2 posts tagged with "agency"

In our previous post, we explored how anti-fragile chaos engineering can help organisations build resilience in the face of uncertainty. We saw how injecting controlled volatility can strengthen systems and prepare them for real-world shocks. But what is it about the current environment that makes this so crucial?

Leadership is moving beyond the jagged frontier of what machines can do. Artificial Intelligence is not yet Artificial General Intelligence, yet the boundary of machine capability continues to advance. The space of tasks that require human-only intervention shrinks each quarter as new language models pair with agentic tooling to run longer chains of execution with less supervision. Competence that once demanded firms, teams, or specialist expertise now sits within reach of motivated individuals, sometimes on a single high-end consumer GPU.

Agency is diffusing. Execution power is no longer a privilege reserved for large organisations because it is being unbundled and placed directly in individual hands. With the right orchestration, anyone can behave like a chief executive who directs an army of digital staff. This is not the singularity, yet it is already a strategic revolution.

How this post fits the series​

• Resets the cultural context after discussing stress-tested autonomy, showing why agency abundance changes power dynamics.
• Provides the rationale for introducing autonomy gradients so leaders can choreograph decision rights as capability diffuses.
• Reinforces the need for double-loop learning to keep assumptions honest when individuals can act without waiting for hierarchy.

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.