Day: 22 August 2018
Robot says: Whatever
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.
All change is system change
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?