Square Peg, Round Hole

A couple of weeks ago I was helping a client interview candidates for a new role. All went as expected… well almost. Like many interviews these days, they were over zoom and one candidate decided to try to be clever. He turned the camera off under the guise of ‘a bad connection’ and then proceeded to use chatGPT to answer his questions.

He relegated his own role in the interview to ‘reader’ rather than ‘responder’.

Unfortunately for him, it was awfully obvious that something was afoot… it was like we were speaking to a human textbook!

After the dullest interview I’ve ever endured, it’s safe to say we didn’t proceed him to the next stage.

ChatGPT is a phenomenal piece of tech, but it’s no silver bullet.

Which raises the next logical question for us as leaders:

Where are square pegs in your own business? Those areas that are under-performing, not because they’re poorly designed, but because you’re trying to fit them into round holes?

In my own business, we’re in the process of redesigning a few processes and we’re quickly seeing that I’ve been guilty of stretching a system beyond it’s intended use. Bending the rules to try to make the square peg fit. (…I mean, you just have to round the edges a little and you’ll get that darn thing in there!)

But I’m already seeing benefits to letting the systems work as intended, and I suspect you’ll find that too.