Improv Is the Leadership Skill AI Cannot Replace
Three years ago I walked away from a 17 year career at McKinsey.
The reason was simple. Since the days of the Model T we have become extraordinary at optimizing physical assets. Machines, plants, supply chains, capital. We never learned to do the same for people. Most organizations still treat the humans on the payroll as resources. Line items. Costs to be managed down.
That instinct was expensive before. With layoffs and AI arriving in the same news cycle, it is becoming catastrophic.
I recently sat down with Jordana Cole on The Flourishing Edge, and she gave me the sharpest framing I have heard of what we are getting wrong. Jordana performed for more than a decade with ComedySportz, coaches Gallup Strengths, and studied positive psychology at Penn.
Her thesis is one sentence long. You are not the resource. You are the source.
The Source, Not The Resource
Jordana named something that has quietly shifted. Twenty years ago, layoffs were the last resort, reserved for a dying product line. Now they are often the first move, with no clear logic about who goes. Loyalty does not protect you. Performance does not protect you. Meanwhile the headlines repeat themselves, with companies cutting deep, investing in AI, then quietly hiring people back because the promised outcomes never showed up.
Here is why. AI has no source material without us. When you trace what actually moves a business forward, you land on relationships, creativity, strategic thinking, judgment, intuition, and improvisation. Every one of those is human.
I understand the short term math. Technology needs funding, the budget has to hold, so you release people and tell the survivors to figure it out. I wrote about this last week and I will keep saying it.
Nobody ever cut their way to prosperity. You can use AI to drive productivity. Prosperity only comes from growing and scaling your people.”
The companies that understood this are not hard to find. Hilton, Hyatt, Costco, Barry-Wehmiller, Panera. Liberty Energy watched demand fall by 70 percent and did not lay off a single person. Those are not soft choices. They consistently deliver alpha.
Uncertainty Is Not New. Our Response To It Is.
I asked Jordana what we get wrong about uncertainty. Her first answer made me laugh. We think it is new.
If she had a dollar for every use of the word unprecedented, she would be retired.
Uncertainty is actually the constant state.”
That landed for me because it is the foundation of every mindfulness tradition I have studied. The past is memory. The future is a mystery. All we ever hold is this moment, which is why it is called the present. The pace of change has accelerated. Change itself has not.
Her second answer is where the leverage sits. Our negativity bias reads uncertainty as threat rather than what it actually is, which is unlimited possibility. Then we respond by asking what we need to fix, protect, or hoard.
It is the same physiology as walking onto a stage. Your heart rate climbs and you decide what that means. Either you are about to fail, or your body is preparing you to be at your sharpest. The signal is identical. The story you tell about it is not.
Play To The Scene You Are In
Jordana’s first principle comes straight from the stage. Play to the scene you are in, not the one you wanted to be in.
In an unscripted show she will have a brilliant idea, tag in her partner, and watch that partner speak first and take the scene elsewhere. She can build on the reality that now exists, or force her original idea in anyway. Performers who choose the second option watch the scene collapse.
I see the workplace version of that collapse every week. Someone offers an idea in a meeting, and instead of exploring it, the next person offers a competing one. Nobody builds. Everybody positions.
Then COVID hit while Jordana was running learning and development for an e-commerce company. Overnight, 85 percent of the business disappeared and she was furloughed with most of her colleagues. She could not control that. She could control what she did next, so she built a wellbeing toolkit for everyone furloughed and a second set for the 15 percent who stayed. Three months later the company brought everyone back, having pivoted into fabric masks.
That is a positive psychology move as much as an improv one. When we hit adversity, the instinct is to go smaller and protect ourselves. Opening up to others gives far more back, and even when it does not, the act of giving fuels you.
You do not have to like your reality. If you fight back against it, all that creates is pain.”
You do not have to like the reorganization, the budget decision, or the AI tool you were told to use instead of the one you prefer. Fighting reality burns the energy you need for the part you can actually influence.
Lead With Your Strengths. Do Not Carry The Flubs.
Jordana described the worst moment she ever had on stage. A closing night, fifty performers, a pun game. Her joke landed in complete silence, and she had to stand there listening to everyone else get laughs while it replayed in her head. Two minutes later, a new scene.
You cannot be present while you are rewinding, so she parked it. The deeper lesson was that her strengths are expression, emotion, character, and physicality. Puns are not on that list. She had taken the spotlight in a moment that belonged to someone else.
The Gallup research is unambiguous. People who focus on strengths rather than weaknesses are three times more likely to report a high quality of life and six times more likely to be engaged at work. Now look at where our organizations spend their attention. Our feedback dwells on what went wrong, our development plans are really repair plans, and most of a manager’s attention often goes to the lowest performers.
Ted Lasso told his team to be a goldfish. Most of us are not goldfish, so I use Roger Federer instead. He won almost 80 percent of his matches and only 54 percent of the points he played. One of the greatest players in history lost nearly half the points, and what separated him was returning to center after every one of them.
Innovation runs on the same mechanic. To innovate we have to fail, then convert the failure into learning rather than carrying it into the next scene. The self-censoring that follows a replayed mistake costs us far more than the mistake ever did.
Co-Create, Including With AI
I ran a small experiment on Jordana live, borrowed from Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence. Sixty seconds, how many uses can you find for a toothbrush other than brushing teeth. She produced about thirty. A drum beat. A record cleaner. A very ineffective fork.
AI could generate 200 in half the time. That does not make AI better than Jordana, because many of those would be duplicates or unusable. What it means is that our ceiling just moved. If you were never especially creative, you can now generate at volume and apply your judgment. I never learned to code, and now I can code. You can read that and conclude you are doomed, or you can ask what you become with that kind of amplification.
Jordana treats AI as a partner rather than a vending machine. She built her own project management system inside an agent, not by handing it a task list, but by telling it where she is strong, where she struggles, and what has failed before, then asking three questions. What do you notice about me that I do not. What do you recommend and why. What do you need to know about me.
Jordana reminded me of this brainstorming trick. Do not ask for the best ideas, because that question makes people afraid of looking stupid. Ask the room for the worst possible ideas instead. The pressure drops, people riff instead of defending, and a few of those terrible ideas sit far enough outside the norm that combining them gets you 10x rather than 1.3x.
Play Is The Catalyst, Not The Reward
Jordana’s fourth principle is the one most leaders quietly dismiss. Give yourself permission to play.
Play forces presence. Nobody plays while ruminating. It floods you with positive emotion, which broadens attention and builds capacity, moving you from threat into creation. Play is also one of Jane Dutton’s four pathways to high quality connection.
Playfulness is part of being alive.”
Save play for after the hard work and you enter that work depleted, tight, and alone. Imagine entering the same project present, energized, connected, and willing to experiment. The outcomes are not close.
As children we play constantly. As adults we file it under reward. I ask people what brings them joy and watch them go blank, as though nobody has asked in years. No wonder so much of corporate life feels grey.
It does not have to be an event. Take the meeting as a walk. Sit with your dog. Notice how you played as a kid, because the thread is still there.
Three Steps To Manage Uncertainty This Week
- Take a beat and re-anchor. Ask what is going on right now, what is genuinely outside my control, and what is the smallest thing I can do with what is inside it. Presence is a choice available every time you notice you have drifted.
- Name and deploy one strength. Most of us have never done this, because what comes most naturally is what we assume everyone can do. Look at the compliments you receive and the praise you shrug off. Pick one moment this week to use that strength deliberately.
- Play for five minutes today. Then check in. What is my energy. If something shifted, build on it. If nothing did, you learned something for tomorrow.
None of this requires a transformation program. It requires the willingness to stop waiting for a certainty that is never coming, and to start building with what is on stage with you.
Listen to my full conversation with Jordana Cole on the Flourishing Edge.
Learn more about Jordana Cole on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Jordana Cole. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
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