Time to Breathe: Leading, Letting Go, and the Speed of AI
“Sometimes it feels like I don’t have time to breathe.”
That was how a conversation with a leader began this week at the end of a normal busy day; not a crisis. It was not a dramatic confession. Just a quiet, honest observation from someone whose days are filled with documentation, contracts, and risk management — the necessary scaffolding of modern organisational life.
I’ve heard versions of this sentence many times. Perhaps you’ve said it yourself?
It’s worth pausing on, because it’s rarely just a figure of speech. When we say we don’t have time to breathe, we are often telling the literal truth. So the question becomes: What would it take to be the change we want to be — starting with the very next breath?
Adaptive Leadership for Hybrid Human-AI Teams (Part 2 of 3): Why the Framework Must Evolve
In Part 1 of this series, I revisited Ronald Heifetz's foundational distinction between technical and adaptive challenges, and argued that most AI rollouts are being managed as if they were entirely technical when what's actually being asked of people is adaptive. This piece goes a step further: hybrid human-AI teams introduce conditions the original Adaptive Leadership framework was never built to handle, and the framework itself now needs to evolve.
For more than three decades, Adaptive Leadership has offered one of the most influential frameworks for navigating complexity and change. Ronald Heifetz introduced the distinction between technical and adaptive work in Leadership Without Easy Answers (Heifetz, 1994), and later extended it into a practical toolkit with Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (Heifetz et al., 2009). Heifetz has argued that a leader can operate with little more than a well-placed question (Heifetz, 1994). The work was never about having the answer. It was about helping a system find its own.