(01)
Know where you're headed? Speed up.
The widely-shared New York Times opinion piece by former Lululemon Chief Innovation Officer Julie Averill will be marinating many executives' brains as summer break draws to a close. It names a fear many leaders have privately expressed, notes Senior Partner Nikki Cicerani: "We're not ready." Those leaders describe tremendous pressure to act as if they know when they don't, and relief at hearing they're not alone.
Don't flatten the insight, though, Nikki cautions. "Slow down" should not be translated as "wait and see." Partner Mark Newhouse sums up the problem not as too much urgency, but as urgency without clarity. There are aspects of AI transformation that leaders need to be working on more urgently, not less—designing the future company, for instance. The "AI wishing" problem identified in the article results from companies focusing on efficiency without a compelling vision of what they are building toward.
If you do have clarity, Nikki and Mark say, speed is justified. Go fast if any of the following are true:
You know where the judgment that you'll need post-redesign resides.
You have co-creation mechanisms that build genuine buy-in.
You've already sandboxed an AI-aided process and are ready to scale it.
The emperor is probably partially clothed. Don't stall while working out what he is wearing; go hard at what's missing.
(02)
Be your own CIO (Chief Interpretation Officer).
An 18th-century empress may not seem to have much to teach us about leadership in the modern age, but hear out our Principal Paola Allais Acree: "Catherine the Great is the supreme example of picking up on outside forces and shaping them for her own ends from a position of relative weakness," says Paola, whose vacation reading included Catherine's biography.
Catherine was a minor noble, a foreigner, and a woman who managed to hold the center of a sprawling nation and preside over a golden age against a backdrop of revolution and global upheaval. How? "She had a dashboard of signals," says Paola, "so she got very good at understanding the forces at play before they gathered full power." Key to this was her ability to gather information across strata—not just elite channels—and then interpret weak signals in combination. It's a model of leadership centered not on command and control, but on sensing and sensemaking.
Paola sees parallels in a recent rise in the hire of chiefs of staff. Leaders without one can ask themselves: Who has a foot in many worlds and can see across signals? What are our shared sources of truth? What rituals can we create to examine these signals regularly?
(03)
Know your JaR (judgment at risk).
With strategic planning season come restructuring decisions. Leaders in our circle are starting to shift attention from value at risk to judgment at risk—from What can be automated? to What human faculties are we weakening if we automate this, and what future capabilities disappear with them?
This parallels a fear bubbling up around schools, universities, labs, and dinner tables about the imperceptible erosion of human judgment and cognition. As Rana Gujral's book, which is on partner Mark Newhouse's vacation reading list, claims: "Intelligence without experience is hollow."
It's not just who knows what. Leaders are asking: When we automate entry-level "grunt work," are we removing the cognitive rehearsal through which junior employees become senior leaders? When AI generates more—data, write-ups, code—than humans can properly evaluate, are we simply shifting the cognitive burden elsewhere in the system and creating judgment fatigue?
Nikki Cicerani suggests one way to mitigate this risk: Engage your people in imagining the future before deciding whether they are surplus. "The old model of making workforce decisions behind closed doors, then moving quickly to announce and execute doesn't serve this moment," says Nikki. Companies should be careful about slapping an AI efficiency label on a RIF: It may generate buzz among investors and the media, but they'll see a long-term chill internally as their people lose trust not just in the technology, but in their leaders. And that's far harder to rebuild.
(04)
Don't mandate what you can't describe.
Partner Kendra Cooke hasn't had time to read this summer. Fresh from a major engagement with a client in the legal field, she says the organizational frontier of AI has moved again: First, it was all about adoption; then, skills. Now, she says, "it's about redesigning the work itself. It's less about how people will use AI and more about how the work changes when people and AI create together."
Companies moving beyond skills are finding that imagination is the barrier—at both the leadership and employee levels. Leaders can't name what they want, only what they don't want: token graveyards, unused tools, and siloed experiments. "Leaders can't just give mandates. They have to provide intention and vision, and create space for discovery" says Anthony Quigley, SYPartners' VP of Enterprise AI Systems.
As ever, we're practicing before we preach: in our Champions model, SYP rotates two consultants through immersive internal projects alongside Anthony. They then carry their new learnings back into client work. "This rotation brings different expert perspectives to imagining the future of our work through a focused investment of time. It's a model we recommend to some of our clients," he says.
(05)
To spark others, tend your own flame.
Senior Advisor Sue Walsh is finding inspiration for the fall from in a book about another 18th-century figure: Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination. In an earlier era dominated by machines, metrics, and optimization—one that "lionized reason, reason, reason"—Blake reminded us not to let the inner fire go out.
"Blake died 199 years ago but speaks directly to the current moment," Sue says. She's picking up on a malaise: People are feeling disempowered and disconnected from their own creativity. One reason, she says, is that the dominant discourse positions humans as vulnerable objects of AI rather than as subjects with agency.
This shows up at work: Sue points out that employee engagement is at historic lows, costing U.S. companies an estimated $2 trillion per year. If your people can't channel agency in a positive direction, she warns, they may well channel it negatively: 44% of Gen Z workers are reportedly sabotaging their company's AI rollout.
Leaders need to stoke imagination precisely when creative fires are at their lowest. The antidote, per Blake (and Sue) is to anchor into your own personhood—to assert your humanity through creativity.
