Random Acts of Productivity

Your team is using AI. Probably a lot of it. ChatGPT for emails, Claude for analysis, various tools for various tasks, real productivity gains happening.

But are those gains adding up to strategic capability? Or could you still be stuck at the random acts of productivity stage of adoption?

Random acts of productivity look like this: people experimenting on their own, finding things that work for them personally, often getting genuine efficiency wins - saving time, improving quality, working smarter.

It's useful. It's not nothing. Individual agency matters.

But it's disconnected. Each person is finding their own way, and nothing is linking these individual wins to what you're collectively trying to achieve.

This is what AI adoption looks like for most organizations right now. Lots happening, but not necessarily adding up to really moving the needle.

AI on purpose looks different.

It's when those individual productivity wins become the raw material for organizational capability. The question isn't whether people should be experimenting - it's whether that experimentation connects to what you're actually trying to achieve.

When you move from random to deliberate, a few things become possible:

You can build on what's working. Instead of everyone figuring it out alone, you can identify what delivers real value and help others learn from it.

You can manage what's risky. Not by shutting things down, but by understanding what people are doing and ensuring appropriate guardrails are in place.

You can measure what matters. Not just efficiency gains, but impact on the outcomes you actually care about.

You can align effort. When individual productivity connects to shared goals, you stop having disconnected experiments and start building organizational capability.

The leaders making progress aren't banning experimentation or waiting for the perfect strategy before anyone can move. They're looking at what's already happening and asking: How do we turn this into something deliberate? How do we connect individual agency to collective purpose?

They're approaching it as a staged process - understand what people are actually doing, identify what's working and what's risky, connect the useful bits to organizational outcomes, and build from there.

AI on purpose. Not by accident.