Blurred Lines of Business Reality
Pondering AI and Liminality
It's been another busy few weeks, and thoughts are bubbling up due to several events, so it's time for an occasional blog.
The first was a great evening where I hosted a Roger Spitz talk for a work event. Roger spoke about his new book, touching on a number of critical topics related to uncertainty and business and linking these to recent AI advances. I'm now on my second, much slower reading, and I'll go as far as to say there's something that resonates on every page. If you are interested in the dynamics of change in relation to business, then I recommend this book.
The second event involves a series of work conversations about futures and AI. I'm observing a pattern of certainty-seeking, resulting in an uncomfortable feeling of contradiction and paradox.
The last occurred during a nighttime run in the rain on a dark Somerset lane. As is often the way, the dots joined, and the insight hit. I raced home to capture my thoughts with the help of the obvious AI assistants. The rest follows.
Blurred Lines of Business Reality
The advancement of artificial intelligence has brought businesses to the edge of paralysis, a state Spitz describes in his book as 'liminality.' This liminality is not just a transition to a new paradigm; it's the unsettling coexistence of competing realities—the known and the unknown, stability and flux, human intuition and algorithmic precision. In this ambiguous in-between, the structures that once anchored decision-making give way to a fluid, ever-shifting context that demands a fundamental rethink of what it means to lead, compete, and innovate.
My hunch is that recent AI developments place organisations in a permanent liminal space, whether they realise it or not.
This is not a fleeting moment of disruption but a persistent state of ambiguity.
In this uncomfortable and undefined space, the boundaries between certainty and uncertainty blur, challenging businesses to operate without the safety of established frameworks or processes. The question is no longer how to eliminate uncertainty but how to navigate it as a fundamental characteristic of an emerging AI-driven reality (and this is not limited only to AI).
The Certainty-Seeking Function vs. Ambient Disruption
Organisations are, by their very nature, built on a "certainty-seeking function"—a deeply ingrained need to predict, plan, and control. This function manifests in familiar forms: forecasts, KPIs, and strategies that depend on measurable outcomes. Phrases like "What is the ROI?", "Where is the business case?", "What guarantees success?" or "What is the value?" exemplify this pursuit of clarity in decision-making.
Another concept from Spitz's book, ambient disruption, plays by different, changing rules. It refers to a persistent and pervasive state of change that continuously reshapes the environment in which businesses operate.
This need for certainty feels like an industrial age relic as ambient disruption grows. AI, with its transformative potential, embodies both promise and peril. It offers tools of precision that cater to the desire for control, but its rapid evolution also destabilises the very assumptions that underpin 'traditional business strategies'. As Spitz observes, the belief that organisations can ever "arrive at the other side" of disruption is an illusion; the boundaries that once delineated competitors from collaborators, digital from physical, even fact from simulation, are dissolving.
This dissolution is not just a technical challenge—it is an existential one. Clinging to outdated frameworks and leadership assumptions in the face of this profound ambiguity risks irrelevance.