PD Newsletter #108: Our new book: The Intelligence Era Organisation
👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.
Many organisations struggle to see value from AI. That’s rarely the fault of the technology itself, but a problem with the underlying organisational environment.
PD’s new book, the Intelligence Era Organisation: Creating the Conditions to Thrive in the Age of AI, written by me, Adam Maddison, helps leaders build the conditions for success. That means the conditions for teams to safely experiment with new practices and technologies, learn what works, and scale it. Get your digital copy.
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Latest from Public Digital
💛 Our thoughts are with colleagues and friends impacted by the two major earthquakes which hit Venezuela last week. If you’re looking for ways to help, you can donate to organisations like WFP, British Red Cross, or UNICEF, or contribute to Go Fund Me campaigns.
🏳️🌈 We’ve been celebrating Pride month at PD. Read an interview with one of our colleagues about identity, belonging, and what genuine LGBTQ+ inclusion actually looks like at work.
👁️ The Intelligence Era Organisation at a glance
Tom Loosemore recently updated his definition of digital, originally written in 2016.
As he writes, our current technological era may be one defined more by AI than by the internet, but the rules are the same: the organisations best placed for success will be those who have already worked hard to create the right organisational conditions.
As I argue in the book, AI won’t help you bypass organisational dysfunction. In fact, it will amplify it. If you're plagued by silos, handoffs and theatrical governance, AI will only make you more dysfunctional, faster.
But if you do have the right conditions in place - a high-trust environment which values autonomy, feedback, learning, problem-solving, and continuous improvement - then AI can make your teams fly.
This book is a step-by-step guide for leaders trying to get there.
📖 Read The Intelligence Era Organisation
📅 Join us online for the book launch on 9 July at 6:30pm.
🎧 Listen to me in conversation with Tom Loosemore and product and delivery leader Nora Bereczkei, exploring how leaders can build the conditions to thrive in the intelligence era.
Internet era ways of working
💔 Thought-provoking essay from Rachel Coldicutt on forms - how they have become the default way to interact with the platform-economy, but how abstracting and resolving everything down to online transactions is exhausting and dehumanising. “We don’t get better relationships or safety nets or cheery smiles, we get notification emails and reminders to rate our satisfaction.”
💡 This essay from Andreas Bleiker perfectly complements the Intelligence Era Organisation. AI has democratised creation, but where’s the consideration that something should be created? Where’s the curation? And where’s the validation that something built actually works? Teams can deliver, but they need a feedback and learning culture - one that stems from the organisation.
❌ If a complicated service isn’t working for users, there is often a drive to make better guidance. As Alistair Ruff points out, this is a short-sighted fix, much like the adoption of AI or some third-party framework. “The end goal should never be to write better manuals to help people navigate a broken system; it should be to make the right path the one of least resistance.”
🌀 A clear-eyed practical guide to the value of experienced humans-in-the-loop from Mark Webster. Yes, AI can generate convincingly polished prototypes remarkably quickly, but shipping something real requires classic product discipline - thinking through edge cases, ruthlessly prioritising the core must-haves, setting tight constraints, and knowing enough to challenge what the AI produces. “The danger with prompting is not that the AI gets things wrong. It is that it gets things nearly right in a way that looks finished.”
🧱 Extraordinarily useful collation of posts from Sarah Taraporewalla - one that I wished I’d had before I started writing my book. “How do we build organisations that are capable of taking advantage of the opportunities that technology creates? The answer lies not in the tools we adopt, but in the foundations we build.”
Technology in focus
🔍 Google, along with other content platforms, have successfully argued that they cannot be held accountable for third party content they surface. But Google’s AI overviews are not search results, and a major precedent on this issue was set by the Munich Regional Court, issuing a preliminary injunction against Google after its AI Overviews falsely linked two publishing companies to subscription scams and fraud. This could - and should - have a profound impact.
📣 Our new book argues that AI amplifies what’s already there. Charity Majors’ piece about the AI enthusiast/sceptic split in engineering teams entertainingly reinforces that point. Both sides of the divide are right: enthusiasts are correct that teams sitting out AI risk falling behind; sceptics are correct that shipping code faster than anyone can understand it erodes reliability and institutional knowledge. The fix? Treat AI adoption as an engineering problem, rather than an ideological one. Real gains are possible, but only for teams with high engineering discipline, fast feedback loops, and a culture of experimentation and measurement.
⚠️ Another argument for the importance of rigour, guardrails, service design and system thinking in this story of a false positive in an AI-enabled system for policing shoplifting. While facial recognition tools themselves are only getting better, if someone can be incorrectly flagged as a suspect without any review or notification process, the results have the potential to be devastating. “A system that depends on its victims to audit it is not a system. It's a class action waiting for the right claimant.”
🇻🇦 On the subject of AI excluding people “without the possibility of appeal”, a substantive, emotive critique – sharper than you might expect – from the Vatican. Leo XIV is specifically worried about the concentration of technological power in the hands of a small number of private actors whose resources exceed those of most governments. He quotes Romano Guardini: "Contemporary man has not been trained to use power well." Difficult to argue otherwise...
🚗 Introducing CrankGPT, an offline, ‘apocalypse-proof’ AI consisting of nothing but a hand crank, a small computer, and a small stack of speech and language models running locally. “It offended our European small-practical-car sensibilities to see people around us throwing kilowatts and thousands of tokens at tasks small models could accomplish just as well as huge ones, for a fraction of the cost and energy.”
Digital government news
🏛️ Creating the conditions to deliver for users is especially challenging when operating on the scale of a federal government, as this piece by George Sheldrake outlines in the context of Australia. Some great observations on the need for continuity of a digital centre, and shared standards and capabilities. As the work of Merici Vinton and others in the US has shown, the lack of any unifying theory of change in transforming digital government makes it really hard.
🔄 3 excellent posts on testing and learning. As Mike Gallagher reminds us, the UK public sector has many wicked problems, and only by doing and learning from doing will it be able to address them. Test, Learn and Grow if you will. Andrew Greenway sets out a beautifully articulate case and roadmap for turning TLG into a movement. As Jack Strachan argues, the hard part of public sector transformation was never having the right method – it was creating and sustaining the organisational conditions in which those methods could actually shape decisions.
🛒 Timely, important work from David Eaves and others in their report on how Canada can create a competitive marketplace for compute - based on the logic that you can make the cloud contestable by commoditizing it, meaning storage and compute are treated like utilities. That’s essential because, as David argues, “replacing a foreign monopolist with a domestic one is still dependency.” In the UK, Matt Wood-Hill has published a useful guide for government teams trying to shape technology markets.
🙌 Wonderful to see the state of Colorado setting out to transform from a project-based operating model to a product-based one, as told by Jen Pahlka and the co-founder of Colorado’s Digital Service. Particular emphasis on the state’s work to hire the right people for the right roles: “change the job descriptions, the hiring assessments, and the success metrics of agency staff, and you’ve rewired the machine.”
🌍 “Whether in West Africa or Southern Africa, in the 1990s or the 2020s, the same diagnosis appears: civil servants lack motivation, accountability, and performance culture.” Interesting examination of the reform efforts across six African countries to understand why well-intentioned civil service reform fails, from Martin Williams.
🇩🇪 Finally, Germany’s new modernisation agenda sets out ambitious plans to achieve faster procedures, digitalisation and the reduction of bureaucracy. That’s enabled by initiatives including a federal-wide digital operating system, stronger data sharing, and citizen digital wallets.
Something fun
How big is a trillion dollars? TL;DR: bigger than you think.
Top posts from newsletter #107