Notes from a year of learning and teaching AI at MillerKnoll.
Design for the good of humankind. That is why we are here. It is what we are meant to teach. It can feel heavy, sometimes, because it’s massive in breadth and scope and possibilities. And if someone reads it passively, it might not click. How to go from a chair to an office to a team to collaborative and creative possibilities to joy and satisfaction and pride in one’s work to that one playlist and maybe a sunroof moment on the way home to bringing this into all the other places we go outside of work that refract and emulate and sop up how we show up and laugh and welcome to how that sticks onto others like a ladybug merrily hitching a ride on their shoulder as they leave out into the world.
Or one may not think about how we mean it quite literally, as well. How designing for the good of humankind begins with being a steward or silent advocate for these brief bodies of ours that hold us and bring us and carry us and welcome us across our decades, that even though we’re sometimes harsh to them and we gnaw and pick and flick at them or compare and critique at them or scrape them and scar them, they’re loyal vessels of life and love and adventure that bring the world up close to nuzzle or carry us over mountains to get a glimpse or that the thing someone loves most about this wide and wonderful and wondrous world is the feeling of being held by your body, and boy oh boy is it hard to do your favorite thing or see the place at sunset or be that person someone longs for if your back is twisted and your neck is craned and your hips are furious. Take it figuratively or take it literally, but know that we take it seriously.
So what does design for the good of humankind mean in the age of AI? After hundreds of hours of training with associates around the globe, I’m no closer to a confident answer than I was at birth, I think. But we were sure of one thing from the start: in an age of AI, still and always, our people are our greatest competitive advantage. The tools are for sale to anyone. Our people, their minds, their capabilities, the skill with which they use the tools at their disposal, are not. So investing in their training was a no-brainer, and what I can tell you, Bob’s your uncle, is what a year of it looked, sounded, and felt like.
It starts with a chart at the front of every session, filling with anonymous dots after we ask one question: today, right here and now, how do you feel about AI? My own dot lands somewhere south of eager and east of overwhelmed, every time (how I feel most days, AI or no AI). And then a company learning out loud brings every emotion to the surface. The person who’s been quietly tinkering for months finally saying so, softly at first, for fear of being shamed, and six people huddled over that same secret tinkerer, turned team savior the moment they offered to help. “Here, let me show you.” “Wait, it can do that?” “Just talk to it like a friend, it’ll understand.”
Dreaded tasks becoming done ones, which bring afternoons back out into the light of opportunity, or better yet, make a kid’s swim meet a “yes” not a “maybe” instantly. “Am I being replaced,” asked out loud, and the same voice, weeks later, saying “I get to learn again.” And some days, someone saying “nope, I’m all good,” and wanting to keep their indelible mark on every part of their work, which is a right I will defend for as long as I am around, because we are here to promote human readiness, not AI.
Through it all, Great Lakes-worth of second-hand joy: the child-like wonder of learning something brand new and getting just good enough to see out into the fields of untouched possibility, the relief when people see it’s not as hard or as daunting as they told themselves it would be, and the smirk of a leader watching their team go, in just a few hours, from anxious dots on a chart to a colony of builders trading tips and tricks and “do this, don’t do that”-s, because sometime between the start and now, fear got a lot smaller and the world got bigger. And all of it began with one four-word question we should probably ask more: how can we help?
Someday, whether with a big pop or a slow fizzle, AI won’t be the thing everyone’s talking about anymore. When that happens, what I hope we keep isn’t the tools, but the habit of finding new, creative ways to crack open things you thought were sealed for good by time and complexity. I hope that this blip in time was loud enough for people to remember that learning shouldn’t stop once you get good at something or that the story you’re telling yourself about someone else’s competency both isn’t true, and more importantly, boy I bet they’d love to share it with you if you asked. I hope we remember the wide-eyed wonder of being a beginner.
People may wonder why MillerKnoll spends real hours on training like this, and I’ve learned our answer is rarer than I thought. What felt instinctual to us (train your people!) is apparently counterintuitive out there. I take that as a point of pride, and as evidence that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. Because we believe that if we fuel their curiosities and feed their capabilities and surround them with others who refract and reflect and multiply, the rest will take care of itself (and that they’ll spend a long and storied career here, with us and for us and alongside us). That idea is actually a belief, and that belief is a commitment, because we know what happens to a person when they’re supported and backed and encouraged and appreciated and challenged. We know what happens to the people they raise at home and the communities they invest hearts and minds into and all the lady bugs riding on shoulders that radiate out from a single, satisfied soul.
And even though all of us too often think we’re miniscule or just a single person or that it’s just a desk chair, this is a story about a year spent with our people in place that believes in the potential of their possibilities and the trust and love and courage it takes to know that the wake one person can have is what actually, really, truly makes a better world.
For you. For me. For us. For the good of humankind.