Ep240: How Leaders Actually Use AI: The Four Choices That Shape Every Decision

AI doesn't make leaders more thoughtful. It amplifies the choices they're already making.

In this workshop recording, Mimi from Humanergy walks through the Four Choices framework (destructive, passive, productive, transformative) and applies it directly to how leaders are using AI right now. She covers what passive AI use actually looks like in everyday work, how to tell the difference between productive and transformative leadership choices, and why the real risk isn't the tool itself but the moment you stop thinking for yourself.

Real examples included, plus an honest look at Mimi's own passive AI moment.

A practical session for any leader who wants to be more intentional about how they work with AI.

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Transcript

Hey, it's Mimi with Humanergy. This is another one of our free workshops. We host these now mostly on the second Wednesdays of every month. Check our website for more information. This one is Practical Tools for Augmented Leaders, and it is presented by me. Enjoy.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Practical Tools for Augmented Leaders. I'm going to take a wild guess and say AI is probably already a part of how you work, whether you planned for it or not. Most of what we hear from leaders right now is some version of, "Are we using it right?" I know that's probably part of why you're here today, but I'm not going to teach you how to use AI. There are plenty of people doing that, and it's not Humanergy's area of expertise.

What I am going to do is give you something that I think, I hope, is more useful. It's a way to think about the choices you're making when you're using AI. I think the better question is, what is AI revealing about how we lead? And that could be a little itchy.

Think about the last time you used AI for something, whether it was an email, a report, a presentation, a quick summary, maybe you even used it to plan a weekend getaway. You got something back fast and it looked pretty good. And you had a moment. Do I use this, or do I slow down and really think it through? That moment is leadership. Not the AI or the output. It's that split-second decision about what you do next.

Most of us think we're using AI productively. And in reality, a lot of what we're doing is passive. It just looks faster. This is not because people aren't good at their jobs. It's because our environments often reward speed, and AI makes speed really, really easy.

And here's the thing about AI as a tool. It doesn't make you a more thoughtful leader, and it doesn't make you a more self-aware one. What it can do is turn up the volume on the choices you're already making. More speed, more pressure, more output, and more visibility into what you actually default to when nobody is slowing you down.

At Humanergy, we've spent over 25 years looking at what actually separates leaders who make things better from those who don't. And it comes down to this. Leadership isn't about your title or your role or the size of your team. Leadership is about the choices you make that impact the people around you.

Every one of those choices sits somewhere on two continuums: care and commitment. So where is your care? Are you focused on yourself, or are you focused on the greater good? And what are you committed to? Are you committed to your own comfort, or are you committed to creating impact? Every decision we make lives somewhere on these two continuums.

If you're familiar with Humanergy's work, you're probably familiar with the Four Choices framework. So some of this might be review, but it's paired with a practical application. You can see commitment horizontally at the bottom. We've got comfort on the left and impact on the right. And we've got care going vertically, with self on the bottom and the greater good at the top.

When you map those together, four quadrants show up. Starting in the lower right and going clockwise, we have destructive: I'll get what I want, even if it hurts others. Passive: I'm going to do what's easiest for me. Productive: I'll help us succeed. And transformative: I'm going to ensure we are successful.

The Four Choices framework is not a personality test. Repeat, not a personality test. It's a moment-by-moment map, and you move around on this every day. AI doesn't move you from one quadrant to another or from one quadrant to a better one. AI amplifies whichever one you're already operating in.

Let's start with destructive. It doesn't always look dramatic. It's not usually someone cackling and using AI for evil. I think of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons when I think of that. There are bad actors out there and we all know that and we've got to watch out for it, but it can also be using AI to bypass people. It's hiding how a decision got made, presenting AI output as your own thinking, and letting automation do the work that was supposed to involve your own brain and your own team.

Imagine a manager who uses AI to write the performance reviews for his team. Doesn't talk to anyone, doesn't gather input, just generates them and sends them out. The reviews might even sound thoughtful. AI can sound thoughtful. But the people on that team can tell that those reviews were written by AI. And because of that, they know that they weren't actually seen.

That's destructive, not because the tool is bad, but because the leader used it to skip the part that actually mattered, the human part. That manager probably didn't think of that as a destructive choice. They probably thought they were being responsible, getting it done, staying on top of things. And this isn't about avoiding work. It's about doing work in a way that cuts your people out of it. That's impact without care. And it erodes trust until some days people just stop believing you.

Being passive with AI doesn't look like checked out or disengaged. It looks like efficiency. This is good enough. Move on. Next thing. And here's what I really want us to think about. AI can actually make it easier to default to passive, even in moments when you might have been more thoughtful without it. Because when the output looks polished and it comes back in 30 seconds, there's a real pull to just use that. And that's comfort over impact. It's speed without ownership. And that's where most of us drift when we're busy. Not because we're bad leaders, but because the path is right there and it's so easy to take when you have so many other things to do.

This is what it looks like in real work. And maybe you heard this story. It circulated last year. The Chicago Sun-Times published a special summer section that included a reading list recommending books people should pick up over the summer. The list had real authors. It's a very credible publication. But the problem was that some of the actual books on the list didn't exist.

The freelance author that wrote it later admitted that he used AI to help put the section together and he didn't fact-check the output before it went to print. Now, that article didn't go straight from his laptop to the printed page. An editor reviewed it. A section editor probably signed off on it. At every single step, someone had an opportunity to ask, "Did we check these?" And nobody did. That's not an AI failure. It's a passive leadership choice. Speed replaced judgment. Done replaced right.

That freelance author wasn't trying to do bad work, and neither was anyone else. But it was an entire chain of people defaulting to comfort over impact. Everyone assumed the person before them had done the thinking. And it doesn't feel like a decision in the moment. It feels like efficiency.

I've done something similar. A few months ago, I used AI to help update one of our older blog posts. If you don't know, Humanergy has over 500 blogs on our website about leadership. Now, Humanergy has been in business since the year 2000, so some of those are getting a little dusty. But the content, those leadership lessons that are in there, those are evergreen, and I want to bring those back and refresh them. So I'm updating and republishing some of those old blogs.

I ran the old blog through AI. I had set up some rules and parameters about how I wanted it to be updated. And it gave me a refreshed version. I skimmed it. I made a few tweaks. And it sounded good. So I scheduled it to publish. About a week later, it went live. And I went back and actually reread the whole thing. I didn't just skim it. And there was one part that I just really didn't like. And I was disappointed that I had let that go through to publish.

Now, luckily, the stakes aren't as high for me. I could go back and I edited it. But by then, inevitably, some people had already seen it. The point is, the original time I ran that blog post through, I didn't use AI to think better. I used it to move faster. And that was a passive choice, because it was easier to treat done as good enough. I was focused on my own comfort, because I have other things on my list that I wanted to take care of. So I took an easy path.

The opposite is true too. There are going to be moments where we catch it, where we slow down, we make the harder call, and we choose impact over speed. That's the productive choice. And that's what we're all capable of when we're actually paying attention. We can't let AI decide what stays. That has to be our responsibility.

I'm guessing that some version of that has happened in your organization. Maybe not a published article, but a report that went out without anyone really reading it, a recommendation that came from AI that no one questioned, a decision that got made fast because the tool made it easy to skip the hard part. That's the pattern. And it doesn't start with bad intentions. It starts with busy people and easy tools.

So what does it look like when we get it right? Productive is where most good leaders aim to operate. AI supports the thinking, but the judgment stays yours. You don't just forward the output. You say, here's what it gave me, here's what I actually think, and here's the decision that I'm making. That's helping us succeed. Self-focus is not the priority. The greater good is. And you're willing to put in a little extra effort that it requires.

I'm going to give transformative a real picture rather than just a label, because it is a little different. It's not the leader who uses AI better than everyone else. It's the leader who, after a rollout, pulls the team together and says, "OK, how should we actually be using this? What's ours to own? Where does human judgment stay non-negotiable? And how do we make sure we don't drift into passive as a team?" And then they don't just have that conversation once. They build it into how the team works with AI.

That's transformative. It's not using AI better. It's changing how the decisions get made. And that's seeing the greater good and committing to impact. Transformative doesn't just produce better outcomes. It makes better choices the norm, not the exception.

Here's what's at stake when we use AI. David Wheatley said this during our free workshop in January: "When we delegate our judgment to the algorithm, we outsource our humanity." I'm going to say it again for impact. When we delegate our judgment to the algorithm, we outsource our humanity. That's not a technology problem. It's a leadership choice. And it's one that's incredibly easy to make, one "good enough" choice at a time.

We can delegate tasks to AI, but the judgment is where leadership lives. If you give that up, you're not leading anymore.

Let's make the distinction concrete between a productive and transformative choice. Productive is when I catch it. I slow down a little bit. I really take the time to review the output and make a decision based on the full picture of the work that's in front of me. I make the better call, and I choose care for the greater good over myself. Transformative is when we build the system so that the better call is what's normal.

Productive is fact-checking and scrapping the AI draft that isn't good enough. Transformative is the team having an actual agreement, something like, "AI helps us explore fast, but humans decide what goes out every time," not because someone remembered, but because that's just how we work. That's the shift from individual leadership to organizational leadership.

These top two quadrants of productive and transformative, these are where Humanergy hopes that leaders live as often as possible.

And here's where I want to leave you. AI doesn't make leaders more effective. It makes their choices more visible. Most leaders know which choice they want to make. The harder question is, why don't we make it more consistently? Old habits under pressure. Teams that haven't had the conversation. No shared norms around what AI is actually for. No one holding anyone accountable, including themselves. Awareness is the starting point.

Awareness alone doesn't change behavior, especially under pressure and especially across a whole team. And behavior change is where the real work is. That's when you call Humanergy.