The Commonwealth supplies less than half the revenue of Australia's universities and sets very nearly all of their terms. That sentence is not a complaint. It is a
The mandate travels downward and the exemption stays where it was written. The fourth essay in the Prior Obligations series examines organisations that require AI of the crew while the bridge quietly abstains, the consumption quota that enforces it, and the questions a director might ask.
What do you do with a system that worked?
The leadership literature is well supplied with accounts of systems that fail. Bad incentives, perverse metrics, cultures that eat their young:
I can audit a model's output on leadership and must take its tax advice on faith. That asymmetry is the whole problem, and it is not psychological. The third essay in the Prior Obligations series argues that AI does not deskill the competent—it unmasks the fake.
Most conversations about artificial intelligence and the executive begin with a number that refuses to move. For the better part of a decade the surveys have promised imminent transformation; for
A score creates an owner, a dashboard, a target, and a budget—everything except an improvement in the condition it measures. The second essay in the Prior Obligations series examines what happens when 'psychological debt' becomes a number, and which way its arrows actually run.
Six new names for old wounds. The 'psychological debt' said to accompany AI is neither novel nor peculiar to the technology—it is the perennial business of managing people through change. The first of five essays on what the diagnosis gets right, and what it conveniently overlooks.
There is a familiar shape to the discussion of artificial intelligence in Australian enterprises. Adoption figures rise. Pilot counts rise. Licence spend rises. Somewhere in the annual report a paragraph
An executive search brief gets the diagnosis right: the constraint on value is not technical. Then it advertises a vacancy. The authority to prioritise, to fund, and to stop already sits with someone. Creating a post rather than confronting an incumbent is a governance evasion.
The leadership literature, and the organisations that consume it, share an unexamined assumption about direction. Progress means ascent. One begins as an individual contributor, demonstrates competence, and is rewarded with
Australia already has the machinery for real accountability—Hayne's findings, the Financial Accountability Regime's own published design, et al. What it lacks is the will to switch it on, because the people who can are the very people it would bind. On the law we possess but struggle to use.
Every serious corporate failure of the past two decades has been examined, in retrospect, by people who found the frameworks in good order. The risk register existed. The policy was
