Responsible Humans

This chapter explores how organizations risk becoming information-rich but capability-poor as more knowledge and expertise are delegated to external systems.

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Can an organization remain capable if it increasingly relies on capabilities located elsewhere? This question goes beyond vendor or model dependency.

 

As we explored earlier, humans increasingly outsource memory, navigation, interpretation and reasoning. We identified that the risk wasn't technology alone but capability erosion. The same dynamic, scaled up, now applies to organizations.

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Dependency itself is not new. Organizations have always relied on external capabilities: lawyers, consultants, software providers, logistics networks, cloud infrastructure. But organizations are now increasingly outsourcing expertise, decision support, analysis, knowledge retrieval, and institutional memory. And the risk, again, is not the AI technology alone but capability erosion.

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Consider what has become visible at several major consulting firms in recent months. Traditionally, these organizations built their value around human expertise: writing their own reports, conducting their own analyses, developing deep sector knowledge, and understanding their clients' processes from the inside. Over time, AI systems began drafting reports, summarizing meetings, generating analyses, and recommending actions. Efficiency certainly improves but a question emerges:
What capabilities are no longer being practiced?

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This question, as uncomfortable as it is, should be formulated not only at these consulting companies, but basically at all organizations. Capabilities that are no longer practiced do not disappear overnight; they simply stop developing. That is a burden that rarely appears on any quarterly performance dashboard review but that will affect the medium and long term.

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There is another possible consequence that needs our attention. Historically organizations learned through mistakes, debates, crises, disagreements and decisions. That became: culture and tacit knowledge or what we call institutional memory. Now, with meeting summaries generated by AI, reports generated by AI, strategic drafts generated by AI and recommendations generated by AI, organizations accumulate information. But do they accumulate understanding?

Those are not the same thing.

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A few weeks ago at a board meeting I asked why a major investment decision was made, back in October 2024. The team instantly retrieved hundreds of pages of reports, summaries, presentations, recommendations, and meeting transcripts. Yet when I questioned the rationale and asked about the assumptions, debates, disagreements, trade-offs, and contextual pressures that originally shaped the decision, nobody could fully reconstruct them.

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The information remained. The institutional memory did not. What struck me was that the organization had become information-rich while gradually becoming capability-poor.

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Dependency is not simply a technical or commercial issue but a stewardship one. Organizations will always rely on external capabilities. The real requirement is retaining enough internal capability, memory, and understanding to remain autonomous in the responsibilities they continue to hold.

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Organizations do not delegate. People do. Which brings us to leadership.

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← See 3.2 Accountability                                                                                                See 3.4 Leadership Under AI Pressure →​

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