Resilience has become one of the most repeated words in leadership circles. It appears in strategy decks, performance reviews, and town hall speeches. It is framed as a personal competency, something individuals can cultivate with enough self‑awareness, emotional intelligence and an adaptive mindset. But the way resilience is invoked today reveals a deeper tension: people are being asked to stay steady in systems that are anything but.

The age of AI has amplified this tension. Technological change is accelerating, but the governance surrounding it is not. Decisions with sweeping humanitarian and environmental consequences are often made by a small number of actors, while the responsibility for absorbing the resulting disruption is distributed widely. Leaders encourage their teams to “embrace change,” yet the change itself is frequently shaped by forces outside the organization’s control—market pressures, regulatory gaps, geopolitical instability, and the rapid scaling of technologies whose implications are not fully understood.

This creates a paradox for leaders who genuinely want to support their people.

Leaders are expected to cultivate resilience in their teams, even as the broader systems in which those teams operate generate instability faster than individuals can reasonably adapt to it. The emotional burden of this paradox is real. People experience cognitive fatigue from constant adaptation, moral dissonance when their work contributes to outcomes they question, and a quiet erosion of trust when institutions fail to protect the public interest.

Resilience, in this context, becomes less about growth and more about endurance. It becomes a way of coping with volatility rather than a pathway to flourishing.

How do we recognize and overcome the cost of being endlessly adaptable?

For leaders, the challenge is not simply to help people “bounce back.” It is to recognize that resilience cannot be separated from the conditions that make it necessary. When disruption is the byproduct of unregulated innovation or short‑term incentives, asking individuals to be resilient risks sounding like a request for them to absorb the consequences of decisions they did not make. Leaders who sense this tension often feel caught between their desire to support their teams and the structural realities that limit their influence.

Yet this is precisely where leadership becomes most meaningful. The work is not to shield people from every disruption—no leader has that power—but to create environments where resilience is possible without requiring people to sacrifice their well‑being or their values. That begins with honesty about the forces shaping the organization’s future. It requires acknowledging uncertainty rather than masking it, naming trade‑offs rather than glossing over them, and inviting people into the process of making sense of change rather than delivering it as a finished narrative.

Resilience, when understood this way, becomes less about personal toughness and more about collective coherence.

Resilience is strengthened by transparency, shared purpose, and the sense that people are not navigating turbulence alone. It grows when leaders create psychological safety, when they advocate for responsible use of AI, and when they challenge organizational habits that treat human consequences as secondary to efficiency. It deepens when leaders help their teams interpret change, not just react to it.

Leaders today have an outsized impact on the resilience reserves of their organizations.

Such reserves are depleted or replenished by the choices leaders make every day—how they communicate, how they prioritize, how they weigh efficiency against humanity, and how they interpret their responsibility to the people who depend on them. At a fundamental level, resilience is not only about helping people adapt; it is about ensuring that the organization’s actions do not require unreasonable adaptation in the first place. Leaders can assess the trade-offs between speed to transform versus the toll of exhausting the workforce with unnecessary or premature change.

The deeper question, then, is not how to make people more resilient. It is how to build organizations—and contribute to systems—that do not require people to withstand avoidable harm. Resilience should not be a measure of how much instability individuals can absorb. It should be a reflection of how thoughtfully leaders steward the environments in which people work.

In this era of complexity and constant disruption, resilience shifts from an individual soft skill to a moral leadership responsibility.

The leaders who rise will be those who stop treating resilience as personal responsibility and start making choices that protect human limits and build a shared capacity to support one another through uncertainty.

Further reading:

Boster, Margo. “Beyond Resilience: Reframing Leadership in the Age of Disruption.” Innovative Human Capital, 1 Jul. 2025.

Debevoise Dewey, Nell Derick. “Why ‘Resilience’ Is Becoming a Leadership Liability.” Forbes, 6 Feb. 2026.

Taylor, Alison. “How to Say Something Without Saying Anything.” Higher Ground, 28 Apr. 2026.

There’s a moment—usually invisible—when a discrete decision transforms into a pattern. A single judgment, made by a human with context and conscience, is handed to a system that can replicate it thousands of times before anyone has the chance to ask whether it was the right call in the first place. This is the quiet shift happening inside organizations right now: technology is scaling our choices faster than we can make sense of them.

And so the real question isn’t how fast AI can move, but what values it carries forward at that speed, and what assumptions, priorities, and blind spots are codified as infrastructure.

What values are we scaling when we scale AI?

AI doesn’t arrive as an empty vessel. It arrives carrying the logic (and ideology) of the people and institutions that built it. And once deployed, it begins to magnify that logic—quietly, efficiently, and at scale.

• Opportunity: Who gets access, advancement, or investment. A hiring model can widen or narrow pathways in ways no recruiter ever could, simply because it never tires and never stops.

• Monitoring and trust: Who is watched, measured, or flagged. Surveillance systems reveal what organizations value most: efficiency, compliance, or control. They also reveal who is trusted—and who isn’t.

• Quality of service: Who receives personalization and who receives automation. AI can create tiers of humanity: premium and discounted, high‑touch and low‑touch, seen and unseen.

• Voice and visibility: Whose concerns are escalated, whose content is amplified, whose data becomes the training set. AI becomes a megaphone for some and a mute button for others.

These aren’t just technical decisions. They are value decisions made at machine speed, with human consequences.

The business case for AI adoption rests on familiar rationale: speed, efficiency, competitive pressure. But AI introduces something new into the equation: moral velocity. Small design choices become large‑scale consequences. A single assumption becomes a system. A single bias becomes a pattern. A single omission or oversight becomes a policy.

Most organizations have governance for financial risk, legal risk, and brand risk. Very few have governance for scaled moral risk—the risk that values become infrastructure before leaders have examined or validated them.

At some point, the pace of a system becomes the shape of a system. And when that pace accelerates beyond our ability to interpret it, leaders need something sturdier than instinct to guide them. They need ways of seeing or lenses that slow the meaning‑making to human scale before that meaning takes off at machine scale.

We need new lenses to evaluate decisions before scale outpaces sensemaking.

When technology accelerates faster than our ability to interpret it, leaders need ways to slow the value‑setting moment, not the innovation. These lenses aren’t frameworks so much as invitations or ways of looking that restore the human pause inside systems that no longer pause on their own.

1. Human Consequence

AI has a way of turning a single decision into a million quiet replications. This lens asks leaders to look past the dashboard and into the lived experience on the other side of the system. What happens to real people when this choice becomes infrastructure? It shifts attention from efficiency to impact. It forces leaders to imagine the downstream, not just the immediate. It reintroduces empathy into places where scale tends to erase it. Every automated decision is still a human decision—just multiplied.

2. Boundaries

Technology often expands faster than our sense of what should be off‑limits. This lens asks leaders to name the lines that matter before the system redraws them for us. Where must we say “no,” even if the technology says “yes”? Think biometric surveillance, automated discipline, emotion detection. These aren’t just capabilities; they’re value statements. Boundaries are not constraints—they’re commitments to dignity. Restraint is a form of leadership, not a failure of imagination.

3. Accountability

When decisions become distributed across models, data pipelines, and automated workflows, responsibility is hard to assign. This lens pulls it back into view.Who holds the moral weight when the system gets it wrong? It clarifies ownership in a world that loves to blame “the algorithm.” It insists on transparency, auditability, and the ability to repair harm. It keeps humans—not systems—at the center of accountability. As systems scale, responsibility must be assigned at all levels.

Innovation doesn’t owe its value to velocity.

Treating speed as the only path forward creates a false choice between moving fast and thinking well. In this regard, leaders don’t need to resist AI—they need to resist unexamined acceleration. The work is not to slow the technology but to slow the moment where values are set. To create just enough friction for reflection and to mitigate moral risk becoming systemic.

As leaders, we don’t get to choose whether AI will scale our decisions; it already is. What we do get to choose is the moral texture of AI systems. The values that become amplified. The boundaries that hold. The responsibilities that remain human, even when the decisions no longer are.

Leadership, in an age of acceleration, may come down to one simple act: slowing the moment where values are set. Not to resist the future, but to make sure we recognize ourselves in it.

Because in the end, AI doesn’t just move data or decisions. It moves us—our values, our blind spots, our unspoken priorities—into the future at speed. And the question that remains is whether we will choose those values consciously, or let the system choose for us.

Further reading:

“Amoral Drift in AI Corporate Governance.” Harvard Law Review 138, no. 6 (2025).

Anagnostakis, Alis. “The Vertical Development of AI.” How Grown Ups Grow Up, 21 March, 2026.

Ball, Dean W. “2023: Or, Why I am Not a Doomer.” Hyperdimensional, 25 March 2026.

Renieris, Elizabeth M., David Kiron, and Steven Mills. “AI‑Related Risks Test the Limits of Organizational Risk Management.” MIT Sloan Management Review, April 23, 2024.

In conversations with younger colleagues about recent events in Minneapolis I heard a common question about why business leaders were not speaking out in defense of democratic values and civil rights. Just a couple years ago the same leaders issued statements for any number of social justice and political infractions. That vision of leadership – the vocal, values-driven, stakeholder capitalist CEO – was what Gen Z and younger Millennial employees came to expect. The silence of the past year has been a shock.

One topic leaders have not been quiet about is AI. A great debate about AI “as normal technology” or AI as an existential threat to humanity is playing out in real time. And most of the chatter accepts the premise that an AI future is inevitable either way. In the meantime, AI is being unleashed at scale with few (any?) ethical guardrails. AI slop overwhelms social feeds and ‘workslop’ erodes productivity. All the slop is at minimum a distraction, and more likely an accelerant, to the erosion of the consensus reality required for a functioning civil society.

Reflecting on these two themes – democracy and AI – it becomes clear that they are two threads of one story. In moving the public square online and ceding intermediary power to tech platforms, deliberately or not, we’ve all been part of a grand experiment to find out what happens to liberal democracy when the flow of information is managed by opaque algorithms, corrupted by unchecked disinformation and rife with synthetic actors (a.k.a. bots and AI agents) with profit and/or political motives. It turns out that polarization and fractured realities make for a good business model but terrible civic infrastructure.

What do CEOs owe citizens? What do companies owe the commons?

As someone who spent a career seeing the possibilities in the business case for social and environmental sustainability, it’s been disheartening to see a near total reversal of corporate speech in favor of solutions that have a tangible impact on long-term value creation. A cynical view might conclude that the business case rested solely on good will and reputation factors and when the zeitgeist shifted, the business sector pivoted to protecting shareholder interests. But that view ignores the very real benefit businesses gain by addressing material risks like climate change and societal polarization and growing inequality – not to mention unlocking innovation by getting creative about constraints or including more and different perspectives in the process.

People who run companies refer to the concept of a “license to operate” as a shorthand for all the factors that contribute to a business’s ability to remain a going concern. There are literal regulatory requirements and operational realities but then there are more intangible dimensions like stakeholder perceptions that the organization can be trusted to fulfill its promises and act with integrity. Business leaders do not take the equivalent of a Hippocratic oath to avow they will do no harm and it is assumed that the market will price ethics and risk and reliability into how it values the business. But that assumption fails in practice, especially in a deregulatory moment like this one. Companies can leverage and privatize many public goods, from physical resources like water to cost of capital advantages and even brand halo effects from being affiliated with a country of origin with status in the world. So it stands to reason that corporate leaders do owe something back to the commons and should help safeguard the social fabric that enables their success.

Transactional minded leaders see the current context as a zero-sum power struggle and fear speaking up will cost them. What they miss is the fact that not speaking up will cost them more. At any inflection point people mark who was on the right side of morality and how long it took them to get there. There are so many lessons from history of what happens to leaders who take too long, or never get there at all. January 2026 is such a moment, as was January 2021, to note just two.

A strong, united private sector – like the one that as recently as 2019 redefined the purpose of a corporation as serving all stakeholders, not just shareholders – could reassert democratic values as good for business, use the power of advertising and political spending to strengthen the rule of law, and advocate for sensible regulation that safeguards civil society and information ecosystems. And they could weather political retribution by standing together.

As a Wharton professor and organizational psychologist Adam Grant noted this week:

“Integrity is standing by your values even when your own group violates them.”

It’s not easy to speak truth to power or stand up when everyone around you to too afraid. And when bearing witness to events that defy reason, words can fail. But that is exactly when leaders must speak, because words fail and that fact must be acknowledged. The act of finding the words is also an invitation to community, collective processing and the first step on building toward a better future.

Further reading:

Allen, Mike and VandeHei, Jim. “Behind the Curtain: Anthropic’s warning to the world.” Axios, 26 Jan. 2026.

Amodei, Dario. “The Adolescence of Technology.” Jan 2026.

DiResta, Renée. “Crisis of Trust 2026: The Retreat Into Insularity.” Agents of Influence, 20 Jan. 2026

Janfaza, Rachel. “Mattering is key to fulfillment. Gen Z isn’t feeling it.” The Up and Up, 27 Jan. 2026.

Taylor, Allison. “Corporations on ICE in Minneapolis: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good.” Agents of Influence, 14 Jan. 2026

Taylor, Allison. “Fear and Loathing in Corporate America.” Higher Ground, 26 Jan. 2026

Headlines about AI seem to always speak in absolutes. AI is/isn’t a bubble. AI will/won’t doom humanity. AI is a revolutionary/normal technology. Experts with entrenched world views about the power and potential of artificial intelligence appear certain in their convictions and equipped with data, proof points and patterns to back them up. They leave little-to-no space for the questioning of assumptions or predictions.

And yet, science and innovation are inherently about the spirit of discovery in the face of what we do not know. Rarely do true scientists speak in absolutes. Instead, they posit hypotheses and lean on theories and principles to assert an educated prediction of what might occur, but always leaving a little room to be proven wrong.

Physics offers a compelling object lesson in how uncertainty governs even the smallest scales of nature – quantum particles. As Werner Heisenberg enumerated in his Uncertainty Principle, the more precisely one physical property of a particle is known – say its position, the less precisely the other – say its momentum – can be known. In other words, the more precisely you know the initial conditions of a system, the greater the uncertainty in predicting its future. There’s a lesson for us all in that axiom!

Uncertainty seems to be hard coded in nature but not the human psyche.

In fact, we humans absolutely hate uncertainty and are by default wired to resolve tension and seek certainty. Our brains evolved to look for patterns to predict dangers and find resources to survive and any ambiguity triggers a stress response that puts us on high alert.

Now think about what that means in the context of leadership. We are wired to seek patterns – in human behavior, in market dynamics, in past events – at a moment in human history when what came before is no longer a reliable proxy for what is to come. The AI revolution, post-truth media ecosystem, climate change tipping point and geopolitical shake-up are concurrent and interwoven disruptions – summed up by the concept of metacrisis – redefining the world around us in real-time.

What is the value of uncertainty?

As our operating environment becomes more complex, we need evolved leadership capacities to override our ancestral instincts and learn to sit in uncertainty. This is where poetry comes into play.

In the British Romantic era, two poets came to represent the paradox of looking for answers versus living the questions of humanity. John Keats, one of the so-called Young Romantics, possessed a rare creative genius that perhaps predisposed him to embrace the ineffable qualities of beauty and the mysteries of life. In contrast, Samuel Taylor Coleridge – a philosopher, theorist and poet of the first generation of Romantics – preferred precision and to reveal the why of beauty. In a letter to his brothers calling out Coleridge, Keats coined the term “negative capability” – meaning “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

This negative capability is the superpower of contemporary leadership but is hard to come by. It requires sitting in the discomfort of not knowing, waiting when there’s pressure to do something now, seeing the echo chamber behind a false consensus reality and allowing inconvenient truths to puncture dominant narratives. But it is the best way to resist the allure of easy answers and false prophets who peddle in certainty when there is none to be had.

Now imagine the mass adoption of generative and agentic AI tools designed to deliver plausible answers packaged as truth. What happens to our capacity to sit in the discomfort of not knowing when easy answers are to be found and the limited transparency about how they are derived and delivered is the whole point of the magic of the technology? How might our development of these tools be different if we valued negative capability as core to the human experience?

Leadership in the age of AI will face many tests. An early one is how to resist the allure of a frictionless answer machine in favor a more profound search for truth and shared reality.

Getting comfortable with uncertainty takes courage.

There are numerous experts and tools out there to help cultivate courage in the face of uncertainty and seductive technology. Many are explored in this blog. Two thinkers with a timely take on the fundamentals of negative capability are social work researcher Brené Brown and organizational psychologist Adam Grant. The two have engaged in a series of podcast conversations unpacking the ideas in Brené’s most recent book, which is all about courageous and vulnerable leadership.

As Adam asserts, “if knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.” That wisdom is hard won by investing in what old-school leaders often look down upon as touchy-feely soft skills like empathy, compassion, humility, self-awareness, adaptability. Those soft skills are juxtaposed with more stereotypical leadership qualities such as authority, decisiveness and control.

One practice that can aid in cultivating capacities fit for the complexity of leadership today is what Adam calls “rethinking” to open your mind.

• Start in a posture of intellectual humility to make explicit what you don’t know.

• That in turn leaves room for doubt, the precursor to curiosity.

• As you become curious about what you are missing and what else could be true you spark to new discoveries.

• The act of discovery reinforces humility as you realize how much you still don’t know.

• And the cycle repeats.

As a poet greatly inspired by Keats, Rainer Maria Rilke picked up the thread of negative capability and summed up what we must do in his Letters to a Young Poet:

“Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Further reading:

Brown, Brené. Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit. Penguin Random House, 23 Sep. 2025.

Grant, Adam. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Penguin Random House, 26 Dec. 2023.

Lewis, Marc. “Why We’re Hardwired to Hate Uncertainty.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 4 Apr. 2016.

Popova, Maria. “The Art of ‘Negative Capability’: Keats on Embracing Uncertainty and Celebrating the Mysterious.” The Marginalian, 23 Dec. 2019.

Popova, Maria. “Live the Questions: Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Doubt as a Stabilizing Force.” The Marginalian, 1 Jun. 2012.

By design or happenstance, certain people rise to the top of organizations. In earlier eras when the external context was more stable and predictable, people often got ahead by becoming experts in the norms and cultures of their organization. The people at the top had a lot of institutional knowledge and experience navigating the policies and politics of the system.

So why is there a rising trend of turnover of experienced executives in the C-suite? Companies are replacing CEOs and executives report they are considering leaving their positions due to increasing levels of pressure and burnout in the face of volatility and uncertainty. Expertise in the organizational system no longer seems to give leaders the perspective and capacities they need to guide the organization through complexity. These executives may be titular leaders on the org chart but that doesn’t mean they are equipped to meet this moment as visionaries, strategists and stewards in a time of chaos. They are unprepared when the system they know collapses. That may be why it’s so difficult to spot leaders doing what is required to effectively navigate a changing context.

What does it look like when leaders effectively navigate complexity?

Anyone with a commitment to personal growth via vertical development frameworks likely knows what it feels like to grapple with complexity and wrestle with paradox. This work is not easy – and it’s never done. So if we know what it feels like when we are leaning into complexity on the inside, what does it look like on the outside? How can we spot leaders doing the transformational hard stuff so we can align with them instead of blindly following the leaders just because they show up at the top of the org chart?

Transformational leaders are courageously human.

Before unpacking what it means to be courageously human, it might help to draw a distinction between transformation and innovation. Leaders are often referred to by descriptors that speak to how they deserve the credit for unlocking novel ideas or technological leaps. They are called “innovator” or “entrepreneur” or “visionary” and the qualities of their leadership are shrouded in mysticism. No shade on the inventors out there, but that is not leadership – it’s discovery. In fact, there is a perennial problem in startup culture when it becomes clear that the founder is a great innovator but not a reliable leader.

The common media narrative around C-suite culture is that organizations are switching out executives to bring in people with more strategic or innovative visions. What I think these organizations are actually seeking but don’t know how to name is a transformational leader who can spot the opportunity in chaos, nurture a constructive organizational culture and nudge the organizational system toward better and more enduring impact.

There are certain qualities transformational leaders share that I define as courageous humanity. “Courageous” because it requires admitting vulnerability, ceding control and sitting with the discomfort of paradox and duality. And “humanity” because it centers on connection with others, considering the perspectives of others and relying on others to co-create the transformation you seek.

RESOURCE: Changing on the Job: How Leaders Become Courageous, Wise and Steady in an Anxious World by Jennifer Garvey Berger

Jennifer Garvey Berger recently released the second edition of her seminal book Changing on the Job and goes deep into how to cultivate (and spot) courageous humanity. Jennifer is a scholar of vertical development and a coach who helps leaders expand their capacity to navigate complexity and steward transformational change.

The book guides readers through four forms of mind that make up a developmental map for a world of complexity and change. You can get a short overview in this blog post.

On the question of what it looks like to experience the transformational leadership of another (versus cultivating it in oneself), Changing on the Job provides three key signals to look for:

1. Courage to hold on and let go: the capacity to set a bold vision and articulate what change needs to happen at every level to get there without needing to take credit for all the change or being committed to any specific outcome on the path to change. Essentially, creating the conditions for others to take action toward a shared vision.

2. Steadiness with agility: a commitment to staying the course while allowing for nonlinear progress and course corrections – and helping others get comfortable with the nonlinear nature of reality. Paradoxically projecting confidence with flexibility.

3. Wisdom: the ability to shape the bigger forces that operate beyond personal agency to nudge the system toward a bold vision through thoughtful and sparing interventions that create big impact. Leaning into intuition, noticing and inertia to know when to act and what to say to amplify favorable patterns and dampen undesirable ones on the path to change.

The underlying theme of these signals is paradox and duality. Yet, people crave simple, easy answers. Our instinct is often to align behind the leader with all the answers when we should seek out the leader asking all the questions. Following the guidance in Changing on the Job can help us get better at spotting leaders with the capacity to meet the moment and also get better at meeting the moment ourselves.

A side effect of 21^st century progress is a habituation to fast and frictionless answers that begets an immediacy bias in how we experience the arc of our own existence. Our online and offline worlds are blurring, increasingly mediated by digital age technologies designed to deliver instant gratification through real-time fulfillment of information, products, services and experiences.

We satisfy our daily material needs (wants?) by adding purchases – be they groceries or bubble tea – to a digital cart and anticipating delivery in mere minutes to hours. We want to know something so we ask a search engine about it in the moment. We seek a confidant or a companion so we turn to an AI chatbot. We hear about something happening in the world so we turn to social media to get unfiltered updates.

As leaders, we are often pressured to have a hot take on current events before the full context can be understood. And the online story about such events often gets established well ahead of facts and perspective. Internet researcher Renee DiResta calls this phenomenon “immediate narrative setting” by influential voices online. It’s a dynamic that allows for a lot of misinformation and even malicious content to spread far and wide in ways that are near impossible to correct after the fact.

Establishing (and protecting) the narrative has become a key part of leadership today. In a fragmented, polarized and volatile information ecosystem, setting the terms of engagement can make or break a reputation, policy or program. This incentivizes early moves in developing contexts. In uncertain times, leaders often feel urgency to have an answer or try to control the outcome in response to new forces and evolving dynamics with long-term consequences.

How should leaders make decisions that balance the immediate and long views?

Leaders who fall into a pattern of making in-the-moment decisions have not left room to consider that near-term actions may be adding up to big consequences for the future. Living on impulse can mean trading tomorrow for the now, especially when fulfilling immediate needs borrows on resources or sets new norms that erode future opportunities. Short-termism also plays into dominant paradigms (and those who benefit from them) designed to distract attention and extract resources from efforts to design a different system that benefits more people.

What is the right move for right now is not always the right move once the fog of the moment clears.

The tension of leading for both short-term and long-term priorities is not new. But the combination of our market and attention economies has made it challenging to bring a long-term focus to leadership. And finding the right balance between the two temporal poles can be more art than science, and relies on pressure-testing decisions though both pragmatic and futuristic lenses.

RESOURCE: Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs by Ari Wallach

Luckily, Ari Wallach has written an antidote for short-termism. According to Ari and his team, "Longpath" is a verb: to Longpath means to actively counter our instinct for short-termism by making decisions, today, that create far futures where humans, ecosystems and planet flourish. The mindset is informed by three key practices:

1. Futures Thinking: the capacity to imagine many possible tomorrows (or what I think of as hopeful scenario planning with realistic contingencies)

2. Transgenerational Empathy: a commitment to acting in the interest of coming generations (or what I think of as being a responsible steward of the world you inherited)

3. Telos: the ability to align one’s actions with broader purpose and vision (or what I think of as purpose-driven leadership for the collective good)

For a quick take on the Longpath mindset, check out Ari’s TED Talk and the essay for WIRED magazine that set the foundation for the movement.

The world taking shape in 2025 seems to be well off a longpath-oriented future. Would that more leaders and influential voices took Ari’s message to heart and worked to imagine a different world of collective flourishing.

One of the digital age paradoxes that frustrates me the most is the inverse relationship between expanding access to information and decreasing levels of literacy across a host of domains (civics and media especially). We are rich in information – the whole of human knowledge fits in our pockets on web-enabled devices – but increasingly outsource our thinking to said web-enabled devices. For example, we are not only asking chatbots about science and history but also about the meaning of life. Many of us are consulting chatbots as teachers, experts, philosophers and therapists.

It's easy to “know” if we define “knowing” as a binary of either possessing the information and facts or not. Computers and AI agents are really helpful in helping find answers to familiar problems or patterns based on an accepted fact base. (Whether we can trust what is accepted as a common set of facts is another ball of wax.)

It’s a lot harder to “understand” if we define “understanding” as coming to deeper comprehension through processes of reasoning, synthesis, intuition and interpretation.

The promise of AI and superintelligence is that artificial brains will not only help us know, but also show us how things connect, why they matter, and what they mean. (Whether we can trust how AI arrives at understanding if it can’t rely on lived human experience is debatable, as is the larger question of if we should outsource this function to AI at all.) Setting aside questions of what the role of AI is or should be, I’m more concerned with what outsourcing understanding means for the human experience itself and how we can protect human ingenuity in the long-term. That starts by deconstructing the process of understanding.

What is essential to make the leap from knowing to understanding?

While humans are not the only creatures to exhibit deep learning, empathy and self-awareness (all foundational to the larger capacity of understanding), these superpowers are innately part and parcel of our shared humanity and ingenuity. To date, no big, complex problem has ever been solved without the aid of people thinking deeply in ways both novel and complementary. Human ingenuity plus AI power, depth and breadth could be awesome indeed, but what happens in one or two generations when the human ingenuity part has eroded? Machine learning and AI problem-solving defined by and for the benefit of artificial systems could bypass human considerations altogether.

Understanding relies on our ability to combine critical thinking skills with emotional and social intelligence. (AI can help with the former, but the latter is up to us.)

Now might be a good time to double down on thinking, deep learning and strengthening our capacity to understand, both intellectually and interpersonally. There are many ways to expand strategic capacity and invest in reflexive practices that hone empathy and other so-called “softer” skills. And it’s advised to explore different ways of leaning and personal growth because they all become the interconnected scaffolding for the whole as we expand our capacities. But if you are looking for a place to start, the art of noticing is both practical and propulsive. The more you look, the more you see.

RESOURCE: Look at More: A Proven Approach to Innovation, Growth, And Change by Andy Stefanovich

Besides his role as chief curator and provocateur at consultancy Prophet, Andy serves as a thinking partner for leaders exploring big ideas. In 2011, he published Look at More, a slim but powerful volume on how to find inspiration by following the directive to “look at more stuff; think about it harder.” It’s a book I return to often to remind myself how to think about deep thinking, connecting dots and finding new perspectives on old problems. Andy calls this a “museum mentality” and you can hear him put this in a context in this TED talk.

The book is organized around a specific framework, but beyond that roadmap, there are three themes that inform thinking as a springboard to understanding:

1. Curate for focus. Attention is a finite resource (at least for humans). There is a lot of noise in the world, both online and off. Curating what you pay attention to and organizing the information and signals you want to explore helps you focus on what matters and protects your energy.

2. Marinate for depth. Understanding comes from both circling a question or topic from different perspectives and also going deep to see the layers and factors that aren’t obvious from the surface. Build on curation by exploring the archives, marinating yourself in the domain, and leave room for randomness and serendipity.

3. Integrate for wisdom. Getting to wisdom requires us to reflect on what we’ve learned, synthesize what it means and then integrate it into how we navigate, interrelate, lead and solve.
   

Thinking deeply is an endless process of curation, marination and integration. Each phase resets your starting point so you can go further every time you confront something or someone new. This process helps us balance skepticism and compassion as we try to make sense of the world and our place in it.

I once worked for a CEO who often said the quiet part out loud, lamenting that knowledge worker productivity is often invisible to the naked eye. His dream was to have a key performance indicator hologram displayed above each employee's head so he could assess the value created per worker on the spot. Did I mention he was the CEO of a nonprofit organization? That anecdote proves just how deep the productivity ethos has permeated professional and managerial work, not just skilled trades and service industry work. With the meteoric rise of AI agents and automation, his dream can now come true, but to what end?

How should we value human work in the age of automation and AI?

The promise of technological progress has most often been framed as the gift of time. The theory was that industrial and information (and now intelligence) technologies would liberate workers from burdensome tasks and inefficient processes and people would net more leisure time to spend on their own pursuits.

But anyone following workplace trends will know that reality never came to pass. Instead, we saw the rise of hustle culture, productivity hacks, gig work and bossware. And workers (especially in white collar and service professions) got the message that they had to figure out how to get more done in a 24/7 connected world where job security was scarce and the threat of offshoring, automation and competition from younger, hungrier workers were unspoken specters reinforcing the myth of productivity.

In practice, working smarter (not harder) is often an impossible goal as organizations seek to do more with less – smaller budgets, smaller headcounts and faster timelines. The mismatch between the promise and reality of productivity means that workers increasingly report feeling burnout and a sense that the workload will never be manageable, let alone conducive to ample leisure time as the sci-fi prophecy foretold.

AI agents and automation tools are just the latest flavor of productivity hacks, but now with an added existential threat that the AI will quite soon replace the workers it is making more productive today. As labor-saving (and replacing) technologies proliferate, how should we think about the future of human work?

Connective labor is an unacknowledged x factor driving meaningful outcomes, even as it defies efficiency metrics.

In knowledge work, caring professions and the larger service economy, what sociologist Allison Pugh has termed ‘connective labor’ is the emotional and relational work people do to build and sustain meaningful connections with others. Those connections, uniquely human in nature, create the conditions for understanding, learning, cooperation and countless other qualitative factors that improve outcomes, change perspectives and unlock novel solutions to sticky problems. It is the connective labor we must protect in the new systems we are creating in the intelligence revolution.

RESOURCE: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World by Allison Pugh

In addition to coining new language for relational work, Allison asserts three key insights that can help us design a more human-centered future of work, even as we embrace new technologies in ways that complement what humans do best.

1. Name and value contributions that are uniquely human: The domains of emotion, empathy, sensation, experience and understanding are human. AI can perform a simulation of such things but can never genuinely connect through shared humanity. It’s hard to imagine that any collective endeavor can succeed in the long-term without a foundation of the shared human condition.

2. Get specific about what AI can (and can’t) do: AI is a non-specific term for a host of classification, prediction and automation technologies that (so far) can’t read connective labor inputs and so devalue them in outputs. Put simply, AI can’t read the real world, only the digital space. Perhaps a better frame for tech innovation is to really consider where tech can complement – not replace – what humans do well.

3. Acknowledge that not all productivity can be metricized: the old adage that what matters gets measured has fatal flaws when it comes to connective labor. As more as more professions become standardized and metricized we lose sight of the ineffable relational aspects that feed people’s enthusiasm and willingness to work hard toward a shared purpose.

BOTTOM LINE: Burnout – and its new cousin boreout – may well hollow out organizations and demoralize leaders well before it becomes clear that AI can’t solve all. Connective labor is a powerful antidote to languishing and dissatisfaction. Better to design a future of work that works for people from the jump.

For a quick take on Allison’s thesis, you can read this contributed piece in The Guardian or watch her public lecture at the London School of Economics.

Volatile. Uncertain. Complex. Ambiguous.

In an era defined by polarization, fracture, disruption and shifting power centers, a rare point of consensus may be the realization that VUCA forces set the terms of engagement in all domains of life, for all of us, all at once.

The world around us is changing faster than – and at a scale beyond – our ability to comprehend and adapt. What to do about that reality is up for debate and a central challenge for leaders of all stripes to address.

The examples of leaders failing to meet the moment are legion. Why is it so difficult for contemporary leaders to clarify what matters and rally people behind a collective vision for how we might effectively navigate complexity, calamity and constant change?

• Is a bias for survival in an uncertain environment reducing many (all?) decisions to the immediate context at the expense of possible scenarios that may unfold tomorrow?

• Is the post-truth information ecosystem rife with #fakenews, AI slop and endless scroll content overload making it difficult to parse the signal from the noise?

• Is the mysticism (and lack of specificity) surrounding artificial intelligence creating an irresistible shiny object syndrome paired with FOMO (fear of missing out)?

• Is the magnitude and existential nature of the challenges we face overwhelming our capacity to care about the future, let alone act in our long-term best interests?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

What does it take to lead beyond human scale?

These paradoxes define leadership in this time of interconnected crises. Good leadership should be able to expand the capacity to grapple with multifactor complexity and objectively define how and where to take the next right action.

We must first start by expanding our individual tolerance for complexity, intellectually but also (and mainly) physically.

Our default human settings are biased toward simplicity and homeostasis. So when complex, adaptive, or ‘wicked’ problems come along, they overwhelm our nervous systems. At the very moment we need to summon our most evolved capacities and resilience to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity and change, our reptilian brain overrides those capacities with stress and anxiety. If we give into those base instincts, we’ll get caught in a doom loop and remain subject to our fear and confusion.

So how do we override our reptilian brain and hack our nervous system for a better outcome? Two of the founders of Cultivating Leadership, a noted leadership development consultancy, have some ideas.

RESOURCE: Unleash Your Complexity Genius: Growing Your Inner Capacity to Lead by Jennifer Garvey Berger and Carolyn Coughlin

Jennifer and Carolyn summarize the innate wisdom we all can tap into as we face the ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’ nature of what it means to be a human right now. Their advice sounds simple but requires patience and practice to actually override our physiology. Here are the three main insights from their work:

1. Pay close attention to your body: practice presence, notice your default response patterns and then rewire your breathing and movement habits to instill more effective default patterns.

2. Redefine your emotional experiences: bring an experimental learning mindset to decision making with a focus on creating the conditions for new solutions to emerge and releasing attachment to specific outcomes.

3. Connect more deeply to others: lean into positive emotions and stories of shared humanity to reframe complexity and empower others to tap into their physical and emotional wisdom in the face of overwhelm and anxiety.

For a quick take on the book, listen to the authors in conversation on the Not Simple podcast. I also recommend exploring a series of conversations curated by Brené Brown on the theme of living beyond human scale. Brené invited thinkers from the worlds of technology, business, psychology and the humanities to deconstruct why it feels so overwhelming to navigate this era.

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What is this project all about?

It’s hard to be a human right now. It’s even harder to lead other humans.

In prior eras, leaders could rely on their expertise, experience and world view to confidently define the next right action. Today, many leaders are realizing the limits of old mindsets and methods given the complexity and turmoil evolving in real time.

As the context becomes ever more uncertain, the job of moral leadership is to clarify what matters and motivate people toward a common goal. That means leaders need new capacities to navigate the age of artificial intelligence, post-truth media, climate change, multipolar power dynamics – and all the vibes and consequences (intended or otherwise) those forces unleash.

That is the focus of this project: to discover those new capacities by wrestling with the pressures on and paradox of moral leadership in this age. Moral leadership is inherently concerned with understanding the human side of decisions guided by ethics, integrity and a commitment to the common good.

Why join this project?

I’ve spent my career helping purpose-driven leaders and organizations advance their vision for a more sustainable world. I’ve advised Fortune 100 executives, global nonprofits, billionaire philanthropists and multilateral coalitions on how to understand and balance the interests of the communities and ecosystems they serve within the realities of the market and attention economies. Together, we’ve been proving that ‘for good’ solutions can generate meaningful returns on investment, both financial and humanitarian.

The counsel and support I provide to clients of all types has been aligned to what had seemed a growing consensus that each sector had a role to play to ensure a sustainable future and that there was shared value to be created together. But this everybody-wins outlook is crumbling in the face of uncertainty and complexity.

At the moment, the principles that guide purpose-driven work don’t appear strong enough to counter polarization, protectionism and the politicization of many ideas that contribute to society and the environment. So we need to find a better, more durable way to advance them.

If we are to find our collective way to a resilient future, we’ll need to become the leaders we are looking for. And that will require us to understand the world in new ways, consider multiple perspectives on the challenges we face and adapt and grow to meet the moment – and beyond.

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Why subscribe?

Curiosity sparks growth. And curiosity can be directed by posing ‘powerful questions.’ These are open-ended provocations that invite reflection and prompt deeper understanding. They are designed to move us out of limited binary either/or, yes/no constructs to embark on a both/and inquiry that opens up new possibilities.

Each post will center on a powerful question as a frame for exploring perspectives on moral leadership and the human side of decision making. I’ll also share side notes about resources that may help expand our capacity to grapple with multifactor complexity and become the leaders our world needs.

Together, this community can help rewrite the future to ensure we end up on the human side of history.

Learn more about me here.