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You need space for the good fights if you want to thrive in the age of AI
Imagine this scenario:
A marketing director strongly leverages AI in developing a new member loyalty program. The output is impressive—detailed, well-reasoned, professionally presented. She takes it straight to the CMO who greenlights it. Three months into implementation, the sales team realizes that several of the new program’s features create direct pricing conflicts with existing organizational memberships. Now they have to back pedal and roll back some of the features, which upsets a lot of members.
This may sound like a simple example of failed cross-functional collaboration. If the marketing team had only run the plan past the organizational membership team, the conflict would have been identified, and the two teams could have hashed out a solution that worked for both of them. That didn’t happen, but not because of silos or poor communication. It didn’t happen because AI was just too fast.
What used to take weeks of producing several drafts of the loyalty program, with meetings and conversations along the way, can now be produced in a matter of hours using AI. That speed is fantastic, but it was in those meetings and conversations that happened along the way where someone would have said “Hey, did you run this buy the organizational membership folks?”
That sounds like a random question, but it’s actually an example of your organization’s conflict system at work. It’s an informal system, so there wasn’t a process or procedure that produced that specific question, but that collection of meetings, informal conversations, 1-1s with your manager, etc. is a system that determine which conflicts get raised and how they get resolved. It’s been working like that for years, and AI just short-circuited it.
The task was accomplished before those meetings could happen, so that conflict was never surfaced. You might argue that the CMO should have raised the issue before greenlighting the program, but remember, under the previous system those conflicts had always been addressed before projects reached the CMO for sign-off. This is the Solow Paradox in real life. New technology bolted onto old ways of working equals no productivity gains. AI broke your conflict system, which then erased the speed gains that you thought you were getting from AI.
Note that the problem here is not with AI, it’s with our conflict systems. We need different processes that (believe it or not) slow things down long enough for the good conflicts to be identified and resolved, so we can make the right decisions. That doesn’t mean slowing it back down to the multiple weeks of meetings from the old way, but if we don’t create space for the human conflict (which smart decisions require), we will erase the gains AI is starting to deliver.
The challenge, of course, is that most organizations don’t know how their conflict systems work. They backed into them over the years, and the rules that guide them are invisible; we never made them explicit. To solve this problem I created an AI and Conflict Readiness Assessment.
Your staff (even just a sample) takes a quick survey, and I follow up with a small number of interviews to gather more context. That, plus a conversation with your senior team, and I’ll be able to produce a useable map of your existing conflict system, pointing to potential trouble spots where AI might short-circuit it. The report will include recommended action items, and I’ll debrief it in a session with the senior team where you can start building a plan to bring your conflict system up to code, so to speak. You’ll go from “Wait, we have a conflict system?” to designing a system that works in the age of AI in less than 4 weeks.
Link to prospectus:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gyag81PZwQj5fPYxlXKQLH3AGOBJjQ9D/view?usp=sharing
Meet the author: Jamie Notter, Culture Scientist
Jamie Notter has spent 30 years helping organizations get out of their own way. He holds a Master's in conflict resolution from George Mason University, one of the field's founding programs, and has been consulting in organizations around conflict, change, and workplace culture for three decades. His conflict systems framework, developed through years of organizational practice and research, gives leaders a new lens for seeing and strengthening one of the most important—and most invisible—systems inside organizations. Jamie is the author of four books, including Culture Change Made Easy (2024) and the award-winning Non-Obvious Guide to Employee Engagement, and writes regularly on conflict, change, and culture on his Between Systems newsletter at jamienotter.substack.com.
