Human Development in the age of AI

Nial O'Reilly • November 9, 2026

Why AI makes leadership development more urgent, not less

When the machine does the expert work

Ask a senior leader how they got where they are, and the honest answer is often some version of: I was very good at knowing things. They knew the numbers, the market, the system, or regulation, better than the people around them. Expertise earned promotion, and the next one, and the one after that.

That route to the top is now being quietly rebuilt. The analysis that took an individual or team a week can be drafted in an afternoon. The KPIs, the market trends, the options: all of it is increasingly just a well worded prompt away. AI is very good at the thing many leaders were promoted for. That doesn’t make leaders less necessary. It changes what they’re needed for.

The expert who rose by being the expert

In our work we keep meeting a particular kind of leader. Someone brilliant, who has risen by being the best in the room at their subject, and who now leads people and problems where being the best in the room is no longer the point.

A leader I worked with recently put it plainly. Bringing a developmental framework into a culture of high-achieving experts is a specific risk, because the people in that culture have succeeded by “being the best”. Then you introduce a way of thinking that says no stage of development is better than another but some stages are better at working with complexity and better able to transform; that runs against everything that got them there.

The deficit isn’t a lack of intelligence. It’s that expertise becomes a way of seeing as well as something a person has. When your value has always come from having the answer, a question with no answer feels like a failure rather than the actual work. Finding this out can be really empowering for a senior team.

“I’m paid to have the answer”

Some years ago I worked with a senior medical professional, a professor of his discipline. Reading back what he had written during a development exercise, he stopped and said: “I can’t believe I wrote that. I can think that way at home, my wife will tell you. But at work, I’m not allowed to think that way. I’m paid to have the answer, and I’m paid to deliver it quickly. I have seen people sacked for thinking that way!”

He was capable of more complex, more open thinking, and his organisation with its very sophisticated and valuable KPI dashboard had trained him to set it aside at the door.

Now imagine that the answer, the thing he is paid to have, can increasingly be generated on demand. What is left for him to be paid for? The answer is precisely the thinking he was taught to leave at home.

Not just more skills: a bigger frame

The instinctive organisational response to AI is horizontal: train people on the tools, add a module on prompt-writing, refresh the digital competency framework. Some of that is necessary. None of it touches the real shift.

Horizontal development adds to what a person knows and can do. Vertical development changes how a person makes sense of what they know: how much complexity they can hold, how many perspectives they can keep in view at once, how they hold polarity, and how they act when the situation won’t resolve into a single right answer.

In the language of Robert Kegan this is moving from being subject to the beliefs and patterns we have “swallowed whole” to being able to hold them as object: to look at them rather than through them, and so become more choiceful and less reactive.

That is the capacity my professor had at home and couldn’t use at work. It is also the capacity AI doesn’t supply. A model can hand you more options. It cannot enlarge the frame through which you choose between them.

Why this is urgent now

For a long time, an organisation could get by with leaders who were brilliant experts and conventional thinkers. The expertise carried them.

When expertise becomes abundant and cheap, that changes. What becomes scarce is the ability to:

stay with a problem that has no known answer, rather than reaching for the nearest familiar one
hold competing views, from people and from machines, without collapsing into one of them too early
notice the assumptions shaping a decision, including your own
know when a confident answer is still only an answer

These are developmental capacities. They grow slowly, through experience, reflection and relationship. They can’t be installed like software, and they can’t be outsourced to it.

A question to carry

This series is about what AI changes for human development, and what it doesn’t. We’ll argue that AI changes what leaders need to develop, but not who does the developing.

For now, one question to take into your next leadership meeting:

If the expert answer were already on the table, free and instant, what would this team actually be for?

Next in the series: Complicated is for machines, complex is for us.

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Answering the Business School Challenge

By Nial O'Reilly • July 22, 2026

Over 10 years of vertical development on the University of Galway Executive MBA

The medical leadership gap Europe is about to fill but perhaps the wrong way!

By Nial O'Reilly • June 8, 2026

A new European survey of psychiatric trainees , published in March, lands a finding that should not surprise anyone and yet keeps surprising the system: 63% had no leadership training in their programme, every single respondent said there should be, and those who did receive some were, on average, dissatisfied with it. The diagnosis is correct. The treatment being prescribed worries but does not surprise me. Look at how the survey — and the institutions responding to the same gap — define “leadership.” It is a list of competencies to be acquired: communication, teamwork, public speaking, professionalism, networking, media interaction. The EPA’s new Leadership Academy, launched last year and a genuinely welcome initiative, describes its aims in almost identical terms: enhancing communication skills, team management, presentation and public speaking technique. Even the UEMS mandate, which I’m glad exists, asks trainees to “acquire and continuously maintain” leadership skills. Acquire and maintain. Those are horizontal verbs. They describe the addition of capabilities to a person whose way of making sense of the world is treated as fixed. But notice what the survey authors keep tripping over without the language to name it. They report that the transition from trainee to consultant — the increase in responsibility, and crucially the increase in “awareness about limitations” — changes which skills people value, and they cite this as a driver of leadership development. That is not skill acquisition. That is a shift in how a person constructs meaning, authority and their own role. In the language of adult constructive-developmental theory, and what we recognise in Harthill a s movement between Action Logics — the kind of vertical growth that no competency checklist can deliver, because the checklist assumes the meaning-maker stays the same while only the toolkit grows. This matters beyond psychiatry. The paper itself notes that the COVID pandemic was what “firmly established” leadership as central to medical identity. Yet what that period actually exposed in healthcare leaders was rarely a deficit of communication technique. It was the struggle to hold complexity, ambiguity and competing legitimate demands without collapsing into false certainty or paralysis. That is a capacity of mind, not a line on a syllabus. You can be an extraordinarily skilled communicator and still be overwhelmed by a problem that exceeds your current way of organising reality. So here is the risk. Europe has correctly diagnosed that medical leadership training is absent. The instinct now is to fill the vacuum quickly, and the fastest thing to reach for is a competency framework — definable, teachable, assessable. We will end up training the what of leadership while leaving untouched the who that determines whether any of it transfers under pressure. None of this is an argument against the EPA Academy or against teaching skills. Skills matter. The point is sequencing and depth: horizontal capability sits on a vertical foundation, and a leader’s stage of development shapes whether they can even use the skills we give them. The same conflict-resolution training lands entirely differently on an Expert-stage clinician defending technical correctness and an Achiever-stage one balancing outcomes across a team — and differently again on someone beginning to question the systems they operate inside. The opportunity for the medical leadership community is to build the vertical dimension in from the start, rather than discovering in ten years that the competency programmes plateaued. The evidence is already pointing there. The survey’s own most-favoured modality — a blend of theory and lived practice, reflected on over time — is exactly the experiential, inquiry-based structure that supports developmental growth, and exactly what most current provision lacks. Diagnose the gap as horizontal, and you fill it horizontally. Recognise that what complexity demands is bigger minds, not just fuller toolkits, and you build something that lasts. Santos et al., “Leadership skills training needs of early career doctors: a European survey,” Academia Mental Health and Well-Being, 2026.