As an industrial designer, I tend to see development as a sequence of iterations. sketches → idea → prototype → test → objection → review → revision → next iteration That is not so different from an assembly line. Manufacturing takes inputs through a series of stages, checks for defects, corrects problems and tries to prevent bad work moving further downstream. Design does something similar, except the thing moving through the system is often an idea. And ideas can carry defects too.
Maybe Anger Isn’t Just an Emotion
We tend to classify anger as an emotion, alongside happiness, sadness, fear and surprise. But I think we may be conflating several different things. Consider the language. We regularly say someone is “getting angry.” Strangely, we rarely talk about someone “getting happy.” Why? Perhaps because anger, particularly in relationships, is often better understood as a process rather than simply an involuntary feeling.
What Deming Did for Production, SpatzAI Wants to Do for Difficult Workplace Conversations
TEN STEPS ON THE ROAD TO EFFICIENT (Seth Godin's Linkedin Post) "Frederick Taylor taught Henry Ford how to do mass production. Deming brought quality, systems understanding and respect for the worker. And operations research brought insight. If you have a repeated production process, the method for improving it is almost always the same, regardless of what you and your team produce:" Below is a summary of his 10 points and how the SpatzAI concept compares with them:
Chess Board and Onboarding with SpatzAI
I have often compared onboarding with SpatzAI to learning chess. The 20-minute idea originally came from Steve Jobs, who said in 1983 that a great computer should be something you could learn to use in 20 minutes. That idea stuck. You can learn the basic moves and rules of chess surprisingly quickly. Understanding how the pieces move is not the difficult part. The challenge is learning when to make each move, how to respond to another player, and how to improve through experience.
Fail-Prevention vs Fail-Safe
This is a short story about two very different approaches to designing the first generation of commercial jet aircraft. The British de Havilland Comet was the world’s first commercial jet airliner. Its four engines were buried inside the wing roots, close to the fuselage. It was an elegant aerodynamic solution: embedding the engines reduced drag and produced a remarkably clean aircraft.....
The Spatz Escalator Pitch
What is the future of addressing workplace psychosocial hazards? For us, and perhaps for many in this field, the answer is becoming clear: AI-assisted, real-time psychological safety. But what does that actually mean? In our view, it means every team member having a standard toolkit and process that helps make speaking up private, transparent (when required), and consistent.
Workplace Disagreements, Objections, Complaints and Conflict Conflation
Workplace disagreement, objection, and complaint are three distinct, open or unresolved interactions. Yet they are often conflated under the broad label of "workplace conflict". We think this confusion makes ordinary disagreement feel dangerous, makes the person disagreeing appear difficult, and leaves minor concerns about behaviour unnecessarily complicated and confusing to address and resolve.
We Systemised Hamburgers 70 Years Before Processing Psychosocial Hazards
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....
Observable General Intelligence 2
Maybe we've been asking the wrong question. For years, the discussion has been about Artificial General Intelligence. Can we build it? When will it arrive? How will we know? But perhaps the future of intelligence is not really about whether it is artificial. Perhaps the future of general intelligence is being observable.
It’s the behavior, stupid!
I think we often confuse criticism with course correction. Criticism usually comes after frustration has built up. "I'm sick of you always doing that." By then, several incidents may have accumulated, emotions are higher, and the discussion can easily become about the person rather than the behavior. SpatzAI takes a different approach....
Object123 