5 Levels of AI Leadership
That is if you don’t simply accept its first answer.
Instead, make the effort to coach it forward. Just as you might with any other team member – while keeping firmly in mind you’re having a conversation with a smart model, not an intelligent being.
Last month, a sneak preview of OpenAI’s five-step roadmap to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) was shared. It looks ahead from the current early-stage environment to the future possibilities of entire organisations of AI agents.
In response we evolved our own AI Leadership framework. Answering the question: if that’s where technological AI (Artificial Intelligence) might possibly be heading, how might our own human AI (Adaptive Intelligence) best evolve?
Making this leadership shift forward requires a conscious effort to push past the theoretical debates of AI Leadership Level 1, by running Level 2 workflow experiments while visioning what your own organisation’s Level 5 might one day be like. Developing this approach accelerates progress while opening up inspiring possibilities.
Even more importantly, it can ensure that rather than blindly accepting a future where AIs run our organisations, we can instead collaboratively create a future where human progress is accelerated with AI assistants.
How?
By having conversations that less than a short year ago weren’t even possible…
For example this week – just ahead of a client meeting where I wanted to suggest their leaders reframe challenging scenarios, to better energise and inspire their teams – I had the idea that rather than just talk about the principle, it would be useful to actually rework one of their example scenarios.
In the olden days – like last year – there wouldn’t have been enough time to shift from idea to implementation, as the meeting was just a few minutes away. But that was then. This is now.
Knowing that one of AI’s capabilities is in speed summarising, just ahead of the meeting I asked it:
Review the following scenario and write a one paragraph introduction that will inspire and uplift a team of leaders while referencing the potential challenges faced. The scenario is as follows:
[Paraphrased for confidentiality] Imagine it’s ten years in the future. Regardless of our best efforts, world leaders and corporations’ slow pace to act on environmental changes have resulted in a grim reality. Organisations now face fundamental shifts in consumer demands and regulatory requirements… [etc]
The AI answered with:
Imagine a world transformed by the relentless grip of climate change. A world where extreme weather is the norm, not the exception, and its impacts ripple through every facet of society. Our organizations are at the epicenter of this storm, facing unprecedented challenges…
Now here’s the pivotal AI Leadership learning. Far too many leaders would take that as proof that the technology isn’t up to it and their own human skills remain superior.
While forgetting the time-honoured leadership principles of asking better questions and leveraging your time by coaching others forward.
Given the time pressure, my reprompt [there’s a new word :-] was far blunter than I’d typically advise:
That all sounds depressing. Please think more carefully and rewrite to be far more inspiring and energising.
The immediate difference was profound.
A world in transformation is calling for leaders like us. Climate change has ignited a global revolution, reshaping industries, communities, and expectations. The challenges we face are immense, but so too are the opportunities…
Could I have rewritten it myself. Yes. Could I have done it in under a minute? No. Can I humanly be available 24x7 to guide all of the organisation’s leaders on applying this energising reframe to their own work? Impossible.
Could experimenting with doing this and then sharing with others lead to greater, even more fulfilling possibilities?
Absolutely.
And promptly.