Leadership and Human Viability, #23

The key constraint of the Sixth Great Transition is human viability—the ability of people to remain coherent, responsible, and meaningfully engaged inside systems that operate faster than humans.

As we all recognize, humans cannot compete against the power and speed of digital platforms, AI, and automation. So what roles and responsibilities do leaders have when speed forces humans to the sidelines?

To answer that question, we must first ask another: What do human leaders owe society—and what does society owe humans.

This question is particularly important when considering how to support your society through times of massive and unrelenting change. It is the implicit social contract of leadership.

For most of history, change was slower. Power was constrained by time, distance, and human limits. Today, however, acceleration, automation, and autonomous systems have altered leadership. Leaders must now oversee systems that act at machine speed, and scale globally with ...