A quiet change has taken place in executive life, and it is not "AI" as such. It is the arrival of smoothness as a default condition.
Language is now cheap. Drafts appear instantly. Summaries arrive with confidence. A board pack can be made to look like a chain of reasons even when it is only a chain of sentences. That is the seduction at the centre of the chat trap: the sense of progress without the experience of thinking.
At the same time, work has become noisier. Collaboration tools never close. Meetings breed like rabbits in favourable conditions. In response, leaders reach for the oldest managerial incantation—work harder—as though effort were a single substance you could pour into the organisation until performance rises. But "hard work" is not one thing. It is at least five, and most failures come from demanding the wrong one at the wrong time.
These may feel like separate problems—AI on the one hand, busyness on the other. They are not. They are two expressions of the same organisational drift: the substitution of fluency for authority.
Authority, properly understood, is not a title on an org chart. It is the ability to carry a decision by reasoned elaboration—to connect claims to evidence, to expose assumptions, to make trade-offs explicit, and to invite argument without collapsing into politics or coercion. When that capacity declines, power expands to fill the gap: more process, more signalling, more management theatre. That is managerialism in its most practical form: not villainy, but the steady replacement of judgement with control.
Cheap language accelerates this. When anyone can generate a confident memo in minutes, the organisation becomes flooded with plausible prose. The problem is not that the prose is wrong in some obvious way—if anything the spelling and grammar of memos have seen a decided uptick in quality. The deeper problem is that much of this plausibility is unearned. It arrives without the cognitive labour that usually hardens an argument: defining terms, acknowledging uncertainty, choosing between incompatible goods, and writing the uncomfortable paragraph that says what you will stop doing. In other words, the memo may be operationally effective (fast, tidy, presentable) while being strategically empty. Porter's old warning still bites: operational effectiveness is not strategy, because it does not force trade-offs.
So what does one do, in practice, when the environment rewards smoothness and the organisation punishes friction?
You do something unfashionable: you design friction back into the system, deliberately and selectively, in the places where it protects judgement. Not everywhere. Not as bureaucratic ritual. But at the exact points where errors are expensive: framing, choice, and commitment.
Three disciplines emerged across my pieces in February, and together they form a workable stance for leaders who want authority without theatre.
First: Build Audit Trails of Judgement, not just Artefacts of Communication
The most useful artefact in knowledge work is not the deck; it is the decision record. One page. The decision required, credible options, the assumptions beneath each, what evidence would change your mind, and a short pre-mortem on how the preferred path could fail. The key is not the format; it is the insistence on a visible chain of reasons.
This is where AI can be genuinely useful—if you treat it as an adversary rather than a ghostwriter. Used well, it increases friction: it forces you to define terms, name assumptions, generate counterarguments, and specify falsifiable tests. Used lazily, it removes friction and therefore removes the only thing that keeps judgement fit for use.
A practical test: if the AI session feels like a warm bath, you are probably offloading the wrong cognitive work.
Second: Stop Moralising Effort; Govern a Portfolio of Hard Work
When performance dips, leaders often default to pure effort because it is legible. It looks like leadership. It also reliably produces diminishing returns, burnout, and error—especially when the constraint was never throughput in the first place.
The better move is diagnostic. Is the constraint uncertainty? Then you need outthinking: better framing, sharper trade-offs, clearer strategy. Is it throughput? Then pure effort may be appropriate, but only with engineered goals and engineered recovery. Is it positional advantage under change? Then opportunistic work—options, boundary-spanning, relationship capital—matters more than hours logged. And for advantage to become durable, you need consistency and focus: compounding routines and the refusal of distraction.
What this offers leaders is a new kind of authority: the authority to say, without bluff, "This week is a thinking week", or "This fortnight is a finishing fortnight", and to align your team's calendars accordingly. The challenge in an environment of momentum is to try and demand all five forms simultaneously—innovate, execute, network, stabilise, and never be distracted—which is another way of asking people to be superhuman. The portfolio view forces sequencing. Sequencing forces trade-offs. Trade-offs are strategy's price of admission.
Third: Rehabilitate the Language of authority—reasons, not Vibes
A great deal of recent leadership talk confuses mood with mechanism. Culture is waved at problems like incense. Authority is treated as charisma, or tone, or a shared feeling. This is precisely why I started the podcast On the Subject of Leadership: to drag discussions about leadership back to the place where incentives clash and someone must decide, with consequences attached.
The practical lever here is linguistic. If authority is reasoned elaboration, then language is not decoration; it is infrastructure. The test of a meeting is not whether everyone "aligned"; it is whether the group can produce a coherent account of reality and a defensible basis for action.
This is also where coaching research becomes unexpectedly relevant. A distinction between noble and base language may sound antiquarian, but it points to something every serious leader recognises: some talk increases autonomy and responsibility; other talk increases dependency and control. When leaders use language to clarify, argue, advise with reasons, and commit, they build capability. When leaders use language to emote, insinuate, posture, and obscure trade-offs, they build politics.
Notice how neatly this ties back to AI. LLMs are extraordinary generators of plausible language. They are by default disinterested to whether the language is noble or base in function. If you use them to produce reassurance, you will get reassurance. If you use them to produce arguments and counterarguments, you will get arguments. The ethical and strategic difference lies in what you demand of the tool—and what you demand of yourself.
Put differently: the future does not belong to leaders who can generate text. It belongs to leaders who can impose standards on text. Standards of definition. Standards of evidence. Standards of trade-off. Standards of commitment.
So here is the thread that runs through the month: in an era of cheap fluency and expensive attention, leadership advantage comes from disciplined friction.
- Friction in thinking, so you do not confuse coherence for comprehension.
- Friction in decisions, so you can show the chain of reasons and revisit it without ego.
- Friction in work design, so effort is matched to the constraint rather than demanded as a moral offering.
- Friction in language, so authority is earned through reasons rather than asserted through role or performance.
If you want a concrete action for the month ahead, try this: pick one recurring meeting and outlaw smoothness. Require, in writing, before the meeting: (1) the decision required in one sentence, (2) two credible alternatives, (3) the key assumption that makes each alternative work, and (4) what evidence would falsify that assumption. Then allow the meeting to be short. If that feels harsh, good. You have found the friction point where judgement is trained.
Good night, and good luck.
Art and About
Pieter Bruegel the Elder returned to the story of Babel at least three times: an early miniature painted on ivory during his Roman sojourn of 1552–53 (now lost), and two surviving oil paintings on panel, conventionally known as the "Great" Tower (Vienna, 1563) and the smaller version in Rotterdam, probably painted shortly thereafter. Both depict the biblical construction of the tower built by a unified humanity seeking to "make a name" and forestall dispersion, yet Bruegel's interest lies less in the moment of divine punishment than in the human enterprise itself. The Vienna version, with its presumed figure of Nimrod in the foreground, is grander and more encyclopaedic; the Rotterdam painting, though closely related in composition (as X-rays attest), differs in palette, architectural detail, and stage of construction. Together they constitute the most influential visualisations of the theme in early modern Europe.
Bruegel's tower is modelled conspicuously on the Roman Colosseum, whose arches and engineering he had studied in Rome and likely revisited through contemporary engravings. For sixteenth-century viewers, the allusion to Rome—at once Eternal City and symbol of decay—sharpened the moral: hubris dressed in stone. The structure appears, at first glance, a stable stack of concentric rings; closer inspection reveals a spiralling ascent built on incomplete foundations, with arches set perpendicular to a sloping ground and already beginning to crumble. Engineers and masons labour with technical plausibility—Bruegel's knowledge of building practice is exact—yet the very accuracy heightens the futility. In an age of confessional fracture and linguistic contest, the confusion of tongues carried obvious contemporary resonance. The painting is thus less a simple illustration of pride punished than a meditation on the instability of human projects that mistake scale for permanence and coordination for wisdom.
Further Reading
Arthur Jr., W, Bennett Jr., W, Stanush, PL, and McNelly, TL (1998) Factors That Influence Skill Decay and Retention: A Quantitative Review and Analysis. Human Performance, 11(1), 57–101. doi:10.1207/s15327043hup1101_3.
Clark, A, and Chalmers, D (1998) The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19. doi:10.1093/analys/58.1.7.
Fernyhough, C, and Borghi, AM (2023) Inner Speech as Language Process and Cognitive Tool. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(12), 1180–1193. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2023.08.014.
Granovetter, MS (1973) The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469.
Lally, P, Van Jaarsveld, CHM, Potts, HWW, and Wardle, J (2010) How Are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. doi:10.1002/ejsp.674.
Leroy, S (2009) Why is it so Hard to Do My Work? The Challenge of Attention Residue when Switching between Work Tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002.
Locke, EA, and Latham, GP (2002) Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey. The American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705.
March, JG (1991) Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning. Organization Science, 2(1), 71–87. doi:10.1287/orsc.2.1.71.
Morgeson, FP, Mitchell, TR, and Liu, D (2015) Event System Theory: An Event-Oriented Approach to the Organizational Sciences. Academy of Management Review, 40(4), 515–537. doi:10.5465/amr.2012.0099.
Pencavel, J (2015) The Productivity of Working Hours. The Economic Journal, 125(589), 2052–2076. doi:10.1111/ecoj.12166.
Perlow, LA (1999) The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(1), 57–81. doi:10.2307/2667031.
Porter, ME (1996) What is strategy? Harvard Business Review, 74(6), 61–78.
Risko, EF, and Gilbert, SJ (2016) Cognitive Offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676–688. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002.
Spillane, R, and Joullié, J-E (2023) The Decline of Authority and the Rise of Managerialism. Organization, 30(5), 961–980. doi:10.1177/13505084211061242.
Weick, KE (1984) Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems. American Psychologist, 39(1), 40–49. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.39.1.40.
Wood, W, and Neal, DT (2007) A New Look at Habits and the Habit-goal Interface. Psychological Review, 114(4), 843–863. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843.
