Personal leadership and artificial intelligence: the real challenge is to keep thinking
The real battle of the future is not over artificial intelligence. It is over our ability to think.
One sentence stands out in a recent article by Paolo Benanti and Sebastiano Maffettone: “The new power is governing what we think.” For decades we pictured power as a mainly external force: control over resources, money, information. Today, as algorithms and artificial intelligence play an ever-larger part in selecting, organising and interpreting information, the battleground also shifts: our ability to keep our own independent judgement.
So the point is not to decide whether artificial intelligence is a threat to our ability to think. That would be too simple a conclusion. The real question is how willing we are to gradually hand over our judgement: to algorithms, to prevailing opinions, to other people’s expectations, to organisational models or to beliefs we have built up over time. For anyone in a leadership role, this distinction is crucial. Because before guiding other people’s decisions, a leader must be able to understand what is guiding their own.
The problem isn’t the algorithms
Every era has had its own tools of influence. What changes today is how pervasive they are, but the central issue remains our autonomy. So the question becomes: how capable are we of building and keeping an internal yardstick for judgement? A yardstick that lets us tell what we observe apart from the interpretations we produce, what we choose apart from the expectations we conform to, and what we believe is right apart from the answers we are simply offered. The concept of an internal locus of evaluation, developed in humanistic psychology, offers a particularly timely key: bringing the centre of judgement back to the person, rather than leaving it mainly to external expectations and evaluations. From this point of view, artificial intelligence doesn’t create the problem. It can, however, amplify it. The more answers, analyses and interpretations are available, the more important it becomes to keep the ability to question them.
Facts don’t determine our decisions
Long before Big Data, Epictetus observed that it is not so much events that disturb human beings as the judgements they form about them. It is a distinction that is still extremely useful today. Real experience doesn’t necessarily match the picture we build of that same experience. Between what happens and what we decide lies a space made of interpretations, beliefs, emotions, past experiences and criteria for judgement. And it is precisely within this space that a large part of personal leadership is played out. A leader doesn’t decide on facts alone. They also decide on the meaning they give to those facts. Being aware of this difference doesn’t mean constantly doubting your own judgements. It means developing the ability to recognise where a decision comes from before turning it into action.
Personal leadership: before leading others, understand what is leading you
We are used to thinking of leadership mainly as the ability to steer people, teams and organisations. But there is a dimension that comes first: the ability to lead yourself.
Through his concept of the Wise Will, Roberto Assagioli describes a will that is founded not on force or imposition, but on the ability to consciously direct one’s own functions towards a purpose. In a management context, this means learning to recognise what influences our decisions before those decisions have consequences for people and the organisation. Every day, people in positions of responsibility have to tell facts apart from interpretations, question their own beliefs and understand when a choice comes from a conscious criterion and when it is an automatic response. It also means recognising the mechanisms through which we may justify decisions after the fact, play down their consequences or shift responsibility for them. Personal leadership therefore begins long before our relationships with others. It begins with the quality of the relationship leaders have with their own way of thinking, interpreting and deciding.
When delegating judgement enters the organisation
This dynamic doesn’t only concern the individual. Within organisations it can become a genuine management problem. Picture a CEO surrounded by capable managers who, over time, have learned what answer the CEO wants to hear. Information keeps coming in. Meetings keep taking place. Decisions are discussed. Formally, the process works. And yet something has changed. Discussion no longer serves to test a decision, but to confirm it. The implicit question is no longer “What do I think about this situation?” but “What is the answer that’s considered correct here?”. It is a particularly insidious form of delegated judgement, because it can coexist perfectly well with competence, efficiency and good performance. At least in the short term.
Add tools that can quickly return analyses, interpretations and arguments consistent with the questions asked, and the risk becomes even subtler: having more information without truly improving the quality of judgement. More information doesn’t automatically lead to better decisions. In some cases it can simply make existing beliefs more sophisticated. The same happens when dissent is discouraged, explicitly or implicitly. People learn which opinions are welcome, which meet resistance and which are better left unsaid. Over time, the organisation loses part of its ability to correct itself. Mindful leadership should instead create the conditions for people to form independent thoughts, argue for them and put them up for discussion. This doesn’t mean constantly questioning every decision. It means distinguishing alignment from conformity. Alignment allows people with different perspectives to move in a shared direction. Conformity gradually erases those differences. And it is precisely the presence of different viewpoints, when managed through clear responsibilities and decision criteria, that makes an organisation better able to read complexity. So the problem isn’t using external tools to make decisions. A capable leader must use data, technology, consultants, specialist expertise and different viewpoints. The problem arises when support for judgement becomes a substitute for judgement.
Leadership always starts with the person
The quality of the decisions we make also depends on the quality of the dialogue we have with ourselves. Before leading a team, facing a change or making a high-impact decision, we need to learn to observe our inner mechanisms without fully identifying with them. Assagioli summed up this principle in the concept of disidentification: what we identify with tends to dominate us, while what we are able to observe can be understood and managed. For a leader, this means recognising emotions, beliefs, automatic reactions and pressures without necessarily treating them as an objective picture of reality. It is in this space that choice becomes possible. And this is where personal leadership meets decision making: in the ability to keep clarity and independent judgement even when the context pushes towards an immediate, reassuring or ready-made answer. Leading yourself therefore means developing an internal yardstick solid enough to listen to influences, data and opinions without being governed by them. It doesn’t mean shutting yourself off from discussion. On the contrary, it means being able to engage in it more freely.
The question of the future
Perhaps the real question of the coming years won’t be:
“How intelligent is artificial intelligence?”
But:
“How capable do we remain of thinking for ourselves?”
The answer doesn’t lie in rejecting technology.
It lies in the ability to use it without giving up judgement, to listen without automatically agreeing, to engage without conforming, and to take in information without immediately turning it into belief. For those who lead people and organisations, this ability will be less and less an abstract quality and more and more a strategic skill. Because leadership isn’t about always having the answer. It is also about keeping the freedom needed to question the answers available, including your own. And continuing to choose consciously which of them deserve to guide our decisions.
