Stressed? Count to 3, and invoke ChatGPT!

For those of us who could use a boost in expressing ourselves smoothly and politely, the good news is that we have a new ally and its name is ChatGPT!

The situation should be familiar: You see a colleague informing via mail about something that is quite a mistake in your own eyes. You know if you don't respond to this it will result in quite a setback. But you also know, that putting this right in the correct way will cost you a lot of time that you really don't have. Do you have to let this one pass? Responding quickly is not a good idea, you know you will probably err and write, unintentionally, something that could make things even worse. Letting it pass is also not really an option. This stresses you.

Here's what you can do now: Go to ChatGPT, and ask it how to respond politely to the request, providing some arguments why its a bad idea. I'll give you a simple example, that also illustrates ChatGPT's impressive knowledge of our world:

A colleague wrote the following, to your agile team:

"I propose that we skip the retrospective this time, we can gain a lot of time to prepare for the next sprint."

Now you are ok with skipping a retrospective some times, the scrum rules are not holy, but in this case you are quite certain that a retro would really help this time. You don't want to respond with a hard 'no, that's not a good idea'. But you really don't have time to explain the whole thing again.

You like the response, but you remember to add something that should somehow stop a long e-mail thread.

That reminds you of the agile manifesto; people and interactions over processes and tools.. this is great! And you change the PS to include that. You can quickly do that yourself, or use ChatGPT again:

And done. If you think its too long of a message, you can ask ChatGPT to make it smaller, its really good at that as well!

I think from this example you can already see that this is just the tip of a massive iceberg that is going to have an big influence on the way people communicate with each-other with written messages, e-mails to be specific. But you can also use it to prepare for a real talk.

It will be misused. Sure.

It can generate a lot of time-consuming communication that would otherwise not have been there. We all know e-mails are to be avoided as much as possible; maybe this results in more of them again.. Could be. Hopefully not.

But you can also use it to everyone's advantage. To me it has a de-escalating effect; it points out nice professional ways to react. Something some people can do easily and fast, but others might have to work a little harder at. I'm quite optimistic in that respect. I think it will be beneficial and result in more pleasant communication and more rationality for all of us.

Some companies are already warning their employees to not commit any internal information to it; that's something to be quite careful with indeed.

I'm curious where this is going. I can imagine many people are horrified by this kind of usage. But its reality; better be ware of this.

This article is not written by ChatGPT. Give or take a few sentences.