GenAI and the GPS problem
Generative AI invites us to outsource our thinking. We need to know when to refuse.
The decision making is the memo writing, is the answering, is the editing of drafts. These actions are not precursors to decision making, they are the decision making.
—Karl E. Weick (1983)
Those who know me will confirm that I have a terrible sense of direction. If left to my own impulses, I will walk or drive away from an intended destination rather than toward it. And I will go quite a distance down a wrong road before noticing my mistake.
This directional weakness made me a grateful and enthusiastic early adopter of turn-by-turn directions when the technology arrived for the iPhone (roundabout 2009). I no longer had to know where I was, where I was going, or the relationship between the two. I could outsource that problem to my device and its conversation with the Global Positioning System (GPS). As a result, the odds of my arriving at my destination were radically improved, but my internal capacity to do so myself went from slim to none.
With the rise of generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and their siblings, we are approaching a similar fork in the road – not for geographic directions but for thinking and decision-making. These large language models are increasingly able to generate compelling and convincing alternatives to human thought. In more and more circumstances, they invite us to outsource our cognitive work – writing the email, memo, summary, analysis, strategy, or report.
Just like GPS, these systems promise to get us to a destination efficiently and with reduced cognitive effort. And like GPS, they can atrophy our capacity to make the journey ourselves.
This doesn’t mean we should shun generative AI from our management practice. The technology has positive, productive, and even transformative roles to play across all ten functions of arts management. But we do need to determine when and how to use the tools in ways that serve us without reducing our individual or collective ability to think when it matters.
It is tempting to claim that a memo is output, not thinking. But organizational scholar Karl Weick would disagree. He argued that “thinking is inseparably woven into and occurs simultaneously with action” (Weick 1983). So, when you outsource a memo to ChatGPT, you’re not only outsourcing the action but also the thinking entangled with that action.
When and where in your management process is it okay to outsource your thinking, and when is it not okay?
Fortunately, this new problem resonates with an old one facing management professionals: when to outsource any business role or function, and when to maintain that capacity in-house. This dilemma has long been a part of competitive analysis and practice, and some of its frameworks could provide a place to start.
For example, Jay Barney (2007) suggests that firms should internally retain (and not outsource) resources that sustain their competitive advantage. Such resources, he wrote, will rank high on all of these criteria (VRIO):
Value: Does the resource enable the firm to respond to environmental threats or opportunities?
Rarity: Is the resource currently controlled by only a small number of competing firms?
Imitability: Do firms without the resource face a cost disadvantage in obtaining or developing it?
Organization: Is the firm organized to activate the valuable, rare, and inimitable resource?
Through this lens, tasks or activities that are low value, widely available, imitable, and adjacent to the organization’s core practice can be outsourced, while valuable, rare, inimitable, and organization-entangled resources should not be. Of course, these determinations will be different for each organization based on its discipline, business dynamics, competitive landscape, and operating ecology. But the framework at least provides some common questions that can lead to your unique results.
Invitations to use generative AI will be everywhere soon. In many industries, they are everywhere already. We can’t stop those invitations, nor the temptations that come with them. But we can build a discipline to interrogate them, rather than defaulting to accept.
The next time a device offers to think, write, or act on your behalf, take a moment to consider whether the shortcut is worth the cost.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: People Operations
People Operations involves designing and driving systems and practices that attract, engage, retain, and develop people within the enterprise (also called human resources).
Framework of the Week: Planning Organizing Leading Controlling (POLC)
Traditional management theory describes four core functions of management in any industry.
Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash
Sources
Barney, Jay B., and Delwyn N. Clark. 2007. Resource-Based Theory: Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantage. 1st ed. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Weick, Karl E. 1983. “Managerial Thought in the Context of Action.” In The Executive Mind: New Insights on Managerial Thought and Action, edited by Suresh Srivastva, 1st ed., 221–42. The Jossey-Bass Management Series & The Jossey-Bass Social and Behavioral Science Series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.