Author, researcher, artist and organisational consultant Dr Julian Stodd tells Natasha Baluchi that AI is a fundamentally social context, which will change the experience of workplaces
IN recent years, artificial intelligence has emerged as a prominent topic of discussion, garnering significant media attention.
Especially within a business, tasks at hand can now be automated, information processed more quickly and routine work completed in a fraction of the time compared to a human.
For organisations that face time constraints, the appeal is apparent.
However, understanding the underlying “threat” of AI is something that people should be aware of too.
Dr Julian Stodd has highlighted that the conversation only goes so far.
As an author, researcher, artist and organisational consultant, he specialises in how modern organisations adapt to what he calls the “social age”.
Having spent the past three years exploring whether organisations might change as technology develops, his work draws on systems thinking, ethnographic research and practice, and he urges audiences to ask a question: What happens when AI does not simply improve the organisation we already have, but begins to challenge the assumptions on which it was built?
“We are busy trying to understand the future using yesterday’s vocabulary,” said Dr Stodd, addressing an audience at a Prosperity 24/7 event.
He believes that there are two distinct levels of change taking place.
The first of these, he says, is efficiency and optimisation, which suggests using AI to make processes faster, cheaper or more effective.
Another is what he calls a “reimagination of the system”.
“This is about looking at the structure, systems and processes, culture and social norms, methods – every aspect of the organisation – and asking how this could be different,” he said.
This is a distinction, he says, that could become increasingly significant as businesses learn to adapt and securely use AI in existing workplace structures.
Adding to that, Dr Stodd believes that traditional organisations had largely been designed around consistency.
“We use systems and processes to give us consistency. We know how to build that organisation. But AI is beginning to challenge assumptions about how work is done and where capability sits,” he explained. “The organisations of the future will still have structure, but AI disrupts our understanding of how things are done.”
Consequently, he believes organisations might become smaller and more “fluid”, with some capabilities remaining inside the business, while others move beyond its “traditional boundaries”.
“We’re starting to see experimentation around the ways that work is allocated and done. And it feels like we are likely to build a more three-dimensional view of capability,” Dr Stodd said.
“One view is one person doing one job, the second is a collective view and a third is permeability, so, increasingly, some of the capability we need makes it outside our walls.
“We will still have organisations but they will be smaller and something new will emerge.”
But he says that, for business leaders, the ultimate challenge is not simply AI adoption.
He said businesses needed to look at three different axes: their “architectural position”, where work is and where it happens, “decision authority”, the question of who decides what, between AI and humans, and “value architecture”, how organisations hold value in people and things.
The latter, he says, is progressively becoming harder to define.
“The value architecture is really understanding how the shape of a landscape is changing,” he explained. “The research poses a question of, ‘in three to five years, where do you believe you will be on the architecture?’”
To help the audience fully understand this point, he gave an example of a CV.
“Historically, if I was applying for a job, I would write a CV and post it to you. It would probably end up on a pile on your desk, and it might end up at the top, and it might not.
But the bottom line is, the value of it has shifted,” said Dr Stodd.
That changing knowledge of value also raises the evident questions about the extent to which businesses should pursue efficiency.
However, Dr Stodd stresses that faster, cheaper and better alternatives to present ways may not always be the right answer.
“It’s always important to remember that people are sometimes not logical,” he said.
“Sometimes better, cheaper, more optimised or more perfect is not the right answer for you.
“Therefore, you need to truly understand both utility and experience. Sometimes their interaction with you is an experience and we optimise that at our peril.”
Here, he indicates that rather than attempting to “remove every point of friction”, organisations may need to accept some uncertainty.
“Sometimes the answer is less perfect and more turbulent,” he said.
Turbulence is a defining element throughout Dr Stodd’s work on experimentation.
He understands that organisations need the ability to “experiment and explore” but says many are poorly equipped to deal with failure.
“We need a specific capability to experiment and explore, but there lies a concern that we are essentially unable to experiment.”
And culture plays a “huge” role in that.
“Culture holds failure in a different way,” he said. “Culture sees what happens with this and it holds onto that. You can measure it and people still calibrate their tolerance to risk.
“I think to have a culture, language and system of recognition and reward that values failure in a meaningful way is important. However, some types of failure should be toxic and avoided,” he said.
But in some organisations, this “fear of failure”, he says, can prevent experimentation altogether.
During the event, Dr Stodd spoke about research carried out with 36 executive-level organisations about the topic of experimentation and failure.
“Only half of them said that they are essentially unable to experiment, and have no standard definition of experimentation, government conditions or structured ability to share the results of what they find,” said Dr Stodd.
He described speaking to a chief people officer, who had deliberately avoided failure with the fear she had only one opportunity to get something wrong before losing her position.
The result, he said, was “real silencing” and a lack of creative dissonance.
“We tend to think we need smoothness and fluidness, but there are times where we need friction and turbulence.”
His book, Unreconciled: Being Human in the 21st Century, explores a physiological stance on modern technology – what it gives people, and what it takes away.
“People want social connection. The whole experience of being human is about connection and community,” he said to the audience.
“This is about connection to each other, and ideas to others, a place we call home and the ideas that validate us and allow us to belong.”
That being said, Dr Stodd emphasises that AI should not be viewed simply as “another piece of technology to be introduced into the workplace”.
“If you say AI is a technology, we will probably be okay. But I say that AI is a fundamentally social context and it will change the experience,” he said.
And for Jersey business leaders, his message is to “start engaging now”.
“The first thing I would say is take part in the research. Take a sketch out of your own organisation to give us something to work from,” he said. “I would also take a sense of urgency to develop the vocabulary. We probably have a window of opportunity to find the language we need, but it’s not endless.
“The experience of being human is fundamentally changing. With the same conversation and the same people, you need to seek out a different voice.”
