Your Org Has Energy. Does It Have Direction?
Pay Attention to What Moves You
I am in my living room watching Norway play Brazil in the World Cup. I’m not a huge soccer fan but I am a huge fan of both experiencing peak performances and seeing an underdog come out on top.
In this game I get to experience both and so much more. Erling Haaland scores both goals leading Norway to a surprising 2-1 victory.
As the final whistle blows, the Norwegian players begin to celebrate. But it is not the usual chaos. There is a slow build. The captain gathers the team, and they all sit on the ground facing the crowd. Then he hands the drum to Haaland, the man who just won the game, to lead what comes next.
Haaland soaks in the moment raising both hands to the crowd. The anticipation building.
Then raises the stick and slams it down on the drum.
And in one motion, every Norwegian player and every supporter packed into the section behind the goal rows. Same direction. Same rhythm. Every beat amplified by a sharp, collective “huuh”. Not a cheer, not a shout. Something stronger than that. Something that sounds like pure, directed effort.
I stand up. I cannot explain why. I am just transfixed by this Norwegian Viking Row.
The goosebumps arrive before I have any words for what I am watching. I make a note to myself the way I always do when something unexpectedly moves me: there is something here. Pay attention to this.
Watch the first minute of this video to see what I mean…
Energy vs Power
I do not force the connection. I file it away and trust its connection point will surface when ready. Some abstract idea I am trying to better understand or communicate that suddenly needs just the right analogy.
A few weeks later, I am deep in the work of bringing TMS and GBG together under one vision. Trying to figure out how to take all the passion and talent already in both organizations and channel it in a more aligned, sustainable direction…and then “huuh”, the Viking Row resurfaces.
So does its contrast.
Because anyone who follows soccer knows what the other end of the spectrum looks like. South American fans…they are absolutely nuts. Fireworks. Smoke bombs. Flags moving in every direction. Maximum, unapologetic, chaotic energy going everywhere at once. I went looking for a video to put alongside the Viking row. It was not hard to find.
Same sport. Completely different experience of what collective energy can produce.
One is a few thousand people generating the kind of power that moves you, compels you to stand up and take notice. The other is ten times that many people vibrating with energy and noise but going nowhere in particular.
The difference…alignment.
The Most Common AI Mistake Leaders Make
Over the last few years of working with more than 100 companies on AI adoption, I have watched the same failure play out again and again. A leadership team gets excited. Chooses an LLM. Purchases seats. Sends an announcement. And waits for transformation to happen.
What happens instead is predictable. A few dive in head first. Most resist or freeze. They do not know where to start, so they do not start. They experiment once or twice, hit resistance, and drift back to what is familiar. The rubber band snaps back to status quo.
The instinct in that moment is to add more. More tools. More pressure. More meetings. But throwing more energy into a South American stadium doesn’t help. It gets more chaotic and more complicated. The activity goes up. The impact does not.
When I went deep into AI adoption for our own company several years ago, there were generally two camps forming among early adopter business leaders. One took a technology-first approach: build the tools, hand them to the team, and expect usage to follow. The other took a human-first approach: train people, build understanding, give them a framework, and then empower them to build for themselves.
The technology-first camp moved faster in the beginning. The human-first camp built something that compounded and went further.
Here is what compounding looks like in practice. A workflow one person builds gets picked up and improved by the next person. A lesson from one team’s roadblock becomes the guardrail for the next team’s attempt. A shared vocabulary means that when something new needs to be built, there is already a foundation to work from. Each thing that gets built stacks on top of what came before it.
Here is what the alternative looks like. People operating at completely different adoption levels with no shared language for what they are even building. Teams creating the same tools in parallel because there is no visibility into what already exists. Work that stands alone and never compounds.
The dividing line between those two realities comes down to one thing: a unified philosophy. A clear, organization-wide answer to the question: “This is how we do AI here.”
Without it, you get smoke bombs and energy going in every direction.
There is an African proverb I keep coming back to in this work: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Going fast alone gets you to individual adoption. Going together gets you to organizational transformation. Those two destinations look nothing alike.
Stop Playing. Start Building.
Think about your organization’s AI adoption right now.
Is there energy? I would bet yes. Most leaders I talk to have people who are experimenting and building things on their own. The curiosity is there.
Now ask the harder question. Is there direction? A shared philosophy for how AI fits into your work? A common vocabulary that connects what one person is building to what the next person can build from?
If the answer is no…you might be more South American than Norwegian right now. That is just an observation. Most organizations are. It is where you start, not where you stay.
The alignment layer is buildable. And it may be the most important work you can do with AI before you do anything else with it.
To be clear, this certainly qualifies under the “simple not easy” moniker.
It took us about two years and hundreds of hours of false starts and dead ends to finally find our approach. You can certainly find your own path too. If you do not have the time or interest to build your company’s own unique methodology from scratch, I highly recommend finding a proven one to import and adapt, whether that is the Lead With AI methodology or something else.
The next Lead With AI cohort kicks off in mid-October, facilitated by Jim Edwards. Each cohort works through a proven step-by-step monthly curriculum giving your team the philosophy and tools to activate and align around AI in just a couple hours per month.
If you are ready to stop experimenting in isolation and start building something that compounds across your organization, this is where that work happens.
Schedule a 30-minute 1:1 session to learn more.
From the frenetic, individual energy of South American soccer fans to the aligned, powerful Viking Row of Norway.
The choice is yours.
Lead With AI,
Derek