I just returned from the Global Agility + Innovation Summit, a one-day leadership conference in DC hosted by Sanjiv Augustine and his team at LitheSpeed. It was a day packed with sharp thinking, great conversation, and the kind of energy that only happens when a room full of practitioners who actually care about the work they’re doing get together.
The theme this year was Adaptive Leadership in an AI-Driven World and if you attended, you already know what I’m about to say: there was not a single session that wasn’t, in some significant way, about AI.
And I’m sure if you’ve been to any conference lately, you’re experiencing the same phenomenon. I have feelings about that. More on those in a moment. But for now let’s dive into some conference highlights.
Jim Highsmith: The Era of Human Judgement
One of the clearest highlights of the day for me came from Jim Highsmith, one of the original signers of the Agile Manifesto, six-time author, and someone who has been thinking rigorously about software and leadership for nearly six decades.
Jim’s talk, “Beyond Agile: Judgement-Centric Management for the AI Era,” made an argument that I think is critical and urgent right now. His central observation: AI doesn’t just accelerate delivery, it accelerates decisions and we need a “judgement architecture” that keeps human judgement “load-bearing” as we barrel into the next few years with AI. Recommendations surface faster. Iteration compresses. The frequency of decisions rises dramatically and we, as humans, need to be in the center of it.
Jim is a fantastic speaker with genuinely unique and thoughtful points of view. I had the pleasure of chatting with him for a long time after the conference and am very impressed by his lifelong work. Not only did he help set the stage for my career in agile, but he’s not stepping aside any time soon. Right now, his main focus is a part-human, part-AI agent start-up that proves he’s able to take whatever curveball the world throws at him, recompile it, and come out on the other side with technology and insights that rival the most ambitious tech entrepreneurs. If you ever get a chance to hear Jim Highsmith speak, please go.
My Talk: The Intentional Leader’s AI Playbook
I had the honor of speaking on a topic that’s been very much on my mind: “The Intentional Leader’s AI Playbook: Building Systems that Serve You.” So many of us are overwhelmed by the pace of change and I’d like to argue that we don’t need to be, we just need a framework to make more intentional decisions.
We’re being told to incorporate AI everywhere in order to be efficient, to stay competitive, and to not get left behind, but at the same time, many of us have a quiet unease about what we might be giving up when we do. What happens to the human judgement, the creative friction, and the leadership instincts that have made our teams and organizations good at what they do?
My framework for navigating this is built around three questions that I think every leader should ask before adopting any AI tool or process. I will elaborate on this in a future post, but I believe we should ask ourselves these three questions in this order:
1. Does this AI tool serve our core values?
2. What problem is this AI tool actually solving?
3. How will we maintain human judgement?
The goal is not to be afraid of AI. The goal is to be intentional about it and to build systems that amplify our ability to adapt, not hamper it.
Chris Sims: Leading People Through Change
Chris Sims of Agile Learning Labs facilitated a workshop on adaptive leadership for successful organizational change and it was exactly the kind of session that a day full of big ideas needs: grounded, practical, and immediately useful.
Chris walked us through Daniel Goleman’s six leadership styles from his Harvard Business Review research, and then layered in the Satir Change Model, a framework for understanding how people and organizations process their way through change. The synthesis: a map for applying different leadership styles at different points in a change journey.
This wasn’t just a talk, this was a workshop that allowed us to work with new connections at the conference to explore different leadership styles throughout a major process or organizational change.
I also got to speak with Chris for a long time at a dinner the night before the conference and I could immediately tell that he would be an excellent facilitator. If anyone is looking for an agile training, workshop, or transition leader in the San Francisco area, look no further than Chris Sims!
Charlie Kennedy: The Product Operating Model at Huntington Bank
One of the most practical talks of the day came from Charlie Kennedy, SVP and IT Transformation and Delivery Director at Huntington National Bank. Charlie walked us through Huntington’s transformation from project-oriented delivery to a full Product Operating Model.
What made Charlie’s talk compelling was the honesty of it. He didn’t present a clean success story. Instead, he talked about the major elements of the model, the Early Adopter Program they used to begin the shift, the full activation plan, and the lessons learned. He probably got the most questions from the crowd because you could tell everyone there was going through something similar.
The shift from project to product is one of the most meaningful transformations a large organization can make, and it is hard. It requires rethinking how work is funded, how teams are structured, how success is measured, and how leadership makes decisions. Charlie’s account of doing this at a major bank, with all the regulatory complexity, legacy systems, and organizational inertia that implies, was both sobering and inspiring.
Larry Taxson: AI at the CIA (and the Infographic That NotebookLM Built)
Larry Taxson works in the Directorate of Digital Innovation at the CIA, and his talk, “From Hype to Help: Leading AI That Actually Delivers”, was extremely interesting.
Larry’s thesis: AI is moving beyond the hype phase and into a help phase, where the real focus needs to be on whether it can support mission-driven work. He talked about the importance of clear goals, trustworthy data, responsible guardrails, and (again, echoing Jim Highsmith’s theme) human judgement. AI becomes useful when we apply it with purpose, care, and accountability. Not as a trend or a buzzword, but as a tool for mission impact.
But what people will probably remember most from Larry’s session was the artifact he brought. Forget slides, he talked in front of a massive, beautifully constructed infographic that he built using NotebookLM: Google’s AI-powered research tool. It was a visual synthesis of the AI landscape as it applies to national security and mission-driven organizations, and it was remarkable both in its scope and in the fact that he’d used AI to help build it. He even pointed out where AI made some mistakes along the way. Useful, but not infallable, that’s where AI is today.
The Question I Kept Coming Back To
Every single talk at this summit was substantially about AI. Every. Single. One. That could have largely been because the theme was Adaptive Leadership in an AI-Driven World, but I found myself wondering, at various points throughout the day: is this a good thing? Is it a sign of how central AI has become to the work of leadership and technology? Or is it a sign that we’ve forgotten what we’re really doing here?
AI is important right now. The practitioners in that room are dealing with real, consequential questions about how to adopt it responsibly and lead through its implications. That conversation deserves the airtime it’s getting.
And at the same time I think the best moments of the day were the moments when the conversation was really about leadership, judgement, and the human capacity for wisdom. Jim Highsmith talking about judgement architecture. Chris Sims facilitating a room of people mapping how to lead through change. Charlie Kennedy being honest about the hard parts of transformation. Larry Taxson making the case for purpose and accountability over hype.
AI was the context, but leadership was still the point. As long as we keep asking the question “how do we infuse human judgement into our processes?”, I think we’ll be okay.
LitheSpeed hosts the Global Agility + Innovation Summit annually. I was honored to speak on “The Intentional Leader’s AI Playbook” and to participate in the closing executive panel alongside Jim Highsmith and Charlie Kennedy, moderated by Sanjiv Augustine.
You can find more of my thinking on intentional AI adoption and agile leadership at amberrfield.com, and my book Agile Discovery & Delivery is available on Amazon.