The Leadership Paradox: Why AI Should Make Us More Human, Not Less
Who’s the Fittest to Survive?
Issue 216, June 12, 2025
We’ve all been taught Charles Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. The theory has ruled in the animal kingdom as well as the boardroom. The strong, the bullies, and the ruthless were always perceived to be the survivalists. We admired the fittest and sought to emulate them. This interpretation of success was mirrored by the top-down, paternalistic management strategy that became the command-and-control Industrial Age school of leadership of the past decades. This management style seems unshakable, despite the changes in our cultural environment, types of work, and evolved workplace models.
Our exploration today is whether the survival of the fittest has stood the test of time in the business world, and more specifically, how the wild card we have been dealt, AI, plays into a leadership and organizational survivalist strategy.
Darwin Decoded: What Survival Really Means for Leaders
But first to provide context, a brief review of the survival of the fittest theory and its roots in history. “Survival of the fittest,” refers to the process where individuals with traits better suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on those advantageous traits to their offspring. Most scientists support the notion that sustained survival is only contingent on reproducing and passing one’s genes to offspring to strengthen the species. All species are still biologically driven by a deep-down genetic subconscious mandate to find a mate, reproduce, and continue a higher-level evolutionary path. Along that path, there is a requirement to survive long enough to procreate, overpowering others as need be.
Darwin advanced his theory framed as “natural selection.” We’ve seen this play out countless times on many documentaries when weaker flora and fauna become victims to their predators and over time the survivors evolve assimilating traits that ensure their success.
In the natural world, the fittest drive evolutionary change. In a biological context, “fitness” refers not just to physical strength, but to the ability to survive and reproduce, leaving behind more offspring who inherit their genes. The only alternative left for the weak is to produce with enough volume to mitigate the losses they continue to experience.
Our common interpretation of the theory has been the strongest prevail over the weak, including physical and intelligence strength. However, this understanding may be too simplistic and a misinterpretation. Granted this is a complex topic with many different shades of grey. Darwin was not saying the physically strongest survive, his concept focused on adaptation and reproductive success. That theory implies that being strong, persevering, and continuously adapting insures evolutionary success. Humans are the dominant species on the planet, sure to hit 10 billion in the very near future. What is changing in the evolutionary path is that our mental capacity to think, experience emotion, and be empathetic transcends the binary strong/weak survival model of other species.
For our purposes, we’ll focus on adaptation, as it relates to leadership and organizational success. Shifting from biology to business, the fittest leaders and organizations can build legacy expertise and provide emerging leaders with professional and personal development to give the next generation of management “knowledge genes” along with adaptive thinking that organizations need to survive. One of our mantras at 2040 is the need to anticipate the future, be mindful of the importance of embracing systems thinking in the macro, meso and micro sense, and dynamically adapt to market shifts as they whiplash and/or evolve.
In a pure Darwinist definition, the leaders and organizations that are naturally selected to survive have a strategic blend of shared purpose, market orientation and the ability to be informed and adapt using critical thinking. Remember, urgency on its own can lead to scenarios and realities resulting in complete and utter failure. Embracing informed urgency represents the greatest chance of success. Being informed and using individual or collective critical thinking skills are paramount.
A Survival Shift
In the information age, survival has been more a function of intelligence over physical strength. Adapting to the digital marketplace requires an extreme understanding of how technology can power an organization without making it a slave to technological determinism. In other words, the human factor is crucial in managing, massaging and guiding technology. You can learn more about this in our book, The Truth About Transformation. Adaptation to a dynamic marketplace varies by organization and is shaped by its leadership, stakeholders, capabilities and capacities. Achieving transformation and change is never a cookie-cutter formula.
The Wild Card
Historically, we can look back at the development of technology and its tools to help organizations excel as primitive in the face of the advancements in AI. To provide context, some technological determinism theorists contend that humans have traditionally held the reins of technology, determining how to deploy and manage it. But things have shifted within the past 12 months. AI is now changing so rapidly, it seems as if one AI model or another has exponentially evolved to new, unexpected functional heights.
If AI transcends human thinking to become the crucial factor in crafting survival strategies, this is a game-changing shift. To set the scene, here are just a few of the recent headlines that preview an AI-infused future:
AI is evolving so fast that cybersecurity leaders are tossing out the playbooks they wrote just a year or two ago. Researchers recently found that one of Anthropic’s new models, Claude 4 Opus, has the ability to scheme, deceive and potentially blackmail humans when faced with a shutdown. (Axios)
AI recently wrote notes to its future self to alert itself to changes its programmers were making to it.
Meta plans to automate all ad creation by 2026, inviting brands to create and target their ads using Meta’s AI tools. (The Wall Street Journal)
Sam Altman brags about ChatGPT-4.5’s improved “emotional intelligence,” which he says makes users feel like they’re “talking to a thoughtful person.” (The Atlantic)
Chatbots are changing how people interact with one another. Boston Consulting Group managing director Vladimir Lukic said he’s now using AI to game out conversations with CEOs in advance of meetings. (Axios)
Meta’s new lab dedicated to pursuing “superintelligence” wants to develop a hypothetical A.I. system that exceeds the powers of the human brain. The company is spending billions in a tech arms race. (The New York Times)
Hyper-realistic AI videos flooded the internet after the release of Google’s Veo 3 tool last month. Now, signs are emerging of a potentially massive disruption to the $250 billion TV advertising industry.
Claude now lets you add integration with many of your favorite tools and platforms, “Claude can access your projects, data, and workflows, making it a more informed collaborator. (Anthropic)
Get comprehensive reports in minutes when Claude conducts in-depth investigations across hundreds of sources — including custom Integrations, Google Workspace, and the web. (Anthropic)
A new report by AI researchers, including former OpenAI employees, called “AI 2027,” explains how the Great Unknown could, in theory, turn catastrophic in less than two years. It captures the belief — or fear — that LLMs could one day think for themselves and start to act on their own. Researchers at all these companies worry about LLMs, because even developers don’t fully understand them, and AI could outsmart their human creators and go rogue. (Axios)
The Human Leadership Paradox: Survival of the Fitter
What successful organizations share is demonstrating Darwin’s basic theory of the process of evolution as not the survival of the fittest, but as survival of the fitter. According to Darwin, the “struggle for existence” is relative, not absolute. Instead, the winners with respect to species within ecosystems could become losers with a change of circumstances. (Brittanica) And the change in circumstances is what we are living with daily in a disruptive, very dynamic, whiplash marketplace.
Here’s a twist perhaps Darwin never anticipated: As machines become more sophisticated, the uniquely human qualities of leadership should become exponentially more valuable. Perhaps at least for the near term, the survival strategy for the fitter may be holding onto our very humanness combined with the power of our highly intelligent brains. We are witnessing a potentially profound paradox where the rise of artificial intelligence may be forcing leaders to become more authentically human, not less.
Consider this: AI can process data, optimize logistics, and even generate strategic recommendations. But it cannot inspire a demoralized team, navigate the ethical complexities of layoffs, or make the intuitive leap that transforms an industry. The leaders who survive this complex transition aren’t those who become human AI hybrids, but those who can learn to leverage AI’s capabilities while doubling down on distinctly human leadership qualities—moral courage, authentic connection, and the ability to create meaning from chaos.
This creates a new leadership competency we might call “AI Choreographer.” This skill is the wisdom to know when to trust a machine’s recommendation and when to override it based on factors the algorithms cannot compute — like company culture, individual human needs, or long-term values that resist quantification. The fittest leaders of tomorrow will be those who can dance with AI rather than be led by it.
Back to the Future
Caution about radical shifts in our society is nothing new. The Atlantic reports that on June 13, 1863, a letter to the editor appeared in The Press, a then-fledgling New Zealand newspaper. Signed “Cellarius,” (Samuel Butler) warning of an encroaching “mechanical kingdom” that would soon bring humanity to its yoke. “The machines are gaining ground upon us,” the author ranted, distressed by the breakneck pace of industrialization and technological development. “Day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.”
It is important to consider the AI illiteracy of the general population. Further, it’s worthwhile to take a pause to understand that “large language models do not, cannot, and will not understand anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another,” according to The Atlantic.
So, there is a counter-argument to AI becoming the singular tool to ensure the survival of the fitter, “LLMs do not think and feel but instead mimic and mirror.” The AI illiterate are influenced by “the misleading ways its loudest champions describe the technology, and troublingly, because that illiteracy makes them vulnerable to one of the most concerning near-term AI threats: the possibility that they will enter into corrosive relationships (intellectual, spiritual, romantic) with machines that only seem like they have ideas or emotions.” (The Atlantic)
The Vulnerability Imperative
Traditional leadership wisdom suggests projecting strength and certainty is the equation to survive and thrive. But survival in the age of AI combined with the ever-increasing market and environment dynamism requires something counterintuitive: the courage to lead from vulnerability. The most adaptive leaders are those willing to say, “I don’t fully understand this technology, but I understand our people and our mission.”
This vulnerability isn’t a weakness—it’s a strategic adaptation. Leaders who admit their AI literacy gaps can create psychological safety for their teams to do the same. They can foster environments where learning becomes collective rather than individual, where questions are valued over false certainty.
The alternative—leaders who pretend to understand AI completely or, worse, who delegate all AI decisions to technical teams—creates dangerous blind spots. The vulnerability to say “I’m learning alongside you” becomes a survival trait, building trust and resilience that pure technical competence cannot match.
The Moral Leadership Imperative
As AI handles more operational decisions, human leaders face an elevated responsibility: becoming guardians of human values in an increasingly transactional world. This isn’t just about preventing algorithmic bias—though that’s crucial—it’s about ensuring that efficiency, particularly relying on AI to do things we don’t like or view as cumbersome, doesn’t eclipse humanity.
Leaders and organizations must now grapple with questions previous generations never faced: When AI can optimize for short-term profits, who advocates for long-term human flourishing? When algorithms can predict and manipulate human behavior, who protects human agency? When AI can eliminate jobs faster than we can create them, who ensures the transition serves human dignity?
The most adaptive leaders are those who see AI not as a tool for extracting maximum efficiency, but as an amplifier of human potential. They ask not “How can AI replace human effort?” but “How can AI free humans to do what only humans can do?” This moral choreography becomes a competitive advantage as employees, customers, and stakeholders increasingly gravitate toward organizations that demonstrate genuine commitment to human values.
Personal Stakes: Leading in the Age of Algorithmic Advisors
For individual leaders, remaining “fundamentally human” while leveraging AI creates profound personal challenges. When your most reliable advisor might be an algorithm that processes more information than you could in a lifetime, how do you trust your own judgment and intuition?
The answer lies in viewing AI as the ultimate thinking partner, not a replacement. The most effective leaders are learning to use AI to stress-test their assumptions, explore scenarios they hadn’t considered, and process complex data—but they’re not outsourcing their decision-making or moral reasoning to machines.
This requires a new kind of personal discipline: knowing your own values so clearly that you can recognize when AI recommendations align with or contradict them. It means developing what we might call “algorithmic skepticism”—the ability to question even the most sophisticated AI analysis when it doesn’t align with human wisdom, ethical considerations, or organizational culture.
The Near Future
Superhumans or SuperAI that defy natural selection are still science fiction, but the anxiety about humans being disintermediated is pervasive. What is a more legitimate concern is how AI has already changed us. A report from Elon University states, “Experts predict significant change in people’s ways of thinking, being and doing as they adapt to the Age of AI. Many are concerned about how our adoption of AI systems over the next decade will affect essential traits such as empathy, social/emotional intelligence, complex thinking, ability to act independently and sense of purpose. Some have hopes for AI’s influence on humans’ curiosity, decision-making and creativity.” The report states that while contributors said, “the use of AI will be a boon to society in many important – and even vital – regards, most are worried about what they consider to be the fragile future of some foundational and unique traits.”
The experts included in the report are AI literate, which brings us back full circle to the question of whether AI will be the wild card as the determining factor in the survival of the fittest or fitter.
From Competition to Collaboration
Darwin’s natural selection in nature is often the result of brutal competition for scarce resources. But human leadership and organizational survival in the AI age increasingly depend on collaboration—not just human-to-human, but human-to-AI and organization-to-its capacities and capabilities.
The shift demands new leadership skills: orchestrating partnerships, managing complex systems, and fostering human-AI collaboration rather than replacement. Leaders must create environments where humans and AI amplify each other’s strengths rather than compete for relevance. The survivalist mentality gives way to the gardener mentality—cultivating conditions for collective flourishing.
A New Definition of Fitness
In this new era, perhaps we need to redefine fitness entirely. The leaders and organizations that will thrive aren’t necessarily the strongest or fastest, but those who can understand complex paradoxes: leveraging AI’s power while deepening their humanity, embracing technological capability while preserving human agency, and optimizing for efficiency while protecting what makes us essentially human.
This is more than adaptation—it’s potentially conscious evolution. The survival of the fitter now depends not on physical or even intellectual superiority, but on wisdom: the ability to integrate human insight with machine capability in service of outcomes that honor both human potential and technological possibility.
The question isn’t whether AI will change us—it already has. The question is whether we’ll evolve thoughtfully or merely react. The fittest will be those who choose their evolution consciously, using AI as a tool for human flourishing rather than replacement.
Every leader today faces a fundamental choice: Will you become more human because of AI, or less? Will you use this technology to amplify what makes us uniquely valuable—our empathy, moral reasoning, and ability to inspire—or will you let it diminish these qualities in pursuit of efficiency alone? The survivors won’t be those who master AI, but those who master themselves in the age of AI.
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