One year of TRANSFORM-AI: Are we settling for too little?
Why does Finland struggle to turn strong capabilities, technology and investment into renewal and growth? A year into TRANSFORM-AI, our thinking about this question has evolved. What initially looked mainly like a problem of biased decision-making increasingly looks like a question of the environments in which decisions are made. What if Finland’s problem is not a lack of knowledge or capability, but decision environments that challenge too little of what we already believe we know? And what if they allow “good enough” to remain good enough for too long?
TRANSFORM-AI – Leadership, Intangible Capital, and Innovation for AI-Driven Growth – started in October 2025 as part of the Strategic Research Council’s WELEC programme.
One of our starting points was bounded rationality and biases in leadership and decision-making. Why do organisations stick to what they know, avoid uncertainty or keep improving the existing model rather than searching for something new?
An important seed came from our earlier research on behavioural interventions and nudging. Nudging typically focuses on the individual’s choice architecture. But the organisations designing and implementing interventions also make choices under their own routines, metrics, responsibilities and institutional expectations.
The choice architect has a choice architecture too.
This observation gradually shifted our attention towards decision environments.
A cautious decision is not necessarily irrational. From the perspective of ecological rationality, it may be entirely sensible in the environment in which it is made. If failure is highly visible but missed opportunities are not, caution makes sense. If efficiency is measured precisely while renewal is difficult to measure, optimisation makes sense.
Nor should organisations constantly reinvent themselves. Herbert Simon’s idea of satisficing offers an important reminder: if the current solution is good enough, continued search may simply waste scarce attention and resources.
The harder question is whether an organisation receives a sufficiently strong error signal when “good enough” is no longer good enough.
And this is where culture becomes important.
Decision environments are not only incentives and formal structures. They also consist of routines, practices, norms, shared assumptions and established ways of interpreting information. Practices matter because they are where these assumptions are repeatedly enacted: in how meetings are run, what gets measured, whose interpretations are taken seriously, how disagreement is handled and which signals ever become consequential enough to trigger a search for alternatives.
Recent discussion on Finland’s growth challenge provides an interesting external mirror. McKinsey’s Seizing Finland’s Growth Opportunity highlighted weak growth aspirations, investment and cultural dynamics in Finnish large companies. The 2026 Deloitte and Demos Helsinki report Raise the Bar To Release the Brake goes further into leadership and organisational culture, highlighting low ambition, risk avoidance, preference for consensus and a tendency to optimise the current model rather than build the next one.
This leads to a deeper question: What if Finland’s problem is not a lack of knowledge or capability, but that our decision environments challenge too little of what we already believe we know?
The same question increasingly connects different parts of our research, from firms and innovation policy to sustainability transitions and AI. AI itself enters an existing decision environment: it can expose organisations to new possibilities, but it can just as easily make existing ways of thinking and working faster and more efficient.
Research projects can become closed around their own assumptions too.
This is where open strategy becomes particularly interesting. How can organisations expose themselves to alternative perspectives and weak signals before failure makes them impossible to ignore – while still retaining the ability to make choices and act?
This tension is at the heart of the 4th Open Strategy Workshop, organised in Helsinki on 15–17 June 2027 by the University of Turku’s Centre for Collaborative Research, Aalto University and Tampere University’s Experience Economy programme.
For TRANSFORM-AI, the question is also a matter of practising what we study.
After one year, our question is no longer simply why organisations make cautious choices. It is what kinds of decision environments help us recognise when continuity is rational. And more importantly: when is it time to search for something fundamentally different?
More information:
TRANSFORM-AI: https://transform-ai.fi
