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Vanessa

Welcome to today’s conversation where we are looking at AI readiness for leaders and how they can get on the front foot for their organisations in making the most of AI and addressing any risk concerns they have. 

I’m here with Barry Thomas and Roisin Ryan from Leading Well. Barry has a background delving deeply into AI technologies, both at the CSIRO and at Federal Treasury, where you were an Assistant Secretary.  

And Roisin, you’re bringing another lens from the role that you’ve been playing with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) as an industry Fellow looking specifically at AI ethics and leadership. So it’s really wonderful to get these two perspectives coming together. Why don’t we start by considering how is AI going to be changing organisations.  

Barry 

That is an enormous question Vanessa, I think it’s one of the problems with this topic is that the level of change is going to be pervasive across virtually every organisation across society. It’ll take a while to play out. AI in its various forms is going to change. It’s very hard to think of something that’s not going to change. A big challenge for organisations is how do you manage the rapidity of change so that your business remains stable and resilient and for that matter, your people. 

Vanessa 

Roisin you are used to working with fast growth organisations and Startups, and you have got an international background in helping tech organisations embrace change. It would be interesting to hear your views on how AI is going to affect organisations. 

Roisin 

Like Barry said, there will be a profound impact across organisations and that will vary depending on the role and the area. For some roles that are easily automated, there may be mass redundancies, but on the other spectrum there is going to be roles that are very unlikely to be automated. 

The majority of the roles will fall somewhere in between, where there will be AI to augment performance. If anything, I think the biggest impact will be the growing divide between those who embrace AI and those who do not embrace AI because the research shows that by embracing AI you can be better, more efficient and finish tasks more quickly in your job. 

You’ll start seeing a big disparity and divide between those two. That is where you can see the biggest impact in terms of leadership and just redesigning the organisation more generally. 

Barry 

There is going to be a difficult choice to be made almost daily for leaders. How much AI am I going to bring into the organisation? How much am I going to use it in my daily life? Because while it’s imperfect, and it’ll be imperfect for quite a long time, you’re always facing a trade-off between, is this making me better or is it holding me back? 

You have to be careful about that choice. You can’t ignore it. People who try to use AI for beyond its capabilities right now will waste a lot of their time and money and become less effective. So there is a sweet spot that is critical. That largely comes down to being aware of AI, what it can do and what it can’t do right now and being prepared to change. 

What it can’t do today, is going to be very different from what it can do in six months’ time. 

Vanessa 

That’s really interesting to have a realistic expectation of AI and bringing it into the organisation, understanding in real time what’s safe to expect and what’s too ambitious. Especially when leaders already have so much on their plate. How do they prepare? And how do they avoid being caught? Slow adopters could face even more challenges because they’ve been reluctant to embrace AI. 

Roisin 

The most important thing is to lean into curiosity and get your hands dirty, get involved with some AI tools, understand the power, how they can impact your role. If you want to lead and role model, then you need to be on the tools. That’s the starting place to understand what is available, how that impacts productivity personally, as well as organisationally. 

Barry 

Certainly, for leaders, they need to be at least looking for themselves at how AI can make them better at their jobs because they do need to model active engagement. I think for most organisations, just about everyone is going to have some staff who are very interested in AI and probably already using it to a degree. You want to support your early adopters, encourage as many of your staff as possible to become early adopters and model early adoption yourself. That helps you understand what AI can and cannot do, but it also gives you that ability to start looking ahead and recognising what is going to be possible at 6 and 12 months. Because one of the problems with AI is it changes the timelines we normally work with in organisations. So, 2 year and even 12-month forward planning becomes quite a lot more difficult.  

A week when you don’t spend some time thinking about AI is probably a week too long. 

Vanessa 

I’ve certainly got some catching up to do myself. We are noticing at Leading Well that when organisations are setting their timelines and looking at their vision and their strategy, they are no longer deluding themselves that they can look 5-10 years out. 

We’ve seen that window reduce and reduce. And its important to allow for the unknown and the emergent in all of this and how much is going to be unplanned along the way. 

For leaders that haven’t yet really connected with AI, where does it begin? What’s the starting point? 

Barry 

You really need to make some well-reasoned decisions. There’s personal awareness which is about just using mainstream tools for your own purposes. But you’re also need to develop your organisational talent to investigate what is possible. 

What might work with AI? Are there areas where AI can benefit us? Also to look outward as to the threats from competitors or other organisations who may be adopting AI faster or differently. What risks does that expose us to? Ideally you need some kind of a map that includes the risks and benefits of taking a variety of strategies. 

Before you can do that, you’ve got to have the staff in-house who have the knowledge to be able to help you. They’re going to climb a learning curve individually while the organisation climbs a learning curve and comes up with a menu of options that ideally the leaders can then look at and go, well, yes, I understand the concept here because I’ve been engaged with it myself and therefore I can start making informed decisions about the advice I’m getting.  

Vanessa 

Like any change, there needs to be a planned and collective approach to looking at AI and how it’s going to change things. Róisín, I know you’ve dived quite deep into the ethics of AI. 

Roisin 

To add onto Barry’s comments, the first step is to demystify AI. Leaders need to be confident about what it is before they then role model that to the rest of the organisation. But really, and equally important, is their responsibilities around AI. Like any technology, there are unintended consequences. 

There are known consequences and it’s incumbent upon leaders, particularly when they’re thinking about the risks across the organisation, how AI will impact. That speaks to the fairness and bias within models and that also speaks to transparency and explainability. It speaks to data privacy and protection and data ownership and IP ownership. 

There’s a whole raft of risks that come to the forefront when AI systems are in play and leaders must understand and know what they are. 

Barry 

There’s one additional point when involving as many of your staff as possible, and its one of the core risks of AI. AI integration is going to bring fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). It’s people who might assume that they’re going to lose their job or bad things will happen. They don’t really understand what it is, so they assume it’s bad news. The more people can get involved with the planning, and the forward thinking around AI in your organisation, the more confident they’re going to be that they’re part of the future of the organisation. 

That’s critical because change inherently creates uncertainty and it lowers morale and decreases creativity. If anything is going to create uncertainty, it’s going to be AI because we’re going to be seeing more and more headlines and changes across many parts of society. Part of the key to maintaining a resilient organisation is making sure that your employees retain a strong sense of inclusion. They’re part of the process, they’re not being displaced by the process. 

A practical example I had just a few days ago was my wife who works at a senior level in warehouse management. She came home saying that she needed to create a governance plan for a big warehouse implementation in a sector she had never worked in before. She knew the broad bones of what needed to happen, but the specifics were new to her. The problem was she needed that governance plan by the following day. With a bit of care and constructing the prompt and knowledge of the tools, we were able to get a very robust and complete governance plan for her in 15 minutes. Now, that was very good for her, decreased her stress level, but it also means that anyone else that she’s working with that can’t move at that pace would find themselves suddenly not good enough for their jobs.  

Roisin 

What you’re saying is that your wife’s output will become the norm, and so that will become the benchmark which performance is measured against. We will see shifting benchmarks that are quite stressful, but potentially good for individuals and the organisation. 

Barry 

That’s absolutely true because there is a big mental shift that we all have to make towards understanding that knowing stuff is going to be much less important than it used to be. And a lot of people build their careers around the fact that they have knowledge that others don’t. 

AI is knowledge as a service. You can just tap it and get the answer to virtually any question. What we bring to the table becomes much more about our people skills, awareness, and creativity.  

AI basically gives us the answer to any question. The new skill set that becomes critical is figuring out what questions to ask. It’s curation, saying what am I going to spend my time on? AI can enable you to do anything. For many people, that will be a big shift because a lot of their day-to-day work is demonstrating their expertise they may have built up over decades, and it will no longer matter that much. 

Vanessa 

That is quite mind blowing when you think about the investment so many of us put into our subject matter expertise. We’ve navigated these changes before with organisations where subject matter experts inside the company have been asked to operate more as coaches, to enable and partner and not just give answers, but somehow transfer that ability to find the right questions. 

And in many ways, the same principles apply. Much of what we base our humanity on is somehow under question when you look at what AI is capable of, particularly with areas like this where it’s suddenly much easier and much faster for AI to be able to produce what might have taken us years and years to master. 

So I’m wondering about how this changes our very concept of humanity. 

Roisin 

It’s interesting, and to Barry’s point earlier around the FUD feelings around AI. I think people really gravitate towards the concept of intelligence, and that’s scary, but we really need to be very clear that these are mathematical models. They don’t have human intelligence, and there is still a lot of humanity in the process of integrating AI. 

The data itself will have human fingerprints all over it in terms of human prejudice that’s often included in data. When you think of human bias, all of these things are actually in the mathematical models, the data that’s feeding those models. There’s humanity in that process that we need to be mindful of and not assume that those responses or answers are perfectly correct because humans have really fed that data. 

Similarly, when we think about the impacts of AI, it still falls upon humans as to how they go about answering or responding to those decisions that need to be made. For example, if there are redundancies, will you reinvest those savings into the workforce, or will you take them out as cost savings? These are all very human decisions and there’s still, I would argue, a lot of humanity in this process. That is why it’s imperative and is even more incumbent upon leaders to really understand it and that is to understand their own personal responsibility, as well as the organisational responsibility by introducing these systems. 

Vanessa  

I’m heartened to hear that because that is really what connects us is our humanness. When that’s seriously under question, it can have all kinds of effect on how people are feeling, on morale, on motivation to deliver and be their best at work. It’s really striking to me that if leaders have put some forethought into this and can be on the front foot to explain to employees that they have a plan to incorporate AI, I’m hoping that a lot of that FUD can be minimised. 

Roisin 

It’s absolutely critical that leaders are having these conversations. We’ve learned from previous tech waves that leaders need to be clearly messaging. They need to understand the impacts on themselves as well as the impacts on the organisation and role modelling this, being very clear and expressing a view to bring back the humanity in the process, explaining how they’re going to make these decisions and particularly around the impacts that AI presents. 

Vanessa 

What’s popping up for me is what does good AI leadership actually look like? 

Barry 

To me, the core issue is that AI at every level is going to make people challenge their sense of value. They’re all going to be questioning, how do I add value now that AI can do so many things? But the reality is, there’s going to be almost no organisation that can magically flick a switch and get rid of all their people and just run with robots. We’re going to have to deal with people for a long time to come. It’s incumbent upon leaders to manage their own FUD and do everything they can to support their people, so their business continues to operate.  If you just let it go, we’re definitely going to have morale problems, a lot of concern, and stress. And the businesses that let it go are not going to be performing well under their peers that do things more proactively. 

Vanessa  

It’s really great to emphasise that if leaders can deal with their own FUD first… it’s the same oxygen mask analogy all over again, isn’t it? 

I know both of you are passionate about helping leaders to do that. If they can just get that little bit ahead collectively as leadership teams, they can communicate to staff… yes, we’re already onto this and we’ve thought about that and we’re working on it. That’s going to reduce a lot of the anxiety in organisations as this change starts to escalate. 

Roisin 

I think you’ve raised a really important point because there is both the personal responsibility and that’s really the demystifying AI for yourself personally, increasing your own productivity, understanding the tools. But I really loved what you said about that collective leadership because everyone must be on the same page around their own organisational responsibility and how they’re going to manage the decisions. There will be tough decisions and trade-offs to be made. So being super clear on that from the get-go is incredibly important, and that should always be tied back to the organisational values. There should be a very clear link between that, and that can’t be done in isolation. That must be done collectively across the leadership team. 

Vanessa 

I think that will go a long way to settling some of the belonging disruption that AI can introduce, because part of that FUD is the fear of being replaced by machine technology. It will be incumbent upon the leaders to decide what place does AI have? It’s not a human place, it’s a technology place. If staff are expressing concerns, anxiety, and fears, I think we’re going to see psychosocially more and more of that emerging. The sooner leaders can give AI a place, an explainable place, so that other people throughout the organisation feel that they can maintain a safe place, the better, as opposed to, is AI threatening my belonging, and will I still belong when AI has fully moved into our organisation? 

Roisin 

I think it’ll be interesting to see what happens here because I completely agree there’ll be a lot of FUD. But I think people will also be really excited about the impacts AI can have on their job as well and their productivity. We need to balance that fear with the opportunity and leaders are in a great position to message that across the organisation. 

Barry 

That points to the need for very active leadership to do things like identify early adopters, those enthusiastic people in your organisation and give them leading roles in lifting up their colleagues. If you’ve got someone who’s going, this is fantastic, look how productive I am, then you want to grab those people and say, all right, teach everyone around you to do the same thing and do that together.  

Vanessa 

This is so vital for the culture of the organisation and it strikes me that’s just as important as the commercial opportunity and the need to maintain commercial relevance with AI. It will be really important for leaders to have their own creative mindset and clarity about how AI is going to transform their organisation.  

 

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