One of the themes I keep coming back to in this Digest is how easily we can misread what is happening inside an organisation. We see a behaviour or an outcome and try to explain it before we have understood the conditions around it. This week’s stories come from very different places but they all challenge this instinct, asking us to look beneath the surface and consider what your people may really be responding to.

1. The AI homework starts after the pilot

One reason I like doing our In Practice interviews is that some of the best lessons for people leaders come from people who sit outside HR. My latest conversation is with Gabriel von Mitschke-Collande, group chief digital officer at Giesecke+Devrient, the Munich-headquartered security technology company with almost 15,000 employees globally.

The finding: G+D began working with AI back in 2017 and 2018, so it has had longer than most organisations to find out what happens once the excitement of experimentation wears off. It now has more than 300 potential AI use cases in its backlog and Gabriel’s view is pretty unequivocal: “From my perspective the time of pilots is over.”

G+D has already proved that AI can do useful things. It now has to decide which ideas are worth pursuing and whether the organisation can actually make them work at scale. Gabriel calls what follows the “homework”. A promising use case can quickly run into data that is difficult to access or a process that has never been properly defined. Sometimes looking closely at that process reveals that automating it in its current form makes little sense.

Why it matters: Many organisations are likely to find this stage harder than the first. Buying tools and encouraging people to experiment can create a lot of activity quite quickly. Scaling something that has worked in one team means getting much closer to how work actually happens and deciding what needs to change around the technology.

G+D has also learnt that people need more than access to an AI tool. Gabriel expects leaders to show how they are using AI themselves and sees managers as important in giving people permission to experiment in their everyday work. HR is now working with him on an AI academy but training only gets you so far when established ways of working also have to move.

What’s really going on: There has been so much attention on AI adoption rates and use cases that it is easy to treat more usage as evidence of progress. G+D’s experience suggests that the harder test comes when organisations try to turn all that experimentation into something worth scaling.

More than 300 ideas sounds impressive but each one competes for money and expertise. G+D has had to become much clearer about the business problem being solved before committing resources. And as AI moves further into workflows it becomes harder to separate the technology conversation from decisions about work itself.

The leadership question: If your AI experiments are working are you ready for what scaling them will expose about the way your organisation works?

👉 Watch my latest In Practice interview with Gabriel von Mitschke-Collande and read the full story on what G+D has learned moving beyond the pilot stage, Scaling AI at work: what G+D learned beyond the pilot stage 6-minute read

Or watch our short video for some lessons on scaling AI from Gabriel 8-minute watch

2. Are you leading with old neuroscience?

Gabriel’s experience at G+D raises an important point about AI adoption: people need enough confidence and permission to try doing things differently. My latest Work’s Not Working… Let’s Fix It! podcast goes somewhere a bit more fundamental. How much of what leaders think they know about human behaviour is still based on neuroscience that has moved on?

My guest Bruna de Palo is a neuroscience-based executive coach and leadership strategist who has worked with leaders in companies including Google and American Express. She is also a faculty member of the Neuroleadership Institute and author of The Brain Instruction Manual for Leaders.

The finding: Anyone who has sat through leadership development over the past couple of decades will probably recognise the idea of left brain versus right brain or the rational brain being overtaken by the emotional one. Bruna says these explanations have proved remarkably persistent because they make something very complex easy to understand.

The science has moved on. One of the biggest shifts she describes is towards understanding the brain as predictive rather than waiting to react to whatever happens around us. Her analogy of the brain as the “CFO of the body budget” is one I particularly like. It is continually judging how much energy may be needed and where that energy should go.

Why it matters: Think about someone you have labelled resistant to change or disengaged. Bruna’s argument gives you another way to interpret what you are seeing. If their brain is anticipating uncertainty or some other form of threat then energy is already being diverted towards protection.

That becomes particularly relevant when organisations are asking people to absorb significant uncertainty around AI and changes to their work. We continue to ask for good judgement and creativity while potentially creating conditions that make those things harder.

What’s really going on: Bruna makes an interesting commercial point here too. During our conversation about workplace trust she asked why an employer would pay for 100% of someone’s brain while allowing a sizeable share of their energy to be spent protecting themselves.

Her advice is practical. Before reaching for another technique or motivational intervention, understand what people may be responding to. She uses the Neuroleadership Institute’s SCARF model to look at areas the brain is particularly sensitive to including certainty, autonomy and fairness. It gives leaders somewhere more useful to look when behaviour changes than immediately deciding the problem sits with the person.

There is also a challenge here for HR. If leadership development, coaching or wellbeing programmes still contain neuroscience that was popular 20 years ago, when did you last check whether the science underneath them still holds up?

The leadership question: When someone appears resistant or disengaged, how quickly do you decide that the problem is their attitude rather than looking at what they may be responding to?

👉 Listen to my full conversation with Bruna de Palo on Work’s Not Working… Let’s Fix It!: Your Brain Isn’t Built For Work: The Faulty Model Behind Modern Management or available on the usual podcast platforms

3. When silence doesn’t mean agreement

Bruna’s argument about misreading behaviour takes us into our final story. Even when we understand more about how people respond to uncertainty there is another reason why we can get behaviour wrong: we interpret it through our own cultural expectations.

Dr Catherine Hua Xiang is particularly well placed to explore this. She is an applied linguist specialising in intercultural communication between China and the West, programme director for the BSc International Relations & Chinese at the London School of Economics and UK director of the Confucius Institute for Business London. Her latest book, Harmony in Differences, looks specifically at politeness and intercultural communication with China.

The finding: Respect sounds like a value everyone should understand but Catherine shows why that assumption can cause problems. In many British workplaces we associate openness with speaking up and are comfortable with the idea that a committed employee might challenge a senior leader directly. Chinese perspectives can place greater weight on role, relational history and preserving dignity when deciding how disagreement should be handled.

Catherine is careful not to turn this into a simple West versus China comparison. Chinese workplaces vary considerably and younger employees are changing some established expectations. She suggests using cultural patterns as lenses that help us question our assumptions rather than labels applied to individuals.

Why it matters: Her point about silence is particularly useful. Someone may disagree with a decision but decide that openly challenging their manager is the wrong way to handle it, especially where hierarchy and preserving face carry more weight. If leaders assume speaking up always looks like public challenge they can easily mistake quietness for agreement.

That has implications for many of the employee voice practices organisations now use. Asking for views in a large meeting may work well for some people while another colleague may give you a far more honest answer privately or in writing.

What’s really going on: Organisations often write values such as respect and openness as though everybody shares the same understanding of how they should look in practice. Catherine’s article shows how much interpretation sits underneath those words.

This does not mean abandoning shared expectations or accepting ambiguity where safety, discrimination or misconduct are concerned. It does mean being more curious about the ways people show disagreement and respect, particularly in global teams where one group’s idea of healthy candour may feel very different to somebody else's.

The leadership question: When you say you value respect, openness or employee voice, how much of what you expect to see has been defined through your own cultural lens?

👉 Read Dr Catherine Hua Xiang’s full piece on what Chinese workplaces can teach us about respect, hierarchy and employee voice, What Chinese workplaces reveal about the hidden rules of respect at work 5-minute read

Find your purposeful space!

Siân

Editorial director, The People Space​

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