AI Won’t Fix What’s Broken

In today’s episode, I want to tackle something I’m hearing a lot: “We should be doing something with AI… right?” And while that instinct isn’t wrong, here’s the truth—AI is not a magic wand. If your internal processes are unclear, messy, or simply broken, AI is only going to make that mess move faster.

So, before you jump into pilots, tools, or strategies, let’s talk about your delivery model. What is it? Why does it matter? And how do you know if your process is actually broken, or just strained from growth?

I walk you through practical ways to diagnose what’s going on in your organization using questions and a simple but powerful framework: the Five Whys. We’ll dig into how to spot red flags, where friction is showing up, and what to do about it before layering in technology.

I also share one action you can take today to start cleaning up your processes so that AI can actually help you scale, without scaling the chaos.

And if you're ready for more support, I talk about our AI Strategy Activation program.  A 3-week engagement to help you build an AI roadmap grounded in your people and your processes.

This one’s all about foundations, clarity, and scaling with intention. Let’s get into it!

Thank you for listening to this episode of Roots of Sustainable Impact!

Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review—it helps others who are passionate about creating positive change find the podcast and benefit from these conversations.

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© 2024 Walking Tree. All rights reserved.

Transcript

0:44

Hello and welcome to Roots of Sustainable Impact. I'm your host, Eloisa Marquez Gonzalez, and during our last episode, we answered a question if you should be using AI should, if you should be. In the AI bandwagon, and the short answer is you are already in it. You are using ai. It's everywhere. The real question is how do you use it intentionally and how do you use it within your organization? How do you enhance adoption and make sure that it's being used in productive ways? By everyone in your organization. No one is being left behind and really right now, maybe you're feeling some pressure to respond to ai. But you are unclear how there's also a lot of noise and hype around, ai. So you may be feeling a little bit overwhelmed. And there's also the, the internal side where maybe your organization, lacks clarity or governance or doesn't have a strategic framework on how you're gonna bring ai, how you're gonna be, embracing it and, and ensuring there's adoption around your organization. And also. You might be thinking, how do I address that shadow AI use within my organization? I don't even wanna ask anyone if they're using it for work because I don't know how I'm going to respond and you are not alone. A lot of professionals are feeling that right now. Really, a lot of the leaders I have been talking to are feeling that pressure about, uh, do something with ai, but they're just ensuring where to start. And what they really want is a way to make sense of AI within the context of their business. But here's the thing that before you can prioritize any use cases or align your leadership around ai or even start choosing,, proof concepts, you need to get one thing straight is your delivery model the way that you work. Because contrary to, a lot of the advice that you might hear out there about, okay, there's, there's issues in my organization. Just put ai, it'll fix it. I'm telling you, AI won't fix what it's already unclear. It won't fix what is broken. It will not help you untangle, broken workflows or make up for the lack of a process. In fact it will make things worse. It'll make a mess faster. So today we're gonna talk about what it really takes to prepare your organization to use AI well, and it really starts by cleaning up your house first. And, and don't worry, we will get to it, to the use of ai. But I wanna touch on this because it's very, very important. So for today's agenda, we're gonna start by talking about, uh, the delivery model. What do I mean by that? Um, how do you know if your process or your operation is broken, or just strain from the growth that you are having as an organization? And then we'll also close up with what do you do about it? All right, so let's get started. First of all, what is a delivery model? A delivery model is a structure approach used by an organization to deliver their products or services to customers. And many times you thought about only the piece that. That is client facing. However, the delivery model accounts for activities, internal activities that impact the delivery as well of the, of the product or services. So you can have an internal or external facing process. So think about, how you fulfill your contracts or how your teams coordinate, how you manage your customer experience. Those are all parts of your delivery process or your delivery model. So now how do you know if it's broken or if it's just trained for growth? A broken process and a a process that is trained from growth can have very similar symptoms. Sometimes people just think that the process is just not working, but it's because you are having, you're having growth and your process is not optimized to that level. Of delivery, so you need to optimize it. But other times your, your process is just non-existent and there is no adjusting. You just have to start by creating structure. So a broken delivery model. This is one that has consistent performance issues like high cost or your customer satisfaction is always low. Even when the demand or your, uh, is low or your employee count increases, your performance remains the same. That means that doesn't matter how many people or how many tools you add into the process. There's no process. It's just broken. Um, or is, is poorly designed. Then a process or an operations that is trained because of the growth might have these similar symptoms. However, they're often temporary or they can be recovered with some adjustments or additional resources that is a main difference. Your broken process, it doesn't matter how many resources or how high or low the demand is, it's always having a poor performance. And on the other hand, a process or an operations is strained because of the growth, just requires adjustments or additional resources. So some questions that you can ask to figure out if your delivery model is actually broken or just strain from growth are, for example, um, as I said, if your demand decreases. Does the performance improves or does it continue to be poor, a poor performance? Do you feel there's a lot of red tape on your organization? When you feel that you are working for the technology. Yeah, that is also a red flag. It means that you have adapted a, a process to a technology and it's not serving you well. Is your team struggling to adapt to changes in their production design or in market? Demand? If there is no. Good way for adapting. I'm not saying easy way to adapt, but if there is no good way for the team to adapt to market changes, then most likely your, your delivery process is broken. If your customer satisfaction, it could be the NPS. The net promoter score, is consistently low. It suggests that your process is poorly designed If it's slow, occasionally due to delays or issues because it happens. Um. Then it might just suggest that the situation is, uh, strained Ask yourself about how your operation and your delivery model is impacting your profitability. If there's a temporary impact on the margins due to the growth, it suggests that it's strained, and with some adjustments, it can improve. So what to do next. If your process is strained, you can start by pinpointing the areas that is beco. They are becoming a bottleneck. What's creating that friction? What is increasing your margin? For example, once you have fixed those areas, it's easier to bring AI into the fold. Because, especially because you will already know what you're doing, what you're doing well, and where are the real pain points in the areas of inefficiency where AI can actually, uh, compliment your, your employees and speed things up, make them more efficient If you cannot adapt, why not? What's stopping you? And that brings me to a great, um, framework or tool, methodology, actually it's called the Five Why's. And it's a simple concept where you ask the question why five times? You do not just take the first answer for a problem. If you're encountering a problem and you say, why that? Result is not what you take on and fix. There's more to it. You have to keep digging. So for example, a tech organization. Selling software and hardware solutions and have signed several clients. But implementation is taking much longer than expected. In this case, we start by asking the first time, why, why is it taking much longer than expected? Why is client onboarding taking so long? Maybe because internal hands off, uh, between cells and delivery are breaking down, or there's not a real standard process. So then you ask why are the handoffs breaking down? And maybe because of delivery teams are receiving incomplete or inconsistent information about the client needs and the client expectations, so that your second why. Then we move to why is this information incomplete? And it's maybe because the team, the sales team captures, uh, notes in different formats. There's no centralized intake, process, or maybe there's no intake process and everyone does it. How are they? They feel it's best. So the information that you capture is not consistent. So then why is there not a standardized intake process? Well, maybe because the company never built a formal onboarding workflow. Um, and sales and delivery teams just started to create their own process organically or maybe created workarounds if there were no systems at some point in time. So now we move our, uh, to our next why. Why are there workarounds instead of a formal process? And the answer might be because leadership prioritized rapid growth. Assuming the teams, the internal teams will align informally. And this is a, a big assumption, especially, uh, startups and scaling organizations where. They assume organic processes are just going to start falling in place on their own. So why was alignment assumed instead of structured? And this is, um, what I was saying, that in the early days, informal communication worked, organic processes worked. But as you scale the organic processes have not been formalized and adjusted for growth. So in this case, as you can see, the problem is not the team capacity, and it's not even the team's training. The problem is unclear expectations a week process design. And too much reliance on informal communications. So there's very specific areas that need to be improved. With the use of the five Ys, you can uncover these misalignments So when a process feels, or an operations feels that it's not working. It is rarely the last step, like in this case, the onboarding delays. It's not usually the issue, the root is often a missing system or a misalignment upstream. So by asking questions, we can pinpoint those areas and go and start creating alignment and start fixing the different areas of the process. Now let's talk about the broken delivery model or broken processes. Many times I hear that process will hinder us, will make us slower. There's too much red tape. But really the issue is not, the process The problem is the absence of one. In those moments when the operation is plagued with issues, with poor performance, with misalignment, when you create a list that keeps going and going and all the different issues that are encountered and that different groups in the organization are filling in those moments, I don't reach for process improvement in those moments. I reach for structure. So now I promise that I, we were gonna talk about AI today, so I will leave you with this. That AI is, is really powerful. It is a great technology, and yes, it's continuing to reshape how we work, but AI is not a magic wand. It cannot create clarity where there is confusion. It cannot bring structure to your business, to your organization if there is none, if there's no consensus on how you're supposed to work as an organization, if your delivery model is broken or your processes are chaotic, well AI will help you scale that chaos faster. That's for sure. But what AI can do and beautifully, I that was hard to say. So what AI can actually do is really amplify. Your good processes, your good communication, your clarity can really empower your employees, it can amplify again, what is already working. It can automate what's already clear. And it can provide you more insights on what's already been tracked on the data that is being captured. So before you jumped into AI tools or automation, just pause and ask yourself, do we actually understand how we deliver value to our customers? Do we know where things are broken and why? Every organization has a process, is poorly designed. It's okay. It's normal. What is important is that we clean that up first and then layer in AI to go faster and smarter in and in a more sustainable way. So here's one thing that you can do today. Pick a process that just feels messy or reactive and maybe can be onboarding to stay with that example, or it could be reporting or project handoffs. I will start by selecting something that is not client facing. Write down what outcome is it's supposed to deliver, and who's involved. And that's your first step towards clarity in the foundation for anything AI related down the line. And if you're ready to go deeper, I'd love to help you. One thing that we're offering right now is, is our AI strategy activation. Program in just three weeks. We help you design an AI strategy grounded in your people and processes so you can enter the third and fourth quarter align and ready to go because you know where AI fits, how your organization can take advantage of it. And how you're gonna also empower your employees to adapt and adopt ai. How are they going to work hand in hand with, uh, AI and. This AI strategy activation program is rooted on our path framework for implementing ai and, and that is an approach that is human centered and it's process. First. We here at Walk Through, we do not chase tools. We build practical people informed strategies so your team can, adopt the tools and the processes and your business can actually benefit. And you can increase your impact. So thank you for joining me today on this episode of Roots of Sustainable Impact. And if you found value in today's insights, please take a moment to subscribe and share this episode with a friend or leave a review.'cause it helps other listeners find the show and benefit from these insights. And if you're ready to take your organization to the next level, you wanna scale with intention, drive that impact, and avoid chaos. Let's connect. You can always reach me@thewalkingtree.green, or you can find me on LinkedIn. Until next time, keep building with purpose.