Four For Friday | December 6, 2024
LF151 | How to allow busy managers to innovate, social microbial network, wildfires linked to dementia, Boring News + Bonus: 20 AI Tools in 20 Minutes
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week. Enjoy!
How to give busy people time to innovate
An HBR article addresses the seemingly conflicting goals of long-term innovation with shorter-time operational efficiency.
The piece suggests four strategies can help:
Eliminate process debt. The processes and procedures that get built up over time and nobody really knows why they’re there. It brings in a case study of Roblox, who created “Bureaucracy Busters,” a tool where 2,000 workers can post about burdensome processes and coworkers can vote to remove them.
Reduce outdated practices. Don’t introduce new projects and ideas without reducing old processes. It suggests assigning someone in meetings to “remind the group to consider subtraction as an option”, creating a rule: Before you add anything new, take something away, and “openly celebrate when a team stops doing something, just like you celebrate the launch of something new.”
Prioritize innovation. Make it a clear priority from senior leadership that innovation is a top priority, else it’ll get lost in the noise. One case study mentioned is a team that does a two-week innovation sprint and hackathon every quarter, during which they’re required to set aside regular projects to focus on new ideas.
Distinguish between invention and optimization. This suggests differentiating between the ‘zero-to-one’ work, which is about invention, and the ‘1-to-10’ work, which is about optimization — improving the business, growing the number of customers, and keeping them happy. It’s the latter that’s metrics-focused, not the former.
The So What: It’s a good idea to recognize the inherent tradeoff between short and long term, and create tactics to address it.
Social microbial network
A Nature paper shows social interactions shape gut microbiome diversity among villagers in Honduras. By mapping social networks and analyzing microbiome data, researchers found that individuals with closer ties share more microbial strains, suggesting a link between social health and biological wellness.
The So What: This could redefine approaches to senior care and longevity, encouraging community-focused health strategies.
Wildfires linked to increase in dementia
A story in The Hill shows a link between wildfire smoke and dementia risks among older adults. Tracking 1.2m individuals, researchers found that each microgram-per-cubic-meter increase in wildfire PM 2.5 raised dementia odds by 18%, contrasting sharply with just a 1% increase from non-wildfire pollutants. This is due to the small, more inflammation-creating wildfire-created pollution.
The So What? More data suggesting the overlap between healthy planets and healthy people.
Boring (data-driven) News
Internet pundit Packy McCormick came of age in the pandemic, when his thoughtful, lengthy, (Not Boring) essays about the Internet, crypto and innovation attracted tens of thousands of subscribers, which he then leveraged into an investment fund.
He’s now launched a new media presence - Boring News - which is his voice, cloned by AI, reading stories that report on data-driven insights from Polymarket. This online betting platform successfully predicted Donald Trump’s recent win, among other things.
As he puts it, “Prediction markets are news with numbers. In the future, news without numbers will seem archaic, a quaintly imprecise relic from a more biased era.”
In an era of societal fragmentation and polarization, AI-powered dis- and mis-information, it’s refreshing to see people look to the data rather, than outrage and social validation, for clicks.
The So What? Another data point towards the idea that soon there’s going to be a billion dollar business with just one employee.
Bonus - AI Tool of the Week
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen