If you want more from AI, you need to chip off the corporate barnacles

A couple of weeks ago, I fell into a YouTube wormhole. It started with “history of ship design” and end with me watching some scuba divers chip barnacles off a tanker propeller. It was more interesting than it sounds.

They explained that the buildup of tiny barnacles can add so much drag that they reduce the propeller’s efficiency by 40%. Forty freakin’ percent! All from a build up of tiny creatures you could fit on a teaspoon.

And as someone who heavily relies on analogies to help simplify complex issues, it immediately made me think of how organisations collect kludges, bodges and patches in a similar way. They may look harmless in isolation, but they gradually build up and collectively reduce the efficiency of the organisation by a significant amount.

Every new adjustment, temporary fix, and political allowance seems harmless - but over years these little additions cling, calcify and multiply. Nobody questions them. But they slow down processes and cause unnecessary frustration.

And now here we are, in the age of artificial intelligence, pinning our hopes on the promise of propulsion while ignoring those pesky crustaceans.

The cult of efficiency that kills efficiency

Most companies worship at the altar of efficiency - dashboards, KPIs, utilisation rates - yet they rarely step back to ask whether their processes are working optimally. People are rewarded for busyness, not brilliance. In fact, the employees who ask intelligent questions are often accused of being obstructive.

The result is unquestioning atrophy and a slow erosion of curiosity.

Meetings multiply, approvals creep upward, and “innovation” becomes something that happens in PowerPoint decks, rather than in practice.

When it comes to AI, the corporate instinct is to plug these shiny new tools into their already tangled mess.

But that’s unlikely to fix the problem. Adding AI to a broken system will simply automate the dysfunction and possibly amplify it to entirely new levels.

The work before the work

Most C-suites have been hoping for AI to magically transform their company with productivity gains and inflated profits. And then been disappointed when it hasn’t kicked a big enough dent in their balance sheet. It seems to be a slower burn and require more effort than they had planned for.

But the good news is that if they properly prepare for AI implementation, they’ll get the very gains they were after before a single prompt is written.

Taking the time to chisel off the corporate barnacles will give you an instant productivity boost. And increase staff morale. The alternative is that AI will feed them on protein shakes and give them steroid injections.

So the process starts by cleaning the data, connecting systems, defining roles and responsibilities, reducing admin, streamlining processes, eliminating unnecessary approvals, quashing petty politics, and replacing kludges with clarity.

It’s the business equivalent of scraping the propeller.

A 2025 study on organisational readiness for AI found that the real differentiator wasn’t the technology but the alignment between systems, governance, and goals:

“Organisations that continually realign their structures and processes are far better positioned to benefit from AI.” (source)

In other words, the smarter your organisation is in practice, the smarter your AI will be.

It’s really just common sense

I always like to give some action points to move from theory to practice. Because that’s the way I work with my clients. To be bluntly honest, most of the time these points are plain and simply common sense - and this article us no different. So here are three blinkin’ obvious (yet, sadly neglected) points for business leaders:

Give Curiosity Some Oxygen

One of the simplest ways to keep a business sharp is to give people permission to think. And I mean properly think and question every part of your organisation. When employees are free to explore new ideas or challenge how things are done, inefficiencies will naturally rise to the surface. From experience, I’ve been regularly surprised at what happens when people ask “Why do we even do it this way?”

3M famously builds questioning into its DNA, giving employees around 15 percent of their time to work on self-directed ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with their job description. That oxygen for curiosity produced not just Post-it Notes but a culture that spots problems before they fossilise into inefficiency.

Shrink the Hierarchy

Big organisations love their hierarchies, yet these are often the biggest anchor slowing them down. The more layers a decision must travel through, the more it gets diluted, delayed, damaged or quietly dropped. Flattening structures by breaking them into smaller, accountable units, reduces the drag. Decisions get made closer to the work, and petty politics are starved of the oxygen they crave.

That’s exactly what Kyocera does through its “amoeba management” model. They divide the company into small, semi-autonomous units that function almost like mini-startups. Each team owns its own results and adapts quickly without waiting for a memo from on high. The structure itself becomes a living process of renewal where barnacles don’t get a chance to stick.

Make Improvement Everyone’s Job

Continuous improvement sounds like a management cliché until you actually see it (that’s not been a regular occurance for me, to be honest). When every employee feels responsible for spotting and fixing inefficiency, the organisation becomes self-cleaning. Instead of waiting for a reorganisation or a consultant’s report, improvements bubble up daily from the people closest to the work.

Toyota has practised this for decades through its kaizen culture and long-running employee suggestion programme, which has generated tens of millions of ideas from staff. Most of those suggestions are small, but their collective effect is massive. Essentially, you turn your entire workforce into a crack team of barnacle scrapers.

The Great Disenshittification

I’m no spring chicken, so I’ve seen my fair share of digital transformation efforts. And I’m yet to see one that’s truly worth putting on a pedestal so that we can all gather round and applaud. Now that AI is the latest boondoggle companies need to adjust to, I’m seeing the same old mistakes popping up like remakes of classic films. Piling AI on top of outdated processes doesn’t create additional intelligence; it’s just gives us another example of corporate stupidity.

The true transformation comes when companies use AI as the excuse to stop doing dumb things. When they use it as the reason to tidy up the messes they’ve been pretending don’t exist. Because every organisation is instantly improved when you strip away redundant layers, reconnect systems, and invite employees back into the business of improvement.

As I’ve said before, the firms most obsessed with efficiency often find themselves too damn busy to work on it. Meanwhile, the ones who pause to scrape off the barnacles find themselves not only ready for AI, but already running more smoothly before they an AI tool starts spitting out responses.

Clean first, then turn on the power

So this is a call to put on your corporate scuba gear and get to work chipping off the barnacles. Because that will make sure you truly reap the benefits of your AI engine upgrade.

I’m not saying it’s easy because it’s not. But one of the reasons it’s so painful is because you’ve neglected it for so long. However - as a bonus for all the hard work - it will give you an immediate improvement to your organisation and give your staff a tasty morale boost.

The smartest leaders in the AI era won’t just be the ones who adopt the latest tools, they’ll be the ones who finally have the good sense to chip away the stuff that's been holding them back.

Dave Birss is Co-Founder of The Gen AI Academy - a collection of over 30 AI experts offering practical training and advice for companies all over the world. If you haven't taken his LinkedIn Learning courses, you really should.