Monday Morning Keynotes

 The 2024 LavaCon conference opened with three 20-minute keynotes. Here are some highlights.

Building Influence: A Roadmap for Content Expertise and Leadership

Melinda Belcher, Executive Director at JPMorgan Chase talked about tactical strategies to establish yourself. Good advice for anyone in the workplace. 

What is influence? It is not authority. Influence is about inspiration. It's about bringing people along with you. It is not something that will ever be handed to you. You have to earn and build it. 

Often you will have influence on people and not realize it. 

Establish credibility. It's what influence is built upon. It's about meeting or exceeding expectations. Unfortunately, it means you have to be your own cheerleader. It is a necessary evil. Start by taking a hands-on approach and partnering with your peers. Know your industry. Share with not only team members, but cross-functional folks. Identify and showcase quick wins.

Invest in yourself. A strategy of continuous learning is not only good for your career, it's good for your life.  Set up a personal learning system. Stay accountable to yourself; find an accountability partner. Part of that is to write it down. You're much more likely to do something if you write it down. Sahre what you learn with others. 

Cultivate trust. Set the pace, protect your space. Check in purposefully with people, make sure they have the information they need. Document and explain yourself. When you take the time to be mindful about that with them, they will be mindful about that with you. Cultivate a "short toes" culture by putting outcomes over ownership, encouraging cross-functional collaboration, and separating personal identity from professional output, and that way no ones toes get stepped on. 

Finally, spark joy in yourself and others. Relationships are the ones you chose. Work is situationships. You're together not because you want to be but because you need to accomplish something together. Make it as positive as you can. Cultivate a joyful mindset around work. Choose inquiry over advocacy. 

Metamorphosis: Empowering Our Craft's Evolution in the Dawn of GenAI's Era

Fawn Damitio, Sr. Manager of AI Infrastructure at Meta, and Peggy Sanchez, Sr. Manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise said that as content developers, we have to learn from the past. Technical writers were some of the first usability testers. 

The Internet exploded in the 90s. Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen helped found the discipline of user experience. 

We're already experts at researching and finding information. We have to learn to recognize AI use cases and to develop prompt expertise. These are critical for career development. 

Have to get into the AI race. Find a way to use it and get better at it. 

Can't do this is a silo. Need to share. Thrive through the power of community. 

The tool is not going to take your job. Someone who can use the tool better than you might take your job. So learn how AI can make you more productive. Ask AI to explain something to you. AI can help you do things much like an intern. It can hell you problem solve. There are ways that AI can make you more productive. That's not your job, but it can help you get your job done faster. 

We're in an immature field, so always, always, always have to review and edit the results. 

Are Your Canaries Still Singing? An Optimist's Guide to Designing for Failure

 Relly Annett-Baker, Head of UX Content Strategy at Google said that the idiom "good vibes only" sounds like it comes across as a threat. "You're bringing problems not solutions" makes it sound like failure is not acceptable. But you have to plan for failure. 

The tech-specific version of "good vibes only" is "move fast and break things." People who move fast and break things: toddlers, speeds runners, world record karate choppers. But what do you do with the mess?

Failures aren't inherently opportunities. It's a neutral situation. It's what you do with that situation. 

But they aren't inherently bad either. Everything is data. And system with many moving parts, something will likely go wrong. And if something will go wrong, like to prepare for it. 

Siloed success is the number one cause of systemic failure.