A leading business consultancy asked us to support them with getting a better grip on their acceleration of digital ways of working, especially around the organisation-wide integration of emerging AI tools and platforms. Stby was obviously delighted with this opportunity, as it strongly aligns with our extensive expertise on digital teamwork and ongoing R&D on AI as a collaborator and team member.
Anticipating multiple futures
Our goal was to enable them to be in the driver’s seat of the changes in their organisation and clientwork, and to be comfortable with this being a rapid transformation with ups and downs, excitements and anxieties. We were transparent with the client team about not being able to predict the precise future role of AI in their workplace and their client work. Our approach to jointly finding out how to anticipate and navigate multiple possible futures won us the job.
Of course we did not come without any ideas of what these futures might look like. Our involvement as the global research partner of Teaming with AI community, prior client projects, and several R&D experiments provides us with a solid foundation of knowledge on how AI changes the ways we work. We regularly share learnings and best practices at conferences, and in articles, podcasts and thought pieces. But we don’t pretend that we know exactly what the future with AI looks like. We are all part of this fundamental and evolving transformation. Our actions do matter in defining the direction of the outcome, and these contribute to the range of scenarios possible, while we also need to accept that there is no dominant scenario yet.
To play a useful part in this transformation, we tend to stick to our deep skill: using innovative ways to understand emerging areas of uncertainty and helping our clients to develop ways to deal with those uncertainties by taking an active role in the ongoing developments. We do this by engaging in experiments with AI (in this case), and learning from these in a systematic way. We make quick progress by getting better at doing these experiments, as well as the learning from it, and by doing all of this together, with clients and peers.
Experimenting to Learn…
Not surprisingly, we also turned to AI to do a quick initial exploration of what possible futures for business consultants could be on the horizon. We ran an intensive simulation workshop with our own team and our partners Markus Edgar Hormeß from Teaming with AI and Anne Mieke Eggenkamp, co-author of Creativity in the Board Room. The result was a useful outline for a programme based on learning and experimenting that we included in our proposal. In the course of the actual project we kept iterating and refining this programme.
We designed and facilitated a series of hands-on workshops with ‘frontrunners’ and ‘explorers’ in the client organisation. These are the people who naturally gravitate towards new and evolving methods and practices, and who usually play a pivotal role as changemakers nudging the rest of the teams to start thinking and doing things differently. The umbrella motto for these workshops was ‘Experimenting to learn, Learning to experiment’. The programme consisted of carefully designed AI-first experiments in small groups, which were followed up by reflections on how these experiments went and what they might mean for their future ways of working, both internally and with clients.
..Learning to Experiment
During the workshops there were clearly indicated moments for experimentation and moments for reflecting and learning. We carefully crafted the reflection moments, by making sure people considered the implementations for their own work, their teams and their organisation. This generated valuable learnings on important principles, opportunities and challenges. After each workshop we also evaluated the programme to fine-tune it for the next iteration, gradually crafting the setup for continuing the experimenting and learning with people at various positions in the organisation over time.
On completion of the series of workshops with the frontrunners and explorers, we also facilitated a follow up workshop with the Management Team of the organisation. They engaged in similar AI-first experiments, followed by reflections on what this could mean for their organisation, strategy and leadership. The hands-on experimental and reflective approach helped them to engage with being firmly in the driver’s seat of the rapid changes and adaptations in their field.
The project also helped us to further fine-tune our workshop formats and best practices around collaborating with AI. Every organisation needs to craft its own approach, its own ways of experimenting with AI in its teams, and its own way of learning from experiments. Stby offers a powerful scaffold for such a programme that gets you going with, or to strengthen, your own strategy and vision for working with AI. Stby can help you to reap real and lasting benefits and put yourself firmly in the drivers seat of this big technological shift.
Do get in touch when your organisation could benefit from a similar experimental and reflective approach. We’re happy to help!
Experimenting to Learn, and Learning to Experiment
Twenty years of exploring Intelligent Systems. Follow this link to read more about the background of our work in the area of emerging smart technologies, and how this has evolved with ongoing trends and developments in the industry.