Leadership in the AI Era

Leadership Exercise Sample

The book turns leadership arguments into practical work and reflection. This sample from Chapter 12 asks readers to map the judgment an entry-level role used to build, then design a deliberate learning substitute for work that is being automated.

The exercise brief

This chapter’s applied work builds a judgment-map for an entry-level role and one deliberate substitute. Expect 3 to 4 hours for the judgment-map and one substitute. Choose a real entry-level role in the reader’s organization whose work is automating.

Step 1. Choose the role and its automating work. Name an entry-level role and the specific junior work, now being automated, through which its people used to build judgment.

Step 2. Map the judgment the work built. With input from senior people, put a name to the judgment the automated work developed, the pattern recognition, error-spotting, or domain feel, making explicit what the old ladder taught incidentally.

Step 3. Design one deliberate substitute. Design a deliberate-practice substitute that builds one named judgment without the automatable volume, such as critiquing machine output on curated hard cases, with the senior feedback that makes it deliberate.

Step 4. Preserve proximity and set the check. Specify how juniors will stay in proximity to seniors for tacit transmission, and how the organization will assess whether the judgment is actually forming. The deliverable is the judgment-map plus the one substitute with its proximity and assessment plan.

Reflection questions

The chapter argues that the old junior work built judgment as a byproduct no one designed. For a senior role the reader knows, what did the grunt work actually teach, and can anyone articulate it?

The judgment crisis is invisible because the pipeline is long. How would the reader’s organization know whether it is quietly consuming its future supply of senior judgment?

The Ladder-Rebuild Model begins by naming the judgment an automated rung built. Why is that naming so hard, and who in the organization could actually do it?

Deliberate practice can build judgment faster than incidental repetition. What would a deliberate substitute for one automated entry-level task look like in the reader’s field?

A technical rebuild can supply explicit judgment while starving the tacit knowledge that proximity transmitted. How does the reader’s organization keep juniors in the room where seniors work through hard problems?

The framework behind the exercise

The Ladder-Rebuild Model supplies four movements: diagnosis, substitution, sequencing and assessment, and proximity. Read the complete framework, its limits and the chapter’s practitioner perspective in the sample chapter.