If you’re railroading your teams, you can splurge on AI trainings to make them the best AI experts in the world, but they’re still busy operating steam trains: exerting lots of effort to move slow without much creativity.
You can add an AI agent to run your steam trains but it will never run faster than the speed of steam or do anything else but follow the suboptimal railroad tracks laid out by higher ups who don’t know the terrain nor the work.
Remember: any progress not at the bottleneck is an illusion.
As organizations become bigger, code is never the bottleneck. Something else in your way of organizing and working usually is.
The default mode of organization is railroading your employees: layers, hierarchy, rules, processes and approvals.
The higher-ups want the illusion of control and enforce this by carefully laying out railroad tracks.
The people that do the work waste their time on overhead and are unable to make decisions because the railroad tracks have been fully laid out.
In the age of AI, this won’t cut it. You’re bottlenecking your humans and agents.
Operating with the speed of trust is no longer optional, but a necessity.
By pairing up your humans with agents, your trust in them should increase as they become more competent. The railroad tracks should disappear because they are able to make more and bigger decisions.
If you don’t ditch the railroad track a smaller competitor will eventually come along to build a better product faster than you ever can.
Not because they have more expertise - they usually have far less expertise and experience, but they don’t have all your railroading steam train overhead. They don’t waste their time sweating and shoveling coal only to move slower.
AI expertise is rarely the problem. It’s the lack of trust and decision-making power of the human experts you already have today.
Only when we’re capable of leveraging all the human brilliance we already have in companies without AI, can we hope to benefit from all the ingenuity humanity is capable of offering by partnering up with AI.
If you’re railroading your teams don’t have FOMO as you are already MO big time every single day.
This is the huge AI blind spot most companies suffer from.
Everybody is busy chasing the wrong things and splurging on AI tokens and trainings because of FOMO.
The companies that ignore railroading most likely won’t survive.
I work with an AI team seeking to help the business by developing innovative AI solution. However, most of the time we can't help, because people don't have their stuff in order: no data, no logical process, no clear value stream, no well thought out business logic...