Start treating people like they're an AI

If you spent any time with AI models, you'll know that each one of them has a different personality to it. And they also work in differently. They emphasize different things and you even, in order to get the most out of them, need to speak to them in different ways.

In Claude, for example, there is an option to preload a much longer and more detailed prompt with multi-step directions and even more complex files into something called a “skill”. Before a user wants to perform a particular action, let's say coding or ideating or interface design, they will load up this particular skill into Claude and it will act with much higher fidelity to industry standards or whatever it is that the user has decided is important in that process.

There's nobody who works seriously with these models who would dream of interacting with them any other way. It would degrade the quality of the output and produce something that was generic at best and probably close to useless most of the time.

What's so interesting though is that what's such an intuitive thing to do for these machine AI models, which should theoretically be able to process any type of text and not pay attention to structure or meaning, becomes something which is wholly onerous, and almost triggers a feeling of disgust when it comes to human beings.

What I mean is, when you tell somebody that in order to get something from someone they have to speak in a particular way, or that in order to communicate something that they want to communicate, they have to package their communication with certain words or a certain tone, there's an almost visceral reaction against that.

“Why should I have to sugarcoat what I want to say?” “I want to tell the truth like it is.”

We even take pride on being a “straight shooter” or “an honest broker”.

The age of AI shows us how patently false this is and actually can help us to become a little bit more human. The people who say that they want to be their “authentic selves” and “tell the truth like it is” are operating under a misconception that most of us have about the way that communication works. We're used to thinking of communication as something that I have to say, which I then package and put it in my metaphorical box called “words,” hand that box over to you, and then you unpack the box and take out the message that I wanted to give you.

But this is actually not at all what communication is like, especially when it comes to human beings. It looks much more like a process of creating meaning together with the person who's listening. You could almost think of this as, instead of giving the communicator giving something to the person who's listening, it's both people are working together to shape something in the space in between them.

If that's true, then of course working with another person you have to use tools that the other person is capable of using, wants to use, and then you have to end up building something that the other person is interested in building. It does absolutely nothing for any goal of communication whatsoever other than making ourselves feel better to communicate purely in a way which we would like to communicate.

This is why the goal of any given communication is so important, because if the goal is anything other than, “I just want to get this off my chest, come hell or high water,” then the goal will inform the tools or the “skills”, as we said before, that we use.

So here's something that I told one of my coaching clients this week and I think it's a good mental model in this digital age of AI. Anytime you go and talk to someone, take a second to load up their context into your mind. Who are they? What's important to them? What things are interesting to them? And then take another moment to remember or bring to mind how it is that they like to be communicated with.

Some people are very happy for you to be direct. Others would rather you speak around the bush for 20 minutes than be direct. And ultimately, if what's important to you is achieving what it is that you want to achieve, the business outcome that you're looking to create or the relationship you're looking to further, then it only makes sense for you to do it in the way which is most effective.

As with most things in a human realm, there is no objective truth that's universally accessible. There is only the world as we make sense of it. And words are a very powerful tool for collective sense making.

Try this out next week when you have something you want to talk to somebody about. Try to load up their context file and load up the skill that it takes to talk to them and see if you're able to get closer to a shared understanding that you were before.