I wrote a piece six and a half years ago with this title. I have been thinking about it again, and I want to come back to it, because the problem I was describing then has gotten worse in ways I did not anticipate.
The piece opened with a line from one of my favorite books John Gardner’s Excellence, Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too? One line in the book has been something I keep going back to:
“Do not let form triumph over substance.”
In 2020, I was writing about sales leaders and organizations who were doing all the things sales leaders and organizations are supposed to do. These are the regular rituals that fill calendars: Forecast reviews, deal and pipeline reviews, account and territory plans, prospecting programs, one on ones. They had invested in the tools – CRM, marketing automation, sales enablement platforms. They had spent millions on training, methodologies, content. They had analysis and dashboards to manage performance.
And nothing was changing. The data showed continued decline in the percent of sellers meeting plan. Customers were becoming reluctant to engage. Average tenure in sales roles was collapsing.
The diagnosis then was simple. We had the right things in place. We were not using them. We had the form of doing the work without the substance of doing it. Stated differently, they were becoming expert at going through the motions. The thinking underneath them was weak.
The good news, at the time, was that the fix was straightforward. We did not need a new program, a new technology, a new methodology. We needed to focus on what we already had, execute consistently, learn from experience, and improve. Form had won, but substance, which drove the outcomes was recoverable. We just had to shift our focus.
That was 2020. I want to talk about what has changed since.
A note on the word “form,” I do not just mean a document or a template. I mean form in Gardner’s sense, the outward appearance of our work, the things that indicates something is happening whether or not anything actually is.
What has changed is how easy form has become to produce.
AI is the most efficient producer of “form” ever built. It produces the appearance of preparation in seconds. We can get the appearance of analysis with a single prompt. It provides the appearance of careful follow-up before you even leave the meeting. The form is excellent, it’s polished, it reads well. It has a veneer of competence that seems more solid than the equivalent human result.
But form without substance is still form without substance, no matter how good it looks.
Think about the rituals I named in the 2020 article, updated for today. The forecast review now has an AI-generated narrative running underneath it. The pipeline review has automated commentary on every deal. The deal review pulls in research, talking points, and recommended next steps automatically. The one on one has a transcript and a follow-up plan generated before the participants left the meeting. The rituals sill happen, but each has more form than ever before. And because it seems so authoritative, we feel as if we have accomplished huge amounts work in much shorter times—with very little effort because the tools took over.
And that minimization of the effort is really the substance critical to making sense of the information. In 2020 it was bad, today it’s gotten worse.
We see it most clearly when something unexpected happens. A conversation shifts, a customer surfaces a concern that was not on the call plan. The dashboard tells us one thing, but what we are experiencing is very different. The agreement turned out not to be agreement, but the absence of disagreement.
Managing these shifts requires judgment. The form cannot help, because the issue has nothing to do with the form.
Substance is what handles the unexpected. But substance is not something we can generate from a prompt. We build substance long before we ever need it. It comes from doing the work, sitting with problems, engaging with what is in front of us. It is the knowledge, judgment, and instinct we accumulate from being actively involved in the process. The person who has only the form can address the surface. They cannot have the conversations that get deep into the issues to move things forward.
We have more information than ever, and less knowledge. Information is form. Knowledge is substance. Information is what the system produces. Knowledge is what we build by working with the information; assembling it, analyzing it, connecting it to past experience, figuring out how to apply it, tempering it with our instincts, learning from our losses.
The person with AI-generated information has the appearance or form of knowing. The person who developed it themselves has the substance of knowing. On the surface they look the same. They are not the same when the situation requires judgment.
So what has changed since 2020?
In 2020, the cost of form over substance was, primarily, time. We had meaningless meetings, meetings about those meetings, and follow on meetings. It took five meetings to accomplish what should have taken one. The judgment was there, but the focus was on the form and the mechanics, so often the judgment wasn’t used.. With enough meetings, we could catch the mistakes and, eventually, the work got done.
But things have changed. As inefficient as it was, it is no longer how things work.
Decisions are now being made on the basis of form alone. The strategic choice rests on an AI analysis that no one has questioned. The pipeline review looks healthy because the dashboards have more information and appear more comprehensive. And the judgment that enabled us to see and avoid these mistakes, does not exist because it has never been built.
Our inability to apply knowledge, judgment, experience—the substance–creates more error and mistake. And because they are continually fed, these mistakes scale.
This is what should alarm us. The form is light years better than it ever has. But the underlying substance is disappearing. We are eliminating the apprenticeships, the ability to get our hands dirty doing the work. All critical to developing knowledge and judgment, all substance.
The gap between the form and the substance is widening, and form is winning. And the result will be larger irrecoverable errors.
Most of what I’m describing is not the result of cynical or bad actors. The people I’m talking about are thoughtful professionals who have focused on the claim that AI will make them much more efficient, freeing up time to do the work for them. They are leveraging the technology without recognizing what it is doing to them. It is eliminating the very thing develops substance – apprenticeship, experience, critical thinking, judgment.
So what do we do?
The answer is close to what I wrote in 2020, with one addition.
In 2020, I said we had the right things in place and just needed to use them. Focus on the highest leverage areas, execute consistently, learn from experience, continue to improve. That advice still holds. The rituals can be made meaningful again. The dashboards can be probed instead of accepted. Deal reviews become a real conversation about how to improve execution. None of this is new. It just requires the willingness to do the work that substance demands.
What is new is that we now must be deliberate about the tools themselves. AI can be used to amplify our capability, or it can be used to substitute for it. Amplification leaves us more capable than we were before, because the tool extends thinking that was already happening.
Substitution leaves us less capable than we were before, because the tool replaces the thinking that would have built the capacity. Same tool. Same output, often. Completely different effect on the human using it.
What I find myself asking, in my own work, is whether I am using these tools to extend my thinking or to avoid it. The answer is not always the one I would prefer.
A few questions worth thinking about your own relationship with the work and these tools:
- When I read the AI-generated summary, did I actually think about what it was telling me, or did I just accept the conclusions? Do I push back on the summaries to develop something more?
- When I joined a meeting, did I form my own view of what mattered, or did I rely on the prep that was handed to me?
- When the conversation moved somewhere unexpected, could I contribute in a meaningful way, or was I working from a script with no answers?
- When I looked at my pipeline this week, did I ask what was actually true, or did I trust what the system was telling me?
- When I provided a recommendation, was there substance underneath it? Did it enable others to think differently? Did it create any value? Or could I only stick to my meeting plan?
These are a starting point. Adapt them to your role and situation. Curiosity, discipline, and the willingness to do the work are what build substance over time. They are what build the difference no tool will displace.
Gardner’s line was true in 2020. It is more true now.
Do not let form triumph over substance.
Afterword: An outstanding AI generated discussion of this. I continue to be surprised by the quality of the discussion and how they add to it with a slightly different perspective. Enjoy!
