I’ve been weaving some of the new ‘AI Impact’ work into my broader narrative of the Social Age. I’m quite excited bout this, as it situates the work from ‘Engines of Engagement - a curious book about Generative AI’ into the core ecosystem of my writing. So, to me at least, it’s been a satisfying few weeks of shaping a narrative and finding synergies and language.
I hope you’ll forgive me but it’s been a very long week - and I need to make dinner for the children - so I’m just sharing the transcript from the video here! More to follow on this next time…
[Text is a transcript of the video, and I asked Claude to remove timecode and superfluous paragraph breaks]
I've been busy this month, really, developing the work on generative AI and learning. And I shared that work again yesterday. So the first time I shared it was at the University of Leeds at the Digital Innovation Summit. Then I shared it at the World of Learning Conference, quite significantly evolved, and yesterday at the Business of Training Conference. And I'm finding a narrative in it. I'm finding ways both to build depth into the work which originated in the Engines of Engagement book, but also to weave it into my broader work.
I just thought I'd reflect on that process. It's quite interesting because I think generative AI is sitting for me at the whole ecosystem level. I'm incorporating it into my language around the social age itself and hence positioning it not in itself as the disruptive factor, but as the amplifying factor. So essentially to say our organizations have moved from the industrial model to the socially dynamic model. And that means we're seeing a shift from the structural to the social. We're seeing learning shift from the codified to the dynamic. We're seeing the model moving away from space towards distribution. We're seeing individualization and social collaboration at the heart of learning.
So we've got all of that going on. What generative AI does, through its key features of dialogue and contextualisation and democratisation, with certain caveats around it, is it amplifies those features. So I do talk about these specific and emergent new ideas, but really seeing it as something which puts a rocket behind the kinds of changes that we've seen and raises real questions. You know, what will we be doing in organisational learning? How will our organisations be effective? And by that, I mean, where will the power sit? Where will the knowledge sit? Where will the sense-making sit? Where will our capability overall sit?
We're very used to, familiar with our legacy structures. You know, we go to school, we go to university, we get a degree, we do a graduate program, we have a first job or usually a succession of first jobs. As we find our way, we settle into a career within organizations that usually have a footprint in the real world. But, you know, this is all changing. Everything is in flow. And what's not yet clear is the specific map of the emergent structure, but what is clear is that the landscape is changing.
We see a shift away from the individual being beholden to the organisation or indentured into the organisation towards organisations engaging with individuals and collectives. They may not be explicit about it, but if you hire me, you also, if you're lucky, get access to my sense-making community. I mean, I might not turn up at the front door with everybody in tow, but when I'm in my communities making sense of that, inherently I'm taking some of the organisational context into it. So we see that, but also our collectives, our community or our personal interests are driving learning. And I suspect that much of what we do to be effective in organisations will fall victim to the fact we can do that learning more easily elsewhere.
Probably the real point will be when organizations think about how much they're spending on stuff that people can just learn themselves. There is elasticity in the model, but at some point, even the most stubborn organization is going to think, why are we spending this money? But what else could we do? And there are barriers to that change. Power and pride is one. Dogma is one of them. The ownership of technologies and what we sort of carry in our heads from that.
Permeability is a big feature of the social age but as is separation of identity so we have our different identities our different selves in different spaces but some things are permeable between them so we can see clearly that the walls of the organization are no longer boundaries that prevent us moving in or out or stories moving in and out or knowledge and capability moving in and out. We're seeing a bit of a move from that individual to collective model, even if it isn't explicit. But we still believe that we hold on to the power and the control within our organizations.
Of course, we do need some of that. When I was talking to somebody at one of the conferences about my work and they said, you know, is this a sort of a replacement model? And it isn't. You know, I say we need the old. Because the formal structural organization gives us lots of things we need. Consistency, conformity, replicability, and scale. If you're going to build a global organization making sneakers and sending them around the world, you better have a really good structural organization. But if you want to be creative, if you want to be able to change, if you want high levels of engagement, you need a really good social organisation. So you need both the formal and the social and to understand how they intersect.
And generative AI impacts onto this because it is dialogic at scale, because it allows us to rapidly prototype ideas and create meaning. So key themes I've been sharing in this presentation I've been evolving are consider these core aspects, the nature of dialogue and access to expertise, the rapid prototyping of ideas, development of vocabulary, the ability to break down barriers between disciplines, to be transdisciplinary at scale, and the idea that we are able to build momentum in social communities using these technologies to help refine ideas, collapse around new ideas, move into motion.
It's a fascinating time. I think that there are significant blinders that we put on ourselves because we get trapped thinking about generative AI as a technology of efficiency or wonder, but we don't really see it as a democratized, distributed technology of enablement still in great motion. You know, we're only at the very start of this journey.
So I woke up this morning quite excited about it. I'm feeling ready to create some more visuals around it, to work around it. I'm trying to just pull together the core story that I weave around the other stories that I share. And I feel I've made good progress on that this week. So I hope you've had a good week. I'll see you next time.
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