I've been thinking about that hotel doorman I mentioned in my previous post. The one replaced by an automatic door to save a little cash and boost efficiency. When we make those trades, we aren't just losing someone who recognises the regulars and helps with the taxis. We're losing intuition.

I was listening to the very excellent Jonny Thomson, and he perfectly captured what's going on here in one of his Philosophy Minis. He talked about how we've fed AI the breadth and depth of all human knowledge. This includes poetry, Wikipedia, textbooks, yet it still lacks a deeper understanding. He referred to this blind spot as the Polanyi Problem, was new to me but made perfect sense. 

The philosopher Michael Polanyi pointed out something so obvious we usually miss it: human beings know a lot more than we can actually explain. We have all this explicit knowledge (described as) the tidy stuff we can write down and feed to algorithms. We have a lot of that in education. 

But then there's 'tacit knowledge'.

This is the messy stuff. It's knowing how to ride a bike. Or catching an atmosphere in a room or on a call and instinctively knowing you need to pause and just listen, relying on that gut feeling. The ancient Greeks called it phronesis... basically, practical wisdom.

You only get that kind of wisdom from lived experience and from navigating the friction of human relationships.

As Thomson highlighted, the real issue for leaders leaning too heavily on tech is that we can only train algorithms on the tiny fraction of knowledge humans have explicitly codified. The vast majority of human wisdom just can't be put into a database. And over time we have probably contradicted ourselves over and over with what we have written down anyway. That all gets fed in chewed up and spat back out. 

So when we try to automate the hard parts of school leadership... we're trying to solve deep, messy human problems using only a fraction of what it actually takes to be human.

Makes you wonder what else we're quietly losing just because it can't be coded....

♻️ Share this with someone who needs a reminder that their instincts combined with their knowledge matter. And if you're feeling this tension in your own organisation... happy to talk it through. 

Send me a message or take a look at Simpang online. I'd love to share more about Simpang and the deeply human work involved in getting this right. 

Because the real work happens through conversation, not automation. Doesn't it?