Disruption of Generative AI on Structures of Knowledge and Power

I woke up this morning thinking about the foundations of our Organisations, and in particular the structures of knowledge and power that underpin them. And how those foundations are shifting.

This is early stage work, so it may be worth me sharing a few definitions behind ideas:

I talk about ‘Codified Knowledge’, meaning the knowledge that we capture, document, and formally validate, as part of our structured approaches to productivity and effectiveness. One can argue that most of what our formal learning functions deal with is Codified Knowledge.

‘Tacit/Tribal Knowledge’, by contrast, is that which is distributed within our social and tribal structures, and which is validated by the community itself. It’s not necessarily ‘better’ or ‘worse’, although we can probably argue that it’s more dynamic, fluid, and is validated by different mechanisms. It’s a mistake to think that formal and Structural Knowledge is inherently better – it is not – and even when it is, it may have a shorter shelf life.

I find that the best way to consider these things is simply as a broader landscape: we used to rely on Codified Knowledge, but now we can broaden our landscape to include the Tacit and Tribal at scale, if we are willing to adapt to do so.

I talk about ‘Social Collaborative Technologies’, indicating a class of technologies that support, permit, or foster social collaboration, but note that these technologies may be owned by the Organisation, or the community – and that more typically we see diverse ecosystems, where people are fluid in where they engage, and most often do so beyond oversight or control. Or to put it another way, people tend to use Social and Collaborative Technologies not only to work within systems, but to work around their edges too.

I’ve written widely about the new Dialogic Technologies of Generative AI, and increasingly (and in this piece explicitly) I argue that these are an amplifying feature of an existing change. They are pushing into hyper speed a dissolution of the Structurally dominant Organisation that was already a feature, but is now accelerating.

The notion of the Socially Dynamic Organisation I coined for the book of the same name back in 2019, and here I use it to describe our escape from the capture of the old. Indeed, I use the term ‘Escape Velocity’ to indicate the cumulative effects of the liberation, de-centralisation, and distribution of both knowledge and Social Political Power (an interpretation of Social Leadership into a more political context).

So the narrative of the diagram is as follows:

The Structural Organisation has deep foundations of Codified Knowledge: this is not simply archives and records, but also the structures of digital infrastructure, power, hierarchy, and context that surrounds it. This is overall a feature of formal technology and historic conceptions of the vertically segmented – post industrial organisation.

In parallel, we have prolific and proliferating Social Technologies, with a concomitant redistribution of power and expansion of ‘sense making’ community, and now the emergent Generative AI tools and specifically the dialogic systems.

I increasingly see the dialogic systems as paradigmatic, in that they allow for synchronous and distributed synthesis of legacy structures of knowledge. Or to put it another way, they steal out the foundations, by bypassing the walls. And they can inherently operate in permeable ways, with both social and formal knowledge.

There is a core aspect of this in that our Social structures of senes making and learning are inherently and fundamentally iterative, dialogic, distributed, and diagnostic, whereas our legacy structures are trying to adapt – all of this against a backdrop that requires our Organisations to be inherently more adaptive and adaptable, but not as a result of purely structural (and exhausting) change programmes and initiatives.

Indeed, I would argue that increasingly our legacy structures of leadership and change inhibit true adaptation.