Open Your Mind, Quaid: QMN006

The Quartermaster Newsletter, Wednesday, 1 May

OPEN YOUR MIND, QUAID. (Today’s report is 4 minutes long)

BLUF: Leadership guides and forms mindsets across the organization, and more realistic and accurate mindsets come from continuous exposure to the wider environment. Leaders must accept challenges to their worldviews in order to keep the business sharp.

KSA here. Some quick thoughts that I’ve been turning over that I’ll likely return to later to elaborate on. In Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Richards J. Heuer writes, “A mind-set is neither good nor bad. It is unavoidable. It is, in essence, a distillation of all that analysts think they know about a subject. It forms a lens through which they perceive the world, and once formed, it resists change.” There are myriad examples of resistant mindsets – of inaccurate mental maps that do not reflect the operational terrain – in business, particularly as you proceed up the corporate hierarchy. While there are certainly C-level executives who thrive on innovation and growth, I rather doubt that they make up the majority. Because the nature of American business is top-down and hierarchical, those resistant mindsets tend to spread, and once they spread, they crystallize in the company culture: they become psychological friction points. They hamper growth. They stifle productivity.

This lack of psychological/intellectual agility is, as Heuer says, unavoidable. This isn’t anything new. Schopenhauer observed it when he wrote that “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Once our mindsets are formed, they begin forming us; that is, we continually reinforce them.

What can loosen our grip on our resistant mindsets is collaboration. Seeing, hearing, and being exposed to different people and ideas while in pursuit of a common goal or solution can help us stay psychologically agile. This, of course, requires an environment that is receptive and conducive to collaboration. As Heuer points out, “new, but appropriate ideas are most likely to arise in an organizational climate that nurtures their development and communication.” What I’ve observed about collaboration and creativity is that those things often run counter to office or corporate hierarchy: they run bottom-up, starting with the people least likely to be thoroughly institutionalized, the people who have more than one lens through which they view the world.

DEEP MEDICINE: Early Indications Review: Deep Medicine by Eric Topol (8 minute read) Doctors aren't getting replaced, there might be algorithmic warfare between health networks and insurers, and precision medicine is waaaay more precise than you think - and focuses as much on diet as it does on dosing. (BJM)

DEEPER FAKES: Japanese AI Automatically Creates Full-Body Images of People Who Do Not Exist (2 minute read + brief video) You’ve gotta love a company that declares its creations as “idols created by AI,” as Data Grid does on their website. As the title suggests, these guys have developed a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that can create lifelike, animated images of people that do not exist. Give it a few weeks and they’ll all have Twitter accounts. (KSA)

DECISION VELOCITY: Decision Making in the Age of Urgency (10 minute read) “... while most organizations seem to make trade-offs between velocity (how fast was the decision made and executed?) and quality (how good was the decision?), faster decisions tend to be higher quality, suggesting that speed does not undercut the merit of a given decision. Rather, good decision-making practices tend to yield decisions that are both high quality and fast.” (BJM)

CHAOS PILOTS: If Your Innovation Effort Isn’t Working, Look at Who’s on the Team (5 minute read) An outstanding look at the types of people you need on teams to catalyze innovation. “Transformation-capable teams are made up of people who are not only high performers, but who hold a unique balance of skills and mindsets that allow them to sustain focus, agility, and optimism in the face of uncertainty for prolonged periods of time.” (KSA via Chris P)

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)