The John Griff Column: Brave New World – or Brave New Year?

If there are, where do we find them and how do we maximise their potential? How tightly will we grasp the nettle for the common good?

The art of delegation is precisely that – an art. Before I worked in broadcasting, I worked for one of the high street banks. One of the first management skills taught to staff embarking on junior managerial roles, or in those areas where the work of others within a team would be falling under the responsibility of a team leader/manager, was the art of delegating work. Delegation was seen as a soft skill where the new manager was obliged to look not only at the job roles of those in their team, but also the individual talents of the people in those jobs, what they brought to the team in the widest sense and their ability to work at whatever level of supervision, together with how much they could reasonably be expected to deliver before meltdown occurred. I suggest it’s always been that art of communicating with colleagues, plus having the courage to pass work over to others to run with, trusting them to deliver to a standard and on time which has brought out the best delegators.

I have a very good friend from my school days who is the Managing Director of a business – but is a hopeless delegator. A success in certain areas, they tend to play their cards very close to their chest. In turn, when (as has happened) a staff role gets vacated or changed, my friend tends to leap in and take the responsibilities of the vacated role under their own wing – whether or not they have a talent for them. A kind of megalomania, it reduces their ability to be fully effective in their role as a senior manager because they’ve taken on too much elsewhere. But they can’t see this and if you suggest that they’re overstretching themselves, they stick their head in the metaphorical sand and withdraw even further. All of which leaves their staff feeling marginalised – and downright suspicious of what’s going on in the company. Rather than being a delegator, they’ve developed dictator tendencies.

Sound familiar? I’ve come across it in a number of businesses – and industries. Failure in communication – be that internally or externally - is generally reckoned to be the biggest single cause of businesses failing to develop or survive. Small wonder therefore that with the expansion of the plethora of online social media platforms, our ability to get a message across accurately and successfully is becoming more and more compromised. Simple emails can all too often be misunderstood or misconstrued. People use a myriad of words for similar things – but words themselves can be misread or given a kind of tone of voice which was never meant and in the current Age of Woke it is becoming ever harder to get a message across without its meaning getting corrupted. Put a limit on the number of characters you can use to get your message across, and things become even harder to achieve.

I am highly sceptical about the effects of AI and what it will bring. Interestingly, Google has for some time been promoting AI publicly on its search engine. Every time a user searches for anything, Google prioritises what it calls the ‘AI overview’ – as though this is the source of knowledge for all things. As a result, we are being soft-sold the notion that ONLY AI can provide us with the information to the questions we want answered. But who is to say that we are asking the right questions and in the right way to get the right answers?

If the world is to make progress through 2025, perhaps we need to work on our communication skills. There’s been speculation about how the current government here is reaching out to Europe in order to re-engage at least some of the elements of our relationship with it pre-Brexit. Likewise, as Donald Trump and the rest of the world look towards his re-inauguration, the quality of the relationships – and deals – which might be struck will hinge on the way in which communications are handled. Communication is one thing – understanding is something very different. Undoubtedly AI will play a part in all of this – but to what end? Will we delegate responsibility to Artificial Intelligence, or will we trust Actual Intelligence and common sense?

Or will 2025 truly usher in the Machine Age?