‘Our businesses have been designed for us by us, for humans by humans, and that’s what the big change is now.’
What’s the real promise and transformative power of AI in business? In their new book Autonomous: Why the fittest businesses embrace AI-first strategies in digital labor, Henry King and his co-author Vala Afshar make the case that organizational design will be transformed by agentic AI, with intelligent agents and humans collaborating seamlessly.
It’s an empowering vision: just as autonomous vehicles will democratize and expand humans’ ability to move around, they argue that AI can augment and democratize our creativity and effectiveness.
And Henry talks me through their ecosystem of iterative idea development, including the use of AI to challenge and expand those ideas, and offers super-practical advice for other writers in this space.
If you’re here for the intersection of cutting-edge technology, business strategy, the future of work and writing, this episode is very much here for you.
Henry’s site: https://www.henryking.com/
Henry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-king-88ba109/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Henry King. He and his co-author, Vala Afshar, are award-winning executives and technology practitioners specializing in business strategy, digital transformation, and AI technologies. And together they have written ‘Autonomous: Why the fittest businesses embrace AI-first strategies in digital labour’ and ‘Boundless: A new mindset for unlimited business success’.
So first of all, welcome, Henry. It’s very good to have you here.
Henry King: Lovely, thanks Alison. It’s really a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Alison Jones: I’m so fascinated to dive into all of this. So let’s talk about the title and the subtitle also of Autonomous, there’s so much there, isn’t it?
‘AI-first strategies’, ‘digital labour’, what is, I mean, ‘digital labour’ was the bit that really caught my eye and I suspect has been the big sort of search term. What is the promise of AI for businesses when it comes to digital labour?
Henry King: Yes, that’s a really good question. And yes, apologies for the long title.
Alison Jones: It’s a long old subtitle that.
Henry King: It’s quite long and someone did say to us previously, so none of my listeners will actually understand a word of that. So we were quite proud of that.
Alison Jones: Well, we’re a very intelligent bunch so all of my listeners will be all over it like a rash. It’ll be absolutely fine.
But it’s interesting actually, a side note, we are writing subtitles as much for the machine as the human these days, aren’t we?
Henry King: That is correct, yes, that’s exactly right.
So, to answer your question, a lot of the energy, a lot of the writing, a lot of the talking, a lot of the debate about AI at the moment, it’s really about generative AI. And that of course has been super interesting, you know, ever since chat GPT launched publicly in November 22. But what we are really looking at much more than generative AI, is agentic AI, where agentic AI or AI as an agent is actually able to perform tasks on its own without human supervision, although potentially, of course, with human governance and human oversight, but nevertheless without direct supervision.
And we think that that’s really an important distinction and that not a lot of people are drawing. A lot of people are still talking about generative AI and whether it’s really intelligent, you know, is it really making sense of the world or is it simply like figuring out the next logical word? Can it really help you think you know, all of these kinds of questions?
And I think those are interesting questions but not really that relevant to business because I think where all of the business impact is going to be is in agents, not just individual agents, but agents working together and agents working with humans. And what that really means for the design of businesses, because I think it’s… it is obvious, but it’s not something that anyone would’ve had to think about even five or 10 years ago.
But all of our businesses are, and have always been, designed by humans for humans. Right. We are, I mean, I don’t know whether you remember the FUBU, the apparel it was called For Us By Us. It was founded by Damon John and it was really, apparel for the hip hop community. And in that same sense, all of our businesses have been designed for us by us, for humans, by humans, and that’s what the big change is now.
So we’ve just assumed businesses are humans and now we are going to have this new species, if you want to call it that, or at least a new member of the workforce. And I think that that will force us to question, what is good about being human? You know, what are things that we used to think that were important, that actually aren’t important anymore or may not be important? And what are the things that maybe we’ve taken for granted that actually we need to think much more about and take much more seriously as being humans?
So that’s really what the digital workforce component of the subtitle is. And you know what we talk about in the book quite a lot.
Alison Jones: And there’s something really positive in that as well. You talk a lot about that sort of the cognitive transfer and what that makes possible for humans. So this isn’t, I mean, I don’t want to sort of dive down the old tropes, but it isn’t about sort of replacing people. This is about augmenting people and taking out some of the blockers from business.
But just, maybe you could give us some examples. What does that look like when you have that cognitive transfer, when you can get agentic AI to take over some of the stuff that actually humans don’t do all that well actually, and, you free humans up to do different things.
Henry King: Yes, it’s a really good question.
I think, you know, using one of the models that we use a lot in the book of the autonomous car because that’s just something that’s like in our faces every day now. We probably all have, you know, if we have a car, we probably have some level of autonomy or at least some level of assist whether that is lane assist or whether it’s cruise control, or whether it’s parking assist, or a combination of all those things.
So we’re used to having this technology in our everyday world, that is helpful, that is assistive, that makes driving easier. But as you rightly say, we are still responsible for a lot of the tasks that actually we are not that great at. So paying attention, you know, there are so many accidents that are caused because we are tired or because we’re grumpy or because we’re texting or because we’re, you know, incapacitated in some other way. You know, we’re texting or we are speaking to our passengers or whatever it happens to be. There are all sorts of ways in which we get distracted and that has a very, very significant impact, you know, on safety and what the technology at that level is going to enable us to do is to be a lot safer. And so, that’s at a very, if you like, that’s a very linear, maybe almost sort of incremental level of improvements and benefits that we’re going to get from AI in our car.
But then there’s a very non-linear set of improvements, which is going to be, as you say, the kind of the transfer of responsibility from the human to the AI that then frees up the human to do things that are more creative.
You know, so we are no longer going to be drivers of our cars, we will be passengers, and yet we’re always going to be responsible for setting the direction. You know, we’re going to tell the car where we want it to go. And if we care, we can tell it the direction or the route that we want it to take.
But freeing up the human from actually being a machine operator to being just, if you like, you know, the setter of the mission and the setter of the direction actually has a very, very profound impact. Not only on that individual human and that individual car, but on a much wider impact on society as a whole and the design of our towns, the design of our villages, and the design of everyday life.
Down in southern Arizona, this is typically a kind of a senior community. And so there are a lot of people in their seventies and their eighties, and they are beginning to go through that process of thinking, should I still be driving? And a lot of the times, you know, their children, the sandwich generation of which I think probably we’re a part, you know, we sometimes are responsible for having those conversations with our parents and their friends.
In five years time, I don’t think that we’re going to have to have those conversations anymore because the autonomous car is going to enable them to maintain their mobility. They’re not going to be isolated as perhaps they now are if they’re no longer able to drive. There are other members of society, so my nephew has occasional seizures so he’s not able to drive and he’s a young man, he’s 25. And kind of imagine being a youngster nowadays and not having the freedom of mobility and you see all of your friends having that freedom. In five years time, he’ll have that same mobility. So autonomy for the car gives us autonomy as humans, much greater autonomy.
It democratizes and frees us up to do other things that are kind of more meaningful to us. So, I think that that’s the overall model. And it’s not just an analogy, it’s a real model. I mean, we think the autonomous car is really the first autonomous system, if you will, that seems…
Alison Jones: it doesn’t feel that far away at all, does it?
Yes.
Henry King: And we think that our companies are going to become autonomous systems in the same way. And we’ll start to open up all of those new capabilities to humans to be freer, still to set the mission…
Alison Jones: …yes…
Henry King: …still to be responsible for the purpose and all of those things of their organizations, but nevertheless, to be free, to do more valuable, more human, more creative things.
Alison Jones: And what’s interesting, of course about an organization is it doesn’t have the whole infrastructure and public policy issues that come along with a whole societal application, like driverless cars. So within an organization, and you talk about the sort of the future fit, you know, the ones that are sort of fittest for the future, really adopting this sort of technology.
What are you still seeing as the blockers to that? Are they systemic? Are they ideological? Are they simply lack of, sort of technical understanding? What’s going on there?
Henry King: I think all of the above. I think systemically our businesses are set up for, you know, ease of management largely, even though it, you know, if I say it’s easy to manage, no one in a large organization is going to agree with me.
They’re going to say,
Alison Jones: it doesn’t feel easy to manage.
Henry King: Yes. It’s really, really tough. And I get it, and I don’t disagree with that, but if you look at the way that we organize departments, for instance, marketing department and the IT department and the HR department and finance and so on and so forth.
Those are all set up to be able to manage the resources within those departments as most cost effectively as possible, as easily as possible. It’s got nothing to do with customer experience, right? We are not organizing our businesses in order to give our customers the best possible experiences. We’re organizing them to make it as easy to manage as possible.
But within that ease of management comes all kinds of things that just slow our businesses down. So decision making across those departments, what we call silos, right? And this is what Boundless was really about. Decision making across silos really slows businesses down. Anytime that you want to get a resource that you don’t have direct control over and you have to kind of negotiate with other leaders in order to get access to those resources, that slows down decision making, that slows action taking down. Every time people go on holiday, but they haven’t and this sounds trivial, right? But it happens all the time and everyone takes vacation and every time people do that, but they don’t have true levels of delegation down and subordinated decision making and and so on and so forth.
That just stops projects and initiatives and processes in their tracks.
Alison Jones: Yes, a hundred percent.
Henry King: And there are so many ways in which these everyday blockages just slow down companies, and everyone thinks that they’re moving very fast, and I get it because everyone is working really, really hard and individually and as teams, people are making superhuman efforts.
But nearly all of those superhuman efforts just get slowed down by the larger context of the structure within which we work and the bureaucracies within which we work and the management structures within which we work and some of the systems themselves within which we work.
So, trying to go fast is, it takes super human effort. And what we really need in the AI world is we need to be able to move fast routinely, and that means being able to take out all of those blockages that we talk about in the book. And maybe we over discuss it a little bit, because I think we’ve got like five pages of just bullet points of, you know, we’ve got something like 18 different types of management blockage and lots and lots of other things.
So, maybe we overdo it a bit, but we think it’s important because most people are just not aware that that’s happening. Most people think we’re working really, really fast and really, really hard, and most people are, but those are not having a larger impact. It’s not causing the organization as a whole to be fast.
Alison Jones: And yet that’s the way we’ve always done it and people don’t like change. I mean, it comes down to the soft stuff, doesn’t it? Change is really hard and change is threatening.
Henry King: And that’s part of the philosophical piece that you are talking about. Well, it’s not just philosophical, it’s mindset.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Henry King: Right. Which is, we all think that change is external and so being done to us.
You know, we build our businesses to be resilient, and I understand that word, but too often what resilient really means is it’s an organization that can withstand change. It can withstand turbulence. It can withstand uncertainty and ambiguity. I get why we use that model. We’ve always used the idea of kind of structural stability, but I don’t think we can use it anymore. I think that’s outdated.
I think that we need to start using new ideas, and we need to start becoming familiar with the idea that the dust is just never going to settle. There’s no point in waiting for it to settle because it’s not going to. So everything is going to be turbulent, everything is going to be uncertain, everything is going to be ambiguous.
And the best way to deal with that is not to try and resist it any longer, but it’s actually to try to develop your own organization to be change native. You know, internally, such that then change becomes the norm and stasis becomes the abnormality.
Alison Jones: It’s funny how language and metaphor govern how we think about things, isn’t it?
And that’s one of the, I think, obligations of the business book writer I think, isn’t it, is to offer people new ways of looking at an organization.
Henry King: Exactly.
Alison Jones: When you are writing about AI, one of the big challenges is that you are writing a book, which is a very old tech piece of technology. It takes a long time to get a book out. It takes a long time to get it written, and then it takes a ridiculous long time to get it published and then it has quite a long shelf life.
Talk me through how you approach writing about such a fast moving topic with such a slow moving format.
Henry King: It’s a really good question. And yes, I think it’s fascinating.
So a little bit of background because I think it will help. A long, long time ago, and I mean, you know, in the mid to late nineties, I read a book. It was called Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly, who was Executive Editor of Wired Magazine, and he was writing, basically, it was sort of a survey of everything that was core at the time, and the subtitle was like ‘The marriage of the born and the made’.
So it was really about human systems and AI systems and technology systems and roboticism and all these kind of things were beginning to merge into these really interesting new systems that they were no longer completely human, but they were no longer, they weren’t just machinic if you like, were not just technological.
And his book fascinated me and it was just a compendium of lots and lots of really cool ideas, some of which I knew about, but a lot of others that I didn’t. And that set me off on a, on a kind of a voyage of exploration. And I really wanted to know what the next book was that he was writing.
And, finally he announced that he was writing a new book and the question that he was asking himself was, what does technology want? And I thought that is so fascinating. That’s such a courageous question to be asking, not asking is technology capable of wanting anything, but what does it want?
And I thought, that’s fantastic. So I have to give myself a go at answering that question for myself, not that I’ll answer it, you know, as well as him.
But then that set me off on a whole train of discovery and an exploration. And that started to get me very, very interested in the idea of silos and siloed organization and storage. And the accumulation of knowledge and the accumulation of other kinds of resources, things of value, whether that’s grain or ideas or expertise or oil or water or whatever it happens to be. And so that was really the germ that then led slowly but surely to the book Boundless.
And then the book Boundless really provided for Vala and me a context and a frame that’ll allow us to explore lots of different ideas. And so Autonomous has really been a beneficiary of the fact of that long history and of that long run up. Such that by the time it came to writing Autonomous, we already kind of knew what we wanted to write about. We understood how to write it, we understood how to work together, and so it was much, much faster.
So it took us, so in terms of process, we meet twice a week, every week. So we meet for an hour on Tuesday and an hour on Friday every week. And we do that through the entire year, whether we’ve got anything to say to each other or not. Before we start writing the book, of course, most of those conversations are about ideas and we are writing articles and we are testing ideas out on each other.
A lot of the ideas that I come up with Vala says, ‘That’s ridiculous. That’ll never work.’ And so I go back to the drawing board. You know, a lot of what you write, talk about in exploratory writing, you know, it’s that kind of phase, right? It’s like, so I was, I read the book Skunk Works about Lockheed Martin and they’re extremely innovative. A practice of creating very, very highly advanced airplanes. And one of the planes that they designed was called the F-117, which is the Nighthawk, which was the world’s first stealth bomber. And it was described in the book as being inherently unstable.
And I was like: inherently unstable as an aircraft? I don’t even understand that idea. And so I started thinking about what it means to be inherently unstable. And after years and doing some exploratory writing, I felt bold enough to be able to tell Vala that I thought that organizations needed to start to become inherently unstable.
And he was like, that’s craziness. We are not going to tell business people that they need to actually embrace instability. We can’t do that. So we went back and forth, again for another couple of years until the whole idea started to emerge, and it really did kind of emerge over that period of talking more about the difference between businesses and systems in general, and tools and equipment that are easy to manage versus those tools and equipment and systems that are high performance.
So that’s the process, right? Which is, it’s not always fast. And it’s very two-way, and it’s very exploratory, and we build on ideas and we discard plenty. But then we’ve got to a point where we probably then have between five and 10 articles we’ve actually written about those ideas, and those then become the main ideas that go into the book.
Alison Jones: That’s so… because what you’re describing really is an ecosystem or it’s like a lifecycle of idea creation and workshopping and full expression in the book. I love that. It doesn’t quite answer the question about the writing about a very fast moving topic in a old tech sort of book.
So how do you, what design decisions do you take to allow you to write about a topic that’s moving very fast and ensure that the book will still be valuable in a year from now, two years from now?
Henry King: It’s a really good question. And I mean, the honest answer to the last part of your question is we can’t be sure.
So what we do do is, so in terms of the design decisions that we make, the first design decision is that the ideas have to be ours and we have to be confident about those. Between the two of us, we can come and go and we can pull and tug and question each other and all that kind of stuff. But we are not really interested as authors in just recirculating other ideas that are already commonplace.
Now, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing to do because in fact, most books take ideas that are already quite, you know, they’re quite well known and they add a new flavor to them, or they add a new perspective or whatever, or new stories about them or whatever it happens to be.
And that’s, we’re not saying that’s a bad idea, we just believe that we need to put our own ideas forwards, and that’s the way that we can kind of generate most value. So, ideas are the things that take the most time for us, and then we think about kind of content and voice and with the content, some content we know we have to write ourselves. So AI is not very good at writing stories. It’s just, it doesn’t tell stories very well at all. So, when we are telling stories and we’re telling stories that illuminate the most important ideas, we write all of that. But then there’s other content which is more a matter of extending some of the key ideas and just adding kind of meat to the bones, if you will.
So we have two frameworks in the book. One of which is called the Seven Levels of Autonomous Work, and one of which is the pseudo model, the m-pseudo model, which is the machine scale, sense, understand, decide, and act.
And we used AI to help us just put the meat on those particular bones. And in those parts of the book, we make it clear, we say what comes next is detail. And if you don’t need the detail of these ideas, if you don’t need to go through 5,000 words to understand the seven levels of autonomous work at that level of detail, they can just skip it. But it’s here because some people will value understanding these concepts at that level. And so we will use AI to help us with some of that work.
And then aligned with that is the whole idea of voice. And again, sometimes it’s really important that the voice is clearly ours. And in some other places, especially in the bits that I just kind of mentioned, it’s not so important that it’s ours.
So we make very intentional design decisions about ideas, about content, about voice, and also about flow, right? So flow… I can’t really write a book until I understand the overall argument flow. So we spend quite a lot of time before we start writing the book, making sure that we understand the full flow of the argument and all of the major ideas that are in that argument as a logical flow that then turns into a table of contents and then spend a lot of time, especially on chapters one and two, and so flow is important in that sense. But again, using AI, sometimes you really get the sense that it’s just generating the next logical word, and you start to get to a point where it just becomes boring and generic. And so we really then need to step in as well and make sure actually that it’s got the voice of the human.
And so that’s kind of our process
Alison Jones: And it doesn’t surprise me at all. It shouldn’t surprise anybody, I suppose, that what you’re modeling is sort of what you’re talking about in the book, isn’t it? It’s that collabouration. It’s deciding what is best done by AI, providing the governance, monitoring, pulling back. It’s really interesting because you said earlier something about freeing people up to do the more interesting stuff, and I think that’s been one of the frustrations, particularly for publishers is that a lot of people have looked at AI and go, oh, brilliant, we can use this to write.
And we are like, no, no, no, use the AI to do something else, so that you have time to write. You know? So it’s, yes, really interesting to see that modeled. I love that.
I’m going to ask you, Henry, for your best tip. So if somebody is listening today, perhaps they are writing a business book, could be on any topic. But I think I’m particularly interested if they are writing about AI or technology in some way, what would you say to them?
Henry King: I think first of all, like, you know, continue to go for it because we both are, you know, clearly believers in the value of ideas and the value of creativity. So anyone else who wants to participate should feel welcome and encouraged and motivated to participate. But I think the main bit of advice, which goes back to something that we just talked about earlier, which is you know, be proud of your idea. Generate your idea. Think deeply about your idea, extend your idea, but also be aware that there are very, very few things that are really new under the sun, and so, be aware of that and look outside to see what’s already been written in the concept that you’re already interested in and pay, you know, respect to that tradition that already exists.
You know, I spent a lot of my career, at least three quarters of it in consulting and consultants are very, very smart people. But they tend to think that when they come up with an idea, it’s their idea. And, I’m not going to name any names, but there was a team that wrote a book about an important topic and they wrote it as if they had come up with the framework themselves.
And it was actually a framework that had been developed by someone else at least five years previously. And I felt really bad for like everyone involved because they didn’t intentionally repeat the framework. But they did actually repeat it.
Alison Jones: It’s actually, I’m just going to step in there as well, because it’s one of the risks of using AI isn’t it? Is that it doesn’t name its sources. It pulls ideas in and you can find yourself inadvertently plagiarizing people or not giving the hat tip where it’s due.
Henry King: Oh, and these were people who were writing a book without AI.
Alison Jones: No, no, I get that. But it’s something that it is exacerbating.
Henry King: Exactly. Right, yes. So it’s a question of be proud of your idea, develop your idea, but be aware of the history that probably already surrounds that idea.
Alison Jones: And that’s okay, right? This is a conversation. You are adding your voice to an ongoing conversation. You don’t have to have the last word on your topic. You won’t.
Henry King: You won’t have the first word either.
But what I’ve also found is, when you then kind of pay tribute to the history of it, you start learning a lot more about your own idea and it starts to become even more interesting, not less interesting.
Alison Jones: Yes. It’s a good service to the reader, isn’t it?
Henry King: It’s, yes, so that’s I think the one.
Alison Jones: It’s a great tip. Yes, terrific. Thank you. Very well articulated as well.
Now, I always ask my guests for a book recommendation as well. You’re not allowed to recommend your own, sorry, but the Wired one was a good one. What book would you recommend that we read if we haven’t already?
Henry King: Well, I think it’s probably clear in this conversation again, that we both kind of love innovation and creativity, and I was very fortunate to work with an a company called the Doblin Group. D-O-B-L-I-N, for a number of years. And they are one of kind of the preeminent design thinking and innovation agencies in the US. They’re now part of Deloitte Consulting. But they wrote a book, their leader, Larry Keeley and other colleagues Helen Waters and others, wrote a book called The 10 Types of Innovation.
And they were, and still are, a fantastic company. Really, really smart people, full of designers. So very kind of designer thinking rather than kind of business strategy thinking. A lot of really kind of wonderful frameworks and a wonderful way of thinking about innovation. So I would really kind of strongly recommend that.
It needs, it’s very much pre AI. It’s very kind of pure around human centered and design thinking and jobs to be done, and a lot of those kind of ideas around design thinking and, those related concepts, very, very strong. We now need to kind of read it and practice it and use all of those principles with the AI aspect very much in mind, that we didn’t previously, but I…
Alison Jones: time for a second edition…
Henry King: …but I still recommend that book as a provocative and very useful book for business people.
Alison Jones: Great. Thank you. I wasn’t aware of it, so I love getting a new recommendation. And then if people want to find out more about the work that you and Vala do, the books you’ve written, where should they go?
Henry King: Well, thank you for that. We’re both easily found on LinkedIn. He is, you know, Vala Afshar, all one word. I’m Henry King, all one word. We write a lot on ZDnet. We’ve got an article coming out in Forbes next week, I think on the 18th.
Alison Jones: And we’re speaking in November, 18th November.
Henry King: I’ve got a website, which is henryking.com.
I haven’t updated that for quite a while. So some of the ideas are rather old, but LinkedIn, you know, if you want to connect with us, then that’s probably the easiest way to do it, and we’d love to hear from anyone.
Alison Jones: Well, I’ll put those links up on the show notes @extraordinarybusinessbooks.com, and thank you so much for your time today.
It’s been a really fascinating conversation, and I take great heart from the fact that somebody who’s right at the sort of bleeding edge of AI implementation is also using exploratory writing and that whole kind of idea ecosystem. I think that that’s wonderful. That’s the true marriage, isn’t it, of the human creativity and the AI execution.
I love it. Thanks, Henry, for your time today.
Henry King: Thank you very much, Alison. It’s been a pleasure.
