Overcoming concerns with disruption

At a recent client meeting, a senior leader asked: “How do we direct disruption?” Their concern was clear. Unplanned disruption would bring chaos and confusion across the business, perhaps even changing the business that they knew. They feared that work which had taken years to progress would be replaced or become redundant.

Their question implied that disruption could be constrained and directed. That it could be applied to specific items but excluded from others. Personal projects would be protected, and sacred processes preserved.

The debate swung between allowing specific teams to change certain aspects of their business but preventing them from touching other parts. Then there was talk on how to govern disruption. Mentioned were reporting lines, management teams, review meetings, and controlling bodies. All of these were focused on the administration rather than the delivery of change.

That’s not very disruptive, is it?

Self-disruption: thinking outside of the box

It’s a fact that most market leaders experience disruption when it is imposed upon them rather than being internally generated.

There are many stories of small start-ups eager to carve out a market share with a big new idea. Their success is in part due to thinking disruptively but also by their larger competitors refusing to think differently.

For many years, the music industry refused to move into digital distribution to preserve their existing business model and revenue. The result was digital companies securing the market.

Microsoft is one of the few large businesses in recent years to self-disrupt, changing its entire business from mission through to execution. We have moved to focus on new problems and new ways of resolving those problems.

So how should leaders manage disruption?

Microsoft’s experience at self-disrupting can provide help.

1. Focus on being a relevant organisation

Any successful business understands its relevance within a market. Relevance is not defined by an organisation alone. It must be agreed and shared with customers, partners, suppliers and, to an extent, competitors.

A clear understanding of organisational relevance, expressed through mission and purpose, is critical in helping an entire organisation to focus disruptive thinking. Leaders need to find time to develop, share and promote their organisation’s relevance to guide disruption.

2. Challenge totems and taboos at all levels

Totems are answers that cannot be questioned. Taboos are questions that cannot be asked. Too many organisations drive their mission and business by avoiding totems and taboos. The organisation then heads down existing routes and repeats patterns of behaviour. The result is a disruption that addresses minor symptoms yet never addresses the significant issues.

Leaders need to encourage the challenging of totems and taboos, and a leader’s role should be to help their teams remove the blockages created by totems and taboos.

3. Embrace ideas by starting with the problem, not the solution

Too much internal disruptive thinking begins with the solution or product, usually something that the team has developed without really having a problem to solve. The result is shoehorning products into irrelevant issues or addressing every challenge with the same process.

Disruption must be problem-driven, and teams should focus on addressing the problem rather than building a solution. Leaders should clarify and prioritise the issues to be addressed and energise their teams to think differently about resolving those issues.

Creating positive disruptive

Only when an organisation has addressed its totems and taboos with a focus on solving problems will it create a platform for a disruption that empowers change rather than chaos. Remember:

Disruptive leaders create and enable this relevant platform to exist and flourish.

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About the author

Tony Reeves brings over 25 years digital expertise working in Public Safety and National Security. He inspires teams to envision their desired future, prioritising value and alternative solutions to eliminate roadblocks and accelerate success. His role as a digital leader focuses on ethical AI implementation and exploiting the value of information within organisations.

The post How to get comfortable with disruption appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

A great CEO creates the environment for their team, their company, and their partners to succeed by making and influencing thousands of decisions. Some, like a decision to merge with a rival, will be huge and complicated with multiple decision makers. Others, like booking travel to make an important meeting on time, will be delegated. Many, like choosing the right corporate culture, will shape how others will make their own critical decisions.

One of these decisions, often done in partnership with other decision makers such as a CTO, or CIO is when to bring technology into business. Whether it’s from an operational or customer experience point of view, you should look at the outcomes you want to achieve before you look at the tools you need to complete this. In our deep dive into the state of the UK’s AI scene, ‘Accelerating the competitive advantage with AI‘, we revealed that just 8% of businesses consider themselves as advanced AI users – yet it’s precisely this technology that can help CEOs make the decisions for their business.

Why should a CEO consider AI?

AI has great potential to bring the people in your organisation together. It extends your capabilities, frees up time to be more strategic and innovative and helps your organisation achieve more. The appeal of AI to decision makers is that it simplifies and reduces the number of decisions that we make. It even has the potential to provide better recommendations.

On average, humans forget 80 percent of their teaching. When pressured to make decisions, humans regularly choose the approach that they have previously employed. In contrast, AI remembers all that it has previously encountered. It constantly updates its decisions based on the most recent data.

We are already seeing AI use this ability to remember, recall, and revolutionise to succeed in computer and board games. In those cases, AI is rapidly learning the rules of the game and developing new strategies previously not considered by humans.

At the same time, AI is learning to infer more information from incomplete information that it encounters. Microsoft’s Semantic AI^[1] demonstrates a fluid conversation between a machine and human, where the AI is determining the subject of conversation from relationships, partial names, and appointments.

In both of these cases, the human receives the output (a perfect winning game strategy or a team meeting set up at the right time and place) yet do not immediately view the evidence or steps creating that output.

These advances could tempt a CEO to replace their board with ever smarter AI. Why have a Chief Security Officer when AI can immediately address security risks? If AI has already predicted the optimum cost model and reorganised the finance structure during the discussion, why review financial performance? Is there a point to even having a discussion?

The importance of ethics in AI

Microsoft is both excited and nervous by these advances. Excited, as we can empower more people and organisations to achieve more across the planet. Nervous, as we believe that AI should provide insight and transparency into how it has arrived at an output and that process should be shared with humans making the decision. We are not seeing this happen. When AI recommends a course of action for a critical decision, the decision maker must understand how that decision was made. A CEO needs to be able to scrutinise the recommendations from an AI Advisor in the same way that they will analyse and probe recommendations from a human advisor.

This suggests a case to run competing AI advisors simultaneously. We are seeing humans increasingly reliant on the artificial recommendation, for instance following a satnav on a daily commute. We immediately see the catastrophic results when this goes wrong with faulty autopilots on aircraft. For business decisions, the consequences are usually slower to appear and, therefore, harder to attribute to a single poor AI recommendation. We need to be better advised, not better delegated.

By using multiple competing AI recommendations, we reduce the amount of bias from a single system trained in a specific way, with specific data. Variety of thought is introduced back into the decision-making process. We reduce the risk of a catastrophic error from a single system. We stop lazy delegation to machines.

 Most crucially, we put the human at the decision point.

Deciding between great recommendations and assessing relative benefits is where humans excel and is the essence of a successful team. AI offers an option for a CEO to remove the board and rely upon just a single AI advisor. Instead, we should be employing AI in the board room to improve the options for consideration rather than replace the decision makers.

AI powers human ingenuity

We need to think about how we use AI in the boardroom. Rather than creating one single AI, we will probably need competing and different AI advisors looking at the same problems. This will provide a true balance of choice. The alternative is an ever-risky reliance on single points of decision with people unaware of the decision process. One artificial brain is good. Two or more is even better.

But what’s important to remember is that AI is a tool for us to use. AI advisors will be able to give us insights, or suggestions. But it’s up to us to make sure we have humans to make those decisions. AI crunches data and helps us form our strategy. It’s the humans who have the insight and the soft skills to help organisations reach their potential.

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About the author

Tony Reeves brings over 25 years digital expertise working in Public Safety and National Security. He inspires teams to envision their desired future, prioritising value and alternative solutions to eliminate roadblocks and accelerate success. His role as a digital leader focusses on ethical AI implementation and exploiting the value of information within organisations.

[1] https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=microsoft+semantic+ai&&view=detail&mid=074A843F792AF0DCB7E2074A843F792AF0DCB7E2&&FORM=VRDGAR

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