Most Gen AI projects fail before they begin. Leaders must start developing a clearer picture of their organization’s AI-powered future
Writing Brian Evergreen
In 1951, a leader at Bell Labs called a meeting of departmental leaders and entered the room in a charged emotional state. He grimly announced that the telephone system of the United States had been destroyed overnight. The leaders were confused, as many had used the telephone that morning. He proceeded to restate that the telephone system had been destroyed and anyone who did not believe him by noon would be terminated. He had their attention.
After a long pause, allowing the leaders to process what he had said, he laughed and released the tension. By manner of explanation, he asked the room about the most meaningful contributions to the development of telecommunications ever made by Bell Labs, who had recently been recognized in an article in Scientific American as the best group of industrial laboratories in the world.
The answers were unanimous: the dial, which was introduced in the 1930s, but invented in the late 1800s; the ability to transmit multiple conversations simultaneously over one wire, which was introduced between the world wars, but invented in the late 1800s; and the transatlantic cable that connected the United States and Great Britain, which was invented in the 1800s and introduced in 1882.
“Doesn’t it strike you as odd,” the leader said, “that the three most important contributions this laboratory has ever made to telecommunications were made before any of you were born? What in the world have you been doing?” he asked.
“The deficiency,” he continued, “is not yours, but mine. We’ve had the wrong research and development strategy.” The sum of their training and experience had been geared toward maintaining the inventions of others. Even research and development initiatives were focused on achieving operational efficiencies on existing inventions rather than new breakthroughs.
This is, unfortunately, the status quo goal for leaders everywhere. To leave everything better than you found it. To improve parts of the existing system without rethinking or redesigning the whole system. You can spot it in common phrases like “quick wins,” “low-hanging fruit,” and “points on the board.”
The leader at Bell Labs was determined to alter the natural momentum of his organization, so on top of their operational responsibilities, he tasked his team with setting aside dedicated time to redesign the US telephone system, working from the assumption that it had been destroyed beyond recovery. He told them to start from scratch to design a telecommunications system as it ought to be, given the latest technologies and the current economic and regulatory environment.
What ensued was an influx of inventions, including some well-known inventions that became ubiquitous in the late 20th-century, such as the touch-tone phone, caller identification, and the foundations of cellular technology.
Why vision matters now more than ever
Today’s leaders face a challenge they haven’t been prepared for in school or on-the-job training: the utter necessity of creating and leading with a vision.
This problem spans industries with roots going back to 1911, when Frederick Taylor, the world’s first management consultant, introduced the concept of process engineering in his book The Principles of Scientific Management. In the ensuing century, incrementalism became – and remains – the prevailing form of management.
After an initial breakthrough is paired with a business model and a market that deems a product or service commercially viable, the organization, in order to scale, shifts into a cycle of incremental improvement, never to invent again. New products and services are added, for the most part, not by invention, but through acquisition. The merger process focuses on industrialization and scale, with incrementalism at its core – driving founders, whose strongest skillset is invention, to retire or exit to start new companies.
Whole careers and markets alike thrived under this model over the last century. The data reflects this cycle: the average Fortune 500 company is 83 years old. Yet the cracks between incrementalism and visionary leadership began to show in the era of digital transformation, as technology companies rose into the Fortune 500; they now represent the top six most valuable companies in the world.
But even in the era of digital transformation, leaders could get by without vision. Incrementalism in moving from analog to digital could yield tremendous results – as it did for most companies.
It’s different with artificial intelligence. Since AI’s reemergence from the second AI winter – the period of reduced funding and research in AI in the late 1980s and early 1990s – leaders have diligently applied the time-honored model of incrementalism. The results are in: 95% of artificial intelligence pilots are failing, as a recent MIT study, titled The Gen AI Divide, suggested.
This is because the successful application of AI, unlike cloud migration, automation, dashboarding, and modernization, requires the organization to fundamentally transform. True transformation is extremely complex and fraught with cultural, economic and systemic inertia, which requires a degree of momentum that only vision can create.
Practices for becoming a visionary leader
Incrementalism is so embedded in our leadership culture that it will likely continue to reign supreme for years to come. Leaders who want to be among the first to replace incrementalism with visionary leadership can start with three practices.
Practice #1 Rethink strategy
Strategy is a cherished word among leaders. Everyone wants to be strategic, and to make strategic decisions and investments. Boards and leaders task their teams with creating strategies for AI, for supply chain, or for whatever else is timely and potentially relevant for the future of their organizations.
Teams come together to research and diligently create a combination of analysis and market context, high-level direction, and a plan – a list of tasks, investments and timelines.
Unfortunately, that’s not a strategy. Strategy is the process of creating and selecting decision trees of choices under conditions of uncertainty and competition, with the aim of achieving one’s goals. Rather than a tactical plan of action and investments, a strategy outlines the path between where the organization is and where it would like to be, documenting assumptions to be validated, roadblocks to navigate, and the sections of the path that remain unknown and need to be explored before choices are made.
Strategy without vision is a misnomer, just like a GPS route can’t exist without a destination. A strategy is the route from the starting point to the vision or goal.
Practice #2 Start envisioning
Those who are particularly skilled at envisioning the future are often attributed with the gift of vision and genius, like modern-day oracles. Fortunately for leaders everywhere, envisioning can be developed like any other skill.
No rational person, in considering software engineers who have written particularly elegant functions in JavaScript, would assert that some people were just born to write code; that the gods blessed them with innate programming talents. Those developers had to learn the syntax of writing code, theory and practice over weeks, months and years to develop the skill to the point that it culminated in elegant code. This is not to say that individuals do not have natural aptitudes that lend themselves to particular skills – rather, that those skills are not pre-determined at birth, and can be developed well after childhood. The skill of envisioning the future is developed in the same manner as the skills of writing software or project management: a combination of theory and practice.
Envisioning is deeply personal, as it necessitates drawing on a person’s experiences and context in order that the vision has relevance for that person, their organization, their industry, or their market. You cannot pay someone else, regardless of their degree of skill in the process of envisioning, to envision your future, or the future of your organization.
Leaders must develop the process of envisioning the future, both individually and collaboratively, if their organization is going to reach, retain or expand a market leadership position and create lasting value in the era of AI. This process of envisioning the future, as opposed to having it envisioned for them by external advisers, also serves as a foundation of mutual buy-in that can sustain momentum when challenges arise.
Envisioning is a vulnerable act of creation – of imagination, distinctively human, and a skill that can be observed under development in any child. For adults, it becomes vulnerable, in that it begins with an admission that the future is unknowable and cannot be controlled – and, like any act of creation, it exposes an individual’s thinking process or line of reasoning to others.
The first step to start envisioning is to create space outside of your operational responsibilities to think. Then, ask yourself what you would create if your company and all its competitors had never existed and you were creating the first company like yours from scratch. Alternatively, start by imagining the announcement of a new product or service from your competitor: what would make you feel frustrated with yourself or your team for not having thought of it first?
One way to build this skill as a daily habit is to start from the other end in your next brainstorming session or business review. Ask yourself and your colleagues: “What’s the vision that precedes this strategy, this plan, or these tactics?”
There are many ways that you can begin to build the skill of envisioning. The important thing is to start.
Practice #3 Replace problem-solving with future-solving
Every leader has experienced the inspiring offsite meeting that leads to zero change to the organization. A vision for the future of the company may be created and agreed upon, but when everyone returns to the office they find it does not fit into the organization.
Peter Drucker is famously quoted as having said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” More accurately, incrementalism eats vision for breakfast. If you bring a great vision from an offsite back to a company whose structure, incentives and processes are wired for incrementalism, that vision will not transform the organization without an accompanying shift in mindset.
Incrementalism is rooted in problem solving, which is the craft of getting rid of what you don’t want – but doesn’t help with getting what you do want. For that, you need future solving: the craft of getting what you do want, by starting with a vision and then working backwards to the starting point of today.
Problem solving begins with the question, “What problems should we solve?” The potential answers are infinite. But problem solving, by design, is an act of maintenance, not innovation or creation. When an organization is problem solving, it may be technically moving into the future – but not in a particular direction.
Future solving begins with the question: “What ought to be?” followed by: “What would have to be true for us to achieve this?” It means working recursively backwards until the entire path has been mapped – from where you are, to the future you want to create.
Make no mistake: this is a new way of doing strategy, making it visual, creating clarity, and forming a foundation for a more scientific way of making decisions.
We are on the brink of a new era, with sweeping implications for the future of work and society. There has never been a greater need – or opportunity – for leaders to boldly step forward to create and lead with vision.
Brian Evergreen is founder and CEO at The Future Solving Company, president at The Future Solving Club, and author of Autonomous Transformation (Wiley)
