A Change in Perspective

Persistent problems often seem intractable because of the frame through which we view them. A fixed point of view on an issue might lead us to struggle because we are trying to solve the wrong problem. Consider the anxiety in the workplace about the growing role of AI. Business leaders see ever wider applications for increasingly powerful technologies but worry that they don’t have the right talent in place to leverage AI; meanwhile, many workers fret about correspondingly narrower options for their own human contributions. Leaders who are focused on building new strategic capabilities often dismiss employees’ worries about new systems as stubbornness or an inability to learn. That narrative of change-resistant workers is reinforced only when AI implementation stalls, as it often does, due to slow adoption by end users.