Deep fake
Promoting quality ideas through the Influencer age
The world is obscured by façade. If you are competent in your field, how does one navigate your own confidence and convictions in an era where you can have exceptional influence but lack quality ideas? The age of deep fakes.
We have a real issue where people fronting to be experts are exerting their influence over the layman, potentially with really mediocre to outright terrible ideas, and making money from it. I believe this showman façade is causing an apathy among competent individuals who should be making their voices heard.
“Influencer”, a term we have all come to know in the TikTok age, is defined amongst others as someone with “specialized knowledge”.¹ I disagree. It is not a pre-requisite.
Examine this graph and place yourself into one of these quadrants.
If you feel you are competent, you have expertise in your field, but for whatever reason are not comfortable in “selling” your quality ideas or your skills, then you are in Quadrant 1. Quadrant 4 is for the façade of professionals that are highly influential, or at least seem to be, but at the root are only attracting attention and don’t have expertise in their field.
Influencer is simply someone in Quadrant 2 and 4. That’s all. I won’t pretend that I am an expert at the algorithms that sit behind TikTok and LinkedIn, but we can safely assume that they primarily promote influence (i.e. is your post getting comments, shares and likes). They are not primarily promoting good quality ideas. Correlation has been established between good ideas and influence, as one would hope, but influence does not guarantee that your ideas are good. How could it? It is not something that is easily measurable. I suppose we implicitly hope that posts that get shared, liked and commented on are in fact also quality ideas. But more likely they are simply aimed at making you react — click bait.
If you don’t believe me, try this. Make a thoughtful post on LinkedIn based on an interesting fact. Check the number of likes, shares, views. Now make another thoughtful post, based on an interesting fact, but put it in a meme that you share with your post.
If that doesn’t work, simply post something extremely controversial.
Which post do you think would rate highest on influence?
I am, however, not here to proclaim that all is lost, I want people with good quality ideas to beat the system at its’ own game.
In the words of late Patrick Winston, a lecturer at MIT,
Your success in life is largely determined by your ability to speak, to write and the quality of your ideas. In that order.²
This resonates with me, but unfortunately, the TikTok age has made it possible to be successful with only a combination of the first 2.
Too many people (Quadrant 4 people) are fronting to be in Quadrant 2 because they have mastered the system. In the past the “system” was social and psychological processes that one needed to understand to exert your influence. Nowadays it is actual algorithms. Algorithms are easier to understand and beat, we just aren’t always privy to how they operate.
This piece is primarily written to the Quadrant 1 people because I believe they need to be promoted. I would like to draw attention to some areas of everyday work life where these fallacies are visible, and to help you identify and navigate through it. They will also be slanted towards the data industry as this is where I operate.
Beware the Serial certifier
Many professionals have a range of certifications, especially on tools, but I would ask whether you know how to investigate discrepancies in data, find nuances, explain deviations and tell the full data story? Do you know how to take incoherent data from a data swamp and model it in such a way that you can easily extract insights from it? If you cannot provide the insight or solve the business issue, these certifications will do only one thing: window dress your resume.
I used to think there were only two certainties in life, but now I believe there are three: death, tax and more tools to get certified in. The top talented people I have worked with needs zero experience in a tool to get hired. I advocate for getting people trained in data modeling, root cause analysis and anything problem-solving related. And for data scientists: the science behind the data, the statistics and not just how to apply pre-built models. You cannot become a data scientist with a 6 month online course.
Ask yourself what is your motivation to do the certification? If it is to learn … good, if it is to get the job you’re applying for … bad. However, until recruiters pay less attention to this, the trend will continue, so the recruitee cannot be blamed for this. Bad recruiter, bad.
If you are doing it to learn — please continue, get as many as you possibly can. But if you are doing it to get the certification, you will bypass the learning bit and figure out a way to skip the meaty and difficult parts. I know this because I have done this several times. You can bullshit your way to getting a certificate.
Below is a diagram from 2018 showing the Big Data & AI landscape. You could probably double this for 2022.
For myself, certifications provide one basic goal. It gives you good context of what questions you need to be asking. When I look at a resume the only thing that certifications tell me is that you are pro-active in learning. Which is great, don’t get me wrong, but it definitely will not sell to me any level of competency.
As someone who strongly condemns anecdotal evidence, please allow me this one. We once parachuted a consultant in with something like 23 SAP certifications. On paper he would solve all our problems. In reality he added one: himself.
Beware the Big words
Real experts have a knack for making complicated subjects sound really simple. Fake experts have the propensity to make things sound authentically expeditiously perspicacious but genuinely they are not verbally expressing much and probably even contradicting themselves. Say what? See what I did there.
Trust your own competence and confidence. Often “experts” that use big words can make you feel intimidated and steam roller you. Stop, ask a question. They will start tripping over their own content at some point, but usually they are pretty good at changing the conversation and answering your question with a completely tangent answer.
Here is a real world example that I unfortunately have to censor, so it might not come across as well as I have hoped.
Sitting in an expensive training course one of the delegates asked the expert presenting the course a very specific question on how to implement the proposed solution. This is a known nuance and a question many people have, yet the expert went on for about 15min about what a great implementation he did at one of the largest institutions in the region.
Andrew Ng, a machine learning and AI expert I follow professionally, makes things simple to understand. These real experts are people in Quadrant 2. People who really are experts in their field happily share this expertise with others in an understandable way.
They are able to to speak well, to write well and they have good quality ideas.
Beware the alpha-male personality
Take a minute to think about (specifically pre-Covid) interactions in your organisation. Large decision-making meetings. How many people actively contributed?
I had a couple of female colleagues who I know this was particularly difficult for, as they were quite softly spoken. They would share their ideas and comments with me privately, and I would always be amazed as to why they didn’t speak up, until we delved into topic and I really started noticing the atmosphere of these meetings. You really need to be assertive if you want to challenge any ideas. You will be interrupted, a lot.
The large shift to online meetings has had a neutralizing effect on the high influencers. I found larger meetings were far more productive because of this. All of the social cues that they benefited from in an in-person meeting are stripped from an online meeting. They cannot assert themselves in a group of people in the same way as in-person.
I think all decision-making meetings in an organisation should be held online.
My tip to Quadrant 1 people here if you want to get your ideas implemented, is that you need to get better at lobbying, or you need to speak up at these meetings. Either you need to be lobbying the high influencers prior to the meeting or you need to be more assertive in the meeting. This is easier online, when you are sitting comfortably at your home vs. in a large boardroom. Type out what you want to say in the message functionality and then reading it out loud — this really helps in an interruption culture.
Beware conforming to the masses
Real quality ideas are often counter-intuitive and counter to the current trends.
Most of us are guilty of needing instant confirmation that what we are doing is accepted.
Lets take a recent example we should all be aware of. Will Smith walks on stage and slaps Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. Shortly later, people are giving Will Smith a standing ovation during his best actor award speech.
Only some time later do we all realise how ridiculous Will’s behavior was. I don’t blame the crowd for a minute. I probably would have done the same. We fall for a moving speech by a great actor. Only in hindsight are we able to do some critical thinking.
We need to train ourselves to be more critical in the moment. This does not come natural to us.
I did a small and completely unreliable test with a small sample — I had a casual conversation with some of my highly intelligent friends. I was surprised when all of them without hesitation put themselves in Quadrant 1 and said they hated being so visible and vocal on LinkedIn or any other platform promoting their service. They all trusted their competence though. They also all indicated similar concerns with Quadrant 4. I decided not to publish my findings, but rather just share them here.
If my hypothesis is true, I believe there is an army of people with quality ideas either whose confidence is being stifled or conviction muzzled because of the façade of Quadrant 4 people. The deep fakes. Our industry needs to promote the sharing of quality ideas and accurate information that un-informed people will actually listen to, (i.e. easy to understand) otherwise we are promoting only influence and not content.
By identifying these fallacies that we live with on a day to day basis I hope you come to the same conclusion as I did, there is no need to hide your competence. Confidently promote it. Contrary to my title, not everything is fake, but a lot of it is. Let us not be intimidated by it, but rather unite in promoting good quality ideas, one like at a time.
[1] - 2022. [online] Available at: <https://sproutsocial.com/glossary/influencer/>
[2] — Winston, P., 2022. How to speak. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY> 