At Unleash & Engage, we’ve been talking to a lot of clients who’ve invested in AI but aren’t seeing a return on that investment.
There are two principal reasons for this. The first is that people have been reluctant to get too involved with AI because they feel it might make their roles redundant. “Turkeys voting for Christmas” is how one client described it.
The second is that too few organisations have given sufficient thought to how AI can be properly and profitably integrated into their business. They admit to having limited understanding as to its true capabilities and often only use it for taking notes at the end of a meeting.
This to me is like buying a brand new sports car and only using it to go to the corner shop. Though they’re now beginning to ask whether they should be doing more with AI to get the full value of what they’ve spent.
Returning to cars for a moment, I always explain how they can do this with a very simple image. Imagine an axle with a wheel on each end. One wheel represents the capabilities of the system within an organisation. This includes AI, digital platforms plus all the other policies and processes that make the business work.
The other wheel represents the capabilities of its people. This includes their skills, beliefs, behaviour and levels of trust.
While organisations have been investing heavily in the “System” wheel – making it bigger and bigger – their investment in the human wheel hasn’t kept pace, so the two wheels are different sizes. They’re not balanced so, instead of the business moving forward, it just goes round and round in circles.
This imbalance is nothing new – it was going on long before the advent of AI. Imagine, for example, a business with 1,000 employees. One person makes a mistake. Instead of having a direct conversation with that one person, the organisation adds new rules and procedures for everyone.
The result? More bureaucracy, slower work, sluggish performance — even though 99.9% of the workforce did nothing wrong.
Some businesses are now behaving like this with new technology. The adoption of AI has meant that the “System” wheel has grown too fast but the “Human” wheel, especially concerning trust and confidence, hasn’t grown with it.
People have not been shown how AI can support and enhance the overall goals of their business. It may automate some routine tasks that people used to carry out but that can free them up to be more creative, more innovative and provide much greater value to the business.
But that won’t happen if they’re scared. Fear affects behaviour and fearful behaviour will hamper technological progress.
Before we can change people’s behaviour, we need to understand their beliefs. What are they thinking? What are they worried about? And this is where the work starts.
If we change what people believe, we can change how they feel. If we change how they feel, we can change how they behave. But we can’t just tell people to behave differently without first understanding what they’re thinking and why.
We also need to promote AI from being a misunderstood bolt-to being part of an organisation’s “Golden Thread”.
That means linking it clearly to strategy, and then showing how that strategy equates to the daily, weekly, and monthly work that people actually do. When they see how AI helps and supports them, they start to use it. And the more they use it, the more they like it.
Finally, we need to rebalance those two wheels — so people and systems are working in harmony to move forward quickly and smoothly.
#leadershipcoaching #operationalexcellence #SOE
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