Before the Room is Ready

A number of years ago I asked someone at an AI startup whether their application could replicate wisdom. He looked at me the way you look at a museum curator who has wandered into the wrong building.

Today, information is considered by many to be knowledge. Algorithms are considered by some to possess wisdom. I heard a thoughtful interview once with a former mentor of Mark Zuckerberg's. Two insights stayed with me: the online dissonance AI purposely facilitates, and how much less severe that dissonance was when humans, not algorithms, curated the information. Human wisdom still has a role to play. At least for now.

That conversation hearkened me back to one I'd had years earlier with John Diebold, the futurist who coined the word “automation.” We corresponded for several years, sharing an interest in how technology, people, and capital intersect. I have since added the natural world to that intersection.

This is a pattern I have lived with for most of my working life. Seeing something clearly before the room is ready for it. Being told, more than once, that I think too far ahead and go too deep.

Guilty. How else does change happen.

The bluebird email. The Red Sox. The pipes at Wellesley. None of those were digressions from the work. They were the work, demonstrated in real time.

Because the data point is rarely in the room to tell its own story. It can show what is happening. It cannot always show what it means, or what the room already knows and has not yet said out loud.

The question is not whether leaders and teams should use better tools. They should. The question is whether they can stay human enough to notice what the tools cannot see.

Which path is your organization traveling?