AI and the Challenge of Organization Transformation

Complex change of this sort is no small challenge whether it is in the context of a small not-for-profit or a major public corporation. In fact the Holy Grail of organizational change has long been to create sustainable, transformative change in an organization, that is, to enable quantum leaps forward in an organization’s capability to deliver needed products and services and, at the same time, to enrich the quality of life for all those connected with the organization, while simultaneously embedding in the organization the capability for continuous, ongoing development.

Pursuit of rapid, sustainable, and transformative change has spawned a collective effort of almost biblical proportions considering the time, dollars, and energy that organizations have spent on the multitude of initiatives—retraining, reforming, re-culturing, reprogramming, restructuring, reengineering, redesign, merger, acquisition, etc. But attainment of OD’s Holy Grail has been elusive. Short-term gains appear in one area of performance indicators such as productivity or customer satisfaction or employee engagement or market penetration, often at the expense of other indicators. Sometimes the inherent slowness of traditional change processes make organizations vulnerable to yet another shift in the environment or in leadership before the change effort can demonstrate results in even a single sector.

Traditional complex system change efforts all too often leave behind a legacy of cynicism in the organization’s culture which, together with the accompanying loss of energy, make the next effort at change or transformation even more challenging. Yet there is a geometrically increasing demand for people in organizations to shift direction, make more effective use of new technologies, and respond to unpredictable crises in shorter and shorter time frames with fewer and fewer resources. At both the personal and organizational levels, an increasing number of people are floundering in this sea of new demands with consequences that we are just beginning to understand at the societal, community, and family levels. It is within this context, and in response to these challenges, that AI has emerged as a powerful framework that directly addresses the conundrum of “People don’t change unless the organization does and the organization doesn’t change unless the people do.” AI provides consultants and their clients with a new “frame” or a new paradigm for the co-creation of quantum change at both individual and system levels—simultaneously and almost literally at the speed of imagination!