There is almost no client engagement I’m involved with these days in which A.I. doesn’t come up in one guise or another.
Professional services firms, investment firms, construction companies, regulators, institutions of learning – the topic comes up with all. It comes up in individual coaching and in team coaching. It comes up in strategic planning and in executive off-sites. I see it take many forms, from curious inquiry to excited opportunism; from mere moral ambivalence to full-blown existential dread regarding the relevance and survivability of one’s job, one’s entire business, the social fabric itself.
If the future is contingent, as I believe it is, we collectively create it with every decision we make. But what should one do at such a juncture? And how will decisions made today flow through in all of their unforeseeable consequences? A jobs apocalypse, as I read recently, followed by misery and insurrection? A new utopia of leisure and personal fulfillment? Something entirely more mundane, perhaps? Most predictions reflect a pundit’s passions and interests more than any real ability to discern the shape of things to come. Nobody knows where all of this is taking us and decision-makers of all stripes are left carrying the heavy burden of steering a course in heavy fog.
Leaders must balance the short-term against the long-term implications of A.I., taking into account the impacts on individuals, on their organizations, and on society more broadly. Act decisively or wait prudently? Squeeze out all possible efficiencies as a matter of short-term survival? Keep investing in talent for the long term, including young talent today, to ensure sustainability? Optimize your business model or rethink it completely? Get out of certain businesses altogether and make huge bets on others?
Traditional business planning frameworks aren’t designed to address some of the emerging questions that we face: about the importance of work for human dignity, for instance, and what happens when this gets threatened on a large scale. There are useful precedents in history but history is not taught in MBA schools. There are useful models in the thought of philosophers such as Aristotle, Montesquieu, Kant, Rawls, and others, but the halls of business are not overrun by philosophically inclined souls.
If the stakes are as high as some think they are, what this moment in time calls for is an abundance of good judgment – what the ancients used to refer to as practical wisdom (as opposed to the theoretical kind). Who wants brash, unethical, self-serving “leaders” when so much is at play for all of us? What we need is wise leaders, at all levels, in all spheres of life, deliberating carefully with other such leaders regarding the various courses of action offered to them.
Thankfully, wisdom can be developed. It requires, as I’ve asserted previously, a solid foundation of general knowledge. But knowledge in itself won’t make you wise. It also requires cultivating virtues of character such as courage, temperance, humility, and many others, as I’ve written here.
An impossible task? Not at all. As Mary Crossan and her colleagues wrote a few years ago in MIT Sloan Management Review, “Contrary to popular belief, individuals are not born with character, nor is it set in stone at an early age.” That character and wisdom can be developed over time is also a central tenet of traditional martial arts, and I have seen it succeed over and over in the 45 years that I’ve been practicing and teaching judo to students of all ages.
You don’t develop practical wisdom, in yourself or in others, by simply invoking it or demanding it. It’s a long process (one, in fact, that never ends), and a painstaking one (see some of the sources quoted below). It’s an investment that you make, in yourself and others. And I would argue that it is one of the most important things individuals and organizations can invest in at such a critical juncture—the investment that will help unlock all others and avoid the worst mistakes.
From the same author on related topics:
