Articles on the Four-Field Model and on leadership in the relationship between people and AI.
Most AI projects don’t fail because of the software. But that statement alone doesn’t help much as long as it’s unclear what they actually fail on. The honest answer is more uncomfortable than any technical explanation: they fail on resistance. And within one and the same company, that resistance can show four different faces in four different places.
Read articleOf all four fields, this one triggers the greatest resistance — and the least visible kind. As long as employees use AI as a tool, the conflict usually remains negotiable: competence can be built, reservations can be reduced. But the moment they’re no longer users but the object of a system — evaluated, monitored, categorized — something fundamental shifts in their relationship to leadership. That’s Field 4: employees as the subjects of AI-driven evaluation and surveillance.
Read article“Drawing authority from clarity and trust rather than positional power and control” — this line sits on my homepage, short and to the point. But it deserves more than a slogan’s worth of space, because it describes the real question every AI adoption puts to leadership: where does your authority actually come from, once a system suddenly delivers analysis you can no longer produce entirely on your own?
Read articleThe deepest look this series has taken so far was at employees as affected parties — the field with the greatest potential for conflict. This time, it’s the reverse: leaders who actively use AI — and in doing so run into a limit that’s rarely spoken about openly. Field 1: status anxiety and loss of control within one’s own leadership circle.
Read articleResilience tends to get filed under “soft skills” — somewhere between grit, communication skills, and team spirit: nice to have, but not decisive. That was already a misjudgment before the AI wave. Now, with one digitalization wave following the next before the last one has even been processed, that misjudgment gets expensive.
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