Chipp Con 2025 Keynotes
In October we hosted over 100 people in Greenville, SC to share how they are using Chipp and AI to build the future of business and work. View all talks here.
Meet Bob
Bob Gower has spent the past 20 years in organization design, figuring out how people work together and how to make work better. His career started at the San Francisco Examiner newspaper, where he learned some hard lessons about leadership. These days, he's building Splendid Torch, a collective focused on helping companies adapt to change through better operations and culture.
At Chipp Con SC, Bob shared why culture matters more than ever, what makes organizations ready for AI, and introduced rippleIQ, a tool designed to help leaders think more clearly about the problems they're trying to solve. Watch his talk below 👇
Why AI Won't Fix a Broken System
AI is a work problem, not just a technology problem. People are looking to AI to save them, thinking it will make inefficient processes efficient. But if you add automation to an inefficient process, you amplify the inefficiency. If you add AI to a broken system or broken culture, you break it further.
Organizations are already struggling with constant change. When Bob worked in newspapers from 1995 to 2003, they went through desktop publishing, digital photography, and Craigslist. But back then, after each wave of change, there was a plateau. You could catch your breath.
Now those plateaus are gone. And AI just dropped into an already unstable situation. When things get tough, most companies pay lip service to culture but go all-in on operations. The message becomes "shut up and do your job." But that approach won't work anymore.
Operations and Culture Need to Work Together
Bob believes there are two main levers for leading an organization: operations (the systems, tools, and processes) and culture (the relationships that make collaboration possible). When both are working together, things flow. When they're misaligned, everything gets jumbled
The Science Behind It
He shared research from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who studied people with brain damage that kept them from connecting with their emotions. Turns out, being purely rational didn't make them better decision makers. It made them unable to decide anything at all. You need emotion to narrow things down first, then rationality kicks in.
Bob sees the same thing in organizations. You need both operations and culture working together, especially now. AI is a forcing function making this alignment more important than ever. Companies that survive are going to be the ones that figure out how to get both working in sync.
Enter Splendid Torch
This is exactly the kind of challenge Bob is tackling with Splendid Torch. He's pulled together a collective of organization designers who understand how work flows, operators who keep things grounded in reality, and AI experts who can build tools.
The Adaptivity Cycle
The idea is simple: help companies build adaptivity before they try to layer on AI. The model follows what Bob calls an adaptivity cycle: become aware of where you are, align around what to do, take action, and learn from it.
That action might be building your first AI tool with a safe use case that won't blow things up. Or it might be fixing a broken part of your culture. But here's where it gets interesting: ideally you do both at the same time. Maybe you have a broken part of your culture and you could build an AI tool that helps address it. Build the tool, test it, learn from it, and feed that learning back into awareness. Operations and culture working together, with AI as part of the solution rather than a band-aid.
Asking Better Questions Before Building Solutions
As part of this work, Bob built rippleIQ. The tool helps leaders figure out what problem they're actually solving. When you're leading people, you don't always know if you have a culture problem or an operations problem. Sometimes you have one because of the other.
rippleIQ doesn't give you answers. Instead, it helps you identify where the problem actually is (team level, org level, individual level) and what's the smallest intervention you might try. Bob's learned that sometimes really small things have the biggest impact. Many leaders adopt new technology because they saw a TED talk, not because they understood the problem they're solving. Before you build or adopt an AI tool, you need to know what you're actually trying to fix.
Wrapping Up: Build Adaptivity First
AI won't save broken organizations. If your operations and culture aren't aligned, adding AI makes things worse. But if you build an organization that can adapt and trust its people, then you're ready to use AI in ways that actually help.
The companies that will thrive aren't racing to adopt every new AI tool. They're building adaptivity into their DNA first. That's what Splendid Torch helps organizations do, and what tools like rippleIQ are designed to support.
