Pre-Flight Checklist: A Letter to Leaders (Post #18 of 20)
What is the AI future we are feeding?
This post is a call to AI leaders: how to drive responsible AI adoption through governance, storytelling, and courage. Not speed and chaos.
What is the AI future we are feeding? One built on courage and governance, or one built on speed and chaos?
Skip ahead to the Three Step Framework below if youâre here for the practical guidance.
There is a pivotal scene in Tomorrowland (2015) where the villain (played by Hugh Laurie) explains why humanity is spiraling toward collapse. He delivers one of the most brutal monologues from any futuristic film.
He explains that humanity was shown a vision of its own destruction, not as a prophecy but as a warning. Providing time to course-correct.
Governor Nixâs argument cuts deep: humanity was shown a vision of its own destruction as a warning, not a prophecy, with enough time to change course. But instead of being galvanized into action, please packaged the apocalypse as entertainment. Disaster became a genre. Collapse became content. And while the world was busy consuming a vision of its own ending, the actual crumbling continued unchecked.
His most damning point wasnât that people were afraid of the future. It was that they werenât afraid enough to do anything about it. The future that required nothing of them today, the one they could just watch, scroll and wait, was the one they chose. They saw the iceberg. They knew it was coming was in advance. Yet they steered toward it anyway.
That speech stems from a deeper metaphor in the film that tells a parable of two wolves. Inside every person, there are two wolves. One represents fear, despair, cynicism and apathy. The other represents courage, hope, creativity and discipline.
Which wolf wins? The one you feed. ~âTomorrowlandâ (2015)
He was making a simple point. Humanity fed the wrong wolf.
Thatâs the metaphor that I keep coming back to when I think about AI governance today.
Looking back through history, the psychological root of every governance failure steps from feeding the wolf that rewards instant gratification instead of responsibility.
We made the choice. We make the choice. We will make the choice.
We have a choice.
I wanted to write a letter to our worldâs storytellers in every country to do that thing you do so well and give a voice to the people. Not the politicians. Not the radicals. Not the evangelists.
Storytellers give people who donât have the mic a voice to say how technology impacts them. They want AI. They need AI. But they also want the guardrails that allow society to function through governance, security and transparency. The boring stuff that protects the beautiful stuff.
Dear Storytellers, Be our voice. Help the world adopt AI through governance, security and transparency.
But Iâm going to have to write a different letter. Because the storytellers ARE doing their thing. They are writing. Theyâve been getting books, plays, movies, and songs published for centuries saying exactly what the rest of us are saying about the future. The silent majority that want intentional thought and planning to accompany growth.
The problem isnât the storytellers. The problem is that the people powerful enough to implement guardrails arenât listening. Because hype pays better than planning.
As we wade through our social media and news feeds through the amount of AI-generated opinions and vanilla-rewrites of authentic opinions, it all starts to blur together.
My hairdresser doesnât care what an LLM is. The doctor operating on you doesnât understand the currency of a token or how you are handling model weights. Thereâs an entire world outside of big tech that are the recipients of decisions made by a very small group of people inside a very big machine.
So, this is a different letter than I planned to write. Because, Hugh Laurie stole my thunder and I didnât even know that speech existed until I started searching for an powerful movie analogy.
This post is a letter to leaders. A call to leadership. A call for courage. A call to the architects of governance.
Three Step Framework: Be an AI Adoption Leader
You donât need a podium or title. You need courage to influence change.
Find the Internal Storytellers. Your organization already has them. The trusted voices and the key influencers. The âSimon Sinekâ types who speak in clarity, not complexity. These are the people who others instinctively listen to.
Start with One Story Worth Telling. Pick one workflow, one product or one process that is broken or inefficient. Then ask, âHow could AI meaningfully improve this without compromising trust or clarity?â
Donât boil the ocean. Light a beacon.
Apply a single AI solution to it until it sticks. Commit to a single use case. Pilot it, measure it and improve it. Then tell the story of how you made it work, including the guardrails you added. This is the key to cultural adoption. One sticky success at a time.
Test Flight: Tell the AI Adoption Story in Your Organization
Try this out over the next 48 hours.
Identify Your Three Trusted Voices. Who do people listen to in your organization? Who shapes belief and trust? Itâs not always, more often than not, the leadership team.
Choose ONE broken workflow that could benefit from AI automation. Make sure itâs repeatable, measurable, visible and one of the most annoying things that people want fixed.
Craft the Story. âHereâs the problem we solved. Hereâs how AI helped. Hereâs the guardrail the ensured trust. Hereâs the value it created.â Now go tell that story three times: in a meeting, in writing and to leadership. YOU are feeding the right wolf.
Mission Debrief
How did it go?
Did you find your storytellers? Did you find a problem worth solving and have the courage to do something about it? Does your leadership have courage?
âTomorrowlandâ ends with a simple truth: The future is not decided. Itâs chosen through the stories we choose to amplify.
This is your shot at immortality. Be the voice that sparks humanity to THINK differently.
And feed the right wolf.
This is Post 18 of 20 in the AI Adoption Framework series. [â Post 17] | [Post 19 â] |
Download the complete framework as a free eBook.
Excellent analysis! How do we ensure leaders take AI warnings seriously without re-packaging them? So insightful.
Itâs very difficult for many people to choose responsibility over instant gratification. I keep thinking that weâd do better to promote therapy and counseling rather than anything else :)