If you were with us earlier this year in New York, Chicago, Dallas, or Houston: that session was about the system. This one is about leadership.

Three leadership shifts and not one of them is about technology.

From expertise to exploration. AI's limitless knowledge means you cannot compete on information anymore. Relevance and credibility now come from reinvention: framing the right problem and asking the better question.

From doing to discerning. AI accelerates action faster than judgment, by default. The scarce skill is discernment. Knowing when to trust the output, when to overrule it, and where human value sits now.

From mandate to movement. AI accelerates individuals. Only leaders accelerate enterprise value, and not by mandate. By activating it across silos and building the conditions where it spreads on its own.

The shifts are what is changing. The sparks are what you do on Monday.

Plenty has been written about why AI initiatives fail. We are more interested in why some succeed, and the answer has less to do with strategy documents than with ten specific actions in the conditions around the work. You could call them levers or nudges. We like sparks. They group into three jobs.

BUILD: coach, workshop, simulate Coaches rather than courses. Workshops where people build something real. Simulations, so the expensive mistakes happen in a safe room.

CHEER: inspire, applaud, accelerate Show teams what is genuinely possible. Reward your innovators visibly, so their peers want in. Then reset the clock on what fast means.

EQUIP: staff, tool, budget, secure The right people, real tools, real data. Budgets that make experimentation fundable. Guardrails that are not an approval queue.

Nine of the ten are about people and how they work with the machine. One, tool, is about the technology itself. That is roughly the inverse of how most AI budgets are split.

It only takes a few dark sparks to stall a gameplan. Most leaders are running well on four or five and have never thought about the rest. You will find out which are yours before you leave.

‍