AI can write code, but can it build a product? In this fascinating episode A.J. Singh walks us through the strengths and weaknesses of AI code generation and its potential impact on business success, both good and bad, now and in the future.
My new book, The Future of Human Leadership, is now available here!
What if the leadership practices that made you successful over the past 30 years are precisely the practices that will cause you to fail over the next ten?
Consider that possibility for a moment. You built your career by making good decisions, developing expertise, establishing clear lines of authority, demanding accountability, improving efficiency, and delivering results. You learned how to manage people, allocate resources, execute strategies, and build successful organizations. Along the way, you earned promotions, recognition, and the confidence of people who depended upon your judgment.
And now, some of those very practices may be becoming liabilities. Not because you suddenly forgot how to lead. Not because experience has lost its value. And certainly not because artificial intelligence has made human leadership unnecessary.
The problem is more fundamental. The world in which you learned to lead is changing, and many of the assumptions that made your leadership practices effective are becoming less reliable.
This creates an uncomfortable possibility. You can continue doing everything that once made you an exceptional leader, execute those practices with discipline and confidence, and still find your organization becoming less competitive, less adaptable, and increasingly vulnerable.
The danger is not necessarily that you have become a worse leader. It may be that you are becoming exceptionally good at leading an organization designed for a world that no longer exists.
Read more in my new book available here.
Traditionally, leaders were evaluated for their ability to establish objectives, develop plans, allocate resources, organize people, supervise execution, and deliver results.
Those responsibilities are no longer sufficient to explain what effective leadership requires.
During the Sixth Great Transition, leaders increasingly govern systems that can observe, analyze, recommend, decide, communicate, and act with reduced direct human involvement. These capabilities operate at different velocities, extend across organizational boundaries, and generate consequences that may outrun traditional oversight.
A leader cannot personally supervise every consequential action. Nor can leadership depend upon the assumption that somewhere in the process a knowledgeable person will notice what is going wrong and intervene in time.
Instead, leaders must design the conditions under which intelligence can contribute responsibly, decisions can remain legitimate, errors can be corrected, people can adapt, and the organization can continue learning.
This changes the focus of leadership from the individual leader’s ability to maintain control toward the organization’s ability to remain governable.
It changes the value of human judgment from being present at every decision to establishing where judgment must remain meaningful.
It changes the objective of speed from moving faster to moving at rates the whole system can responsibly sustain.
And it changes the meaning of performance from delivering results today to delivering results without destroying the capabilities required for tomorrow.
My latest book on this topic is available here.
Before we examine evidence about the future, our beliefs, experiences, and desires already shape what we expect to see. These influences affect what we notice, whom we trust, and whether we are willing to change our minds. This essay examines those influences so we can better distinguish what the evidence suggests from what we hope, fear, or believe must happen.
Imagine a company discussing whether to use artificial intelligence to do more of its work. One manager sees a chance to save money. An employee worries about losing a job. Another person remembers an earlier technology project that failed. Someone else has already promised the boss that the new system will succeed. They hear the same presentation, but different parts catch their attention. Before anyone studies the results of a trial, each person has reasons to welcome or resist what those results might show.
Experience is useful. We would make poor decisions if we ignored everything we had learned. The problem begins when we judge information differently depending on whether we like its message. We may accept good news with few questions and search for every possible flaw in bad news. Psychologist Ziva Kunda described how the conclusions we want to reach can shape the way we think through information.[1] This can happen without a deliberate attempt to mislead anyone. We may believe we are being fair while giving our preferred answer an easier test.
Read more…
We are building organizations that can increasingly sense, analyze, predict, decide, coordinate, communicate, and act without waiting for a human being to perform each step. Artificial intelligence is accelerating this shift, but the larger story is not simply about AI. It is about what happens when intelligence, capability, speed, and autonomy become distributed throughout the systems we depend on to run businesses, institutions, economies, and increasingly our everyday lives.
That changes the leadership question. The challenge ahead is not merely learning how to use more powerful technologies. It is deciding what all this new capability should be used for, where authority should reside, what humans should remain responsible for, and what kind of organizations and societies we are creating along the way. Beneath everything I wrote in The Future of Human Leadership: When Intelligence Is Everywhere are six ideas that, taken together, form the deeper argument of the book.
1. We Are Entering a Different Operating Environment
Most of our assumptions about management and leadership were developed in a world where intelligence was concentrated primarily inside human beings. People gathered information, interpreted what it meant, made decisions, communicated instructions, coordinated work, and accepted responsibility for the consequences. Organizations were built around this reality. Hierarchies existed partly because information had to move through people, decisions required human attention, and organizational knowledge was largely stored in human experience, documents, processes, and institutions.
That operating environment is changing. Intelligence is increasingly being distributed across software, machines, networks, algorithms, sensors, robots, and autonomous systems. Information moves continuously. Decisions that once took weeks can increasingly be made in seconds. Systems can monitor thousands of variables simultaneously, recognize patterns that humans cannot see, coordinate enormous workflows, and increasingly take actions without waiting for someone to approve every step.
This means human leaders are confronting something larger than another cycle of technology adoption. We are entering an operating environment characterized by acceleration, compressed decision times, persistent connectivity, growing interdependence, distributed intelligence, continuous exposure, and compounding complexity. Organizations may soon be capable of operating at speeds and scales that exceed the natural rhythms of human comprehension.
That is why simply inserting AI into yesterday’s organization will not be enough. Decision rights, accountability structures, management practices, governance mechanisms, skill development, organizational design, and even our understanding of leadership itself will have to change. We are not merely giving leaders better tools. We are changing the environment in which leadership takes place.
2. Greater Intelligence Does Not Automatically Produce Better Outcomes
There is a natural tendency to assume that more intelligence will lead to better decisions. In many cases it will. Better forecasting, pattern recognition, simulation, analysis, and access to knowledge can improve performance enormously. Intelligent systems may help us detect diseases earlier, design better products, manage supply chains more effectively, discover scientific breakthroughs, reduce waste, personalize services, and solve problems that once seemed impossibly complex.
But intelligence has an important limitation: it can help us determine how to achieve an objective without necessarily telling us whether that objective is worth achieving.
An extraordinarily capable system might become very good at maximizing engagement, reducing costs, increasing productivity, identifying profitable customers, optimizing workforce utilization, or accelerating output. Yet none of those abilities answers the larger question of what should be optimized in the first place. A system can tell us how to reach a destination more efficiently without telling us whether we have chosen the right destination.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as intelligent systems grow more capable. Leaders will still have to decide which goals matter, which tradeoffs are acceptable, whose interests deserve consideration, what risks are worth taking, and what consequences should cause us to reconsider what we are doing. These questions involve values, judgment, context, responsibility, legitimacy, and purpose. They cannot simply be outsourced to greater computational capability.
The paradox is that as machine intelligence becomes more powerful, human judgment may become more important rather than less. Intelligence expands the range of what is possible. Leadership must decide what among those possibilities is desirable.
3. Capability and Authority Are Not the Same Thing
One of the most important distinctions leaders will need to understand in the coming years is the difference between what a system is capable of doing and what we should authorize it to do. Technology continually expands capability. Leadership determines authority.
Consider how this might play out in hiring, lending, healthcare, insurance, employee evaluation, education, public services, military operations, or any other setting where decisions can significantly affect another human being. An intelligent system may eventually become better than most humans at predicting certain outcomes. It might identify the candidate most likely to succeed, determine which borrower represents the lowest financial risk, recommend a medical intervention, or calculate which employee appears most productive.
But predictive accuracy does not automatically confer legitimate authority. A system may be capable of making a decision without being the appropriate entity to hold responsibility for it. There may also be circumstances in which a decision involves values, context, human consequences, rights, exceptions, or questions of fairness that cannot be reduced to statistical prediction alone.
This is why one of the defining responsibilities of leadership will be drawing boundaries around autonomy. What can we delegate? What should we delegate? Which decisions require human review? When must a human retain the ability to intervene? Who remains accountable when an autonomous system acts? Leaders will increasingly have to answer these questions before systems are deployed rather than after something goes wrong.
The crucial principle is simple: the fact that technology makes something possible does not settle the question of whether we should do it.
4. Humans Must Not Become Passengers Inside the Systems We Create
Imagine an employee whose work once required investigating problems, interpreting ambiguous information, challenging assumptions, exercising judgment, making recommendations, and taking responsibility for decisions. Now imagine that same employee several years later after intelligent systems have gradually taken over most of those activities. The employee may still be working and may even be more productive than before, but the nature of the work has changed. Instead of thinking through problems, the employee increasingly monitors, approves, or executes recommendations produced elsewhere.
The short-term business case for this arrangement can be compelling. Decisions may be faster. Costs may fall. Errors may decline. Productivity may rise. Yet there is another question leaders should be asking: what happens to human capability when people stop exercising it?
Human capacities develop through use. Judgment improves by making judgments and learning from the consequences. Expertise grows through repeated exposure to difficult problems. Creativity develops through experimentation. Responsibility deepens when people know their choices matter. Relational trust grows through meaningful interaction. If we steadily remove opportunities for people to exercise these capacities, we should not assume those capacities will remain waiting for us indefinitely.
This creates a profound organizational risk. We may design highly efficient systems while slowly reducing the ability of the humans inside those systems to recognize when something is wrong, challenge an automated recommendation, improvise during an unexpected event, or assume responsibility when the system encounters circumstances it was never designed to handle.
The leadership question, therefore, cannot simply be, “How much human work can we automate?” We must also ask, “What human capacities do we need to preserve, strengthen, and deliberately exercise?” The organizations that thrive in the future may not be those that remove humans from the greatest number of processes. They may be the organizations that become exceptionally good at understanding where machine capability should expand and where human capability must continue to develop.
5. Optimization Is Not the Same as Leadership
Businesses are designed to optimize. We seek higher productivity, lower costs, faster cycle times, better margins, fewer errors, more predictable outcomes, and improved customer experiences. These are legitimate goals, and intelligent systems will give organizations unprecedented power to pursue them.
The danger comes when optimization becomes too narrow.
Organizations are complex systems. Improving one measurable variable can weaken another part of the system that is harder to see. We can optimize speed while reducing the time available for reflection. We can optimize labor efficiency while weakening expertise. We can automate decisions while making accountability harder to locate. We can optimize individual productivity while eroding collaboration. We can reduce redundancy so successfully that we also remove resilience.
This is one reason leadership requires a broader field of vision than management. A manager may reasonably ask, “How can we make this process faster?” Leadership must also ask, “What else happens if we do?” Good leaders look beyond first-order benefits and consider second- and third-order consequences. They recognize that organizations depend on qualities such as trust, adaptability, judgment, creativity, institutional knowledge, belonging, responsibility, and resilience even when those qualities do not fit neatly onto a dashboard.
Some of the most dangerous systems of the future may not be systems that malfunction. They may be systems that work exactly as designed while relentlessly optimizing an objective that was too narrow to begin with. Leadership is therefore not simply the work of improving performance. It is the work of deciding what performance should mean.
6. Leadership Is Ultimately Stewardship
As intelligence becomes more distributed and organizations become more capable, leaders will gain access to forms of power previous generations could scarcely imagine. They will be able to analyze more information, coordinate more resources, automate more decisions, personalize more interactions, influence more people, and act across greater distances at extraordinary speed.
The important question is what that power will serve.
It is easy for leadership discussions to become dominated by technology, productivity, competitive advantage, efficiency, and shareholder returns. All of these matter. But none of them, by themselves, answers the deeper question of purpose. An organization can become exceptionally good at accomplishing something without ever seriously examining whether that accomplishment contributes to a larger good.
This is where leadership becomes stewardship. Stewardship asks leaders to think beyond what they control today and consider what they are handing forward. What kind of organization are we building? What kinds of people are our systems helping to develop? What conditions are we creating for employees, customers, communities, institutions, future generations, and the ecosystems on which all economic activity ultimately depends?
These questions lead to the one question that sits near the philosophical center of my book: “Whom do I serve?”
There will rarely be a simple answer. Leaders serve customers, employees, owners, communities, partners, institutions, and many others whose interests may conflict. The purpose of asking the question is not to pretend those tensions disappear. It is to prevent leaders from allowing efficiency, technology, or short-term optimization to answer the question for them.
The Choice We Are Making
There is a deeper principle beneath all six of these ideas. Human beings should not retain dignity, judgment, agency, authority, responsibility, creativity, and meaning merely because machines are not yet capable enough to replace them. If that is our reasoning, then human importance becomes temporary. Every improvement in machine capability simply moves us closer to the day when another human role can be surrendered.
I believe we need to make a more deliberate choice. We need to decide what qualities of human life and human leadership are worth preserving because we value them, not merely because technology has not yet found a way to reproduce them.
We may be entering an age in which intelligence becomes abundant. Wisdom will not become abundant automatically. Neither will judgment, responsibility, legitimacy, meaning, or purpose. Technology can greatly expand what an organization is capable of doing, but it cannot relieve leaders of the responsibility to decide what those capabilities should serve.
That is why the future of human leadership will not ultimately be determined by how intelligent our machines become. It will be determined by how wisely humans choose to design, govern, and live alongside them.
The goal should not simply be to create organizations that are faster, smarter, and more capable. The larger goal should be to create organizations whose growing capabilities contribute to human flourishing—to people, institutions, societies, and ecosystems having a better chance to thrive.
That is the leadership challenge underneath the technology story. And it may become one of the defining responsibilities of our generation.
Imagine an organization introducing an artificial intelligence system that allows work to move much faster. Its leaders see opportunities to improve service, reduce costs, and solve problems that previously required enormous effort. Employees have questions of their own. Will their experience still matter? Who will be responsible when the system makes a mistake? Will they have time to learn their new roles? Customers wonder whether they will still be able to reach someone who understands their circumstances. A technology decision quickly becomes a question about work, trust, responsibility, and the kind of future people will share.
The Flourishing Together framework helps leaders understand how these questions connect. It begins with a simple question: What should leadership make possible? The purpose is to help people, organizations, societies, and ecosystems thrive together. Each depends on the others. Organizations need capable people and functioning societies. Communities need institutions they can trust and meaningful opportunities to participate. All depend on living systems that provide food, water, and the conditions for life. Leadership therefore carries responsibility for both what an organization accomplishes and the conditions its actions create for others.
Flourishing Together gives the other concepts in the framework a common purpose. Leadership mindsets, stewardship virtues, foresight virtues, human capacities, polyintelligence, human viability conditions, transformational energy, and the four clocks each address a different part of that responsibility. Their value becomes clearer when we see how they work together.
Read more…More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek mathematician Archimedes explained one of the simplest and most powerful ideas in mechanics: the lever.
The principle was straightforward. Give someone a long enough lever and a properly positioned fulcrum, and a relatively small force can move an enormous weight. Archimedes is famously associated with the statement, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.”
The important insight was not that humans had suddenly become stronger. They hadn’t.
The architecture around the human had changed.
The lever multiplied what a person could accomplish.
Human history can be understood, in part, as the continuing search for better levers.
Agriculture gave us leverage over food production. Machines gave us leverage over physical labor. Steam engines and electricity gave us leverage over energy. Industrial organizations gave us leverage through coordination and scale. Computers gave us leverage over calculation. Networks gave us leverage over communication and connectivity.
Now artificial intelligence is giving us leverage over something different: intelligence itself.
This is one of the defining characteristics of what I call the Sixth Great Transition.
For most of human history, intelligence was scarce, expensive, local and overwhelmingly human. If an organization wanted more analysis, writing, planning, design, problem-solving or decision support, it generally needed more people with the necessary knowledge and experience.
That assumption is changing.
Machine intelligence can increasingly analyze information, generate ideas, write software, create content, recognize patterns, coordinate activities and operate systems. One human working with intelligent machines may soon be able to accomplish things that once required dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people.
We are building an extraordinarily long lever.
But Archimedes’ lesson contains something else that deserves our attention.
A lever requires a fulcrum.
Where you place that fulcrum determines what happens when force is applied. The same is true of technology. Artificial intelligence does not determine its own purpose. People, organizations and institutions decide where it is deployed, what it is optimized to accomplish, what authority it receives and what boundaries surround it.
That makes leadership increasingly important, not less.
When intelligence becomes abundant, the central leadership question shifts from simply, “What can we do?” to “What should we do?”
Capability is not purpose.
Intelligence is not wisdom.
And intelligence does not confer moral authority.
The more powerful our technological leverage becomes, the more important human judgment, ethics, responsibility and stewardship become.
This is why one question runs through my book, The Future of Human Leadership: When Intelligence Is Everywhere:
“Whom do I serve?”
It is a deceptively simple question. But it forces us to think about the purpose toward which all this extraordinary capability is being directed.
Are we using our new leverage simply to make organizations faster? To reduce costs? To automate more work? To increase profits? Those may all be legitimate objectives. But they are incomplete answers.
The larger question is whether the systems we create ultimately help people, organizations, societies and ecosystems flourish together.
Archimedes taught us how a small force could move an enormous object.
The Sixth Great Transition gives us increasingly powerful technological levers of our own.
The challenge for this generation of leaders is deciding where to place the fulcrum, who controls the lever, what we intend to move—and, ultimately, whom all that power is meant to serve.
The backstory begins with something I kept hearing: “We’re doomed.”
In conversations people kept expressing the same concerns that artificial intelligence is moving too fast, it’s taking our jobs, and it will ultimately kill us all!”
What bothered me the most was the sense of helplessness underneath it all. People were talking as though the future had already been decided, and all we could do was wait to find out how bad it would be.
I found myself asking, “If this is the case, who is doing this to us?” And the uncomfortable answer was: we are.
Humans are developing these technologies, funding them, choosing their purposes, and deciding how to use them. We don’t all have equal power, and nobody controls the whole process. But human decisions are shaping this future. That means we still have responsibilities, and we still have choices.
Read more…What I’m saying in this book is that our ability to change the world is growing faster than our ability to understand and govern the consequences. We’re gaining extraordinary capabilities through artificial intelligence, science, and technology. I want us to use those capabilities to solve difficult problems and improve lives. But we also have to ask: What are we trying to accomplish? What kind of future are we using all this intelligence to build?
For me, that begins with a personal question: “Whom do I serve?” We can become so focused on increasing productivity, reducing costs, and meeting our targets that we lose sight of what those achievements are ultimately supposed to make possible. I believe our purpose should be Flourishing Together. That means our families doing well, our organizations succeeding, our communities becoming healthier, and the living systems around us remaining capable of supporting life. That is a future worth working toward.
Once we choose that purpose, it changes how we think about leadership. Every decision we make helps create conditions that other people have to live and work within. We influence whether people understand what is happening, whether they have a voice, whether they belong, and whether they can see a meaningful place for themselves in the future. If we want people to bring judgment, creativity, empathy, and responsibility to their work, we have to protect the conditions that allow those capacities to develop and contribute.
We also have to look beyond the immediate result. An organization can report success while exhausting its people, weakening its community, or passing costs to future generations. So we need to ask who benefits, who carries the burden, and what remains possible afterward. Difficult tradeoffs will always be part of leadership. Our responsibility is to face them honestly, listen to the people affected, and remain willing to change course as we learn.
Ultimately, I’m asking us to take responsibility for the future our decisions are helping create. We won’t control everything, but we can influence the purposes our technologies serve, the authority we give them, and the conditions we leave for others. I want our children and grandchildren to look at what we built and find opportunities to live well, contribute, and make their own choices. That is how I believe leadership should be measured: by what we accomplish today and what we leave others capable of becoming.
Amazon’s link to the book, https://a.co/d/07P5cAt0
Telos is an ancient Greek word meaning end or purpose. Aristotle thought that to understand anything fully, we have to ask not only what it does, but what it’s for. That question sits very close to the philosophy in my new book, “The Future of Human Leadership”.
Today we have astonishing and fast growing capabilities. We can analyze faster and automate almost anything, but telos asks toward what? Capability answers “can we?”, while telos asks “should we, and for whom?” That’s why my book’s guiding principles, flourishing together and whom do I serve, really matter. They provide a direction, a reason beneath the speed.
Aristotle thought that the highest telos for humans was flourishing. Today we face the same question at a civilizational scale. What is all this intelligence ultimately for? In an age of abundant capability, telos reminds us that purpose is not optional, it is the point.
