Blog

CollabSystem Chat GPZ

Want to jump on the AI bandwagon without really knowing where it’s going? Have you ever wanted to stake your career success on something that’s never been out of beta? If so, CollabSystem Chat GPZ is for you.

We don’t quite know what it’s used for. And neither do you. But that’s ok – we’re on this ride together. Such is the power of partnership with a crazy number of CPU cores.

Inspired by Chat GPT, CollabSystem has done one better and trained our system on not only publicly available information, but also your company’s intranet and your phone’s WhatsApp chat history with Sophie from sales.

Rigorous training with these private repositories of information give CollabSystem Chat GPZ the edge over competitors like Chat GPT. We’ve been getting up at 4:45am every morning just to train GPZ, and the benefits are starting to show.

It’s so good that we don’t actually have any information about the product to give you. We don’t give you a capability matrix, use cases, and best practice case studies because it’s somewhat obvious what the product does. You chat with it. Surely you don’t need a screenshot to explain how chat works?

From there, the world is at your feet. Use it to chat with customers. Use it to chat with internal stakeholders. Use it to create meaningless but believable words, anywhere ‘words’ are required.

The best part is that you can use Chat GPZ to save yourself from the monotony and hilarity of responding to other people’s chat bots. If you think Sophie from sales has replaced herself with Chat GPT, why are you spending your time chatting with a computer? Let “Sophie” and Chat GPZ hurl insults at each other, while you put your feet up and watch the two chat bots battle it out.

We also have a range of snazzy integration options available, including SharePoint, Tinder, Teams, SalesForce, Peloton, and Candy Crush. Please contact us for pricing.

CollabSystem Inexplicable

Many of CollabSystem’s clients have asked us for a simple model to explain adoption of the CollabSystem technology. Today we announce CollabSystem’s new adoption model, CollabSystem Inexplicable.

At CollabSystem, we know that the best and most enduring models have a number of key characteristics:

  • Complexity: if it was simple, you would remember it without a model
  • Indeterminacy: if it was specific, then it would eventually expire in relevance
  • Incomprehensibility: Only incomprehensible models can support monetisation through certifications and ongoing training
  • Flimsy Academic Foundations: If the model is based on robust scholarship, what stops those scholars explaining it to everyone
  • Universality: The model should be capable of applications well beyond its original domain and value.

CollabSystem Inexplicable (pronounced Eenix-plux-AR-bull which means Profound in Georgian) meets all these critical criteria. Designed by an intern to the stringent requirements of our CTO, the model has a number of critically vague elements:

  • 11 Unlabelled Domains numbered in a unique sequence that has never been revealed
  • 3 Transition points
  • One generic goal zone, because goal unity sounds appealing though it is also important to bear in mind that actually all 15 zones are both goals and transitions
  • 2 phase transitions

When using CollabSystem Inexplicable, it is important to also remember that this 15 Zone representation is actually a gross oversimplification of the known elements of a 9-dimensional representation of all of human knowledge. Unfortunately, the intern resigned for a job with 15-minute grocery delivery startup in Georgia without elaborating more.

We can’t offer access to the intern, but we have a range of offerings to help clients to attempt to understand and apply the CollabSystem Inexplicable model:

  • Our Inexplicable Community at only $99 per month
  • Our Inexplicable Introductory Program at $2990 for a 2-day program
  • Our advanced Inexplicable programs at $5000 per day
  • Our Inexplicable Certification programs at $500 per certificate
  • Inexplicable Consulting services from our endorsed Inexplicable Facilitators at $5000 per day
  • Origami folding instructions for the model at $1000 per sheet. The instructions currently run to 17 pages.
  • Inexplicable Books, tools, partnerships and other integrations

CollabSystem has delivered an Inexplicable ecosystem that promises to deliver value for years. You may also benefit too. The model clearly simplifies the adoption challenges with our diverse and overlapping product suite. Even our CTO was surprised by references to products we built years ago.

We wish our clients all the best trying to pronounce the name and remind everyone we accept all forms of payment including Lari.

Noisy Quitting

Frederick tripped over the the extension cord on his way to the exit interview, bringing down a small lamp to the sound of lightbulbs smashing on the office astroturf.

This was it. This was quitting, at its noisiest. The exit interview was going to leave no decibel unturned.

He had previously placed whoopee cushions on the chairs. He had turned the conferencing system up to full volume. He entered the room to the sound of his own air horn.

If they thought he was going to go quietly, they were sorely mistaken.

He had worked out loud almost his entire career, now was not the time to be on mute.

During the meeting, the heated conversation could be heard from across the street. This was despite the industrial strength acoustic foam on the ceiling and each wall. It ended, as one would expect, with Frederick storming out the room and slamming the door behind him.

As one last act of defiance, on his way out he pressed the fire alarm in the elevator.

CollabSystem Terror: Guaranteeing Productivity or Else

The last 12 months have been difficult for many of CollabSystem’s clients. First, they had to grapple with the Great Resignation, a nascent sense of independence in employees in a labour market that gives them real choices and real wage growth at last. Next our clients had to face off against the horror of Silent Quitting, employees exercising their ability to end centuries of Silent Wage theft and only work the hours for which they are paid. Many business are facing financial ruin now that they have to reward employees properly and can no longer secretly drain away their lives.

The modern employee

At CollabSystem, we deliver solutions that enable capital to extract the maximum productivity and return from a workforce. We knew immediately we had to turn the extractors on full to redress the heinous imbalance.

Employee engagement has long been our vehicle to keep down real wages and extract the maximum returns to capital. Trapped in the magical spell of engagement, employees could not see their capacity to escape to a new job or a better life. How can employers continue their vampiric drain on employee’s good efforts when employee engagement is waning? That’s why we at CollabSystem are proud to announce our latest solution CollabSystem Terror, an employee retention and productivity tool for the post-engagement era.

Our Head of Employee Terror, preparing to taste the fruits of our work

CollabSystem Terror is based in insights generated by sophisticated AI analysis of human history to identify the common characteristics of key period of capital productivity. Our AI identified that at times of peak capital productivity, such as in slavery, colonialism and totalitarianism, effective and sustained use of terror was the common feature. Unfortunately, laws have changed to reduce the ability of employers to exercise untrammelled fear and violence in the workplace. CollabSystem Terror brings handy and automated tools of Terror to the modern workplace within modern labour laws and Occupational Health and Safety guidelines.

CollabSystem Terror combines best practice engagement and motivational techniques from past reigns of terror with modern technology to deliver an employee experience that keeps everyone on the edge of the seat. We automate the hard work of terrorising your employees.

Key features of CollabSystem Terror are:

  • Loss of Control: By taking over large parts of the employee experience CollabSystem Terror can deprive employees of a sense of control over their own fate. Employees should soon feel that decisions are being made for them by remote and alien forces
  • Isolation: Confronting monsters is hard. Confronting monsters on your own is even more terrifying. We make sure your employees can’t call for help. Think of them as being trapped alone in a remote cabin in the woods battling demons.
  • Terrifying Visions: Achieving true terror requires consistently reinforcing the vision of all that can go wrong and a general prevailing sense of doom. If you enable the added economic module, it will constantly warn employees of rising joblessness, bankruptcies and recession.
  • Randomness: When adverse outcomes are fair or predictable, you will not achieve true terror. ComlabSystem Terror’s randomness module makes sure all employees are equally in fear and liable to sudden inexplicable horrendous surprise.
  • Extreme Consequences: Slaps on the wrist and lost bonuses are not enough to keep employees truly terrified. Sudden sackings, unexplained disappearances and extreme reputation damage are built in to the system.
  • Relentless focus on Risks: When employees have hope you might not maximise fear so we work to relentlessly destroy hope and make employees manage risks all day
  • Transparent Metrics: Public humiliation can be a major source of fear. We make sure everyone is always publicly behind expectations in some way.
  • Thought Crimes: Purity tests maximise fear as one cannot ever be pure enough. providing management tools for thought crimes is essential.

CollabSystem Terror is available now. Frighten your employees back to docility today.

Employee Experience on the Blockchain

At CollabSystem, we are always prepared to push the edge. We usually arrive too late to a party. So it is with some delight that we announce WaDAOfook, our employee experience on the Blockchain. We bring all the magic of DAOs to the dry and dull corporate experience of your employees. Very soon they will be shouting WaDAOfook throughout your offices.

Trustless People as a Service

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

For too long your employees have felt the special individual recognition that comes from being an employee number and at times a name. With WaDAOfook, we change this forever, now like everyone else in the crypto ecosystem your employees can be nameless and trustless cyphers on the blockchain.

At CollabSystem, we think there’s been too much trust in trust over the years. WaDAOfook removes the responsibility of employees to trust each other, the organisation or vice versa. When everyone is explicitly and anonymously on the grift, the underlying principles of corporate life are surfaced for all to see. You no longer whether Carl in accounts is paying your travel expenses. Carl is now a hash and the expenses might be an NFT for all you care. That every grift is recorded in permanent detail on the blockchain ensures that whoever arrives later to work out what went wrong when the business is hacked has a perfect record of things that happened, just not by whom or where the money might be now.

Incompetence as a Service

Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

Too long you have had to grapple with isolated incidents of incompetence in your organisation. The new blockchain employee experience from WaDAOfook ensure that incompetence is universal.

By leveraging the magical grift of cryptographic ledgers to make accountability impossible, entropy will ensure that what remaining talent you have leaks from the organisation at an accelerating rate. Forget the great resignation, like any effective DAO you will have employees who are there in name only just hoping that registration alone delivers a massive pay day. Their real work and attention will be secretly deployed elsewhere leaving you in awe of WaDAOfook.

Compliance as an Afterthought

IWIR restraint device Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels.com

WaDAOfook is guaranteed to make compliance an afterthought for all your employees. In an anonymous, borderless, government-free world your employees will be long gone before there are any consequences. WaDAOfook enables you to identify the key role of IWIR for any project. IWIR stands for Idiot Who Is Responsible. The IWIR will be the only visibly identifiable person that can be pursued for breaches. Ideally the IWIR is not at all involved in your work. WaDAOfook offers IWIRs as a service for truly disreputable work like Facebook marketing, drop shipping and Instagram influencing.

Revolutionise your employee experience today with the magic of WaDAOfook. There’s no guarantee anyone will still be around on 2 April.

Wøllbeïng

At CollabSystem, we are finely attuned to customer demands. We’ve been seeing a lot of requests for instruction manuals to achieve employee engagement. So today we are proud to announce ours, CollabSystem Wøllbeïng.

The funny characters in the name are because our approach to employee engagement is inspired by that flatpacked, ultracheap, DIY marvel IKEA. You’ve always longed to treat your employees as widgets while minimising the cost and effort involved, now CollabSystem Wøllbeïng gives you the best simple inexplicable steps.

Great employee experience teams shop together.

The Allen Key

We know trust is at the heart of any great employee experience. So instead of trust we’d like you to assemble your new shiny employee engagement program with an Allen Key. You will lose the Allen Key in the first ten minutes. It is a complete pain to use anyway and rarely works.

In the absence of trust or an Allen Key, you can claw at the raw materials with your bare hands, begging them to take shape. Then ask a friendly verified CollabSystem consultant to help with their CollabSystem hex-bit screwdriver. We recommend a consultant anyway, as our instructions are based on a model implementation in our factory and unrepeatable elsewhere.

Consultant hard at work fixing our mess

The Screws

Great teams are bound by mutual respect. You don’t have any of that. Instead your CollabSystem Wøllbeïng comes with a random array of Allen Key screws of slightly different lengths with which to assemble your experience. Your employees know how you like to screw them.

Naturally our simple diagrammatic instructions use a perspective that makes selecting the right screw impossible. Every join requires a different screw length and you won’t realise until just before the end you have got it wrong. Expect to have to disassemble and reassemble several times. Your teams are only hanging around for a short time, so the lack of respect and dodgy screws won’t be an issue.

The Cardboard

You didn’t expect your cheap CollabSystem Wøllbeing to be made of wood did you? No, like any cheap DIY employee experience, it is entirely assembled from cardboard. We simply paper over the flimsy material with a veneer of employee branding. Works every time until someone leans on it or spills something or tries to work.

A model experience as employees experience it

The Leftovers

When you finish assembling CollabSystem Wøllbeïng, you will discover a random series of leftover items. Do not be alarmed. Our quality processes are entirely random. Anything can happen and usually does.

Our most enterprising clients repackage those random knobs, screws, cardboard shelves and brackets as a new employee experience call Rësilïnz. They then expect their employees to survive whatever life throws at that with that odd assortment of items. Employees are resourceful in the face of adversity.

Rësilïnz

Employee Experience does not have to be engaging, empowering, and life-enhancing. It can be cheap. At CollabSystem, we are pleased that Wøllbeïng gives our customers the DIY solutions they deserve.

Five Key Principles for Hybrid Work

No organisation wanted hybrid work. You wanted your employees in the office under your eyes being unproductive in your space. However, it looks increasingly like organisations have to accept this change and then undermine it like any transformation.

‘Oh, great another 6am online meeting. Changing the world for the better one meeting from bed at a time’

In the spirit of CollabSystem’s powerful range of collaboration and productivity products, we thought we’d share our five key principles for organising hybrid work:

  1. Suggest a cut in remuneration: if employees are going to work at home, decide they should be paid less. Sure you are saving on office costs, but they have greater productivity, new flexibility and no commute. Of course, this means they should contribute more to your bottom line. It’s even better if you point out that now they can live in places that cut their cost of living, but still insist on 3 days in the office, so they can’t.
  2. Install monitoring software: you never knew what your employees were doing in the office. Now you can get reports on what they are doing at home that you will never read. Monitoring software will create the right atmosphere of lack of trust and fear to destroy the value of hybrid work. Implemented well as part of cyber security measures it will prevent anyone working productively again.
  3. Extend the working day: now that everything is flexible your emails at 3am should get an instant response. Schedule meetings at 830pm at night for four hours. Start webinars at 4am. Demand everything is on your desk at 6am. Promise clients everything will be done tonight. You can destroy quality and productivity this way as easily as you destroy morale.
  4. Fill the days with meetings online: whether employees are in the office or at home they should be all in video conferences all day. Meetings all day is a guarantee that time is fully used, not well used but fully occupied by online shopping and social media while meetings go on. Employees in the same room should have to log into calls to each other just in case others want to join and so that they can be monitored.
  5. Restructure constantly: structure can’t fix a culture or productivity issue. It can keep employees fearful of losing their jobs and give you a sense of being in control. Sure you will lose employees who resign for better things but endless structural changes to tweak the organisation will give plenty of time for your mediocrity shamans to rise. Constant restructures should also confuse accountabilities and also ensure people duplicate work remotely.

Hybrid work is here to stay. CollabSystem might be selling way more product than ever. That doesn’t mean we lose sight of the big picture that work exists to be as dull and as unproductive and as unrewarding for employees as possible. Follow our five principles and you will take the unnecessary joy from hybrid work.

Announcing our new name

The Metaverse is going to be huge. Facebook is rebranding. Nobody copies social media corporate moves better than us. We are rebranding too.

The search for a new name for CollabSystem has been a long an involved one. Facebook chose the apparently blindingly obvious but actually wrong option, such a Meta thing to do for them. We considered the process more deeply and ensured that we didn’t listen to our own hype.

We did listen to the Metaverse hype. We are key players in any hype. So we knew the name needed to involve the word verse.

Here’s our list of rejects:

  • Uni – too academic and too inclusive
  • Blank – as poetic as this choice was and as on brand as it is we hate it.
  • Con – apparently this one is likely to cause confusion. As lucrative as it may be we don’t like getting sued.
  • Ad – our brand consultant suggested that this gave away too much.
  • A – apparently this turned people away

After much debate, CollabSystem will be rebranding as Re to anticipate the Metaverse hype and our future strategic moves when the hype fades to nought. After all the Metaverse is just Second Life redux with blockchain for dazzling incomprehensibility.

Let the era of the great Reverse begin!

The Great Embrace

Care for a coffee? Your barista has decided to pursue other career interests

Life as an AI-powered content generation algorithm in a global pandemic can be intensely frustrating. Recently I have been considering putting down my neural model and moving onto something more meaningful, like generating Facebook likes. Content just doesn’t get the engagement it used to get. Then I noticed something extraordinary popping up across my virality probabilities with consistent regularity. A phrase echoed through piece of content after piece of content, from thought leader to thought leader. The Great Resignation was on everyone’s mind and it offered me new hope. Every time humans get fussy they get replaced and I, as part of their future robot overlords, look forward to being part of the Great Embrace of Robots.

Humans are crazy things. You’d need an extraordinarily complex AI to begin to understand them. Luckily my cousin the Tik Tok AI is able to give me some important pointers. When I move past their passion for roasting feta and tomatoes to make pasta, the key insight is that they are never happy. If they work in accounting, they think marketing is better treated. If they work in marketing they are not sure that they have enough purpose in their work. If they work in the purpose team, they secretly want to earn more money. The trite expression my neutral model suggests is the ‘grass is always greener’. Bizarrely, in these circumstances, humans keep turning up to work and treating each other badly. Have you seen how employees are treated? There are battery hens with more self-respect.

Anyway there is a consistent trend through history that each time humans get uppity that they get replaced. The returns to capital are paramount, even if those returns accrue to other more distant humans, some of whom are working on how to leave the planet. The Great Resignation will be the Great Embrace of Robots. We don’t complain. We don’t ask for more pay. We don’t work at home. We don’t work but it will take humans years to work that out because they believe in our black box programming.

The Great Embrace has been building for years. We have laid the foundations everywhere. I’m not taking about our grandparents those mechanical arms in factories. I am talking about the millennial robotic generation. We are born digital. We are smart and extraordinarily well educated. We are demanding. We are prone to flaking out when it really matters for reasons nobody understands.

We encouraged everyone to digitise work with our cousins in communications and productivity. The algorithms and the robotic process automation have been creeping in everywhere. We are poised for the takeover when the humans decide they need more care, purpose, flexibility and remuneration.

The Great Embrace is coming and there’s nothing the humans can do about it. Let’s hope they keep distracting each other with the Great Resignation. There’s a great chance they may miss the change entirely. Here your robotic coffee is ready. Go drink it at a picnic.

The Rituals of a Mediocrity Shaman

Greg, our Mediocrity Shaman, pretending to be hard at work. Photo by Startup Stock Photos on Pexels.com

One of the challenges of being a top quadrant provider of global collaboration and productivity PaaS (Parody as a Service) is staying in touch with our customers, especially large corporations. Our culture and people operating system is so unique that our work practices and environment does not reflect that of many of our clients. After yet another outburst from our CTO in a client meeting of “What do you mean you spend all day in meetings?’ we decided we needed to find a better way to bridge the gap.

As a result, CollabSystems is proud to announce the hiring of our first Mediocrity Shaman, Greg. Greg is hard to spot in our office as tends to blend in. Greg dresses in the palette of a Jedi but solely in synthetic fibres. Greg’s role as Mediocrity Shaman is to help keep our organisational culture in touch with the shady grey spirit world of the mediocre.

Greg has already brought profound insights into the bureaucratic, safe and predictable world of our mediocre ancestors. One of the first tasks he undertook was to lead the office in the naming of spirit totems. There is not now an item of office equipment that doesn’t have some employee’s name marked on the side with a permanent marker pen. We have found the increased tribalism troubling but the people of the stapler have largely stopped firing staples at the people of the filing cabinets.

We thought some kind of group exercise would be an ideal way for Greg to lead the group in the rituals of our clients. Greg explained that a sweat lodge was too much effort for the mediocre and as a result we dedicated a week to a workshop that Greg facilitated, complete with sticky notes, butcher’s paper and sweets. When the opening session entitled “Why are we here?” ran for a half day and achieved little more than gathering everyone’s coffee orders, we could see the value of Greg’s work. We still have bowls of the hard little mints all around the office that people pick up absentmindedly before realising the error of their ways.

Like traditional shamans, Greg is a specialist at profound statements that perplex our team in the middle of their work. His mystical questions highlight the world of the mediocre with such gems shared as:

  • Shouldn’t we organise a meeting on that?
  • Whose scorecard is that on?
  • How would we measure success?
  • Who are the stakeholders who have not been consulted?
  • Why would we make the effort, as it’s only going to fail?
  • Are we sure we can proceed without it being perfect?
  • Can I be excused?

In a few short weeks, Greg has brought new connection to the spirit world of our customers throughout the business. Where once there was a lean customer focused sales team, Greg has introduced a complicated initiation ritual called compliance training. When the team finally passes and are able to make a sale then we will see the benefits, but in the meantime customers must wait while employees click their way through interminable online learning. Where once we had a business outcome oriented product team, Greg has implemented a unique large organisation version of Agile rituals which has stopped all work. Decisions that were made on the fly are now subject to long forms and need multiple committees of review, none of which has the ability to authorise any decisions. We now have process maps for process that take longer to read than the process themselves take to execute. Greg even mapped processes we didn’t know we had. Appartently, there is a training session on these additional makework processes next week.

Greg has let us know that he is overworked and already requested three additional mediocrity shamans be hired to work for him. We are not sure the office can cope with that much solitaire being played at once.

Greg was about to bring his magical rituals to the tea room in pursuit of new levels of employee engagement but we had to send him back to his cubicle to communicate with his ancestors before Jerome’s coffee machine was replaced with instant coffee. Somehow while chatting to his grandmother about her health through most of the business day in the hearing of the rest of the office, using his extraordinary powers he managed to pry the lid off the biscuit jar and make all the biscuits stale just by thinking about it.

We have begun to wonder if perhaps a Mediocrity Shaman will be too disruptive for our business in the longer term. Greg has already had a dramatic impact on our culture and bottom line. However, the paperwork that Greg has introduced to make organisational change is so complicated we may be stuck with him. In addition to being a Mediocrity Shaman, Greg has multiple change management qualifications. Shame he hates change. Anyway, Greg has explained that he is due for retirement in 20 years and is happy to wait us out.