The AI Organization

Chapter 5. The Culture of Collaboration: Organizing Teams

Imagine that your company is a person. What adjectives do you think your customers would use to describe its personality? That’s your company’s brand perception. What adjectives do you think the employees would use to describe it? That’s your culture.

The company culture is the true personality of your organization. It influences how it behaves, what it does, and the way it works. It is anchored on shared assumptions by employees, which heavily guide what they do and how they do it. Any plan, any activity, any initiative that is not aligned with that personality feels unnatural and doesn’t stick.

Without a culture aligned with AI, any attempt at embracing it will also feel against the grain and won’t stick, either. You can target a few use cases and even be successful in some of them, but you won’t be able to truly transform your organization with AI, any more than I could transform myself into a dancer by memorizing a couple of dance moves—it’s just not who I am or what I’ve been preparing for.

Fortunately, unlike me, company culture can be changed. It’s the result of many factors that we can act on: the way the company is organized, the leadership style, the communication strategy, talent management, training, rewards… these are all aspects we can control that help shape the culture of the organization. This chapter will focus on one important factor: the team structure and collaboration model.

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