FoHR Ep. 8: AI and HR, Part 1 - A Third Way Between Hype and Fear
About this episode:
Original Air Date: September 18, 2023One midnight scroll through LinkedIn is all it takes to be overwhelmed with AI stories and hot takes. There’s a massive amount of confusion, apprehension, excitement, and just general noisiness to make sense of, some which is created by AI tools themselves. But as more and more AI-powered solutions promising to revolutionize HR flood the market—and as more and more employees spiral with worry that the’ll be automated out of their jobs—how are we supposed to get caught up on some AI basics? Let alone actually use these tools at work?
In this miniseries, Brave New Work’s Rodney Evans is joined by friend-of-the-pod and Ready OG Sam Spurlin to dive into how HR can become more resilient, efficient, and equitable.
Today on episode 8, they explore how AI will help the most advanced HR teams move from Level 4 to Level 5 of our maturity model—and how it can be a positive force for change if we’re asking the right questions and trying to solve the right problems. In fact, Rodney and Sam had so much to digest, this episode became a two-parter.
Downloadable Tools from The Ready:
Mentioned in this episode:
MBTs (“Mission-Based Teams”): FoHR Ep. 1
“The DAO arc”: BNW Eps. 105–107, 109–111, 113–115, 124–125
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Rodney Evans:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to our miniseries, all about The Ready's Future of HR. It is me, Rodney Evans, and my co-host, Sam Spurlin. Hi, Sam.
Sam Spurlin:
It is me, Sam Spurlin. Hello. How's it going?
Rodney Evans:
I just thought you were going to say sassy banter because it's just written in the script.
Sam Spurlin:
I'm saving the sassy banter. I'm saving it. Our script says we're going to do sassy banter upfront. I might throw it in the middle to keep you on your toes. We're going to be all business upfront.
Rodney Evans:
The banter are in the back. Business upfront. Our banter in the middle.
Sam Spurlin:
Mullet Podcast.
Rodney Evans:
Oh, no. Okay. Y'all, Sam and I are silly. It is a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend.
Sam Spurlin:
Sure is.
Rodney Evans:
But it's Episode 8. We're going to talk about AI and how AI can unlock level 5 in the maturity model. This is starting to sound like a sci-fi film in a way that is funny to me. Anyway, let's do a Check-in round first and hopefully by the time we get through that I'll be more grounded in things that are serious.
Sam Spurlin:
Centered and grounded and we'll stop having so much fun.
Rodney Evans:
Yes, stop it.
Sam Spurlin:
Check-in question for you. Rodney, I know you just took some time off, and hopefully many of our listeners have as well over the summer months. What is your favorite evidence that you have had a successful time off?
Rodney Evans:
I'm just going to say the first thing that popped into my mind is just that I'm not such-
Sam Spurlin:
That's how this works. That's how this works
Rodney Evans:
... is that I'm not such an asshole.
Sam Spurlin:
That's my favorite evidence for you too as well actually.
Rodney Evans:
I think it's everybody's. I don't know. I just feel like I was away for almost a month and I did a lot of work the first week, but after that I really didn't. And I just find when I have that much space from work, I come back and I feel quite patient and quite relaxed and spacious and chill. And so, even my internal thoughts are more generous. I just generally feel calm and happy and appreciative and I am trying to hang onto that for as long as possible before I turn back into the monster-
Sam Spurlin:
How long did you got?
Rodney Evans:
... that you love so much. How long do I have?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
I don't know, man. But this year I'm serious about it and I'm really making some life changes to stay vacation Rodney, which is also my actual personality back at work. So forever is the answer, Sam.
Sam Spurlin:
That's cool. All right.
Rodney Evans:
Forever I'm going to be like that.
Sam Spurlin:
I'll hold you to that.
Rodney Evans:
I can't wait. What about you? How do you know it's been a banger?
Sam Spurlin:
My answer is so... I love how thoughtful and real your answer was because here's my stupid answer. I'm thinking like, this is how I know I've had a good weekend, is that you know what Touch ID is on your computer where you use your fingerprint to log in?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, Sam. I am a grownup woman with a laptop.
Sam Spurlin:
I wasn't sure how new your laptop was.
Rodney Evans:
Oh my god. I feel you're like, "Have you ever heard of an iPhone?" Is this ageism?!?
Sam Spurlin:
So I thought you were going to stop being an asshole. What happened? You lasted 45 seconds.
Rodney Evans:
But I don't feel mad about it.
Sam Spurlin:
No. It's about your experience. I got you. I got you.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, exactly. This is not about you. This is about my experience of the interaction.
Sam Spurlin:
Anyway, my Touch ID when I go to log in on Monday, it's like, "Yo, you need to type in your password. It's been too long since I've seen you." And I'm like, "Yes. Yes it is too long since you've seen me. You don't know my fingerprint anymore. I will type in my password." And bonus points for me, if I have to sit for a second and be like, "Password...password..."
Rodney Evans:
"What is it?"
Sam Spurlin:
"Yes, got it." And then I type it in. That's how I know I've had a decent short time off.
Rodney Evans:
Okay, that makes me a little bit sad for you. But you know what? The point of this is not to judge each other's answers. The point of this is that you need longer vacations.
Sam Spurlin:
We should do an Oops, All Check-ins episode someday. You know like the Captain Crunch cereal? It was like all crunch berries. All Check-ins.
Rodney Evans:
Oh. All Check-ins. Yeah, that would be a user manual to meet episode live but with just check-in questions.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
That's fun. I like that idea.
Sam Spurlin:
I'll put that in the old back burner.
Cutting through the AI hype and fear
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, I'll kick us off but I'm probably about to kick us off in a way that you weren't necessarily expecting, but I just wanted to throw this out here because I've been-
Rodney Evans:
Sassy.
Sam Spurlin:
... reading and imbibing lots of AI material for the last many months and I am allergic to the certainty at which everybody is talking about AI right now, especially people who have things to sell you.
Rodney Evans:
True. Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
So can we just lay it out that like, yeah, we're going to talk about AI but we're kind of figuring it out along with everybody else and nobody has the super clear view of what's going to happen with AI and how It's going to develop and how It's going to affect things. So let's not pretend that we have that crystal clear view either.
Rodney Evans:
I love that. I'm 100% on board. And just to add two notes to what you just said, AI has given me two massive realizations that have very little to do with our work. One, the news cycle and particularly platforms like X reward the hottest of hot takes and the most certain of hot takes. The only way to get eyeballs is to be like, "AI is going to murder us all" or to be like, "AI is irrelevant as you were." And It's like, "Y'all, all of it is nonsense." And we should know this from how elections and wars and climate change and everything else goes and yet we don't learn this lesson. But AI to me has been potentially the best example of the way in which social media in particular favors the dumbest, most spicy takes.
Number two is, and this is actually related to The Ready, the wave of AI cometh, obviously, and watching it closely and reading a lot and paying a lot of attention since about last October has really shown me how in org design, that is good org design, urgency for urgency's sake is fucking stupid. The world doesn't only get one chance at this. Your org doesn't only get one chance to do AI. That's just not how complex systems work. And so, I've gotten some poking here and there that's like, "What are we doing about this?" And I'm like, "We are learning about it." And yes, I think there will be a lot of opportunities for our organization and a lot of others and I don't think first in is the most important thing.
So I say this as a backdrop not to give anyone a pass to be ignoring anything because that is definitely not what we're going to talk about today. But I just think the combination of those two things in the public landscape, it actually pushes people into paralysis and being like, "I'm missing it or I've missed it," which you haven't, and it's all or nothing, which it isn't. And so today we're going to have a more nuanced conversation about what's in between.
Sam Spurlin:
I agree with all of that. The only place where I think urgency is probably more allowed is for those very small handful of organizations that are maneuvering to be that platform level foundational technology that other things are going to get built on top of.
Rodney Evans:
True.
Sam Spurlin:
And that is not the vast majority of people and organizations and It's definitely not us. And there's actually downside to picking a winner too early in that race and then suddenly what...your Betamax instead in VHS wins or whatever kind of format war you want to look at from the past. So I think there is benefit from being patient while understanding the forces and the dynamics that are going to be coming into play and are in play so that when it actually makes sense and the market has matured a little bit more, you have a plan. You've already built some chops to go do a thing.
Rodney Evans:
I totally agree. And that has been a little bit of a journey for me in terms of my own self-work, is to not rise to the occasion of people being like, "You're going to miss it and this company is going to eat our lunch" and to just be like, "Let's start testing solutions that solve actual problems that we have. Let's learn by doing things in order to inform our opinions on this" and not just be like, "Here's our hottest fucking take like everybody else's. And here's our webinar. Pay us $300." Like, no, thank you.
Sam Spurlin:
"Here's the playbook for how to install AI in your organization."
Rodney Evans:
Ugh, install the playbook. No thanks.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I hate that.
Rodney Evans:
I hate it.
How Rodney and Sam are personally using AI
Sam Spurlin:
So as additional kind of ramping up into this, I'm curious, what on a personal level have you experienced, have you tried, have you played with? What are your just kind of individual thoughts around AI right now?
Rodney Evans:
Okay. Can I tell you my AI use case that is my most favorite thing to use it for?
Sam Spurlin:
Yes.
Rodney Evans:
But It has nothing to do with work.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
I use it constantly for dream interpretation.
Sam Spurlin:
Love it.
Rodney Evans:
Because obviously, dream dictionaries are analog and not that useful. Searching for dream stuff on the internet, first of all, the websites are pretty wonky. Second of all, you can imagine, you basically have to use the content that's out there to define a bunch of terms and then string together a narrative on your own based on defining through a variety of websites like, "Well, what does snakes mean? And what does the color green mean? And what does darkness mean??" Whatever. And then once you have all of those definitions, be like, "Okay, well if I put this together, what is the gestalt of what It's telling me?" ChatGPT does that.
So if you tell ChatGPT a description of everything you remember about your dream, it will pull together those disparate parts but then it will also create an overarching narrative. And that to me has been a really... First of all, it's fucking so fun and really rad and everyone I've told about it texts me later and is like, "Holy shit!" But secondly, I think that's a good mental model for a way of using it, which is like, if you think about search as being a way to disaggregate and parse, I think about AI as a way to pull together and cohere a bunch of disparate things. And that's how I use it for lots of things, like for collating research and for casting a wide net rather than having to do the synthesis myself.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, what I love about that use case is that dream interpretation doesn't have one right answer, right? So we all know one of the problems with AI right now is that they love to make shit up.
Rodney Evans:
So much.
Sam Spurlin:
And AI will just be so confident like a little kid and be like, "Yeah, this is the answer" and it's not. So I worry sometimes when I see people using ChatGPT or any of the other chat AIs as a Google replacement because it will just hallucinate things. But for something like that where you are trying to synthesize a bunch of things and there's not one right answer and it's really about stimulating your own thinking about a thing, that's a pretty cool use.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And I think that can be applied to work in a lot of cases too where it's like I will often say like, "Okay, show me the most interesting feedback models that have been published in the last 10 years." And It's like, "There's not a right answer, I am looking for synthesis. It is meant to provoke my own thinking. I do have a level of subject matter expertise." That's going to make me a pretty good filter of what I get and what in there is nonsense, but yeah, that's sort of the loop I'm in. I would love to hear your answer to your own question too.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, it's actually I think similar-ish. So primarily, interacting with ChatGPT and not some of the other chatbots, I've done a little bit with the image generation specifically, Midjourney. But on the writing, on the text space side, so two different things, one is basically eliminating the blank page syndrome of writing.
Rodney Evans:
Yes. Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
Like, "Just give me some high level things to think about as it relates to this topic" just to start giving me some structure and something to start riffing with. That has been interesting. And then the other thing has been the other side of it like, "All right. Here's the thing that I know a lot about. I'm going to give you a lot of context. What am I missing from this?" Sometimes it does surface things that I've missed.
And then the example that your example made me think of is something I just did a couple of days ago. I was playing with this idea of the law of requisite variety called Ashby's Law, which comes from cybernetics, it has org design applications. So I was just like, "Hey, apply the law of requisite variety to organization design." I had to do a couple iterations on that. And then I guess straight up didn't really know if I had an answer to, "Well, what if you apply it to this other thing that I've been thinking about around personal development and the idea of complex personal development? Is there a connection between law of requisite variety and this other thing?" And it came up with some stuff that I thought was actually quite good and now gives me some rabbit trails to go down that I don't know that I necessarily would have on my own. So it's not like I'm just taking it like, "Oh ChatGPT said it's true," but it got me thinking in a new way or help me see connections between two things that I didn't know were actually connected.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, it is like a really good brainstorming partner.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. In ChatGPT now, you can give it a persistent description. Or I don't know what their exact phraseology around it, but basically you can give it directions that it will just keep permanent all the time so it knows that I work for a company called The Ready that does organization design, boutique consultancy. It knows I want relatively short answers. And I told it to act like a curious and competent colleague. So it has started asking me follow-up questions on the ends of things that it gives me and it is legit kind of helpful.
Rodney Evans:
That's amazing. I love that.
How to experiment with AI in a Mission-Based Team
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Okay, cool. I feel like now we're-
Rodney Evans:
We're in it?
Sam Spurlin:
I wanted to just centered and I wanted to better understand what your AI experience has been so far. So now I think we can dive into some org stuff, HR maturity model thinking.
Rodney Evans:
Let's do it.
Sam Spurlin:
Let's do it.
Rodney Evans:
Where do you want to start?
Sam Spurlin:
I mean, I guess we're on level 5, right?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Or level 4? Level 5?
Rodney Evans:
Level 5, man.
Sam Spurlin:
It's been awhile.
Rodney Evans:
But are we going to wait until level 5 to be experimenting with AI, Sam?
Sam Spurlin:
Oh yeah, you have to wait until level 5 because you can't do anything with AI until you officially get the certificate from The Ready about being level 5 ready and then we give that to you, and then you're allowed to start researching AI.
Rodney Evans:
Someday we should have a certificate for something.
Sam Spurlin:
Probably should. We should.
Rodney Evans:
I want one.
Sam Spurlin:
No, everything I just said right there was utter horseshit.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
What you should do is now be thinking about AI. And not even just thinking about AI but experimenting with AI. Everything you and I just talked about were personal experiments we're running on the tool to just better understand what is this thing even good for. Like if someone hands you a hammer for the first time, you could analyze it forever or you can just go start hitting stuff.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. We now have had a few hundred of you take the assessment. The vast majority of orgs are sitting around Level 2, which is no surprise to us. The second most are in Level 1. So the idea here is to move from Level 1 or Level 2 to Level 3, which is where we start experimenting with MBTs and separating out persistent work and putting that into a platform.
I have been talking to folks about the fact that an MBT is a wonderful container to do some AI experimentation because a lot of the very quick roadblocks to AI are someone, for example in HR, saying, "I'm interested in testing a tool that might have a predictive hiring capability or that might be able to aggregate LinkedIn search in a different way or whatever" and then immediately it's like, "I don't know about tech. I don't know if IT will let us do that and security and blah blah blah." And so it's like there is no way to experiment with this very, very nascent technology in an organization without doing it cross-functionally. There just isn't. So It's a great place to do a tightly scoped mission to explore and test and learn from a tool that solves a real problem for you.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. And I think the only kind of lookout to share on that is say make sure the MBT is actually doing something and not just researching a thing.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. Not just researching.
Sam Spurlin:
I think it's always tempting to just be like, "Hey we're going to go learn about a thing and then we can give you a report, our recommendations." You can do that in addition to, "Hey, here's actually some stuff we tried too and what we learned from that" because I think there's so much that you can only get from actually starting to get your hands dirty with whatever it is that you're going to be exploring.
Rodney Evans:
I totally agree. And it doesn't have to be a standalone MBT, right? Like if we are running an MBT that is about a new approach to performance management that we want to try this quarter or a new approach to feedback, we can be using AI for a lot of the things that you and I have already talked about in this episode. I used it very recently. Will and I were creating a skills matrix for The Ready and we fed it tons of information and it solved the blank page problem for us. It was not perfect, but it gave us a starting point that was pretty good. In the course of that same project, I aggregated a ton of research to look at that would've taken me hours and hours and hours to parse through. And so, what that real mission-based team was about was creating a leveling framework that was useful and deployable within The Ready and testing that quickly and iterating it quickly within a small pilot group that's the overarching mission. But we used AI as a part of that mission in a way that was pretty cool and pretty effective.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I love that. And that made me think of another use that I have experimented with a little bit, which is telling an AI, telling ChatGPT about a thing or feeding it some sort of argument and then asking it to steel man the other side.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
"Give me all the reasons this isn't going to work. Be as forceful and as direct as possible, but why this thing I just told you is bad." And then that is super valuable when you're trying to figure out, "What is it that we're doing here and is this actually any good?"
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm assuming that a lot of people listening have done some of their own experimentation. But just in case you haven't, the thing that is to me even at this moment really revolutionary is the fact that you can be in a conversation with this tool. It's not like other situations where even if you were able to Google a framework, which that falls apart pretty quickly, but even if you were able to, you can't look at it and go, "Oh, shit. I forgot facilitation is one of the skills that should be on here. Add facilitation." That is the beauty of this thing is that you can be in an ongoing iteration where you're asking for generation, but then you're doing refinement and being like, "Now collapse it to three levels. Now make it 10 levels. Now tell me what this is like. Now add this thing. Now put it against market comp." And that's the magic, is being in the back and forth.
Sam Spurlin:
And it does not require any technical ability.
Rodney Evans:
No.
Sam Spurlin:
Which is I think one of the huge things here because people-
Rodney Evans:
It's good because I don't have much.
Sam Spurlin:
You know what a Touch ID button is though, so it should give you more credit.
Rodney Evans:
Give me a certificate.
Why the barrier to start experimenting with AI is so low
Sam Spurlin:
The reason I bring that up is because people have been pointing to this AI moment then comparing it at least in the HR space to the creation of relational databases. So that was a big deal when those were invented and became a thing and became huge pieces of software that we use in organizations now.
But if you weren't technical, you weren't going to go play with a relational database or even before that. So early days of the internet, people are comparing like, "Oh, this AI moment is the beginning of the internet." Only super nerds were ones playing with the internet in 1994 or earlier. And that is not the case right now. All you have to do is go log in, make an account, and start typing to an AI and you can start interacting with it. So if there's anybody out there who has been reticent to start experimenting because they think they don't know how to get started, I promise you there is no technical expertise needed to start playing with it now.
Rodney Evans:
I feel like something I've been thinking a lot about is that because we're humans and we are capacity for knowing is finite and our desire for sense-making and storytelling is massive, that particularly in the complex systems we work in, but certainly as the world turns faster and there's increasing complexity, the limitations and the natural output of the fact that we are human beings steering a thing, is the simplification and the synthesis of what's going on. So in a example-
Sam Spurlin:
It's like a survival mechanism almost.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly. Exactly. In an example like the one that you gave, and we say this in companies all the time, it's like you go to your board meeting as the C-suite and for the quarter you put together a PowerPoint deck that has bullet points with sub-bullet points to explain what has happened. But It's very limited by human cognition and understanding and data and everything else. And I just think that there's a world coming where we won't have to do that and where we could just know a lot more and have a lot more richness without actually having to personally sensemake and understand and dig into minutiae.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I completely agree. And the thing that is going to be a bit... The word I want to use is mindfuck, but I'm going to say another one just in case we don't want to use that one.
Rodney Evans:
Okay.
The counterintuitive moves AI requires
Sam Spurlin:
The thing that is going to be hard to wrap our minds around is that some early AI research was really focused on giving AI games to figure out. So Go, chess, StarCraft, which is near and dear to my heart. You give an AI a game because games have clear rules and you can tell whether or not you're winning the game or learning the game. One of the things that happened pretty quickly I think across all of these games is that, first of all, it very quickly became very good at most games. And then second, it would make moves that seemed stupid, seemed wrong, but inevitably they would end up developing the game and they would win.
So the reason they seem stupid is that it was not using it kind of human constructs, human principles for how to play the game. It was really from first principles figuring out how to play the game. Well, what is that going to look like or feel like in our organizations when AI start doing things or telling us things that don't necessarily jive with our interpretation of it.
One of those knock-on effects I think that's going to be very interesting to figure out, do you trust the AI because it obviously is making sense of the information in a way that is just beyond human comprehension? Or is it actually the AI is going off track? I don't know how you necessarily figure that out. Is that going to be a skill that people are going to be able to develop in the future? 100 years from now, every organization has the AI sense maker and It's very close with the AI. And it becomes like an oracle. That's weird. Oh, I guess freak my own brain out.
Rodney Evans:
Well, to me what you're describing is just fodder for experimentation. So right now when it's like we have a talent gap and we need to upskill in our organization, the limitation of our imagination is like, "Okay, well we could hire some new people, we could teach some people some stuff. We could guess what those skills are." In a world that you're describing, it's like, "Maybe the counterintuitive move is that everyone does a headstand for five minutes a day because ultimately that increases oxygen to the brain and it makes us more capable of problem solving." I don't know. But I think it's interesting to be able to run even more counterintuitive, radical, not obviously correlated experiments in the future that are inspired by something not just completely random.
Sam Spurlin:
And that just then makes the argument for why the stuff that we're dealing with today and helping organizations with today about being comfortable with experimentation and just building that as a muscle that we have and get stronger all the time so that in that future it's just like, "Okay, yeah, fine. We've got a new inspiration for some experiments to run and it happens to be coming from an AI. Great. Who cares?"
Rodney Evans:
Totally. Who cares? It's like over time hopefully just like right now, often when we are going to talk about a new return to office policy for example, it's like you have an opinion, the custodian has an opinion, the CEO has an opinion and then we're going to look at the internet and see what 10 other companies are doing. Hopefully this is just a much larger data set to add into the soup of possible experiments to run.
How AI moves HR from Level 4 to Level 5
Rodney Evans:
So I want to talk just in a more grounded way about really the move from Level 4 to Level 5. So Level 4 being the talent marketplace. We've talked about talent marketplaces a lot on this show. And they're the future. Side note, y'all, some of you are not ready for this, but this is happening, it's happening. So strap in. Let's talk about how we see AI, and I would just say tooling broadly, but certainly intelligent tooling, impacting and affecting things like talent marketplaces.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. So I think this is actually a good place to talk about a thing that I was hoping we would get to, which is I'm wondering if we are over indexing on the chat interface to understand AI because that's what is popular and has kind of popped right now.
So when I think about talent marketplace and AI, I don't think about a chat interface at all. I think about an AI that is sucking up all of the information about the skills and interests and abilities and previous work experiences and what went well and what didn't go well and communication styles and literally everything about the people in an organization on one side, and then every opportunity that needs a human attached to it on the other side and all of those characteristics and making really smart and non-intuitive connections between those two sides of the marketplace and not just a person in the middle who is trying to look at two different spreadsheets and send emails back and forth to connect people to opportunities. That's the obvious, I think, AI connection to the talent marketplace.
Rodney Evans:
Yes, agreed. I would add two pinches of spice to that soup. One is when you talk about all of the information that's being sucked up, I think it's easy for people's minds to think about existing technology rather than AI that is listening to Zoom calls, Slack channels, Teams, email, and is garnering and gaining a lot of the information about how you shoot, move, and communicate without there being explicit "data" captured in a system meant for that purpose. So there is a holistic view coming that is not so influenceable that actually tells me who I am and how I'm perceived and what I'm good at and helps me sort of orient myself inside of my organization. So I just wanted to add that bit because I think it's very easy to be like, "Oh yeah, it'll process what's in our talent systems and our HRIS and whatever," but think much, much more broadly than that.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, think about... I guess the analogy that's coming to mind for me is that in the course of doing work, we're creating a lot of, as of right now, useless exhaust: conversations going off into the ether, text messages or whatever. We're just creating a bunch of data that's so far doing nothing. That's the stuff that you're talking about, the things that are just kind of offput in the course of doing work.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, 100%.
Sam Spurlin:
Which I mean obviously has privacy and ethical and-
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
... lots of various implications that we're just figuring out.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. And the other thing is I think this is where a lot of the concepts that we're talked about on this show in the past, over the years, about the permeability of organizations comes into play. So everything that you said about the opportunities and the matching and the forecasting of what is going to be needed, et cetera, I think that in an AI-augmented world that will extend outside of our organization to be able to identify where those skills and capabilities and styles and time and et cetera exist outside of our organization. Quote, unquote, "organization." I fundamentally think that this shift is going to accelerate the knowledge and idea that organizations as a construct are just constructs.
But my point is the talent marketplace will not be ultimately constrained by the walls of our company. It will be just like it is now when I say to The Ready, "We need an instructional designer, anybody know how to do that?" and everybody goes, "No." And then it's like, "Cool, should we get a consultant? Should we hire a partner? Should we go on Upwork? I don't fucking know." AI will be able to do that work in just a much, much better way than we do it now.
So I think on the one hand everything will become much more atomized where it's not like, "I need this person." It'll be like, "I need this piece of work or this kind of experience or this specific moment." And on the other side, there will not be containment inside of people, roles, organizations, et cetera. Just a lot of those human made boundaries will be brought down, which is just sort of an inversion of how things work right now, which is monolithic jobs in monolithic orgs. It's just like an unbundling and an atomization that we can't do now because of our little human brains.
What atomized marketplace roles mean for people
Sam Spurlin:
Do you think that ultimately ends up being a net positive or net negative for human beings?
Rodney Evans:
I have no idea, man. I mean, my guess is net positive. I mean, play this back for me in two years and we'll talk about it. But I think two things. One is I know that that is where the world has been headed for a long time and a lot of the explicit boundaries around organizations and humans are based on our legal and capital structures but don't really serve people. It's like we have to stay in these constructs because that's how we comply with laws and pay taxes and get benefits, but that's not really how work works and value gets created. So in a world where we don't have to do that, that makes a lot more sense to me.
And just drawing inspo from the DAO arc that we were on, the amount of opportunity that unlocks for people in all different parts of the world with all different kinds of access to education, et cetera, I think, could be pretty revolutionary. And so obviously, there are going to be some real challenges and downsides to all of this I would imagine, but I just feel like the DAO thing was like 0.1% of what we're talking about here, but you still saw people have access to opportunity and to be able to contribute who just never would have otherwise.
Sam Spurlin:
That makes sense.
Rodney Evans:
What do you think, Sam? What do you think about all that noise?
Sam Spurlin:
Well, first of all, I think that our current system is not particularly great for humans anyway, so Let's not over index on keeping this amazing situation.
Rodney Evans:
Fair.
How AI plays out differently in industrial-era vs evolutionary orgs
Sam Spurlin:
Second, I think a lot of the anxiety around AI and automation and what that could mean is because people are looking at the application of AI into industrial era OS organizations because what most people know and they can see the writing on the wall. These organizations generally see people as cost. And if there's ways to get rid of the people, then they're going to do it. And I think there's lots of other things going on there where AI being applied to industrial era OSs is just going to be bad in lots of different ways, including bad for the organization I think. I think an industrial era OS applying AI is going to go faster into irrelevance.
Rodney Evans:
Interesting.
Sam Spurlin:
What I'm excited about is applying AI into evolutionary organizations, organizations that are already trying to act like a network, like a truly complex adaptive system and are actually being let down by our lack of tooling. We do a lot of talking about how important transparency is, but I don't know that we have a great explanation or solution to how do you manage all of that information that you're making transparent, how do you make sense of it all. And I think AI in one way could be a huge unlock for that. So I'm very curious about what it looks like for AI to enable this future of work that we actually talk a lot about and have to do some handwaving around because we don't have the technology to actually bring to life what we have in our brains.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I mean I don't know if this has been your experience, but we call Level 5 "The Neural Network" because the idea is that there are all of these connections that are being made and there's not a triangle shape where the top is making those connections or holding and sort of doling out the information, but that there is a level of intelligence that is becoming ever better and stronger and more refined and added to.
I have been in more than one large scale transformation project where the visualization of the evolution of the OS has been trash and where the clients were like, "How can we know and see what we're tried and then what's happened and what that means and understand both the explicit outcomes of that, but also what the inputs were to that and blah blah blah blah." And I'm like, "Let me make you a pitch deck with some sticky notes on it." That's not good. We live in complex systems that live and then the systems that we have to document them and to draw from and to have an archive are not living. They are complicated dead systems that are only as good as the living inputs to them. And that will go away and I truly cannot wait.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, it's like we have created a more beautiful and lush forest and instead of me being able to really just take your hand and stand on this hill and we'll look at it together, I have to break off a branch and give it to you and do a 35-minute presentation about where this came from. And it's not really quite the same experience.
Rodney Evans:
It's not really quite the same. Exactly. Exactly.
So on that note, we always say on the show we could do a whole nother episode about this and today we're actually going to do that rather than just continuing to talk to you for an hour. So we're not going to rush through. We're just going to take our time. And this episode, it's going to be a super dunk two-parter. Please do hook us up with your CHRO or your HRBP, we want to talk to them, want to answer all of their questions and hear about all of their problems, and we appreciate it and you.