When thought becomes inconvenient

How are we redesigning the work around artificial intelligence?

Many companies are approaching this question as if it were primarily a technological issue. But the strategic question might be a different one: how much thinking capacity do we still want to maintain within organisations? When we talk about AI, we point to the risk of individual cognitive surrender: if we delegate cognitive tasks, we tend to weaken them. This is a real issue.

But cognitive performance is not only about individuals. It can also concern organisations. We can speak of organisational cognitive surrender when the problem is not what the individual stops exercising, but what the context stops making convenient. The difference is substantial.

In the first case, the person progressively delegates part of his cognitive work. In the second, the system makes it economically more convenient to perform rather than question, to accept rather than doubt, to accelerate rather than interpret. This is where thinking becomes inconvenient. And it is here that the risk of cognitive disinvestment becomes strategic.

Organisations produce predictable behaviour. Not mechanically, but their established mode of operation makes certain outcomes highly probable. If work fragments activities, information and responsibilities, it produces fragmented knowledge (and meetings multiply to recompose what the system originally separated). If there is a lot of distance between those who experience problems and those who decide, it slows down the ability to respond. But there is a less visible effect. In recent decades, many organisations have expanded the cognitive contribution required of people, rewarding above all a specific form of thinking: analysis. Data, reports, detailed evaluations. In these contexts, the hyper-analysis that often paralyses is not an individual limitation. It is an organisational product. Because not all thinking is of equal value. Analysing means breaking down, deepening, optimising a part. Interpreting means linking signals, reading interdependencies, building an overall view, questioning assumptions, making judgements when data are not enough. This is the thinking that allows decisions to be made in discontinuities. And it is precisely that which many organisations have cultivated less. This is not surprising, if we think of how modern organisations were conceived when they came into being. Henry Ford is credited with a phrase that has remained famous: "Why is it that every time I ask for a pair of arms, I also get a brain attached?". A vision that still resurfaces today in formulas that sound archaic but have not disappeared: 'you are not paid to think', 'you do this because I tell you to'. What is new is that this logic can now resurface in much more powerful forms when individual and organisational cognitive performance reinforce each other. The individual delegates because it is convenient, fast, efficient. The organisation implicitly rewards that behaviour because it accelerates execution. A silent convergence is thus created: thinking less benefits both. And it is here that organisational cognitive performance takes shape: the automation of the skills that companies have trained the most, without reinforcing those they have cultivated the least. In the short term, the benefits are obvious in terms of increased efficiency and reduced time. In the medium term, less visible costs may emerge: decision-making conformism, cognitive dependence on outputs, reduced critical comparison, less ability to read anomalies, criticalities and opportunities. This means apparently faster but potentially less robust decisions, greater difficulty in intercepting changes of scenario and a progressive weakening of competitive capacity in discontinuities. In short: operational efficiency accompanied by strategic fragility.