Why AI Is The Missing Link In Building Strong Corporate Culture

• A vast majority of CEOs and CFOs believe that enhancing company culture can boost financial performance, yet many feel their cultures are suboptimal.
• AI has the potential to significantly enhance organizational culture and learning by capturing, storing, and sharing the collective knowledge and expertise within a company.
• AI can facilitate situational leadership and decentralized decision-making by identifying individuals with the best situational awareness and expertise, which can improve organizational effectiveness and adaptability.

Research reported in the MIT Sloan Management Review suggests that 90% of CEOs and CFOs believe that improving their company culture would improve financial performance. Yet, at the same time, the research also indicates that 80% of the same group feel that their cultures are not as healthy as they could be.

This research mirrors other data that underscores the difficulty many companies have in managing their people. We already know that only around 33% of employees are engaged in their work, and that 70% of change efforts fall short of their goals. These commonly cited statistics are never uplifting.

However, AI has the potential to positively impact company cultures and how they are led in the future of work. This requires a reassessment of core assumptions about what culture is, in the first place. 

AI and Evolutionary Anthropology

Typically, business leaders think of organizational culture as “the values, beliefs, and behaviors that people in an organization share.” This is partially true, but it also misses an important dimension of culture.

In an evolutionary sense, culture — Big C culture — is not just about values, beliefs, and behaviors, but is equally concerned with the pragmatic efforts of human groups to survive over time. 

This speaks to the fact that there are two basic dimensions of culture: one concerned with stories, meaning, values and beliefs (idealism), the other with problem solving, innovation, adaptation, learning and survival (materialism). Culture is always both of these at once.

With its ability to radically amplify learning (via machine learning), AI has enormous potential to help organizations store and share information and learn in unprecedented ways. For advocates of strong corporate cultures, this represents a generational opportunity.

In his seminal book The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making us Smarter, Harvard evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Henrich summarizes culture’s significance this way.

“The secret of our species’ success resides not in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brains of our communities. Our collective brains arise from the synthesis of our cultural and social natures — from the fact that we readily learn from others (are cultural) and can, with the right norms, live in large and widely interconnected groups (are social). The striking technologies that characterize our species, from the kayaks and compound bows used by hunter-gatherers to the antibiotics and airplanes of the modern world, emerge not from singular geniuses but from the flow and recombination of ideas, practices, lucky errors, and chance insights among interconnected minds and across generations.” 

While much of the focus of AI applications today is on supply chain efficiency, more effectively identifying relevant customer segments, improving customer service, and eliminating wasteful internal processes (all clearly very important), the potential of AI to significantly boost organizational learning is an untapped opportunity. 

Indeed, if CEOs want to close the gap between how they see the importance of culture and their actual culture on the ground, embracing AI-enabled human learning is a new frontier.

AI and Managing People and Knowledge

In their recent Harvard Business Review article, “AI Has a Revolutionary Ability to Parse Details. What Does it Mean for Business,” David Weinberger and Michele Zanini provide a way forward for leaders to reimagine the potential of AI. They make a distinction between the current thinking of AI as a tool, on the one hand, and AI as an idea, on the other. The distinction is important.

We have all explored various AI tools and have learned how to write prompts to receive dumps of information (or pictures, or music, etc.). Those tools are very exciting and laden with potential. What Weinberger and Zanini are talking about is different.

When company information is used to build proprietary language models, the collective brain of the organization can be captured, stored, and made available. 

Platforms such as Zignal Labs and Guider provide real-time intelligence that link up different individuals and departments to make the collective brain of a company visible and extensible. This is only useful, though, if people have access to it.

Many organizations do not, as a matter of course, share critical information broadly across the organization. In his Harvard Business Review article, “The Neuroscience of Trust,” Paul Zak suggests that only around 40% of employees are “well informed” about their company’s strategies, goals, and tactics. The remaining 60% of workers are, to a certain extent, flying in the dark. 

That is, many employees are simply not learning much of what is going on around them. This dynamic undermines the collective brain that drives human and organizational learning.

Zak’s insight underscores the fact that decision making in most organizations remains centralized and top-down. This of course assumes that those with tenure and title always have access to all relevant information and know what is best for the organization. 

Often, critical knowledge resides at the margins of organizations, in employees without much in the way of tenure or title. Yet, they sometimes have important expertise from which the company can benefit.

How can management access that knowledge? Equally important, how can younger staff access the insights and guidance of experienced employees — without having to engage in old school, one-on-one mentoring? 

Are there insights within an organization, either at the top or on the margins, that can help the company better understand their shifting customer needs or competitive landscape? Who has those insights? 

How can we capture and leverage all potential information and knowledge — inside and outside the organization? 

The Power of Situational Expertise

Weinberger and Zanini present a helpful example of how AI as an idea can aid an organization in its cultural learning process. They reference a 2023 paper from the Center for Strategic Leadership at the Army War College which claims “that AI will directly influence the organizational structures of militaries.” 

For example, AI could “identify the soldier with the best situational awareness, put him or her in charge of the unit, and assign the rest of the team to supporting roles.” In this scenario, AI can lead to situational leadership that could make or break an operation.

They then cite the oft overlooked management guru, Mary Parker Follet, who suggested (in the 1920s) something similar when she said that “one person should not give orders to another person, but both should agree to take their orders from the situation.” 

On the one hand this runs against the instincts of many managers, as the statistic presented by Paul Zak suggests. On the other hand, however, finding relevant situational expertise leverages the greatest potential of an organization.

Closing Thoughts on Homo Innovatius

Innovation is what humans do. Indeed, one can argue that the history of the human species is a history of innovation. 

The long line of innovations across human history is mind boggling:

• Advent of hunting technology and big game hunting
• Domestication of fire and cooking
• Domestication of agriculture and animals
• Development of sedentism, city states, surplus, bureaucracy, and standing armies
• Development of the first boat
• The wheel
• Gunpowder
• The magnetic compass
• The printing press
• The steam engine
• Industrial Revolution
• 19th Century (steam ships, photography, telegraph, telephone, light bulb, phonograph, electricity, sewing machines)
• 20th Century (Information Revolution, penicillin, airplanes, cars, radio, TV, spaceships, computers, the internet, cell phones, nuclear power)
• 21st Century (human genome, genetic engineering, wireless internet, cloud computing, smart phones, GPS, electric cars, virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, virtual conferencing, AI and machine learning)

When placed within the lineage of human innovation, AI is the perfectly logical, and perhaps inevitable, next step in the expansion of human learning and cultural evolution. 

To date, many managers remain wedded to a previous era’s assumptions about how much to trust employees, what information to share, etc. 

However, if corporate leaders are serious about improving the cultural foundations of their organizations, AI is clearly the next frontier. 

Being able to document, store, and share the collective brain of an organization (both human and artificial intelligence), the capacity for organizational learning is just now being tapped. This is what humans have done over the course of evolution.