Data and AI Organisational change

Spoiler alert – there are now 9 tribes of digital

Catherine Howe – Curious?

The eight tribes of digital (which were once seven) have become nine.

The real value of the tribes – other than that they are the distillation of four years of observation, reflection and synthesis – is not so much in whether they are definitively right (which pretty self-evidently they aren’t, and can’t be) but as a prompt for understanding why individuals and groups might behave as they do. And of course, the very fact that there can be nine kinds of digital is another way of saying that there is no such thing as digital

Data and AI

Robot says: Whatever

Margaret Boden – Aeon

The phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ is a brilliant piece of marketing. By starting with the artificial, it makes it easy to overlook the fact that there is no actual intelligence involved. And if there is no intelligence, still less are there emotions or psychological states.

The core of this essay is the argument that computers and robots do not, and indeed cannot, have needs or desires which have anything in common with those experienced by humans. In the short to medium term, that has both practical and philosophical implications for the use and usefulness of machines and the way they interact with humans. And in the long term (though this really isn’t what the essay is about), it means that we don’t have to worry unduly about a future in which humanity survives – at best – as pets of our robot overlords.

Systems

All change is system change

Catherine Howe – Curious?

An odd thing about many large organisations is that change is seen as different from something called business as usual. That might make a kind of sense if change were an anomalous state, quickly reverting to the normality of stasis, but since it isn’t, it doesn’t.

If change is recognised as an essential element of business as usual, then lots of other ideas drop easily into place. One of the more important ones is that it allows and encourages better metaphors. The idea of change as something discrete which starts and stops, which has beginnings and ends, encourages mechanical parallels: like a machine, it can be turned on and off; like a machine, controlling the inputs will control the outputs. But if change permeates, if organisations and their environments are continually flexing, then metaphors naturally become more organic: the pace of change ebbs and flows; organisations adapt as a function of their place in a wider ecosystem; change is just part of what happens, not some special extra thing.

From that perspective, it’s a small step to recognising that there is real power in thinking about organisational change in terms of systems. But it’s a small step with big consequences, and those consequences are what this post is all about.

The world of system change provides a different framing of organisational change and a way of seeing it as part of an organic process and not something that is bolted onto an organisation.  The simple but powerful shift from process to purpose is something that can make a profound difference to how you go about engaging the networks that already exist within your organisation.  Once we acknowledge and bring to fore the networks that make up our organisations and the system they create can we ever really deny that all change is system change?

Future of work Social and economic change

It’s Not Technology That’s Disrupting Our Jobs

Louis Hyman – The New York Times

This is a good reminder that the development and, even more, the application of technology are always driven by their social. economic and political context. There is a tendency to see technological change as somehow natural and unstoppable, which is dangerous not because it is wholly wrong, but because it is partly right and so can easily be confused with being wholly right.

New technologies cannot be uninvented (usually) or ignored, but how they are developed and deployed is always a matter of choice, even if that choice isn’t always self-evident. This article focuses on the implications for employment, where too often the destruction of jobs is assumed to be both inevitable and undesirable (leaving only the numbers up for debate). But the nature of the change, the accrual of the benefits of greater efficiency and of the costs of disruption and transition are all social choices. That’s a very helpful reframing – which creates the space to ask how we might retain the benefits of traditional employment structures, while adding (rather than substituting) the advantages which come from new ways of working.

Organisational change

Using the 7 Lenses of Transformation

Billy Street – Transforming Together

This post provides a good introduction to The 7 Lenses of Transformation recently published by the UK government. Its power is in a form of modesty: there is no spurious promise that religiously following a methodology takes the risk and challenge out of transformational change, but instead provides a sensible framing of seven areas which need to be thought about and acted on to increase the chances of success. It is strewn with useful prompts, reminders and challenges. But it also prompts a couple of broader questions.

The first is what counts as transformation, as opposed to mere change. The definition in the guidance isn’t altogether satisfactory, as ‘reducing the costs of delivering services and improving our internal processes’ is sufficient to count. That’s not just a niggle about wording: if there is something distinctive about transformation, there needs to be some clarity about what it is. It’s tempting to fall back to simple scale – but some large scale changes aren’t particularly transformational, while some much smaller changes can have a really radical impact on the relationship between inputs, outputs and, most importantly, outcomes.

The second is an inherent problem with numbered lists, which is that they present themselves as self-contained. It’s worth reflecting on what an eighth item might be. One possible answer is that there is more – quite a lot more – to be said in expansion of the seventh lens, on people. The recognition that people need to be involved and enthused is a good start, but a communication campaign isn’t a sufficient means of achieving that: if change is transformational, it is almost certain that it expects – and depends on – people’s behaviour changing, and it is dangerous to assume that behavioural change is an automatic by-product of change programmes. And of course there will often be many more people affected than those in the programme team itself – a point the ‘red flags’ section seems to overlook.

And there is a small but subtly important issue in the title: the lens metaphor is an odd one, which doesn’t stand up to very much thought. That’s not to say that there is a single self-evidently better one, but moving away from language which implies inspection and distortion to language which hints more at engagement and multiple perspectives might be a stronger foundation for delivering real transformation.

Strategy

Strategic changes are hard

John Naughton – Memex 1.1

A short post making the case for the assertion in its title  – strategic changes are hard. It’s based on the example of Intel, taken from an essay by Walter Kiechel III which ends with this timeless warning:

Read over the tale of what it took to get there if, in a delusional moment, you’re ever tempted to think that putting strategy into practice is easy, even a seemingly emergent strategy.

Data and AI Social and economic change

Q & A with Ellen Broad – Author of Made by Humans

Ellen Broad – Melbourne University Publishing

Ellen Broad’s new book is high on this summer’s reading list. Both provenance and subject matter mean that confidence in its quality can be high. But while waiting to read it, this short interview gives a sense of the themes and approach. Among many other virtues, Ellen recognises the power of language to illuminate the issues, but also to obscure them. As she says, what is meant by AI is constantly shifting, a reminder of one of the great definitions of technology, ‘everything which doesn’t work yet’ – because as soon as it does it gets called something else.

The book itself is available in the UK, though Amazon only has it in kindle form (but perhaps a container load of hard copies is even now traversing the globe).