Are We Outsourcing Wisdom to Intelligence and Scaling Dysfunction?

“Same devil, new level.” Dwayne Johnson said this to me often when I was his strategist, helping him embrace new technology and build his presence online.

Nobody has a black belt in navigating the current level of accelerated uncertainty. Somewhere between Dallas, New York and Austin last week, I slowed down just long enough to collect my thoughts on what I’m seeing and hearing.

I also reflected on some of DJ’s words. (Yes, we just abbreviated The Rock there. Efficiency.)

One question kept following me as I was flying home:

Are we outsourcing wisdom to intelligence and accidentally scaling dysfunction?

I had just sat with a room of C-level execs representing Fortune 500 companies who told me, almost in passing, that in some areas they have more problems now than they did before AI. Not despite the rollout. Because of it. Brand new problems stacked on top of the old ones.

Head tilt. Shared almost in passing … like that wasn’t a sentence worth pulling the car over for?

These leaders know hard. Recessions. The pandemic. Organizational change. They climbed the ladder eating healthy tension for breakfast. That experience matters. It doesn’t mean they’re supposed to have a complete answer to every new question this moment creates.

Quick time-out and disclaimer: I’m a tech optimist, rooted in reason. I’ve been saying “the future of technology is the future of humanity” for more than a decade. Tech isn’t good or bad, it’s what we, as humans, decide to do with it … and how to train it. This article isn’t an alarm bell, more of an energetic yellow flag.

I’ve spent the past several weeks speaking with leaders across technology, financial services, real estate, telecom and healthcare. Different industries, different levels of adoption, a truly impressive collection of acronyms.

The tension is between everything they know and everything they’re being asked to figure out. Simultaneously. While keeping the business running and getting their teams to operate radically differently.

The task: Change human behavior. While changing everything around the human. And do it fast. Wall Street is watching and voting daily. Ready? Go.

The fundamentals still apply. Judgment. Humility. Trust. Knowing where we have agency. But a black belt in yesterday doesn’t exempt any of us from being a beginner today.

And right now, we’re rewarding the people who add. I think we need to start rewarding the people who subtract.

 

Scaling Dysfunction

If the plumbing was already broken, AI doesn’t skip the leak. It just runs more water through it, faster.

A process with six unnecessary layers of approvals doesn’t become a brilliant process because AI can prepare and distribute the paperwork in twelve seconds. We can automate the paperwork and have the same argument faster but we still haven’t answered why six people need to approve it?

That question might require someone to give up control. Or admit that the process was designed around a problem that no longer exists. Or acknowledge that nobody feels trusted enough to make a decision without collecting witnesses first.

Those are human conversations. Occasionally expensive ones, even when the conversation itself doesn’t “technically” cost a dollar. Pride has a budget too.

Technology transformation without human transformation is just expensive acceleration without direction.

Of course adopting something this disruptive creates new problems. Some friction means people are experimenting and discovering what needs to change.

But we need enough honesty to distinguish the mess of learning from the mess we’ve just made more efficient. Otherwise, we’re scaling dysfunction and calling it transformation because that sounds better in the budget meeting.

More AI, faster, doesn’t automatically equal more ROI or value. Sometimes it means more output to review, more exceptions to manage and more decisions for someone already drowning in them. Which brings us to the “someone”. A human, not an agent or bot.

 

You Cannot Outsource Wisdom to Intelligence

Trust me. I’ve tried (by accident). I think of AI as an extremely capable new hire with a PhD in every subject on their first day at work and their first day on the planet. We’ve got to keep an eye on ’em. AI actually was born yesterday. (That’s a nod to all the Bluey parents out there. IYKYK.) Or at least your Agent may have been born yesterday. You get the point.

AI. Brilliant help. Still needs context. Still needs someone to check the work and own what happens next. Still needs checks and balances in the form of wisdom and real-world experience of actually walking the planet.

AI can help us examine a decision, challenge an assumption and see possibilities we missed. I use it for all of those things. But a beautifully articulated answer doesn’t relieve me of the responsibility to decide whether it makes sense.

Wisdom includes asking whether we’re solving the right problem. Whose perspective we haven’t considered. What happens after the immediate goal is achieved.

And sometimes: why am I so eager to accept this answer?

At a healthcare conference in New York last week, a man in the audience asked whether I’d ever caught myself using AI for something I didn’t actually need it for.

Yes. Immediately, embarrassingly, yes.

For example, a thought I could have stayed with longer before circling the AI wagons. Something that needed my original judgment, and there I was, handing it over before I’d even tried.

Sometimes I want help. Sometimes I want relief from deciding. Those can look remarkably similar when I’m tired.

The human work includes deciding what deserves to be produced. Being humble enough to say, “I don’t know yet.” Asking someone to challenge the answer we were hoping to hear.

Including someone with an actual pulse.

Confidence, for me, comes from competence and community. Doing the thing, learning from it and having people around me who can catch what I miss.

Especially when the pace makes a confident answer feel like somewhere to put my brain down.

 

The Human Speed Limit

In our heads, we’re running. The headlines are running. ‘The Race’ is heard, seen and felt. The expectations have purchased a jet pack.

Inside a large organization, integrating new capabilities into real systems, with compliance requirements and people who need to change how they work, can still look a lot like crawling.

Both can be happening at once.

You’re doing difficult work and still feeling behind because the comparison keeps moving. Before you’ve absorbed one change, there’s another capability to understand. Another prediction about your company or your role.

We’re accelerating everything except our ability to process what acceleration is doing to us.

And I don’t get to observe this from a comfortable distance. Apparently spending your professional life talking about human capacity doesn’t grant you an exemption from being human. I checked.

Between these trips, AI helps me on every level. Useful help as both a productivity tool and thought partner. I also want to notice whether the time I get back ever reaches me. Or whether I immediately spend it on another obligation.

More, faster ≠ better. Pause, think, reprogram.

It’s not Artificial Intelligence vs. Wisdom.

The better combo: Wisdom + AI + Wisdom.

Bookend AI with human logic and experience.

Out in the wild, I’m feeling a low- to medium-grade anxiety that’s moving up and to the right. It’s accelerated noticeably compared with 3–6 months ago. Even the expert technologists are admitting the advancements of AI are happening much faster than they predicted.

In my defense (it’s odd to type those words on a quiet screen), on the Kolbe assessment, I’m a ten in Quick Start. Moving before I have every piece of data is familiar territory, often useful in business and occasionally a very expensive personality feature. I’m not known for waving yellow flags.

But judgment requires room to think critically. Sometimes a decision is reversible and safe enough to try immediately. Sometimes the consequences deserve more thought than we’re giving them.

Same person. Different stakes. Different pace.

DJ puts it this way: “Success at anything will always come down to this: focus and effort. And we control both.”

Which raises a slightly inconvenient question: where are we putting ours?

We can work extraordinarily hard at something that no longer needs to happen. Focus requires choosing what deserves our attention. And having the nerve to stop giving it to everything else.

 

Producers and Reducers

We’re adding quicker than we’re editing.

New tools. New capabilities. New expectations. New meetings to discuss the new capabilities and expectations. (Sounds ridiculous but I know you can relate.)

We tell people to learn AI, experiment, rethink their workflows and maintain their performance. Then we leave every existing obligation in place.

Same reporting. Same approvals. Same standing meetings.

That’s addition. We’ve assigned a second job and named it productivity.

Where is the capacity supposed to come from?

I’m asking literally. Which hours? What can someone stop doing without getting in trouble?

We celebrate Producers. We also need to celebrate and elevate Reducers. The people willing to remove what no longer earns its place.

The Reducer: A person, usually a Renegade, who asks whether the report needs to exist. Who retires an approval. Who notices that three teams are generating different versions of the same thing and suggests one shared source.

Subtraction can take more courage than addition. Adding something gives us an announcement. Removing something may require a conversation with the important person who invented it.

I had a conversation recently about how sacred one-on-ones and staff meetings can become inside a company.

Some are where trust gets built and problems surface. Some are where a manager catches what a dashboard won’t.

Others are there because it’s Tuesday, and apparently Tuesday has tenure. We have to be able to tell the difference.

If we’re going to be ruthless about the race, we must be ruthless about our priorities.

And when someone creates capacity, what do we do with this asset? (Human talent gold.) People learn from that answer too.

Where can we delete, delegate and divest?

The same applies to investment. AI capital expenditures are through the roof but what are we divesting from? Which projects, services or products deserve to be sunsetted, beyond headcount?

 

The Bravery Economy

Because reducing work requires permission to question it.

And experimenting requires some confidence that an imperfect first attempt won’t become Exhibit A in your next performance review.

I think we’re entering a bravery economy. Organizations need people willing to raise a hand, question an assumption and try something before the full answer is available.

Maybe leaders need to start giving tokens to the Renegade hand-raisers and figure-it-outers. Shall we make bravery and curiosity a new currency?

Everyone on the team is watching to see what happens to the first person who tries. Is the newly declared and expected behavior being rewarded?

You can’t demand bravery from a culture that punishes the first failed experiment. You can request it. You can put it in a presentation. But people have memories and they’ll use those before they use your new culture framework, especially if their job is at risk.

If the person who challenges an unnecessary process gets labeled difficult, everyone else learns to keep processing. If every experiment gets added to an already impossible workload, people learn that raising their hand earns them another job.

Bravery needs somewhere to land, at least briefly, because it’s a trampoline. Otherwise, it’s a trap.

“The desire to succeed will never be as powerful as having the guts to fail.”

That line from DJ gets more interesting inside an organization. Everybody wants the successful experiment. What happens to the person whose experiment teaches us something expensive?

We ask employees to have the guts to fail. Do their leaders have the guts to let them?

It’s relatively easy to encourage courage in the abstract. Much more interesting when somebody exercises it in your direction.

Same devil, new level.

 

The Questions I’m Taking Into the Next Room

I don’t have a tidy ‘ta-da’ all figured out for you. None of us do. I’m still on the road, still figuring this out, still getting good at catching myself before reaching for AI when a thought of my own deserves another minute.

But I know what I want to ask the next leader who tells me they can’t afford to slow down.

What, exactly, are you speeding up? Has it earned the right to be accelerated?

And then:

• Have we identified the right problem to solve?
• Are we improving the work or helping a flawed process produce more?
• What judgment are we asking AI to support and who owns the consequences?
• If you had one day to identify the top 10% of your talent whose judgment you trust most, could you?
• What can we delete, delegate or divest from (beyond headcount)?
• What happens to the first person who says, “This isn’ working”?
• Are your direct reports playing to win or playing not to lose?

I’m including myself in those questions. It’s much less comfortable from this side of them.

Back to those executives. More problems than before. That admission gives us somewhere honest to start, if we can resist rushing past it on our way to the next solution.

If the plumbing is broken, eventually someone has to find the leak.

Let’s do that before we celebrate how much faster the water is moving because we can’t ignore that in some cases, the water level is rising.

Same devil, new level.

Ajo