🤖 "Secret Cyborgs" - Why This Phrase Hit Home Today

I love Ethan Mollick 's description of "Secret Cyborgs" - those quiet AI innovators already transforming work from within. Our team brought our own "cyborg" into the virtual room today, giving me insight into what the future of work could look like.

Our team was working on our framework for clients when we decided to make our process more "cyborg-like." We fed our existing content into an LLM, but here's the key: we didn't just accept its output. Our expertise guided us as we challenged its suggestions and used our collective experience to evolve the process.

Here's how our evolution looked - and where your organization might be on this journey:

  • Level 0: "The Resistance" - Teams working in isolation from AI tools
  • Level 1: "Secret Cyborgs" - Individual innovators using AI quietly
  • Level 2: "Open Experiments" - Teams acknowledging and sharing AI use
  • Level 3: "Collaborative Innovation" - Humans and AI working together openly
  • Level 4: "Systemic* Integration" - AI innovation becoming part of organizational DNA

Today, we operated at Level 3, bringing our "cyborg" into the open. The result? A framework more robust than what humans or AI could have created alone.

This mirrors Mollick's insights. He points out that 65% of marketers and 64% of journalists already use AI at work, often quietly. But here's the critical part: individual productivity gains don't automatically translate to organizational success.

The real opportunity? Creating what Mollick calls "The Lab and The Crowd" - environments where AI innovation can flourish openly. Our experience today exemplified this: by bringing our "cyborg" into the open, we transformed what could have been individual experimentation into collective innovation.

Leaders, consider where your organization is on the journey towards combining AI into its DNA. The question isn't whether to embrace AI—it's how to create the psychological safety and incentive structures that let your team's AI experiments drive organizational transformation.

What level is your organization at, and what's your plan to move up?

#Leadership #AI #Innovation #FutureOfWork #OrganizationalChange