A Human-Centric Approach to Your AI Strategy
An organization's culture is tested in times of turbulence and uncertainty, and leadership plays a crucial part in how it scores. Currently, many organizations are grappling with the excitement and challenges that AI has presented them. How and why AI is used will vary greatly on each organization’s strategy and operations. Two universal principles will help you understand the direction it will take and the success of its implementation.
The values of your leaders matter. They will shape and influence how AI or any disruptive technology is adopted and deployed. This is the time to take stock of leadership styles and the organizational culture they create to understand how they help or hinder the achievement of an organization's objectives. Knowing your strengths, blind spots, and possible limiting behaviors will significantly inform the capacity and potential for AI adoption. This process of understanding is best supported with objective, data-driven insights that drive leadership alignment through shared understanding. If needed, the leaders can make changes to prepare themselves and the organizational culture better to support the ever-evolving business landscape. This is the cornerstone of a resilient organization.
Aligning your culture to your systems and processes is the way to create sustainable success. AI will continue to provide an ever-expanding array of uses in business. Not every application will fit your business, and discerning that starts with your culture. Implementing AI in a manner that deviates from your culture will inevitably create dysfunction and failure. Aligning AI with your culture is the pathway to amplify your performance and create more impactful outcomes. Leaders who clearly understand their culture can tap into the organization’s cultural capital and realize the future gains of new technology.
Are you considering the impact on your people and culture in your AI strategy?
How will AI disrupt or challenge your organization? How can you prepare your people & processes for the change?
AI is generating a lot of fear and uncertainty. How is your organization addressing this?
Leadership plays a critical role in AI adoption or avoidance. What must you do as a leader to step into the AI era?
Your deep questions may differ, as these considerations are particular to your organization, but aligning your culture to strategy is universal and time-tested.
Let’s look at one scenario under two very different leaderships and cultures:
Company A is focused on cost-cutting and goal orientation. The Marketing department proposes to cut 50% of its content developers and replace them with AI-assisted content. The remainder of the staff will manage the development of the AI content—mostly editing and fact checking. The team continues to meet deadlines, but their job satisfaction is low, the leads generated by the content are decreasing, and turnover has increased.
Company B is focused on quality, creativity, and job fulfillment. Their Marketing department proposes to explore how AI can assist their content development team. They create a team to review the opportunities, conduct short-term tests of work process changes, and develop recommendations for the best approach. They identified that some content did not work with AI and redesigned the job descriptions to create a hybrid job of manual content development plus AI-assisted content development. The result is increased job satisfaction, improved productivity and lead generation, and a plan to move 25% of the content developers to different marketing positions.
For over 25 years, BVC has been working on leadership and culture. The number one reason this work begins is either a crisis or navigating significant change. AI can be the catalyst for both. If you are ready to strengthen your leadership and culture, start with data, use the data to understand where you are and where you need to go, and ensure your plan is holistic. The entire organization system - leadership, processes, strategy – must be aligned.
