The Backstory to the Book - The Future of Human Leadership

The backstory begins with something I kept hearing: “We’re doomed."

In conversations people kept expressing the same concern that technology is moving too fast. That artificial intelligence is taking our jobs! That AI is destroying our future, and that it will ultimately kill us all!” 

What bothered me the most was the sense of helplessness underneath it all. People were talking as though the future had already been decided, and all we could do was wait to find out how bad it would be.

I found myself asking, “Who is doing this to us?” And the uncomfortable answer was: we are. 

Humans are developing these technologies, funding them, choosing their purposes, and deciding how to use them. We don’t all have equal power, and nobody controls the whole process. But human decisions are shaping this future. That means we still have responsibilities, and we still have choices.

I felt we were giving up something important when we spoke as though those choices had disappeared. I started pondering the question, what kind of future do actually want? A healthy future? A safe future? One in which our children have opportunities and people can live with dignity? If those things matter to us, then we need to do something about it.

But that brings us to a harder question: What is our purpose? Are we dedicating our lives to cutting costs, increasing productivity, and helping billionaires become trillionaires? I understand the importance of successful businesses. They provide livelihoods, create useful things, and make opportunities possible. But I also want to know what their success is ultimately serving. What would make all this effort, all this change and discomfort worthwhile?

This led me to the concept of Flourishing Together.  Flourishing Together means I want our families to do well. I want people to be healthy, to have diginity and meaningful work, to feel that they belong, and to have time for the people they love. I want organizations to succeed, communities to be places where people can build good lives, and the living world to remain healthy enough to sustain us. When I think about the future, those are the things I care about.

That is also why I’m excited about science, innovation, and artificial intelligence. We have difficult problems to solve: disease, poverty, pollution, energy needs, and so much unnecessary suffering. I want us to have the best tools we can develop. The possibility of helping more people live healthier and fuller lives gives me hope. But we have to make a deliberate connection between what a technology can do and the human good we want it to accomplish.

For example, if AI saves us time, I immediately want to ask who gets that time and what it makes possible. Does someone get more time with a patient, more opportunity to learn, or some relief from an exhausting workload? Does the organization use that capacity to serve more people? Those are leadership choices. The time saved is an opportunity; we still have to decide what to do with it.

As I thought about that, I kept coming back to the people experiencing all this change. What does it feel like to have spent years developing knowledge and experience, and then wonder whether any of it will matter? What happens when you can’t understand the decisions affecting your life, or you feel you have no voice in them? I care about that. I want people to be able to participate in the future with confidence and dignity.

That led me to the Human Viability Conditions. People need coherence: enough understanding to make sense of what is happening. They need agency: a meaningful ability to influence decisions and act. They need belonging, fairness, and meaning. And they need identity continuity—the ability to adapt and grow while retaining a connection to who they are. We can ask people to change while still respecting the experience, relationships, and sense of self they bring with them.

Those conditions matter because they support the human capacities we need. We need judgment when the answer is uncertain, ethics when choices affect other people, empathy when someone is struggling, and creativity when familiar answers stop working. We need narrative to help us make sense of our experiences, and relational trust so we can work through difficulty together. I want us to build environments where those capacities can develop and contribute. That requires caring for the people who bring them.

And we have to bring that human contribution into a larger relationship. Machines can help us recognize patterns, explore possibilities, and understand information at a scale we could never manage alone. Ecological intelligence helps us understand interdependence, natural limits, regeneration, and consequences that unfold over long periods. Human intelligence brings lived experience, judgment, values, and responsibility. I call the purposeful coordination of these different contributions polyintelligence.

What interests me is how we braid them together in service of flourishing together. We need to ask where each can help, where each has limits, and who has the authority to act. I feel strongly that human responsibility must come with meaningful human authority. If a person is accountable, that person needs the information, time, and power to question a recommendation, stop a harmful process, or change the direction. Those abilities have to be real in practice.

That places substantial demands on leaders, and I have respect for how difficult their work is becoming. They need grounded realism to face what is happening, adaptive curiosity to explore what might work, and systems awareness to see how their decisions affect others. They need anticipatory preparation so they can act before a problem becomes a crisis, and orchestration to bring different contributions together. Adaptive steadiness and continuous learning help them stay purposeful while adjusting to new evidence. Those are the habits of mind I believe are important for us to develop.

I also believe the character we bring to that work is important. The Stewardship Virtues in the book are clarity, courage, humility, responsibility, integrity compassion, and patience. I believe it benefits us to have leaders who can explain a difficult choice honestly, admit when they have missed something, and care about the people living with the consequences. I want us to have the courage to change course, even when we have invested heavily in being right. Those virtues become meaningful through what we do under pressure.

And I want us to be honest about the energy change requires. People draw on a finite amount of psychological, cognitive, emotional, and relational capacity as they adapt. In the book, I describe that through the concept of Transformational Energy Units. Learning a new system, rebuilding confidence, adjusting to a new role, and managing uncertainty all make demands on a person. Leaders need to consider the total burden, provide support, and allow time for recovery. I don’t want us to mistake a person’s exhaustion for a lack of commitment.

All of this is happening during what the book describes as the Sixth Great Transition, a much broader change than AI alone. Developments across technology, science, society, economics, geopolitics, philosophy and the environment are interacting and changing the conditions of leadership. I think people’s sense of being overwhelmed deserves to be taken seriously. They are trying to find their footing while the environment around them keeps changing.

In the book, I describe eight operating conditions. Acceleration means change is moving faster. Temporal Compression means we have less time to understand and respond, while Consequence Compression means the effects of our decisions can unfold very quickly. Intelligence is becoming more distributed. Persistent Connectivity keeps people and systems linked, and Continuous Exposure keeps them open to outside pressures. Growing Interdependence means more things depend on one another, and Compounding Complexity makes those relationships harder to understand and manage. Put those conditions together, and you can see why working harder alone won’t answer the challenge.

Another issue I discovered in my research, and feel particularly strongly about, is time. A machine can update overnight. A person may need months to learn, regain confidence, or rebuild trust. Digital Time and Human Time move differently, and leadership has to respect that. We also carry Historically Imagined Time—the stories we tell about the past and the parts of it we hope to recover. And we need Future Time: the ability to consider what our decisions will mean years or generations from now.

I’m also exploring doctrinal time: how beliefs about what the future is destined or supposed to become shape our choices today. That is a further line of thinking beyond the book’s Four Clocks. It interests me because people can look at the same situation through very different understandings of where we have come from and where we are going. Understanding those differences matters when we are trying to build a shared future.

So, when I think about why I wrote this book, I come back to a feeling of responsibility and a sense of possibility. I care about what happens to people. I care about whether our children inherit opportunities, healthy relationships, functioning institutions, and a living world that can support them. We won’t agree on every decision, and we won’t avoid every mistake. But we can choose purposes that deserve our effort, face tradeoffs honestly, and keep learning from the consequences.

I want us to feel that we have a meaningful part to play. Every time we decide what to build, what to reward, what to protect, or what to permit, we help shape the conditions someone else will inherit. That is why I keep returning to the question, “Whom do I serve?” For me, the answer is the people whose lives our decisions touch, including those who come after us, and the living systems we all depend upon. I wrote the book because I believe we can use this extraordinary intelligence to help us flourish together—and I want us to take responsibility for making that possibility real.

The book, The Future of Human Leadership," is available here.

*I use AI in all my work.

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Kevin Benedict

Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.