VAPORIZED by "GenAi?"

Admin
May 7
2 min read

Updated: May 12

Image Credit: MIT Sloan Management Review

Advancing Open Systemic Challenge Framing

Welcome back Humantific Journal readers. This week we are happy to recommend an article that appeared recently in the MIT Sloan Management Review, entitled "The Innovation Advantage GenAI Can't Give You."

Written by David Schonthal, professor of strategy and innovation at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, we were delighted to see that the article reinforces our own Humantific messaging around the growing importance of building Open Systemic Challenge Framing capacity in organizations of all shapes and sizes.

Unlike traditional discipline-based framing, Open Systemic Challenge Framing makes no upfront assumptions regarding what the actual challenges might be, (think constellations, not one-offs) a key dynamic in tackling complex organizational and societal changemaking work.

HIGHLIGHTS

In particular we loved these points tabled in the MIT Review article:

“For Most of Modern Business Times competitive advantage belonged to whoever had the best ideas…. That advantage has been vaporized by AI.”

"Until recently, most organizations could get away with mediocre problem framing. Why? Because ideas were scarce enough to be valuable on their own. That’s no longer the case."

“GenAI has turned ideation into a full-blown utility. Anyone with a $20 subscription can instantly generate 100 product concepts, rendering raw ideas as abundant, accessible, and cheap as electricity — and nobody competes on electricity.”

“The competitive advantage has therefore shifted upstream: from the solution to the problem, and specifically to how you identify and frame the problem in the first place.”

“Companies that win in the GenAI era won't be those that generate the most ideas — they'll be those that develop superior capabilities in problem identification and framing, a distinctly human skill that AI augments but cannot replace.”

QUESTION ZERO

The article author refers to this important work undertaken in the terrain of upstream as "Question Zero," the question before the question. "Before asking "How do we solve this?" you need to ask "Are we even looking at the right problem?"

"Question Zero" is not an earth shattering concept for seasoned Complexity Navigators engaged in Open Systemic Challenge Framing but might be a useful construct for organizational leaders trying to decipher what’s missing from their innovation equations.

Building the capacity to engage in "Question Zero" is the heavy lift of rising interest to organizational leaders looking to help diverse groups within their organizations.

See the full MIT Sloan Management Review article here.

Our readers will know that writing for our new Humantific book “Advancing Design for Complexity” we recently published a chapter on Rethinking Framing: Making Sense of Open Systemic Challenge Framing.