by Bruce LaRue, Ph.D. and Jim Solomon

Leading Humans in the Age of AI:

The role of the leader in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is evolving into what we call the Integrator Leader. The focus of the Integrator Leader is to provide clear intent and rationale, guided by key principles (see sidebar), while utilizing AI as a means of extending the reach and capability of self-organizing teams of knowledge workers. With less attention given to the mechanics of managing workers, and with knowledge workers spending less time managing data, both can become more strategic. This will place a premium on the leader’s ability to drive innovation and integrate the efforts of specialized cross-functional teams across the enterprise. Further, while AI is expected to cause major disruptions in global labor markets, the implications of declining birth rates and aging populations are occurring in most advanced industrial countries leading to an acute shortage of qualified knowledge workers. In this context, we argue the leader must use AI primarily as a means of augmenting rather than replacing the knowledge worker.

Why We Need Integrator Leaders

Integrator Leaders possess the unique ability to see what isn’t there, channeling the collective energy of others to make their vision a reality. Simply stated, leadership is about leading change. Rather than engaging in futile attempts to manage, adapt to, or resist change, Integrator Leaders utilize the full range of AI technologies to extend the capability and reach of their teams in service of their mission.

In the Age of AI, leaders must see the world more as an integrated whole rather than a collection of independent parts. Seeing patterns of connections between thoughts and ideas will help to understand the world in terms of systems of complex interdependencies. Much like the challenges and crises we face today, they cannot be seen in isolation nor solved independently of one another. In the Age of AI, we need Integrator Leaders who can build coalitions of people to create change in our complex world.

The role of the Integrator Leader is to guide, mentor, provide essential resources, and remove barriers to progress. The leader is also responsible for ensuring that the team operates within appropriate boundaries while achieving essential outcomes.

As the leader, your job is ultimately to guide the ship from the helm and not from the engine room. That is, you set the compass heading and priorities while you help your team self-organize to create an ownership mentality in how they accomplish the mission. Throughout this process, we must be careful to separate What from How. That is, we want to keep our strategic intent separate from how this strategy is operationalized in practice. This is because the old strategic planning paradigm rooted in industrial times routinely attempted to control both the What and How of change. This approach made sense in industrial times when most companies used unskilled workers to perform repetitive tasks on long runs of standardized products and services with very little variation. In the Age of AI, we must turn this paradigm inside out to create nimble, flexible organizations that can adapt and leverage change to their advantage.

Change has become so pervasive that simply to survive means that we must learn to leverage change to our advantage by building organizations that are more adaptive, agile, creative, and innovative. Improving your change strategy by becoming an Integrator Leader is therefore not only a matter of survival, but it is the key to thriving in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world.

Globalization and AI-enabled automation are accelerating at a dizzying pace, leaving people, organizations, and whole societies struggling to adapt. Work has become increasingly specialized, and specialization without integration leads to internal fragmentation, which is the enemy of any strategy. We need Integrator Leaders capable of inspiring others with fresh visions of the future, coalescing and aligning the efforts of our entire organizations to accomplish their mission.

How Humans Adapt Their Environment to Themselves

At the most basic level, nature teaches us that organisms that sense and adapt to changes in their environment will succeed, while those that don’t will fail. Organizations, like organisms, must learn to sense and appropriately adapt to changes in their environment to survive and thrive. Yet biological adaptation, while crucial to our survival, is only part of the picture. Biological adaptation on its own is exceedingly slow and, at its root, largely unconscious and reactionary.

Humans are unique among other species on earth in that we don’t simply adapt to our environment, but instead, we adapt our environment to ourselves. This means that we are fundamentally and inextricably involved in creating and re-creating the world around us through the mechanism of culture facilitated through technology. AI dramatically accelerates this progression of technology, becoming an extension of the human mind and body, expanding both our capability and reach. The problem is humans have not yet learned to fully comprehend the second and third-order effects of the changes that we ourselves initiate in the world.

How we respond to change is ultimately a choice. We can see change as a threat to be avoided or a challenge to be overcome. We can choose to be a victim of our circumstance, or we can learn to leverage change to our advantage. The key is to never surrender our ability to choose how we respond to our situation. This is the essence of how humans adapt, develop, and evolve, and it is what distinguishes us from nearly every other creature on this planet.

The Change Integrator

The Change Integrator is a tool for guiding your vision from concept to reality. As we can see from the Change Integrator model above, the first role of the integrator leader is to clarify purpose (strategic intent) and to build a compelling rationale for why change is necessary.

Begin with a focus on the purpose (What) that guides the change effort and the rationale (Why). Then ask the team for input as to how best to accomplish the purpose. The sequences are nearly always the same: What, Why, then ask How. That is, after providing the purpose, ask the team for their input, their insights, what is working, and what is not; then help integrate what they have proposed into a course of action. Ultimately, we want to create teams that can self-organize behind your intent to accomplish their mission

Seeing the Operation Through the Eyes of Your Team

One of the primary goals of the Change Integrator model is to help leaders learn to see their organization through the eyes of their people, treating them as their operational advisors. Employees have typically been on the receiving end of change initiatives and are rarely asked for input or consulted along the way. By understanding the true nature of AI-enabled knowledge work, we approach leadership and change in our organizations differently.

It has been said that we should lead people and manage processes. We look at this a bit differently: our goal is to lead people and allow them to manage processes – including all essential AI-enabled technologies. Treat your workers as the eyes and ears of your operation. Give them a clear strategic intent and rationale, engage them with appropriate AI-enabled technologies, and then ask them how best to get from here to there. In this way, AI serves as an extension of the knowledge worker, enhancing both their reach and capability.

If you consistently utilize this form of leadership, your people will not only provide you with input on your course of action, they will learn to bring you an entire plan of action and ask you for your input on their plan. This is when you know you are on the right track. Your job should get easier while your people step up, take more initiative, engage with one another, and take ownership of how change is implemented.

Purpose: Defining Your Strategic Direction

Defining our purpose begins with seeing the world from the canopy view. The idea is to widen everyone’s aperture so that they see their actions within the broader organizational context. Through the use of AI technologies, this canopy view enables workers at all levels to become more productive and efficient, and better able to align their efforts with those of the broader organization.

The first role of the Integrator Leader is to determine the Purpose. It defines what we are here to accomplish, and as such, it serves as your compass heading or your strategic direction. It needs to be clear, concise, and compelling. Begin by outlining your organization’s purpose or strategic intent. This should include any key strategic priorities or special initiatives coming your way. Do not make the mistake of assuming everyone understands the common purpose. Knowledge workers are inherently myopic; that is, they possess a deep, yet fragmented, knowledge. They know more and more about less and less. Without a clear compass heading to orient their activities and an AI-enabled dashboard to provide feedback on their progress, knowledge workers will never be fully productive.

Providing your team with a view from the canopy gives them a clear line of sight to their goal. Show them where they are going and then ask them how to get there. Help them learn to self-organize behind your intent and become less dependent upon you over time.

Unlike industrial times where workers were viewed as an extension of the machines they operate, in the age of AI, these technologies become an extension of the knowledge worker. All AI-enabled technologies must be routinely validated against the leader’s intent, and the structure of the algorithms must clearly operationalize this intent in practice.

Build an Ownership Mentality in Your Team

To build an ownership mentality in your team, begin by outlining what challenges and changes are coming, why they are important, and how they will impact your team. Summarize the mission of your organization, your key strategic priorities, and your expectations of performance. Tie your expectations of performance to the outcomes you expect your team to create.

Everyone on your team must understand that you will hold them accountable for these outcomes and not just their inputs. When defining your purpose, focus on the following three key categories:

1. Strategic Priorities: What are your core priorities? This should flow from your organization’s strategic guidance. Paint a picture for your team so that they can see their own desired end state based on what the customer expects in the form of an integrated solution to their problem.

2. Outcome-Based Success Criteria: What are the criteria by which you will determine a successful outcome? On what criteria will your end-user or customer judge a successful outcome? What are the gaps between what your customer expects and what you are delivering? What are the key milestones along the way that you expect your team to achieve, and by when?

3. Expectations of Performance (Linked to Priorities): It is important that you tie individual and team performance ratings to the outcomes you expect them to produce. The activity does not equal progress. We have often witnessed large organizations whose major functional groups were meeting or exceeding their performance metrics, but the goods and services the organization produced were below par. Customers expect integrated solutions to their problems, and integrated solutions require integrated operations. This means that workers need to self-organize and integrate cross-functionally to achieve the results customers expect.

The most innovative firms anticipate customer needs to be based on a methodical form of empathic observation and questioning, where they place themselves in the customer’s shoes and look out at their world through their eyes. This capability is greatly enhanced in the Age of AI, where we can leverage big data cloud computing combined with social media and predictive analytics to identify patterns and emerging trends, leveraging this information to drive innovation and rapid change.

Why: The Rationale for Change

Your team must understand the rationale for any changes or new priorities that you propose within the following three key categories:

1. Why will this change benefit our customers?
2. Why will this change benefit our organization?
3. Why will this change benefit individuals?

How: Crafting the Roadmap

Whether speaking of algorithms or humans, we do not want our standard operating procedures to become substitutes for thinking and straitjackets that limit our ability to think and act creatively. We need to stay out of the prison of the known by continually looking for new and better ways to meet our mission. Rather than focusing on following a process, the focus must be on the outcome we achieve.

Your team may not always come up with the best solution the first time, though with practice they will often amaze you. However, by asking first and then listening carefully to their responses, you will know exactly how they are thinking. This window into your team’s psyche is invaluable as it allows you to calibrate your leadership accordingly. Your goal is to guide your team to their own solution. The more they own the solution, the less you will have to manage them, and the happier your customers will be.

The Feedback Loop

The feedback loop on the Change Integrator represents a constant real-time integration of strategy and action that goes both ways. It symbolizes the critical need to ensure that strategy is being informed by action, the action is being informed by strategy, and that What and How are always aligned. It symbolizes our ability to identify and exploit unforeseen opportunities and to spawn new innovations. The feedback loop also reminds us that tactical decisions have strategic consequences.

One effective form of a Feedback Loop is to provide an AI-enabled dashboard of critical vital signs throughout the organization. The main criteria for this dashboard are that it is accurate, timely, and actionable. While many knowledge workers in the past spent much of their time analyzing, modeling, and crunching data, AI technologies allow them to spend less time on the mechanics of data analysis and focus more on where they are going strategically. This is analogous to focusing on driving your car versus spending your time under the hood. Many of our customers report that these AI-enabled dashboards allow teams to spend less non-productive time crunching data and preparing for briefings, and more time focused on their mission. The dashboard provides the leader and their teams with a strategic view of the operation, allowing them to make adjustments to their strategy in real-time.

We have frequently seen knowledge and expertise hidden away inside people’s heads, housed in fragmented databases, or within pockets of the organization, where it is not widely shared and therefore cannot make the rest of the system smarter. This problem can be endemic within large, complex organizations that follow rigid operational procedures and lines of authority. Too often, critical knowledge exists within silos and stovepipes, meaning that many organizations literally do not know what they know.

The Feedback Loop on the Change Integrator represents a constant real-time source of information between strategy and action, and between cross-functional groups within your organization. AI-enabled technologies can play an essential role as a feedback loop to ensure that everyone understands the mission and how their activities support it. The feedback loop also helps functional groups better understand what they need from one another.

As an Integrator Leader, you can’t over-communicate; and communication requires learning to listen as well. Listen closely to your own people and utilize the critical operational intelligence that exists throughout the organization.

Let your team know that you are not only open to their input, but that you expect it. That is, you expect algorithms and robots to follow processes, while you expect your workers to analyze and improve these processes. This means that you expect your team to manage and maintain algorithms, robotics systems, and other AI-enabled technologies which have now become an extension of the knowledge worker. In fact, let them know you want them to come up with the entire plan while you mentor and guide them just enough along the way to assure that the plan becomes theirs and not yours.

Demonstrate through your actions that you are willing to incorporate input from your people in service of the mission and give them all the credit and recognition for their ideas. Conversely, if you are unable to use their input, do your best to explain why their suggestion cannot be implemented. Assess all ideas on their merits regardless of position or grade of the one who originated the idea.

To create an environment where feedback is encouraged, you as the leader must model this behavior by routinely asking for feedback and input from your team. Conversely, you should also challenge your team’s ideas, as appropriate, based on the needs of the mission. It is their job to sell you on the merits of their idea by explaining why it will benefit the mission, and it is your job to explain why the idea cannot be implemented when that is the case. The key is to be as transparent as possible in this process to build a foundation of trust in the team. Be patient, and do not expect that your people will always get it right the first time.

Create a Culture of Innovation

Make a habit of thinking out loud with your team. Rather than giving them answers, help them follow your train of thought to arrive at an appropriate solution. Most importantly, expose them to your own source code—the values, rationale, and ethical standards that underlie your decisionmaking process. At the end of the day, it does them no good for you to give them answers. Instead, you want them to own the decisions — anticipate what a situation requires, use AI-enabled technologies to think for themselves, and work as a team to self-organize around a solution. This helps them to become less dependent upon you over time.

Once your team understands your What and Why, asking them How allows you to have a window into their consciousness and their way of seeing the operation. Now as a leader, you know exactly how your team is thinking, and you can adjust your mentoring accordingly. The key is to ultimately help them think on their own and self-organize behind your intent.

Escape the Prison of the Known

To take a new idea from concept to reality, leaders need to help their team see differently: to begin to see our organization as it could be rather than how it has been in the past. Like many corporate, non-profit, and governmental agencies struggling to remain viable in the face of accelerating change in the Age of AI, they can be stuck in the prison of the known. Leaders must be able to help the team escape the shackles of their past by developing a new vision for their future along with a compelling rationale as to why change is both necessary and desirable.

To focus the attention of your team on the future, you must first guide them out of the prison of the known. This prison is where our individual favored ways of seeing become ways of not seeing. If we are not careful, we see our future in terms of the past, which is a bit like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror. Yes, whether we realize it or not, most of us exist inside a prison of our own making. The walls of our prison cell can best be thought of as our basic assumptions. To become an Integrator Leader, you must first become self-aware, meaning that you clearly perceive your own basic assumptions and learn to consciously modify them where necessary.

Our current reality did not arise by chance. Rather, each of us exists within our own prison of the known, comprised of the preconceptions, assumptions, and biases that make up our world view. However, looked at another way, the same forces that have imprisoned us can also create new worlds limited only by our imagination and collective will to act. You may think that what makes you who you are is a given; but the self is largely a constructed entity, evidenced by the degree to which the concept of self changes across cultures. By first becoming self-aware, that is, becoming aware of the assumptions and biases that comprise the self, the Integrator Leader learns to see the subtle basic assumptions operating both internally and externally to their organization. This heightened intuitive sensitivity helps to better understand the complexities of a situation or what makes another person tick. With time and practice, you can learn to quickly grasp the basic assumptions operating within an individual or the culture of an organization.

AI technologies will not solve this problem. If left unchecked, advanced AI technologies will simply replicate our current reality in a more efficient and effective manner. Integrator Leaders must ensure that knowledge workers remain on azimuth, and that the knowledge workers are managing all relevant AI technologies to support and carry out the mission.

Skilled Integrator Leaders can comprehend multiple points of view without being tied to any of them. This is the difference between assumptions that hold us and the assumptions we hold. In other words, we all see the world through an unconscious set of beliefs and assumptions that hold us captive to some degree. They are a lens through which we evaluate everything without realizing we are wearing glasses. Further, this prison grows into a self-reinforcing echo chamber through the effects of AI-enabled social media, marketers, and internet search engines that constantly feed us more of what we already believe and desire based on secret algorithms. Rather than becoming aware of and questioning the basic assumptions that drive us, our assumptions are being systematically manipulated and reinforced by the digital air we breathe, leading to the heightened social fragmentation and disintegration we see today.

Basic assumptions can be thought of as cultural DNA. Unlike biological DNA, your cultural DNA can be manipulated by others through the mechanism of culture and increasingly facilitated through the use of complex and often secret algorithms. These assumptions and biases, intentional or not, become embedded in the algorithms underlying all AI-enabled technologies. As such, these assumptions and biases must be routinely evaluated and validated in light of our mission and changing circumstances.

If you have the courage to leave the familiarity of your own prison of the known and examine the hidden assumptions that stealthily guide your life, you can begin to intentionally change the lenses through which you see the world. Using the language of AI, this process is similar to changing your own source code. While many approaches to leadership development focus on changing behavior, we have found that we don’t need to change a person’s behavior. Instead, if we can help people to see their world in new ways, positive actions naturally follow. In other words, if you want to change the world, begin by changing how you see the world.

Leading Distributed Teams in the Age of AI

As we move into the Age of AI, organizations will become increasingly composed of individuals and teams that are geographically dispersed. Whether you lead a team of individuals who telecommute part of the week or an entirely distributed organization, Integrator Leaders need to adapt their leadership approach to ensure their distributed workforce can achieve superior results.

Adapting the Change Integrator model to distributed teams will allow them to learn to self organize behind mission priorities, resulting in greater customer satisfaction, organization effectiveness, and employee engagement. Treat your distributed workers just as if they were sitting in the office with you, making them an integral part of the team. Our goal is to create a more cohesive team that can collaborate across space, time, and organization boundaries to align behind mission priorities while requiring less direct supervision.

Conclusion for Integrator Leaders

Leading in the Age of AI requires that you learn to see possibilities where others see obstacles, inspiring others with fresh visions of the future. A premium must be placed on utilizing AI to extend the capability and reach of the knowledge worker. This enhanced capability permits leaders to drive and accelerate change, while creating a culture that attracts, develops, and retains top talent.

Chambers Bay Institute develops leaders capable of inspiring others with fresh visions of the future, integrating and aligning their efforts to accomplish their mission. We help leaders to see possibilities where others see obstacles, channeling the collective energy of their organization to make this shared vision a reality. To learn more about Chambers Bay Institute, visit www.chambersbayinstitute.com

Leading Humans in the Age of AI – Why We Need Integrator Leaders is based on the book “Seeing What isn’t There – A Leader’s Guide to Creating Change in a Complex World”. Deeds Publishing, Atlanta, 2019, LaRue and Solomon.

About the Authors

Bruce LaRue, Ph.D.
President & Cofounder, Chambers Bay Institute

Bruce has focused much of his career on the emergence of the knowledge economy and its implications for the development of leadership competencies in distributed, technologically complex organizations. He has inspired thousands of leaders around the world to see in new ways while developing self-organizing Action Teams capable of transforming their vision into reality. As a consultant, graduate professor, and coach, Bruce has worked with leaders in aerospace, the Department of Defense, wireless telecommunications, cybersecurity, global logistics, financial services, municipal and national government, and the nonprofit sector.

Jim Solomon
CEO & Cofounder, Chambers Bay Institute

Following his leader development studies at the University of North Georgia, Jim was commissioned and advanced in his Army career to the rank of Colonel with global responsibilities. He then went on to hold numerous leadership positions within Fortune 500 corporations, privately-owned companies, and entrepreneurial startups. His spirit of service attracted him to volunteer on various non-profit boards where he has served as committee chairs and Chairman of one of the largest senior living communities in the state of Texas. As a leadership coach, consultant, and author, Jim continues to demonstrate his commitment to developing capable leaders for future generations. Jim’s leadership philosophy is simple – it’s all about WE, not ME.

Bruce and Jim have collaborated on global projects, leadership coaching, and writings since 2004. Together they founded Chambers Bay Institute, where their mission is to develop leaders capable of leading change in a complex world.

Learn more from our team at Chambers Bay Institute and our latest book “Seeing What isn’t There – A Leader’s Guide to Creating Change in a Complex World”