What does AI Adoption and Women During World War II Have in Common👩‍🔧?

As parts of the world open up, people are eager to slip back into the old normal. After all, the familiar comforts of the physical world are too tempting.

Take the example of university education. Most institutions have switched back to in-person classes with compulsory residential programs.

“It’s as if the Covid-forced changes were a temporary nuisance that can now be conveniently forgotten,” says Vijay Govindarajan, Coxe Distinguished Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Today’s big question is whether the pandemic-driven innovations will be sustained and built upon long after masks and booster shots are gone.

Looking back at history, we can find our answers. Govindarajan shares the example of World War II, another black swan event.

The revolutionary change birthed by World War II

With American men drafted into military service, the factories suddenly didn’t have enough workers. So, they reluctantly recruited women, something they had resisted until that point. Not only did women do these jobs, but they also excelled at them.

However, this revolutionary change didn’t last after the final shot was fired in the war. As men returned, women were promptly retrenched from their jobs.

It took a few years for factories to re-embrace the idea of women as part of the mainstream workforce, working alongside men. However, this shift did happen, and the women’s movement has never looked back.

Isn’t this similar to what’s happening now during the pandemic?

Once any crisis or urgency passes, the human tendency is to go back to business as usual. “I call it dominant logic,” says Govindarajan. “This makes people say, ‘That nuisance is over, so let’s all go back to our face-to-face classrooms.’”

This is the equivalent of factories firing women once men became available for recruitment after the war.

The longer a practice or entity has been in operation and the more successful it has become, the tougher it is to shake off dominant logic.

Dominant logic and AI-driven transformations

What’s the biggest roadblock reported by Chief Data Officers for the adoption of AI? It’s organizational culture. The inertial force that’s at play here is dominant logic.

How can organizations tackle it to get over this cultural resistance?

To learn a new behavior, organizations must first forget old ones – those that hold you back. “If you can’t forget, you can’t learn,” says Govindarajan. He shares a blueprint for forgetting organizations in his strategy framework, called The Three Box Solution.

Drawing lessons from this framework, there are two ways to fight dominant logic:

1. Role of leadership: Leaders shape organizational culture, consciously and subconsciously. When habits become dysfunctional, it’s the leaders’ responsibility to intervene – through ongoing messaging, incentivization, and hard decisions.
2. Continuous re-evaluation: To weed out non-constructive behavior, you must first identify it. Set up mechanisms to continuously evaluate the relevance of established ideas and prune out unhealthy ones. Organizations must create a conducive environment of trust and openness to enable this.

Once you tackle dominant logic, opportunities open up for creating the business of the future with AI.

Curious to know more about the three-box framework and how it can help build an AI-powered organization? Check out my interview with Professor Govindarajan.