The Leadership Decision Most Teams Never Realize They Gave Away

Most teams believe they’re using AI to move faster. 

Few realize they’ve also handed over something far more consequential. 

The right to decide what the problem actually is. 

MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence set out to answer a deceptively simple question: Why do some teams consistently outperform others when problems become complex? 

What they found overturned a common leadership assumption. Performance had little to do with intelligence, experience, or seniority. It had everything to do with how thinking was distributed. 

High-performing teams separated three kinds of work: 

1. Framing the problem 

2. Exploring options and patterns 

3. Making tradeoffs and decisions 

When AI was introduced, performance improved by up to 30 percent only when machines were used for exploration and pattern detection, while humans retained responsibility for framing and judgment. When machines defined the problem or decided what mattered, performance declined. 

In practice, this shows up when Cross-Intelligence Leaders protect human ownership of problem framing, while letting systems handle analytical depth and scale. 

Reflective question: 

 Where, in your organization, has problem framing quietly shifted away from humans? 

Source: MIT Center for Collective Intelligence https://cci.mit.edu/publications/