07 - Excuses Excuses
Massive Ambition, Specific Intentions, Expanded Direction, Lackluster Reception, Wider Mandate, Parallel Processing, AI is Full of It.
Massive Ambition
My "proposal" was all about "changing the way we think" in preparation for a world with Generative AI. So, I have always been more concerned with how to communicate the thinking, persuasively and effectively. This was always made clear. Agreed upon projects were to anchor the work in something that could be delivered.
Specific Intentions
I proposed we tackle Impact Reporting or create a "Life Saving Challenges Campaign." We discussed our expertise was new but also cutting edge, so any other form of Content & Data publication would fit. My small team's direct experience was moving from intention through design to complex website but simple web app, by way of using the JAM Stack coupled with either a Database App or a Headless CMS.
The reasoning behind the JAM Stack scoped project was to create an interest in Data Fluidics, and connecting different services through the common convention of REST APIs.
To boot, I discussed using design artifacts to tackle a concept I was calling Visual Leadership. This led to me proposing to create CARBS that would represent a Information Flows.
Expanded Direction
Here are the different perspectives I heard from key individuals as I had increasing dialogs with Laerdal: !The Lossless Group
Not to make excuses, but we took some comments to mean that more important than building an app was to evaluate developing trends in AI, survey and create findings in potential Cognitive, Collaborative Tooling, and other technology options, and sense-make out of the chaos. This became quite the never-ending endeavor.
The Communication Burden
Increasingly clear became the necessity of finding clever ways to communicate complex ideas. We are, not just in politics, increasingly in our own information bubble. Globally, and for everyone, our thinking, beliefs, convictions, and even our imagination is grounded in what we know -- and increasingly we know very different things. So, to explain one of our concepts like Data Fluidics, or Stack Engineering, will mean very different things to different people, unless quite a lot of context is communicated with it.
Therefore, building an app was not the constraint. In our own five years of startup life, we consistently experienced the real constraint: developing a common understanding at a painstaking level of detail. A group of people must converge on a common understanding of the problem, user, and possibilities; the design goals and priorities, which lead to decisions and to reasoning, then the crafting of user experience, user interface; then converge around the logic, and select a tech stack. Once all of this is accomplished, implementing with code goes very fast.
So, we dove into background work, creating designs that will create this common understanding, and creating animation artifacts that seek to fully convey complex ideas while making them easy to understand. The irony, of course, is that if we have done our jobs -- it will feel like a casual "I get it" to the consumer of all of this media.
We spent quite a while putting everything into CraftDocs, only to realize that the software only works on Macs, and using it aside from looking at pretty links, featured below, forced us to migrate to Obsidian. We wanted to make short presentations, only to realize we hadn't developed a Digital Asset Library that creates a brand consistency of communication.
To get a sense of the scope, and hopefully the potential, of our work in 2023, just review quickly the vocabulary list we have included in this web publication. For your convenience, here's a GIF overview as of February 1, 2025: !2025 02 02 13.05.41_Conveying Vocabulary.gif
Address a problem, don't build a product.
First, the solution Jon and Morten ended up choosing needed proficiencies outside of our recent fluency with the JAM Stack, though it felt closely related at the time. Yet, even approaching this new direction required us to augment the skill set we recently had full-stack experience building.
Stack Collisions
In particular, we were worried about Stack Collisions within the Laerdal Tech Stack, or the various technologies different teams and individuals at Laerdal are using. We can't position our designs to differentiate when we don't know what technology is currently being used.
More problematic became that we were also doing a very substantial market mapping of pretty much everything cool, planning to recommend tech adoption. This means whatever we thunk up to build, we would find a tool that more or less does it. Building a custom business application that needs to be maintained is negative value if there is a better, commercial alternative for a modest monthly subscription. See AI Generated Customer Insights 1: !AI Generated Customer Insights 1
Getting Access was a bottleneck, so it was easy to strategically wait as we reasoned.
On Laerdal Side:
Got a Laerdal Email on January 16th. I needed a Laerdal email for:
Access to Salesforce, without it I couldn't really make last mile sense of the data.
Access to ProductBoard and Dovetail, without it I couldn't understand how to use REST APIs to put data in the place where it will be utilized.
AI is Full of It
An unexpected finding was that even Perplexity AI, the service known to be better at using AI for realtime search and quality source material, commonly comes back with fluff instead of substance.
Here's a likely response from an LLM model.
[!Response from "Summarize Recent News"] There are no specific news articles or recent updates available about the CARSON CITY REG'L FACILITY in Carson City, Michigan, 48811, from the past 12 months in the provided search results. However, understanding the facility's role and needs can help in assessing potential sales opportunities for Laerdal Medical's products.
To gather more context, you might consider the following steps:
Contact Local Authorities: Reach out to local health or emergency services departments in Carson City to inquire about their training needs and current equipment.
Facility Type and Use: Determine if the facility is a hospital, emergency response center, or another type of medical facility. This can help tailor your sales approach to their specific needs.
Training Programs: Find out if they have existing CPR training programs and if they use simulators or mannequins. This information can help you assess the potential for sales or upgrades.
Community Engagement: Consider community outreach programs that might involve CPR training for residents, which could increase demand for your products.
Without specific news articles, these steps can provide valuable insights into potential sales opportunities at the facility.
Ways out of this include:
using AI Powered Data Capture tools like Spider, Jina.ai, Hexomatic.
using Meta Prompting and SCARP methodologies.