AI discounted all traditional knowledge work. The value didn’t vanish. It moved to the one place a model still can’t reach, and most leaders aren’t looking there.
AI has made the components of leadership work nearly free: analysis, draft, model, first-pass decision. The value didn’t evaporate. It relocated to the one place a model still can’t reach: the connections between the parts. That shift is why systems thinking, long filed under “nice-to-have,” is now the highest-return skill a leader owns. A nine-second corporate catastrophe this spring shows what it costs to keep watching the parts instead.
This is the second article in a short series on three cognitive lenses for thinking under pressure: tension, connection, and reduction.
Continue reading “When the Parts Got Cheap, the Connections Got Expensive”