ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

What if leaders knew as much about their organisations as Google knows about them? By deploying appropriate technologies, it is possible today for organisations to capture data on practically every interaction and consolidate every performance metric in an organisation.

Analytic tools powered by AI can rapidly probe the resulting mountains of data to identify correlations and make accurate, useful predictions. By applying such technologies, companies can essentially automate many operational decisions, freeing leaders to focus more on areas where human judgement is clearly required.

Automating management offers decisive advantages. As the system knows exactly what everyone is working on and what is being produced, accountability is clear. Performance evaluation can be grounded in contextually relevant data, rather than subjective inference. Coaching and feedback can be automated, tailored to the individual, and delivered exactly when required, making the dreaded annual review cycle obsolete.

All information can be made available to anyone in the organisation who needs it, and collaboration tools can allow instantaneous communication around a single real-time version of the truth.

Dependencies become much clearer, as the impact of actions in one part of the organisation on another are immediately evident. Peer pressure can drive compliance to process and motivate people to meet their commitments. On a day to day basis, the organisation can be made to largely run itself.

So, is this science fiction? The New York Times best-seller The Decoded Company describes how a company named Klick has made technology and culture inseparable. A Canadian digital agency specialising in healthcare, Klick has pioneered applying digital technology to 1) provide real-time coaching to enable talent and to automate processes 2) use data as a sixth sense to inform decision-making, and 3) create a talent-centric organisation.

At the core of Klick's culture and systems is clarity of roles and tasks. A platform developed by the company keeps all its leaders and employees informed on the progress of work and clearly specifies who is accountable for what.

There is a culture of hyper-transparency, where an entire project team can comment on every aspect of their project. Performance feedback happens every week. And every transaction, interaction, input and outcome is stored in a 'Wisdom Layer' of data that enables "gut feel" to be combined with data to inform rich insights. AI brings predictive insights to inform the company whether a contract will be profitable or a recruit will be successful.

This experiment in automating and augmenting practically every aspect of a company has yielded remarkable efficiencies. Klick, an organisation of 700 people, has just five people in finance, no HR department, no annual review process, and remarkably few administrative assistants. It has sustained a consistent 40% annual growth rate, high levels of profitability, less than 3% voluntary attrition (in an industry where rates are typically near 20%), and public recognition for its contributions to broader society.

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