Everyone is focused on transformation these days. Individuals improving productivity by using AI, governments reimagining their roles in an ever-shifting geopolitical environment, corporations adapting to … both the potential of AI and the turbulent environment. It’s clear that none of these transformations exist in isolation. They overlap, they compound and they move faster than most leadership frameworks were built to handle: that’s not judgment, just man versus machine reality.
The corporation perspective is at all levels but boards are focused on how these transformations interplay in a few principal ways. Who is the right leadership team? What is the right strategy? How will supply chains be impacted? It’s almost a flywheel of change: AI has broken open our ability to produce at an individual level, which could mean we need fewer team members to accomplish current productivity levels (because those levels were set when all work was performed by humans). Then the question becomes are the surplus people repurposed to do new tasks? Which in turn could allow different strategies than before. And that’s just a Tuesday. (Obviously, not really. It’s taking years to sort this — but the conversation is happening everywhere, and it’s happening fast.
Boards are designed to see the big picture and take the long view. That doesn’t mean crises don’t rise to them, or that short-term pressures don’t occupy real bandwidth. They do. But the board’s fundamental job is to look past the immediate turbulence and ask whether the organisation is positioned for what’s next. And increasingly, that question isn’t about strategy or technology. It’s about people. Specifically, it’s about whether the leaders running the organisation have the internal capacity to keep pace with what’s being asked of them.
Complexity is a distraction. It’s tempting to frame this as a complexity problem. But the deeper truth is that most leaders aren’t struggling because the environment is too complex. They’re struggling because their capacity hasn’t kept pace with the demands placed on them. Complexity has always existed. What’s changed is the speed, the visibility and the stakes. When you don’t have enough capacity, decision-making gets clouded.
What needs to be dealt with isn’t complex, it’s crowded. When too many decisions need to be made, the experience psychologically is a threat. The amygdala doesn’t distinguish between ‘something dangerous’ and ‘too many decisions’. The same defence is thrown up mentally whether we are under siege or undercaffeinated. The brain doesn’t care.
Overly emotional can signal under capacity. It isn’t education, tenure or track record. Capacity is the ability to think clearly under pressure. To regulate emotions rather than express them. That isn’t easy – this goes to absorbing scrutiny without collapsing into defensiveness. A board needs to make confident decisions even when the information is incomplete, evolving or contradictory. When emotions surge, it is hard to stay aligned to enterprise needs when those needs aren’t in line with personal preferences.
That’s a high bar. And most organisations don’t measure it, because it’s hard to recognise, let alone quantify. We assess business outcomes, revenue targets, strategic delivery. But we rarely assess the internal architecture of the person making those calls. Capacity is what separates leaders who can meet the moment from those who get overtaken by it. And in a period where the moment keeps accelerating, that distinction matters more than ever.
This can help the board manage itself internally, as in, ‘do we have the right mix of people to support these decisions?’. But most certainly it is the lens through which they should analyse senior leadership. Are the right people with the right capacity in the right seats? Capacity can mean emotional, experiential or literal in terms of bandwidth. One way to think about this – if AI increases productivity, then results and processes are moving faster. A leader’s role might not have changed but the cadence of that role could have.
Think of it in early 2000s parlance, when many of today’s leaders were starting their careers. Sending something by post or even DHL took a day minimum, in most cases. Email was becoming more popular, but not yet fully adopted for official correspondence. Mobiles were fairly ubiquitous but they were not the calendar/internet browser/note taker they are today. So phone calls and posted documents limited the pace of business but email and mobiles were accelerating it.
It’s hard to imagine in 20 years’ time what will be the pace acceleration of AI on workplace information, communication and reaction. Will a week’s worth of decision-making collapse to a day or two? Because humans will likely need more capacity to act faster. We constantly evolve – so our stress reactors may learn over time that more decisions are a baseline – but that won’t happen overnight.
AI is not the whole conversation: merely the loudest. The rise of AI has intensified this capacity conversation, though not for the reasons most people assume. It’s not that synthetic intelligence is better than human synthesis. It’s that the way we are now using AI, especially large language models, has started to expose how leaders actually think. AI reveals decision patterns. Every prompt that goes into AI, is phrased in the very specific way that each human thinks. About everything … including how should I phrase this for AI?
That last bit is actually significant (if a bit meta) because even if leaders see the problem the same, they will feed the story of the problem into AI in a way that reflects their own biases. On the one hand, we always have processed even identical information through the lens of our narrative. But the enormous difference with AI is we now have a tool that can amplify and intensify that personalisation. And it does it in a way that feels reassuringly objective.
So here is where the conversation around capacity broadens back out from AI. Only another human can truly help move forward strategy. Because strategy is about decisions. And decisions need context, facts, assumptions, goals. Companies are run by teams because each member brings different versions of those inputs. It is impossible for any one person to capture the way those inputs collide and must be reconciled into a strategy. At the time of this writing, no AI can manufacture and engage with a single user by presenting the capacity of thought provided by an eight-member or 11-member board (averages for companies under $100 million or over $50 billion) or a 10-person C-suite.
That isn’t about complexity. That’s about the enormous amount of data large scale organisations must reconcile with. And how fast new results are realised. And the current (current meaning at least a dozen years running now) of extreme geopolitical shifts. And as a result, a swelling of critical decision making that probably took a month 20 years ago, and two weeks ten years ago. Think about Ukraine or Israel. Companies probably had three to four days to decide their responses. So, basically, a Tuesday.
The leadership risk hiding in plain sight.
Too many leadership conversations right now are anchored in AI strategy or digital readiness. Those are valid concerns. But from a board perspective, the better question is whether the organisation has leaders whose capacity can keep pace with increasing acceleration. Boards need to understand not just what leaders are doing but how they’re thinking. Because the real risks aren’t always in the data or the decision. They’re in the leader’s judgment under pressure. AI can give you analysis. It can calculate outcomes. But it cannot make trade-offs rooted in human relationships, stakeholder trust and long-term impact. That still requires a team of humans with the clarity and capacity to decide wisely.
