AI & The Quest for Individual & Organizational Purpose

New technologies often unleash a series of existential questions.? Individuals wrestle with purpose and meaning as they simultaneously look to experience and explore the new horizons that tech opens.? In most cases, this has involved how we humans look at work (will we have the new skills required; are our jobs going away?) and leisure (will our jobs become easier and our work weeks shorter?).?? But what questions are organizations asking themselves??

Tech as a Tool

Conversations about technology are often framed by the desire to become more productive and efficient.? Questions such as : “How can these tools make us more productive?” and “How can we do more with less?” dominate.? Why is that?? Well – productivity is what we measure.? It’s how we measure our economy: GDP per hour worked or per unit of capital is the primary determinant of the standard of living we enjoy.? It’s how we measure companies and whether they are healthy and worthy of investment: a higher level of productivity grows profits and earnings per share.? It is what we appear to value above all – increase productivity and you unleash profit.? And, after all, no less than Milton Friedman stated that “an entity's greatest responsibility lies in the satisfaction of the shareholders.”?

The latest round of AI-based tools is being hailed first and foremost as tools that will help us become more productive, at the individual, organizational, and societal level.? And I would certainly acknowledge that we need a productivity breakthrough in many industries; however, a reductionist vs. abundance view could turn AI into a productivity weapon inside of our organizations with the goal of ‘proving’ who is and is not more productive at the unit level.? It turns out that many of us are aware that this is exactly what is happening – and we don’t like it.? In an intriguing Forbes report 40% reported that their employer is measuring their active time on their computer, 32% had their chats monitored, and 50% had their active work hours measured ( those of us who do a lot of creative work via old-fashioned pen/pencil & paper or whiteboard work must look like total slackers!).? 43% of workers felt this surveillance negatively affected the overall spirit and culture within the company.? And a recent Wired article reports that, so-called “bossware” is on the rise with a quarter of the tools available introducing ever more invasive features.?

Is this the message we want to send at a time where AI is rapidly transforming the way work is done, and individuals are wrestling with where the personal risk/benefit is for them?? Is productivity really the number one lever for a healthy organization?

Purpose and the Individual

In my last blog I talked about the intrinsic need of humans to activate purpose and meaning through work.? When ManpowerGroup surveyed 5,000 frontline workers in 5 countries about what was important to them at work, flexibility and opportunity for career progression led the list.? 70% said they wanted to find meaning in their daily work and 64% wanted their work to contribute positively to society.? At no point did anyone reference ‘productivity’ as a galvanizing purpose.? In fact, I think it is fair to say that the best way to look at productivity on the individual level is that it allows them to better activate on their mission & purpose.? That said, organizations should not make the assumption that individuals use these tools to put their extra discretionary time on the market for their employers to use as they see fit.? Put another way, individuals see their outputs (vs. their hours) as the true measure of their effectiveness, and not as a way to free up more time for their employers to unilaterally repurpose toward more tasks.? Consider that discretionary time provides a space for creation, imagination, human interaction, and ambition.? That’s the horizon organizations want to touch.? The art will be in how organizations get access to it.?

The Purpose of an Organization

One of the most frequently cited definitions of a business's purpose was offered to us by the management guru, Peter Drucker: "The purpose of business is to?create and keep a customer.”? It has endured because of its elegant simplicity.? Creating and keeping a customer implies a relentless focus on anticipating what customers want (innovation), balanced with providing ongoing customer delight through effective (and yes!) efficient operations.? It implies that passion is a key ingredient in running an effective business.

Founders and visionaries (think Steve Jobs or Elon Musk) do not generally create winning companies because they are pursuing profit.? Instead, they had a clear mission, vision, and purpose and saw where the market intersected with that passion.? They then found leaders that shared that passion and were incredibly picky about who could help them drive the vision.? Structure, process, and accountability were key – but were essentially “along for the ride” in service of helping them better execute the vision. ?

Complacency in the vision and a relaxation around innovation morphs a company into a machine to drive productivity.? And yet, we have multiple generations of workforce citing purpose as incredibly important at a time when we are implementing tech tools that risk demotivating the workforce as they are viewed as ‘spyware’ or a way to ensure that employers ‘get their fair share’ of an employee’s time.? Wouldn’t a better way be to earn that share of time by deploying tech tools in a way that empowers them and unlocks imagination & innovation??

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Better Questions to Ask

What if what we really need is a new way of answering the question: how do we create a new way to unlock & unleash the potential of an organization given that we now have new tools to do so?? I believe that answering this question well also requires us to answer this one: how do we think about technology as being in service of individual employees and allow them equal stake in the benefits??

Have you invited your teams to describe what THEY think is possible, or are you driven by a productivity-only point of view?? New AI tools should allow us to dream new dreams and have new visions…If organizations want to get access to the time that is unlocked through new generative AI tools (for example) they need to involve individuals in the design.? AI will not benefit the individual or organization if it pushes us farther in the wrong direction (miniscule task management) vs. the mission for which your employees signed up for in the first place.?

The challenge of management has always been in connecting the vision, mission, and purpose through the organization to the individual – much like an orchestra conductor leads individual artists and sections to produce a performance that is a delight to the ears.? In particularly effective organizations, individuals reflect that purpose back to the organization if, and only if, they feel that they are empowered to do so.? At a time when the ability to measure & monitor productivity is more heightened than ever before, we should be asking how AI can be used to better activate passion! ?More than ever, we need to be clear about the purpose of the organization and its vision and how the productivity gains introduced by new tech tools will be reinvested in freeing up talented individuals at the horizon of passion, where imagination, creativity, invention, and effectiveness are activated.? That is the horizon at which we delight the customer, fulfill our purpose, and bring humanity into the center of the AI revolution.

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