The Human Factor
As AI reshuffles where value is created, leadership must redefine what humans are truly optimizing for.
Over the past week, I’ve been interviewing stakeholders as part of building a strategic narrative for a new client. These conversations are designed to uncover the patterns, tensions, and aspirations that ultimately shape how an organization sees itself and the value it creates in the world.
On the surface, we’ve been discussing AI, organizational design, competitive positioning, and the future of work.
But beneath nearly every conversation, I’ve noticed a deeper question emerging.
Not “What can AI do?”
But rather, “What will people be expected to do when AI can do so much?”
It’s tempting to frame this as a “human-in-the-loop” moment, where people simply oversee increasingly capable machines. Yet that feels too narrow. What I’m witnessing isn’t a workflow challenge. It’s a human challenge. A leadership challenge. A judgement challenge.
More importantly, it’s a narrative challenge.
As AI continues to reshape where value is created inside organizations, leaders are being asked a far more consequential question:
What are we optimizing for?
NOW
Much of today’s conversation around AI focuses on capability.
Models are becoming faster. Costs continue to fall. Agents are beginning to complete increasingly sophisticated work with minimal supervision. Business models are shifting due to tokenization. Organizations are naturally asking how quickly they can adopt these advances to gain a competitive advantage.
Those are reasonable questions.
But I wonder if they’re the wrong first questions.
Thinkers like Sangeet Paul Choudary have written extensively about AI’s ability to reshuffle where value is created inside an enterprise. That observation has stayed with me because it’s exactly what I’m hearing from executives.
For decades, companies have optimized processes.
Repeatability.
Efficiency.
Scale.
Consistency.
AI excels within those systems because process is precisely what machines optimize best.
But when process becomes abundant, value doesn’t disappear.
It migrates.
Toward judgment.
Toward discernment.
Toward context.
Toward deciding what deserves attention before the work ever begins.
That migration feels far more significant than another wave of automation.
It represents a shift in what organizations, and the people inside them, are ultimately valued for.
NEW
If value is moving away from execution and toward judgment, then perhaps we’re asking the wrong question when we talk about AI.
Instead of asking, “What tasks can AI perform?”
Perhaps we should be asking, “What decisions become more important because AI now performs the tasks?”
That subtle shift changes everything.
Organizations have spent decades building operational excellence.
Few have invested with the same discipline in decision excellence.
How do leaders make better decisions?
How do teams exercise discernment rather than simply execute?
How do cultures encourage curiosity over certainty, synthesis over speed, wisdom over efficiency?
And perhaps most importantly, are organizations prepared to redesign themselves around this new reality?
Just as importantly, are people ready?
Many of us are beginning to carry what feels like a “brain on our shoulder.” An always-available advisor capable of summarizing information, generating ideas, challenging assumptions, and accelerating our thinking.
Yet possessing extraordinary intelligence doesn’t automatically produce extraordinary judgment.
The differentiator isn’t having AI.
The differentiator is learning how to think with it.
NEXT
I suspect the organizations that thrive over the next decade won’t simply be those that deploy AI the fastest.
They’ll be the ones that become intentional about what they choose to optimize.
Speed certainly matters.
Efficiency matters.
Cost matters.
But none of those metrics answer the deeper leadership question.
What are we trying to create?
Every company will eventually gain access to similar AI capabilities.
Every executive will have access to remarkably intelligent digital assistants.
Competitive advantage will increasingly come from something far more human.
The ability to frame better questions.
The courage to make better decisions.
The wisdom to know when optimization should give way to empathy, creativity, or long-term thinking.
Technology can accelerate intelligence.
Only leadership can determine its direction.
Perhaps that’s where the next era of competitive advantage will be found.
Not in building smarter systems.
But in building people and organizations worthy of the intelligence they now possess.
Building Narrative Worth™
As technology reshuffles where value is created, Narrative Worth reshuffles where human value endures.
Please pass this along.
If this week’s essay sparked a different way of thinking about AI, leadership, or the future of work, I’d be grateful if you shared it with someone navigating those same questions.
The best conversations rarely begin with answers.
They begin with better questions.
And perhaps the most important one of this AI era is still the simplest:
What are we optimizing for?
I’m Tobin Trevarthen.
I spent the first thirty years of my career inside organizations, building brands, leading partnerships, and helping companies shape the stories that moved markets.
Over the last twelve years, I’ve worked across companies, countries, industries, and executives, helping organizations find the narrative that aligns people around meaningful change.
Along the way, I realized something unexpected.
The work was never just about organizations.
It was about people.
Because organizations don’t transform unless the people inside them do.
That realization became the foundation for everything I do today.
I don’t believe our lives unfold in straight lines.
I believe they accumulate like mosaics.
Every experience becomes another tile. Every success, setback, relationship, reinvention, and lifequake changes the larger picture. The image only becomes clear when we step back far enough to see how the pieces belong together.
I call that accumulated value Narrative Worth™.
Today, I work with founders, executives, and leaders at the moments when their old story no longer explains where they’re headed next. Together we reconnect the pieces, uncover the patterns, and build a narrative that others can believe in because they believe it themselves.
Some of my most rewarding work is with neurodivergent leaders whose greatest strengths often sit outside conventional frameworks. Their mosaics were never incomplete. They simply needed to be seen differently.
That is the work of SpatialShift™.
Because I believe your Narrative Worth™ is the most valuable asset you will ever own.
Your point that value migrates toward deciding what deserves attention before the work begins is the one I would press hardest, because that decision is rarely made fresh. By the time a seasoned person judges what is worth attending to, years of formation have already settled most of it, and settled it below the level of choice. The same training that produces good judgment also tunes attention toward what a field codes as signal and quietly away from what it codes as noise, so decision excellence arrives with a cost that never shows up on the ledger. The better formed the eye, the harder it becomes to notice the horizon the formation drew, since discernment feels like seeing clearly rather than seeing selectively. So alongside what are we optimizing for, I would ask what our optimizing has already trained us to stop seeing, because AI will inherit that blind spot and scale it.
Tobin, you are framing the archetypal quest: become worthy of greatness. This usually involves slaying a dragon(s), acquiring special knowledge, then sooner or later, facing one's demons. "Perhaps that’s where the next era of competitive advantage will be found. Not in building smarter systems. But in building people and organizations worthy of the intelligence they now possess." Well said.