AI Leadership: what management taught you, and why it now stands in the way

  • Motivating ImagesAn image is never merely a record; it is always already an interpretation. What we see, we have helped to shape through the frames we look with: culture, expectation, history. "Moving" points to process: images are not static but in continuous reconstruction, like the organisations and identities they reflect. To hold an image to be fixed is to freeze what is in essence fluid.
  • Animated VoicesEvery voice carries a claim on reality, spoken from a specific position in the social field. Speaking is not a neutral transfer of facts but an act that helps to construct the world: whoever speaks helps to determine what can be heard. The plural "voices" points to polyphony: truth arises not from one authoritative statement, but from the friction between perspectives.
  • Clarity of MindClarity here is not a synonym for simplicity but for lived ordering: the capacity to see through one's own constructions without mistaking them for fixed truth. A thought becomes clear only when it is aware of its own constructedness, of the fact that it is one possible ordering among many. This is reflective capacity at its core: thinking about one's own thinking.
  • Ideas in ActionAn idea proves itself not in abstraction, but in the action it makes possible. Because we produce our reality, every idea is at the same time an intervention: it changes, however subtly, what is subsequently experienced as "real". Practical here does not mean instrumentally simple, but responsible: the idea that acknowledges its own creative power and acts accordingly.
René de Baaij

3 July 2026 · René de Baaij

English AI LeiderschapBlogLeiderschap #Human-AI#Leiderschap

Today, 1 July, a new episode has appeared in the KNVI podcast series: ‘Leadership and AI’. This podcast is a genuine recommendation for anyone in a management or expert role who works with AI and wants to understand what it asks of personal leadership. Not standard tips, but in-depth guidance grounded in change-management thinking. Comments in a post below are welcome.

Does this resonate with you? Within the KNVI, a new interest group ‘AI and Personal Leadership’ is taking shape. Would you like to be kept informed about it?

Listen to the episode

Listen to or download the episode (mp3)

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