January 2026
Thesis
As a leader, you shape who your people become.
Every environment shapes the humans inside it. When that environment runs on AI, you’re not just deploying technology. You’re deciding how your people think.
Two archetypes emerge. The Optimized Operator — capable of superhuman execution, incapable of knowing whether the execution matters. And the Perspective-Holder — someone who can do what AI cannot: see why, hold contradiction, and grow.
AI capability is table stakes. The same models, the same tools, the same cognitive horsepower — available to anyone who wants them.
Perspective is the new alpha.
Thoughtlessness builds one type. Intention builds the other.
Environment
We don’t know who discovered water. We know it wasn’t a fish. The environment is what you can’t see when you’re swimming in it. AI is now the water.
We spend most of our waking hours at work. When work happens inside systems that simulate thinking, it shapes how we think. How we think determines who we are.
A muscle you don’t use weakens. A skill you outsource fades. A judgment you never have to make becomes a judgment you can no longer make.
If you’re a leader, the question shouldn’t be whether your people can use AI. It should be whether AI makes your people more human or less. Whether it makes them more capable of the things machines can’t do, or less.
Few leaders are asking this question. Most measure adoption rates to realize productivity gains. They’re creating Optimized Operators.
Two Types
The question is which type.
The Optimized Operator:
People shaped by constant augmentation, algorithmic feedback, and machine-mediated judgment. Capable of executing at superhuman speed. Incapable of knowing whether the execution matters.
Alone together. Productive but empty. They’ve become extensions of their tools — judgment atrophied, relationships shallow, self-worth tied to output. They can’t function without the machine.
You know this person. They’re in your business now. They reach for a tool before they gather their thoughts. They can’t sit in a meeting without an AI assistant. They’ve forgotten what they believe because the model gives the answer.
The Perspective-Holder:
People shaped by intentional development, protected relationships, and cultivated solitude.
They’ve deepened their judgment through experience, expanded their perspective through encounter, grounded their identity in meaning. They can function with or without augmentation — the tools extend them but don’t define them. This is the person who can do what AI cannot: grow.
Perspective as Alpha
AI can hollow perspective out or blow it wide open.
As a vehicle to see what we couldn’t see on our own. To encounter viewpoints we wouldn’t have sought. To stress-test assumptions against simulated objections. To explore possibility spaces too large for any individual mind.
Not AI replacing human intelligence. Not even AI augmenting it. AI showing us what we couldn’t see alone.
Perspective is the ability to hold multiple frames. To see a situation through the eyes of the customer, the employee, the regulator, the skeptic, the enthusiast. To know which frame matters when. To integrate contradictory views into action that works.
AI can simulate perspectives. Only humans can hold them — feel their weight, be changed by them, integrate them into judgment.
The organization full of Perspective-Holders has a structural advantage that compounds.
Nobody can buy a workforce that operates in Perspective-Holder mode. That’s an intentional capability to build. The window to start building is now.
Artist Mode
The Perspective-Holder acts like an artist.
Not artist as job title. As orientation. Someone who uses constraints generatively. Who tolerates ambiguity without rushing to resolve it. Who finds value in not knowing. Who sets up conditions for emergence and then pays attention to what happens.
This is optimal orientation for human-AI integration. Not the operator who executes prompts, but the artist who designs systems and becomes an audience to the results. Not control, but cultivation. Not prediction, but discovery.
The best artists work this way. They establish constraints — a form, a palette, a set of rules — and then explore what becomes possible within those limits. Limits generate possibilities.
AI is the most powerful constraint engine ever built — it can generate infinite variations within any boundary you set.
A simple example: A strategist needs to pressure-test a market entry plan. The Optimized Operator asks AI to “analyze this plan and identify risks.” They get a list. They check the boxes. They move on.
The Perspective-Holder designs a different process. They create five AI personas — a skeptical CFO, a hostile regulator, a desperate competitor, a confused customer, a cynical journalist — each with specific constraints and incentives.
They run the plan through each perspective, not looking for answers but for frames they hadn’t considered. They sit with the dissonance. They notice what surprises them.
They revise not just the plan but their understanding of the problem.
Same AI. Same assignment. Radically different relationship to it. The Optimized Operator got efficiency. The Perspective-Holder got growth.
Imaginative practice isn’t a department. It’s the human capacity that AI best amplifies — and most threatens to erode.
Distributed Authority
There’s an organizational philosophy that produces Perspective-Holders: push decision rights to those closest to the action. Higher levels support lower levels, not override them. Responsibility is distributed, not centralized. Leaders trust their people to steer.
AI can enable radical distribution of responsibility and agency. Capability pushed to every node of organization. People empowered to make decisions locally. Intelligence that builds personal judgment and problem-solving skills.
Central planning failed in economics. It will fail in AI deployment.
The organizations that thrive will be the ones that distribute responsibility, cultivate local judgment, and trust their humans to steer.
Trap Doors
What’s the difference between a tool that extends you and a tool that replaces you? The Perspective-Holder uses AI to expand their capacity to see. If that expanded perspective depends on AI, have they grown or become dependent?
Three tests to find out:
The Residue Test: The tool should make you more capable when you use it, not less when you don’t. The calculator freed mathematicians for higher-order thinking. The word processor removed friction from revision. These tools deposit capacity rather than extract it.
Some AI use extracts capacity. If you can no longer write without generation, evaluate without scoring or decide without recommendation, you haven’t been extended. You’ve been hollowed. Can your people still do the work without the tool? If not, something has gone wrong.
The Boundary Test: The tool should make your boundaries clearer, not dissolve them. Healthy AI use strengthens identity. The musician who masters an instrument knows more about who they are as a musician.
Some AI use dissolves identity. When you can’t tell which thoughts are yours and which are generated, when your judgment becomes indistinguishable from the model’s recommendation, you haven’t been extended. You’ve been absorbed.
When you can’t tell where your thinking ends and the model’s begins, you’ve lost something more fundamental than a skill. You’ve lost track of who’s thinking.
The antidote: Regular unplugged reflection. Explicit articulation of your own views before consulting AI. Rituals that ask: what do I think?
The Authorship Test: People remain authors of the work. An author isn’t someone who produces every word. An author takes responsibility for the whole. They set the intention. They make the judgment calls. They stand behind the work.
The Perspective-Holder uses AI to generate possibilities but never surrenders authorship. The judgment of quality, the sense of purpose, the accountability for outcome. These remain human. The moment you can’t explain why you chose this output over that one, you’ve stopped being the author.
Final Frame
Four capacities make perspective possible. Each is irreplaceable. Each is under threat.
— Judgment: the ability to ask whether the metrics are worth optimizing for.
— Meaning: the sense that work connects to something worth doing.
— Relationship: the unscripted encounter with another human who might change you.
— Solitude: the ability to know what you think before asking the machine.
These aren’t soft skills. They’re what the Optimized Operator loses and the Perspective-Holder cultivates.
Without intention, we’ll trade the difficulty of thinking for the comfort of delegation. Our people will forget what their own minds feel like.
Perspective is the new alpha. Not because it sounds good in a strategy deck. Because it’s the only thing left that can’t be bought, copied, or automated. Every competitor has access to the same models. Nobody can buy the culture you build.
The window is now. The organizations shaping Perspective-Holders today will compound that advantage for a generation. Those that wait will look up in three years and wonder why their workforce can’t function without a prompt.
The humans you shape will raise children, lead communities, and model what it means to be present or absent. They’ll carry what you built into every room they enter for the rest of their lives.
Build like it matters.
These ideas are explored in depth in Perspective Agents: A Human Guide to the Autonomous Age (2024).