Frankenstein, AI, and the Things We Leave Behind
Frankenstein has been popping up in my mind lately.
Which probably isn’t how most conversations about organizational friction begin.
The older I get, the less convinced I am that Mary Shelley wrote a novel about a monster. I think she wrote a novel about a creator. More specifically, about what happens after something you’ve built enters a world you can no longer control, and what it reveals about the person who built it.
For two hundred years we’ve treated Frankenstein as a cautionary tale about creating something too powerful. I’m beginning to wonder if that’s the wrong lesson.
Victor Frankenstein’s greatest failure wasn’t that he created life. His greatest failure was that the moment his creation became real, he abandoned his responsibility to it. He moved on. The creation remained. And everything he had embedded into it, his choices, his compromises, his blind spots, kept shaping the world long after he stopped paying attention.
That distinction feels increasingly important to me. Not just as a literary observation, but as a practical one.
Because this is what organizations do, too.
Every process inside a business was created by someone. Every approval structure, every meeting cadence, every workaround, every shortcut that became policy, every compromise that became standard practice. Someone made those decisions. Usually with good intentions. Usually under real constraints. Usually in a moment that made complete sense at the time.
And then they moved on.
The creation remained.
Years later, someone else is working inside the environment those decisions produced. They didn’t build it. They inherited it. They’ve never met the person who decided the approval should require three signatures, or why the report gets sent to seven people, or how the onboarding process ended up working the way it does. They just know that’s how it works, and that changing it feels harder than adapting to it.
This is what I’ve come to understand about Operational Debt. On the surface it looks like process problems and communication breakdowns and systems that no longer serve the people using them. But underneath all of that is something more fundamental.
Organizations don’t simply accumulate debt. They inherit it.
The creators have moved on. The fingerprints remain. And the people living inside those fingerprints are compensating for decisions they had no part in making, adapting around constraints they can’t fully explain, and slowly accepting friction as the normal cost of doing the work.
That’s the Frankenstein problem applied to every organization that has ever outgrown its own foundations.
What fascinates me about the current moment isn’t the technology itself. It’s the mirror it holds up to the people building it. It forces a question that every builder has always had to answer but rarely asks directly.
What exactly are we embedding into the things we build?
Not just code. Values. Assumptions. Priorities. Ways of thinking. Biases so familiar we stopped seeing them as biases. Every creator leaves fingerprints. The question is whether we’re paying attention to the ones we’re leaving right now.
Because the fingerprints don’t wait until the creation is finished to start mattering. They accumulate from the first decision. The first compromise. The first moment we chose speed over clarity, or convenience over structure, or a temporary fix over a real one.
By the time the debt becomes visible, the creator is usually long gone. What remains is a team of capable people doing their best to work inside an environment they didn’t design, compensating for decisions they didn’t make, and carrying weight that was never supposed to be theirs to carry.
This question lives at the center of the work I do. When I walk into an organization, I’m almost always walking into someone else’s fingerprints. Decisions made years ago by people who have long since moved on. Compromises that made sense at the time and calcified into policy. Shortcuts that became structure.
That’s the inheritance. And the work, the real work, is being willing to go back and look at what was actually built, why it made sense at the time, and whether it still deserves to remain. Not to assign blame to the people who created it. But because the people living inside it deserve better than to keep quietly paying for decisions that were never really theirs to carry.
This is why I’ve come to believe that stewardship isn’t something that begins when creation is finished. Stewardship begins the moment we decide to create at all.
Whether we’re building a company, designing a process, shaping a team, or writing code, the question is the same. Not just can we build this. But what will the people inside it inherit once we’re no longer the ones making the decisions?
Will what we create become more dependent on us, or more capable because of us?
Mary Shelley understood something her readers have spent two centuries overlooking. The danger was never the creation. It was the assumption that once something exists, the creator’s responsibility ends.
It doesn’t.
The things we build keep making decisions long after we stop making them. The processes we design become the environment someone else has to work inside. The shortcuts we normalize become someone else’s definition of how things are done. The debt we accumulate becomes someone else’s burden to carry.
We leave far more behind than we realize.
The real question, the one I think every builder eventually has to sit with, isn’t whether we’ll leave something behind.
We will.
It’s whether the people who inherit what we built will be freer because of it, or quietly paying for it.