if you’re cutting jobs because of ai, make sure you cut the right ones.
"In 100% of our strategy workshops in the last 12 months, leaders raised AI as a critical driver of strategic decisions. All of them - over 45 engagements and across 32 industries!"
Matt Braithwaite-Young, Managing Partner, Turning Leaf Facilitation
It’s easy for leaders to treat AI as a technical and operational challenge. Their conversation naturally focuses on how to use AI to cut costs and, regrettably, which roles to cut to maximise efficiency.
While that’s an understandable first instinct, especially in a structural recession, starting with cost-out might be grabbing the wrong end of the stick.
The challenge presented by AI is a remarkably good stimulus to prompt your leaders to think more deeply about your longer-term organisational direction and your transformation options.
The trap to avoid is treating AI as a technical issue, which leads every function to look for overhead impacts and AI tools to apply to their own part of the value chain.
While that’s good for quick wins, you can easily miss the whole-of-organisation picture and the opportunity for joined-up cross-functional work that will give you longer-term competitive advantage.
Before you send your functional heads off to audit their workforce and value chains, you really need to consider some more strategic questions.
Questions like:
-
As AI reshapes your sector, which leadership behaviours, assumptions, and ways of working will add most value to your organisation?
-
Where can your people use AI for maximum impact?
-
What kind of organisation do you want to be?
-
What external trends do you expect will be magnified or reduced by AI?
These leadership questions have to come BEFORE your operational and cost-cutting decisions.
The rise of AI demands both technical and adaptive leadership work
In the book Leadership on the Line, Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky from Harvard developed a distinction every leadership team needs to understand. There are two types of leadership challenge: technical and adaptive.
1. Technical challenges can be solved by applying your organisation’s expertise. You and your team are familiar with the type of problem. You know how to deal with it. You have the right people, the right tools, and you apply a known process or principles.
2. Adaptive challenges are where you’re uncertain about the best path forward because they lie outside current capability and involve uncertainty of response. Heifetz and Linsky found that these kinds of challenges always require leaders to question and change their assumptions and behaviours.
Adaptive challenges are how organisations grow. AI-driven transformation sits squarely in the adaptive category.
There is no certainty about AI evolution, so the solutions will be created in real time by your team.
Because AI is technical in nature, it is easy to fall into the trap of treating it as a technical challenge. You end up commissioning an IT project and a workforce audit. And worse, your functions all begin to ask for IT help to implement their self-generated AI solutions. This is both impractical and wasteful.
Don’t miss the transformative opportunity to use AI uncertainty to inspire adaptive cross-functional teamwork!
The most important work you can do under the AI uncertainy is leadership alignment.
Use the AI crisis to align your leaders on what matters first:
-
What kind of organisation do we want to be?
-
What are we each genuinely prepared to change?
-
Where do we agree and disagree on direction?
-
What becomes possible that wasn't before
-
How can we make it safe for our people to experiment with AI and tell us what they find?
"Unless AI transformation is treated as a strategic and leadership challenge, functional teams default to treating it as a cost-out opportunity. AI is a leadership challenge, not an IT one."
Matt Braithwaite-Young, Managing Partner, Turning Leaf Facilitation
Two kinds of leadership challenge
Most organisations spend the majority of their energy on the left side of the table below. The leadership teams making the most progress on AI do the adaptive work on the right.
1. technical ai challenges
Where most organisations start:
They know the problems and the solutions, and they know where to delegate.
They ask questions like:
-
Which AI platform or model to use?
-
Where in operations to automate?
-
Data governance and security covered?
-
What integration with existing systems?
-
Workforce reduction arithmetic
This is hard work, but it is understood by your organisation and is manageable using current capabilities.
2. adaptive ai challenges
Where the real leadership opportunity is.
They build a coherent strategy and are confident in direction and accountability.
They ask questions like:
-
What kind of organisation do we want to be?
-
What are we each genuinely prepared to change?
-
Where do we agree and disagree on direction?
-
What becomes possible that wasn't before
-
How can we make it safe for our people to experiment with AI and tell us what they find?
First, align your leadership team on these questions, and unlock something much more valuable.
If you see AI primarily as a cost reduction exercise, you’ll only find short-term gains.
However, if you use the pressure of AI as a stimulus for the adaptive leadership dialogue about direction, accountability, and commitment, you’ll unlock something much more valuable: an aligned leadership team, a coherent strategy, and expanded capacity to move with confidence as the competitive landscape shifts around you.
That conversation does not happen by itself.
Whether you use an external facilitator or not, you will need structure, honesty, and the time and space for the right questions to stay on the table long enough for your team to emerge aligned on your direction and ready to grow.
why choose turning leaf for your ai planning?
We have spent two decades helping leadership teams think through the most complex strategic challenges they face. AI is the latest, and in many ways the most consequential, of those challenges. Our facilitators bring deep experience in strategy formation, competitive positioning, and organisational change to every AI Transformation workshop we run.
We are not technology vendors. We have no platforms to sell and no stake in which AI tools your team chooses. What we bring is the facilitation expertise to help your leadership team surface the real issues, challenge comfortable assumptions, and commit to a strategy your whole team will actually execute.
Our approach is fast, practical, and focused. A well-designed AI Transformation workshop can be completed in a single day. Your team walks out with a prioritised set of AI opportunities, a shared strategic framework, and the ownership and energy to move forward decisively.
