Michael Quigley
An 8 point model to integrate AI successfully into your organisation
Please note: this blog makes reference to the Kataholos model, The 8 essential aspects of understanding. If you are using and implementing this model, feel free to do so. Please make sure to mention where you got it from.
A note on AI references in this piece:
Because of the disruptive and fast changing pace of the development of AI, I will not be making reference to recommendations of particular tools or AI software: as successful software and tools are often replaced and supplanted by better ones every day. Instead, I will be focusing on quality leadership guiding practices, whilst making reference to the opportunities AI presents, as well as certain types of AI uses and applications. This is done so that you can return to this blog many times, and apply the suggested 8 part model, using your own choices of tools and software.
Wow, how did we get here?
AI is now a thing, isn’t it? Are you using it in your business and life yet? Perhaps you are and you are loving it. Or perhaps you aren’t, don’t have the first clue what it is about. And you might be feeling quite overwhelmed with how to make a solid plan, to help you and your people to engage with meaningfully.
Firstly, artificial intelligence (AI) like business, or health or relationships, is a huge topic, that I will not attempt to cover all aspects of here.
Let’s focus specifically here on how to help you, as a leader, to implement AI in a meaningful way- with your people, and in your business.
I will be using the Kataholos model, The 8 essential aspects of understanding as your framework to do this.
I created this framework, after several years of business and teaching, to help give people a solid foundational frame from which to approach and understand any topic. You can use this model to help you with any aspect of business or life: marketing and sales, your leadership and management, your health, being happy. It is a simple model, which you will see here, takes you on a journey from what you think about something all the way through to how you feel about it every day.
Let’s go!
1 Concept- what is it?
Always start with this. Your concept, is what you understand to be true about the topic. It’s your knowledge. In this case, about AI. Everthing good will come from this: if you have a deep conceptual understanding of AI, your following 7 aspects will be fantastic. However, if you have a shallow conceptual understanding, then all of your strategies, plans, and action will be poorly thought out and poorly executed.
- So how do you improve your conceptual understanding and deepen your knowledge of AI? Here’s how:
- Dedicate yourself to studying about AI. Every week, from now on
- Make a commitment to learning about it- like phones and the internet, it is now a part of our lives, and will never go away
- Play with it- use generative AI apps to start to understand how they work
- Explore OpenAI and the ethical principles around AI
- Read articles and watch videos from people who have a high skill set and knowledge- focus on the ones who show results, rather than give opinions
- Pay attention to studying AI broadly, as well as just in your industry, this could include: fintech, insurance, macroeconomics, human psychology and art and culture
- Be aware that developments and the format of AI is changing daily, to allow your studying to be humble and free flowing- you may have to keep revisiting certain topics many times
- If you studied just one hour a week in the topic of AI, in a year you would have studied for 52 hours, which is over 2 days (48 hours) worth of knowledge gained
No matter how knowledgable or not you currently are about AI, begin with a commitment to deepening and improving your knowledge of it. This will deepen and shape your conceptual understanding of it. The benefits this can bring you can include: highly valuable creative ideas, a sound strategy, detailed plans, excitement and curiosity and a deeper understanding of how our world works and where it could go in the near future.
2 Guiding principles- valuable statements that do not change over time
Now you have created a working understanding of your concept of what AI is, make sure to establish sound guiding principles of its use in your organisation. You could begin by using AI and Google to look at how current businesses have successfully done this. Or you may want to look at existing policies that you have, such as diversity and inclusion, discrimination, sustainability and health and safety, to see if your policy, or guiding principles for AI in your organisation, could be rolled out on a simile way.
For example, at (insert name) company our AI is
- For the good of humanity
- Applied in an ethical way
- Used to assist and promote our employees
- Held to high standards regarding privacy
- Is humble, open minded and curious
- Respects the rights of our individuals
To begin to implement your own guiding principles, which will guide your employees’ use of AI, you can ask these kinds of questions to help you:
- How do we want our employees to use AI?
- What do we want them not to do?
- What are we trying to promote and encourage?
- What are we wanting to avoid?
- How to does it link into our duty of care towards our employees?
- What are we currently doing well that works? Can we do similar with our implementation of AI?
Remember, just as you have the power and authority to create and keep alive the vision for your organisation, as well as live and promote its values, you have the choice of what you want its guiding principles to be. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing, or what is currently fashionable with AI. Forget all that. Start by focusing on your vision and the values of your company, consider those alongside your ongoing conceptual understanding of AI, and good guiding principles will emerged.
3 Strategy- your approach
Now that you have your guiding principles in place, let’s look at how to determine a winning, successful strategy for your organisation. Your strategy is your approach: it could be targeting business to business (b2b) or business to customer (b2c). It could be targeting a specific sector, such as logistics, with a particular approach. For example, supporting logistics by helping solve transposition price issues. It’s all about the how. Now when it comes to adding AI into your strategy, or even using it to help you to influence and direct your strategy, it can be easy to get lost in technicalities and little bits.
Remember, as a business leader, you need to keep the full, big picture in mind, and your strategy is the direction you are going in, not what you are going to do- that comes later.
Now because AI develops and shifts so quickly, it can be good to base a strategy using it on existing successful pre-AI strategic approaches, until you become more confident with it. Remember, no one can master something straight away, so give yourself headspace and time to self reflect, and think, in relation to how AI can help you with your strategy.
To keep it simple for you, here are two strategic approaches, that you can take with anything; in this case, implementing AI to help you to achieve your business goals and mission.
Deliberate strategy– you know exactly what you are going to do and you do it. You then create plans and action items from this very clear picture, with actions added in. You stay focused on this vision, and do not get distracted by anything else.
This can be very helpful in some contexts, such as athletes training for competitions.
Emerging strategy– you start from where you are, and see how you can move forward. You pay attention to what is working, and adapt and remove what isn’t. Over time, a picture and direction will begin to emerge, that you can use. The emerging strategy approach is a lot more fluid and adaptive.
In relation to a strategy which includes AI, I would recommend, what I call:
Deliberate vision, emerging strategy– you know what the values of your business are, what you stand for. And they do not change. You have a clear vision of where you want to go as a vision for your company and your people. And you implement AI using an emerging strategy: to allow for new directions, new initiatives, innovations and directions to emerge, on your journey of discovery towards fulfilling your vision and mission.
This is a very useful approach, as it allows you the security and surety of knowing who you are and what you stand for- and that does not change. And it also frees you up, through the emerging strategy approach, to find new ways and make discoveries of expressing who you are and fulfilling your mission.
Because of the disruptive, interdependent, blistering pace of change and daily development of AI, this deliberate vision, energy strategy approach will allow you enjoy the ride; knowing that as long as you get to your destination, you are open to taking new routes to get there.
- Common strategy failures that business owners often make include:
- Copying the strategies of other businesses
- Confusing planning with strategy
- Changing strategies with no real reason
- Having conflicting strategies within different departments
- A lack of understanding of the vision, values and mission of the organisation- part of the concept and guiding principles level
- Underestimating the ability to pivot and change strategy as environmental or financial circumstances can dictate
4 Planning- what you are going to do
Now you have your approach sorted, let’s look at planning out what you are actually going to do. It is important to not rush to this stage, without having done the first 3, as they go in order of highest importance and value, starting from 1.
Simply put, you plan out the action items that will make your strategy real in the world. This is a very exciting aspect, and utilising AI brings in trillions of new opportunities for you in what you are going to do.
If you find planning difficult, I have written a blog to help you, you can read it here:
https://kataholos.co.uk/plan-do-review/
Now, when planning out, for example, your next 90 days, consider using AI like an extra employee, or a extra team, in your thinking. This is a much more useful way of thinking about it, which will allow you to implement it in many different ways.
Ask yourself self-reflective questions such as:
- Could this be done by AI to save time and energy for my people?
- Where can we use AI to enhance this operation?
- Which software and/or tools can give us the best result?
- Which AI consultants can we partner with on this to help us? (This is an excellent way to outsource the implementation of AI)
- What processes are involved here- repetitive tasks, projections, customer experience, data analysis and insights, marketing efforts, logistics and supply chain management, financial issues, decision making?
As we have used internet searches to conduct research for decades now, using AI in a curious search/style way at the start, middle and end of the planning cycle, can highlight potential gains. These gains can be gains of time and energy, new insights and often, if implemented well, help to break out of established patterns and closed feedback loops, which may be harming your business.
Key points from the planning stage:
- When planning out an activity, begin to put into your thinking whether it can be outsourced or not, if AI could enhance the action, or not and why.
- Consider partnering with an AI strategist to outsource and support your organisation with implementing AI successfully.
- Remember, AI is there to help you to fulfil your vision, not as a distraction- keep your vision and values in mind and what your mission is, when planning out your action points for each quarter, period of measured time or project.
5 Action - doing it, reviewing it and re-doing it
Now that you are implementing your actions it is crucial to measure their successes and failures, and your AI integration is a part of that. For example, if your generative AI (using prompts to create original AI derived content) is not of good quality, that could be a fault in the part of how you are prompting and the words you are using. In contrast, say you are using AI to run diagnostic decision scenarios and it is generating unique and valuable results and excellent insights, make sure to share this good practice with your people.
As with anything, measure what you can, hold onto what is working and question what isn’t. Keep in your mind a spirit of curiosity in your actions, especially using AI, and you will keep discovering new things. Just repeating what you have always done, will not take you to places of innovation and new ground. Keep an open mind and be humble, and allow the technology to evolve alongside your ability to use it. This kind of attitude of lifelong learning can turn a short term “failure” into a highly valuable learning experience.
And that’s as far as most people take their business planning- it ends with the monitoring and feedback of their actions. But we can do better for you! Let’s finish by going further and exploring 3 essential yet often missed aspects of success in business.
6 Culture - how we do things here
It’s such a simple definition- culture is how we things here. So how do you do things at your organisation? With your team? Start with your mission and values and then think:
- How do we think about our organisation?
- How do we act in it?
- How do we interact within it?
- Once you have that in mind, ask the same types of questions about thinking, acting and interacting, in relation to utilising AI in your organisation:
- Thinking-
- How do we want to do AI here? As an essential part of what we do? As an add on? Slowly but surely? With excitement?
- How do we think about AI here? Is it an extension of what we do? Do we want it to become integral?
- Acting-
- How do we act with AI here? Are we always learning? Are we open and transparent in our successes and failures with it? Do we learn from the best about it?
- Interacting-
- How do we interact with AI here? How do we act as a group using AI?
- Do we have policies and safeguards in place? Do we partner with AI consultants?
- Remember, you get to choose what your culture is like, and you can choose how AI can be a part of it.
7 Context - where are you doing this?
Context is crucial to keep in mind, especially in global business.
So ask yourself these questions to make sure that you frame your use of AI within real life application. And consider using AI in a diagnostic way, to find out the answers to these kinds of questions.
- Which country are our clients in?
- What is our financial implications in relation to investing in AI?
- What do our current local and global markets look like?
- Where are we at in our business year?
- Where are we in our busing and selling relationships with our customers, clients and suppliers?
- How is our team right now, performance and energy wise?
Important privacy note: be very careful, as with all online activity, to not disclose sensitive and confidential information through AI software and apps. Look carefully at the privacy policy of the software and tools that you use. As your information is your responsibility.
8 Climate - how does it feel every day?
And finally, remember that the main reason why people leave a job is because they are unhappy in their relationships there- either with their boss or their team. So keep this important question in mind to recruit and retain your best people:
- How does it feel to work here each day?
- If the culture is how you do things, then the climate is how it actually feels on a day to day basis.
- Here are some simple ways to use AI to keep the vibes good af your organisation:
- Use it to conduct surveys into employee satisfaction and wellbeing
- Use generators AI apps to create content- pictures, music, videos- relevant to your people
- (I know of one person who used AI to create songs that include personal references to his family and their interests.)
- Use AI to delegate and outsource lower value tasks, to allow your people to focus on high value, meaningful projects
- Treat your people like people and not machines- you will be amazed how many people get this wrong
- Remember that many people have fears and uncertainties around AI- provide training to help to increase their confidence and their skill sets.
Final Thoughts
To infinity and beyond…
The future of our world for our lifetimes and those whom we love will involve two things
- People
- Technology
Neither of these things are going anywhere in our lifetimes. The internet is here to stay, so are phones, and so is AI. As with any advanced technology, you will go through several emotional phases as you come to terms with it: fear, curiosity, excitement, overwhelm, reassurance, confidence and excitement again. Remember that your people will often be feeling a combination of these emotions every day, in relation to both AI and many other things.
Your role as a leader is simple, but not easy.
Your leadership will ask you do consistently do 3 things well:
- Provide the compelling vision for your people- as Buzz from Toy Story says, “To infinity and beyond.”
- Equip your people with the skills to succeed- training, software, partnerships, a supportive and successful culture.
- Remove the barriers they get in the way-emotional states, ignorance, financial barriers, uncertainty- you must help remove the things that stop your people from succeeding, this will free them to be all they can be.
Begin with your concept of AI, allow it to evolve as you understand more and move through the 8 stages of the understanding model. Stay humble and keep learning. And if you can do this, your exponential potential, as shown to you by technology such as AI, is waiting for you on the other side.
Go for it!
Love and best wishes,
