People First, AI Smart: How Great Organizations Scale

It’s high time we remembered that AI is in the infancy stage for its role in business and society, that the pendulum always swings, that the new almost always settles into balance and symbiosis with what’s already there, and that AI will in fact not singlehandedly transform humanity into two-headed aliens, any more than past innovations like the telephone and the Internet did. 

Only people can transform a society. The relationship between society and AI today is an early romance, not a marriage, and it has all the passion and imbalance of first love.

Take away AI and you have… a world without AI. Take away washing machines and you have a world with piles of laundry and scrubbing boards. Take away the electric light and you have a whole society queuing up to buy candles. But what are you left with when you take away people?

Nothing, that’s what. A howling, empty world full of dormant computers, silent washing machines and mountains of unused candles.

That’s why people always come first, why they will always be the most important thing, and why you should—as a leader—spend your last penny and your last iota of effort on your people. Anyone can copy your IT system, buy the same AI that you bought, use the same brand of washing machine or energy-efficient lighting. But nobody can copy your people – unless you manage them badly enough to lose them – and for that reason, the human being will always be the last true competitive edge you have in business.

When the short-term is so bright, we’re blind to the long game

Smart human beings and healthy team dynamics are also the key to intelligent consumption. We all need to understand new technologies like AI as they roll along, and nobody’s suggesting that we should ignore AI’s role in organization-building any more than we should go back to candles and scrubbing boards. But the proper building of companies, teams and small and large organizations requires human collaboration above all else. 

I’ve personally seen this dynamic play out again and again with clients for whom we did organizational change-based team programs, including IBM, Toyota, Olympic teams and the State Department.

The technology debate is heated precisely because the definitions are not agreed. Most organizations have a short-term view of AI smartness when it comes to organizational scaling, building and rebuilding, whatever they may say. At this moment in history, they’re in love with the short-term promise of great savings in labor cost, the single biggest line-item expense for almost all businesses. 

Expectation vs. reality vs. hindsight

That utopian view—conceived more in hope than in forethought—will turn out to be more complicated than people expect, just as automation turned out to be unexpectedly tricky when the weaving loom replaced thousands of workers in the 1880’s. Technology came, but not with miraculous ease. Employers forgot that weaving looms were expensive, broke easily, produced zero output when they did break, were always being superseded, were hard to retool when markets changed, and still required lots of people to maintain and operate. 

Again, I had some personal experience of this concept with one client, a large vehicle builder, as they struggled to keep up production while also retooling automated and robotic production lines to keep up with changing models.

Workers, for their part, are not focused on how much money the company hopes to save, and instead are more worried about their jobs. They see the AI argument from an entirely different perspective, one in which they get no relief at all from the pressure of work and deadlines, but simply increase their production volume over the same hours, similar conditions, and probably fewer jobs—as did their predecessors in the weaving mill. Lately, I’ve been talking to many middle managers trapped in this situation, overwhelmed with brimming emails and in-trays, even as their jobs are under threat.

Let’s be honest with ourselves…

The dream of getting the same salary for less work, owing to the work being automated, is a pipe dream as old as the workplace itself. It simply makes no economic sense for the employer to do that. Employers will always want to extract the greatest possible amount of work for the smallest possible investment in labor cost, for the same reason that a water glass always refills to the top when immersed in a bucket. The glass does not magically half-fill just because the bucket has changed. And there’s an endless supply of brimming buckets in every company. 

Smart organizations know this. They also know that all organizations breathe, regardless of technologies, and mostly owing to market forces. Some days, they inhale, adding staff to take on new or expanded missions. Other days, they exhale, shedding staff to slim down for new challenges or changed circumstances.

That process of inhalation and exhalation is perennial, and wise strategic leaders see and plan for that, rather than panicking at every inhalation and exhalation. Nobody knows what the net short-term effect of AI will really be—will jobs ultimately go up or down?—and they understand the long-term effects even less.

If you’ve ever seen Venus Williams play tennis, you’ll know how wise organizations handle this reality. Venus in her heyday was a center-court player, meaning that she gravitated toward center court so as to have maximum flexibility and an equal distance to move no matter where the ball landed. 

Smart leaders cope with an unstable, disrupted, highly fractal environment by developing their organizations in balance with the demands of task and intellect on the one hand, and spirit and emotion on the other. Task and intellect are essential for figuring out the day-to-day jobs and the “noise” of business, but spirit and emotion are vital for the needs, loyalty, retention, and optimization of people. When rival players lost to Venus Williams, it was almost always because they forgot about center-court balance and got “stuck” on one corner or the other of the court, letting themselves get too far distanced from the action to respond flexibly.

Focus on your allies…the real ones

Therefore, stay away from silly arguments about whether AI is good or bad. The reality is, it’s here. And the other reality is that your people are far more important—they always have been. As you scale, recalibrate, and adjust your organization to handle the pressures of government direction changes, cost control, changing markets, and the reality-versus-hype of new-old technologies like AI, play center court. 

Take good advice from your good people—the ones you retained by investing heavily in them—and you’ll manage to stay in a position where you can jump toward the action no matter where the market dynamics end up. You’ll certainly use technology to help with that, but remember that technology makes a good servant and a bad master.

Invest, invest, invest in the human being. I promise that the results will amaze you.

Subscribe for More

Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more product leadership resources and guides, plus the latest podcasts, interviews, and other insights from industry leaders and experts.