Everyone knows the road often (and wrongly) pinned on Einstein that the definition of madness is doing the identical factor time and again and anticipating a distinct end result. However right here’s the factor few folks in enterprise really perceive in the case of the services they ship: “The enemy of delivering quality is doing different things yet expecting the same result.”
Enchancment requires change; high quality requires consistency. The artwork of management is figuring out when to do which and constructing the muscle to do each on objective.
Some have recognized this present interval in enterprise because the Nice Flattening, the place AI places huge reservoirs of information at everybody’s fingertips in simply milliseconds, making many center managers and different data employees out of date. Gartner discovered that via 2026, 20% of the organizations they surveyed will use AI to flatten their organizational construction, eliminating over half of their present center administration positions. I count on this to solely develop—and speed up—within the coming years.
The upshot is that this: should you’re a center supervisor, you could already be in your group’s endangered species record. The data that used to distinguish you from everybody else will quickly be desk stakes. In case your edge is “I know more,” put together to be leveled.
The brand new differentiator is whether or not you possibly can flip your data into utility—the flexibility to do issues that should be achieved. It’s via utility that you simply create worth by reworking the what into the how and why of programs, and execution that produce high quality on demand, with out drama. Worth will probably be created within the new financial system not by figuring out the reply, however by figuring out the query. Utility is the flexibility to execute, to know the issue, to have the query.
That distinction got here house to me whereas teaching a workforce, a buyer criticism led to a undertaking to search out the foundation trigger. Because the workforce peeled again the potential causes a sample emerged. Every operator altered the gear to run “according to their training,” it turned clear that all of us used the identical machine and supplies however used totally different strategies. Every particular person adopted the data they obtained from totally different trainers.
Make no mistake: Everybody believed what they have been doing was appropriate. Data was scarce and extremely specialised within the arms of quite a lot of specialists and trainers. “We were doing different things but expecting the same result”. It’s a cautionary story; you possibly can delight as soon as, however a system will ship each time.
As I inform purchasers, you possibly can’t maintain what you possibly can’t clarify. In case you don’t know why a win occurred, you possibly can’t personal it subsequent time—not to mention lengthen it throughout a community of web sites, traces, or groups.
The elephant in each boardroom
Now add AI, that nice massive elephant in each boardroom. For a century, companies constructed moats round data, their “Intellectual Property,” the specialists within the center who “Had the answers.” That layer, as we speak largely comprised of center managers, is being thinned from the herd. Organizations that perceive that AI will develop into the last word keeper of organizational data, a useful resource for studying and standardizing on greatest practices, would be the winners.
Within the Nice Flattening, the premium shifts to utility and the arduous, unglamorous capability to execute with consistency. Entrance‑line leaders develop into pivotal; they’re the translators who flip “standards” into “how to adapt to this situation” via figuring out the best way to ask the precise questions, to learn the scenario, and to use standardized data. My criticism workforce failed due to variation in data, the chance shifts within the new actuality to efficiently making use of that data, to recognizing deviations and asking why?
This isn’t semantics. Worth is what the shopper truly receives. Utility is your group’s means to create and ship that worth on demand—on time, in spec, each time.
If that sounds inflexible, do not forget that requirements are the way you earn the precise to enhance. As soon as you are able to do “Tuesday” on command, then you possibly can experiment with a greater Wednesday—since you’ll know what modified. That’s the place requirements shine they drive questions that create readability, reveal causes, and preserve changes anchored within the work, not in a PowerPoint. The goal isn’t to freeze the world; it’s to stabilize what works after which lengthen it—throughout shifts, throughout websites, throughout companions—till your greatest efficiency turns into your regular efficiency and your new baseline for the subsequent step up. You progress from miracles to methodology.
Which brings us again to the dual aphorisms that started this piece. Einstein’s misattributed “insanity” quote warns towards rituals that produce nothing new. My corollary warns towards novelty that produces nothing dependable. Within the Nice Flattening, each traps are profession‑ending. In case you do the identical factor and count on distinction, you’re dreaming. In case you do various things and count on sameness, you’re playing along with your status.
So, by all means, continue learning and experimenting. There’s worth in discovery. However don’t mistake experiments and opinions for requirements. Your prospects don’t come again for surprises; they arrive again for guarantees stored. In a world the place AI collapses the price of data, the scarce useful resource is the flexibility to execute—to make the identical promise and preserve it many times. Utility creates worth. Utility scales. Utility survives the Nice Flattening.
And one final perspective price taking to work tomorrow morning: in order for you it to be there subsequent week, seize the foundation explanation for your success to determine the data AI might maintain in your group, as a result of you possibly can’t maintain what you possibly can’t clarify.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary items are solely the views of their authors and don’t essentially replicate the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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