I joined Simon Hill on the Total Innovation Podcast last week to talk about something that's been bugging me as I watch teams gear up for agents: most of them aren't ready, and it has nothing to do with the technology.
Most organisations I work with don't have an ideas problem. They've got piles of ideas. What they're missing is a way to connect their decisions top to bottom, so the right bets get backed and the wrong ones actually get killed.
Vision sits on a poster somewhere. Strategy lives in a slide deck nobody opens. OKRs are tracked in some separate tool. And teams are told to "be empowered" without anyone really explaining what they're empowered to decide. That's the gap I wrote The Decision Stack to close.
Now bolt agentic AI onto that mess.
When humans are misaligned, you get friction. Slow meetings, rework, the odd pivot. When agents are misaligned, you get the same problems firing in parallel, at machine speed, with nobody in the room to catch them. Misalignment compounds.
That's why this conversation felt urgent. Leaders are about to inherit a workforce that ships faster than anyone can fact-check in real time. The only way through is to get your Decision Stack honest before you scale it.
Simon and I got into:
- How to build a Decision Stack that actually holds up when things get fast
- Why "empowerment" without shared context creates noise instead of velocity
- Reframing ideas as bets so the bad ones get killed on purpose
- Where AI helps you align faster, and where it just helps you go wrong faster
If you're running an innovation portfolio, a product org, or any team trying to move quickly without losing the plot, give it a listen.
