#3. How to enjoy collaboration with humans (in the age of AI)
Interesting observation — we started to use Gen AI more, and we also started to be less involved in some human conversations. In the work environment you can now do much more on your own, end-to-end, so you don’t need to pay “communication tax” involving other people. ChatGPT can be your coach, your advisor and expert — so no need to go, talk to someone and be vulnerable “publicly” if you need to. The list can go on.
Also, there were other interesting shifts: with remote work setup and all the online and async technology we started to spend less time in live conversations, offline, together. With the development of delivery services and self-checkouts there is no more need to interact with people that much. You just push the button — and that works.
The challenge is though that we have evolved in the way that we are social, and this is so fundamental to human nature and wired into our hormone system, that it affects our mental and physical well-being. Also, there was a research that says that the relations and community are among the top factors affecting our happiness and longevity.
For me personally it has been also evident in the recent times how the significant decrease in interaction with people and lack of close relations resulted in a visible decrease of my happiness. Speaking about the work as well.
My fundamental belief is that we still need other people to do the work together, also because it’s much more fun. So, here are my personal tips.
Spend time in-person. Try to do it as much as possible for building connections, trust and having some fun and truly shared experiences. I was very much sceptical that sport challenges or quizzes can build trust in pre-covid era, now I realize how important and valuable it is.
Inject a little bit of weirdness. Being human means not being right all the time, being human means that you can create a mess (then clean it up — maybe), being human means you can do wild stuff together.
Create shared rules, norms, traditions. Sense of belonging matters, and one way to do that is to create a list of values and principles you commit to, list of shared beliefs that guide how you do things and reflect who you are and aspire to be. This is also important not only for sense of belonging, but also for a joint growth journey. And when we grow together, we create very tight bonds that can last for life.
Be curious. All these humans around have stories behind, just like you and I do. Why are they here in this moment? Why are they wearing this black suit for work? What keeps them up at night? And what are they thinking of all these AI things? Seeing human behind the role and Slack avatar and practicing a bit of empathy uncovers so much — and partially the reflections of ourselves.
Enjoy unpredictability. What makes human interaction so attractive and so addictive is a variable reward — humans are complex, and every time you don’t know what to expect 100%. While it can be frustrating, exactly this makes all of our interactions so meaningful to us and so important. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Humans are beautiful 🖤