Internships and full-time work, law school, graduate study, and perhaps a PhD are all options he’s considering; given our recent family history of military service, he is also exploring Air Force Officer Training School. Each path carries its own application requirements, timelines, and entrance exams. Depending on what he decides to pursue, he may, for example, find himself preparing for the LSAT, the GRE or GMAT, and the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT) all within a relatively compressed period.

Watching him sequence the decisions and respective tests made me think about how much evidence institutions require before someone is allowed to enter.

None of these exams can predict an entire career. I.e., a strong LSAT score does not prove that someone will become a good lawyer; the GRE/GMAT cannot tell us who will produce meaningful scholarship; and the AFOQT cannot determine, by itself, who will become a capable officer.

Still, admission usually requires more than aspiration and a persuasive conversation.

That then sent me back through my own history. I had to qualify for an Air Force scholarship. Military life brought recurring evaluations, professional education, selection processes, and different forms of quantitative and qualitative assessment. When I later joined P&G, I completed an employment assessment before I could enter the company; then I had to “re-test” when I switched functions…still within P&G (but that’s another story about standards).

So, although I remember being tested before entering several institutions, I do not remember an equivalent moment that cleanly “tested me” before I first became responsible for other people.

My path into leadership, like many others, relied on accumulated evidence: performance, trust, reputation, observed behavior, sponsorship, and increasing responsibility. Those signals were not meaningless. People who knew my work judged that I was “ready”.

Ready…

By leadership here, I mean formal people leadership: authority over workload, performance, development, opportunities, compensation recommendations, etc. Leadership through influence is broader; I recognize and acknowledge that. For the purposes of this essay, I am interested in the moment when an organization gives one person meaningful power over another person’s working life.

That promotion is often treated as the next step in a career, even though it is an entirely different professional responsibility.

A strong individual contributor is accountable primarily for the quality and impact of their own work. Whereas a manager shapes the conditions under which other people work. They decide what receives attention, whose interpretation carries weight, how mistakes are understood, and whether disagreement is welcomed or tolerated. They may determine whether a difficult quarter or year becomes a coaching conversation, a performance label, or an exit.

Under this guise, doing the work well is evidence of expertise. It does not, however, automatically establish that someone is prepared to exercise authority over the people doing it. Yet the promotion process may still rely heavily on results from the previous role, reputation among senior stakeholders, and a general sense that the person has earned the opportunity. They are deemed ready.

Sometimes that judgment is precise. Sometimes, however, the team under management becomes the place where the organization really finds out.

Readiness. Context. Judgement. Words that ultimately led me to this essay’s organizing question: Why do we often impose a more visible burden of proof before someone enters an organization than before giving that person formal authority over the people already inside it?

The evidence between aptitude and performance

My son’s impending exams are largely attempts to measure aptitude: can he reason, comprehend, learn, communicate, or process certain kinds of complexity?

Whereas once someone is in a role, the organization can evaluate performance, results accumulate, and people observe what actually happened.

I think people leadership readiness sits awkwardly between the two. It asks whether someone can apply judgment when the problem is interpersonal, the facts are incomplete, and their own status is involved.

While organizations do gather experiential evidence before promoting—stretch assignments, project leadership, mentoring, informal influence, and the ability to create clarity without formal authority can reveal a great deal—those experiences do not carry quite the same stakes as becoming someone’s manager:

• The decisive operator who brings clarity under pressure may also overuse that strength until other people stop offering a view.

• A gifted salesperson may understand customers intuitively and still struggle to teach someone whose instincts are less developed.

• A highly collaborative colleague may become reluctant to make an unpopular call once the consequences are theirs to carry.

The issue is not whether the person possesses admirable strengths—they are important; as I wrote about recently, it is whether they understand the context under which those strengths stop helping. That kind of readiness is difficult to infer from success in a role where the person did not yet hold the same authority.

An entrance standard

All that said, I think a literal leadership entrance exam would probably become shallow rather quickly. Candidates would learn the approved vocabulary. They would identify the empathetic answer, the inclusive answer, the courageous answer, and the response that communicates just enough vulnerability to sound self-aware. We’d likely see prep courses and tutoring for such tests, much like today’s cottage industries built on improving standardized entrance exam performance.

Besides, organizations already have plenty of people who can describe good leadership elegantly. Perhaps a more useful entrance standard would involve observed judgment: i.e., place the candidate in simulated situations where the answer is not obvious and watch what they do with the ambiguity.

• Consider a high performer whose results are excellent and whose behavior is quietly eroding the team. Does the candidate protect the results, react to the reputation, or slow down long enough to understand both?

• Consider a respected senior leader asking the candidate to soften an inconvenient truth. What happens when candor threatens access, sponsorship, or status?

The value would not lie in finding one officially correct response. It would lie in what the candidate notices, whose interests they consider, and whether their position changes when new information arrives—aka, their adaptability quotient.

Then again, even that approach, although well-intentioned, also creates complications: Who designs the assessment? Whose model of leadership becomes the standard? A few more issues come to mind:

• An organization that already overvalues confidence may build a process that rewards polished decisiveness.

• A culture that avoids conflict may mistake accommodation for emotional intelligence.

• A leadership team that has reproduced itself for years may design a supposedly objective standard that quietly favors people who sound and behave like its current members. What I have previously called “nepotism of thought".

In other words, a structured process can expose bias, but it can also formalize it.

That is why the answer cannot simply be “more assessment.”

The burden of proof has to become more deliberate without pretending that the people defining readiness are neutral observers.

Perhaps candidates should be evaluated by people above them, beside them, and closer to the work they would lead—this is why 360 feedback has become the assessment du jour. Perhaps temporary responsibilities and observed assignments would reveal more than a single leadership simulation (examples here and here). Or perhaps the most useful evidence would come from comparing how someone behaves when they know they are being assessed with how they behave when they believe no promotion decision is at stake.

But let’s face it, no method removes judgment entirely from the process. The point I’m arguing is to demand better judgment, informed by more than one vantage point, before authority is granted. Then, once granted, a continuous, regular assessment through a combination of quantitative and qualitative elements—in short, more evidence before and during.

Before and after the promotion

My military experience partly shaped the thesis behind this essay.

To clarify from the outset, I’m not saying that the military leadership development system solved leadership selection bias. I encountered leaders I would willingly follow again and others whose authority exceeded their self-awareness. Formal processes did not eliminate politics, favoritism, poor judgment, or preventable damage.

What the system did recognize, however imperfectly, was that greater authority required additional evidence. Technical competence alone was not supposed to settle the question: education, observed performance, recurring evaluations, and progressively consequential assignments were part of the development path.

Corporate organizations sometimes work the other way around.

A person may complete a formal assessment to enter the company and later move into people leadership through a process that is more relational and less visible. As the authority becomes more consequential, reputation and stakeholder confidence may carry more of the decision.

Those are valid forms of evidence, but they are also evidence gathered largely from people senior to the candidate. I.e., the employees who will live with the decision often have little influence over it.

That asymmetry may be unavoidable to some degree, but it should not be ignored. Nor does the assessment end once the promotion is made. I.e., any pre-promotion process can only support a hypothesis; the role itself will reveal things no simulation can reproduce.

Some leaders grow into the responsibility, and some will perform well in an exercise while others will struggle under persistent pressure. Context changes people. A leader suited to a stable, experienced team may be wrong for a turnaround. Conversely, someone valuable in a crisis may have difficulty letting the crisis end.

The appointment should therefore remain provisional evidence, not permanent certification.

Over time, the clearest signals of readiness may be relatively simple:

• Do people become more capable?

• Can uncomfortable information travel upward?

• Are results produced through a system that can be sustained?

None of those questions can be answered by one metric. Strong leaders inherit damaged teams and weak leaders sometimes produce impressive short-term results. Retention, engagement, business performance, and talent movement all require context.

But read together, over time, they can tell the organization whether its original judgment of readiness continues to be true. Unfortunately, too often, that evidence becomes forensic. Organizations’ go-to 360 assessment, or team intervention, arrives after people have already absorbed the consequences.

Look, I get it, I’ve lived it: some learning curve is unavoidable. First-time managers will make mistakes (shameless plug: literally why we wrote the first book!); I know I certainly did—and the people I led were the first signal. Could that have been avoided? I don’t know.

What I do know is that accountability and honest feedback will sometimes create legitimate discomfort. And discomfort drives growth. Thus, my concern is not the elimination of difficulty. My concern is using a team—individuals, humans—as the first place to discover whether someone can handle authority without misusing it.

In other words…

Preparation will not prevent every failure. It may reduce how much preventable failure has to be financed by the people with less power.

Closing thoughts: more than aspiration

My son will likely take some combination of entrance exams over the next year.

Each one will produce an incomplete signal. None will establish that he is destined to become an excellent lawyer, scholar, officer, or professional. The institutions will combine those scores with other evidence and still make an uncertain decision.

The exams exist because admission is consequential enough to require more than aspiration.

I posit that formal authority over other people deserves at least the same seriousness.

That said, I am not convinced leadership needs a universal written exam. I am, however, increasingly convinced it needs a clearer entrance standard: observed judgment, evidence from more than one vantage point, and, more importantly, a willingness to revisit the decision after the title is granted.

We should know something about how a person responds when the facts are incomplete, when dissent feels inconvenient, when credit becomes valuable, and when their own status enters the equation.

We should also remain humble about what any process can tell us—and alert to whose definition of leadership the process is rewarding.

The role will always test the person in ways no assessment can fully anticipate.

But the promotion should not be the first meaningful test.

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Naturally, I had to take it.

I spend enough time thinking, writing, experimenting, and occasionally arguing with artificial intelligence that I was curious where I would land. I also wanted to understand what the test considered “AI-first” in the first place.

My score was 68.2%, classifying me as a Curious Tinkerer and describing me as the kind of AI chef who might bake a cake with a blowtorch.

Funny, and fair.

My mindset score was considerably higher than my skills score, which also felt about right. I am willing to experiment, deconstruct a problem, test prompts, and choose between tools based on the work in front of me. At the same time, much of what I do still depends on me being present to guide, interpret, redirect, refine, and occasionally rescue the process.

Although I use AI regularly, I am not yet living inside an elegantly automated system that hums along in my absence. Thus, the recommendation was straightforward: turn more of the tinkering into something repeatable that other people can use.

Hmm, perhaps. Let’s just say “work in progress” for now.

Regardless, I think the test was seamless, visually polished, and specific enough to feel personal without becoming clinical. It gave me a score, an identity, a description of my advantage, and a development opportunity. It also led naturally into the broader learning platform behind it: curiosity became diagnosis; diagnosis illuminated identity; identity signaled a gap; and the gap pointed toward a call to action. Net, good product design.

Still, I have notes.

On more than one question, I found myself moving the cursor between two answers; I wanted to pick more than one answer, or I wanted to write in my own. For example, one described how I work when I am exploring. The other described how I work when I already understand the problem. Subsequently, sometimes I use one tool; sometimes I use several because they are better suited to different parts of the work. Sometimes I begin by deconstructing the prompt altogether or run different prompts concurrently.

In other words, like with any self-assessment, the test required only one version of me—it wanted a lane.

Which makes sense and I’d argue is an important evolution (and, I hope, maturation) of the technology itself. Are we moving from hype to heuristic perhaps? Is measurable value creation next?

As the old Chinese parable goes, “maybe”.

A report card for a moving target

Any scored assessment has to reduce some ambiguity. Otherwise, there is no score, comparison, archetype, or clear recommendation—no benchmark, no starting line.

An assessment — incomplete or elegant — takes a moving set of behaviors and turns them into a point-in-time identity. The result becomes easier to understand and act upon, even if the behavior underneath it may be more conditional than the number suggests.

As a result, my interest shifted away from whether 68.2% was flattering, disappointing, or oddly specific.

The more interesting development is that there is now an AI-first score to receive in the first place. AI has entered the report-card phase.

(Side note: I recognize that there are likely others; they just haven’t hit my feed yet, and I admittedly am a fan of Allie).

We have moved beyond asking whether people have tried it. Increasingly, we are asking what kind of AI user they are, how advanced they are, what they should do next, and are asking each other, “What prompts do you use? When? For what purpose?” and, my favorite…

“Can you send me your prompts?”

(Another side note: just sit with that sentence for a bit. Did you ever imagine that in less than 5 years, we’d be asking for each other’s prompts? That there’s going to be a whole generation of folks that are/will be born with prompts as a default? Fascinating.)

A similar instinct is appearing around organizations through maturity models, capability maps, adoption measures, workflow inventories, training completions, and collections of success stories.

I.e., individual fluency and organizational maturity are not interchangeable. An individual assessment can focus on habits, skills, judgment, and repeatability. An organizational assessment, on the other hand, has to account for funding, governance, technology, workflows, incentives, and outcomes distributed across a system.

Still, the arrival of assessments, archetypes, academies, certifications, and development pathways suggests that AI is moving beyond informal experimentation. Or perhaps the market forming around the desire to become AI-mature is moving faster than maturity itself.

I am not sure the two can be separated yet.

The scorecard may tell us something about the capability. It certainly tells us that AI-firstness is becoming an identity that individuals and organizations may feel expected to demonstrate. And it’s not the first time we have seen or felt this way.

We have been “first” before

The phrase “AI-first” sounded familiar the first time I heard it.

I have lived through digital-first, mobile-first, cloud-first, data-first, and several related declarations that a new capability needed to move from the edge of the business to its center.

At one point, I briefly imagined earlier versions of the same idea:

• Are you computer-first, or do you still begin every important document on paper or a typewriter?

• Is your transportation strategy automobile-first, or are you over-indexing on the horse?

The comparisons are imperfect (but fun). They are also a reminder that technologies which eventually become ordinary often pass through a period when just using them is treated as a distinguishing characteristic.

I posit that “First” language tends to appear when a capability is important but not yet natural. It reverses the inherited default:

• Mobile-first asked companies to stop treating the desktop experience as the real product and mobile as a smaller version added later.

• Digital-first challenged organizations to reconsider analog processes rather than placing a screen in front of them.

AI-first appears to be serving a similar purpose:

Do not begin with the inherited workflow and ask where AI can be inserted. Instead, reconsider what the work could become now that AI is available.

That can be useful inside organizations with established routines: existing incentives, decision rights, and operating rhythms tend to reproduce the current workflow. A strong phrase can interrupt the pattern long enough to create room for experimentation, investment, and redesign.

In that sense, AI-first may be less a destination than a transitional management technology. It directs attention, shifts resources, creates expectations, and challenges the assumption that yesterday’s process should remain the starting point. It’s a phrase that can be catalytic.

It can also turn a capability into an identity, and the identity into a test of competence, organizational innovation, or cultural change:

• Are you AI-first enough?

• How many use cases do you have?

• How many employees are trained?

• How much time have you saved?

Those measures can show whether experimentation is spreading. The risk, however, begins when they become the primary evidence of progress (versus the value created):

• Did the decision improve? How?

• Did the customer receive more value? By how much?

• Did the organization stop doing anything? Are we tracking this?

• What happened to the time that was saved? And how often do we check?

A company can become more AI-active without becoming more AI-integrated. In other words, people can also learn to perform the visible behaviors of AI-firstness without materially improving the value created.

The organizational test I did not take

Allie also offers an organizational assessment. I was curious, but alas, I stopped short of taking it simply because I think scoring (viewing, assessing, etc.) an organization from one seat can create the illusion of enterprise knowledge that no individual really possesses.

As I wrote recently, AI destabilizes functional identity:

• A technology leader may see architecture, security, integration, and platform readiness.

• Finance may see funding discipline and whether promised value is appearing in the economics.

• A commercial leader may see customer use cases and field adoption.

• HR may see capability building, role design, and managerial readiness.

• Legal may see risks others underestimate.

• Frontline employees may know whether the tools are helping or merely adding another expectation to the day.

The same company could plausibly receive very different scores depending on who answers. Yet, the variance may be more informative than a single composite number.

Perhaps the first problem with an organizational AI-first score is deciding who is qualified to answer on behalf of the organization. A more revealing assessment might ask people across functions, levels, and workflows to complete it independently. The gaps between their answers could expose where ambition, capability, governance, and lived experience are misaligned:

• The executive team may believe the organization is scaling.

• The frontline may believe it is experimenting.

• Technology may believe the foundation is immature.

• Finance may believe the costs are more visible than the returns.

All of them may be accurately describing the part they can see because measurement can surface differences that vague aspiration allows people to avoid. It can also compress those differences into a number that looks more conclusive than the underlying system deserves.

Besides, organizations rarely move through maturity stages in a linear sequence anyway. A company may be experimenting, scaling, retreating, standardizing, and declaring victory at the same time, depending on the function or workflow.

One score has trouble holding all of that.

From success stories to value

I’d offer that organizations need visible examples to make change feel possible. Early AI success stories tend to be workflow-based: time saved, steps removed, drafts accelerated, summaries generated, content created, or repetitive work automated.

And that’s ok…for now. They make the technology concrete and create permission to experiment. But, again, workflow improvement is not automatically value creation:

• A faster process may still produce an unnecessary output.

• A shorter meeting may simply create room for another meeting.

• More content may increase volume without improving relevance.

• An automated task may be efficient and still sit inside a workflow that should have been redesigned rather than accelerated.

And yet still, the report-card phase may encourage companies to document more of these examples, which is probably healthy. Naming what changed is better than relying on broad statements about transformation.

Eventually, though, and as I’ve argued before, the workflow story has to connect to the contribution story.

So, what comes after AI-first?

I am glad I took the assessment.

The “Curious Tinkerer” label was recognizable, and the development suggestion was practical. I should turn more experiments into repeatable methods and workflows that do not depend entirely on my presence.

But the score also pulled on another thread: an AI-first assessment may be most useful as a prompt to consider the next transition rather than as a permanent declaration of identity.

For me, that means less tinkering for its own sake and more discipline around what should become repeatable, what should remain situational, and when AI is simply not the right answer.

A team faces a different challenge: turning scattered individual habits into shared practices without standardizing away useful judgment.

An organization may still be trying to distinguish visible activity from integration, and integration from value. Different parts of the same company may be in all three places at once.

Eventually, some capabilities become ordinary.

A genuinely digital organization does not need to remind everyone that computers are permitted. A mature mobile experience does not announce itself as mobile-first. The capability becomes part of how the work is designed.

Perhaps the same will eventually be true of AI.

Perhaps not everywhere, and perhaps not cleanly.

Some organizations may keep performing AI-firstness long after AI has become ordinary. Others may abandon the language before the underlying work changes much. And in other cases, the phrase may remain commercially useful even after it becomes operationally vague.

The report cards may help while the capability remains difficult to see, describe, and develop. But if integration deepens, the phrase may begin to feel less necessary.

In the end, perhaps the point of becoming AI-first is to stop needing to say that you are.

Simple, not easy.

• Part 1: How We Create Value vs. How We Recognize It

• Part 2: What Counts as Contribution Now?

• Part 3: Making Contribution Legible

In part 2, I specifically argued that what counts as “contribution” was already blurry before AI.

Fast forward a few months to when I spent four days at Gartner’s marketing conference in Denver, where the dominant topic was exactly what you’d expect.

AI.

The conference floor had all the usual ingredients: tools, bundles, demos, maturity curves, roadmap language, capability maps, and plenty of confident talk about transformation arriving just after the next procurement cycle. (I like that line; it harkens back to my days as an Acquisitions Officer… but I digress).

Some of it was useful. Some of it was familiar. Some of it sounded, to my ear, like productivity with better packaging.

I do not mean that dismissively. Productivity & speed matter. Better access to information matters. I.e., the ability to generate, summarize, analyze, personalize, prototype, and experiment faster is not a small thing.

Unfortunately, one of the odd side effects of overblown AI language is that it can make the practical benefits sound smaller than they are. Still, the conversations that stuck with me were not really about the tools.

They were about the organization and the new connections that would need to be created in the system. Not in the vague “future of work” sense, where everything becomes important enough to become meaningless. I mean the practical operational questions that arise as soon as a large company tries to move from AI interest to AI integration:

1. Who owns the decisions?

2. Who pays for the experimentation, integration, capability building, and change management?

3. Where should AI support judgment, and where should human judgment remain more intentionally in the lead?

4. How do sales, marketing, technology, finance, data, customer experience, legal, HR, and performance management stop treating AI as an adjacent conversation?

And, underneath all of that, what does being in your “function” actually mean for contribution once AI enters the system?

That last question is the one I have been wrestling with for a while now.

Because AI does not just make work faster—it destabilizes functional identity.

And by functional identity, I mean the inherited assumptions about what a function uniquely owns, why it has authority, and how it proves its contribution to the business outcomes.

That may sound a bit dramatic, especially inside large companies where functions are not going away anytime soon. Marketing, Sales, and Finance will still exist. Technology, legal, HR, data, operations, supply chain, customer experience, and strategy will still exist.

I don’t think AI is a eulogy for the functional org chart. Then again…could it be?

Let’s dig in.

What is your function?

For a long time, functions have been able to define their value through proximity to certain kinds of work. Marketing owned the customer language, the brand system, the content engine, and the demand conversation. Sales owned the customer conversation, the account reality, the field signal, and the conversion of strategy into commercial action. Finance owned the economic model, the forecast, the investment discipline, and the performance story. Technology owned the architecture, systems, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and technical enablement. HR owned roles, capabilities, incentives, and talent systems. Legal and compliance owned risks, standards, obligations, and guardrails.

Those descriptions are incomplete, of course. Every function does more than what fits in the shorthand job descriptions. But the shorthand matters because organizations rely on it when deciding who gets invited to the meeting, who has decision rights, who receives funding, and who is presumed to have authority to interpret the problem.

AI now makes some of that shorthand less stable, and the lines considerably blurrier.

Meaning that when a marketer can generate a first-pass research synthesis in minutes, when a finance leader can interrogate customer behavior more directly, when a strategist can prototype a communication plan, when a technologist can draft a business case, when a commercial team can create content variants, and when almost anyone can produce a halfway decent first draft of almost anything, the old borders become harder to defend by assertion alone.

This is where some of the enterprise AI conversation becomes a tad too squishy for how my brain works.

We talk about augmentation, productivity, experimentation, and responsible adoption. Those are all useful words. But within the actual lived-in “messy” enterprise, AI also reveals an older organizational tension: functions are not merely collections of expertise. They are also territories of identity, influence, budget, status, and control.

That does not make them bad. It makes them human.

And if AI changes who can do the work, how quickly the work can be done, and how much of the work can be generated before a traditional functional expert gets involved, then each function has to answer a more demanding question:

“What do we make better in a way that would be meaningfully weaker without us?”

• For marketing, the answer cannot only be more content, faster campaigns, or greater-scale personalization. It should also be sharper customer understanding, stronger judgment about what should and should not be personalized, clearer demand choices, better brand standards, and a deeper ability to connect market behavior with business strategy.

• For finance, it can’t simply be tighter control over spending or another layer of approval around AI investment. It should enable a more honest economic model for value creation, better allocation discipline, clearer productivity assumptions, and the ability to distinguish measurable enterprise value.

• For sales, the answer should not be only more automated outreach, faster account summaries, or an AI-generated CRM. It should be sharper customer sensing, better prioritization, stronger account strategy, cleaner feedback loops from the field, and a more disciplined connection between customer conversations and enterprise choices.

• For technology, it should not be limited to platform ownership or vendor governance. It should be the architecture, reliability, security, interoperability, and technical judgment required to make AI usable beyond isolated experimentation.

• For HR, it should not be another training curriculum. It should be the redesign of roles, incentives, learning systems, talent pathways, and managerial expectations so people are not asked to “adopt AI” while still being measured against yesterday’s job design.

• Legal and compliance have their own version of the same test. Their contribution is not merely saying no with better documentation. It should help the organization better understand risk so it can move with confidence, rather than either freezing or pretending the uncertainty does not exist.

Every function has a legitimate claim. But this is when it gets more problematic…

When Every Function Has a Claim

One common enterprise instinct is to solve ambiguity by assigning ownership. When something matters, we want a name, a box, a leader, a governance body, a dashboard, and a standing meeting. Taken at face value, that usually helps. A company without clear ownership can drift forever in the pleasant fog of collective interest.

But AI is awkward because it cuts across the enterprise too thoroughly to belong cleanly to one function.

• The CIO has a claim because architecture, security, infrastructure, data access, vendor standards, and technical reliability matter.

• The CFO has a claim because investment discipline, funding models, productivity assumptions, value capture, and performance measurement matter.

• The CMO has a claim because customer understanding, content systems, demand generation, personalization, and experience design matter.

• The Chief Commercial Officer has a claim because customer relationships, field execution, channel behavior, pipeline quality, account prioritization, and commercial adoption matter.

• The CHRO has a claim because capability, adoption, role design, leadership behavior, and workforce transition matter.

• Legal, compliance, privacy, and risk leaders have a claim because the costs of getting certain things wrong are not theoretical.

• The COO (or all operations) has a claim because AI that never reaches the workflow is often just an expensive demonstration of possibility.

The problem is that all of them are right.

But this is where I also become skeptical of the reflex to hire a Chief AI Officer or create another executive title to sit above the mess. There may be contexts where that makes sense. Highly technical businesses, regulated environments, fragmented governance, or organizations with no natural integrator may need a more explicit AI leadership role.

But in many companies, a new title can become a clean-looking answer to a problem that is anything but. It may even make the problem worse if the title becomes a substitute for the harder integration work.

If the real challenge is cross-functional integration, then creating a new function focused on AI can become another boundary to manage. It can give the organization the comfort of saying “someone owns AI” while leaving the more uncomfortable questions untouched.

• Who changes the workflow?

• Who gives up budget?

• Who absorbs the transition cost?

• Who owns and manages the notoriously irregular operating costs?

• Who changes incentives?

• Who decides whether the productivity gain becomes margin, reinvestment, faster learning, better customer experience, or simply more work?

A title cannot resolve those questions on its own. In fact, the title can become a hiding place, or worse, a scapegoat.

The better question may not be who owns AI. It may be who integrates the competing claims when every function sees a different part of the truth.

This is where the Chief Strategy Officer, or the strategy function more broadly, may have a more important role than many organizations initially assume.

I say that with some self-awareness. I work in strategy, so there is an obvious risk of sounding as if I have conveniently discovered that the answer is close to my desk.

That is not the argument. The argument is not that strategy should own AI. Nor is it that every company should avoid appointing a Head of AI or Chief AI Officer under all circumstances. Organizational context matters too much to make any universal claim.

The argument is that enterprise AI integration needs a mechanism for coherence.

At its best, that is strategic integration work. In some companies, the formal strategy function may be well-positioned to facilitate it. In others, the same work may sit elsewhere.

The important thing is not the departmental label; the question is whether the integration work is actually being done, measured, and adaptable.

Strategy as Integration

Strategy as integration is different from strategy as a deck factory. It is different from the annual planning theater. It is different from a clever narrative superimposed on decisions already made.

It is the discipline of choosing where the company is headed, what must change to get there, which capabilities matter most, which trade-offs are unavoidable, and how the organization learns when reality refuses to follow the plan. (See also: “Where to Play and How to Win”).

That kind of strategy work does not replace the CIO, CFO, CMO, CHRO, legal, data, or operations leaders. It needs them. It should respect the depth of their domains.

But it can help prevent AI from becoming a set of functional or fractured subplots, each operating in siloes:

• Marketing builds an AI content engine.

• Sales builds an AI-enabled account planning process.

• Technology builds a platform roadmap.

• Finance builds an ROI model.

• HR builds a training curriculum.

• Legal builds a governance process.

• Data builds standards.

• Operations runs pilots.

Each activity may be reasonable. Each may even be well managed. And still, the enterprise may not have changed very much—the work becomes faster without becoming better.

The company generates more ideas without improving its choices, teams create more content without becoming more relevant, and leaders review more dashboards without making stronger decisions. And perhaps most importantly, employees can save time without anyone agreeing on what the time saved is for.

A great deal of AI enthusiasm rests on productivity. But time saved is not automatically value created. It depends on where the time goes, which decisions improve, which work stops, which work becomes possible, and whether the organization has the discipline to capture the benefit rather than simply filling the space with more activity.

In my mind, this is one reason AI creates such an interesting contribution problem.

If an AI system can produce ten decent options, the scarce skill is not producing the eleventh. It is knowing which option deserves attention, which should be discarded, which is merely plausible, which is on-strategy, which is off-brand, which solves the wrong problem elegantly, and which introduces risk that the organization does not yet understand.

Human Judgment Is Not a Checkbox

The phrase “human in the loop” is often used in AI conversations and is directionally helpful. But I sometimes wonder whether it lets us off too easily. A human in the loop can mean careful judgment, accountability, interpretation, and ethical responsibility. It can also mean a person checking a box in a workflow that was never redesigned in the first place.

The point here is not to keep humans symbolically present. The point is to understand where human judgment changes the quality of the outcome and creates incremental value.

That requires functions to examine themselves with more precision. Where are we adding judgment, context, standards, and trust? Where are we improving decisions? Where are we deepening our understanding of customers—are we improving our customers’ experiences? Where are we helping the organization allocate resources more wisely? And where, if we are honest, are we mostly protecting our historical proximity to the work?

Those are not comfortable questions. They are also not indictments. Every function has accumulated work that made sense at one point and now persists because the system knows how to keep doing it. AI did not create that problem.

This is why I believe that the conversation about ownership and funding matters so much:

• Ownership determines who gets to shape the work.

• Funding determines what the organization is actually willing to change.

• Contribution determines whether the work deserves to exist in its current form.

If AI is treated only as a technology investment, the organization may underweight adoption, behavior, incentives, and workflow redesign. If it is treated only as a finance exercise, the organization may over-focus on cost takeout and under-invest in learning, customer relevance, or capability building. If it is treated only as a marketing opportunity, the organization may generate more demand activity without resolving data, governance, measurement, or economics. If it is treated only as a talent initiative, the organization may over-index on training and underweight decision rights, systems, and the actual redesign of work.

None of those functions is wrong—each is simply…incomplete.

Net, I’d argue that the enterprise question is how to hold the incompleteness long enough to design something better.

Closing Thoughts

The best conversations I had in Denver were not with people pretending they had the whole thing figured out. They were with colleagues and practitioners trying to make sense of what they were hearing in real time. Comparing notes. Challenging assumptions. Asking what would actually work within a company with a history, incentives, systems, constraints, personalities, governance, and customers who do not care how elegant the internal operating model looks.

Most large organizations are not blank sheets of paper waiting for the future. They are living systems with inherited structures, embedded routines, and functions that have learned how to survive, deliver, defend, translate, and matter.

AI enters that system… and the system reacts to it like any other symbiotic organism: what. is. this.

So the work is not just to ask, “How do we use AI?” The work is to ask what AI reveals about the company. Where are the boundaries useful? Where are they performative? Where does functional expertise improve the outcome? Where does functional ownership slow the learning? Where are we funding ambition without funding the conditions that make ambition real? Where are we using the language of transformation to avoid the discomfort of reallocation?

And where are we asking people to adopt new tools while leaving the old measures of contribution untouched?

That may be the part leaders need to sit with before demanding “more AI” or making declarative statements about being “AI-first”.

I’d argue that the more AI compresses production, the weaker production alone becomes as a basis for functional authority. That does not make expertise less important. It makes it easier to test the quality of that expertise.

It may also reveal that some functions were adding more value than the rest of the enterprise understood. It may reveal that others were relying too heavily on ownership of activity as a substitute for contribution.

Most likely, it will do several of those things at once.

That is why I keep coming back to the functional identity question: functions may need to become more explicit about why they remain essential… but perhaps in a new form. A new operating model.

And finally, I don’t think that every company needs to make Strategy the owner of AI. Nor do I think that every company should rush to hire a Chief AI Officer or Head of AI and assume the integration problem has been solved.

In some cases, that role may help. In others, it may create another boundary around work that already suffers from too many boundaries.

The whole point is that AI integration will likely expose whether the enterprise has any real mechanism for resolving cross-functional tension when everyone is partly right.

That mechanism might sit with strategy. It might sit with a transformation office. It might sit with an enterprise AI council that has real decision rights rather than ceremonial alignment. It might sit with a CEO willing to demand clarity. It might take different forms depending on the company.

But it has to exist.

Because as ideas become more abundant and execution gets compressed, functions become less able to justify themselves by proximity to work alone.

They have to explain what they make better, what they are willing to fund, what they should own, what they should enable, what they should stop protecting, and where they are prepared to let the work change.

All in service to better outcomes.

Simple, not easy.

Additional references that informed this piece:

Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey supports the “investment ahead of readiness” point: CMOs are allocating an average of 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI, while only 30% report mature or fully developed AI readiness; Gartner also notes the risk of investing in tools faster than building data foundations, processes, governance, and talent.

Gartner’s Chief AI Officer guidance supports the skepticism toward rushing into a new C-suite title. It argues AI needs leadership, orchestration, and multidisciplinary governance, but does not necessarily justify a dedicated C-suite position.

McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI survey supports the operating-model argument: organizations are redesigning workflows, elevating governance, and assigning senior leaders to AI governance, but many still have not seen enterprise-wide bottom-line impact.

Deloitte’s CSO framing supports the strategy-as-integrator angle, particularly its view that CSOs connect AI activity to strategic objectives, cost/ROI, collective business value, and CxO alignment.

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I have been asked some version of it in interviews, development conversations, talent reviews, reference requests, coaching settings, and the occasional networking conversation where someone wants to skip the pleasantries and signal that we are now in “serious territory”.

Usually, the question arrives with a certain familiar tone, almost as if everyone involved already knows what kind of answer is supposed to come next. And yet, every time, some version of the same reaction rises in me.

Ugh.

Or, if you prefer a more descriptive word: resistance.

I get the ick, not because I think I am above development, nor because I lack flaws (far from it). And most assuredly not because I believe self-awareness is optional. What I resist is the question itself.

The question sounds rigorous and like the sort of thing leaders and thoughtful interviewers are supposed to ask. But the more I’ve examined it and the resultant answers over time, the more I believe that asking for one weakness is less evidence of developmental rigor than people assume.

The question often assumes, or at least steers the conversation toward the assumption, that strengths and weaknesses are discrete, portable traits.

In other words, the question implies that a person can reach into themselves, pull out one cleanly bounded deficiency, label it accurately, and hand it over as evidence of self-knowledge. Maybe sometimes people can do something close to that. More often, however, I suspect that they are producing a socially acceptable answer to a familiar script.

I don’t believe that people have neatly isolated strengths over here and neatly isolated weaknesses over there, all sitting outside of context waiting to be cataloged. I believe people have behavioral tendencies. They have recurring instincts, preferred ways of operating, familiar patterns under pressure, and certain moves they reach for faster than others. And those tendencies can create enormous value in one context and inhibit — sometimes destroy — value in another.

I.e., the same reflex that makes someone effective with one team under one set of conditions can make them distinctly less effective elsewhere, for example:

• A person may be decisive in a crisis and bulldozing in a collaborative process.

• A person may be deeply reflective in strategy work and frustratingly slow in fast-moving execution.

• A person may be empathic and trust-building in one environment, then conflict-avoidant and too indirect in another.

• A person’s high standards can look like excellence (detail-oriented) in one moment and like exhaustion (micromanagement) in the next.

• A person can naturally display confidence, which can create steadiness here and, under a different setting, hubris there.

And so on…

So when someone asks me to name one weakness, my instinct is almost always to ask a different question back: Under what context?

I wrote about this many years ago and then covered it in more depth in my first book, Big Things Fast, as “strengths and shadows”.

The shadow side of a strength is what shows up when a useful tendency gets overused, misapplied, or carried too far into the wrong environment. The problem is not always the tendency itself. The problem is often its rigidity, its overextension, or its lack of fit.

This is why I am skeptical of the traditional strengths-versus-weaknesses framing. It may be a convenient shorthand, but it often flattens a more useful perspective: that much of what gets labeled a weakness is actually an overused strength, a context-misaligned tendency, or an adaptive behavior that no longer fits the moment.

That strikes me as a much better place to start versus a tidy — and often contrived — pseudo-confession.

It is also why the “one weakness” question can create a false sense of developmental rigor. It rewards people who can narrate themselves neatly and privileges clean self-description over pattern recognition. It sounds like rigor while reducing the person into something more compartmentalized than they really are. What gets praised in those moments is not actual self-awareness so much as the ability to package self-awareness.

Again, I am not arguing for softer development. If anything, I am arguing for development that is harder, more accurate, and less satisfied with reduction.

Net, if the “weakness” question is not especially useful on its own, the more important question becomes what should replace it. That is, what should leaders, interviewers, mentors, coaches, and reflective professionals ask instead if they actually want a more accurate picture of development?

Equally important, how would you answer the question? Would you answer it differently in a different context?

See what I did there?

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What stayed with me, and prompted this essay, was the way the room kept getting smarter as the day went on. That does not always happen in corporate settings. A lot of gatherings peak early and then taper off. People present, others listen politely, a few comments are offered, and everyone leaves with some version of that was useful before the rest of the week closes over it.

This felt different.

Part of that was the quality of the presenters. Part of it was the credibility of the sponsorship. But a large part of it, I think, came from the design of the session itself. The group was given a focused stimulus, then moved into smaller breakout sessions where people could test, challenge, and extend what they had just heard. Then, when they returned to the larger room to integrate the first two parts, the conversation had more shape. Some of the ideas had already been worked through socially before they were brought back into the open. But the conversation really took off as people riffed off each other’s energy and posed provocative questions, under the pre-established guardrail of “psychological safety.”

By the end of the session, it no longer felt like a series of one-way presentations. It felt like the entire room had been doing real work on the ideas together. I.e., less brainstorming (that happened pre-symposium) and more co-creation and debate.

Later that day I was talking with one of our early-career marketers and presenter/idea champions. She had landed on, and expertly delivered, an elegant insight for one of our brands, one of those articulations that feels obvious only after someone has already done the hard work of making it simple. It was witty, clear, and immediate. You understood it quickly. More importantly, you felt why it worked quickly.

At one point, our conversation turned to sports marketing, a tactic that had elevated the insight and was working for her brand and in her region. Now, I am not going to make a general case for sports marketing here. Plenty has already been written on that. What interested me more was the hypothesis that began forming in my own mind as we talked. I offered that I thought sports may be one of the clearest remaining examples of what I would call euphoric focus.

By that, I do not mean happiness in some vague sense. I mean a concentrated, emotionally heightened, socially reinforced state of attention in which people are unusually available to what enters the moment. They are not casually watching. They are invested. They are gathered, physically or virtually, with others who are invested as well. Their emotional salience is high, their identity is active, and the event is more likely to shape what they notice and remember. Research in psychology and neuroscience supports the broader mechanism here: emotion influences attention and memory, and emotionally salient stimuli tend to receive attentional priority over neutral ones.

So, what does that have to do with leadership? Let’s connect some dots.

First, the backdrop.

When you strip it down, live sport is a strange and powerful human ritual. Adults are watching other adults throw a ball, swing a club, skate across ice, hit a racket, tackle one another, chase fractions of a second, or execute movements that, in another context, are simply games. And yet no one who has ever sat through a game-winning drive, extra innings, penalty kicks, or a final putt on Sunday afternoon would describe the emotional experience as neutral.

The attention is too concentrated for that: the feelings are real, the identity markers are alive, and the social reinforcement is strong.

That may be one reason sports marketing can be so sticky. It doesn’t just appear in front of people. It shows up inside a moment when people are already highly available to meaning, memory, symbolism, and association. Research on sports sponsorship points in a similar direction: fan identification, perceived congruence, and sponsor attitudes all shape purchase intention, suggesting that the effectiveness of sports sponsorship depends not just on reach but on the relationship between identity, affiliation, and the sponsoring brand.

That, however, does not make the effect automatic: execution, fit, and congruence still matter. In fact, some of the same literature suggests that strong fan identification can turn against a sponsor when the association is misaligned or tied to a rival identity. I.e., Emotional intensity cuts both ways—something to keep in mind the next time you design a meeting or workshop.

Now, back to the symposium.

At first I thought I had simply walked out of a good symposium and into a good marketing conversation. It took me a little while to realize that both were pointing to something perhaps connected, something similar.

To be clear, I do not mean that a martech symposium is the same thing as a live sporting event. It obviously is not. But both, in very different ways, created a heightened state of collective receptivity. In one case, that receptivity came through ritual, suspense, identity, and emotional overinvestment. In the other, it came through focused stimulus, intellectual challenge, small-group processing, and well-designed participation. The mechanisms were different, but the underlying human pattern may not have been.

I guess what I’m arguing is that in both cases, the audience was not just present; it was more available than usual. That distinction is what I’m trying to draw out, especially in leadership and transformation work, because many organizations still confuse exposure with receptivity.

They assume that if the message is clear enough, repeated enough, sponsored by the right executive (or keynote speaker), and distributed through enough slides, town halls, dashboards, cascades, and talking points, then it will eventually take hold. If it does not, then the reflex is to assume that people did not hear it enough, did not understand it well enough, or were not tightly aligned with it.

Sometimes the evidence would say that is true. Often, however, it is not.

Often the message was heard just fine. It simply entered a mindset, a room, a week, or a culture that was not especially receptive to it. That, to me, is a different diagnosis.

A bridge to broader implications.

Misdiagnosis of audience receptivity is one (of many) reasons many transformation efforts feel weaker than their intent.

In other words, leaders often assume they have a communication problem when what they may actually have is a receptivity problem. So they work harder on the storyline, the deck, the launch plan, the change management plan, the FAQ, the talking points, the one-pager, the visual identity, the script, etc. And while none of those things is unimportant, the quality of the message and the quality of the story matters.

But if the human beings receiving it are cognitively fragmented, emotionally detached, socially disengaged, or structurally excluded from engaging with it, then even well-executed communication can remain paradoxically inert.

That, I realized later, is why the symposium stayed with me.

What made it work was not only that the ideas were good. It was that the room had been structured so people could actually work with those ideas. They could hear them, test them, reshape them, and return with something better. The format allowed meaning to be built socially before it was ever asked to scale institutionally.

That is a different kind of meeting. It is also, I posit, closer to how real transformation takes hold: i.e., transformations are more likely to take hold when attention, emotion, participation, and meaning converge in the same moment.

Please note that I am making an inference here, not claiming a settled law. But it is an inference grounded in both lived organizational experience and a broader body of evidence showing that emotion and attentional salience shape what people notice and remember.

That is the part I think leadership teams sometimes miss.

Sports works as a marketing environment because people are already deeply in the moment. Their attention is concentrated, and emotions are activated. Their social identity is engaged. Their memory is being shaped by uncertainty, ritual, and shared experience.

Most enterprise change efforts, by contrast, are introduced into conditions of fractured attention, ambient fatigue, and partial presence. People are multitasking, context-switching, trying to survive the week, and carrying pressure from five other “#1” priorities…

No wonder leaders often ponder why a carefully crafted message did not land with the force they imagined. The words were delivered. But maybe the room wasn’t quite ready for them. To me, that changes the leadership question and is a more demanding standard. It asks leaders to think less like broadcasters and a bit more like designers of receptivity.

• What kind of attention does this room actually have right now?

• What emotional state are people in?

• What social dynamics are active?

• Are they simply being informed, or are they being invited to work with the idea?

• Have we created a format for interpretation and contribution, or only for exposure?

• Are we trying to drive change through passive attendance and then calling it alignment?

Those feel like better questions to me. (Pre-mortem anyone?) They are also more difficult than polishing the deck one more time or tightening the script one more round.

Closing reflections.

The more I sit with all of this, the more I think sports marketing may have stumbled upon something that many leadership teams still underweight. Breakthrough is not only about visibility. It often depends on entering moments of unusual openness. That is why the same brand message can feel forgettable in one setting and memorable in another. The creative may be identical, but the human conditions are not.

I think the same can be true of leadership messages.

Some messages land because they are clever and timely. Some because they are repeated often enough. But the ones that seem to take hold most deeply often arrive when the human system is open enough to do something with them, not just hear them, but discuss them, test them, extend them, and make sense of them together.

That is what I think I witnessed in the symposium. And it is why the conversation about sports marketing stayed with me afterward.

Euphoric focus may be one of the clearest large-scale examples of concentrated human receptivity that we still see. Leaders should be careful not to romanticize it or imitate it too literally. But I do think there is something useful to learn from it.

In my early days as a brand marketer, I had Maya Angelou’s quote printed out and would read it before evaluating creative. I’ve carried that quote with me ever since, both figuratively and literally, as I wrote my first book, Big Things Fast, and each time I’ve had to face the challenge of communicating change. So it makes sense that it surfaces here again.

It has stood the test of time. And in concluding reflection, I think I’ve adapted it for this essay in a slightly different direction: people rarely change just because they were reached; they are more likely to change when, for a moment, they are receptive enough to work with what they have heard.

And that may be the better question for leaders to ask. Not simply, did they hear it? But were they ever in a condition to really receive it?

Simple, not easy.

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The same thing happens when I hear calls for more resilience.

It is not because I think perseverance has no value, or because I believe people should be shielded from difficulty, pressure, or the need to recover. Quite the opposite. I’ve long advocated that leadership, by definition, asks a great deal of people (whether by choice or circumstance). Teams will face setbacks. Plans will break. Markets will move. People will disappoint each other. Unexpected conditions will force changes that no one wanted and few feel ready for. None of that is avoidable.

My issue has less to do with the underlying ideas than with the way the words are often used.

When leaders ask for more grit or resilience, the language can sound serious, even noble, yet remain underdeveloped, shall we say. I.e., it can create the impression of depth without offering much developmental clarity; it compels me to ask, what exactly is being asked of the team (or individual)?

• More endurance?

• More emotional control?

• More willingness to absorb stress without complaint?

• More stamina in a poorly designed system?

• More recovery after repeated shocks?

Sometimes the answer is yes to some of those things. But the question itself is often left unexamined. That is where my resistance begins. Because if a capability matters, I want to know whether it can be taught. Then…

• If it can be taught, I want to know whether it can be practiced. Then…

• If it can be practiced, I want to know whether it can be reinforced often enough to become part of how a person actually operates.

If I hold the words against that standard (taught, practiced, reinforced), then my relationship to them changes.

Now, to be fair, grit and resilience are still useful ideas. In organizational life, though, they often do not strike me as especially useful instructions.

And that is part of why I keep coming back to adaptability; not because it is trendier, sounds softer, or is somehow free of the same risks. It is not. After all, any leadership term can become vague enough to be admired and broad enough to be useless.

Adaptability can absolutely fall into that trap if it stays abstract. A leader can say, “We need to be more adaptable,” and mean little more than “deal with it.” So I am not trying to replace one empty virtue word with another.

I am trying to get underneath all three and ask a different question: what can actually be taught?

That’s the question that has been sitting with me for a while, and I think it is part of why the second book Marcus and I are writing on adaptive leadership is taking the shape it has. It is not becoming a purely theoretical treatment of adaptive systems, or a long meditation on why adaptability matters in the abstract.

Like our first book, our new book is becoming much more of a manual. More practical. More procedural. More concerned with steps, disciplines, and how to build the thing rather than merely describing it.

And, equally important, the more I sit with that choice, the more it feels right. Why? Because I have grown increasingly skeptical of leadership language that asks people to possess a quality without showing them how to develop it.

Let’s dive in.

The Difference Between Admiration and Instruction

There are some concepts leaders use that are valuable mainly because they name something worthy of the honor they confer. Courage can function that way. Integrity can function that way. Humility can too. They matter, and it is useful to name them, but naming them does not automatically make them teachable in a clean, linear way.

In organizational life, grit and resilience often get used in a similar register. They function as a form of praise for people or teams who can endure difficulty, recover from adversity, or persist with a challenge over time. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In many contexts, those capacities matter a great deal.

But admiration and instruction are not the same thing.

A leader may admire a team's resilience and still have no meaningful way to help the team become more resilient. A company may celebrate grit in its highest performers and still have no idea whether it is developing grit, selecting for it, exploiting it, or merely rewarding the people who have learned to endure dysfunction more than others.

When a team is told it needs more resilience, the message can easily become moral rather than developmental. The implication is that the deficiency sits inside the individual or the team. The demand lands first; then the mechanism arrives, if it arrives at all. In some organizations, it never does. The word becomes a way of asking people to absorb strain while the system remains comfortably uninterrogated.

That is one of the reasons I react to it.

Grit can be used the same way. It can sound like a call for perseverance when, in reality, people are being asked to carry ambiguity, overload, or inconsistency without sufficient support, structure, or developmental guidance. Again, that does not make grit a meaningless concept. It just means the word is too often asked to do a plan's work. It’s suboptimized leadership words hiding in plain sight.

And words are not plans…

• If I tell a team to have more grit, what have I actually taught them?

• If I tell a leader to be more resilient, what have I actually given them to practice?

Those questions may sound almost annoyingly literal, but I have come to think they are among the most important in leadership development. We spend a lot of time praising the right qualities and not nearly enough time distinguishing between what sounds admirable and what can be built.

Why Adaptability Feels Different

This is where adaptability begins to feel more useful to me. It is not perfect or self-explanatory, but it does strike me as more practical.

The main reason is that adaptability lends itself more naturally to behavior. It does not sit in my mind as a trait that one either possesses or lacks. It feels more like a spectrum of response.

It starts to move from identity into practice.

Adaptability, at least as I think about it, is not simply toughness under pressure. It is not the same thing as stoicism. It is not passive tolerance. It is not “figure it out” stripped of support and thrown over the fence to a team. It is a set of more active moves, more kinetic if you will:

• Noticing what is changing.

• Interpreting what matters.

• Letting go of old assumptions sooner.

• Reframing the problem.

• Adjusting the approach without losing the purpose.

• Remaining responsive rather than purely reactive.

Simply, it’s learning in motion, which, to me, is a different developmental proposition.

A leader can coach someone toward better pattern recognition. A team can practice reframing assumptions before conditions force them to do so. A group can get better at running premortems, pressure-testing plans, noticing weak signals, asking better questions when the facts change, and shifting tactics without treating every change as failure. A manager can create check-ins that ask not only what happened, but what changed, what was learned, and what now needs to be updated.

None of that guarantees adaptability, of course. But it creates pathways into it.

Adaptability can often be operationalized more directly in day-to-day leadership behavior. That does not make it easy. It does make it more teachable. Simple right?

The Watch-Out

Still, I want to be careful here. Adaptability can become just as empty as grit or resilience if it is left at the level of aspiration.

A leader who says, “We need to be more adaptable,” without defining what that means in practice, has not solved the problem. They have just swapped vocabularies. The word may feel more modern, more dynamic, even more sophisticated. But if no one can observe it, practice it, reinforce it, or assess it over time, then it remains little more than a better-dressed abstraction.

This is the trap I do not want to fall into.

If I am going to argue that adaptability is the more useful concept, then I also have to accept the burden that comes with it. I have to be able to say what it looks like. I have to be able to describe how it is strengthened. I have to be able to point to the systems, routines, and reinforcing mechanisms that help it become part of how people and teams actually operate.

Otherwise, I am doing the same thing I claim to dislike—I am naming a virtue, admiring it from a distance, and pretending that language itself counts as development. It does not. What turns a concept into a capability is not the first exposure; it is what happens after.

That is one of the more practical insights Marcus has surfaced repeatedly in his work with clients, and it is one I continue to see as well. Many leaders are open to initial concepts. They will nod along with a workshop. They will agree that adaptability matters. They will often welcome the language and even the first set of tools. Where resistance shows up is later, when the capability starts making demands on real behavior: Follow-up. Check-ins. Practice loops. Repetition. Reflection. The operating discipline that is required to turn a good idea into a changed response. That is where the work becomes less flattering and more developmental.

This is true of almost any capability worth building:

Teaching creates language and awareness. Practice creates behavioral trials. Reinforcement turns isolated trials into patterns.

Over time, those patterns shape beliefs, which in turn alter how people respond under real pressure. That is not a circular argument. It is simply how human development often works. Very little of what matters in leadership arrives fully formed through insight alone.

That is why I have grown suspicious of development efforts that stop at naming or branding. Most of them do not fail because the idea was wrong; they fail because the system never stayed with the idea long enough for it to become practice.

What Can Be Taught

So, I keep coming back to that question because it feels both narrower and more useful than many of the leadership questions we ask: what can be taught? I do not mean what can be admired, demanded, or made to sound strong in a keynote or a strategy offsite. I mean, literally, what can actually be taught? With evidence?

I think adaptability passes that test better than grit and resilience usually do, not because perseverance and recovery are unimportant, but because adaptability gives us a more workable path from concept to behavior.

As I posited before, if a capability can be named behaviorally, it can be practiced. If it can be practiced, it can be reinforced. And if it can be reinforced, it has a much better chance of becoming part of how a person or team operates under pressure. That is a very different proposition from simply telling someone to be tougher, recover faster, or stay in the fight.

Upon deeper reflection, there may also be a subtler ethical question here: when leaders rely too heavily on words like grit and resilience, they may unintentionally shift too much of the burden of adaptation onto the individual.

That message, even when well meant, can become: “absorb more, withstand more, bounce back faster.” Thus, leaving the recipient dejected, confused, aimless, or disengaged/cynical.

I recognize that adaptability does not automatically eliminate that risk, but it gives us a better chance to distribute responsibility more honestly. It allows us to ask not only whether the individual is growing, but also whether the team is practicing the right habits, whether the leader is reinforcing the right behaviors, and whether the operating environment is making thoughtful adaptation more likely or less likely.

That distinction matters to me…

Why the Book Became a Manual

I think that is the deeper point behind all of this. It is also one of the reasons our next book will also feel like a manual rather than a theoretical treatment.

Important to note: there is no shortage of writing explaining why adaptability matters. I (we) believe that there is less writing that helps a leader build it step by step or helps a team embed it into real operating rhythms—meeting them where they are, rather than where we “wish” them to be. I.e., if adaptability is going to become a central leadership capability for the future, then theory will not be enough. Leaders will need handles. They will need practice. They will need ways to diagnose where adaptability is weak, ways to rehearse it, and ways to reinforce it after the first conversation.

In other words, they will need something that can be taught.

To be clear: I do not reject grit; nor do I reject resilience. I understand why those words still hold so much cultural weight. But I do not trust leadership language simply because it sounds serious, and I have grown wary of asking teams for qualities that are easier to praise than to build.

That is why I keep coming back to adaptability. Not as a slogan. Not as a substitute virtue. And certainly not as a cleaner buzzword.

Adaptability is a capability that, when handled with sufficient care and specificity, can provide leaders and teams with something useful to work on. Because adaptive leaders don’t just learn leadership; they run on it.

Simple, not easy.

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For most of my career, I understood this intellectually: publicly traded companies report quarterly (not exactly a hidden feature of the model). There are earnings calls, investor expectations, internal reporting rhythms, monthly reviews, weekly updates, and daily pressure, all cascading toward a date on the calendar that everyone knows is coming. None of that surprised me.

What took me longer to understand was how deeply that clock shapes everything around it.

The quarter shapes more than the narrative presented to the market, or which numbers get elevated and which explanations get polished. In many public companies, it reaches further than that. It shapes decision quality, organizational energy, leadership behavior, emotional tone, and the kinds of trade-offs people start to accept as normal. It reaches into development, into home life, into the way people talk to one another in the last few weeks of a reporting cycle. It even shapes which kinds of leaders look effective and which begin to disappear from view.

For a long time, as a “naturally-inclined-to-drive-change” type person, I resisted that reality more than I understood it.

I kept thinking there had to be a better way to lead inside the machine. Surely with enough effort, enough clarity, enough better prioritization, enough better management, you could soften some of the distortions and pull the system toward a more durable rhythm. To be fair, sometimes you can improve parts of it: you can improve local systems, you can protect your team better, and you can create clearer decision rights, a stronger operating cadence, better handoffs, and more honest conversations.

But that is not the same thing as changing the governing clock, and I believe that distinction matters more than I used to.

Over the past few years, especially as I moved from one industry context into another, I found myself getting increasingly (still?) frustrated by how much of organizational life seemed to bend toward the quarter. Decisions that should have been made for longer-term health were often narrowed by what the next call would require. Reporting discipline, business reviews, monthly check-ins, weekly check-ins, all of it, in one form or another, seemed to serve the same downstream question: what are we going to say about how we performed, and how are we going to explain it?

None of this is especially novel. Anyone who has lived inside a public company long enough has felt some version of it. What felt newer to me was the realization that my frustration was no longer coming from a particular leader, a particular decision, or even a particular company.

At a deeper level, it was coming from the clock itself.

Once I saw that more clearly, something structural shifted in me. I do not mean that I came to agree with it, endorse it, or admire the ways short-horizon incentives can distort otherwise good judgment. What changed was something closer to internal structural clarity. Maybe even a kind of peace, or at least a reduction in unnecessary friction. I stopped trying to fix, with the force of will, what was, in fact, built into the institutional rhythm. I stopped taking every quarterly distortion as a fresh moral injury. I stopped confusing a structural feature of public-company life with a personal failure to lead hard enough, influence well enough, or persuade clearly enough.

This does not make me passive. It makes me, I think, more deliberate.

The Clock

In a public company, the quarter is not just a reporting mechanism. It is a governing clock.

That clock not only tells you when numbers are due. It tells you what kind of time horizon is likely to dominate decision-making when pressure rises. It shapes the ladder of internal cadence below it: quarterly business reviews, monthly updates, weekly reporting, and daily escalations. Even when leaders talk about long-term transformation, durable value creation, or building for the future, the nearer clock remains present. It hums underneath the language; an understood, unbreakable rule. Everyone knows that at some point the story will have to pass through the discipline, compression, and exposure of the next quarter.

There is a rationality to that. Public markets require rhythm. Investors require comparability. Leadership teams require operating discipline. A recurring cadence can create focus, urgency, repeatability, and accountability. In that sense, the quarter is not only a source of distortion. It is also a source of order.

Part of why this system persists is that the quarter does create something real. People often talk about quarterly pressure as though it were only corrosive, but that is reductionist. The quarter also creates predictability. It gives large institutions a metronome. It forces preparation. It creates a shared external date that can organize work and sharpen attention. Even the exhaustion of it can begin to feel strangely legible over time. You know when the compression will come. You know which conversations will intensify. You know that some decisions will be pulled forward, some explanations will be polished, and some trade-offs will be justified in the name of getting through the close.

There is a certain kind of stability in knowing the rhythm, even when the rhythm is unforgiving. But the stabilizing features of the quarter do not erase its costs. They coexist with them.

Once a reporting clock becomes the governing clock, near-term pressures do not simply sit alongside longer-term thinking. They begin to act as a filter. I.e., A decision may still be directionally right for the business over time, but if it complicates the next quarter badly enough, the system will feel the tension immediately. Leaders start learning, consciously or not, which truths can be carried now and which ones must be delayed, softened, sequenced, or reframed. Not always for “performative” reasons. Sometimes, simply because the institution does not have the slack to absorb long-horizon pain while still satisfying the short-horizon demand of the next call.

This is where a lot of corporate frustration begins, especially for thoughtful operators.

The frustration is not merely that the quarter exists. It is that the quarter often compresses the future into a series of reportable present moments. That can make even intelligent organizations behave more tactically than they otherwise might (sometimes at the expense of their end-users and/or stakeholders).

It also trains leaders to protect the narrative, smooth the volatility, and make just enough of the right moves to get through the next visible checkpoint, even when everyone in the room knows that the deeper work would require a longer breath.

And yet, for all of that, the clock rarely changes.

That was the part that took me too long to accept. (Side note: “accept” still doesn’t quite feel right, but that’s probably something to explore at another time.)

You can argue with individual choices. You should. You can advocate for better decisions. You should do that too.

The Ecology

Once you recognize the clock, the next thing you start to see is the ecology around it.

Every institution develops its own leadership ecology. By that I mean the set of conditions, incentives, survival strategies, reflexes, and behaviors that become adaptive within that environment. The clock helps shape that ecology, and the ecology, in turn, teaches people what kinds of leadership are rewarded, tolerated, or “selected” out.

That is why I have become less interested in debating whether one type of leader is better than another in the abstract. Most leaders are, to some degree, adapted to the environment that formed them.

Public-company ecology tends to reward a certain bundle of capabilities. Leaders learn cadence. They learn repeatability. They learn how to operate under recurring compression. They learn narrative discipline, stakeholder management, escalation logic, and the ability to translate performance into something legible for multiple audiences at once. They learn how to carry short-horizon pressure without fully unraveling. They learn how to make trade-offs when every option seems to cost something on the way to the next checkpoint.

Those are real skills, not fake corporate inventions. They are often hard-won and highly portable. People who have spent enough time inside public-company life can develop an unusual tolerance for operational rhythm, performance scrutiny, and institutional complexity. They often know how to steer through matrixed environments, hold multiple stakeholders in view, and keep a large machine moving even when the gears do not naturally align.

But every ecology produces shadows alongside strengths.

The same clock that builds discipline can also build near-term reflexes that are hard to unlearn. Leaders formed in quarterly environments may become overly responsive to what is visible, measurable, and narratively manageable. They may grow strong in compression but be less patient with incubation. They may start to confuse recurrent urgency with seriousness, or assume that what cannot be defended cleanly inside a reporting rhythm is somehow less real. The pressure to remain composed can become emotional compression. The need to keep the story coherent can become overmanaged certainty. The recurring need to hit the number can slowly crowd out curiosity about what the institution is becoming in the process.

None of this makes those leaders weak. It makes them adapted.

That is the ecological point, and it is also why so many leadership debates feel unhelpful. People often compare leaders from different environments as though they were all shaped by the same conditions. They are not.

• A founder who has lived inside early-stage uncertainty is often adapted to a different clock entirely. That ecology may reward speed, improvisation, breadth, personal ownership, and tolerance for ambiguity. It can also produce its own shadows: chaos tolerance becoming chaos dependence, underbuilt systems, identity fusion, poor delegation, or an instinct to romanticize motion simply because everything still feels alive.

• Private equity creates another ecology. The clock is different, but no less powerful. It may sharpen resource discipline, performance accountability, and focus. It may also compress trust horizons, reduce slack, and push leaders toward more aggressive optimization than the system, or the people inside it, can healthily absorb.

• Fractional work creates yet another ecology. It can reward sharp diagnosis, fast pattern recognition, portability of judgment, and influence without formal authority. It can also create fragmentation, distance, and the temptation to value perspective more than embedded responsibility.

None of these environments is morally superior in the abstract. None is free of distortion. Each clock produces strengths, blind spots, and survival habits. Each ecology teaches leaders what matters there.

That may be one reason leadership transitions can be so jarring. A leader who thrives in one ecology may struggle in another, not because they suddenly lost their ability, but because the adaptations that once made them effective no longer fit the surrounding conditions. Someone formed in a public-company clock may arrive in a founder-led environment and experience the lack of structured cadence as chaos. A founder may enter a large public institution and experience a recurring rhythm as simply bureaucratic. A seasoned operator may move into fractional work and discover that credibility without embedded control is a very different muscle.

The problem is not just “fit” (as the talent acquisition professionals profess). It is that people often mistake ecological success for universal leadership.

I think that is where the conversation can get shallow.

A more honest view is that leadership is always being shaped by a surrounding system of incentives, time horizons, role expectations, and feedback loops. The question is not whether you have been formed by an ecology. You have. The question is whether you can see its imprint clearly enough to understand both what it built in you and what it may have made harder for you to notice.

That is a more mature kind of self-awareness than the standard “know your strengths and weaknesses” language usually allows.

It asks different questions…

• What does this environment reward in me?

• What does it slowly normalize?

• What has it sharpened?

• What has it flattened?

• What kinds of choices does it make easier for me?

• What kinds of courage does it make less likely?

Those are harder questions. But they are also more useful than pretending your leadership style emerged in a vacuum (or dictated by any one “leadership style test”).

Agency After Clarity

Finally, once I could see the clock and the ecology more clearly, I stopped feeling less powerful and started feeling more deliberate.

That may sound counterintuitive at first. We often assume that if a structure is deeply constraining, clarity about that structure will reduce our sense of agency. In my experience, the opposite can happen. Misdiagnosis is exhausting. When you keep treating structural realities as though they were just temporary leadership failures waiting for your brilliance, you burn energy in the wrong places. You push against the system's existence rather than making more intelligent choices within it.

Clarity does not erase constraint. But it can stop you from wasting yourself against it. That, to me, is the beginning of a more grounded kind of agency.

Agency inside a public-company clock does not mean pretending you can rewrite the governing rhythm. It means understanding where your influence actually lives. You may not control the quarter, but you can still shape how you prepare your team for it, how honestly you interpret its pressures, how much unnecessary emotional spillover you allow into the system, and how thoughtfully you protect longer-horizon work from being fully consumed by short-horizon demands. You can get better at translating the clock without becoming fully captive to it. You can build stronger local systems, cleaner decision-making processes, more durable capabilities, and a more humane operating environment within a structure that will never be entirely humane on its own.

If you’re a new or emerging leader in the public company ecology, re-read that last sentence; it matters. So does the second part of the insight: once you stop romanticizing other clocks, your choices get better.

A lot of people who are worn down by quarterly life start imagining escape as the cleaner answer. Sometimes a different environment is the right move; sometimes it is exactly what a person needs. But changing environments does not mean leaving structure behind. It means entering another clock, another ecology, another set of incentives and shadows. The startup has its own tyrannies. The founder-led business has its own gravitational pull. Private equity has its own compression. Independence has its own instability.

The point is not to become loyal to the quarter. The point is to become literate about the clocks that govern institutions, and more honest about what each one gives and takes.

That changes how you should think about your own development, too.

If you have spent years inside a quarterly clock, you have likely learned things you would not have learned elsewhere, or at least not in the same way. You may have built operating discipline, performance rigor, resilience under recurring scrutiny, institutional fluency, narrative translation, and the ability to keep functioning when the system is under compression. Those are not small things. They may become deeply valuable later, especially if you ever move into another ecology that rewards different strengths. They are also easier to appreciate once you stop seeing the quarter only as an enemy and start seeing it as a demanding teacher with a very particular curriculum.

That does not necessarily mean staying forever. It means learning consciously (adaptively) while you are there.

It means extracting the capabilities without fully surrendering to the distortions. It means noticing what you want to keep and what you do not want to carry forward unchanged. It means understanding that some of your frustration may be a signal that the clock no longer fits the life you want, or the kind of leader you are trying to become. And if that is true, clarity helps there, too.

This is where I have landed, at least for now: I am not in love with the quarter, and I am certainly not blind to what it costs or eager to defend the near-term distortions it can create. But I am no longer interested in spending so much emotional energy acting shocked that a public company behaves like a public company.

I work inside a clock. That clock shapes the ecology around me. The ecology shapes leaders, sometimes in useful ways, sometimes in costly ways, and often in ways that are not obvious until much later.

Seeing that more clearly has not made me cynical. It has made me calmer and, I think, more responsible for the choices that are still mine to make.

Simple, not easy.

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A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.

Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.

I understand why those quotes keep circulating. They flatter adversity. They make hardship sound like the primary proving ground of leadership. They suggest that turbulence is where leaders are forged, and calm is where lesser people can coast.

I’m not entirely convinced.

Let’s explore.

Crisis matters, of course, and adversity often does reveal something important about leadership. Still, those lines seem to collapse leadership into its most visible moments while missing the harder work that happens when there is no singular threat forcing everyone into alignment.

That, I posit, is where leadership gets more difficult.

To be clear, by “without a crisis,” I do not mean a world without pressure, ambiguity, or complexity. Modern organizations rarely operate in anything close to that. I mean periods when there is no one obvious external threat doing the alignment work for you. No product recall. No social media crisis. No acute competitive shock. No restructuring. No immediate breakdown that suddenly makes the priority list obvious. The environment may still be dynamic, demanding, and messy. But there is no common enemy concentrating attention on everyone at once.

In those moments, leadership has to do more of its own work.

That was the point I pushed on in the room with the facilitator.

I told him that in much of my corporate experience, leadership during a crisis can actually become simpler in one important respect: the problem is visible. Priorities compress. Trade-offs clarify. Cross-functional friction often softens, at least temporarily, because people know what matters right now. The organization, again, at least temporarily, becomes more congruent because the threat is sufficiently obvious to pull energy in one direction.

The system may still be under immense strain. The decisions may still carry real consequences. Execution may become more difficult. But ambiguity often narrows. You no longer have to spend as much time persuading people that something matters. The situation has already made that case on your behalf.

That is why I have become skeptical of the idea that rough seas are always the ultimate test of leadership.

Rough seas may test execution. They may test the nerve. They may even test endurance and judgment under pressure. But calm, or what passes for calm in organizational life, tends to test a different mix of leadership capabilities. It tests whether a leader can create coherence without fear doing the work for them.

It is harder than it sounds. Why?

Because, hard to admit, but when there is no visible crisis, the real enemies are often internal: competing priorities, drifting focus, political positioning, functional silos, deferred decisions, complacency, fragmented energy, and the subtle temptation to confuse motion with progress—none of these problems arrives with sirens. None of them force immediate alignment. And yet together they can quietly erode performance more effectively than a single dramatic event.

This is where the old sailing quote really begins to feel incomplete.

When the water is still, the work is not over. It is just less theatrical. That is when the ship gets repaired. That is when the crew gets trained. That is when weak spots get noticed before they become fractures. That is when roles are clarified, habits are built, discipline is reinforced, and contingency scenarios are considered before the pressure arrives. Calm is not leadership downtime; it is leadership without the benefit of adrenaline.

And perhaps that is why some leaders appear strongest in crisis and less effective outside it.

Crisis gives their leadership a more visible stage. It concentrates attention. It suspends some of the politics. It creates urgency without them having to generate it. It simplifies the narrative, “There is a problem. We must respond. Here is what matters now.” That kind of environment can make leadership look cleaner than it really is.

By contrast, periods without a focal crisis demand a more generative form of leadership. The leader has to create direction without panic, sustain energy without drama, drive preparation without visible danger, and keep people moving in a congruent direction when reasonable people can make different arguments about what matters most.

That is not a lesser test. It may be the greater one.

Because now leadership is no longer being validated by the existence of an emergency. It has to stand on its own. It has to align people around what could matter, not just what is already on fire. It has to build trust and readiness before circumstances make both unavoidable. It has to keep the organization from mistaking the absence of a crisis for the presence of health.

I think that’s the key distinction.

A business can appear calm and still be drifting. A team can look stable and still be underprepared. A function can seem productive while still slowly hardening around the wrong priorities. In those conditions, the leader’s job is not merely to maintain. It is important to notice what is taking shape, strengthen what needs strengthening, and challenge what no longer fits before the cost of delay becomes obvious to everyone else.

That kind of leadership is rarely celebrated in the same way crisis leadership is.

It is less cinematic. It tends to be quieter, more repetitive, and less publicly rewarded. It shows up in planning, process & preparation (gasp!), coaching, clear decision rights, better questions, cleaner priorities, stronger handoffs, and the patient work of building capability before capability is demanded all at once.

There is also a more uncomfortable possibility here: some organizations become so accustomed to rallying around disruption that they start to depend on it. Crisis becomes the one thing that temporarily cuts through the noise. It creates focus. It quiets debate. It makes people feel useful and aligned. Over time, leaders can begin to overvalue the very conditions that are exhausting the system, simply because those conditions make it easier to impose direction, leading to dependence (or, worse, the generation of artificial crises).

That may be one reason some teams look oddly functional in adversity and strangely fragmented in ordinary operating conditions. Not because crisis brings out their best in some noble, universal sense, but because a crisis can temporarily reduce the need for the harder work of sustained alignment amid ambiguity.

That is the work I find more interesting:

• Can a leader keep an organization focused when the pressure is ambient rather than acute?

• Can they prepare people for what is coming without needing fear as the primary motivator?

• Can they create urgency without creating panic?

• Can they teach, repair, clarify, and strengthen while the system still has the slack to do those things well?

To me, that is a more demanding test than the old quote allows.

Anyone can admire the captain in the storm. The harder question is what that captain was doing before the weather turned?

That is not as poetic as saying smooth seas do not make skilled sailors. But it is closer to how leadership actually works.

And leadership is not only tested by how people respond once the crisis becomes obvious. It is tested by whether they were building the conditions to respond well long before anyone had to.

That, to me, is why leadership is harder without a crisis.

Simple, not easy.

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Most of us, at least in the common shorthand many of us inherit, tend to picture the past behind us and the future ahead. It feels natural enough that we rarely stop to question it. We talk about looking ahead. We tell people not to look back. We treat “forward” as a synonym for progress, clarity, and readiness.

But the version he shared flipped the metaphor.

He described a view, often associated with the Aymara language and culture in the Andes, in which the past is understood as being in front of us and the future behind us.

The simple logic is part of what makes it memorable. In that framing, the past is in front because it is what has already been seen or known. We have lived it. We may not remember it perfectly, but it sits within view. The future, by contrast, is behind us because it has not yet been seen. We may sense it, prepare for it, and imagine it, but we do not have direct visibility into it. Researchers studying the Aymara language and gesture have described this as a distinctive and well-documented temporal metaphor, one that runs counter to the more familiar “future ahead, past behind” framing common in many other languages. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

I have not been able to shake that image.

Partly because it feels more honest than the language many of us use in leadership, planning, and organizational life. We often speak as though the future is something visible to the disciplined and the prepared. Build the plan. Name the priorities. Set the milestones. Tighten the forecast. If we do it well enough, the path ahead will come into focus.

Sometimes that discipline helps. Often it does.

But even strong planning does not turn uncertainty into certainty. It just helps us move through uncertainty with a little more coherence.

That may sound blandly obvious, but organizations are surprisingly skilled at creating the impression otherwise. We build slide decks that imply more visibility than we actually have. We reward confidence in ways that can blur the line between conviction and overreach. We ask leaders to project steadiness, which is fair, but sometimes expect them to project something closer to clairvoyance, which is not.

The value of the parable, at least for me, is that it helps reframe some of that performance pressure. It reminds us that uncertainty is not always a failure of planning. Sometimes it is just the honest condition of being in motion.

Seen that way, leadership starts to look a little different.

Maybe leadership is not primarily about standing at the edge of the present and staring boldly into the future. Maybe it is more often about moving carefully into what you cannot yet see, while staying oriented by what is already visible. The past does not hand you an answer key. But it does give you evidence. Patterns. Consequences. Signals about what people respond to, what systems reinforce, and where earlier decisions may still be shaping current behavior.

However, that does not mean the past should dominate the future. It should not. Too much organizational thinking is already trapped there. There is always someone ready to explain why an old constraint still deserves veto power, or why a previous failure should permanently narrow the group's imagination. Institutional memory can be useful. It can also become a polished argument for hesitation. Organizational inertia is a very strong force, and becomes stronger with age, size, and success of the org.

That is part of what makes this metaphor interesting. The past may be in front of us, but not all of it deserves equal weight.

Some of it is close enough to be instructive. Some of it is far enough away to be fuzzy. Some of it was misunderstood the first time and has only grown more mythologized since. Anyone who has worked inside a long-tenured team has seen this. Events become stories. Stories become lessons. Lessons become rules. And after a while, no one is quite sure which part was real and which part was simply repeated often enough to harden into truth.

So the point is not to romanticize the past simply because it is visible. The point is to respect visibility without confusing it for certainty.

That distinction matters in leadership because teams often want multiple, possibly divergent, things simultaneously. They want direction and honesty. They want someone to help them make sense of what is happening without pretending that all ambiguity has been resolved. They want steadiness, not theater.

This is one of the many quiet burdens of leadership. People do not just look to leaders for answers. They look to them for orientation. They want help understanding what can be known, what cannot yet be known, and what deserves attention now. That is different from prediction. It is also more useful.

Planning starts to look a little different through this lens, too.

A good plan is not proof that the future is visible. It is a disciplined way of preparing for motion. It helps a team decide what matters, what assumptions it is making, what tradeoffs it is willing to accept, and what signals it needs to watch as conditions change. Planning still matters. A great deal. But perhaps not because it lets us see the future clearly. Perhaps because it gives us a stronger posture for moving into what remains unseen.

This may also be why experience matters so much, though not in the overly simplistic way it is often framed.

Experience does not always make someone wiser. Sometimes it just makes them more certain about old interpretations; bias is well rooted here. But at its best, experience improves judgment by expanding what a person can recognize in the visible field. It gives them a richer sense of patterns, a stronger feel for second-order effects, and, ideally, a little more humility about how often the future surprises even the capable and well-prepared.

There is also something deeply human in this metaphor for anyone trying to build teams.

When people are entering a new role, a period of change, or a stretch of uncertainty, they are often not asking for a leader who can perfectly describe what lies ahead. They are asking for someone who can help them stay grounded while the path is still taking shape. Someone who can say, with calm and credibility, here is what we know, here is what we are watching, here is what experience suggests, and here is where we need to stay open.

That kind of leadership may not feel as dramatic as “visionary” language often suggests. It will not always sound bold on a stage or fit neatly into a slogan. But it tends to travel better in real operating environments, where conditions shift, incentives matter, and most important decisions are made with partial information and limited time.

Finally, the image my colleague inspired stays with me because it shifts the emotional tone to one of uncertainty: if the future is in front of us, unseen outcomes can start to feel like a failure of planning or perception. We should have spotted that. We should have seen it coming.

But, if the future is behind us, the standard becomes a little more realistic. Not easier. Just more realistic. The question is not whether we can see everything coming. We cannot. The question is whether we are moving with enough awareness, enough discipline, and enough honesty to respond well as the unseen becomes visible.

That may be true in strategy. It may be true in leadership. It may be true in team development. It may simply be true in life.

Either way, I keep coming back to the humility of it.

The past is in front of us. The future is behind us.

We move with what we know, we stay alert to what we can sense, and we make the next decision as responsibly as we can.

Simple, not easy.

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The second layer of that tension is now becoming harder to ignore. As assistance becomes ambient—Copilot, shared GPT prompts, automation—visible effort compresses. Output is easier to generate, faster to refine, and less reliably tied to a single person’s hands. The work can still be excellent. The impact can still be real. But the “who owns / who did it” gets harder to read.

• Part 1: How We Create Value vs. How We Recognize It

• Part 2: What Counts as Contribution Now?

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Which creates a practical challenge for anyone building a career inside a matrixed organization: it’s not enough to do good work. You also have to make the right work legible.

That sentence can sound cynical if you take it the wrong way. This isn’t an argument for self-promotion or credit hoarding. It’s a recognition of reality. In complex environments, the work that matters most often happens between the artifact (deliverables)—in how problems are framed, how trade-offs are surfaced, how ambiguity is reduced, and how decisions get cleaner.

Unfortunately, those contributions don’t always announce themselves. They don’t always show up in a dashboard. They don’t always map neatly to a single deliverable. And they’re easy to miss during performance season when the system is asking for visible proof.

This is why activity theater becomes such a tempting trap. When tools make first drafts easier, and meetings multiply, it becomes possible to look busy without moving anything. That’s not a moral failure; it’s an incentive pattern. But it does create a separating line: the people who consistently create incremental value are usually the ones who can see the real bottleneck early, name it clearly, and help others move.

As I posited previously, in an assisted world, contribution tends to shift upstream.

The scarcest skill is often not producing more. It’s choosing what matters, framing it with clarity, and directing effort toward the constraints that actually determine outcomes.

So what does that look like in practice?

It looks like being the person who turns a vague initiative into a decision. The one who identifies the constraint that has been hiding in plain sight. The one who reduces noise so the team can act. The one who makes trade-offs explicit rather than implicit. The one who improves decision quality, not just decision velocity. The one who makes execution easier next time because they strengthened the system, not just the result.

That kind of contribution is real. It’s just less visible by default.

Which is why the most useful “career move” for many people in these organizations might not be working harder. It might be learning how to capture and communicate the value they’re already creating in a way that reflects how work actually happens now.

For my paid subscribers (thank you!), this week I’m offering two Monday-ready tools designed for exactly that: one to help you track your contribution without slipping into performance theater, and another to help you make your highest-leverage workmore visible and reusable: The Contribution Ledger and The Framing Receipt.

Feel free to DM me if and how you used them, and whether you found them useful (or not). If you have your own tools, I would also love to hear from you!

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Leaders sit down to set objectives for the coming year, often with genuine intent, and quickly gravitate toward what is easiest to define, measure, and defend. Activities get named. Targets get assigned. Metrics get codified. Planning becomes a translation exercise: turning ambition into something that looks “prioritized” in a single PowerPoint slide.

Recently, a colleague shared a post that captured the tension succinctly: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. The line resurfaces every year for good reason. Many leaders can feel that something important gets lost when meaningful work is reduced to activity-based goals or KPIs that signal motion without necessarily producing impact.

This isn’t a failure of effort. It’s often a mismatch between how objectives are set and the context in which they now live.

SMART objectives were designed to create clarity and accountability, and they tend to work best when work is well-specified and the operating environment is relatively stable. Decades of goal-setting research show that specific, challenging goals often improve performance compared with vague “do your best” intentions.

Many modern challenges, though, are not stability problems. They’re complex problems. They involve interdependencies, learning curves, feedback loops, and human behavior that rarely move in straight lines.

So instead of asking whether SMART is “good” or “bad,” it feels more useful to ask a different question: When does SMART work well—and when does it need help?

That question opens the door to a more practical way of thinking about objectives, one that meets people where they are rather than forcing a framework conversion.

It also suggests something simple: objective-setting is not one thing. It has levels.

Level One: SMART — Get good here first

It’s unfashionable to say this out loud, but SMART isn’t the problem. In many organizations, the real issue is that objectives aren’t actually SMART. They’re vague, overloaded, poorly bounded, or disconnected from the constraints that shape day-to-day work. In those environments, specificity and measurability aren’t bureaucracy; they’re clarity. They reduce ambiguity, lower cognitive burden, and make expectations explicit.

Used well, SMART is basic hygiene. It disciplines thinking and creates accountability. It helps teams stop drifting and start committing. It’s also, in a very practical way, respectful: clear objectives reduce the amount of guesswork people have to do to understand what success looks like.

Where SMART begins to strain is not at the level of intent, but at the level of application.

In practice, SMART objectives can draw attention to the target rather than to whether the system that produces them is healthy. The environment is treated as a given, and attention is focused on the number.

Sometimes that assumption holds. Sometimes it doesn’t.

When systems are underdeveloped, misaligned, or working at cross-purposes, SMART can accidentally reward activity over learning—especially when goals are narrow, incentives are tight, and feedback loops are weak. Researchers have documented systematic side effects when goals become too narrow or overemphasized: neglecting non-goal priorities, distorting risk choices, and quietly corroding culture.

This is why SMART is best treated as a starting point. A foundation. If objectives are vague, incoherent, or performative, SMART is still a meaningful step forward.

The mistake is stopping there when the work demands more.

A natural transition

This is the point at which most leaders feel the tension but don’t always have the language for it. They’re hitting goals, but the work feels heavy. Progress feels brittle.
The same frictions keep recurring, and success depends too much on effort and not enough on structure.

The issue isn’t ambition. It isn’t discipline. It isn’t even execution.

It’s that the objectives are doing too much work on their own.

That’s where I propose that the next two levels could come in. Not as replacements for SMART, but perhaps as additional layers of applied critical thinking:

• SMART+ for leaders who want results that last

• S.P.A.C.E. for leaders operating in adaptive systems where outcomes cannot be fully known in advance

What follows are two practical, Monday-ready tools designed to help leaders move beyond targets and into systems-level leadership. These are not frameworks for theory. They are working tools for real planning cycles, real teams, and real complexity.

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It’s the kind of question that feels obvious at face value: of cours…

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His answer was, of cours…

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As a result, authority, used unconsciously, can make leadership appear more effective while making it harder to practice in a truly effective way.

Let’s explore.

Why The Distinction Matters

In interviews, HR still defaults to the familiar binary: individual contributor versus people manager. As if leadership activates the moment someone sits under your name in Workday.

In reality, direct reports can create a false sense of competence. You get compliance before you’ve learned how to earn commitment. Often, authority also has a way of reshaping your instincts: you may talk more, listen less, push for alignment rather than build it, and rely on delegation rather than teaching. None of this is malicious; it’s simply what hierarchy (aka your org chart) allows.

Over time, because people often adapt to your patterns, you can feel effective even as specific leadership muscles begin to atrophy. When you rely on authority, your team quietly absorbs these negative signals. When you don’t have authority, those same moments naturally stop your leadership in its tracks.

Research Snapshot: Behavioral scientists have long shown that negative signals (confusion, inconsistency, emotional spikes) carry more weight than positive ones — they travel farther and stick longer. Source: “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Baumeister et al.

Authority Hides What Influence Reveals

When someone has to follow you, you rarely see the actual strength of your leadership. Remove the authority, and the reality comes into view:

• People don’t owe you their attention

• Ideas stand or fall on clarity and receptivity alone

• Alignment is earned, not granted

• Your thinking has to travel on its own

• Influence becomes the real test

Leadership without authority often reveals far more than leadership with it. There’s no gravity, no compliance, no shortcuts — just whether people choose to move with you.

This becomes especially clear in environments where tone and psychological safety matter. Research shows that leaders who convey positive emotional presence and respect elevate trust, safety, and willingness to speak up. In those environments, people contribute more — not because they report to you, but because they feel safe to offer honest input.

Research Snapshot: Teams perform better when leaders — regardless of title — create psychological safety. Leaders who rely on tone, clarity, and respect (not authority) drive higher trust and higher engagement. Source: Studies on psychological safety and leader emotional presence, 2023–2024 (multiple ScienceDirect peer-reviewed articles)

Shared and Applied Experiences

Across my career, I’ve led large teams in the military and smaller cross-functional teams in corporate roles. But the highest-quality, and often most intellectually demanding, leadership I’ve practiced has happened in roles with zero direct reports. (That still surprises me when I say it.)

The work requires moving decisions upstream, relieving choke points, aligning executives, teaching the strategy behind the work, reducing friction, helping others think more clearly, building talent laterally, and shaping choices rather than enforcing compliance.

This is systems leadership — distinct from hierarchical leadership, though both can coexist. Systems leadership scales. It spreads. And it often strengthens capability rather than depleting it.

Research Snapshot: Studies on cross-functional collaboration show that clarity, shared understanding, and psychological safety matter far more than org-chart lines in predicting performance. Source: The Open Psychology Journal, 2023

Final Thoughts

Does one need direct reports to be a leader? I’d argue you need direct reports to be a manager. For argument’s sake, let’s not conflate the two.

A question to sit with:

If your title changed tomorrow and your org chart disappeared — who would still seek out your thinking?

Direct reports shape the landscape of leadership. They influence the tools available to you. But they do not define whether you’re actually leading.

Some leaders grow with authority; others struggle under its weight. But leaders who practice clarity, influence, and talent development without relying on hierarchy are operating with fewer safety rails. Their leadership has to stand on its own.

Authority may give you compliance. But influence is what gives you impact.

Simple, not easy.

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