It's Time to Ask Leaders & Investors About Their World View ...
Speed Without System Awareness Degrades Value Creation
Innovation is both exciting and exponential right now. New tools and technology every day. Excitement and fear combine to ignite forward progress.
However, organisations create value through executing their business model - not activity. This execution depends on how decisions, work and information flow through the business.
Value is created through a series of decisions (what to prioritise, build, pursue, stop). These decisions flow across a system, which is a design choice and is often invisible. This is the organisation’s value flow - the speed, quality, and coherence with which decisions translate into commercially meaningful outcomes across an organisation.
When this is working well, ideas become action, action becomes outcomes, and outcomes translate into commercial impact. When it doesn’t work so well we see slow decisions, rework and missed opportunities.
Today many businesses are trying to accelerate the organisation without first mapping and understanding how value moves through it.
Back in 2022, just at the time AI became ubiquitous, the research and prevalent thinking indicated a bit of a decision-making crisis.
It’s probably a sensible time for many organisations to take stock of the value-flow before feeling the need to rush ahead with organisational redesign.
Leadership Teams and Investors Need to Develop an Organisational World View
I was quite staggered when I came across this recent world view, from a VC, on the Great Reorg. Most of the stats were eye-catching. One in particular, a company with an expert-to-generalist ratio of 1:6 today is targeting 1:25 within twelve months and 1:100 eventually. At the same time, we are also being warned of the end of the generalist. It’s a stark reminder of the VUCA era that we are living through. Nobody really knows.
After unpicking this world view, I concluded that it made me feel slightly uneasy. It’s mechanistic and slightly dystopian. It’s a vision of the future so extreme, so bloated with technology that this scene in Wall-E came to mind. It’s perhaps the definition of a highly-optimised organisation which is simultaneously devoid of any natural intelligence. It’s certainly one lacking absorptive capacity and strategic friction.
I offer a contrarian world view to this. My worry for this type of organisation is that the job roles (mostly) and therefore company DNA, lack purpose and meaning. Which, according to psychologists, risks creating a company of overthinkers. I imagine it would quietly lose the expertise it needs to innovate, respond to crises, and compete.
My own world view is far more aligned with Sangeet Paul Chodary. I think the VC perspective is a classic strategy consultant mindset. Projecting the opportunity of today, AI Agents, to a future of human gap-filling. I take a Futurist perspective, imagining shades of grey based on human optimism and potential. Great companies of the future will be the 1980’s Toyotas of tomorrow. Reimagining the system and adjusting the architecture.
I have seen countless transformations struggle due to human behaviour. So, in my view, most organisations should be mapping the value flow (decisions/bottlenecks) and human behaviours. That’s a precursor to having the right dialogue with the wider organisation about any imminent reimagining of said system. This is human-first. Learning from Toyota to imagine what is possible when a new capability enters the system. When the capability changes, the architecture must adjust. From a CEO and investor perspective, the organisational structure is now hand-in-glove with the business strategy.
The Hare & The Tortoise
Jack Dorsey (Block) chopped his company in half and predicted that he would be on the right side of history - asking to be judged after one more lap of the sun.
Wise leaders will think beyond the tech, learn from the dotcom days and endure the messy period of experimentation with the core aim of rebuilding the business around human potential.
This is not an attempt to force a false dichotomy of Dorsey = bad, unnamed human-potential CEO of the future = good. But I will explain some emerging data on the merits of being a little slower in the race.
Without wishing to overindex on four-legged metaphors, right now we have a hamster-wheel velocity problem. The 2025 Indeed Workforce Insights Report, which surveyed some 80,000 workers across eight countries, found that the time saved with AI was mostly redirected into doing “more of the same tasks” or was absorbed by other projects. Hints of genuine augmentation, such as innovation/creative work and increased client interaction didn’t even break the top five use cases.
So let’s imagine a spectrum of CEOs in a race. They all sit somewhere between two extremes, the Automation Hare and the Augmentation Tortoise. Bear with me.
Investors and leaders should consider carefully the compounding gains of the augmentation path when in the heat of the battle of short term ROI and market hype/pressures. This is about unlocking positive dynamics within the culture that will help the company grow in new ways.
Choosing the path of human potential is not the easy option. It is the more imaginative, strategically demanding path. It requires leaders with a consistent world view which is probably nothing like the aforementioned VC blog. This holds true because successful transformations are a function of human behaviour which is a function of employee perception. Getting this right delivers more engaged, collaborative and innovative people.
You Are Approaching a Fork in the Road, Please Prepare Your World View
This is not a straightforward time for leaders and investors. The upside potential of new technology is commercially tantalising. However, the unintended consequences of the wrong supplier, consultant or internal communication could be severe.
I don’t believe that we are in an AI-first era. That’s my world view. I argue that we are in a redesign and reimagine, human-potential era.
This era necessitates strategists, innovators, technologists and talent teams inventing the future, not optimising the past.
It’s fascinating to me that we are also seeing a Leadership Variable era play out. Oracle (Hare) just removed 18% of the workforce. A profitable company cutting humans to fund machines. In the same quarter IBM (Tortoise) tripled entry-level hiring. Same sector, opposite conclusions.
Leaders are arriving at a fork in the road and need to form a world view around their organisational DNA, not the view of the latest supplier or Sam Altman.
IBM is redesigning the system around new capabilities, just as Toyota did in the 1980s. They are betting on organisational transformation. Oracle is reducing labour to insert new technology and automation inside the old system, just as General Motors did. They’ve created a culture of fear to fund data centres.
The analogy stops there. IBM is redesigning the demand-side of work (tasks, decisions, workflows). Oracle is redesigning the supply-side (cost-structure, headcount).
I’ll let you decide, faced with a hypothetical choice, which leader you would rather work for.
If you are a leader or an investor, how do you think about the value-flow in your organisation and are you building an army of tortoises or a battalion of hares?