Why Your Organization Needs an Elastic, not Synthetic, Culture

I can still remember when a dear marketing friend dropped the term “synthetic content” into a discussion.

It was in relation to the worrying (and increasing) velocity of AI-generated video content that looked real but was obviously not. And his genuine concern that these deepfakes would undermine public trust, fuel more tinfoil hat conspiracies and that the delta between fact and fiction would be forever erased.

The term synthetic lodged in my brain like a “Last Christmas” earworm as you walk through the mall in November. <sorry, not sorry>

It is the season after all….over 2 billion streams on Spotify to date…and counting.

Since then, the rise of areas in our businesses and society that are synthetic has exploded.

We use digital twins or synthetic humans to augment our market research.

We generate synthetic marketing content to accelerate the velocity and volume of our communications.

We model, leverage and deploy enormous synthetic datasets to remove the messiness of real-world lead and lag indicators.

We create synthetic chatbots to optimize our customer service interactions while eradicating call center staff and in-branch humans that we can actually talk to.

All of these synthetic operations and investments get bundled into an enterprise bucket titled “Efficiency”

Our share price gets a momentary bump. We can calm our nervous Board of Directors that we’re actually becoming the AI-First Enterprise we boasted about on our last analyst call.

And that’s not entirely a bad thing.

What I’m certainly not suggesting is convening a “Luddites Unite” conference in January. No-one in their right mind visits Toronto in January.

And, candidly, there’s much to celebrate in the promise of some of this synthetic efficiency.

Hands up who doesn’t want more effective meetings, less nonsensical reports for reporting’s sake and more genuine collaboration and cohesion with invisible colleagues whose experience and insights can genuinely improve our products.

However, what happens though when our relentless quest for synthetically-derived efficiency becomes a dangerous House of Cards?

When removing messy, irrational, emotional and empathetic humans “from the loop” diminishes the veracity of the very relationships we need for our businesses to survive? I welcome one example of a chatbot interface that frustrated consumers actually relish interacting with. Bob and Betty at the call center may be annoying but at least they had some humanity and empathy.

When we build our future on large language models trained on our historical knowledge, unconscious biases and how things were versus trying to address how things are and how things might be in our uncertain future?

When we scale these magnificent “answer machines” by deploying these tools by enterprise mandate with scant regard to how our humans actually need to be counseled, trained and role-modeled in order to get the very best results from them? Heaven knows none of us need to read another Gartner report about “failed” AI deployments that talk to the human factors conveniently ignored in the deployment and change management action plans.

So, what is the counterpoint or the balance to an organizational predilection with synthetic?

Organizations that are more elastic, than synthetic

I fully acknowledge I’m having some linguistic play here, but elastic organizations strike me as more robust, more resilient and more adaptive than the efficiency-obsessed synthetic ones.

In recent months I’ve had the good fortune to interview some of the most recognized strategic foresight and scenario planners on the planet. <Shameless plug but they are all listed under ARTICLES on my LinkedIn profile>

It has been a rare treat.

To a person their recommendations have echoed variations on the theme of elasticity and how that very human mindset is a vital aspect of the future we’re hurtling toward.

So how might Elastic and Synthetic co-exist in the organizations we’re all looking to nurture?

Elastic organizations build in more emphasis on questions and curiosity than automatically defaulting to the answer machine output of AI . Curiosity in our people and our culture that interrogates the “workslop” and asks “what are we missing” in this evaluation rather than breathing a sigh of relief and breathlessly moving on to our next task.

Elastic organizations recognize that hyper-efficient systems are not better, they’re actually brittle and snap, versus bend, when confronted with unanticipated stresses. This point is eloquently made by Jamais Cascio in his excellent book “Navigating the Age of Chaos”. His example of the Evergreen snafu on March 2021, where our hyper-efficient global supply chain flew into a frenzy when one container ship got “stuck” in the Suez Canal. As Jamais outlined in our interview “In a BANI world, conditions change too quickly. You must focus on the desired goal, not strictly pre-defining or pre-determining a single path for your people.”

Elastic organizations appreciate that informed and deliberate debate (versus blind consent) is a superpower that truly leverages the diversity we’ve been discussing, but not genuinely implementing, for over a decade. Synthetic research creates the mistaken illusion of certainty when what we really need is more discussion around the numerous plausible and potential futures our organizations face. In my discussion with Dr Craig Wing, he tells leaders to build a culture where your leadership, your organizations perceptions of your strengths and the external landscape are aligned to a common view of the “Season” your firm is in.

Lastly, in an excellent HBR article by Bob Sutton and Rebecca Hinds entitled “The 5 AI Tensions that Leaders Need to Navigate” I was particularly taken by Tension #4 – “Fast vs Slow” as it reflected a view that speed is still regarded as the largest AI opportunity. Like Bob and Rebecca, I’m more partial to the sniper mindset that “slow is smooth and smooth is fast”

Ultimately I’m enthusiastically advocating for leadership and organizations to avoid “The Tyranny of OR” as so beautifully explained by Jim Collins.

We can - and must - create organizations that are both Elastic and Synthetic.

Organizations where leadership leverages the flexibility of human curiosity and the rapid deployment of AI workflows.

Organizations where the culture actively nurtures the creative brilliance of our humans as a feature and doesn’t see that messiness as a bug.

A culture optimized for both synthetic and elastic.

Where synthetic becomes a superpower in your organization.

Where elastic becomes your sustainable competitive advantage.