Rita McGrath
What the world needs now… is love
and AI?
Thought Sparks
Introduction
Paul LeBlanc, in his thought-provoking book “Broken,” shows how scaling removes humanity from many of our systems of care. AI might be the great unlock that would allow us to flood our systems with quality people, uplift them, and set the stage for a new era of human thriving. But what does the same pattern mean for management consulting?
Our systems of care are failing us.
Paul LeBlanc, just stepping down now from his role as the trailblazing President of Southern New Hampshire University and into the job of a startup entrepreneur, joined me by the fireside on May 17. Our conversation took his recent book “Broken: How Our Social Systems are Failing Us and How we can Fix Them” as a point of departure. In the book, which draws on his own background and personal experiences, but connects them to the systems of care we have designed, he points to positive solutions we can create, which will only be accelerated by the advent of better and better artificial intelligence software.
Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
The secret sauce? Humans.
What they have learned at SNHU, and what Paul could be a model for other care systems at scale put humans into these systems at critical touch the problem with operating systems at scale is t systems love predictability, reliability and samethe same time, humans are unpredictable, noto unreliable and different from one another. All to systems designers favor the demands of the sys the needs of the humans.
Human work initiatives.
Paul suggests that this model offers a solution to our broken systems. What if you could limit the resources consumed by the expensive part of a system (doctors, lawyers, professors and the like), but vastly expand the resources available to “flood” the system with competent, welltrained, but less expensive people?
Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
A great inflection point that may make this possible.
Carlota Perez, whose work you all know I greatly admire, suggests that when we have a transformative technological revolution, such as the advent of digitization and now the rollout of powerful AI systems, societies change. The old winners can become losers. The formerly outsiders can become insiders. New opportunities and ways of thinking emerge. It represents an opportunity to reinvent the way society works.
So what does this mean for those who trade almost purely on their expertise?
If doctors, lawyers and professors’ expertise is likely to be democratized, what does all of this mean for the field of management consulting? In this, I am delighted to say that I’m being joined at Valize by Kes Sampanthar, recently of BCG and KPMG, to consider what next-generation consulting will be like when getting a complex analysis done is a simple as asking a question and pushing a button.
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Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
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