While Open AI CEO Sam Altman declares we have not solved the AI alignment problem, I ask, “When have we ever?”

Let’s start macro. I don’t see much alignment these days between leaders in our Local, State and Federal Governments. In fact, all I see are conflicting values.

And with AI, who gets to decide the alignment? Personally, I hope it’s a diverse team with diverse interests. But even so, it won’t be the same team for every LLM.

As the AI alignment problem is not a problem most of us can solve, let’s look at alignment problems we can fix. The ones within our teams.

While AI is brilliant at generating perspectives for teams to consider, it doesn’t create collective sense-making and the collective ownership that flows from it. Why? Because we all look at a decision through our own mental model of the world. And these mental models need to be shared, otherwise misalignment ensues and your well thought through strategy begins to crack and break apart.

For an agile organisation, you ideally want devolved decision making, which I wrote about in my paper on Adaptive Leadership during another period of heightened uncertainty, April 2020. With devolved decision making, decisions are made by individuals and teams closest to the project or challenge, not by ‘head office’ leaders. And this is why teams matter more than ever. Or more specifically, good team decision making under uncertainty. And good decision making starts with strong alignment within your teams.

Not all decisions can be devolved. For decisions to flow smoothly up the hierarchical chain, there needs to be alignment of teams to strategic intent. However, just like team members having different mental models of the world when looking at a decision, so too do the teams involved in influencing those decisions, as well as the individual executives and board members. Another reason teams are more important than ever.

While alignment of AI is going to be uber critical for our future well-being, it’s out of our remit. What is in your control in this fast-changing world is making your organisation more agile and resilient by creating uber-aligned teams, executives and board members.

And this starts by sharing mental models.

I highly recommend sharing mental models visually using the decision maps I describe in Chapter 5: Delicate Design in my book Team Think: How Teams Make Great Decisions.

As always, I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts on team alignment – and how your team fared using decision maps.