The Ties That Bind

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I am fascinated by arguably the most powerful force in the history of human technology - the default setting. I am a trained anthropologist and historian and trust me when I say, my intention is not to be hyperbolic. No other invention in the history of technology has held such power as the default - it allows cultural norms, biases, prejudices, to all be passed along - embedded inside the technology itself. That didn’t happen with fire, nor with the wheel, even when the Industrial Revolution started making more machines dedicated or designed for a specific use, a savvy operator could switch the output from say weapons to tools. In fact, the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that has carried defaults within itself for centuries is double-entry bookkeeping. That carried with it the default setting for how we see and value the world to this day. Now that I think about it, writing and numbers are inventions that carry defaults within themselves. The different default understandings of language between say English and Japanese are deep and culturally embedded and radically different. You’ll instantly give yourself away if you pick up some manga and try to read it front to back in the Western style. So maybe I’ll think deeper about how long we’ve been embedding defaults into our systems but I’d stand by the assertion that they’ve never been more powerful or really more unseen then they are right now.

Employees are only able to be accounted for as liabilities or costs by the defaults in our accounting systems. Most content authoring tools (here I’m speaking from the Western perspective although I’d wager there is a similar default on the Eastern side) work in a module>chapter>book workflow. The QWERTY keyboard for Pete’s Sake. The 9 to 5 schedule. Classroom desks in a row. Classrooms themselves! Courses as the primary output of instructional designers. I can hear you reading (neat trick I know), and you’re thinking, all this is cool Mark but what does it have to do with anything? As long as I’ve been writing this newsletter (still kind of think of it as a blog), I’ve been talking up this idea of figuring out what our value is vs our activity. My thesis is that AI will ramp up this tension and serve as a massive accelerator just like the pandemic did. The pandemic really tore several holes in the fabric of business related to productivity and how we need to think more deliberately about what “going into the office” means. I think those holes were already there but the pandemic accelerated the tearing. I think there has always been a tension between value and activity - I mean what else does “busy work” even mean except as a description of that difference? So what can be done? We can rewrite the defaults.

Let’s take a look at retention and what it means to be “agile” in an AI age. What if the default setting changed from “you are hired to do X job” to more like “you are hired because you have Y talents”? X locks you in place. You are rated and assessed at how well you do X regardless of if X is what the company needs at the moment or if X is what makes you happy or even if X is what you’re best at. Now if we hire you because of Y talents, then that leaves open the door to n number of X jobs in which you can apply those talents. That lets you be agile and lets the company hire and acquire a set of talents that can be re-ordered to meet changing needs. The cool part here is that AI will allow people with the right talents to move more quickly between jobs and be at market speed in terms of proficiency quicker than ever. Retention can be increased as people flow to roles that are best suited to them (something you don’t always figure out until you’re in the org), hiring can be more accurate while simultaneously increasing flexibility in the workforce.

All we did there was change one default setting (from job to talents). There will of course be follow-on work to do, like retraining people from writing job descriptions to writing, let’s call them “talent requirements.” We will need to do some organizational structure work to build in such a way that people and teams have room to re-configure to meet changing needs without hamstringing roadmaps or creating a budgetary nightmare.

Just one last idea on what that might look like. Before AI sucked up all the air in the room, the creator economy was also a pretty big topic. Always though in the context of operating outside the organization. What if an internal creator economy was the organizational structure we used to allow that talent-rich pool of people we just hired, to move and shift in response to shifting market or organizational needs? Imagine posting the requirement for X number of people in the org to be trained on Y new technology. Then we watched as employees who are not only passionate about teaching new skills but who have the talent to do so, market their work product in an internal marketspace? Haven’t we just found the best trainers we have? And let them do what they love? The ones who don’t win in that market can do exactly what companies do, learn and adjust. We can use the fractional ownership that’s baked into NFT technology to actually give those employees ownership and rewards based on that work and so on.

All that happened here, all that potential that’s described above, flows from changing one default setting in our thinking. Imagine what other potential is out there waiting for us to switch from an activity to creating value. (also change the default password on your home wifi).