Work Feels Brittle, People Don't

I walked into that room expecting weight.

Thirty senior-level leaders. A day and a half together. A world outside moving faster than anyone can fully track. AI accelerating everything, org structures shifting in real time, the future of leadership itself up for debate. I knew what these leaders were carrying…the culture, the pace, and the pressure.

What I found stopped me. These leaders showed up with energy, curiosity, warmth and an openness that you do not manufacture. You either bring it or you do not. From the moment we were together, there was laughter, real conversation, a hunger to connect that felt almost urgent. Not despite everything they were carrying, but alongside it.

I have been doing this work for over twenty years. I was not naive about what the room might hold. But I was moved. And I have been sitting with why ever since.

The leaders in that room are not observers of what is happening with AI. They are inside it, building it, being reshaped by it in real time. The questions are genuinely new. What does good leadership look like when your team includes machines? What is the role of a manager when the org design is changing faster than anyone can map it? What do you hold onto when the ground keeps shifting?

There is a framework I come back to in moments like this: BANI: Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. It was built to describe something rawer and harder to read than anything most of us were trained for. These leaders are not only in complexity, they are in chaos. And in chaos, pushing harder, moving faster, and reaching for expertise, stop working.

In chaos, there is no playbook. And still, the instinct is to speed up.

Here is what I did not expect to find.

In a room full of people at the center of the AI race, people whose organizations are making bold bets on a future with fewer human roles and faster machine-driven work, the thing everyone was hungry for was each other.

Not answers, not frameworks, not someone to tell them what to do next. Each other.

The peer conversations were electric. When one leader named something hard and twenty-nine others exhaled because someone finally said it out loud, that was the moment that mattered most. Being in person, face to face, with peers who understood without needing it explained. That was the thing nobody could get anywhere else.

There is a fear running through a lot of conversations right now that AI is going to strip the humanity out of work. I hear it from leaders. I read it in the think pieces. I feel it in the questions people are afraid to ask out loud.

What I witnessed in that room was the opposite.I watched thirty people choose connection, choose presence, choose each other with an intentionality that told me they know exactly what is at stake. They are not waiting to be told humanity matters. They are fighting for it.

Kevin Cashman writes in The Pause Principle that leaders who pause purposefully grow exponentially. That growth is not just strategic. It is human.

What made that day and a half work was not the content but the container. Time and space to slow down enough to actually see the system you are in, the people beside you, the things you have been carrying without stopping to look at. Not reflection for its own sake. A deliberate act of stopping so that something true can surface.

And what surfaced, over and over: we are all in this together. Nobody has the answers. Everyone is learning in real time. That shared honesty is what brought people closer and made the work possible.

The pace of this moment will take everything you give it. The pause is how you decide what is actually worth giving.

One of the core aspects of the program gives leaders the opportunity to reflect on what they want to be able to say about their leadership six months from now. Not their goals. Not their OKRs. What they want to be true about how they showed up.

For me, six months from now, I want to be able to say that I figured out how to pair the power of artificial intelligence with the power of human wisdom in a way that is actually helping leaders and teams unlock what they are capable of. Not one or the other, but both together.

That is the real leadership challenge right now. Not surviving AI. Not resisting it. Learning to lead with it in a way that makes the human parts of work more powerful, not less.

What is clear to me is leaders cannot figure that out alone and organizations cannot design for it by accident. It takes time, space, honest conversation, and the kind of peer-level learning that does not happen in a Slack thread or a thirty-minute all-hands.

It requires someone to build the container.

That is the work we care most about right now. And if you are thinking about what your leaders need to lead well in this moment, not just the technical skills but the human ones, we would love to talk.

Tina Richards is a co-founder and managing partner of Collabic, a leadership and organizational development consultancy. She works with leaders and teams who want to do this differently. Find us at thecollabic.com.