Leading from the edges in an AI age.
A framework that maps the natural ebb and flow of creative work — and shows exactly where AI belongs in it.
From cave paintings to corporate decks, we’ve been recording and sharing narratives for millennia. Today — whether we craft strategy presentations, pitch investors, or write legal briefs — we are all, one way or another, engaged in storytelling.
But a paradox confronts today’s knowledge workers: we must produce more compelling work than ever, yet the pressure to deliver quickly and at scale forces us to sacrifice the very things that make work stand out — originality, nuance, and genuine human connection.
“What do well-intentioned creatives do when a deadline looms? Pull up an old template, swap the details, and race to get something into stakeholders’ hands.”
Creative work moves through three phases. Our uniquely human capabilities shine brightest at the two ends — while the middle is where AI now does its heaviest lifting.
Where raw ideas are born and nurtured through deep, unstructured thinking — before the pressure to produce sets in.
Where promising concepts take shape — exploring many directions in parallel, the heavy lifting we used to dread.
Where human discernment shapes work into its final, resonant form — nuance, judgment, and lived experience AI can’t replicate.
The shape holds whatever the craft. The same three phases — human-led at the edges, AI-accelerated in the middle — play out across fields that look nothing alike.
Deep reflection on a thorny ethical dilemma and its real-world stakes.
Draft argument outlines and map the key ideas into rough concept maps.
Hone the language for clarity and meet the strongest counterarguments.
Synthesize the week’s news, brainstorm guests, and map the arc of the show.
Draft multiple scripts, segments, and crew instructions.
Fine-tune segments, run rehearsals, and make the last-minute calls.
Conceptualize features and whiteboard the user’s real needs.
Build the implementation and run it through testing.
Debug, optimize, and polish the experience.
Traditionally, we get bogged down in the middle — wrestling first drafts, organizing information, reformatting for every channel. Today’s AI excels at exactly that, freeing our energy for the edges, where the work becomes ours.
Human ingenuity shines brightest at the edges — yet most of us toil in the middle, where our capabilities are least utilized.
We continue down a chosen path because of past investment — settling for the best of limited options, not the best possible outcome.
The pressure to reassure stakeholders with linear progress forces half-baked ideas out prematurely, just to have something to show.
“Design by committee” waters unique visions down to appease everyone, as collaborative tools make it ever easier to weigh in.
We’ve always been stuck here. What’s new is the way out — as AI takes on the middle, it frees our energy for the work only we can do, at the edges.
AI earns its keep in the middle. Reach for it at the edges — to spark the first idea or apply the final polish — and it tends to disappoint.
A prediction machine defaults to the median — handing back safe, likely ideas before your mind has had the chance to play. The original thought never gets made.
Run every draft through a chatbot to “clean it up” and the unconventional phrasings that make the work yours flatten into the same mush as everything else in the inbox.
From producers of content to directors of process.
So our energy goes where it’s irreplaceable: the edges — where lived experience, intuition, and human emotion come into play.
Twenty-eight pages on leading from the edges — the three phases in depth, the forces that keep us stuck, the leaders who mastered the curve, and the AI pitfalls to avoid.
Download the paper ↓Leading from the edges in an AI age
