---
title: Your organization is changing faster than you are learning to lead it.
description: AI is changing how units run faster than leaders can learn to lead it. Why courses don't transfer, what a practice is, and the first move to run this week.
---

[Blog](https://managementkits.com/blog)

# [Your organization is changing faster than you are learning to lead it.](https://managementkits.com/blog/your-organization-is-changing-faster-than-you-are-learning-to-lead-it)

 Written by [Olaf Bach](https://managementkits.com/blog/author/olaf-bach) | 26 Oct 2026

**AI is arriving in how we manage, lead and organize, and what it brings with it is organization work that somebody has to shape and lead. Most of the people it lands on are being offered nothing, or a course. This note opens a series that does it the other way round, one organization problem a week, one piece of research behind it, one move you run on your own unit: we call it a practice because you don't read it – you run it.**

In the operating rooms Matt Beane observed for more than two years, something had quietly gone wrong with how surgeons learn. In open surgery the procedure needs four hands, so the resident is in the work: holding, cutting, being corrected in real time. At the robotic console the attending surgeon can operate alone. The resident stands at a second console, or holds an instrument to clear the smoke, and watches, present for every procedure and learning almost nothing. The few residents who became competent did so by bending the rules: hours on simulators, surgical videos late at night, operating with less supervision than the training programme allowed. Beane called it shadow learning and published it in [Administrative Science Quarterly in 2019](https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839217751692).

We keep coming back to that study, because the same thing is now happening one floor up, in management, to the people who run units. AI is entering the work **faster than it is entering the organization around the work**. Somebody has to decide who may overrule the tool, which hand-offs change, what the saved hours are for and what good enough means for work nobody wrote alone. That is organization work. It has landed on unit leaders, and what most of them are being offered in return, if anything at all, is a course on tools, or two days at an off-site with a binder, and back to the desk. The resident at the second console, in a nicer room.

## Why do we say you cannot read your way into this?

Because **the evidence on how leaders learn** has been consistent for a long time, and it does not favour courses. In 2017 Christina Lacerenza and her colleagues pooled 335 evaluations of leadership training in the [Journal of Applied Psychology](https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000241). Training works, on average. What decides whether anything arrives back at the job is **the design** (some practitioners speak of "learning architectures"): practice and feedback built in, several sessions rather than one, more than one method, and run close to the work rather than away from it. The further the learning sits from the work, the less of it transfers.

The newest evidence says the same about learning with AI. In the cleanest study so far, a randomised trial with about a thousand students published last year in the [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2422633122), students who had answers handed to them by an AI tool during practice did worse once the tool was taken away. The students whose tool was built to withhold the answer and make them work for it kept what they had gained. The person has to produce the move, and reading about it does not count. *Reading tells you what good looks like; running tells you what it costs.*

The practical conclusion we draw, from the research and from our own work with leadership teams, is simple: training is table stakes at best, and at least half of any training budget belongs in redesigning the work so that people learn inside it.

## So what is a practice for learning management and leadership in the emerging AI age?

At Management Kits we take a clear position here, and it is the reason this series exists rather than another reading list. The organizational side of AI is the rarer half of the skill and the half that transfers least from a course, and it is learned the way surgery was learned before the robot: in the work, on a real case, with someone who has done it before looking over your shoulder. A practice is how you organize that for yourself.

A practice, as we define it, is **a loop you run on your own unit**:

1. You baseline where the unit stands.
2. You pick the one problem that decides whether AI sticks there this quarter.
3. You make one organizational move, small enough to finish and real enough to change what somebody does on Tuesday.
4. You write down what happened.
5. You look at it with someone who has run the same move elsewhere, and then you go round again.

The unit of progress is not a chapter finished but a move that changed something you can point to.

That is how we built the MK Practice, and it is the rule we hold ourselves to there. The AI in it helps with the diagnostic legwork: it reads where your unit needs work first and keeps the move bounded. A practitioner looks at your problem within 48 hours. Neither of them writes your move. In our work with leadership teams, the leaders who got somewhere with a new way of working were rarely the ones with the best material. They had a real problem on the table, a date, and somebody they had to show their work to.

*Working on this in your own organization? [See how the MK Practice works →](https://managementkits.com/practice?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=cta&utm_campaign=p1-practice&utm_content=pn01-mid)*

## What the next five notes will ask you to do

Each of the next five notes takes one decision that has landed on a unit leader's desk because of AI, puts at least one piece of research behind it (we can't help ourselves), and ends with one move you can run in due course. Two notes a week for the next three weeks, then weekly.

1. **Who may overrule the tool?** The decision-rights map for one workflow an AI tool has already entered.
2. **Why your team is not resisting AI.** It is resisting being redesigned without a say, and one session changes that.
3. **What the saved hours are for.** A ledger for the hours AI gives a team back, and the one quality norm that goes with it.
4. **Your rollout has a plan. It needs a story.** The one-page change story for your unit, tested on three listeners.
5. **Where transformation starts.** Not at the top: in one unit with one problem. Your first track, assembled from the four moves before it.

Run them in order or start with the one that is on your desk. Either works, as long as something in your unit is different at the end of each move, not just something in your notes.

## The move for this week: write one page about your own unit

Before you read anything else, including the next note, write one page about your own unit. In the last ninety days, what has AI changed in how the work gets done here? Who decided that, and who was simply informed? What has nobody decided yet? Where do you think the unit stands, and what would you make the first move? Date it and keep it.

The page comes first for two reasons. The research above says the answer you produce before you see one is the answer you keep. And in our work with leadership teams, a leader's first page about their own unit is usually wrong in one specific place, and that place is the finding. You will check the next five moves against this page. In the MK Practice it is where the work starts too, before the diagnostic says anything.

A decision rule we find useful: if an AI tool has entered a workflow in your unit this year and you cannot say who may overrule it and what the saved hours are for, you have a rollout and not yet a change. Then start with the page above; it takes an evening. Run the first move; it takes a week. By the end of the third week you will know whether the organization around the tool has moved at all. If it has not moved after a quarter, no course would have fixed it.

## Where this method has its limits

Obviously, a practice is slower at the start than a course: the first week produces one page, not a certificate. It starts a journey. It needs a unit you are allowed to change; if you do not own the decision rights over the workflow in question, your first move is to get them, or to pick a workflow you do own. And it needs a second pair of eyes. Running the loop alone works for a while; running it alone for long is how good intentions end up as notes. [The one controlled trial we know of](https://a.storyblok.com/f/45434/x/8a08babd23/research_ai_vs_human_coaching.pdf) that gave senior leaders a human coach, an AI-only coach or neither found that the human made the difference.

Back in the operating room, Beane's residents learned by stepping out of the shadow and getting their hands on the work, against the rules of the programme that was supposed to train them. You do not need to break any rules. You need a unit, a problem, one move a week and someone to look at it with. The next note is about the first decision: who may overrule the tool.

You don't read a practice. You run it.

The MK Practice is a structured process you run on your own organization: a diagnostic that reads where your unit needs work first, working topics like the ones in this series, a work agenda that keeps the moves coming, and a practitioner who looks at your problem within 48 hours. Founding Member: USD 990 a year, 30-day money-back guarantee.

[See how the MK Practice works →](https://managementkits.com/practice?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=cta&utm_campaign=p1-practice&utm_content=pn01-run-it)

*Running it with a whole leadership team? [Schedule a short demo](https://calendly.com/martin-managementkits/demo-english).*

[View full post](https://managementkits.com/blog/your-organization-is-changing-faster-than-you-are-learning-to-lead-it)

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