In the 1950s, McDonald’s did not transform fast food by simply expecting employees to work faster or telling them, “Make a burger with a patty, and make it fast.” That instruction described the desired outcome, but not the process. Instead, the the McDonald brothers studied every movement. They designed the kitchen layout, clarified each role, standardised the sequence, created machines, set timing expectations, specified ingredients, created quality checks and established what should happen when something went wrong....
SpatzChat™ Escalator Pitch
You know that feeling you get when someone unfairly and subtly puts you down after you share a radical idea at work? If it happens repeatedly, many people eventually complain about the person to their manager or HR. But what if you could safely address this behaviour, privately and in real-time, instead of waiting for them to repeat it? That’s what we do.
A Speculative Research Proposal on Fair Conversation as a Pathway Toward Artificial General Intelligence
This paper presents a speculative research hypothesis rather than a claim. It proposes that fair conversation may provide a richer environment for developing general intelligence than the bounded environments traditionally used in many AI systems, such as games....
Communal Accountability
Most workplace systems still treat objectionable behaviour as something for leadership or HR to decide. That makes sense once a matter has become serious. But what about the moment before that? What about the small public put-down, the dismissive tone, the repeated interruption, the sarcastic remark, the patronising comment, or the unfair delivery during disagreement?
If You Were Sue, Would You Use SpatzChat?
Imagine you are Sue in a team meeting. You suggest an idea. Jim responds publicly: “Babe, that’ll NEVER work! What were you thinking?” Maybe Jim was careless. Maybe he did not realise how dismissive he sounded. Maybe he did. Either way, the real test is what happens next. Sue gives him a light verbal caution:
I’ll Spatz You Later
Imagine if we had a chat-app and platform that enabled teams, during meetings, to address minor objectionable issues on the fly, before they were allowed to fester, compound and escalate into more intractable conflict incidents down the track.
I have been thinking about a possibility that sits at the heart of workplace conflict research. What if disagreement and conflict are not the same thing? Reference: Understand Conflict Most conflict researchers seem to define conflict broadly enough to include disagreements....
Addressing Workplace Impingements
For years I've been interested in workplace conflict or micro-conflicts, but lately I've been thinking about something even smaller. Not conflict. Not even an infringement. An impingement or someone impinging on the other player's space. In soccer, a player can subtly tug an opponent's shirt. It may be almost invisible. The referee might miss it. The crowd certainly won't notice most of the time....
Ignoring is Ignorant Behavior
Ignoring is one of the quietest ways minor workplace tension becomes conflict. That is: Not answering. Not acknowledging. Letting a concern hang in the air. The difficulty is that “ignoring” is hard to prove. A person can always say they missed it, were busy, misunderstood, or did not think a response was needed.
SpatzAI: Building a Category Before the Category Exists
I recently saw a post about how Taiwan became the centre of the world’s semiconductor industry. The simple version is this: Taiwan did not begin with a semiconductor industry. It began with a plan, selected people, serious training, and time to learn. In 1974, Taiwan sent 19 hand-picked engineers to RCA in America to learn how to build chips. They had no mature industry, no deep experience, and no category to slot neatly into. What they had was a foundational bet.
Object123 