Neurons That Fire Together: Building Better Connections Using AI

On Sunday morning, my wife and I made the increasingly rare and therefore strategically important decision to sleep late after a lovely braai evening with friends in what constitutes the Cape Town midwinter (read summer nights).

Our children, apparently deciding that parental supervision had become an unnecessary bottleneck, got themselves dressed, found money in their savings boxes, took the keys and cycled down to the local SPAR. They returned having successfully procured breakfast. Breakfast, in this instance, consisted primarily of sweets.

As a parent, I probably should have delivered a thoughtful lecture about nutrition, financial discipline and why a packet of jelly babies does not constitute a balanced meal. Also, this was 100% their first solo jaunt beyond our complex gate. Too early? Perhaps. But, you know what. It’s a cool neighbourhood on a Sunday morning,  so instead, I let it go. I can’t hold on to them forever, and as for the sweets… It was simply too funny, and beneath the sugar rush was something worth celebrating. They had planned, collaborated, solved a problem and taken another small step towards independence. And it struck me that we spend years building pathways for our children. We give them access to devices, games, information and experiences. We establish boundaries around Nintendo time and iPad time, often with the seriousness of a cybersecurity committee protecting the national grid. Yet their real development still happens when those pathways connect with human judgement, initiative and interaction.

That same pattern appeared throughout my work this week. First, I started by facilitating the Cash Day masterclass for EO Accelerator Cape Town. We combined traditional financial tools such as the Power of One, profitability analysis and Profit First with a collection of AI-enabled tools designed to increase understanding and participation across the full team.

I built a gamification tool with Claude that allowed us to spin a large digital wheel and draw people into the conversation. I also created an advanced prompt pack that participants could use to analyse information, test assumptions and explore possible actions.

Now, it would have been easy to position this as an AI-powered finance session and spend the day admiring the technology like proud parents at a school concert. Yet the AI tools probably occupied less than 15% of the allocated time. The rest of the session involved people speaking to other people.

They compared experiences, questioned assumptions, challenged one another and worked towards solutions together. AI helped us generate better questions and process information more effectively, but the real insight emerged through conversation. I love my AI buddy… but I will defend this principle till the day I die: People remain our best sounding boards.

Later in the week, I hosted an AI-enabled session for a large IT company focused on the building blocks required for adoption at scale. The conversation reinforced another important lesson. You cannot leap directly into company-wide AI implementation because someone in the executive team has bought a ChatGPT subscription and discovered how to create a picture of themselves as an action figure.

Before scale comes scaffolding. Organisations need to understand their infrastructure, data, security, compliance and governance requirements. Current AI-adoption guidance similarly emphasises the importance of turning policy into a practical governance framework and establishing the technical and organisational foundations before attempting larger-scale implementation.

The principle connecting all these experiences is often summarised as: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” The phrase is associated with the work of Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb, whose theory proposed that connections between neurons strengthen when one neuron repeatedly contributes to the activation of another. The familiar wording is a later summary rather than a direct quotation from Hebb, but it captures the core idea that repeated association strengthens a pathway.

The same principle can be applied more broadly to how people and organisations learn: 

1. When finance is repeatedly associated with fear, complexity and judgement, people learn to avoid the numbers. When it becomes associated with participation, practical experimentation and useful conversation, people begin to engage.

2. When AI is repeatedly associated with shortcuts and isolated tools, it becomes another collection of subscriptions quietly consuming money on the company credit card. When it is connected to sound business principles, appropriate governance and meaningful human interaction, it becomes part of an organisational capability.

3. And when children repeatedly experience opportunities to make decisions, collaborate and occasionally purchase an appalling breakfast, they begin to develop the confidence required to operate independently.

The lesson is not that technology matters less. It is that technology becomes valuable when it strengthens the right connections. Your AI strategy cannot sit separately from your business strategy. Your financial information cannot sit separately from the people making daily operational decisions. Your infrastructure cannot sit separately from security and governance. Your people cannot sit separately from the conversations that help them make sense of the tools.

Neurons that fire together, wire together. The question for leaders is therefore not only, “Which tool should we introduce?” Rather, I would ask: “Which connection do we want to strengthen?”

I’m going to eat my own dog food this week. We are releasing our first CST (Claude Starter Kit) this month, focused on EOS Self-implementation. Join the interest list here!

PG's Pro Tip:

First, identify one important business capability that currently lives inside the head of one expert. Use AI to help document the process, but involve the wider team in testing and improving it. A clever document hidden in a folder changes nothing. A shared conversation begins to build organisational muscle.

Second, connect every AI experiment to a genuine business problem. Begin with the outcome, decision or behaviour you want to improve before selecting the technology. Otherwise, you may build a remarkably sophisticated solution to a problem nobody has.

Third, design human interaction into the implementation. Create opportunities for people to discuss the AI output, challenge it and apply their own experience. AI can accelerate the thinking, but it should not remove the thinking.

Use the following prompt with your team:

AI Prompt:

Act as an AI-enabled management consultant helping our organisation strengthen the connections between its people, processes, data and technology.

Ask me questions one at a time to identify:

1. One recurring business problem we need to solve.

2. The people currently involved in solving it.

3. The information, systems and tools they use.

4. The security, governance or compliance considerations.

5. Where AI could improve speed, quality, participation or decision-making.

6. Where human conversation and judgement must remain central.

Once you have gathered enough information, design a practical 30-day experiment. Include the desired outcome, responsible owner, participating team members, AI tools required, governance safeguards, weekly actions and three measurable indicators of success.

Ensure that the experiment strengthens a lasting organisational capability rather than creating dependence on a single person or AI tool.

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