In July I wrote about the difference between complex and complicated. A complicated problem is knowable. With enough time and the right expertise, you can work it out. A complex problem can't be worked out in advance, because the pieces are too connected and too many of the unknowns are ones you can't name yet.
Here is the next question. What happens to leadership as AI gets better at the complicated?
The Complicated Is Getting Cheaper
Migrating your payroll system is complicated. It's hard, and the right experts can solve it. Until recently, those experts took time and money to find and to bring up to speed.
AI is lowering that cost fast. Analysis, research, drafts, plans and first-pass answers now arrive in seconds. In my experience, the complicated is becoming much easier for people on your team to handle.
So where does the leader's time go?
To the complex. Rebuilding culture after a merger. A team with all the skills that still won't work together. A change that no one can predict.
My read is that complex work will take up a larger share of a leader's day. The easier problems go to someone else, or to something else. What's left on your desk is what resists an answer. That’s already what I'm finding for myself every single day.
Four Things That Stay the Same
Tools change. These four don't.
Someone has to choose the question.
AI answers what it's asked. Deciding which question matters and how to ask it, in a situation with competing priorities and incomplete information, is leadership work. A polished answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer.
Complex problems still need experiments.
In their 2007 Harvard Business Review article on the Cynefin framework, Dave Snowden and Mary Boone describe complex situations as ones where cause and effect only make sense looking back. You can't analyze your way to the answer. You try something small, watch what happens and adjust. AI can speed up what we learn from each try. Someone (I’m talking to you leaders) has to be willing to try and be comfortable not knowing.
People decide whether to follow.
Trust gets built the old way, by keeping your word, by showing up, by being honest when you don't know. No tool can do that for you. And when the situation is complex, your people look to you to make sense of it. I wrote in my newsletter, Your Remarkable Day, that "making the complex simple is hard work." The leader who does that for their team is giving them something they can't get anywhere else.
The decision is still yours.
AI can inform, challenge and pressure-test decisions. But it can't be held accountable for them, and your team knows it.
What Gets More Important
If you agree with my take, a few leadership skills move to the front.
- Judgment. When information is free, the scarce thing is the person who can look at a confident answer and sense whether it fits this team and this moment.
- Thinking partners. Complex problems need other perspectives, and the best thinking comes from conversation. Leaders who have people to think with will make better decisions than those who don't.
- Comfort with uncertainty. This is the hardest to build. Most of us were rewarded for having the answer. A complex situation asks us to say "I don't know yet, so let's find out."
Try This Week
List the five biggest challenges on your plate. Next to each one, write complicated or complex. Be honest. If enough time and expertise (from yourself, your team or some tools) would get you to an answer, it's complicated.
Give the complicated ones to the right people, or to AI, and check the results. Then look at what's left. That's where your time and attention belong.
Once you’ve sorted your five, you’ll know which ones need more than speed. If you want to work on one of them with me, join the free session on Thursday, October 29 at 1:00 pm ET.
0 comments