Adam Green
I've spent more than twenty-five years in business, law, regulation and technology, much of it working out why work goes wrong. I've designed and built systems and analysis tools which use machine learning (before most people called it AI) and deployed new tools at scale to help and change businesses.
My roles have included Group Chief Risk Officer at Equiniti Group. I'm now Chief Executive Officer of Contexis, a B Corp consultancy that is focused on people and culture: how we perform, how we work with risk, how we effectively use controls and how AI is changing both how we work and the companies we work with. I wrote Tempered to help focus us back on what matters, with strong high-quality work at the heart of our roles.
I am currently focused on the way people and organisations can use AI to improve their skills and effectiveness, and what that means for training, team and organisation design, and future careers.
What I got wrong, and what it taught me
Early in my career, at the UK's financial regulator, I spent the best part of a month chasing a single wrong number. A calculation would never quite balance to zero. The fault meant the analysis tool I was building was broken, but I ended up finding it had nothing to do with my logic or my data. The fault was deep in the software. Excel, like most software, stores numbers in binary, so some everyday decimals can't be held exactly. The error was tiny, but at scale it mattered.
Many errors and risks which matter are like that now. They start small, don't look immediately problematic but can spread quietly through everything that relies on them, and if undiscovered over time can develop into significant issues.
I learned that we need to think "end to end" about our systems, processes and quality of work. Start with the end goal in mind, what is the impact we are trying to achieve, then work back removing what is preventing that. When the end goal is quality, we need a way of working to ensure we achieve it.
AI has made quality harder to judge and poor work easier to produce. To be successful we need to turn this around and use AI to build better.
What this site is
A place to bring together ideas which help navigate the change AI is bringing to our working lives.