Have you tried my Leadership Heroes & Archetypes Quiz yet? No? Give it a go here. Join us now at the Integrity Leaders Community: From technical expert to trusted leader. For first-time managers in tech, seeking clarity on their leadership style (and who have a healthy love of sci-fi). More info at the bottom!

Listen to this week’s podcast episode, Ep.239: Organizations Under Pressure, Failing AI Strategies and the Lessons for Leaders, with Patrick Bell, click here to listen now.

Fair to say artificial ‘intelligence’ is the dominant conversation in business today. It’s nearly impossible to open a software application, visit a website, read a news article or LinkedIn post (or even talk to a business owner!) without it coming up. But for an organization, the shift to an AI-driven world isn't as simple as it sounds. It’s not a case of tossing an LLM or an AI agent into a department and watching your business become a billion dollar venture overnight. The key to navigating this technological wave sits exactly where it always has: within your core strategy.

Just like in leadership, where how you do something often matters far more than what you do, with AI transformation how you implement change matters far more than the specific tools you deploy.

In my podcast chat this week with Patrick Bell, an AI doctoral researcher and transformation expert, this exact theme came up a lot. Before getting into AI, Patrick’s career spanned decades and timezones, working across radically different social and business environments from Canada to Zimbabwe, Europe to Japan and the US to Kenya. With this grounding in global business and culture, today he focuses on helping executives design and execute technology strategies that actually succeed in the real world.

Our conversation tackles the glaring corporate reality elephant in the room: while many companies look incredibly successful with AI (or tech more widely) from the outside, the truth on the inside is often a messy mix of missteps, confusion, stalling initiatives and failed projects. Without getting into the merits of ‘AI’ itself (you probably know by now, I have my own issues with the whole thing!), it is worth thinking about the change and transformation that it’s in-arguably causing across the business world. The pressure to compete as this new technology changes the game is exposing deep cracks in traditional management, so if we want our businesses to survive rapid shifts, we have to stop looking at technology as an IT challenge and start treating it as a fundamental leadership issue.

Decades of moving between different business and social cultures taught Patrick that while surface behaviors may change, the core vulnerabilities of an organization remain remarkably consistent. In Japan for example, where he spent twelve years running English conversation schools, he experienced a business culture built entirely on honour, meticulous structure and slow, consensus-driven decisions. It was an environment that excelled at Kaizen the art of continuous, incremental improvement. He recalled how a team member was praised simply for moving a photocopier two meters closer to her desk, saving one minute of movement a day. Yet, that same rigid structure often choked out fast, creative experimentation.

Moving his family to Nairobi, Kenya, presented in many ways the exact opposite environment. Suddenly, the predictable, trust-based Japanese systems were replaced by an unstructured world requiring extreme alertness. He even faced severe ethical pressure early on, walking away from a bribe request to secure a work permit, a decision that ultimately cost him $$$ in unfair import duties.

Despite these cultural extremes, Patrick noticed that the exact same institutional bugs show up everywhere. Teams struggle to stay aligned, executives find it difficult to get unvarnished visibility into daily operations, decisions take too long. Businesses don’t tend to break because of lack of effort or poor strategy, they more likely break because the underlying system (how decisions are made, the way information flows, whether change is managed and if/how people are held accountable) stalls under pressure.

This structural breakdown is, Patrick argues, exactly what we’re witnessing with current AI implementations. When a new technology hits the market with massive hype, the immediate reaction for many executives is to mandate widespread experimentation and adoption. On the surface, everything looks fantastic, divisions run pilot programs, employees build basic dashboards, throw an AI Agent or two at a random problem and marketing assistants announce they’ve created an AI workflow to automate social media posts.

But when you look underneath, has anything fundamental changed? Patrick points out that the vast majority of these corporate initiatives look successful only because organisations are measuring activity instead of outcomes. Letting your team play around with new tools is fun and low-stakes, but the moment an executive steps in and says an initiative must own a measurable business result, it sort of falls over...

People inherently push back against true accountability, it's easy to report that your team is "using AI" but it's much harder to tie that usage to a specific financial impact or a verified reduction in operational costs, a productive outcome, an actual efficiency. This creates a dangerous layer of false progress and because managers frequently rely on progress updates that sound encouraging but lack cold numbers, they fail to see that their people are simply protecting what they aren't able to be accountable for. The project looks like a win right up until the moment management tries to scale it, where it inevitably collapses due to a total lack of structural governance.

Through his doctoral research into AI transformation, Patrick identified three specific pillars that leaders must establish before attempting to scale any advanced workflow across their business: Clear Ownership, Absolute Visibility and Decision Discipline.

First, you cannot have a technology initiative sit in a corporate gray zone, every single automated workflow or digital agent must be tied directly to a real human owner who is responsible for the final commercial result. If a marketing assistant deploys an AI agent to generate content, someone still has to own the actual outcome. Does it drive traffic? Does it generate revenue? If the workflow malfunctions or begins to "hallucinate" (as Patrick witnessed firsthand during his consulting work with advanced agents) a human must own the intervention. Technology failure is almost always an ownership failure in disguise.

Second, leaders require absolute visibility into performance; you might have a dozen different automated experiments running simultaneously, but you must demand precise metrics. How much time did this workflow actually save when you factor in the hours spent building it and the frequency of human intervention required to assure the quality of outcomes? By how much did it reduce costs or improve output quality (not just quantity!)? Without measurement, you have motion without direction, which as any navigator will tell you, isn’t a great idea.

Third, executives must practice decision discipline: you need an agreed-upon process that clearly defines what success looks like, how a tool is rolled out and exactly when a failing project gets ruthlessly binned. Without this discipline, the resource-draining, failing projects get the same attention as the ones that create actual value, with the end result being the latter suffers.

When an organization comes under intense pressure to move faster, that pressure instantly exposes whatever is weak in your leadership and your management system. People get political, they start protecting their own departments, they fudge reports to the CEO etc. To counter this, successful transformation requires a clear architecture of authority (or, if you prefer as I do: decision-making).

Patrick shared a framework that he learned from his mentor, David Lively, the CEO of Studio 98 AI. In any business, you must establish three elements before you can ever realize a sustainable profit: Authority, Role and Function.

To put this into practice, every single task within an employee’s job description should be assigned a clear number: 1, 2, or 3.

This simple communication tool removes the agonizing friction that paralyzes modern teams. Throughout the week, an individual can look at an operational challenge and instantly know their boundaries. More importantly, it forces executives to confront their own micromanagement tendencies, you can’t scale a company or adopt fast-moving technology with a workforce buried under 1s. True scale requires a system populated by 3s and 2s, leaving 1s for exceptionally rare, high-risk scenarios.

Excellence isn't about professional charisma, big talk, grand gestures or chasing the loudest industry trend. Success in business and leadership is really about consistency, clarity and the daily discipline of follow-through.

Patrick shared a vital piece of advice that completely changed how he approached his life and career at age thirty: Don't spend your time trying to be interesting; spend your time being interested.

In a corporate world where managers constantly talk over their teams to appear like the smartest person in the room, the real superpower is active curiosity. Great leadership looks a lot quieter than people think, it means stepping into the trenches, asking deep questions and genuinely listening to the answers.

Technology will continue to shift the tracks underneath our businesses, forcing us to make decisions at a pace that can feel completely overwhelming, but we can take immense comfort in knowing that this isn't a technical crisis. It’s a governance challenge, a leadership problem, a people thing. By stabilising your management structure, defining ownership, keeping people-in-the-loop and setting clear boundaries of autonomy, you can build an organisation resilient enough to handle whatever comes next.

-

To hear the full episode, find it on your preferred podcasting platform or use the web-player at this link: https://smartlink.ausha.co/leading-with-integrity/ep-239-organizations-under-pressure-failing-ai-strategies-and-the-lessons-for-leaders-with-patrick-bell-leadership

If you prefer video then you’ll find it on YouTube too: https://youtu.be/AW4KBmbwEd8

Join me again next week when I chat clarity, values, finding your North Star and why a company can only evolve at the same pace as it’s founder does, with guest, serial entrepreneur/founder, investor and facilitator: Frank Gessner.

And to close with my weekly affirmation: THANK YOU for reading, for listening, for supporting Leading with Integrity. There’s no show or newsletter, no future of leadership without each and every one of you.

Be a Leader Not a Boss,

- David

In case you don’t know me that well, I’m David Hatch and I’m here to help you lead more like a Jedi and less like a Romulan.

If you’re a new manager or first-time leader in a tech, expertise or specialist driven workplace and you’re feeling lonely, stuck, overwhelmed, or simply ready for your next chapter in leadership, the Integrity Leaders Community offers conversations, courses, resources and support to help you grow one step at a time. If you have a healthy love of sci-fi and want to learn more about leadership, then this is the community for you! Solopreneurs also welcome. 😉