From Chaos to Curiosity: A Leader’s Guide to the Age of AI

People are worried. Every day brings new concerning stories about the jobs AI will replace, the privacies it will take from us, and how our opinions, our art, our culture will be shaped not by human intellect, but by an algorithm. We have all heard the term VUCA – or even its new equivalent BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible). Is this nervousness new? Is it just a strategy of fear, pedalled by those with a stake in selling more Leadership and behavioural change services?

Because the world has always been an uncertain place. Every generation has had to face shifting social and geopolitical tectonics. In the mid-20th Century, the Cold War brought 43 years of protests, civil unrest, and the looming threat of a nuclear holocaust. African nations were still grappling with post-colonial rule, whilst China was in the middle of its Cultural Revolution that would cause the death of millions through starvation, execution, and persecution.

Further back, two World Wars and the Spanish Flu claimed tens of millions of lives across the world and left a legacy of famine, disease and poverty.

As for the working world, every recent century has had a technological revolution. The Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century shifted workers from farms to factories. In the 19th Century, the Second Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of modern office work, using innovations like electricity and the telephone. And then the 20th Century brought with it automation and moved work almost entirely from manufacturing to the service sector, before computers and the internet created entirely new industries.

The facts are that we have always lived in an uncertain world.

But this is different. It’s different because the speed of change is occurring to all of us on the planet, at the same time. It is within this relentless dynamic environment that leaders must decide whether to jump into the accelerating Jetstream or snorkel in the shallow waters of irrelevance.

In their book No Ordinary Disruption (2015), R. Dobbs, J. Manyika, and J. Woetzel postulate that humanity is at the confluence of four colossal tributaries of change, each crashing into the other in complex and chaotic ways while mankind sits atop, on a deflating dingy, guided by Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. These amplifying “Disruptive Forces” are: Urbanisation; Technology; An Aging Global Population, and Connections.

At first blush, it would be easy to dismiss such work as one in a long line of books about globalisation (a now threatened concept), not dissimilar to Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (2005), so allow me to spare you the price of the book, for here is the spoiler: the world is changing quickly. Very quickly indeed. Much more quickly than ever before, and understanding this will make you a better leader.

Let us focus on technology for the sake of this blog. Today’s leaders can no longer claim ignorance of technology as a badge of honour. In 2023, a global survey by LinkedIn found that 92% of executives believed AI literacy would be a critical skill for leaders within the next five years. The image of a leader proudly disconnected from tech is fast becoming a relic.

Warren Buffet may get away with it, but few others do. In 2016, Hilary Clinton and her election team, cited a lack of understanding of how emails were classified for an imbroglio that arguably ruined her shot at the presidency of the United States. Consider the more recent example of the use of the communication app Signal by top US government officials to share classified (yes, classified) information about a military strike in Yemen. Not only was it potentially illegal, but said much about the users’ own personalities including a particular lack of sobriety in relation to the taking of lives. Trust is eroded if mistakes appear deliberate.

Pleading technological ignorance in a world that requires technology to function is no longer an excuse.

But why is the world changing so quickly, and why can we not just carry on as we did before? To answer this question, let us call the author, inventor, and futurist Ray Kurzweil onto the scene; a man who famously coined the phrase “Law of Accelerating Returns (2001)” in his 2001 essay of the same title. In it, he postulates that technological change is exponential, and to further boggle the mind, “there’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth.”

To fully appreciate what this means, imagine walking down a road where each step is measured as one metre. By taking two steps down this road, you travel two metres; the third step takes you three metres along; the fourth, four metres along, and so on. This follows a linear process.

Now let us imagine a non-linear (or exponential) process, in which each step carries you twice as far as the previous one. In this universe, the first step takes you one metre down the road from where you started, the second step moves you two metres, but the third step takes you four metres along, and the fourth, eight metres. By the twelfth step, you would reach over two kilometres.

This somewhat convoluted example illustrates how non-linear processes induce a rapid divergence from their initial conditions. Now replace the example of steps along a road with AI models, and it becomes clear why change is accelerating even faster. Generative AI, in particular, has turned what was once human-only work into a machine-driven process, where text, images, code, and even decision-making frameworks are evolving at a pace that outstrips traditional industries, not to talk of our own understanding.

The rate of technological expansion is causing cracks to appear in the old mantle of the pre-algorithm world. For some leaders, the fissures appear as yawning chasms of uncertainty. For others, they are vast expanses where new ideas can be set free. With AI-driven insights, businesses can now predict trends before they emerge, make data-driven decisions with unprecedented accuracy, and even model leadership capabilities in real time. The leaders of tomorrow will not just understand their teams; they will have an AI-enhanced ability to sense and respond to changing dynamics before a crisis even emerges.

The three-year era where ignorance of AI was forgivable, is over.

Avoiding it will not slow its impact. It is already embedded in decision-making, strategy, and human capital management. If a single tweet can change the course of human history, an AI-optimised campaign can shift entire markets.

Some people may not like it. Indeed, one could argue that the rise of the far right in Western politics is a convulsive reaction to a deep-seated desire go back to simpler, fairer times. That’s not an excuse for the collapse of decency or humanity towards each other, but through a prism of sympathy, can be understood as a cry for help from a section of society that feels the system they are born into is broken and no longer works for them.

People feel lost. We are willingly walking – no, sprinting headfirst into – an environmental catastrophe; social media is fuelling division and conversational doom loops; political discourse is polarised; we don’t know what to teach our kids; everything is so expensive, and now, AI is coming for us too.

But if history has taught us anything, it’s that from the demise of one system, a new one emerges. AI isn’t going back in its box. The question now is not whether we stop it – but how we shape it. How we use it for good, to amplify human potential and solve problems we’ve long struggled with. AI could make cancer curable, and be the key to solving the climate crisis. We need to be as ready as we can for the arrival of this new system. You, need to be ready.

Leading in the Age of AI

To be a good leader is to make sense of the environment in which one lives and works, while helping your people understand it too. If that environment is evolving by the second, more effort must be made to understand it, remain up to date and remain engaged. Lift the gloom; give your teams the tools to help them thrive; motivate them by understanding their fears and drivers; be open to challenge; learn how to use these new tools together. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because leadership has always required the same skills but in this instance, with a couple of tweaks:

1) Dial up your own curiosity and learn this new language. Don’t wait another year. AI will have taken that twelfth step by then.
2) Train yourself to look a little further ahead. Think about the possibilities. If you’ve learnt this new language, you can begin playing, experimenting…adding value.

There’s an old Venetian proverb that my grandfather would always say to me:

El saòn no’l sa gnente, l’inteigente el sa poco, l’ignorante el sa tanto, el mona el sa tutto!”

Which loosely translates into:

The wise person knows nothing, the intelligent person knows little, the ignorant person knows a lot, the idiot knows everything!

…because there is even more change coming, and it will call your working knowledge into question again and again. Your ability to re-learn and re-invent will be your shield and that of your team. Be wise, know that you know nothing. Go again.

Barack Obama said “The arc of history gives us hope – that for all our flaws, humanity moves forward.” We are about to start living in the age of AI. Push the boundaries of your mental dexterity. Ask, seek, knock. Your brand as a leader is at stake.