Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | TuneIn | RSS
Over the past 25 years, Lisa Welchman has established and codified the field of digital governance.
With an enterprise consulting career that spans the emergence of the web, the arrival of social media, and the rise of mobile computing, she is uniquely positioned to help digital practitioners, managers, and executives understand and manage the governance issues that arise with the arrival of generative AI.
Lisa is the author of the leading book in her field, Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design.
We talked about:
- her career in enterprise digital governance
- her concern about the lack of transparency in the existing governance practices at AI companies
- an analogy she sees between WYSIWYG and AI tools
- the contrast between more mature governance models like the UX field has developed and newer digital practices like the adoption of GPTs
- governance lessons that new tech implementers can always learn from prior tech eras
- her call to action for technical experts to alert executives of possible harms in the adoption of new technology
- the elements of her digital governance framework:
- understanding team composition and the organizational landscape in which digital practitioners operate
- having a strategic intent
- articulating governance policies
- establishing practice standards
- the range of digital makers she gets to interact with in her work
- the importance of accounting for the total business and organizational environment when jockeying for a seat at the table
- the responsibility of experienced digital makers and managers to call out potentially troublesome patterns in the adoption of new tech
- the importance for digital practitioners of staying aware of how much agency they have right now
Lisa’s bio
Lisa Welchman is a digital governance trailblazer with over two decades of experience. She’s passionate about helping organizations manage their digital presence effectively and sustainably. Known for her practical approach, Lisa has worked with a variety of clients, from global corporations to non-profits. She’s also a popular speaker and the author of “Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design.” A mentor and educator at heart, Lisa is dedicated to helping leaders make the digital world a safer and kinder place for everyone.
Connect with Lisa online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 29. Whenever new technology like generative AI emerges, organizations have to deal with both the opportunities and the challenges that arrive with it. It often falls to practitioners like content strategists and designers to alert the C-suite of potential governance concerns that arise with the adoption of new tech. Lisa Welchman sees in this situation an opportunity for digital makers to take the lead on educating their organizations about these important issues.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 29 of the Content + AI Podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Lisa Welchman. Lisa is a true legend in the field of digital governance. She pretty much established the discipline, I think it’s safe to say, over the past 25 years. She wrote what I would argue is the leading book on it, Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design. But welcome Lisa, and the reason I wanted to talk to you this week is we’re right in the middle of Rosenfeld Media is doing a conference on design and AI, and it seems like AI is an area that’s really ripe for a conversation about governance. Does that make sense?
Lisa:
Yeah, it does. I will contextualize myself a little bit in saying that digital governance is a really broad term, and my focus is really around enterprise digital governance, how digital governance manifests inside of an organization that’s making and putting things online. And there’s a lot of other governances around there in the internet web space that are equally interesting, but not where I specialize.
Larry:
That idea of enterprise. And what’s interesting about that is that the big companies that are doing this stuff, that are most prominent in the field, it’s all Google and Anthropic and Microsoft and OpenAI and huge organizations like that. Do you have any feel for what governance is happening inside those orgs?
Lisa:
I don’t actually have any kind of feel. I think the types of organizations that you describe have in some capacity mature governance inside of the organization because of the nature of the types of products and services that they offer online. And just from evidence. Now, whether or not we like the decisions that are being made within that governing framework that they have, that’s an entirely different concern. I am concerned about those larger organizations married with the newness of this version of AI, that’s like the iceberg, the AI iceberg is finally poking its head out of the water and we’re paying attention to it now. And there’s a lot of stuff underground that these organizations have been doing for years that we’re not really aware of. I’m a little nervous about the lack of transparency around the preamble governance that may have happened, concerned about that.
Lisa:
But I’m not concerned that they aren’t governing for many organizations, enterprise organizations, B2Bs who are coming into this technology afresh just as it’s emerging to them I’m more concerned because they’re more likely to take ChatGPT, and I know it’s not a great analogy, but ChatGPT feels to me like a WYSIWYG AI tool. You don’t really need to know what you’re doing. It’s like those of us back in the day who learned HTML, we actually had to learn HTML to make things work. And then you got these, what you see is what you get tools, these WYSIWYG tools come out of the framework and anybody could code a page and it made really sloppy, nasty code on the backend, but it didn’t matter because the browser served it up.
Lisa:
And I see some of these new tools, particularly around generative AI as like WYSIWYG tools for AI. And it makes me nervous because not a lot of people are asking “What’s in that black box and what’s happening and who made the decisions about it?” Which is really what governance is about, “Who was considered, what are the policies, what’s the value system around making this technology?” And I don’t see a lot of people asking that in the enterprise.
Larry:
I think a couple of things about what we just said. One, the notion that these things are black boxes, that the LLMs, and in fact, even the engineers who build them often say they can’t explain what’s going on underneath them. But you contrast that with, I spend a lot of time with conversation designers and other UX designers, and in that world, it’s so clear that transparency and explainability are crucial to consumer acceptance and adoptance and safety. It seems like reconciling that should be on the governance agenda someplace. Is that reconciliation of intent with customer expectations, is that something that governance can help with?
Lisa:
It is, but I would also argue that you’re comparing apples to oranges because one of the things that I like to talk about a lot that a lot of people talk about are maturity models. And the maturity model for a new technology or a new anything is that it comes out of the chute hot and heavy. People don’t really know what they’re doing with it. They try new things. There’s a lot of craziness on organic growth. We make a big mess, a lot of harm and lack of safety come into play and somebody screams and says, “We need to govern this,” or, “We need to write policy around this.” Or if you’re more on the operational side, “We need to write standards around this. We need to become more transparent. We need all of these things happen.” And then there’s some struggle and then things mature, and then you have a more sustainable model.
Lisa:
You’re comparing a UX model that’s fairly mature with a coming-out-of-the gate one. And it’s not entirely fair because UX has not always been that way and experience development and the development of an online experience has been quite chaotic and a lot of harm that we see has been a result of UX not thinking through problems early on or implementing things or not understanding the foundational functionality of what they’re asking for, not understanding that certain types of online interactions will create certain data pools that can be exploited by the organization. That all happened in the UX world. It didn’t come out clean.
Larry:
I want to follow up. There are two things about that. One you alluded a minute ago to the AI tip of the iceberg. The AI has been around forever, since the seventies and eighties, and it’s just now the arrival of the GPTs and in particular ChatGPT 3.5 almost a year and a half ago now. There’s that, but that’s where people perceive the start of this to be, and that’s where it does lag far behind UX practice, but in fact, it’s been around for a while. Is this a common pattern, I guess to see the technology?
Lisa:
Yeah, it’s just how it flows. This is just how things work. This is a presentation that I give about the history of automotive, automobile safety and things come out of the gate very hard. Usually in the US, other parts of the world, people are trying to make money or trying to figure out how to exploit this new technology that’s become mature enough that it can actually be used to make money and to build product. We all know there’s a huge preamble to every technology where people fail and fail hard and fail sometimes for 50 to a hundred years or more. They’re failing, failing, failing. Finally, somebody comes up with something that’s actually viable and it comes into the marketplace and then people think, “It’s new.” And of course it’s not new, but I think that’s always the case. I just want to correct that. I’m forgetting what your actual real question was.
Larry:
But that’s actually a really interesting point that when things emerge, because all the stuff to permit the internet was in the web, was around for decades before that. And then there was this coalescing of technologies and practices and it came together. And it seems like we’re at a similar point now with AI. And maybe, but like you said, there’s always preambles, there’s always a setup for it. But I guess maybe let me ask about, are there opportunities and lessons or could we learn lessons from prior things like the arrival of the web or things like that and apply them?
Lisa:
Yeah, of course we could. Of course we could learn lessons if we wanted to. I’ve become a little bit cynical as I’ve watched various iterations of web and internet roll through us, websites and then the big push and then social and the big push and the mobile. Now we’ve got this AI push and even looking prior to that at television, radio, all sort of telecommunications types of technologies, we tend to let them get really messy and hard and make mistakes before we actually govern them. Part of that just might be human nature. Part of that just might be greed. I think when the tip of the iceberg comes up out, what that tip really means is here’s the opportunity to make money, which is a really interesting thing. It’s not necessarily a functionality. It’s not necessarily a technology maturity that somebody’s figured out how to make money off of this or how to replicate it quickly or how to manipulate it in a way that’s going to bear fruit.
Lisa:
I think if there are any lessons that we can learn from looking at previous technologies is that there’s actual value in governing upstream. Particularly the more powerful the technology, I think the more important it is, the more powerful and the more scalable and the more quickly something can proliferate, the more important it is to address certain types of safety and accountability issues upstream. Because what happens is the thing deploys, you build something, it starts making money, and once that happens, it’s just going to inflate and grow. And it’s very hard to take it off the burner and say, “We were wrong. Let’s pull all the harm out it and redeploy it.” It’s just not going to happen. Particularly if the company’s gone public or it’s not going to be brought back. And I think that’s where content people, designers, developers, anyone who’s a digital working in that ecosystem has a responsibility to first realize that a lot of people, not all the time, sometimes companies are founded by makers who actually do understand the technology.
Lisa:
And I think everyone in this space that’s actually creating AI-based technologies and products and services, they’re probably led by people who understand the technology. But the vast majority of people that I work with aren’t those people. They’re people inside an enterprise that’s led by somebody that’s not a technologist, which means they’re the domain experts inside the organization about what harm might come to pass and what’s possible, good and bad. And this call to action that I perpetually have with people that I get frustrated because they don’t listen to it and then everything goes bad and then they blame people higher up in the system, and it’s like, “Those people were actually ignorant. They actually didn’t know.” Now we can argue all day about whether they should know or whatever, but I would argue probably the CEO of a gas and oil company isn’t going to know a lot about AI.
Lisa:
That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable thing, but somebody who’s sitting in the design team, who’s actually using these technologies should have a responsibility to at least survey the landscape of what could go wrong and to be clear about what players are on the team and who has accountability for making certain types of policy decisions or raising those policy decisions up into the management structure instead of dawning a role of like, “I’m being forced to do this.” I just see this a lot. It’s really frustrating for me, and I understand. I am a single parent or have been a single parent, my son’s almost 30 now. I understand the stress of a mortgage and the stress of having to make a living. And I also understand within those stresses of having to have a day-to-day job and being paid, there are opportunities to actually raise issues inside of an organization early in the process.
Lisa:
It’s so much easier to raise the issue early in the process before it’s a moneymaking endeavor. Of course, after it’s out of the gate and your living is based on it, nobody wants to hear it. And I think the opportunity is really understanding the pushing of the awareness around safety ethics and building a mature governing framework around this new technology or the use of an old technology inside the enterprise is super important and something that we can learn from in the past. But also cynically, I’ll say, it seems like people don’t.
Larry:
I was going to say, depending on the charter of your job and what you signed up for, it’s either an opportunity or an obligation like, “Hey, chief, we’re building something here that might blow up,” or have all these various concerns, which I was almost hesitant to ask. I know so much of governance happens beyond the purview of, I think most of my podcast listeners are practitioners or managers at some level and very rarely in the executive rank. That call to action that you’re making of like, “Hey, you’re down there in the trenches, these people above you, they just don’t know and it’s your job to inform them of some of these consequences.”
Larry:
The other thing about that that I think it’s related to that is you talk a lot about intent and how governance is a way for organizations to be more intentful and purposeful and how they do that. Do you see those two lining up? If part of your intent is to do… I don’t know, it seems like money gets in the way a lot, you’ve alluded to that a number of times, but are there other ways to affect the expression of an organization’s intent from a practitioner or a manager perspective?
Lisa:
Ask that again in a different way. Is there another way?
Larry:
It seems like I’m seeing an opportunity here and even an obligation in addition to the opportunity to be proactive in, if not driving, at least trying to shape that intent, that underlies a lot of the governance work that you do because as I understand it from your book and some of the things we’ve talked about before, is that a big part of your intent is to help orgs become more intentional, and is there an obligation for people who aren’t in the high-level things communicating back up, I guess is what I’m getting to.
Lisa:
Yes, it’s building a framework and I can talk about that. But just to hark back to the first thing that you said, money doesn’t get in the way, greed gets in the way. Just to be clear, we operate in a world where people barter and exchange goods and services for millennia. It’s not about that. It’s about hoarding. Basically, it’s about hoarding and about not creating limits around money at any cost. I just want to be clear about that. That is my take on it.
Lisa:
People make businesses, businesses make money, they pay people, people go to work. There are things like that. That’s just the way of the world. And maybe in my own private time, I might get philosophical about that and to what extent that works and doesn’t work or whatever the case may be. But with my management consultant hat on, I often have a certain amount of respect for the fact that this company is trying to make money, but it’s like at what price? And how much is required? And how much greed is in that system up against the benefits of customers that may be using their products and services? I just want to clarify that now as it relates to say an organization or an enterprise has good intention or they have a value proposition that they want to offer, and they’re thinking about AI and how can governance help play a role in that?
Lisa:
And one of the most interesting things when I go in and I help people create a governance framework, which is really just do you understand who in your system of makers are related to whatever it is that you’re building? Say it’s AI, who in this system is somehow going to have to resonate with this? It might be data scientists, it might content people, developers. It’s a whole sea of people that are going to touch it. It might be compliance officers, if you’re in a heavily regulated industry, and governance makes sure is one that you understand that landscape. Do you understand the landscape, the team of people that need to be doing that? I found that often in the content and design world, you can get quite siloed and very product oriented. It’s like, “I’m writing this and only I need to write this,” or, “I’m understanding the full content strategy or the content design and only I need to do this,” or, “I’m doing UX and I’m going to do the things that I need to do to do UX.”
Lisa:
And the rest of it is out of scope. And if you’re doing anything AI related and you’re not also including developers in the process, and you’re probably not including compliance officers and explain to them what’s going on and the types of interactions, you’re probably off. That’s number one thing that you can do to do that. The other part of it is having a strategic intent. When a new technology rolls out, the thing that usually, unless that’s your whole business, unless you are Google and it’s search, unless that’s your whole business, your whole business is AI, then you probably don’t really have any articulated intention around how you’re going to use this technology. And what usually happens is it comes in a side door in the middle of the organization with makers. Somebody’s doodling around with something if, “It’s cool, we could do this,” or some management to hire management person says, “What are we going to do with AI?” And they look down at their team, “What are we going to do with AI?”
Lisa:
And they start fiddling, “We could do this and we could do this and we can do this.” And what’s missing is that strategic intent. It’s like you go from nothing to, “What can we make?” And when you’re creating a governance framework, it really is expressing the way in which you need to operate and think about decision making as it relates to this strategy. If you don’t have one, that’s a problem. Having one cross-functional meeting with the team of people that might be impacted or whose input is required and saying, “Hey, this new thing is just coming in. What do we think about this strategically as an organization?”
Lisa:
Even just having that conversation and having three bullet points of what your intention is better than nothing. You don’t have to have the whole shebang, but you also just need to know because in that conversation you might be able to surface sorts of harms, “Do we want to do this?” Or, “What do we know about this language model that did all of this work? Do we know is it inclusive enough?” You might start to ask those sorts of questions and be able to document and wonder about them. And that strategy will then allow you to understand more fully who needs to be on the team. It’ll help you understand more fully, “Are there any adjustments in policy or new policies that we need to write inside of the organization?” And then of course, what you decide to build along with those other things that I just mentioned, help you understand what standards you might need to set.
Lisa:
And that’s all a governance framework is being able to express those things. Standards are hard to set when you don’t know what you’re making, but you probably have some standards already around visual identity. You might have some standards in your organization or policy in your organization around harm, around language use, about what languages you do use. There’s all kinds of things that you can just be thinking about that don’t necessarily need to slow you down, but can be considered and baked in so that you don’t come out of the end with a product that causes harm or is out out of alignment with who you are as an organization and then wonder why that happened. It happened because you didn’t do the work. That’s why it happened.
Larry:
Nice. I got to thank you. You read my mind because just before you started, you just set out your whole framework and I was going to ask you about that. Thank you for setting that out. But one of the things I just want to jump in and point out, I had a conversation with a friend yesterday and I just want to throw a motivational pitch in here to content designers, especially on the call, but any number of content professionals, they’re often marginalized and always fighting for the seat at the table and all that stuff.
Larry:
I was talking to a leader at a big financial services firm in the DC area yesterday, and he said that his time is currently divided between conventional content design. We’re still fighting all those old battles and he’s also doing AI stuff. And he said the C-suite and executives are coming to him all the time asking for advice about this. That bottom-up stuff, like if you start to think about policies, the need for policies and the standards that support them and stuff that it feels, again, this is back to the opportunity. I feel like there’s an opportunity for practitioners of all kinds once they’ve cultivated some expertise around this stuff to, I don’t know, govern up. Is that a thing?
Lisa:
Sure. Managing up is a thing inside of an organization. You mentioned something that people say in almost every discipline. One of the privileges of doing the type of work that I do is I talk to every kind of digital maker. From the hardest hardcore IT, nerdo, all the way to this very content functionalist, visual design, amorphous stuff. I get a left brain, right brain view of the whole ecosystem and everything in between and then the management or whatever. That’s really one of the privileges. And I hear a complaint from a lot of people at the maker operational level about wanting a seat at the table because of this dynamic that I talked about before, which is when a new technology’s introduced, usually the person that actually understands how it works isn’t in an enterprise or the C-suite might be talking about it, but like in big bold strokes.
Lisa:
I saw this article on Fill in The Blank with Wall Street Journal and they said, “Blah, blah, what are we doing with that?” They don’t really get that. And the first thing you have to do is, I think for people at that level is one, put your freaking ego down because not only do they not know about these technologies, but you don’t know their job either. And this is a thing, it’s like if you want to seat at the table, you can’t have things both ways. If you want to be a respected individual contributor and a respected senior individual contributor in the organization, frame yourself that way. That person usually visits the big table from time to time, says smart things and goes away. That’s what their job is. And that’s a great job.
Lisa:
In a lot of ways, I wish I had taken that job myself. You just go and you go back in your corner and you keep counting your stuff, but you can’t go back in your corner and then be upset because the C-suite didn’t make the decision that you wanted to make. Things didn’t turn out the way. If you want to be at the C-table, then you have to do the work to be at the C-table, which probably means going back to school and learning things about business and learning other disciplines about the organization and losing that big cap of, “I’m a senior super expert.” A lot of times I see people, not just content people, but a lot of folks talking out of both sides of their mouth and it’s like, “This is just not how it works.” Right up at that level, oftentimes people in the C-suite have gotten there through some kind of vocational path, and I would love to see more people at that table who actually came out of the digital maker community.
Lisa:
Whether that’s content person or designer, I would love to see that because that knowledge at the table would be great, but just having and being an expert with that knowledge isn’t enough to be a member of that table. You have to understand the business, you have to understand the other lines of business, and you have to understand the types of compromises that happen at that level. It’s less of a purist activity. And we can argue all day philosophically about whether or not that’s a good or bad thing, but that’s the dynamic of what’s happening at that level. And that’s what I have to say about that.
Larry:
Because I’ve talked a lot with folks about the challenges of going from an individual contributor to management, but then going from management to an executive role, that’s a whole other leap. And you just articulated the dynamics around that very nicely I think that just we’re all human-centered, empathetic people, and just holding some of that empathy for the executives at the top who are… But we also have that, I keep coming back to this, that opportunity to educate them now because they’re not going to be in the weeds about AI stuff, I guess the ones who run those AI companies are.
Larry:
But one other thing I wanted to ask you about, and I don’t know if governance has any role in helping people understand or grapple with this, but there seems to be a big disconnect right now between the hype around AI and the reality of on the ground implementations and actual benefits of it. Do you have any thoughts from a governance perspective about that?
Lisa:
Anything not really governance focused. I think that’s just how new technologies roll. There’s hype, but people are excited by it. And a lot of the people who are super excited about it are people who never thought of it before. It’s just a simple, it’s like, “Look at that new car. Wow, I never thought about that. No windshield. Cool. What could you do with no windshield?” I think some of that is just the energy and push that comes with somebody being excited about something new that they’ve never seen before. And I think those of us who have either seen it for a long time or have seen cycles of new technology come into play, have a special role to play in maintaining some sense of levity around what’s actually going on right now, which is a lot of blah, blah, blah.
Lisa:
We’ve seen it and yes, real things are being built and the power of these tools is strong. I’m not undercutting that, but also, there’s just a lot of bubbling stuff. As it relates to governance, if I think about that for a minute, I can only come up with the same answer, which is those who have seen these cycles before and have maybe weren’t strong enough with website governing stuff or weren’t strong enough with social media governing stuff or weren’t strong enough with mobile stuff and have seen this pattern, I think these people have a special responsibility to look and see, “What could we check early on inside of our organization to make sure that we don’t scale something that’s either harmful or unethical or not in line with the culture of our organization as well as the positive stuff? What can we actually do with this new technology?” I think that’s just the nature of the beast is that people are going to be really overexcited about things when they first come out because they seem new and fuzzy.
Larry:
The theme just keeps coming up, people keep on being people and getting excited about new things is a people thing. But Lisa, I can’t believe that we’re coming up close to time, I like to keep these around a half hour. But before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything that you want to make sure we cover or revisit from the conversation?
Lisa:
I guess I’ll just re-emphasize in a nutshell that people need to really be aware of how much agency they have right now, particularly people in the design and maker or digital maker, community, whatever it is that you’re doing, to not let your whole self get completely absorbed into the making operational component of it, but to maintain some sense of separation from that and wisdom and realize that you actually do have agency. It doesn’t matter if you are a junior person, my first job at Cisco Systems was maintaining the product pages, which actually made me one of the most powerful people in their ecosystem, but I was really junior. I didn’t even have people reporting to me at the time. And I think that’s an important thing to remember that no matter where you are when it’s a new technology, that can be a huge differentiator. That can be a huge power that you’re the one who knows, and don’t take that for granted.
Larry:
I love that. Capturing the power in knowledge. One very last thing, Lisa, what’s the best way for folks if they want to connect or follow you online, where can they find you?
Lisa:
LinkedIn is good. LinkedIn is a good way to reach me.
Larry:
Excellent. I’ll put that in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Lisa. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Lisa:
Thanks for having me.
