What “Owning” the Work Really Means in the Age of AI-Enabled Leadership

One of the most interesting parts of my job is interviewing senior leaders from around the world and across industries to gather their insights so we can build realistic business leadership simulations that help organizations learn by doing.

Recently, as part of a new leadership simulation for a global professional services firm specializing in construction and project management, I had a fascinating conversation with one of their senior leaders.

Like many organizations, they are trying to develop stronger early-career and mid-level leaders. Their business operates in two worlds simultaneously. They must execute today's projects flawlessly while also building tomorrow's business through a pipeline of opportunities, customer relationships, and future commitments.

During our discussion, we began talking about accountability and ownership. The leader made a comment that really got me thinking about what he said and then about what I am seeing in the business world these days.

For years, leaders have preached the same message:

Move fast. Break things. Experiment. Learn. Innovate.

In many of our business acumen and leadership simulations, we actually reward aggressive experimentation, rapid decision-making, and calculated risk-taking because, quite frankly, organizations that don’t innovate eventually become irrelevant.

But a recent conversation with a senior finance leader completely reframed part of my thinking.

I was interviewing the CFO of a massive, multibillion-dollar business unit as part of a strategic leadership simulation we are building focused on innovation, finance, and enterprise decision-making. During the conversation, he made a statement that was simple, direct, and honestly pretty brilliant:

“If everyone in the organization is breaking things in the name of innovation, eventually you run out of money to fix them.”

That landed hard.

Because he wasn’t arguing against innovation. He was arguing for something much more sophisticated:

Lowering the cost of failure while still encouraging breakthrough thinking.

This blog wasn’t on our radar. But all of a sudden, over the last few weeks, as our clients, leaders of global businesses, started to move from, “Oh yeah, the thought of using AI is cool,” to “Oh damn, this is great, but it’s not what I thought,” we’ve been hearing urgent requests for business acumen and business leadership training on a very basic but very important new skill:

How do you coach your AI partner?

Not use it. Not prompt it. Not play with it.

Coach it.

Because that is the shift.

AI is not a search engine. It is not a magic vending machine where you type in a sentence, pull the lever, and out comes brilliance. It is also not some mysterious super-brain that automatically understands your company, your culture, your strategy, your customers, your politics, your priorities, or what your boss actually meant in the email that made everyone nervous.

I was sitting in our client’s headquarters, waiting for my next interview with a subject-matter expert. Beautiful, panoramic views, collaboration rooms, world-class coffee.

And quiet. Stone cold silence.

Even though there were people around, they weren’t talking. Individuals were doing individual work, and the only thing I heard over the course of an hour was one person asking another if they were done with the huddle room. I really don’t think there was another word spoken as the person in the huddle room quietly packed up their stuff and left with their head down and no other acknowledgment.

This isn’t the first time I have noticed the change. Having been in office environments starting in the 1980s and experiencing the energy and buzz of people working together, it is still startling.

And it raises a very real question:

Have people stopped learning how to work with people?

Because here’s what I think is happening.

In the post-pandemic world we have created, we didn’t eliminate collaboration. We just made it optional.

Between hybrid work, endless digital tools, Slack messages, Teams messages, dashboards, and AI-generated summaries, people can now function without ever really engaging with another human being.

As I have shared, one of the most intriguing parts of my job is interviewing leaders to gain their insights into the key issues they are embracing and wrestling with in their real-world environments so that I can build them award-winning business simulations that enable organizations to learn by doing.

For example, I recently interviewed 30 leaders from around the world across a range of functions to gather their insights into better, more practical coaching best practices so I can build a portfolio of Praction AI role-playing exercises.

As I reviewed the customized summary of my interviews and an analysis of what I heard with our clients, one of them asked me a provocative question, “Did you get any insights or the sense that our message of creating and coaching to a much more aggressive, proactive, breakthrough innovation culture is getting through?”

I answered transparently that I did not, and shared that maybe I wasn’t asking the right questions, to which they assured me I was, since they had helped me write the questions and approved them.

We then had a deep discussion about the takeaway learnings from the interviews, which were all very traditional, like “I need to spend more time preparing for coaching conversations.”

I was then given the directive to make the simulation experience compel leaders to coach differently. “Now is the time for bold leaders to move fast and break things,” was the mantra, and my job is to build a simulation that creates the environment and coaching environment to do that. And obviously, AI is the catalyst behind this.

However, this is a content area that seems relatively new because of the AI aspect that is simply changing everything and integrating it into the approach. I decided to come up with a list of the five things leaders must do to coach toward a culture of move fast and break things: