Why should leaders invest in AI-driven transformation of their organisational operating systems, and what is the payoff?
The biggest challenges in enterprise AI are not technical, but organisational and human.
The real business opportunity is not just using GenAI to write documents or make pictures or sprinkling automation over existing process work, but rather to create a radically cheaper and more agile system for coordinating work at scale.
For the past decade or more, we have seen what is possible at the team level with collaboration technologies, the digital workplace and new autonomous ways of working. The difference between a traditional function run using bureaucratic process management and a modern, small team structure is like night and day in terms of agility, quality, productivity and management overhead. But coordination at scale is a challenge in the old line management model.
“…it’s a cliché at this point, but we have to address the systemic issues that prevent fluid, agile team working, and that means we have to be teaching leadership, org structures, technology/tools, incentives and system design in combination.”
Going beyond platitudes in teaching high-performance team development
Now we have the opportunity to build out an organisational system that doesn’t rely on manual management alone.
This would allow us to elevate the role of teams and contributors, putting them in the driving seat of value creation whilst improving visibility of how their work connects with others. This offers traditional firms the chance to de-bureaucratise operations and take cost out of the business, and new startups and scale-ups the chance to grow quickly without re-creating the same mistakes.
What were manual repeatable processes will become lightweight automations and smart services. Synthesis and summarisation will happen in the background, rather than in time-sink meetings. Centaur service teams will augment human ingenuity with AI capabilities to deliver greater value per head than ever before.
“This may not be news to any modern, digital organisation that takes this way of working for granted, but it is orders of magnitude more productive than those corporations still communicating and coordinating through the medium of nursery school PowerPoint pictures shared using the turn-based combat of passive-aggressive email.”
Bridging the Exponential Gap Will Need Dynamic, Transformative Structures, not just AI Magic
We need to combine technology, knowledge and service design.
If we can bring together key stakehodlers and involve the workforce, supported by learning, change and org development, then we can tackle some fundamental challenges of transformation:
- Understand where and why to use AI as part of smart, hybrid services that get the human/machine mix right.
- Upskill leaders at all levels to think more broadly about organisational innovation, to manage hybrid human/software capabilities, and support new ways of working.
- Develop and improve agile structures to get the best out of these new ways of working.
“A shared digital transformation roadmap today needs to encompass a great deal more than just technology development, and should ideally be guided by a common map that defines the new digital business capabilities the organisation can build on, and pinpoint those it needs to develop to fulfil its strategic vision.”
From Silos to Synergy: How to Organise for Collaborative Digital Leadership
We need to focus on organisational systems, not just technologies.
The underlying technology is evolving so fast that we should not place a long-term bet on any single codebase or LLM, but we can get started with a system for designing and developing the services – like a software development environment, but for our organisational operating system.
This is the vision for Shift*Base – to map and connect digital business capabilites, identify gaps, and align learning, new ways of working and change management towards achieving these goals.
The payoff in terms of cost savings is enough to make this a priority, but the long-term returns from greater agility, productivity and innovative potential is the real prize.
“The programmable organisation, in which small autonomous teams and groups using smart systems and structures can achieve more than entire divisions of a C20th corporation, might become a reality sooner than we think, especially in areas of high competition and dynamism.”
Accelerating the Map → Change → Learn loop to guide enterprise AI adoption