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Playbook · AI transformation · 8 steps
AI transformation 1: Before you start
Decide whether you are adding AI to today's organisation or redesigning the work around it.
“It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over.”
- 1The Dynamo Lesson (Productivity Paradox)Are we bolting AI onto today's organisation, or redesigning the work around it?A general-purpose technology pays off only when work and organisation are redesigned around it, and that takes years; dropping it into the old layout gives little.Open
- 2Amara's LawWhich expectations for this year are inflated, and which long-term changes are we under-preparing for?We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run, so plan for both the hype and the structural change.Open
- 3The Jagged FrontierOn our own tasks, where is AI reliably good, and where does it fail without warning?AI is excellent at some tasks and unreliable at others of similar difficulty — and the boundary is invisible until you test it.Open
- 4Moravec's ParadoxWhich tasks did we assume were easy for AI, and have we tested them on real cases?What is hard for people is often easy for machines and what is effortless for people is often hard, so intuition about which tasks AI will find easy is unreliable.Open
- 5CynefinWhich problems can we analyse and plan, and which need small experiments first?First work out what kind of situation you are in, because clear, complicated, complex and chaotic problems each need a different way of deciding.Open
- 6Automate or ObliterateIf we designed this process today with AI available, would it have these steps at all?Speeding up an old process with new technology mostly preserves its waste; redesign the work around the outcome, using what the technology makes possible.Open
- 7The Algorithm: Question, Delete, Simplify, Accelerate, AutomateWhich steps and requirements can we delete before we automate anything?Make the requirements less dumb, delete what you can, and only then simplify, speed up and automate — in that order.Open
- 8Theory of ConstraintsWhere is the real bottleneck? Speeding up anything else only builds queues.A system's throughput is set by its bottleneck; improving anything else is an illusion.Open