I’m writing a talk for Lean Agile Conference in Edinburgh at the end of October. It is about seriousness. I have been thinking about this topic since I accidentally used it as an engagement tool during a civic assembly.

This post is just me sorting thru some ideas, diagrams and phrases for the talk.

Play

GenAI makes play as an engagement tool tricky as the spaces made by AI mimic spaces made by play. It’s a form of smog, or polluted swamp.

I have used play a lot in workshops over the years. It is not that I’m anti-Play now as facilitation technique, it’s just that seriousness enables people to maintain a sense of how they matter and how the work matters with each other.

It is those relationships that can guide people and projects out of the smog, out of the swamp.

Value Capture

Around this play issue is a secondary problem.

Value Capture (an idea described in C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score) is how methods and tools, like Agile and Key Performance Indicators (KPI), have left organisations vulnerable to GenAI slop.

The critical capacity of experts has been swapped out for simple measures and explanations.

If people are rewarded for forming and following simple measures, then over time, their deeper expertise is lost to the simple. Both developing and using KPI affect experts. The simple measure and measurement activity replace the depth and subtlety of expert knowledge.

Play works when expert people can see its boundaries. The umpires and referees matter in play.

When that capacity is lost then organisations cannot tell what is good and useful and what is bad and useless. AI can appear useful when value capture has reduced expertise.

Unhelpful coincidence

So the problems are linked but separate.

Both Play and Agile were good as facilitation methods and business tools for many years.

However, put together, after all those years, they create a strategic weakness at the time when GenAI is deployed.

I will be talking about seriousness as an anchor for individuals and institutions.

How do we respect ourselves more as experts, how do we share that sense of value with more people and how does that enable better work?