Real feelings in an unreal world

Outsourced emotion

Picture this: I'm watching my colleague Paul demo a new AI meeting transcriber. Beyond just capturing words, it claims to read the room - marking up "positive" and "negative" sentiments based on our faces and voices. Green for good, red for bad.

Clever technology, but here's where it gets interesting.

During a strategy discussion, the AI reported high engagement - animated voices, bright expressions. When the conversation shifted to action plans? Suddenly we were all "negative" - simply because we'd adopted a more serious tone. The AI couldn't distinguish between gravity and disengagement.

This is becoming pervasive, too. Here are two other instances I’ve come across recently of outsourced emotions:

1. A large client uses AI to respond to customer complaints in an empathic way. It works pretty well. But, they’re now suspecting that more customers are using AI to create their complaints. Picture that: AI complaints met with AI empathy, a perfect loop where nobody actually needs to feel anything.
2. Dating sites are increasingly using AI to help users generate conversations with matches. Of course, when both parties train the bot to ‘be me’, you get the inevitable situation where each lonely heart is sitting at home, watching their bot ‘be me’, and watching their match’s bot ‘be them’. Again, nobody feels anything.

And, back to the meeting transcriber. Here, the bot doesn’t know what anyone actually feels.

Question: What emotional engagement in your organisation is at risk of being hijacked by technology?

Mount Stupid

In my early 20s, armed with a newly minted psychology degree, I worked as an employment consultant: finding jobs for people with intellectual disabilities.

Most of my clients had measured IQ in the range 60 - 80 (100 being the population mean). They could learn simple repetitive tasks, follow one- or two-step instructions, and were mostly compliant with workplace rules. But, I had some ‘borderline’ clients who were hovering around the 80 mark and I noticed something intriguing about them.

Take Kelvin. He became fixated on asking out a receptionist. She rejected him. He persisted. She mentioned her boyfriend and, eventually, an uncomfortable parking lot conversation occurred between Kelvin and said boyfriend. Yet the next day, he asked again. I’ll leave you to imagine the consequences (and, yes, I was drawn in by the manager, who wanted to sack Kelvin for harassment).

Kelvin knew enough to get into trouble, but not enough to get out of trouble.

Pilots have a name for this phenomenon: Mount Stupid. It's that dangerous peak around 500 flight hours where pilots know enough to be confident but not enough to recognize real danger. They've mastered the controls but not their own limitations.

For pilots, the ‘five hazardous attitudes’ that help the ascent to Mt Stupid are:

1. Anti-authority (“Don’t tell me”)
2. Impulsivity (“Do it now”)
3. Invulnerability (“It won’t happen”)
4. Macho (“I can handle it”)
5. Resignation (“Who cares?”)

Research by psychologists Dunning and Kruger can help us understand what’s going on for both Kelvin and the pilots. The Dunning-Kruger effect describes an intriguing paradox: those with the weakest abilities in areas like logic, grammar, and humour tended to most overestimate their own competence. This tells us that the very knowledge needed to perform well at something is also required to accurately evaluate performance in that domain.

Now, Kelvin might never (or not easily) learn from his limited social capabilities, whereas for most pilots, the descent from Mt Stupid will occur quite naturally as a consequence of experience — and learning.

Question: How do you help your team recognise and recover from their "Mount Stupid" moments?

Virtuous Cycles

Our weather has turned sunny and on one such morning, I found myself sipping coffee at a bustling café with Sean, a filmmaker friend who’s now head of a renowned film school. Sean and I often have conversations that meander from personal anecdotes to profound insights, and this one was no different.

“What’s your single most important measure of success in your job?” I asked, expecting him to mention student numbers, revenue growth, or some other traditional metric.

Instead, he leaned forward and said, “It’s the quality of the work my graduates produce—years after they leave here.”

I paused, intrigued. “Tell me more.”

Sean explained how his institution fostered a culture where students received high-quality, immediate, actionable feedback that pushed their boundaries. "Iterative improvement," he said, "is everything. The quality of feedback determines the quality of the work. And that feedback, applied well, creates a virtuous cycle of growth."

This resonates deeply with what I've observed in organisations that execute strategy best. Excellence isn't built on grand plans or sweeping reforms—it's created through systems that allow human potential to flourish, where people feel the positive 'buzz' from genuine feedback and can grow, thrive, and continually improve.

Question: Whose performance are you actively elevating through genuine, quality feedback?

If this resonated, let me know - even a simple click of the ‘Like’ creates a millisecond of real connection (truly!).

This week, try noticing the authentic emotional threads that weave through your organisation's daily life, and see you next Friday.

Andrew