'What is your AI strategy?'
Three reasons why that's the absolute wrong question.
If you work for a civil society, government, or a philanthropic organization, the question of the moment is this: ‘what is your AI strategy?’ This is the wrong question for at least three reasons.
AI: AI is not a north star. It’s not a vision of the future you want to create. AI is an especially problematic starting point because it and other data-driven technologies can encode past inequitable patterns in the present. Technology might be a piece of the puzzle, but the sociotechnical problem you’re trying to solve and the future you’re trying to create should drive your approach.
Strategies shouldn’t look forward, they should map backward. The future is not a neat ‘theory of change’ away. All technologies are entangled in social systems (e.g. race, gender, power, etc.), which are complex, and don’t often adhere to cause-and-effect. Moreover, if we start from the present and map forward in time, we allow our current beliefs, values, and stories to constrain our conception of what’s possible. Your strategy must map backward from the future you want to create while being clear-eyed about these complex dynamics and constraints along the way.
‘Your’ assumes that you can do this alone. You can’t. Shifting systems and building new futures requires collective action, which in turn, hinges on collective sense-making. Collective sense-making requires getting on the same page about the complexity of the problem across diverse stakeholders, the future the group wants to create, and how to get from here to there. It requires building relational infrastructure, translating across difference, and transforming power dynamics.
We must shed our existing mindsets and adopt new ones. We must imagine alternative futures and align our individual and collective actions to them. We have to live these futures today, and then tomorrow.
I’ve developed a course to turn these and other ideas into practical strategies, and the first cohort launches in January. The course includes:
👉 Two, four-hour interactive sessions.
👂 One hour of free coaching following the course.
📖 A 90-page workbook full of practical exercises and tools.
➕ If you sign up by December 20, you’ll get a free annual paid subscription to Untangled and The Golden Hour ($140 value)
That’s it for now,
Charley