“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have, and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up,” advised James Belasco and Ralph Stayer.
Advances in technology move quickly – while organisations are slow to change. One is exponential, the other is linear. Should we use the artificial intelligence [AI] tools readily on offer, or just ignore them, staying comfortable? Is there such a thing as ‘co-intelligence’ working with formulas – algorithms that can be prone to hallucinations?
Speaking to BBC News, Sundar Pichai, the Google CEO said while the growth of AI investment had been an ‘extraordinary moment’, there was some ‘irrationality’ in the current AI boom. But what if the AI investment bubble goes bust? With tech change going off the charts, should we issue a funeral notice for five- year plans?
“Something new entered our world in November 2022 — the first general purpose AI that could pass for a human and do the kinds of creative, innovative work that only humans could do previously,” points out Wharton professor Ethan Mollick in his book Co-Intelligence.
In what seemed like ‘all of a sudden’ we now have kind of co-intelligence that could augment, or even [some would suggest] replace, human thinking.
Mollick stresses the need to engage with AI as co-worker, co-teacher, and coach. Really, is there a choice? AI packages can do in seconds, what it would take a team of intelligent interns a month to come up with.
Imagine you hired a real sharpie – with a newly minted MBA from Strathmore, the Harvard of Kenya– who had wide ranging knowledge, and was both analytical and structured in their thinking. Immediate response would be to get them working on the firm’s biggest problems, same goes for AI, it would be Luddite like silly to ignore the tools’ capabilities.
Trick is to be able to take advantage of AI’s enormous power without losing one’s identity, and to learn from it without being fooled by its irrational hallucinations. Makes sense to apply AI to address the quintessential business task -- create and capture value.
Applying AI is a bit like changing a car tire. When you have the wheel on the studs, you don’t tighten up one bolt all at once, it might risk bending the rim. Instead you tighten each of the five bolts gradually.
With AI it makes sense to experiment, making gradual moves, working on a number of fronts, to see what works best. Blatant ‘cut and paste’ of AI content will prove disastrous, AI is the co-worker there to contribute to critical thinking, not replace it.
Death of five-year plans
The days of 5–10-year plans are over. As the pace of change accelerates, one has to adapt with far shorter cycles of ‘thinking strategic’. Plans are easily set and relatively certain. Strategy is tricky and uncertain.
Given the constantly shifting corporate sands, it may make sense to experiment with a portfolio of test strategies on a small scale, in a way that does no harm. Little low cost, small risk experiments – and for the ones that’s don’t work out, fail forward. Then with proof of concept, implement the strategy most likely to succeed.
With the transactional ‘Disruptor in Chief’ in the White House, it’s a cliché to say, ours is an uncertain world, strategies must be agile. Innovation is not static.
At the heart of strategy creation is ‘creative problem-solving’ both diagnostic - analytical, perhaps combined with a touch of ‘out of the box’ thinking. Reality is, those who do not give equal attention to strategic agility and innovation, risk stagnating, losing their value and competitive edge.
Can you fight reality?
“Part of making effective decisions boils down to dealing with reality. How do you make sure you’re dealing with reality when you’re making decisions?” Posed Silicon Valley savant, Naval Ravikant.
In business, as in life, if you are fighting reality, it’s a loosing battle. But being human means that if a challenge comes to our business reality, we fight it. Both frustrated and angry, we have a problem sitting what’s actually happening with our model of reality.
We stay within our corporate comfort zones working with people and practices that support our model. If things start to go in another direction, we get uncomfortable. One course of action is to focus on back to basics, working up from simple and clear thinking.
“The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than memorise all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics. If you can’t rederive concepts from the basics as you need them, you’re lost. You’re just memorising.”
Clear thinkers
“The advanced concepts in a field are less proven. We use them to signal insider knowledge, but we’d be better off nailing the basics. Clear thinkers appeal to their own authority.
By not having a strong sense of self or judgments or mind presence. The “monkey mind” will always respond with this regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the world should be. Those desires will cloud your reality. This happens a lot of times when people are mixing politics and business.
“The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be. One definition of a moment of suffering is ‘the moment when you see things exactly the way they are.’
This whole time, you’ve been convinced your business is doing great, and really you’ve ignored the signs it’s not doing well. Then, your business fails, and you suffer because you’ve been putting off reality. You’ve been hiding it from yourself” says Naval.
Do we hang on to what we have? Or give it up, creating new value? Your pace, or mine?
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