The Reverse Turing
The Turing Test: A machine can be said to be intelligent if it can (on average) fool a human into mistaking it for another human
The Reverse Turing: A human can be declared unintelligent if his or her writing cannot be told apart from that generated by a machine [adapted from Nassim Taleb in Fooled By Randomness]
In 1996, music enthusiast, blogger and tech wunderkid Andrew Bulhack created the mischevious Dada machine — a device that makes it possible to generate random, meaningless but realistic looking text within a defined genre. This is now reimagined as The Postmodernism Generator
With a little tech wizardry and tricks using ‘recursive grammar’, you could be fooled into thinking that you are being enlightened by some postmodern intellectual..but in reality, it is meaningless drivel spat out by a machine
In the same vein, a spiel by a CEO/manager that contains a combination of the following phrases “We look after our customer’s interests/We need to be agile/We need to fail fast/We are mission-oriented/We strive for work-life balance”…with the required fillers should be regarded with a little sadness. Because with a little bit of personality, heart and humour — the message resonates and endures
There is a dearth of prose in business communication. Most speeches are banal, most writing dreary (as a recovering engineer, I am well aware I might be throwing stones at people in glass houses etc). The annual report which is usually a snoozefest could be a great way to tell your story as a brand as well as communicate financial performance etc.
Warren Buffet’s letters to shareholders are a glaring exception, like this one where he tells the story of his company at the 50year mark.
And that’s the keyword: story. As the author, Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros reminisces in this touching post “The power of story is that it activates an intelligence that can never be learned in the classroom”
Coming up with good ideas or a great strategy is one thing..communicating that idea or strategy is another. It is not facts of the ideas or the strategy that live in memory but the story behind the thinking. To paraphrase James Carse what resounds most deeply is the journey that made knowledge possible and not the knowledge that made the journey possible.
JFK in his famous Moon Speech said
“ But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
He did not say “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives” [adapted From Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath]
