How to future-proof your leadership in the age of AI

In 1811, on a field outside Berlin, Friedrich Jahn opened the world's first gym.

His critics thought he was absurd. Why would anyone do hard physical work voluntarily? Most people in 1811 still spent their days hauling, plowing, walking miles. Their bodies were strong because their lives demanded it.

Jahn saw something coming. Steam engines were starting to replace muscle. Factories were going up. The future, he suspected, would no longer require the body the way the past had. And when the challenge stops finding us, we get soft.

He was right. Within a century, the gym had become a fixture of modern life for everyone who wanted to keep healthy.

We're standing at the same moment again. The engine isn't steam this time. It's AI. And what it's replacing isn't muscle.

It's thinking!

I want to offer a new perspective on AI & human development in today’s newsletter, and help you focus on what will prepare you for the future 👇

AI saves you time. But the process it shortcuts is exactly what was building you.

Think about how you used to solve a hard problem at work. You wrestled with it. You asked a colleague who didn't quite know but had half an idea. You went down a research rabbit hole. You tried something, watched it fail, tried again.

That whole messy, frustrating, social, slow process — that was the gym. It built your judgment and character. Your tolerance for ambiguity. Your skill at reading people.

Now you type the problem into a chat box. A clean answer comes back in twelve seconds.

The answer is often great. But the process — the part that was actually building you — is gone.

Research on cognitive offloading shows where this leads. When we hand a task to a tool, our own capacity for it quietly atrophies. GPS has measurably reduced spatial memory. The "Google effect" showed that simply knowing information is searchable changes what our brains bother to retain. AI is the same dynamic at a vastly bigger scale — reaching far deeper, into the kinds of thinking that used to make us who we are.

The question becomes: how do we keep the amazing benefits of AI, and keep growing our judgment & character as humans?

Here is the second important question that many are anxious about: what happens when AI takes most of our jobs?

We already know. We've seen it before. We're watching it right now!

Bridgerton is a hit TV series because it dramatizes a real historical condition: a class of people who didn't have to work. What did they do with all that time? They went deep into relationships. Marriages, alliances, scandals, reputation, family dynamics — whole lives spent navigating the social fabric, because that's what was left when economic work was off the table.

Endless shows about housewives follow the same pattern. Take part of work out of the equation, and human attention floods into relationships. Friendships, feuds, alliances.

When humans reduce time they have to work, they don't go quiet. They go relational. Energy that used to go into producing goes into connecting, reading, influencing, belonging, creating.

That's the future AI is pulling all of us toward.

As AI commodifies the technical work, the people who win are the ones who can do what AI can't: hold the room when a decision is unpopular, name the unspoken tension in a team, build trust across real difference, know when to push and when to pause, read what someone isn't saying, help a colleague see themselves more clearly, make meaning out of mess.

As AI becomes omnipresent and cheaper, more people will crave real conversation, real attention, real presence. Call it AI fatigue. In a world of synthetic everything, the premium becomes deeply human everything.

AI is about to remove a lot of the technical lift from a lot of work. The people who thrive won't be the ones trying to compete with AI on its turf. They'll be the ones who deliberately build the part of themselves AI can't touch.

Where do you go for that? In 1811, the answer was new and strange: you go to a place where you do hard things on purpose. You lift weights heavier than your life requires. You build the muscle your daily routine no longer demands.

In 2026, the answer is similar: you need a place to practice the hard human skills: difficult conversations, ambiguous decisions, leading without authority, holding tension without flinching, giving and receiving honest feedback, working through conflict, sitting with discomfort. The skills you used to get as collateral gain from your work, that AI is now quietly eating.

Growth comes down to a simple formula: experience + debrief. You need both — a real, stretching experience, and a debrief that pulls the learning out of it. Most people get plenty of the first and almost none of the second. The debrief is what turns experience into capacity.

Leadership gym, then, is a place where you can intentionally challenge your leadership/human skills AND have someone to help you extract the learnings from that experience through artful debrief and reflection. That basically sums up my daily work in my classroom, in workshops, and in programs I lead 🙂

Deeply human skills don't develop alone. Reading people requires people. Trust is built across difference, not in solitude. The debrief that turns experience into wisdom gets sharper when other minds press on yours. Community here isn't a luxury — it's the equipment. That's the work I'm doing with ChangeLab and my program Uncertainty Advantage — a group of practitioners going through various leadership experiences together, debriefing honestly, building the skills that don't develop in isolation. If that's the kind of room you've been looking for, just reply to this email to learn more.

Ask yourself three questions:

The Industrial Revolution didn't make humans weaker. It just changed where our strength had to come from. The same is true now.

AI isn't taking the most valuable skills off the table. It's putting them under the spotlight.

The question isn't whether you can compete with AI. You can't, and you don't need to. The question is whether you'll build, on purpose and in community, the part of yourself that nothing else can replace.

The future belongs to people who choose to do the hard human work on purpose ✊

Thanks for reading! Please reply at any time with questions or feedback.

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