Dear Reader,
I was talking with someone recently about the start of my career, which was, slightly alarmingly, more than 30 years ago.
I was on a graduate scheme with a multinational food manufacturer. One of my first jobs was dealing with customer complaints. People would sometimes send the actual product back, and I had to work out what had happened, whether it needed testing and how we should respond.
And then I had to handwrite the response.
This was the early 90s, but I had already had an Apple Macintosh at university. I was used to typing assignments, although I sometimes had to ask lecturers for permission to hand them in typed. Some said no!
So I went from using a computer back to handwriting letters, correcting them with Tipp Ex and handing them to someone else to type.
It sounds ridiculous now.
But it made me think about what it must feel like if you have started using AI regularly and then join an organisation where nobody is really using it.
We don't need to have AI figured out. But we do need to be figuring it out.
I don't think anyone has AI figured out yet.
I am also pretty sceptical when CEOs say AI is already saving significant numbers of jobs. In many cases, I suspect it is being used to justify cost cutting that would probably have happened anyway.
But I think the opposite position is problematic too.
If you are leading an organisation and aren't testing, learning and figuring out where AI can make you more effective, you aren't thinking strategically enough about what is changing around you.
That doesn't mean adopting every new tool or trying to automate everything. It means experimenting enough to understand what might genuinely make the organisation better.
But when I got to thinking about my first job, it took me back to the start of my career and realising that not everything about the way we used to work should disappear.
Some of my best early career development wasn't development at all
I learnt an enormous amount simply by watching.
I watched meetings. I watched how people interacted. I saw how decisions were made, how disagreements were handled and how more experienced people navigated situations I had never encountered before.
I also had a female boss. In the early 90s, that wasn't necessarily a given, and I suspect seeing a woman in authority shaped my sense of what was possible more than I understood at the time.
None of this was a formal development programme. It happened because I was there.
I was talking to a CEO whose organisation is 100% remote and who is hiring someone quite junior and she was thinking about how to set out realistic expectations, hence thinking about the start of my career.
I am a big supporter of flexible working and have absolutely no desire to recreate the office culture of the 1990s. But I do wonder whether we have underestimated how much early career development happens through proximity.
If that is true, the answer isn't necessarily putting everyone back in an office five days a week. But it probably means we need to be much more deliberate about creating the learning that used to happen almost accidentally.
Organisations are changing. Technology is changing. How and where we work is changing. The funding environment is certainly changing.
We need to respond to all of that.
But we also need to be thoughtful about what genuinely needs to change, what we shouldn't accidentally lose, and what problem we are actually trying to solve.
I would be interested in your perspective. Where are you seeing organisations adapt well to what is changing, and where do you think we might be overcorrecting?
Warmly,
Liz
Strategic Advisor | Former CEO | Founder, Volante
Based in Kenya, available globally
