Speaker 1 00:00
Hi, welcome to the Creator's Edge. This is Thursday's episode, The Master's Way, and this show is for creators in this wide, wide world of creator economy, where it's called many things: content creation, course creation, knowledge, business, expert, influencer. But it's for those of you who care deeply about quality, integrity, and your learners' success, those people that buy your programs, webinars, workshops, e-books, and anticipate learning how to do something or learn something new. Hi, I'm Michele, and you know I've spent decades helping others turn knowledge into impact without the hype, the shortcuts, or what this industry suffers, which is a pretty terrible 10% success rate for those we serve, the people who are buying our products. Only about 10% actually can get what we sell. Now the industry keeps settling for if you're for this, and if you're ready to build real results, empower your learners, and create courses that actually you know change lives. Well, you're in the right place, and a course is simply the tool that we use to help others learn something new, or better, or to learn how to do something new or better. So it may be in the form of an e-book, it may be in the form of a book, a webinar, a workshop. You may have a YouTube video, whatever it may be. When you are taking what you know or know how to do, and you are promising to help others learn that thing, then that is education, and the form that it should take is in a course format. We'll talk about that more as we get through some more of our podcast here. Well, now let's get to work here at the Master's Way. Today we're discussing continuing the topic of how to do an A three. Now the reason we want to do an A three is a problem solving tool. In Strategic Monday of this week, and I believe it was episode 11, we talked about what exactly strategic planning is. Now, if you think across your life, across careers, jobs, and a lot of what you've done, whether you were writing a paper or solving a problem when you were in grade school, you used a process to go through how to figure out what is wrong and what you can do better and what you should do. So that's a problem-solving process. Well, here in the creator economy, we're facing really high rates of low trust. We're seeing saturation, excuse me, and a lot of that's being magnified because of AI, and people are just grabbing hold of tools for quick fixes. And I just watched a video the other day where this very sincere young lady was saying, "Oh, here is this new AI tool. Just give it a title, and it will write you an entire book. Now that is what's being referred to as AI slop, because in order to write a book, if any of you are authors, you know that it takes a great deal of discernment, wisdom, synthesis, reflection, and things that AI can be coached to do to some extent. Remember, AI is about patterns. It can recognize patterns and it can repeat stuff, and it's a fantastic resource. But it cannot write a quality book. It just can't. It needs the person, the the the nuances the like I said the synthesis across ideas it's the experience it's doing research and thinking that doesn't feel right writing a book is a very complicated thing once you've learned how to do it though it's one of the richest, funnest things that you'll do. A well-written nonprofit book, or excuse me, not nonprofit nonfiction book, is always going to be based on learning. So when I write my books, they're in the form of a course. I'll explain that more along the road here as we travel together. But let's think about everything that you do and how you solve problems. We're going to begin with a very simple example, which is fixing. Going to plan what we're going to have for dinner and then what we need to do to fix dinner. Well, you have to go through an assessment first, right? You have to know what food you have. You have to know what kind of preferences people have. Are there any allergies? You have to know what you can afford if you need to buy something at the grocery.
Speaker 1 05:16
So you do what's called an assessment process, and you do that really without thinking. You just run through your mind. You might go look at the refrigerator, hold the door open, and stare at it for a while, and go, "Oh, looks like scrambled eggs and hash browns tonight. You make an assessment of what you have available, what you like, how much time you have, etc. Right? And so, what I just showed you as I opened the refrigerator and I said, "Oh, looks like a scrambled egg and hash brown night. I had gone through an assessment very quickly of what was available, what I liked, how much time, getting some some protein in there, getting some low comfort food in there, and then making a diagnosis. Oh, it's going to be scrambled eggs and hash browns. So that's the diagnosis. That's the next thing you do. This comes, by the way, this process comes from engineering, but many disciplines have a problem-solving process. Assessment first, diagnosis second. Then the third thing you do when you're cooking dinner, right, is you've got to have a plan. Well, hash browns and scrambled eggs don't take very long. I'll need to dice up the potatoes, and maybe I want to put some bell peppers and onions in there. I'll and you just have to gather. You have to have a little plan. I'll start the potatoes first because they take longer to cook, and then I'll do the eggs, and that may be the extent of your plan. Well, then when it gets closer to time to actually have dinner, then you have to implement it. So that's the next piece. We've got an assessment, we've got a diagnosis. What's up with this kind of situation? And then we've got a plan, and now we're going to implement it, and that means you're going to go cook the dinner, and then the next piece you may say, "Oh my gosh, I put way too much salt in these potatoes, or "Ooh, they're not salty enough, or "Ooh, I I don't think I I want onions with this ketchup, or whatever it may be, and you may just say that was really satisfying. I'm full. I ate a decent dinner, and your evaluation, which is the last piece, is completed. So that's a problem solving that you go through very quickly without thinking that you're in a problem solving era. Now, why does that matter? Why does this assessment diagnosis say what the problem is? Make a plan, implement the plan, and evaluate the plan. Why does that matter to us as creators in the creator economy? Well, it matters because we're really at an inflection point. We are at a place where the people that have a lot of followers, a lot of customers, and they're dominating the industry, and they're just going to get bigger because they can afford to up their game on AI tools, and they can scale with AI so much more than the individual or the person just starting in the creator economy. I'm seeing that it's going to create a greater divide between those who who grow and scale and get massively wealthy as as a business part of the creator economy. Is they're just going to grow even more. Those uh. of us that are solopreneurs are going to have harder time competing currently. Based on what some of the very big names self report, anywhere from 90 to 98% of the people that try to get into this creator economy and become successful. Fail. That that's that's pretty pretty bad. Now there's something a muck there, and we'll get into that in the master's way in on strategic Monday of why that might be. But for today, when we're thinking about planning and what that means for those of us in the creator economy, especially in the expert creator economy, where we want to share what we know or know how to do and monetize it-that is, make money-well, we need to learn some better strategies. So that's why on Monday we're talking about what strategic planning is and how to come up with some better strategies so we can compete and and be viable and be able to actualize our dreams for our work in this new era that's being called the. Expert economy, the expert creator economy. Okay, so what tool then is best helping us?
Speaker 1 10:10
Where do we begin if we want to start doing our own little problem solving? With where am I at? Well, the tool I mentioned last Thursday was an A3 in last Thursday's Master's way. Well, I'm today going to take you through that very thing. So this is something you're going to do personally, and I will attach a very simple A3 to the podcast where it is going to be over in YouTube. But the first thing you want to do is look at the issue, and what is what is the problem? What is the issue? What is the thing you're challenged by? So right now, let's say that what you're challenged by is 100 different AI tools out there, creating more confusion, adding to your already very busy life and not quite sure what to do with it in order to compete with the people who have bunches of employees and already have a lot of money to support rigorous investment in AI and how can you you just don't know where to go with that. So let's pretend that's the issue you're facing, and do this as your own problem. But I'm just want to walk through with one thing. First thing you do is look at the issue. Then the next thing you want to do is look at the background. Well, why is this a problem now? Why did this AI thing suddenly become an issue for me. Well, we can look at AI as being relatively new. It sort of came out in 2022 for folks. There was a lot of glitches in it, but it became widely available and pretty, pretty helpful in 2023. Okay, that's the first thing. So this this toolset is pretty new. It holds potential for the the creators and the the software and the people that own the AI, and so there's tons of competition for what they're doing, and so everybody's getting on the bandwagon for AI. That doesn't mean you're at fault. That just means it's a mad rush for everybody to make a profit off of AI. So I would say that's kind of the background. That's the sec. So first, the issue we're being flooded with AI, and it's confusing what to use. Two, it's fairly new, and a lot of people are trying to make money off of it, and are trying to convince you to get their AI tool. And then the next thing you want to do is go to what's called current condition. So this is where you start saying how it's going for you, and get real practical about this. You may think That the AI is too expensive, or it may be because there's too many different types of AI. There could be AI for authors, AI for for doing slide decks or presentations. Canva has got a brand new, not brand. Well, everything's fairly brand new with AI. New AI tool to help you generate images. It could be AI for marketing, and there's so many AI tools out there, and you're trying to figure out which ones you really need for your business. Now, the problem. The next step that you do here, number one, is decide the issue. Number two is to look at the background of why is why is this happening now. Three is to look at the current condition, how it's impacting you, and then we need to analyze the problem. And this is what's usually called a root cause analysis. So, just by example, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a quick example of what a root cause analysis is, and it's usually asking five questions until you get to the actual why this thing happened or why it matters. Now I'm going to use an example of a young person who showed up in the emergency room and has a bad cut on their leg. So we can say the first question is why do you have a bad cut on your leg? Well, the answer to that is because I cut it on a piece of metal in the playground. So the second question then becomes, well, why is there a piece of metal that would cut you in the playground? Well, the third question then would be. Why is there? Are this that second question is why is there metal in the playground? It's because that's where we can play.
Speaker 1 15:10
Is where there is a pile of metal. Well, why are you playing on a pile of metal? Well, because our apartment building is next to an industry area where there is a bunch of junk metal. Well, why are you playing on junk metal? Where's the playground? Well, there isn't a playground because we live in low income housing, and the scrap metal's the only place to play. So instead of it just being a simple issue of oh, there's there's a piece of metal somewhere and I cut my leg. That's easy. We'll just pick up that piece of metal and prevent cuts in the future. But this becomes more of getting down to why there was metal in the playground. One, the playground didn't exist. Two, the apartment was near in an industrial area where there were piles of junk metal, and the child got cut. And likely, if you want to prevent cuts in the future, you're going to have to get that pile of metal cleaned up, and you're going to have to perhaps help that neighborhood get a park or a playground. Now that is a root cause analysis. That if we would have stopped at the first question, oh, I cut my leg on the playground. Well, you could just say, "Well, we'll just go fix that one piece of metal in the playground, and that would not be the correct solution to the problem. I hope I hope that a quick example might help you understand what a root cause is. But I'd like you to do the same thing with AI. Now, if the issue is that it's very confusing, there's too many AI tools. You don't know how to compete, and instead of it creating more opportunities, AI is actually creating a greater divide. You look at the background. AI is new. Everybody's trying to make money off of it. Everybody's trying to sell it to you, and then the current condition for what AI tools you need to be competitive, or to ease your work, or to be able to complete your work-that that's for you to do. But then the problem analysis would be something like you would start with, well, why do I even need AI? Maybe your first question, and another question could possibly be, well, what AI do I need? Well, what AI do I need to be competitive? Well, what AI do I need to make my work easier? What AI is going to maintain the integrity of my products? It really depends what your starting point is with your problem, and what kind of questions you ask, and then after your problem analysis, again issue first, background second, current condition third, problem analysis, which means a root cause analysis. Ask five questions till you get to the the core of what the cause is there. Then your fifth thing you're going to work on is your target condition. Now, target condition means what is your ideal? What is it you would prefer to have? What do you need? What will be best for you, your business, personal life? And it could be your your target is that you have one AI tool you use for transcripts, one AI tool that you use for marketing, creating copy, and helping you with your ads and your funnels. And you may need one AI to be a problem solving partner that you can brainstorm with. You can get help with resources. Can help you with editing. Something like that. That becomes your ideal. Then it fits within your ideal. Could fit within a certain budget. Your ideal could be part of how much time you save? Your ideal could be how much time you do not spend on AI, how much, etc. So that's your target conditions, and then like the example of the problem solving here, you've you've walked through. You've got your issue, your background, your current condition, your problem analysis, your root cause, and you've got your target condition. Is what you've just done there is created your your assessment, your diagnosis, and your plan. You you've said this is what. I want, and so the next piece of your A three is to work on your implementation plan. That's what are you going to do? Who's going to do it? When are you going to do it? And what do you want from it?
Speaker 1 20:17
So an implementation plan for adopting AI could be something like I am going to learn. I'm going to take three days to explore and learn which AI transcript software is the most efficient for me does what I need it to do and is within my budget. You see, and it really depends on your personal need. But think about it then. And if cost is a factor, this is a time when you do a little budget. Then, of course, if we're going to keep with that, do the assessment, the diagnosis, the plan, the implementation, and evaluate it. So now we've walked through our implementation plan. Now we need to go do it, and once we do it, we have this A three we've worked on. So we can come back and check ourselves. So did it work? Is this the right AI tool? Am I still within budget? Did it save me the amount of time I hoped for, or did it add to my workload? Did I just go down all these bunny holes because AI keeps suggesting and suggesting and suggesting, and I think I don't want to miss out, so I'm going to try everything AI asked me to do. So I will put a copy of this in, attach it in the YouTube, and until next week, I'd like you to try to think about using an A3 for where you are at in your business. Pick one issue, one thing that's bugging you. It could be your bookkeeping. It could be your content flow. How how often you're creating content, and you just run it through an A three. And what we sometimes think is the problem, we get it down on a piece of paper, and we have a visual right in front of us that helps us to create the systems that are supporting your good work. We're supporting the good work of the people. Now, as we move forward here, I wish you the very best in your creation and what you do, and remember, you're not behind, you're not irrelevant, but this is a decision point. You can, and you can continue to create content-based courses, or you can choose to have personality-driven offers, individual frameworks, and sort of that trendy-based products, but if you're someone who really cares about results and the quality of your life and the results you get, then this really is the place for you. But right now, I want to wish you the very best and to remember that quality is your promise. Quality is always your product, and I wish you the very best. And until next week, happy creating, and strive to improve those results that your customers are getting.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
