series of slips that went on, one after another. This is just a technique, a gimmick you might say, but it turned out, I think, to be a technique that gives Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a great deal of its complexity, its fundamental sweep and wholeness, and its unification.”

So, using slips of paper was key to his writing method.

Now, if you’re interested in this kind of thing you will remember that there is a similar idea called the Zettelkasten, a card box, which researchers have used for a while to organise their research and help with their publications.

Niklas Luhmann’s zettel is perhaps one of the most famous.

You’ve also probably heard of Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his books on index cards, working a bit at a time on any part of the story rather than taking a linear path from start to finish.

This idea, a linear versus non-linear approach, could be important.

An editor, in a video on YouTube, talked about how she advises writers to start at the beginning and work through the manuscript.

Each time the editor and writer meet she wants to see progress in terms of pages.

But writing isn’t really like that, is it?

Can you just start at the beginning and work to the end in one unbroken state of flow?

Some people can – Terry Pratchett wrote that way, I understand.

Back to slips of paper. Who else uses that.

I came across a lesser known approach called the “Crawford Slip Method”.

This takes writing to the extreme level, writing each sentence on a slip of paper and then working with the slips to organise material into paragraphs, essays and books.

Two monographs published on the topic are:

Crawford Slip Method: How to mobilize brainpower

and

Productivity Improvement by the Crawford Slip Method

This does not seem like the easiest way to write a book.

Even a small book will have around 40,000 words, so that’s around 4,000 sentences, which will need 4000 slips of paper, or an entire ream of A4, cut into 8 slips each.

Not the easiest stack to handle.

After a brief detour round the CSM, I went back to Pirsig’s paragraph and noticed the word “technical”.

Did technical writing manuals really tell you to work out ideas on slips of paper?

It turns out they did.

“Technical Writing” by John M Lannon, published in 1990 and a previous book with the same name by Gordon H. Mills and John A. Walter (1978) both have sections describing this method.

Not that I didn’t believe Pirsig, of course.

And a modern equivalent of this kind of writing is also used by John McPhee, as described in his chapter called “Structure”.

McPhee’s process was to type up all his notes and then have a go at the whole lot (after taking a copy) with a pair of scissors.

He then sorted and resorted the ideas until he worked his way to a finished piece.

So, if Pirsig were around now, would he use slips of paper or use a computer?

He was a technical person so I suspect the latter.

He used slips of paper because it was too hard to move sentences around that were written on a single page.

Crawford had the same problem.

With digital tools we can move sentences around more easily.

Well, I say that, but a wordprocessor really doesn’t make it easy without some customisation.

A text editor like emacs, on the other hand, makes this a trivial job.

That’s why McPhee used a text editor rather than Word.

I suppose the takeaway is this.

The functional unit of writing is the sentence.

If you want to write, you need to be able to do two things.

First, write lots of sentences quickly.

Then, have a tool that lets you sort and replace your sentences until they tell a story.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.07pm

Sheffield, U.K.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed. – Kurt Vonnegut

Every so often in a game of football you see a straightforward foot race. The ball is kicked forward and then there are just two players on the pitch. For a brief moment in time what happens next hinges on who gets there first.

I saw this moment play out again and again in a game today, between children, where the faster kid won out time after time.

Speed matters in football.

And it matters in other areas as well.

Take b2b marketing.

I recently tried posting more often on LinkedIn. I had some posts that got some traction. And some that didn’t. Some that felt well written. Some that were garbage.

Very quickly I found myself in an echo chamber. The same voices, commenting on the same things, turned up again and again. It’s like finding yourself trapped in a vortex, or maybe a tornado, with a surprised looking cow and you bouncing around the sides of the funnel.

If you do shout into the darkness you hear echoes.

If you are quiet, you still hear them, just different ones.

Drucker once said that “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer”.

I liked that definition, and it led to Drucker’s next point that only two activities: marketing and innovation helped achieve this purpose.

So, one might ask, what is the purpose of marketing?

The purpose of marketing is to start a conversation with a potential customer.

And where do conversations start?

The best ones probably start in bars. The second best ones from an introduction.

Not many start from cold calls. Probably none. I wonder if anyone in the history of the world has ever created real business from a cold call.

Yeah, they say they have. But I don’t know.

The value of a platform like LinkedIn is, on the surface, as a place to have business conversations.

Its real value is as a list of people doing jobs.

And some of those may be ones you can advertise to.

Consider two futures.

In one you start a posting habit and serve the algorithms to create content and build a following.

In another, you pay money to advertise to your target customers.

Which one do you think will work more quickly?

Which one will you choose?

Okay, that was a trick question. I learned from one of my children that you never choose.

You take both options. And some that aren’t on the table.

Take every chance you get. And be quick.

That’s the secret.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 9.17pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real. – James Salter

Do you pay for any of the media you consume? I don’t. At least, not in the sense that I pay for the news. I pay for internet access and entertainment subscriptions, but I don’t get a newspaper. I used to read the Economist, for example. I even paid for it for a while. But now I don’t. Why is that?

The big technology firms have conditioned us to think everything is free. They’ve changed our behaviour. They’ve taught us that we don’t need to pay for things like news. We can simply tell each other what’s going on. Social media is gossip on a planetary scale.

At the same time, technology allows us to create more than ever. The number of journals and papers have exploded. There is more “thought leadership” being produced. We are incentivized to create more to serve the algorithm. We work to serve algorithms.dd

Why do we behave the way we do? Landsburg wrote in “The Armchair Economist”, “People respond to incentives. All else is commentary”. There are three incentives: pain, pleasure and effort. We try and avoid pain, seek pleasure and minimise effort.

It’s all about the high. The algorithm is carefully designed to dose you with pleasure and pain. Keep posting, and each like delivers a shot of dopamine – which gives you the same feelings as having a cigarette, alcohol or drug. The algorithm knows that you need an unpredictable dosage, so sometimes lots of exposures and likes to make you feel good, and sometimes low impressions to punish you – keep you oscillating between a state of “high” and “wanting more”. We are now increasingly digital media dopamine addicts.

The solution is to slow down and do hard things. Thinking is hard. Going for a run or exercising is hard. Swiping through posts on a phone is easy. We have to do more of the former, and less of the latter.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 8.37pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Automation is no longer just a problem for those working in manufacturing. Physical labor was replaced by robots; mental labor is going to be replaced by AI and software. – Andrew Yang

A month ago I started to use AI as a research assistant.

I used it to read long reports and give me a list of key points. I then read those points and selected the ones that looked interesting, wrapped them in posts and published them.

This is what I found.

1. AI doesn’t make boring stuff more interesting

Some of the reports were about important but dull things. What’s happening in the metals and minerals sector? How are hotels decarbonizing?

These topics matter, but if you’re going to read a post like that you’re probably already interested in the subject.

This showed up in the viewing statistics. The posts didn’t get too many views. There was some interaction but that was mostly from experts. And experts in what you do are not your target market.

I did notice on someone else’s post that a unwary end user talked about her experiences. She was promptly buried by an avalanche of sales requests.

2. It does make you, the writer, more informed

It’s funny how often someone would talk to me and ask a question related to something I had just written about using this process.

As a professional you need to be informed about what’s going on in your market whether you use AI or not.

Writing regularly forces you to look things up and that discipline is valuable.

3. Summaries are ok but detail is magic

AI summarises material but detail is what connects us to the idea.

In a recent post, for example, the AI summary was “reducing BIC Cristal barrel weight from 4.4g to 3.1g through value engineering”.

But I had to read the detail to learn that they did that by making the interior profile of the pen a hexagon to match the outside.

It was previously circular.

That detail is more interesting than the phrase “value engineering”.

Specific and concrete details matter and that leads to the next point.

4. AI is useless with well written work

Some books are a one sentence idea stretched over 40,000 tortured words.

Others are 5,000 carefully crafted sentences.

The first type of book is not worth summarising.

The second cannot be summarised.

AI’s true value may be in improving mediocre work so that it is at least average.

I think we quickly start to recognize the difference between manufactured words and human ones – there’s a sameness to the output, a ultraprocesed quality to the taste of the words that puts us off.

Of course, it’s going to get harder to tell the difference, just like a plant-based burger is really no better than a mean-based one.

There will be, I suspect, a flight to quality.

This happened to me with Kindle Unlimited. The idea of lots of books was great but you only found rubbish on the package while the good writers kept their books off and you still had to buy them.

People we already trust will get more of our business.

In commercial writing, however, the stuff you don’t read on websites for example – all that will be AI generated.

Because no one cares about that stuff.

5. Why do you write anyway?

I don’t know about you, but I write to think.

A first draft is me telling myself the story.

This is often rough and rambling. Most of it is rubbish.

But…

There’s a sentence or two that might be interesting. A fragment that makes it into a second draft. An idea that sparks a question that needs more research to answer.

You could spend time with a prompt engine to do this or you could just do the work because it’s interesting and because you want to understand it better.

The key point is that all this “stuff” has to make its way into your brain for it to be of any value.

You’re the consumer. And so you’re the most important person in the room.

Final thoughts

There are some tasks, like coding, where AI has changed everything.

Programming jobs are the easiest to automate because you don’t need a large team when a small team with AI can produce more and better code.

I don’t think AI is going away. I do think individuals and teams that use AI to help them create better work will do well.

People that try and simply use AI as a replacement for great people or teams will end up with mediocre and average results that will be ignored.

And, in today’s world, being ignored is the worst thing that can happen to your business.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh