The AI revolution means we need to redesign everything. It also means we get to redesign everything.

“We need help. We really, really need your help.”

Steve Jobs walked to the podium, threw his jacket on the floor, and implored a group of designers to help shape the coming revolution. Addressing the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, he simply explained his vision for the personal computer era he saw coming. He then turned to the challenge: “We have a shot at putting a great object there, or if we don’t, we’re going to put one more piece of junk object there … this stuff can either be great or it can be lousy. And we need help. We really, really need your help.”

One more piece of junk?

What Jobs recognized was that major technological inflections are not just about accelerating what went before, but moments of profound redesign, and that takes more than just technical leaps. How we shape technical revolutions determines who participates, who benefits, what is gained and what is lost. 

Artificial intelligence, the latest technical revolution, arrives amidst a wholesale rejection of broken systems: only 36% of people believe the next generation will be better off, two thirds think society is on the wrong track, and populism is on the rise.

So how this revolution is shaped is of profound importance. Will it lead to a further concentration of wealth, power and dissatisfaction, or an abundance—of science, education, energy, optimism, and opportunity? 

Design is how we apply intention to deliberately shape life, systems, and the future.

The scary news is: we have to redesign everything.

The exciting news is: we get to redesign everything.

How can we redesign?

Technical revolutions create windows of time when new social norms are created, where institutions and infrastructure is rethought. This window of time will influence daily life in myriad ways, from how people find dates, to whether kids write essays, to which jobs require applications, to how people move through cities and get health diagnoses.

Each of these are design decisions, not natural outcomes. Who gets to make these decisions? Every company, organization and community that is considering if—and how—to adopt AI. Which almost certainly includes you. Congratulations, you’re now part of designing a revolution.

Whether we do this design well, or poorly, is up to us. In our work at ENSO, a future design company that helps organizations design the future they aspire to, we have seen that getting big transformations right requires clarity, bravery, and the creativity to bring people along. 

Find clarity: Asking big questions

In ordinary times, ordinary questions can suffice. Questions like, “how can we add to our market share?,” “how can we operate more efficiently?,” or “can we refine that process?” These kinds of “small minded questions” are premised on the assumption that next year will look very much like last year, so incremental improvement is a fine goal.

But these questions can hold back the potential for radical progress. As the Harvard professor Clayton Christensen once said, “too often, we overlook an obvious fact: finding the right answer is impossible unless we have asked the right question”. 

In extraordinary times, extraordinary questions are more productive. In ENSO’s future design process, we like to start with big questions like: “what is ultimate success?,” “what are people yearning for?,” and more recently, “how could AI reinvent this category and company?” It’s often remarkable how differently leaders think about the same business: seeing current performance in a different light, disagreeing on what’s hindering progress, or holding divergent visions of the future. Getting to clarity is critical to avoiding organizational malaise.

Clayton Christensen described the importance of getting clear on “the job to be done” for customers: are they looking for a coffee or an experience? Do they want a diagnosis, or a compassionate conversation? Do we need to sell features, or alleviate fear? Finding clarity on what success looks like (for all stakeholders, not just customers) is the first step to any redesign. Success today may not be what we thought it was yesterday. 

Many business leaders and advisors have developed a strong muscle memory in getting to answers fast, based on best practices from the industry—but by definition, this is perpetuating old ideas. Eras of reinvention require more questions and more listening, to inform brave new paths.

Foster bravery: exploring rather than forecasting

To say there is little certainty about how the AI revolution will unfold is an understatement. Some of the best attempts at expressing what may occur, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace, paint the broad outlines of what’s possible.

But even Amodei says, “everything I’m saying could very easily be wrong”, and he proposes more concerted efforts of exploration: “it is critical to have a genuinely inspiring vision of the future, and not just a plan to fight fires … there has to be something we’re fighting for, some positive-sum outcome … Fear is one kind of motivator, but it’s not enough: we need hope as well.” 

Like it or not, we are so early in the AI era that the only reasonable option is to summon the bravery to explore multiple futures rather than assume one. 

But businesses love forecasts. They give everyone a sense of confidence and control in the future. They feel diligent. They also assume the future is very much like the past, just a bit better. They make no account for transformed user behavior, old marketing channels being upended, or most damaging of all, the opportunity cost of not considering the adjacent possible: the options available to a company at any time.

While uninspired companies seek comfort in forecasts, inspired companies are relentlessly exploring beyond the established formula, particularly now AI has led to an explosion of adjacent possibles.

As the economist Tim Harford has said on forecasts, “the problem … is not that they’re insufficiently precise, but that they allow us to short-circuit any further thought on the matter. Thinking seriously about the future can be a worthwhile exercise, not because the future is knowable, but because the process is likely to make us wiser.”

At ENSO, we find that creating future scenarios is remarkably productive: freed from the pressure of creating an ‘accurate’ forecast, we can explore beyond the expected. One scenario may be a more logical extension of the current reality, while others may be much more optimistic, or serve people in different ways, or assume the world changes significantly.

Each scenario paints a picture of the future: what the company is saying and doing, how others receive it and respond. The scenarios can then be debated, dissected, remixed and improved upon. This process of future exploration has a lightness, joy, and curiosity about it that is so often missing from annual planning processes, which assume a singular path and become battles over budget and control.

Connect emotionally: bringing people along

Traditional business culture loves rational thought, but humans are emotional creatures making emotional decisions. Employees feel uncertain and are disengaging, while customers are frustrated and losing trust. Google found that psychological safety is the leading determinant of their highest performing teams, but the typical C-suite proving grounds of economics, engineering and finance do not naturally equip leaders to connect emotionally.

Starbucks recently realized it had “over rotated” on technology replacing the humanity of service, which left both baristas and customers unhappy. At this moment, the excitement around AI could lead many leaders to optimize for ‘productivity enhancing’ technology adoption, rather than adopting technology in service of an inspiring vision.

How can you connect emotionally?  Marketers know how. Artists know how. Designers know how. Too often, those voices have been heard long after critical decisions have been made: finance-driven forecasts and engineering-led products that leave only small decisions for those emotionally equipped to bring people along. Instead, those voices need to be (re)introduced to company strategy, product management and the boardroom. 

The intersection of technology, design, and understanding people and the world

Every leader, even those steeped in logic-based disciplines can find their way to more emotionally-atuned ways of leading, but only if they are freed from executing ‘business as usual’. As Rick Rubin says, everyone is a creator, and “the best work is the work you are excited about.” If you’re not excited yet, go back to asking bigger questions, listening and exploring; then, you can bring people into the excitement.

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg raised eyebrows with $100 million signing bonuses for AI engineers. But even these look small compared to the $6.5Bn OpenAI paid to enlist Jony Ive’s help. Why would Sam Altman pay so much for a designer? He said at the announcement, “AI is an incredible technology, but great tools require work at the intersection of technology, design, and understanding people and the world.”

That’s why, at the dawn of a previous revolution, Steve Jobs implored designers to help. At this moment, when we need to redesign everything, and we can redesign everything, it’s important that intersection is deeply baked into business principles and practice.