Find the Story: Turn Data into Meaning

Mark Smith (00:11)
Hey, welcome back and welcome back to the AI Advantage. We are on air for another episode. I love doing this weekly. Along my other podcasts that I do, all of the shows that I do, I do them in batches at the start of each month. So this is actually a podcast week for me. But I love that we're chosen to do this one every Monday morning New Zealand time and we've had such amazing feedback last week. Just remember if you're listening to this and we show stuff on screen, this is an audio and video podcast. So you can either listen to it on your favorite app or if you use Spotify or YouTube, you can actually watch the full video version of this episode. Meg, good to have you back.

Meg Smith (00:57)
It's good to be back. When you said that, made me think of a really lovely comment I got from our friend Sarah Jones in the UK, who had watched the video episodes and she was saying how it was just really clear that we support each other and actually do in fact like each other, which I was like, okay, that's good, that's coming across.

Mark Smith (01:15)
would hope so. I would hope so. What is it, 15 years now married?

Meg Smith (01:19)
Yeah, it'll be 15 years in February. So I'm already, I'm the planner. So I'm already thinking about the like, what are we doing? my brief is I want to feel like I'm on an overwater villa in the Maldives without leaving New Zealand, which I'm not sure is possible. And I know you threw a like, feel like I'm in Bali vibe in there.

Mark Smith (01:22)
We will. Yeah, so we'll get something sorted. We had an exciting thing happen at the tail end of last week in that we had our authors copies delivered of our book, which we're more than excited to see finally in print and produced by Microsoft Press. It's gonna be interesting to see what happens. If you have a copy of this book, and I know a bunch of people have already... got their copies, they've sent me photos of it. Thank you so much. Could I ask a little favor? And that is go to Amazon and write a review. Even if you just read a little bit of it. If you go to Amazon and write a review, it will help us move up the Amazon rank and challenge the algorithm and perhaps get this out to a wider audience. So super excited to have that finally in our hands. It has been a big project to undertake this year.

Meg Smith (02:34)
It's been so fun to work on it together. I think we learned a lot about ourselves in the process. And one of the best things about it was it actually gave an opportunity to tell so many of the stories that we had collected throughout our working lives. I love to say that you've had multiple lives at work because every time we actually just happened on the weekend, we were having a conversation and talking about a hospital. I said, is there a hospital in that town in New Zealand?
And you go, yeah, there is, I certified it. Which is my running joke that if there's a hospital or a lab, Mark has been in and certified it. Cause in another life, what were you? What was it?

Mark Smith (03:11)
I was, my official title was called an Applied Physics Technician. And I worked on behalf of the government to certify the safety from secondary infection of around medical processes in any hospitals, so in operating theaters and then laboratories in New Zealand. And so it might sound glamorous, but it meant three days of the month I was on the road, traveling with massive you know, laser test equipment and whatnot. And I did that for seven years, yes, before I got into IT.

Meg Smith (03:43)
I don't know if we included that specific story, but we certainly drew on stories from ⁓ the different roles we've had and the different clients we've worked with, well, particularly you, right? Because you've worked in this space for a really long time.

Mark Smith (03:57)
Are we wild? Thank you so much for the feedback last week. We had so many on the episode on critical thinking, so many people, you know, commented and gave us feedback in the WhatsApp group. Remember if you want to get involved with the WhatsApp group that accompanies this show. I'm pretty strict on who I let in and I bet everybody and that we've had already had at the very start a bunch of spammers jump in. And so if you want to get involved, I'll put the link on screen.
It'll be in the show notes and feel free to either pre-show or post-show give us feedback. We want to include it. ⁓ And I think it leads nicely into this week's topic.

Meg Smith (04:34)
Yeah, this week we're talking about communication and storytelling. And this has been ⁓ one of my favorite topics to learn about. We cover it in the book, but I've also talked about it at a lot of the presentations I've given over the last years, years, last one year. But for me, kind of anchor storytelling in relation to AI as the thing that helps us get to so what. So when I was at Google, I had a really cool 20 % project. So 20 % projects are this really cool thing that Google do where they give employees, some employees, like if you're doing well in your job and you're hitting your numbers, you can get 20 % of your time to work on another project. It really spun out of the engineering org and is responsible for things like Gmail. Gmail came from a 20 % project. My 20 % project I saw advertised on our internal jobs board. and it was to welcome people on their first day. It was called a Noogler champ, because if you're a new Googler, you're a Noogler. And I was working in the Sydney office and it was the best 20 % job. So every other Monday, I would start my week by welcoming anything, anywhere from five to 35 people into the organization. And they might be working, coming in as an intern, they might be coming in as a director of a department. I got to meet so many wonderful people.

And the first thing we did in that session was, you know, razz them up and go, it's so good you're here. Who knows the mission of Google? Who knows Google's mission? And so I had to be able to rattle off from memory that Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And the funny thing is that I didn't know that before I got that 20 % job and Mark had to tell me that. So I had to go and learn that. But I, it sits with me well. And I thought about it in the context of AI, a lot of the work that we've done to say, between Google and the other tech companies out there, we, we now have access to the world's information on our phones, in our pockets, on our laptops. it's pretty organized and arguably useful if you, if you can navigate it. So if everyone has the same access to that information, isn't that kind of overwhelming?

So we have to use some way to make it make sense or make it meaningful. And that when I think about how we can work with large language models or tools that use large language models, we have to really think about what story are we trying to tell? Who are we speaking to? And how can we communicate in a way that is going to go from overwhelming to meaningful? to something that's tailored for someone and that you're really communicating the message that you're trying to get across. And one of the ways that I think AI can help us do this is to play the role of the different audience members that we might be preparing a communication for. So one of the prompts that I use a bit is to find the story in whatever I might be looking at. So say you had a a data set or you had a whole list of like a common one for me. I've used this for customer reviews. So then you could use a prompt like analyze the following data set for trends and patterns. What is the single most important story that emerges from this data? Highlight key insights or statistics that illustrate the central theme and suggest a clear message I can send. I can share with my stakeholders. And if you want to go one better. Name your stakeholders, give the role. I'm talking to the CEO, I'm talking to the marketing manager, I'm talking to a new intern who's just joined our business, who has maybe, you know, this is their first job. Giving the context of who you're speaking to can, can really help.

Mark Smith (08:12)
like that. One of the, to speak of story, tell Meg, you read out to me this morning when we dropping our kids off about somebody that gave us feedback last week and they particularly had a Yoda quote and I think it'd be great to share

Meg Smith (08:29)
Yeah, this is ⁓ one of my favourite things that came out of the Critical Thinking episode last week was a real, from a few people, a recognition that we are living in these times where the stories we're hearing are designed to make us afraid, to make us feel fear, and that there are many tools and we shared some critical thinking techniques, but there are many tools that we as people have drawn on, whether that's philosophical or connection with people to navigate this. And I think the storytelling is so powerful. So the quote that was shared from Yoda, so it's from one of the most famous story anthologies in our popular culture.

over the last wait was from the seventies, right? So nearly 60 years, this has been part of ⁓ our sort of stories that we tell. So Yoda's quote here is, fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. And what ⁓ the conversation was, was to say, if you're fearful, you can only feel fearful for so long before that turns to anger.

And if you're really angry, it's much easier to get to a point where you're exhausted with feeling angry and you accept that others are suffering as just part of the way that the world is. And also you accept your own suffering as inevitable. And I felt quite challenged by that because what the point was is that where can we interrupt ourselves in that cycle? Where can we create an interruption of, a redirect. Ideally, it's at the fear point, right? It's at the fear point that we can go, okay, how can I find an antidote to this feeling of fear? And if I'm already angry, how can I flip that so that I'm not in a, and that sort of, the inevitability of that cycle really robs you of hope, which was the other part of the conversation that we had to, to find pathways back to hope and to believe that there is that there is peace.

Mark Smith (10:41)
I think it's super important that the minute you sense that what you're consuming is creating fear in you, the minute you sense that you need to interrupt that process and whether that means you stop scrolling, you stop consuming, you really go why am I feeling this fear and ask that question analyze why it's generating in you because you don't want to use have that as the trigger to this path which we are seeing more than ever at the time the level of hatred, vitriol that is levelled at people that are not like us right in other words it's them and us and we are creating this barrier between us and another quote Meg that I loved in the the drive to the drop-off the kids today you talked about about the ball and the player What was that one?

Meg Smith (11:32)
Yeah, so this, saw this as a response. Someone had responded to a negative comment on their post about, was on LinkedIn, they said, play the ball, not the player. So if you've got a criticism of my idea, I'm all ears, but don't say I'm an idiot. Cause if you say I'm an idiot, then you get a completely different reaction. That's a different conversation.

Mark Smith (11:56)
Yeah, and if you just take that concept and apply it to what's coming out in the media at the moment, how quickly it's not about the ball, the topic, the issue, it's turned on and addressing the other person or the other party or the other involved. I really like storytelling and because I think it brings to life the stickiness of how our, I suppose, our brains work and what's just come to mind. I remember opening a book many years ago and how many of you could remember without going back to it the opening chapter of a book and the book was called Made to Stick by the Heath brothers and in it he tells a story and

You know, last year I was in Las Vegas for the Power Platform Community Conference and at this conference I heard a story about a person that was at that event and they, it was getting towards the of the conference, they went to a bar, they went by themselves to a bar, have a drink on the last night and they looked up and there was a pretty lady in the bar who came over and sat at the know the bar still next to him and they had a drink together had a drink or two and the next thing he woke up and he was in his hotel bathroom in the bath and the bath was full of ice

And as he was coming to like why I'm in the bath, why I'm in this ice bath, he looked in there on the wall was a note taped to the wall and it said whatever you do don't get out of the bath dial 911 because you have had your kidney harvested. And he felt down and he felt there's a tube and a pain and he dialed 911.

What this was is a gang that had been operating and they would You know use the pretty woman to get the guy To take a drink. He was drugged and The gang was harvesting organs for resale now I Guarantee in the story I just told That you could pretty much tell it just like I've told it because there were a lot of

visual hooks in that that either played into experiences of your past, I used Las Vegas even though of course it wasn't in Las Vegas that it happened, just happened, that I set a place and a time for you that you could, your brain attached to. Which was, I was at that conference last year in Vegas, I was in the Hotel MGM Grand and I'm creating these kind of place and time hooks for you to attach to.

You've all seen in movies a bar scene and somebody at a bar and a pretty lady and a guy and and then it now guess what I did I played into your fears of harvesting an organ of hey you've heard that this thing happens and my gosh it happened in real life and and the ice bath and there's been the you know it becomes tangible is enough

picture for it for you to really visualize this scene in your mind. In fact, as I was telling it, I could see the bath, which was a triangle style bath in the suite I was in in the hotel Grand last year. And I could imagine myself in that bath. Of course, I would have never, you know, had a drink with a pretty lady at a bar, but who knows who knows, right? And so this is the brilliance of storytelling. Yeah, I've still got both my kidneys. ⁓

Meg Smith (15:32)
Wait, do you still have both your kidneys? ⁓

Mark Smith (15:37)
Yeah, I came home a couple of weeks late from Vegas last night. Yeah, still got my kidneys. But I love this concept of storytelling and one that's really impacted me was somebody that came on my podcast a few years ago. from SLB or Schlumberger and was a great example of ⁓ the power platform

Meg Smith (15:41)
weird.

Mark Smith (16:00)
adoption at scale like 20,000, 30,000 apps and automations and stuff. And one of the things he had about building his champions program, which we use that story in the book, which he would look for people, the three H's, he would look for people that are humility, he would look for people that were hungry to learn, and he looked for people that were hungry to teach. Those were the three criteria.

of accepting anyone into his Champions program, which then he gave an agent number based on what point of entry. He was Agent 001 and founding the program, but I've had people on my podcast since that had their own individual agent numbers, Agent 002, Agent 003. In fact, they would use them on LinkedIn because there was such a sense of pride in part of this Champions program that he run inside the organization. And I love that.

using the three H's as he called it, he was able to create something that was hyper sticky in people's minds, but also allowed people to go, do I have humility? In other words, I'm not gonna know it all, but I'm wanting to learn it all. Am I hungry to learn everything that Allen is gonna provide in the context of the champion program? And then am I hungry to teach? Am I?

hungry to hand the information onto others, to give other people a leg up, a lift up, and an opportunity to excel in this space. So I just put that graphic on screen, which by the way is part of an infographic I've had done around the book and the various concepts and each graphic I aim to tell a story with it ⁓ as we start promoting the book over the next few months.

Meg Smith (17:47)
I love that humility as the first qualifier, right? To go, to be willing to say, don't know, but I want to find out. When we were talking about fear just before it reminded me of, actually there's some parallels there with grief as well. So when I lost my dad and I was really experiencing grief for the first time in a really all consuming way.

One of the things that surprised me about the reality of that versus what maybe I had imagined, I had feared about that, was that you can't feel, you can't be crying all the time. It's exhausting. And so how quickly you do shift from that feeling to looking for some kind of distractor. there are, are distractors that are good for you or constructive. And there are distractors that are really bad for you and destructive.

And some of the things that I turned to in those early days were destructive. And I actually talk about this a little bit in the first book that I wrote, lost heart found. talk about how distractors for a while I was drinking in a way that was just not helpful. was making things worse for me. I was waking up in the morning and feeling like, you know, the dreads of like, God, what did I say last night? What did I do?

Some of it was fun, but also in the scheme of things, when I looked at the sum of the year, I kind of thought, I don't want to keep doing that. I don't want to keep drinking like that. So then we looked at a different distractor, which was to quit our jobs and go traveling, which, you know, I highly recommend, um, if you, if your situation allows it. But when we went on that, that year of travel and, and subsequent travel after that.

It was the stories that we collected along the way or sometimes the stories I had read. a big reader. love, um, I've always loved novels. was like that kid that my door would be left open a crack at nighttime with my light off and I would be using the hallway light to move my book and to be able to read after I was supposed to be asleep. So when we were traveling, we were sometimes going to places that I had read, you know, books and stories about. went to.

Troy in Turkey, specifically because I had as part of my at high school as part of classics, I had read the Aeneid and or Homer's Odyssey. We read both these these stories that have kind of helped shape my world and and made me really curious about the world hungry to learn. And what we're seeing we've just seen in New Zealand last week or the week before.

Our ⁓ minister of education pulled classics in art history from the curriculum for our high school students. We've seen humanities around the world being defunded. And we, as much as anyone, are saying STEM is important and, you know, science, technology, maths, so important. But we can't lose the storytelling and the sense making and the ability to create spaces where people

can take stories like Yoda, like you can do college courses on Star Wars. You can do college courses on Lord of the Rings. Heck, you can do college courses on Taylor Swift. Like this whole ability to create spaces where we can understand how stories teach us and create ways for preserving human knowledge. that, it's so, it scares me to see this attack on it and to see these messages from your money speaks, right? So you take away the funding. People aren't, you're not going to have people saying to their kids, you should go and learn this.

Mark Smith (21:13)
I was talking to my son the other day and ⁓ he's at university doing a law degree and it was, you know, always interested to see how the world is impacting him and what his universe looks like, you know, because he obviously comes from a massively different generation time to myself. And it was interesting the discussion of the great disconnect coming up.

you know, or moving towards and I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, you know, I'm getting rid of apps off my phone. ⁓ I'm focusing more on time spending time with people than computer screens or phone screens. And it's interesting over the last couple of weeks, I have removed all of Meta's products from my devices.

So uninstalled them. I don't want them on. I've seen ⁓ policy recently around how their intention and use of AI and their intention and use of fear to elicit responses in people. And I'm like, I don't need that in my life anymore. And for me, my family, my siblings, et cetera, all communicate on Facebook Messenger.

and now I've not been on it for maybe six weeks and I've decided to go back to traditional text messaging in a lot of cases. Now the WhatsApp group is the only meta product that I am still using at this time. I would love to be able to go, hey, let's go to something else, but I'm also gonna look at what the widest group of audience that, you know, that,

we have on the show, et cetera, is most likely using. And so it's hard to balance it, but I've definitely, know, Facebook's gone, Facebook Messenger, even Instagram, no longer on my devices. It doesn't, I haven't closed the accounts down or anything, but there's no way that it's reading my data anymore. It's not, I'm not giving it that level of access. I'm not letting it give the feedback into my life on the reverse side of things as, yeah, I just think the

this concept of the disconnect from tech is happening. And even though Meg and I classify ourselves as high-tech hippies, we do a lot where we use tech, but also in a disconnected way. We're a very rural and where we live and we spend a lot of time with our kids. There's no screen times for a lot of how we're bringing them up. We're a lot of outdoor times.

so that they, you know, grow up very as close to nature as possible. but we do use technology where the massive advocates of course of AI, and using it in our everyday work.

Meg Smith (23:54)
Yeah, and I think the challenge or the way that I phrase the problem for myself is not what is the right decision to make here, because I think that's a moving target. Yes, you know, completely off Facebook, completely out of Google. I mean, we will continue to evaluate it, but it's the decision making framework that I'm really focused on working out.

It is building in some of these things we've been talking about, you know, we're listening for those stories. What are the stories telling us about how our information is being used? We are the product so often for the tech companies. So let's be listening. Let's be thinking about what does it mean? What signals are, what is the news story? And then what is the implication of that underneath? And then how does that apply to me to create this framework that is, is flexible enough.

so that we can keep making decisions about our technology use that is in line with our values. It's not for me about to say you should delete your Google account, you should delete your Facebook account. It's for you to go, okay, be really intentional and engaged about how you're using technology, which is in itself a bit of a rebel position because by default, all of this assumes a lack of

of critical thinking, assumes a passive consumption. All the algorithms are designed to keep your attention engaged and all your, it's a little active resistance to go, actually, I'm just going to check in with my feelings at this point. I've been on Instagram scrolling for half an hour. Do I feel better or worse? Do I feel more calm and peaceful and inspired about the world? Or do I feel like the world's a really bad place?

there was a really great episode of one of Brene Brown's podcast. in, she did a whole bunch of crossover episodes talking to people about AI and talking to people about this.

She calls it living beyond human scale that the technology enable enables us to connect with way more people than we could actually hold personal relationships without the technology. So we have all these pseudo connections of likes and comments and follows and they actually prevent us from focusing on the real connections. I think technology can enable real connections. So I don't want to dismiss it entirely. But anyway, one of the stories she tells

Mark Smith (25:48)
I love it.

Meg Smith (26:12)
is how their research, so her organization does research. And one of the things they ask people about or they studied was this question of...

do people who generally move through the world thinking that people are doing the best they can with what they have? That was one of their research questions. Do you think that people are generally doing the best they can with what they have? What they found was people that said yes to that question, they tended to fall more often into the category of what they called happy wholehearted living. And...

I love, she actually tells a great story. So go and find the episode. If you can, she talks about sharing a hotel room with someone who just like pushed her buttons and really like she did not want to be sharing with this person. And how much she sort of had to learn herself that on reflection, she didn't give that person the benefit of the doubt. She didn't engage in a way that really saw that person as a person. She saw that person as a hindrance, as a problem to her.

as a distraction of her comfort, I suppose. But what I loved about the insights in the research, she said the people that say no to that question and can give you reasons that can give you reasons why they are right. She said they're so focused on being right that they don't realize that it's not actually, it doesn't matter if it's true or not to say people are generally doing the best they can with what they have. Because what the research found was that just having that opinion or just having that mindset.

really improved your likelihood of being happy and being able to engage wholeheartedly with the people around you. So it doesn't matter if it's true or not. And I'm sure that if you've been traumatized or if you've lived through trauma, you would have all the reasons in the world why that is not true. And the challenge, and I can, I can list them as well, right? Everyone's had wrong done against them. But what I took away from that was

It's up to me to choose how I move through the world and I get to go first by assuming and yes, put your healthy boundaries in place. Totally protect your peace. I'm also for that, but I just love that little insight to go. Actually, it doesn't matter if it's true or not, because if you choose to take that attitude, you're still going to be better off.

Mark Smith (28:25)
Love it. That's all we've got time for. That's all folks, as I would say to my home automation system. I switch off all my theater and whatnot. We're keen to hear your feedback. Remember the WhatsApp group. Watch it on YouTube, Spotify, if you want the video version of this. If you want us to discuss something specific in the context of AI, similar in the vein to what we've been discussing, please let us know. We love your feedback.

Meg has been doing a series of emails out, very challenging emails. And so, yeah, if you want to get involved, if you want to get on that email list, there's about what, 1600 people already receiving that email at the moment. And yeah, what's your series on actually? Why don't you just see.

Meg Smith (29:10)
We're doing a learning series at the moment where we're focused. Yeah. So I
just finished up a series on success and we've started a new series on learning. and actually a lot of the learning content and, ⁓ kind of advice I've got from Mark Mark's one of Mark's superpowers is learner. So if you do Clifton's StrengthsFinder, he like learner comes out top for him. And I have had the benefit of all the time we've been together to learn how to learn from Mark.

And the irony of course is that I was a good student. I did well at school and Mark, as he shares often, was bottom of his classes. But this is the whole thing that our systems can sometimes send messages that aren't helpful. Because I came out of school knowing how to rote learn, but I didn't know how to be curious and think outside the boxes that were put in front of me, right? Whereas so much about learning how to learn as an adult.

has been to use that combination of structure and holding yourself to a really high, like I see you hold yourself to a really high standard of I'm gonna go deep on this, I'm not just gonna skim the surface and take the first point of view that's thrown my way. I'm going to use AI to check my sources and to give me a broad point of view and help expose bias. I'm going to...

really take the chance to talk through these ideas with someone, not just let it swirl around in my head. So anyway, so we're talking about learning at the moment and yeah, you can sign up school tech trailblazers. I think you can find it on both of our LinkedIn's or on our websites as well. ⁓ And again, the feedback from both the podcast and the newsletter has.

Honestly, it's the little energy boost that keeps us going and getting to Monday and really fired up to share some more. So thank you so much. I can't thank you enough. It really does make my week when someone replies or gives a bit of feedback on what it's meant for them or if it's helped them.