Film 03 · 22 min
Leading With Machines
What is left of a leadership role when the analysis is instant and free, filmed with executives who have already handed large parts of their work to machines.
Who appears
Dr Chris Tamdjidi
Founding Director, Awaris
Anneke de Vries
Group Chief Operating Officer, Meridian Industries
The thinking behind it
Automation does not remove judgement. It removes the delay that used to disguise the absence of judgement.
The film's central case is an organisation that cut its analysis cycle from three weeks to an afternoon and found its decision quality fell. The bottleneck had never been analysis. It was the time the analysis bought people to notice their own reasoning.
It then asks what deliberately should not be automated: the parts of a decision where the cost of being confidently wrong is unbounded, and the parts where the act of deciding is itself the message to an organisation.
The film refuses the usual ending about human creativity. It ends on discernment, which is duller and defensible.
Sources
Kahneman, Sibony & Sunstein (2021), Noise
On decision hygiene and where judgement fails predictably.
Parasuraman & Riley (1997), Human Factors
Use, misuse and abuse of automation.
BGLI and Awaris corporate cohort interviews, 2025–2026
Anonymised.
Transcript
DE VRIES: We got the answer in four hours and made a worse decision. That took a year to admit.
TAMDJIDI: The machine removed the pause. Nobody had noticed the pause was doing work.