The AI Trap: Why Command and Control Will Break Our Organisations
Has someone on your team disappeared in the last couple of years because of a restructure? Did their work end up on your desk? Or maybe you lost your job, found a new one, and now you're basically doing two people's work?
Restructures, shrinking teams, and AI coming at us faster than we can possibly keep up. In almost every organisation I visit, I see people who are overwhelmed. I see systems we built for a different world. Systems that are starting to break.
When everything feels chaotic, most leaders do what feels safe. They take charge and default to command and control. It looks like leadership. It feels decisive and fast. But it causes damage: It stops conversations. It kills debate. Silences dissent. It strips away the diversity of thought. It kills innovation and creativity. And it makes for bad decisions!
The problem isn't headcount
Command and control creates learned helplessness. The main bottleneck is rarely the headcount or budget. It's the learned helplessness that's creeping into every corner of our organisations.
In times of change, with high uncertainty, anxiety is high. People who are struggling with life aren't in a headspace to think freely and creatively. They just want to sit back and wait to be told what to do. Pair this with command and control leadership and you'll see smart, capable people feeling that the safest thing they can possibly do is nothing at all. To just wait to be told what to do.
Talking to Leaders
I wanted to see if my hunch about this was correct. So I talked to 20 leaders from different companies across New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the US. I asked them: what's autonomy actually like in your organisation?
Every single leader told me the same: People are hesitant. They escalate decisions they're fully paid and able to make. They're asking for permission instead of forgiveness. Everyone's waiting to be told what to do. We're losing the ability to just figure things out.
The AI trap we're walking into
We all think AI is going to save us. That it'll make everyone more productive. But what happens when you give a workforce that has already learned to be helpless a tool that gives them instant, easy, frictionless answers?
They'll stop thinking.
If your people are waiting for permission to think, AI won't make them faster. It will just help them produce generic work at lightning speed. To handle the velocity AI brings you don't need better tools, you need people who own their decisions.
If we're not careful, AI won't be a tool for creativity. It will be an engine for conformity. It will take this learned helplessness problem and make it ten times worse.
The AI trap: learned helplessness amplified
You can't be agile without autonomy
We have to fix the human problem first. This is why we need to talk about the actual goal: agility.
Autonomy is the prerequisite for agility. You can't have one without the other. We talk a lot about being agile, moving fast, and adapting to market changes. But if people are still waiting for permission, if they are escalating every decision, they can't respond. They can't adapt. They can't move fast.
You can implement all the agile frameworks you want — Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Disciplined Agile, whatever — but if the underlying culture is one of fear and decision-gridlock, it will fail.
What learned helplessness looks like
This collapse in autonomy isn't easy to spot. But you can see it if you know where to look and have a framework.
I use a framework adapted from Robert E. Kelley’s research on followership. I’ve shifted the focus from 'personality types' to relationship dynamics, because this isn't about who people are, it's about how they are being led.
Relationship dynamics in organisations
I know what you're thinking: "OMG, she's putting people in boxes", I am not: These aren't personality types. They are behaviors and highly context-dependent. We have all been acting in relationships like this at some point.
The Alienated. You know these people. They're brilliant, sharp, independent thinkers who've given up. They've seen too much, their ideas have been ignored too many times, and now they just sit in meetings and snipe from the sidelines. A developer told me once: "I used to have ideas. No one listened. Now I just watch the train wreck."
The Passive. These are the people who do exactly what's in their job description and nothing else. It's not laziness. It's a totally reasonable response to a culture that punishes mistakes. It's quiet quitting as a survival strategy.
The Conformist. The yes people. They look busy, they're always agreeing, but they're not actually thinking. They're just happily following orders.
Effective Relationships. This is where we want our relationships to be: independent, critical thinkers who are highly engaged, working together.
Three things that work
Right now, most of us are stuck in the bottom two categories. Before we can be agile, we have to fix the learned helplessness problem. Here are three levers we can use:
1. Let teams self-select
Self-selection is a facilitated process that lets teams pick themselves. No, this isn't anarchy. It is a strictly facilitated process with clear constraints where people choose who they want to work with and what they want to work on. It's a proven, structured way of restoring agency. We have a decade of global evidence from companies like Riot Games, The Iconic, Spotify, Trade Me and ING that proves this works.
Teams today are more dynamic, smaller, and leaner, and they are being asked to do more with less. And soon they will have AI colleagues. That makes self-selection even more critical now than it was a decade ago. It simply is the fastest way to get people to stop waiting to be told what to do.
2. Give structure, not control
Autonomy is not a vacuum. It’s not a free for all with no hierarchy. It needs guardrails.
The job of a leader isn't to tell people how to do their work; it's to provide absolute clarity on the "why" and the "what." Define the purpose of the work, the constraints, and a clear definition of success. Then have the courage to get out of the way.
Guardrails are there to apply the right level of trust, to enable self-service and to protect the person accountable (HT @Adam Heinz)
3. Build a culture of autonomy
Self-selection is the foundation. Don't make it a one-time thing but use it as the foundation for a culture of autonomy. This culture is something you have to keep working at. Reward people for trying stuff, even when it doesn't work out. Celebrate smart risks. Actually talk about what "acting like an owner" means. Treat people like adults, not kids who need constant supervision.
What this looks like when it works
When you get this right, work stops feeling like a hierarchy and starts feeling like you're all solving a problem together. It's just adults bringing their best to something that matters, and figuring it out.
The choice
We're all being asked to do more with less. Many leaders are banking on AI to bridge that gap. But remember: AI acts as an amplifier.
If you drop AI into a culture of learned helplessness, you won't get innovation. You’ll just get faster, cheaper conformity. You will automate the very lack of thinking that is already holding you back.
The choice is clear. We can keep driving via command and control, burning out our best people and automate mediocrity. Or we can do the hard work of restoring autonomy.
Autonomy isn't just a "nice-to-have" for employee wellbeing anymore. It is the only way to ensure that when AI speeds us up, we’re actually going somewhere worth going.
*This post is based on my talk "The AI Trap: Why Command and Control Will Break Your Organisation " about the collapse of autonomy in organisations and how to rebuild it.* Contact me if you’d like me to speak!
More about Self-selection: Read more here or get the book on Pragmatic Bookshelf or Amazon.