I2I’s Heart-2-Heart on Artificial Intelligence, Rest for the Revolution, & Outcome Harvesting

Happy 2023, friends!

Welcome to Intention 2 Impact (I2I’s) Heart 2 Heart (H2H) newsletter - where we share what’s on our minds, in our hearts, and up-our-sleeves. This is an archived newsletter from January 2023. Want to read the newsletter in real time? Click here to subscribe!

We hope you are feeling rested, recharged, and reinvigorated after a well deserved holiday break. This month, we prepare for the AI uprising, remind ourselves that rest is essential for revolution (take that, ChatGPT!), and spotlight Outcome Harvesting - a tool we’ve been using in the past year.

On Our Minds

Have you met our new frenemy yet?

ChatGPT - the chatbot developed by OpenAI that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to generate original content from existing data. Let’s just say, we’re equally impressed and spooked by its potential.

The bot can write poems, essays, jokes, recipes, rap lyrics, lines of code - whatever your heart desires, on demand. This thing absorbs info faster than a sponge… and, we asked it to write that metaphor:

A lot of people are freaking out about the implications of AI on knowledge workers. How can we compete with something that can scrape the Internet faster than we can say the alphabet backwards (...maybe even forwards)?

You know what they say, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em…

Or at least use it to your advantage. We asked ChatGPT how to make sure AI doesn’t replace our jobs, and here is its advice:

I guess our new year’s resolutions now include: hone skills for strategic thinking, strengthen relationships, continue upskilling, and practice saying the alphabet backwards…

In Our Hearts

One thing we do better than AI? Rest.

I2I closed shop from December 23rd - January 9th; and wow - was it necessary. When you are focused on work, it can be hard to see the forest through the trees… honestly, there are times that we’re so deep in the weeds that we lose sight of the tree itself!

That’s how we felt at the end of 2022. Not quite burnt out, but burning the midnight oil (with Taylor Swift’s Midnights on replay). Thankfully, we made the commitment a long time ago to rest into the new year.

During the “in-between” week (iykyk), we slept, spent time with loved ones, and indulged in all our faves (foods, beverages, shows, movies, books, activities, you name it).

Then, the first week of January, we eased into a “quiet work” week. Think of it as the opposite of quiet quitting… instead of doing the bare minimum because we’re checked out, we did the bare minimum to check back in. We quietly got ahead of our inbox, calendar, and to do’s - while we told our clients we were still offline. 🤫

Now we’re back & better than ever! If you need a reminder that rest is required for revolution, we recommend following the Nap Ministry - at your leisure, of course.

Up Our Sleeves

Methods spotlight 🔦

I2I is proud to serve as the MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation, & Learning) partner for organizations that are tackling some of the most complex issues of our time —from housing affordability, to climate change, to quality healthcare access for all… you know, easy stuff. 😉

Because these issues require systems transformation, we leverage methods that embrace complexity.

For example, many of our foundation clients are increasingly interested in retrospective portfolio evaluations to understand how, if at all, their investments have contributed to systems change. Rather than start with a linear theory of change and set of predetermined outcomes, we use processes like outcome harvesting to collect data about what has changed, and then work backwards to interrogate how, if at all, the intervention or strategy contributed to those changes.

Want to learn more about outcome harvesting? Hit reply.