To realize a vision, you need people doing stuff!

Recent hires will have fresh eyes that lead them to notice things longer-term employees have come to accept.

(For more practical insights about building Job Scorecards, read Bluewire Media’s excellent blog on the topic.)

Rigorous data analytics should inform intuitive thinking. Shantanu Narayen, for example, stressed its role in his decision to move Adobe to cloud-based service. The process involved “a lot of discipline,” he said. “We ran pilot in some countries. We got feedback. People give us credit for bold decisions. But we put in a lot of work.” Yet, when asked how he evolved as a CEO, he said, “I got much more comfortable with pattern matching.” Discerning a pattern you’ve seen before in a new situation is one of the signature abilities of informed intuition. But spotting patterns, as Narayen cautioned, can be “both a plus and a minus.” Doing it well requires building up a robust mental archive of patterns seen through time. With that strong repertoire, pattern matching can be remarkably powerful. Without that archive, it can go badly awry. But even with good experience, it’s easy to fall into the trap of confirmation bias— seeing a pattern because you expect it to be there. It’s essential to rigorously challenge your intuitions.

Narayen emphasized that to ensure you’re both listening to your intuition and checking it, it’s important to create a process for combining your informed intuition with that of others, as Paz did.

Computer vision seeks to re-create our sight; natural language processing and generation, our ability to read and write; speech recognition and synthesis, our ability to hear and speak; and image and video generation, our creativity and imagination. As software for each of these capabilities has advanced, researchers have subsequently sought to combine them into so-called multimodal systems—systems that can “see” and “speak,” “hear” and “read.” That the technology is now threatening to replace large swaths of human workers is not by accident but by design.