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Everyone a CEO

· 3 min read
Dave Hulbert
Dave Hulbert
Builder and maintainer of Wardley Leadership Strategies

Artificial Intelligence is lowering the barriers to leadership and execution. Starting and scaling an initiative once required significant capital, staff, and infrastructure. Today, a single person with a set of AI models and tools can operate like a small company. The essential resources of production—knowledge, labour, and coordination—are becoming commodities, available to anyone with the drive to use them.

This series explores how leaders can navigate this new landscape. It follows a deliberate path: we start with the collapse of execution costs, then layer in sensemaking, governance, and autonomous doctrine. Each post is designed to stand alone, but together they form a playbook for building AI-native organisations. We'll introduce the core frameworks here and then return to them in later articles as we add more nuance.

A quick guide to key concepts​

  • The Cynefin framework is a sense-making tool that helps leaders understand the kind of situation they are in, so they can make better decisions. It identifies five different domains—Clear, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic, and Confused—each requiring a different leadership style.
  • Agency refers to the capacity of an individual or system to act independently and make its own choices. In this series, we'll explore how AI is diffusing agency, giving individuals the power to execute tasks that once required entire organisations.
  • Doctrine refers to the fundamental principles that guide an organisation's actions and decisions. It's the playbook that helps a team coordinate and adapt.

From a Wardley Mapping perspective, the elements that once differentiated firms are shifting rightward. Doctrine, capability, and even access to labour can be assembled as services by individuals. The result is not that everyone suddenly acquires the full skillset of a traditional CEO, but rather that the entry cost of playing the role has collapsed. What remains decisive is drive: the willingness to take initiative and push forward in an environment where the basic tools of execution are available to all.

This shift changes where strategy happens. When execution is cheap and easy, other things become more important. Good judgement in choosing problems, clear constraints, and access to distribution become the real differentiators. The ability to decide what matters and to reach an audience or market is not as easily automated as the work of building, coding, or drafting.

The implications extend across value chains. As automation strips away intermediaries, industries flatten, and competition becomes more fragmented. Individuals and small teams can deliver at scale. But in a landscape where anyone can produce, trust and provenance become the scarce bottlenecks. Advantage lies less in the ability to produce and more in being recognised, believed, and distributed.

AI does not make everyone a CEO in the traditional sense. It doesn't grant leadership qualities, vision, or resilience. But it does mean that anyone with enough drive can assemble the tools and capabilities of an organisation. The essence of leadership in this age is not commanding labour but orchestrating leverage. Motivation and judgement are now the critical constraints.

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