The agency-is-environmental point lands hard in project work, where the daily version of this fight is reporting. AI gets sold to PMs two ways. One frees people: it kills the status-deck busywork so the team spends its time on the actual work. The other surveils: it auto-captures every status change and flags every red item before anyone can explain it, and the team feels watched, not helped. Same tool, opposite outcomes, and the deciding variable is the trust you name. After 15+ years running programs, I think the reporting was never really about information. It was a proxy for mistrust. AI doesn't change that, it amplifies whichever was already there. Drop it into a low-trust org and you don't get adoption, you get a faster surveillance layer people quietly learn to game.
Apposite and timely for me; I'm just formulating a business operating system (change) that gives agency without giving away necessary security - the question posed to me was, “The landscape is changing so fast it’s hard to know what to focus on.” So, the question we need to ask ourselves is - "What would need to be true for this to be safe, trusted and valuable?"
The other failing by leadership is not giving enough time and space to not only learn new tooling, but a fundamentally new way of working. It doesn't happen overnight even if you're willing. There's a lot of failures, and otherwise slow starts along the way.
Not to mention time is even tougher to come by as they cascade layoffs under the guise of efficiency gains that haven't been realized, and collapse those inefficient responsibilities to who is left.
The tell I experienced driving AI inside a med-large tech company: the word "experiment" got quietly redefined to mean "a thing already on the path to shipping." Every genuinely exploratory question got funneled through a program management lens (with heavy executive oversight from leaders who only knew how to optimize and not innovate/build), and the people who needed space to find the real answers spent their cycles writing status updates and taking direction instead. You can mandate adoption, but you can't mandate the judgment about where it's actually worth anything.
"Crickets. The math only works if you don’t ask where the value goes." - this is so true for a lot of the AI conversation these days which is tech driven rather than value driven
" Instead, we’re navigating highly pathological environments, where trust is low, mandates are high, and the people best positioned to figure this out together have been stripped of the agency to do so." Well said.
The agency-is-environmental point lands hard in project work, where the daily version of this fight is reporting. AI gets sold to PMs two ways. One frees people: it kills the status-deck busywork so the team spends its time on the actual work. The other surveils: it auto-captures every status change and flags every red item before anyone can explain it, and the team feels watched, not helped. Same tool, opposite outcomes, and the deciding variable is the trust you name. After 15+ years running programs, I think the reporting was never really about information. It was a proxy for mistrust. AI doesn't change that, it amplifies whichever was already there. Drop it into a low-trust org and you don't get adoption, you get a faster surveillance layer people quietly learn to game.
Completely agree that it's about the organisations culture.
and game they will!
Apposite and timely for me; I'm just formulating a business operating system (change) that gives agency without giving away necessary security - the question posed to me was, “The landscape is changing so fast it’s hard to know what to focus on.” So, the question we need to ask ourselves is - "What would need to be true for this to be safe, trusted and valuable?"
It's a very good question to start with, but it's a big one. Have you answered it yet?
I’m getting there… I think🙂
All the best with it - you may find some useful clues at The Sovereign Career Hub - just a thought
The other failing by leadership is not giving enough time and space to not only learn new tooling, but a fundamentally new way of working. It doesn't happen overnight even if you're willing. There's a lot of failures, and otherwise slow starts along the way.
Not to mention time is even tougher to come by as they cascade layoffs under the guise of efficiency gains that haven't been realized, and collapse those inefficient responsibilities to who is left.
The tell I experienced driving AI inside a med-large tech company: the word "experiment" got quietly redefined to mean "a thing already on the path to shipping." Every genuinely exploratory question got funneled through a program management lens (with heavy executive oversight from leaders who only knew how to optimize and not innovate/build), and the people who needed space to find the real answers spent their cycles writing status updates and taking direction instead. You can mandate adoption, but you can't mandate the judgment about where it's actually worth anything.
Indeed!... At which point 'Innovation' shrivels back up into its shell and leaders ask 'Why aren't our people more innovative?
Considering we've spent so many billions of dollars on Leadership programs it's surprising that our leaders don't know better by now.
"Crickets. The math only works if you don’t ask where the value goes." - this is so true for a lot of the AI conversation these days which is tech driven rather than value driven
" Instead, we’re navigating highly pathological environments, where trust is low, mandates are high, and the people best positioned to figure this out together have been stripped of the agency to do so." Well said.