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Hi everyone. Ricardo Vargas here. And this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today, I would like to discuss one point that I'm mentioning a lot. Every time I talk about AI in terms of response and I say about triggers and what is a trigger. A trigger is an indication that a trend, risk, or event is happening, most of the time involving risks, threats, accidents, problems, or trends. Everything that is uncertain gives some indication before it becomes real. Let me use just an analogy. It's like a plane crash when we see a plane crash, most of the time planes are extremely safe. So why do they crash? It's because a succession of challenges, a succession of events and triggers that people did not perceive or that people act wrongly. And this is what happened. In most of the cases, you don't pay attention to a specific signal, or a failure goes on the top of the order failure. And when people perceive you lost completely the control over the aircraft. And this is like, for example, when we think about a building collapsing, the building does not collapse suddenly. It gives you hints and indications. You can see cracks, you can see problems, you can see, for example, the building inclining to one direction, the same thing. When we think about what happened between Russia and Ukraine before Russia invaded Ukraine, we saw an indication of that. For example, when you see a movement of troops close to the border, when you see, for example, tanks and armored vehicles going close to the border. And I remember that and everybody said, no, no, this is just bluff. And it was not. And many people miss that trigger. It's very easy for me to record this podcast and talk about the past, but let me talk about the future in your project.
This happens every single day and it will happen today, I'm sure. For example, let me give you an example. Let's suppose you are at the beginning of December of a given year and then, you know, holiday season is approaching, and then one of your critical suppliers that needs to deliver some goods or equipments to your project calls you maybe on December 10th and talks to you and ask when will be the annual leave of your team, when you will stop and do a recess at that time? What do you need to understand? It's what is behind that talk. What is behind that question? It's not because he or she wants to make sure you are happy at the end of the year with the holidays. Let's not be naive. Most of the time the person is asking this because probably they are late, and probably they want to know this time frame because probably they will miss the deadline and they will deliver the product only early next year. So this is what we need. This kind of feeling is what we need. And this is what I'm calling all the time triggers. For example, on AI, everybody knows that I have a very strong interest on AI for many, many years. And now with generative AI, it's even more. And of course, people ask me what will be the impact in the work of project management. What is my answer? I don't know in concrete terms. I know it will change and it will change a lot, but I don't have the detail.
So what do I need to do? I need to identify triggers of change. So what do I do? For example, I keep myself informed. I track many hashtags on AI, AI and project management in social media. I subscribe to more than ten different newsletters, and in all of them I have a custom GPT that helps me. I put that newsletter there and I ask about impact in projects, productivity and project work, and I receive some feedbacks. So many times I subscribe a newsletter where everything. Talking about music and photo, eye music and photo. I'm not saying this will not impact me, but this is not the core of what I do. If I was a photographer, then these would be. But when, for example, Microsoft releases copilot ops, this is a big impact. Or when PMI released infinity. That is a fantastic product of PMI that could leverage project managers. This is a trigger that something is evolving, that something is moving towards a specific direction. And this is what we need. Remember, before the water becomes hot, it becomes warm. We see the impact when we burn ourselves with the hot water. But before it became hot you can identify, look, it will become hot and I need to act. And this is one of the best competencies of a great project manager is this ability to take a look and see some triggers, and from that trigger, take some actions that will minimize if it's a bad thing or maximize if it's a good thing in the future. Always think about this. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Pay attention on your triggers and see you next week with another five minutes podcast.
