Early in our AI journey, I made a well-intentioned decision that nearly stalled us. I opened the conversation to everyone.
It felt right, and in a culture sense it was. People across the organisation had views about AI, hopes and worries both, and inviting them in generated real energy. Ideas surfaced from places I’d never have looked. Engagement was high. For a while, it looked like exemplary change leadership.
Then progress quietly stopped, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to see why.
The more voices we added, the harder it became to land anything specific. Every proposal attracted nuance. Every concern arrived with conditions. Every group, reasonably, wanted its priorities reflected. None of it was wrong, and that was exactly the trap: you can’t dismiss reasonable input, so you accommodate it, and each accommodation dilutes the direction a little more, until the path forward represents everyone and moves no one. This is called the participation paradox. The inclusion that builds commitment, applied at the wrong altitude, destroys decisiveness.
The fix wasn’t to stop listening. It was to get deliberate about where participation operates. Broad participation is invaluable for understanding sentiment, surfacing risks, and finding opportunities, the sensing layer. Direction, prioritisation and trade-offs need a small number of accountable owners, the deciding layer. We’d let the sensing layer drift into the deciding layer, and called it engagement.
Untangling that felt uncomfortable, like a betrayal of the openness we’d promised. It wasn’t. People, it turns out, don’t actually expect to co-author the strategy. They expect to be heard, to understand the reasoning, and to see their input given real consideration. Consultation with visible listening builds more trust than consensus-seeking that never lands, because people can smell a decision that’s afraid to be made.
Listen widely. Decide narrowly. Explain openly. That’s the balance we eventually found.
If your AI program has lots of engagement and no momentum, count how many people effectively hold a pen on direction. That number is usually the diagnosis.