Disruption, Vulnerability, and Doing the Opposite

You’ve been wondering, on repeat, how these generative tools are going to affect your work. You use them for your first drafts. You even trust them for full outputs. You wonder if you even need to be in the loop at all.

It helps to know that the person who gets disrupted doesn’t see their options the same way than a person who stands to gain. In a time of re-adjusting toolsets, like we’re in now, there’s a bigger story: there’s people feeling disrupted, and there’s people feeling empowered.

So should you write out emails by hand, dare tweak marketing copy, use image generation at all?

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Let’s say you’re currently busy. You need to be busy with work, or else you will topple the career ladder you climbed. How do you use generative tools in that situation? You’ll tend to use them liberally, everywhere, as much as possible, to save time, because that’s the only aspect you can control now. You’re vulnerable in this regime, you have fewer levers than you used to have, and the downslope is scary.

Let’s say, on the other hand, that you do have time to spare. Whether you’ve spending your runway money after a layoff, or you own something that you run, or the hard adjustment to the new reality is behind you and you’re in play mode, you now have new options. You stand to gain from the wisdom of your choices from this point on, because you have time to discern. The upslope is interesting.

When the tools give you new leverage, you might even consider using them in the opposite way than your peers who are vulnerable to disruption. They’ll choose to write emails and articles and online posts via AI tools, unrevised. You’ll choose to do the opposite. You’ll pen your emails, you’ll sign your articles, you’ll show your personality and your vulnerability in your online posts. This you use AI for, this you don’t.

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We’re right in the middle of a cultural adjustment. Culture, the cocktail of decisions, habits, preferences, standards and beliefs we uphold, is being reworked.

But you already have your own culture, parts of which need not change. If you stand to gain from these new tools, we’d really like you to show us your culture, so we can see how it should be done.