Welcome back to Untangled, a newsletter and community for people who refuse the story that technology just happens to us. It’s stewarded by me, Charley Johnson, and enriched by members like you. This week I’m writing about what David Robinson’s exit from OpenAI and Maggie Jackson’s work on uncertainty reveal about pacing AI in the workplace. As always, please send me feedback on today’s post by replying to this email. I read and respond to every note. On to the show! Untangled HQ Over the next few months, I’ll roll out one new tool per week. The first two — an AI Readiness Assessment and Strategy for Uncertainty Assessment — are free and accessible to anyone. All subsequent tools will be paywalled for those who sign up for the new Untangled membership. Deep Dive We Have No Time to Rush: Why Organizations Should Slow Down AI Adoption This week I’m sharing my conversation with Maggie Jackson, author of Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, a book I’d hand to anyone leading an organization through AI right now. We discuss: * How the early AI field treated uncertainty as an obstacle, and why AI that can say “I don’t know” matters. * What happens to our curiosity when AI search summaries hand us one tidy answer. * Whether tolerance of uncertainty is a skill people build or something their circumstances allow. * Why people grow more confident in AI’s answers while losing confidence in their own abilities. * How organizations can slow down AI adoption, and what surgeons can teach them about pausing. The conversation is well worth the listen, and it got me thinking about what organizations lose when they adopt AI in a hurry. If AI companies are unwilling to slow down, we can. A while back, Maggie gave a short talk on uncertainty to a small group of chief technology officers from Fortune 100 companies. When she finished, the first response wasn’t a question. One CTO told her, in effect, “We don’t have time for uncertainty. We need answers immediately.” This sums up the status quo. Adopt AI as fast as humanly possible. Ask questions later, or preferably, never. Speed is scarce, and uncertainty eats time, so whatever you do, don’t slow down. Imagining alternative futures AI use might enable or constrain? Too much time! Redesigning workflows in a way that intentionally distinguishes between what must stay human and what AI does well? Not enough time. Attending to the organizational dynamics AI use might exacerbate? You get the point. This entire way of thinking is premised on the assumption that uncertainty slows us down, speed is a virtue, and pausing is a luxury we simply don’t have. Why AI companies won’t slow down The companies building AI work from the same premise. Earlier this month, David Robinson quit OpenAI, where he led the writing of the safety reports the company publishes alongside new models. I got to know David a bit when I was at Data & Society Research Institute. He’s deeply smart and thoughtful, and he’s not quick to hyperbole. He’s as even-keeled as they come. So I was keen to read his essay in The Atlantic, and listen to his conversation with Ezra Klein. I’d encourage you to read/listen to both. Basically, Robinson argues that the whole AI industry has an unsafe culture, and he described how fast things now move inside it. New releases used to come a few times a year. Now companies keep adding new training, tools and features to existing models, and, he said, “we’re shipping new capability and risk every Tuesday.” Klein asked whether safety testing can keep up at that speed. Robinson answered a narrower question, how much time there is to kick the tires: “And the answer is not a ton.” There are brakes, he said, and some launches and training runs have been stopped, but the pauses are “very carefully scoped.” Robinson also explained why he didn’t see the danger sooner, which narrowed in on incentives and time. He joined OpenAI in May 2023, and “it’s been one Slack ping after another ever since then,” he said. “Only in stepping back from my operational responsibilities over the last few weeks have I started to have the time to really reflect on where we are.” The pace of the work, in short, kept him from seeing what the work was doing. (That should sound familiar to anyone running adopting AI in their organization.) He concluded that OpenAI “is such a machine and it is moving so fast” that the change he thought was needed couldn’t come from inside. As he left, he ended a note to colleagues with this line: “We have to make good choices. We have no time to rush.” How uncertainty helps leaders make better decisions Robinson wrote that line for his colleagues at OpenAI, but it applies just as well to the companies and organizations adopting AI — and to the presumably exhausted CTO Maggie encountered. The CTO’s comment rests on a common assumption: leaders who feel unsure hesitate, and leaders who feel certain act. Maggie pointed me to research from Nils Plambeck and Klaus Weber who tested that assumption and surveyed 104 German CEOs about the European Union’s 2004 expansion, a change that opened new markets and brought in new competitors. The upshot? The CEOs who saw the expansion as strongly good and strongly bad for their company at the same time were the most likely to act, and their companies’ responses were broader and, by the CEOs’ own account, newer and riskier. I’d argue this ambivalence is what uncertainty looks and feels like: you take both possibilities seriously instead of picking one and moving on. Feeling torn, in other words, pushes leaders to look beyond their usual playbook for answers. So where does that ambivalence come from? In a follow-up study, Plambeck and Weber found that it depends on two big things. First, CEOs whose companies pursued new opportunities while also protecting what they already had were more likely to see both sides than CEOs whose companies did only one or the other. The second was the company’s sense of control. CEOs who thought their company had little control over the expansion didn’t look closely, and CEOs who thought it had a great deal grew overconfident and fell back into their routine. The CEOs in between were the most likely to feel torn and embrace uncertainty. How to pace AI adoption in your organization It’s hard not to see current AI adoption status quo in both of those groups. Some leaders see AI adoption as inevitable. It is happening to them, so the vendors speed sets the pace and the market sets the timeline. Their only job is to keep up. These leaders look a lot like the low-control CEOs who stop looking closely. By contrast, the leaders who treat AI just like another IT rollout — who look for stability in past routines — look like the high-control CEOs. The leaders most likely to sit with the question long enough to respond well are the ones in between: they believe their choices shape how AI changes their organization, without believing they control the outcome. Slowing down doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means moving with intention or as Jen Briselli suggested, never acting faster than you can learn. Maggie once spent time embedded in operating rooms, and some of the surgeons understood that to operate well in a crisis, that “you just need to spend a couple of minutes.” The surgeons used those minutes to access the reflective, curious side of themselves before they acted. The pause was intentional and purposeful, albeit brief. An organization’s pause needs a purpose too. It needs to be able to answer the question Robinson and Maggie keep coming back to: is your organization clear on what must stay human, ready to say what it doesn’t know, and attend to the organizational patterns AI-use generates? That’s the question behind the AI Readiness Assessment I mentioned up top. It’s free, and it’s a good place to start if you want your organization’s pause to be purposeful. Take it, share it with your team, and compare answers. We have no time to rush. Until next time, Charley Work With Me Here are 3 ways I can help: * Advising: I can help you navigate uncertainty, make sense of AI, and steward change in your system. * Training: Everything you and your team need to cut through the tech-hype and implement strategies that catalyze true systems change. * 1:1 Leadership Coaching: I can help you facilitate change — in yourself, your organization, and the system you work within. This is a public episode. 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