The machines get smarter every quarter. We don't.

What we believe

That's where we are. The machines get smarter every quarter. We don't. And I'm a lot less worried about them than I am about us.

We don't need another echo chamber. We need neutral practice ground. A place where people from different companies, industries and rungs of the ladder co-create, learn to co-exist with the machines, and get better at being human together.

From the legacy systems we're still renewing to the AI going live this quarter, all of it has to rest on wise humans. Right now most of it doesn't.

This is bigger than one company. Bigger than one person, me included.

Somewhere in the middle of the building

We have dashboards, process mining, and more AI in every tool than anyone can keep track of. We have never known more about how our organizations run. And we run them as if we know nothing. It makes me a little crazy.

Somewhere in the middle of the building everyone already knows which decision nobody owns. I've sat in that room more times than I want to admit. I've been the one who didn't say it, and I remember the drive home.

Then the Club of Rome, with UNESCO's BRIDGES coalition and Arizona State University, published A Time of Great Consequence and said the same thing about the whole planet. I read it with a lump in my throat. It's every steering committee I've ever sat in, at planetary scale.

Better tools won't fix this. We have to become better humans. That scares me, because it includes me. And we don't have ten years to figure it out. The AI is going live now, with or without us.

Judgment lives in the middle. We keep cutting it out.

We treat judgment like a memo: written at the top, cascaded down. That's not where it lives. Judgment is collective. It lives in the middle, where complexity can't be delegated any further and where the actual work happens.

When it's missing, you can hear it. In one company the executive described a healthy program, and the person closest to execution described a very different one. Same building, same week. Nobody was lying. They were looking at two different companies and calling them by the same name.

That gap is where the money leaks out: rework, slow decisions, the meeting after the meeting where the real conversation finally happens. And our answer? More process, more dashboards, now more AI. Which mostly makes the gap faster, and more expensive.

It's not the middle against the top

And before this starts to sound like the middle against the top. It isn't.

I've sat with CIOs who get asked every single week what their AI strategy is. Every vendor they already pay just bolted AI onto the license, and nobody can tell them yet what it costs once the whole company starts using it. Move fast, don't blow the budget. Pick one. Meanwhile we made the whole tech architecture headless on purpose, decoupled, every piece talking through a clear contract. Then we did the same to the humans. Without the contracts.

And I've sat with founders and CEOs who rewrote the strategy in March and watched the market make it old by June. New technology every quarter, customers changing their minds, and a whole team looking at them for an answer they don't have yet. Most of them don't say that out loud either. I wouldn't have, in their chair.

So the gap isn't anybody's fault. It runs through every floor of the building. Up top it feels like pressure to decide faster with less certainty. In the middle it feels like decisions nobody owns. I've worked on both floors. It's the same problem.

From knowledge worker to WISE worker

Peter Drucker gave us the knowledge worker, the person whose edge was knowing more than everyone else. I built a whole career on that edge. It's going, and fast. The machine in the room already knows more than anyone sitting at the table, me included.

So what's left for us? The things we've been quietly giving away: agency, judgment, the feeling that it's on you to decide and that you're allowed to. We handed them to the process, then to the system. Now we're handing them to the model, and calling it efficiency. They aren't lost yet. But they need room to come back, and soon.

And they won't come back on a straight line. For 25 years I ran transformation the way everyone did: kickoff, go-live, champagne, done (and then the hangover nobody had planned for). Living things don't change like that. They evolve, and evolution goes in circles. You try something, you notice what happened, you feed it back in and try again. The straight line does change to people. The circle lets them be part of it.

And it's not humans and machines anymore. It's humans, nature and machines, whether we like it or not. We'll have to co-create the work with the machines and co-exist with everything the work touches. The machines can already forecast the second and third order effects. I want people who can read them, and who still care. I call that person a WISE worker.

Something as old as time

My early work wasn't about technology at all. I spent years looking at pancultural wisdom, the things cultures all over the world figured out long before anyone wrote a project plan. How to sit in council. How to listen until the quiet person speaks. How to move someone through a passage, and who has to walk beside them when they do. I believed those traditions knew a whole lot more about being human, and being human together, than our org charts ever did. I still believe it.

For years I lived a kind of double life. Several weeks out of every year I guided groups into the Colorado wilderness as a trained rites of passage guide, and sat in council with people who had carried that work for decades. The rest of the year I rescued broken tech transformations. I was clearly the odd one out with that combination, and mostly I kept quiet about it. If I'm honest, I was a little ashamed. It took me far too long to see that the two jobs were the same job.

That work matters more now than when I started. Our technology runs at two speeds at once. AI at lightning speed. Legacy renewal at a snail's pace, sometimes slower. And in between stands a human who has completely lost orientation. I see it in faces in every workshop. Some days I see it in the mirror.

Another tool won't fix that. We need a map of where we actually are, not where the slide says we are. A compass that still points true when everything shifts. And a skill set as old as time: listening, holding memory, carrying each other through change, deciding together. We had all of it once. We forgot.

What holds: WISE

WISE is my attempt at a modern compass for leaders and organizations. Built on very old things, for very new terrain.

What holds an organization together through a big technology change is Human Infrastructure. It's real, it's buildable, and it belongs in the budget before the first line of code gets written. WISE is how you know whether it's holding.

Weave. Someone runs the connections across the silos the system inherited. Yes-and, not either-or. The ERP and the people. The AI and the people.

Invite. The people who do the work help design the system that will do the work with them. Early enough that what they say can still change what gets built.

Steward. Ownership is somebody's actual job. The person who notices first when it drifts, and gets paid to care.

Elder. Someone carries the memory of what happened last time. Tech without an elder repeats the same mistakes, just at a higher price.

Every one of the four has two sides, and you need both. There's the people side: how leaders and teams actually behave when it gets hard. And there's the operating side, what I call orientation helpers. A named owner. A decision rule. A place where the memory lives, so it doesn't walk out the door with one person. Most companies invest in one side and hope the other shows up on its own. I've done it myself.

Nonaka and Takeuchi named the wise company back in 2019. WISE is the attempt to make it something you can measure and build, not just admire.

Why sign at all

Because right now, everyone carrying this thinks they're the only one.

The IT lead who just inherited someone else's platform. The CIO who gets asked for an AI strategy every week. The founder rewriting the plan for the third time this year. The plant manager halfway through an ERP switch. The transformation lead who sees the gap every single day and has no mandate to close it. They sit in different industries and on different rungs, and they carry the same weight. It's too heavy to carry alone inside one company, surrounded by people who are paid to say it's going fine.

A signature says: I see it too, count me. It makes the middle visible to itself. That alone is worth it to me.

And then, every now and then, I want to get those people into the same room. A CIO next to a team lead next to a founder, working the same knot from different ends, with nobody selling anything. Somewhere you can finally say the thing you usually only say in the car park.

A place to be human, and not only a tech leader with a roadmap to defend. Someone who's tired sometimes and unsure sometimes and still cares enough to keep going. I've needed that room badly at times. I suspect you have too.

Here's the picture I keep coming back to. The whole world with crazy hair. AI and markets and legacy systems and all of us, everything going on at once, sticking out in every direction. Nobody's going to comb that out. But a web of people practicing together can hold one layer of it. A WISE hair net, if you want. Not fixing everything. Just holding the layer we keep skipping: how we decide, remember and look after things together, and where we fit in the bigger system we're part of. I suspect that layer has to grow outside companies first, between them, before it can move back inside.

A net holds because of its knots. Here the knots are people who've been through the work, alumni who host a circle where they are. Stewards, in the plainest sense of the word. And over time an elder council, a few people who've carried this longer than most, to keep it honest and keep it from turning into one more product.

And further out, the dream. Everyone's talking about AI literacy right now. We need it. But it's a fix for the problem in front of us, and fixes end. What's missing is a layer. You can't learn your way back to orientation from a screen. This has to trace back to nature, because that's where I learned most of what I actually know about people.

So my big dream is a place in the Colorado foothills. A ranch, a place for new thinking, where the old and the new finally sit at the same fire. People who've been doing this work alone in their own corners, standing in the same field for a few days. Humans, nature and the machines we brought along. I want to build that with the people who sign.

What I commit to when I sign

None of this is heroic. It's stuff you can do on a Monday, which is kind of the point.

• I'll weave across at least one silo I usually route around.
• I'll invite the people doing the work in before it's decided. Not after.
• I'll name who actually stewards what we build. Out loud, with a name on it.
• I'll say what happened last time, even when it's awkward.
• And when I see the gap between what we know and what we do, I'll say so. I've been quiet often enough.

What you get back, and what you don't

You won't carry this alone. And you won't have to argue it on opinion either.

A fireside. An open online fireside once a quarter, starting in November. Twelve chairs, no recording, so people can actually talk. You're overloaded, I know. This is not one more thing on your list. Bring what's already on your desk and leave a bit lighter. People who've been through this work with me get the first seats, signers next. When it's full, it's full, and I'm sorry about that in advance.

A mirror. Any signer can take the free pulse check. If it shows you something, bring your team and see how far apart your answers are. Then take that to the person who signs the checks. That conversation is yours to have. I just make sure you don't walk in empty-handed.

One voice, heard through many. Every quarter I'll pull together the patterns that keep coming up in what signers see. Never anyone's scores, never anyone's company. Along with the roster of who has signed publicly. Then I'll hand it back to you. So you can walk into your leader's office and show them you're not the only one seeing this. Not one person complaining. A lot of people, across companies, saying the same thing.

The Collective. It already exists. It's an online practice space for being human, all year round. Entry is through the Threshold: eight weeks, usually brought in by a company, on company time, with your role actually recognized. Because the people carrying this shouldn't have to pay for it out of their own pocket, on their evenings, where nobody sees it. The fireside is where it starts.

What I don't promise: a personal reply to everyone, one-to-one calls, or free interpretation of your results. Signing is a stance, not a certification. And signing doesn't get you into the Collective. Bringing this to your company does.

Where this comes from

It started in 2012, with my book Meetings in Moccasins: Leadership with Wisdom and Maturity, my first attempt to give that double life a voice, back when I still had different words for it. One of the people I interviewed for it was a member of the German Association for the Club of Rome. So reading their manifesto now gave me goosebumps, honestly. It felt like a circle quietly closing.

Last year I finally got a stage for it, at the Global Peter Drucker Forum, where I spoke about building ecosystems and the human infrastructure that holds them together. WISE grew out of that talk.

Signing

This started with 25 people who've done this work with me, and a room of well over a hundred people at a keynote this fall, who heard the word WISE and recognized themselves. Honestly, that room moved me more than I expected. They sign first, then a small founding circle, and after that anyone.

There are two ways to sign. Publicly, with your name and role. Or quietly, just counted, no name anywhere. I know not everyone can put their name under this at their current job, and I'd much rather count you than lose you. Either way, no company logos. This belongs to the people doing the work, not to any firm. Mine included.

If you sign publicly, you get a small badge for your profile. It doesn't certify anything. It just tells the people around you that you see it too, and maybe gives the next quiet person in your company the nerve to say so.

If you want, add one sentence about what you've seen. I'm more interested in what you've actually seen than in what you believe.

Sign the manifesto

I honestly don't know yet what this turns into. I know how it starts: with the people who see it, saying so.