Human development in a world of intelligent machines
For a long time, we’ve thought about leadership as something like driving a car. We decide where we want to go, study the road ahead, make a plan, and adjust our speed when conditions change.
But what if the world we’re entering is more like surfing?
A surfer cannot control the ocean, predict every wave, or chart a precise route to shore. Yet an experienced surfer is not helpless. She learns to read changing conditions, sense what is happening, make judgments in motion, and respond with her whole being.
The difference is not simply one of skill. It is a different relationship with uncertainty.
At the recent Neuroleadership Summit, Brit Aylor of Microsoft introduced this distinction between driving and surfing. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
Because it raises a question that goes well beyond leadership:
What does it mean to be ready for a world that is changing while we’re learning to live in it?
Neither is ready
We hear constantly about the extraordinary capabilities of artificial intelligence. And they are extraordinary.
But the closer we look, the more apparent it becomes that the technology itself is not fully ready for the world we’re asking it to transform.
AI systems remain vulnerable to errors, manipulation, and security threats. The electricity, data centers, and manufacturing infrastructure needed to support their expansion are struggling to keep pace. Even cable production is emerging as a bottleneck.
Organizations face their own difficulties.
Recently, two former executive clients described what they’re encountering as companies introduce AI agents into existing operations.
One organization recognized that its processes needed redesign before agents could improve them. Teams were instructed to examine and clean up their processes, then work with AI to create something better.
Another organization was caught in repeated meetings about everything that wasn’t working.
The distinction is revealing.
Introducing powerful technology into poorly designed processes doesn’t necessarily produce better results. It may simply make existing problems more expensive and more difficult to understand.
And what about the people expected to make all this work?
The other readiness problem
Organizations are investing heavily in AI literacy, reskilling, leadership development, and change management.
These efforts have value. But I wonder whether they address the deeper challenge.
For more than forty years, I’ve worked with leaders and watched how human beings grow and change. One thing has become increasingly clear to me: developing human capacity is not the same as acquiring new skills.
We can teach people techniques for making decisions, communicating effectively, or managing uncertainty.
But the capacity to perceive what others overlook, recognize emerging patterns, remain steady under pressure, or exercise judgment when there is no obvious answer develops differently.
It involves more than accumulating knowledge.
It involves how we make meaning, how we experience ourselves and others, what we notice, and what becomes possible for us to recognize and do.
Yet much of organizational life continues to operate on assumptions inherited from the industrial age.
We divide work into functions, measure what can be counted, reward predictable performance, and design systems intended to control variation.
These approaches have produced enormous accomplishments.
They have also shaped how we think about human beings.
We are trying to prepare people for a new technological age using many of the assumptions about human beings that the industrial age left us.
What if our difficulty developing human capacity isn’t simply that the world is changing too quickly, but that our inherited understanding of human beings is too small?
What genuine readiness requires
Consider clarity.
In relatively predictable conditions, clarity often means knowing the destination, understanding the plan, and communicating expectations.
But when conditions are continually changing, clarity must become something more dynamic.
We need clarity of purpose: knowing what matters and what we’re trying to serve.
Clarity of perception: seeing what is actually happening, including what doesn’t fit our expectations.
Clarity of understanding: recognizing relationships, patterns, and possibilities without prematurely forcing an explanation.
And clarity of action: exercising grounded judgment while remaining responsive to what happens next.
These aren’t simply four more competencies to add to a leadership development program.
They describe capacities that allow us to engage with a world we cannot fully predict.
And they raise another question:
How much human capacity are our organizations trying to develop while simultaneously constraining the capacity people already possess?
We ask people to be innovative while rewarding conformity. To exercise judgment while prescribing their decisions. To collaborate while evaluating individual performance. To embrace uncertainty while expecting predictable results.
Perhaps the challenge isn’t only that we need to develop more capacity.
Perhaps we also need to create conditions in which existing human capacity can emerge.
Learning to meet the wave
The surfer offers us another way of thinking about readiness.
She doesn’t become ready by eliminating uncertainty. She develops the capacity to meet it.
Her knowledge matters. Her experience matters. But so do perception, timing, balance, judgment, and her ability to remain responsive to what is actually happening.
And every wave offers another opportunity to learn.
The world of intelligent machines is not waiting for us to finish preparing. Nor is the technology finished developing. We are already influencing one another, changing the conditions under which both human and technological development will occur.
Perhaps readiness is not a destination at all.
Perhaps it is an ongoing capacity to perceive, learn, respond, and develop as the world unfolds.
And perhaps the most consequential question is not simply how we become capable of working with increasingly intelligent machines.
It is what might become possible if we began taking the full potential of human beings as seriously as we take the potential of the technology.
