AI is driving a ‘need for speed’. I hear it from senior leaders every week: “We must move faster”.
In a world where LLMs have democratised access to all publicly available knowledge and where most organisations have access to the same AI tools, speed may be the only real competitive advantage left to them.
Leaders know that to have a chance of survival, let alone growth, they must be at the cutting edge.
But where is the cutting edge, and what does it take to live there?
The Knowledge Doubling Rate
In 1982 futurist Buckminster Fuller commented on what he called the ‘knowledge doubling rate’. He suggested that until 1900, knowledge doubled roughly every century. By 1945 knowledge was doubling every 25 years and by 1982 it was probably doubling every 12 months. Today many people suggest that it’s doubling much faster. The precise figure is contested and probably unknowable, but the direction of travel isn't. We are generating, publishing and revising research faster than at any point in human history, across every field that matters to leadership: neuroscience, adult development, behavioural economics, organisational psychology.
This means any organisation that’s currently splashing in the warm waters of competitive advantage needs to wake up, because it’s quite possible that within a year everything they think they know may be less than half of what is known in their area of expertise. And within 2 years it should be easy to leapfrog the knowledge advantage on which their competitiveness was based.
This creates a very inconvenient truth for anyone advising leaders for a living.
If the knowledge base is doubling every day, or every month, then guidance built on research from five, ten, or even fifty years ago isn't "timeless wisdom." It's an outdated snapshot of a much smaller, much less complete picture, mistakenly presented as the whole view, or even worse passed off as ‘the cutting edge’.
Nowhere is this more visible, or more expensive, than in the leadership assessment industry.
A Very Short History of Measuring People
Somewhere in your organisation, right now, a senior leader is proudly sharing their Hogan profile, their MBTI type, or their top five ‘Strengths’ from their talent review. They talk about it the way people used to share their star sign, as though it settles something. The truth is it predicts nothing and, in fairness, was never designed to.
But here’s the question nobody asks: how old is the thinking behind that assessment? And how relevant is it really in a modern AI-powered business?
Most leaders assume the personality test they took last year is a product of modern psychological science. It isn't. It's a product of the first world war trenches. If they were using the same phone from those days we would find this hilariously outdated
The first mass personality assessment, the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, was built in 1917 to screen US Army recruits for susceptibility to shell shock before they shipped to France. The Army Alpha and Beta tests followed shortly after, sorting recruits into ranks by cognitive type. This was the birth of the entire ‘descriptive’ testing tradition.
Assess the person, sort them into a category then guess how they'll behave. It happened before psychology had anything like a mature evidence base, and decades before Jean Piaget gave the field its most important idea: that human beings don't have fixed traits, they develop. They move predictably through different levels of sophistication in a set sequence.
With each new level more nuanced and useful ways of making sense of the world come online.
The descriptive tradition never absorbed that idea. It kept describing.
MBTI, which is very loosely built on Jungian typology in the 1940s, still tells you which of sixteen fixed boxes you belong in, never mind that the research shows that roughly 50% of people are sorted into a different box if they simply retake the test a few weeks later (Pittenger, 1993).
The Hogan Personality Inventory, built on the Five Factor Model, still measures where you sit on a handful of stable trait dimensions.
And the myriads of ‘Strength-Finder’ tests randomly pick a set of characteristics that are falsely assumed to confer some sort of commercial advantage. My favourite example is “Committed”. Sounds great doesn’t it. Who wouldn’t want someone in their team who “gives everything”? Such a quality sounds perfect, unless you’re a blood donor.
Descriptive leadership assessments drive a multi-billion-dollar industry. But personality tests, typologies and strength finders were never designed to answer the question boards actually care about: will this person be capable of leading us through what's coming next, which is more complex than what came before?
That's not a design flaw. It's a category error we've been making for a century.
The Cutting Edge is Developmental not Descriptive
Fortunately, there’s a new kid on the block. Well, ‘new’ relative its hundred-year-old colleague. This second approach, to leadership assessment, is ‘developmental’ not ‘descriptive’.
The origin of the developmental approach started with Piaget's game-changing research. Then many other academics, such as Jane Loevinger, Susanne Cook-Greuter and Bill Torbert refined the approach moving it from well-documented levels of child development to profile the equally well-studied levels of adult development.
Adult development defines the way leaders make sense of, interpret and respond to the world. Ken Wilber synthesised much of this into a broader integral framework.
The developmental approach doesn't ask: what type of leader are you? It asks how much complexity can you handle, and how good are you at dealing with a BANI world (yes, VUCA has been leap-frogged and is now called brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible - BANI, a framework coined by futurist Jamais Cascio in 2018).
How much complexity can you handle is a fundamentally different, and more useful, question for anyone trying to predict the future performance of their leadership population.
And the evidence backs this up. Research by David Rooke and Bill Torbert, published in the Harvard Business Review in 2005, found that leaders operating from more sophisticated levels of meaning making were much more likely to drive successful organisational transformation. In contrast, leaders operating from earlier, less developed levels couldn’t drive transformation, regardless of their personality, type, or strengths.
If you read through the entire leadership literature you can’t escape the overwhelming obvious conclusion that “there’s no personality type, strength set or typology that reliably predicts great leadership”. Why? Because great leadership isn't a fixed trait. It's an evolving capability.
The cutting edge in leadership assessment isn't a better version of the descriptive test. It's a whole new approach. And even within the brave new world of developmental assessments, only the instruments that have been built or substantially updated in the last couple of years deserve the label ‘cutting edge’.
The landscape is moving way too fast for organisations to still be using outdated Edwardian cartographic methods to map their leadership population.
Cutting Edge Behaviours
If we look beyond archaic descriptive assessments and even the rapidly evolving field of developmental assessments, we can identify some key behaviours that define whether your leadership population is at the cutting edge or not.
Ask yourself “are my leaders still reading?" Are they searching for, and open to, ideas that didn't originate inside their own building?
Way back in 1982 Katz and Allen's study of research teams identified something they called the "Not Invented Here" syndrome.
Teams that lacked openness to challenge showed measurably declining performance, even as their confidence in their own expertise increased. Insularity doesn't just limit a leader's thinking, it actively degrades it, despite those individuals feeling masterful on the inside.
Leaders who operate at the cutting edge have the humility to know that they don’t know everything, which is why they actively explore new ideas, and seek out information. They are often voracious readers and are never too self-important to meet with people, young and old, who have novel thinking. If you are not researching and exploring widely you simply can’t know whether your current view has been overtaken.
In addition to seeking out novel concepts, people who operate at the cutting edge are skilled at what researchers call ‘integrative complexity’, the capacity to hold multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives in mind and weave them into a fuller picture, rather than averaging them into mush or picking the one that confirms what they already believe.
Peter Suedfeld's research suggests this isn't just a nice-to-have. Analysing the wartime correspondence of Robert E. Lee and his opponents, he found Lee's integrative complexity was consistently higher than the generals he defeated, and lower in the battles he lost (Suedfeld, Corteen & McCormick, 1986). Sophistication of thought isn't decoration, it's a measurable and predictive capability. Great thinkers recognise that a view built on a narrow, comfortable slice of the research isn't sophisticated. It's just confident.
The Question Worth Asking
Next time someone in your leadership team reaches for a familiar assessment, a well-worn model, or a framework they learned early in their career, ask one question: when was this last seriously updated, and by whom?
If the honest answer is "more than a year or two ago" you're not looking at the cutting edge.
You're looking at a very well-marketed antique.