‘Heartwood’ by Zoe Scaman

Photo by Julia Eagle on Unsplash

If you only read one thing about AI this year, make it Zoe Scaman’s beautiful, important article ‘Heartwood’.

Some excerpts here -

Heartwood is the dense inner wood of a tree. It forms slowly, over decades. You can’t see it from outside. And once it’s cut out, you can’t grow it back on any useful timescale.

In an institution, heartwood is the accumulated judgment, relational memory, ethical stance and tacit knowledge that distinguishes one organisation from another. It’s what the organisation is made of - not what it does.

Right now, in nearly every major organisation, the heartwood is being cut.

It’s happening at a pace nothing has prepared us for. Heartwood is the slowest thing an organisation builds. AI is the fastest thing an organisation has ever deployed. The slowest asset, meeting the fastest rollout - which means the cut is happening faster than any institution can notice it’s happening, let alone stop it.

If we protect the heartwood, sharpen it, build on it - what we have is something nobody else can replicate. An institution that thinks like itself, that reads situations no one else reads quite the same way, that compounds its difference at exactly the moment everyone else converges.

But if we keep accelerating intelligence and cutting away the heartwood - if we trade the compounding for the quarterly gain, automate the shallow version of ourselves and call it transformation - then one day someone is going to ask what makes your organisation different. What it knows that nobody else knows. What it has learned that cannot be replicated, or bought on a meter.

Beautiful and timely - thank you, Zoe, for this important contribution to the conversation.