Nollind Whachell

Something has shifted within me the last few days that is making me consider doing a complete pivot with regards to how I approach my work and market myself. It arose after reading an extensive article that was written by McKinsey & Company in 2022 that talks about The Great Resignation (aka Great Attrition, Great Renegotiation) and the new talent pools arising from it.

While the paper was an amazing read (because it highlighted how workers are not just quitting jobs but they’re quitting entire industries to move to other ones), what really caught my attention was the latter part of it. It describes how the current workforce talent pool has splintered and becoming more complex by shifting into two primary groups: traditionalists and non-traditionalists. When reading this, I was basically dumbstruck because what it was describing sounded very similar to the difference between Socialized Minds and Self-Authoring Minds as described by Robert Kegan’s work.

For example, while it broke down non-traditionalists into four personas (i.e. Do-It-Yourselfers, Caregivers, Idealists, Relaxers) of different age groups, a common characteristic of these people is that they seem to be all valuing more freedom, autonomy, flexibility, and purpose in their work, not too mention wanting a greater focus on their health and well-being in their career development. In comparison, traditionalists often aren’t willing to strive or bargain for these things because they’re more risk-averse, thus they’re happy with just having a decent salary, good job title, and status at their company.

To understand the shift that’s occurring here in greater detail, it helps to focus on the values that people feel like they need to progress further in their work and development (as noted by this quote from the article below).

To navigate this new playing field successfully, hiring managers can look beyond the current imbalance in labor supply and demand and consider what different segments of workers want and how best to engage them. 

To do this, employers should understand the common themes that reveal what people most value, or most dislike, about a job. For instance, it cannot be overstated just how influential a bad boss can be in causing people to leave. And while in the past an attractive salary could keep people in a job despite a bad boss, that is much less true now than it was before the pandemic. Our survey shows that uncaring and uninspiring leaders are a big part of why people left their jobs, along with a lack of career development. Flexibility, on the other hand, is a top motivator and reason for staying

Why this is important is that it directly correlates with vertical development and how our values change as we “level up” our consciousness and move from one stage of development to another. Richard Barrett has an awesome chart that shows this in greater detail below. Not only does it show the newer positive values one desires as they level up, it also shows the limiting values at lower levels that one is looking to step away from. Note how this corresponds with what people are looking for within organizations right now and what they wish to avoid in companies now (often represented by potentially toxic leaders and culture).

And what’s most remarkable of all is how this chart and its attributes correlate with what I said above about how traditionalists are like Socialized Minds and non-traditionalists are like Self-Authoring Minds. In effect, traditionalists as Socialized Minds would be those who have reached level 3 (recognition, self-esteem) above. In comparison, non-traditionalists as Self-Authoring Minds would be those who have stepped beyond level 3 and are now desiring the values associated with level 4 (freedom, autonomy) and 5 (meaning).

This is why this extensive article seems so profound to me. For the longest time, I’ve been harping that we need to help people to “level up” their consciousness, awareness, and perception, thus enabling us to collectively tackle the more complex issues arising within our world today. But what’s happening here is almost the reverse. The increasing complexities and challenges within the world of work are causes people to seriously question the way that work works and making them desire to “level up” and strive for something better.

To put it another way, I believed my challenge before was trying to make people understand the deeper complexities and paradoxes of vertical development. What if it isn’t? What if my work is simply making people aware of the vertical development that is going on all around them and within their lives already? In doing so, it can help them to see a larger context and framework to life that they can begin to navigate with beyond their current limited frameworks or mindsets that often don’t describe what’s off the unknown, uncertain edge of their worldview and beyond the horizon of their mind.

AI Platforms like ChatGPT Are Easy to Use but Also Potentially Dangerous

Systems like ChatGPT are enormously entertaining and even mind-bogglingly human-sounding, but they are also unreliable and could create an avalanche of misinformation

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-platforms-like-chatgpt-are-easy-to-use-but-also-potentially-dangerous/

As the last example illustrates, they are quite prone to hallucination, to saying things that sound plausible and authoritative but simply aren’t so. 

Because such systems contain literally no mechanisms for checking the truth of what they say, they can easily be automated to generate misinformation at unprecedented scale.

When I started using ChatGPT, I completely missed the fact that it can’t go out and read article links on the web. But when I asked it to summarize article links initially, it actually did so with some accuracy. Once I understood it couldn’t go out and read article links, I realized what it was doing and created a false article link…which it proceeded to summarize because it was using the keywords in the link itself to imagine what the article was about.

BTW I only realized that it couldn’t go out and read articles on the Web, when I asked it to provide three of the best articles on vertical development. What it provided was three article names and links with notable authors in the vertical development field for each. When I clicked on them, they went to the appropriate site (i.e Harvard Business Review) but no such article could be found. It was then I realized that not only was it making the article and links up, it was making up the fact that it was reading the links I had asked it to read earlier.

These bots cost almost nothing to operate, and so reduce the cost of generating disinformation to zero.

Nation-states and other bad actors that deliberately produce propaganda are unlikely to voluntarily put down these new arms. Instead, they are likely to use large language models as a new class of automatic weapons in their war on truth, attacking social media and crafting fake websites at a volume we have never seen before. For them, the hallucinations and occasional unreliability of large language models are not an obstacle, but a virtue.

While I’m enjoying using ChatGPT myself, there’s something evident about it when you use it. If you don’t understand and comprehend the deeper meaning of what you’re asking from it, all you’re doing is highlighting your ignorance rather than hiding it. To use it critically, you need to comprehend what it’s communicating, so that you can alter the prompt parameters more effectively and thus get it to communicate more clearly and accurately.

For example, imagine people relying upon it so much in the future for their work that they begin to fear talking to other real people about their work because it will quickly become apparent to others that they don’t understand the deeper meaning of their work.

I think this is part of the problem of the world we live in right now, which is why tools like ChatGPT are kind of exacerbating the misinformation issue. Most of us don’t understand things because we misperceive the meaning of things. But we like to bolster our ego and portray ourselves as knowledgeable “experts” on the subject matter, having perhaps read a snippet from an article or two on the subject, because it helps meet our base psychological needs.

So no one wants to be ignorant but most of us are in one way or another. Until we can get over this hump and let go of this facade, we won’t be able to truly collaborate on the serious issues before us and make any serious headway. In effect, we can’t learn and grow, if we don’t accept that we don’t understand something and begin to question it to better learn about it.

So this is so much more than just about people perhaps misperceiving knowledge, this is about people misperceiving information which they use to live and navigate their daily lives. And what’s scary about this is that people in power are aware of this and using it to their advantage.

All of this raises a critical question: what can society do about this new threat?Where the technology itself can no longer be stopped, I see four paths. None are easy, nor exclusive, but all are urgent.

Fourth, we are going to need to build a new kind of AI to fight what has been unleashed. Large language models are great at generating misinformation, because they know what language sounds like but have no direct grasp on reality—and they are poor at fighting misinformation. That means we need new tools. Large language models lack mechanisms for verifying truth, because they have no way to reason, or to validate what they do. We need to find new ways to integrate them with the tools of classical AI, such as databases, and webs of knowledge and reasoning.

The ending of this article completely misses the bigger picture here though. It’s not about coding new AI to help us fight other AI, thus making us reliant and dependent upon it.

What we need to do is recode ourselves. We need to level up our consciousness, helping us to become more self-aware and more capable of dealing with complex issues. This is why helping people with their personal development using vertical development is to me the number one way to do this. It actually transforms and upgrades their perceptual interface of reality and helps them to see past their previous misperceptions as the illusions that they are, helping them to navigate the ever increasing complexities of life today in a whole new way.