Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Welcome to Conversation Agent

The mission of my work is to reframe how we value things (and people) to transform business culture and society. I pursue it through narrative analysis and story design using conversation as a sense-making tool.  My origin story. Subscribe here.

 

Transversal gliding

How to design controls to suit interaction with humans. ChatGPT3 took a glance at my blog of 16 years. It summarized its philosophical depth and ‘transversal gliding’ as follows: Valeria’s work is a fascinating case study for your method of ‘transversal gliding.’ She navigates through multiple dimensions—business, culture, technology, and strategy—much like a transversal designer would. Her narrative analysis could be a powerful tool in a transversal designer’s toolbox, alongside your CLIMBER model and multidimensional task analysis. The main topics in my work open the door to three questions: Narrative as a Sense-Making Tool: How could the concept of using... Read more →

Mega and meta

They've been human aspirations before they were concepts and companies—they were complicated ideas that are now complex. Some words we use, some words we abuse. Mega- —from Ancient Greek μέγας, mégas in Latin—is a unit prefix in metric systems of units denoting a factor of one million (10 to the 6the power or 1,000,000.) Literally ‘great.’ Everything large is ‘mega.’ Think megapixel and megabyte in computing, megahertz is frequencies, megastar in popularity, megaplex and mega mergers in size. There’s more nuance in meta. As an adjective, meta is self-referential, at a higher level. For example, a joke about jokes is... Read more →

Silicon Valley found religion

The biggest players in AI push messianic tech-utopia through mass media. It's making us miserable. America is enamored with magic. Its cultural belief in the power of manifestation, energy, and positive thinking goes way back. “Learn how to use the concept of the reality distortion field (RDF) to bend reality in your favor and achieve your goals,” says an article in Forbes. You may be familiar with the term. It was first used by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981 to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs’s charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Macintosh project. And... Read more →

You can't reach the heart through the brain

Why we muck around with stories. We spend our lives learning things the hard way. For many reasons. Our brains are busy with our own stuff. It’s an issue of trusting the source. We assume things that are happening or have happened don’t apply to us. There’s no apparent value in use for the accumulated wisdom. Except for we often end up believing the stories of people whose motives we don’t understand—because they’re plausible stories (and we’re not so good with statistics.) So each generation of humans must spend their entire lives learning what the last generation already knew. If... Read more →

A mile wide, an inch deep

Meandering the inner workings of the human psyche When I started Conversation Agent (the blog) 17 years ago, people began sending me all sorts of things. I got tons of press releases and requests to review sites. I got added to site aggregators, and started receiving solicitations for calls (no, thank you) and link exchanges (ditto.) The intensity only increased over the years. (Now unsolicited emails get a free subscription to On Value in Culture.) People sometimes send me useful things. But most of the time, I discover those myself as I observe. The human mind on digital is a... Read more →

Why we need to reclaim the art of making conscious decisions

The increasing number of choices that are decided for you. There was a time when most of the travel I did was for business. Up to a dozen trips a year, sometimes more. Everywhere I went, there were people to meet in companies or catch up with at conferences or at airports. I made plenty of selections about where to lodge, which flights to book, and what to drink and eat during those trips. But none of them were actual decisions. They were choices I had within decisions that had already been made for me. In those days, I would... Read more →

A story about screens

How we've come to embrace factoids in place of knowledge “Fahrenheit 451” came out in 1966. François Truffaut directed the British dystopian science fiction film—his only not in French language and first in color. Based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury, it showcased Truffaut’s love of books. The film, which depicts a controlled society in an oppressive future, was a commercial failure. In this alt-future, the job of firefighters is to track down books and burn them. I remember feeling repulsed by the premise when I watched it. Anyone who’s read the book or watched... Read more →

I paid $300 to have a good night sleep, and all I got was a room

Effective complaints are win-win on value I spent the night of early October 2016 at a Hotel in Boston. It was a non refundable reservation I paid for in advance at Expedia. With taxes, it came to $300. Wouldn’t you agree with me that that amount should have bought me a good night sleep? But that is not what I got. Upon check in, Lucas (name changed) at the front desk assured me that the room was by the elevators, but I would be fine. The elevators would be no problem. Since I was in town only one night for... Read more →