Part III of a IV part series: thirty-four per cent of organisations claim to be deeply transforming with AI. Eighty-four per cent admit no jobs have been redesigned. These two findings cannot both be true in any operationally meaningful sense. One of them is theatre.
A double issue. April and May kept returning to one move: swapping something legible—a competency grid, a diagnosis, a silver-bullet hire, a perpetual pilot—for the harder work of judgement. The task is always to weigh the particular case, not reach for the proxy that spares the weighing.
Part II of a IV part series: twenty-five per cent of organisations have moved AI experiments into production after nine years of trying. Fifty-four per cent expect to within three to six months—a prediction that has appeared in every major survey for nearly a decade.
Part I of a IV part series: for nine years surveys have produced a remarkably similar finding: a small minority of organisations capture real financial value from AI; the great majority spend, signal, and pilot.
March’s essays converge on a simple truth: leadership is less about solving problems than managing enduring tensions. From strategy to governance, the task is not to choose sides, but to exercise judgement—resisting the drift toward process, theatre, and easy answers.
A practical method for how to turn AI into a thinking partner—surfacing assumptions, testing arguments, and strengthening decisions through disciplined cognitive friction.
AI makes language effortless—but thinking is done best when it is effortful. Thus, beware the “chat trap”: how casual use of generative AI can quietly soften judgement by replacing framing, definition, and trade-offs with fluent prose.
In an age of cheap text and AI-generated plausibility, leaders are not misled by too little information but by too much of the wrong kind. In this piece I explore why attention has become a governance risk—and why learning what to ignore now matters as much as what to know.
The em-dash has fallen under suspicion—treated as a tell-tale sign of artificial writing rather than what it has always been: a mark of care, rhythm, and thought in motion. It should return to good standing so we can recover linguistic standards we seem oddly eager to abandon.
A 2025 review of authority, trust, coherence and attention—plus a strategic outlook for 2026 on AI governance, provenance, regulation and decision quality. What to prioritise, what to ignore, and why clarity beats theatre.
A practical playbook for human-centred AI: redesigning workflows, building capability, governing judgment, and sustaining talent pipelines so AI amplifies human agency rather than hollowing out the organisation.
