Leadership in the era of generative artificial intelligence

The 20th century, with its revolutions, had already highlighted the close connection between technological progress and leadership styles. From command-control systems, suitable for environments where binary logic is prevalent, paradigms such as the leader-coach and similar models have gradually emerged, which, more effective in more horizontal and agile organizational models, have shifted the focus from technical knowledge and expertise to an emphasis on distinctive, cross-cutting aspects such as active listening, emotional intelligence, change orientation, and inspirational vision.

Today, in the pervasive digital transformation we are experiencing and whose impact we cannot yet define or measure, it becomes urgent to think about what features are and will be best suited to accompany and enhance the new scenarios we are opening. Not to replace what works but to add, expand, and improve.

Theaccessibility of generative artificial intelligence, infodemia, and rapidity of change demand attention and a major redefinition of mindsets to manage their impact on teams. Managers and leaders today find themselves leading teams of composed of different “intelligences,” different actors, some human, some not, who influence each other, transforming outputs and dynamics. They operate in complex environments where all variables are highly interconnected, the complete antithesis to the “one best way” approach.

What skills then are needed to lead people and projects in an environment that is so difficult to predict and control, where artificial intelligence is constantly reminding us of our permutability? What anchors do we have that can help us stand in the transformation and be part of its creation?

The way to find some answers I look for them in the figures of the Giants, from Isamil al Jazari to Ada Lovelace Byron: what distinguishes those who have over the centuries designed progress? What will we need tomorrow?

To answer these questions, I identified three essential points, on which I find continuity in different research and biographies: imagination, the ability to stand in the transformation rather than understand it, and the ability to build guardrails.

It comes as the first key word. It is one of the hallmarks of human beings, a form of thinking, independent of fixed rules and logical links that helps us outline new ways to unite disjointed aspects, solve problems, and often precedes knowledge.

It is a cognitive process that concerns the possible, it is the repertoire of the potential, the hypothetical (as Calvin describes it in American Lectures) and consists precisely in the ability to represent something that is not there or not yet there.

Imagination is related to the ability to foreshadow futures that do not yet exist by identifying them among the most desirable ones in an extra-ordinary scenario. It means being able to make visible the possibilities one most desires to realize.

A crisis of imagination increases mindlessness and bewilderment.

Today we need new ways of thinking, imagining novel scenarios and innovative solutions, breaking out of the meshes of rationality and conformity.

In The Stone of Madness, Labatout uses a wonderful image, describing us as kingfishers diving with our eyes closed, stunned by the rush with the water. We are thrown into the rush, without solid predictions about the future, seemingly free but lost.

Rapidity, complexity, unpredictability, dispossession are recurrent in stories about what makes us afraid of progress. We lose control, fade certainty, lose meaning.

Here, too, the scientific posture-understood as the intellectual and methodological attitude that presupposes open-mindedness, rigor and humility-can come to the rescue, even in the more humanistic and cross-cutting fields. It becomes a way of posing in transformation and research.
We know the patterns that have worked in the past, but they must be reconfirmed by the new variables since solutions always depend on the reference system and today, ours, has changed considerably.

Studying, deepening, experimenting, is a way of being in the transformation, searching not for absolute truths but for a point of view that best answers our questions, in our contexts.

It takes time and intention to know and understand. The most powerful levers for learning, the origins of our drive to know, are the times when we claim not to know and when we make mistakes.

Those who do research, do not grasp in either case a moral value, a declaration of vulnerability or weakness, but rather ways to continue the research, straighten the logical procedure or even change it. Ways that allow us to inhabit uncertainty and measure it.

In order to lead in transformation, another central aspect is the ability to identify boundaries and rules, to create environments in which experimentation and adaptation can take place responsibly and safely.

The technical term guardrails, used especially when we talk about large language models, makes their exact function sharp: to ensure that models operate in accordance with corporate standards, policies and values.

They accompany the path, limiting it at the riskiest points. The image panders to the idea of rule as a process, not as a state, as something unchangeable.

In the new scenario, we need to understand and define what rules-and therefore what processes-we need to ensure the resilience of the pillars we have put at the foundation of our organizations.

We need to design them by holding different perspectives together, as a system of rules serves to make its different components coexist. This is why building multidisciplinary teams, which value the plurality of viewpoints and interests, leads to working to simplify and allows us to identify what is essential.

However, one of the most interesting starting points for defining new rule systems is to try to answer the question: what reality will they draw?

The fears and discomfort we may feel in the face of technological progress, I think are useful if used for what they point us to: the need to recognize ourselves as useful and unique in our human characteristics, the attention we need to have in order to progress, evolve and transform, securing and avoiding the occurrence of what we do not want.

Curiosity, that motion that drives one to seek out what one does not know, the questions one chooses to seek answers to doubts and needs, the ability to contextualize them according to the environment, the choice to design scenarios and define the rules to achieve them, I believe are the central points for a leader today. An architect of possible worlds.