Lead What You Can’t Outrun, leading teams in an AI world, the series plan

Why I'm doing this

I've spent the last 15 years of a nearly 30-year career leading teams, and I love it, helping people grow, watching them develop, nurturing new talent. But somewhere along the way, the conditions changed. We all know the myth. If you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump out, but if you put a frog in cold water and slowly boil it, it won’t. Have we been slowly boiling our teams for years: asking them to do more, with fewer people and less time, while adapting to new technology every few weeks? Then we added AI to the mix. Trying to keep up became nearly impossible.

That realisation became a long easy / short book: Lead What You Can't Outrun. And rather than let it sit on my hard drive, I'm going to serialise the whole argument here over the coming weeks, one chapter at a time, because we all live this every day and even if you only take one thing away from this series it will have been worth it.

The core argument

Most advice tells leaders to move faster and adopt more. This series makes the counter-intuitive case that the winning response is subtraction: protecting attention, finishing what's started, curating the noise, and building the conditions in which a team can do its best work as the ground keeps shifting.

The spine of the whole thing is a single idea:

You cannot out-run an exponential. So, lead deliberately, subtract, don't chase.

And underneath every chapter runs one finding from Microsoft's research that reframes the job entirely: the biggest determinant of whether a team thrives in the AI era isn't the talent of its individuals or the tools they're given. It's the system around them and the leader is the architect of that system. The lever is you.

Who it's for

Managers and team leaders, especially in organisations building, selling or adopting AI, who feel the pressure to transform but lack a clear, research-backed way to lead their people through it. No technical background required. If your Tuesday disappears into interruptions and the work that matters gets pushed to nine o'clock at night, this is written for you.

What's coming in the series

Here's the layout, one post a week:

1. The Ground Has Shifted - why the pace is real, and why chasing it backfires.
2. It's Not Effort. It's Attention. - your team's real constraint, and the one instrument that directs it.
3. You'll Never Keep Up (and That's Fine) - why finishing beats starting.
4. Judgement Just Got Expensive - the skill AI made more valuable, not less.
5. Trust Is the Real Unlock - why governance is the brake that lets you go fast.
6. Your People Are Ready. Your Organisation Isn't. - the Transformation Paradox.
7. Leading Humans and Agents - the new discipline hiding in your org chart.
8. Hire and Grow Learners - why learn-it-all beats know-it-all.
9. A Pace You Can Sustain - beating the infinite workday.
10. Assess Your Team's Current State - locating where you actually are.
11. The Operating System, A 90-Day Plan - turning all of it into action.

Then a finale to tie the whole thing together.

The promise

This isn't about AI. It's a series about leadership in the world AI has made, fast, demanding, lean and unrelenting. And it ends with a practical guide to drive change. You'll be able to assess where your team sits today across four stages of readiness, then follow a 90-day plan to move from reactive and overwhelmed to focused, adaptive and genuinely managed.

Stop trying to keep up. Start leading what matters.

Follow along if you want to know more, see you at Chapter 1!