Willful Blindness, AI and the Crisis of Leadership

What makes a good leader?

It’s a deceptively simple question. We often talk about vision, communication or decisiveness. But beneath all of those sits something more fundamental: judgement.

At a time when organisations have access to more information than ever before, making good decisions should, in theory, be getting easier. Yet leaders are navigating growing uncertainty, increasingly complex organisations and a wave of technologies promising to remove ambiguity altogether.

So what happens when certainty itself becomes the goal?

In this episode of Workplace Geeks, Chris Moriarty is joined by Margaret Heffernan, entrepreneur, author of Willful Blindness and one of the most thoughtful voices on leadership, decision-making and organisational behaviour.

Together they explore why smart people still make poor decisions, how power can distort judgement, why organisations have become increasingly uncomfortable with uncertainty and what leaders risk when they outsource thinking to machines.

The conversation also examines the growing role of AI in leadership. Not as a debate about the technology itself, but as a discussion about trust, legitimacy and accountability. If a leader cannot explain how a decision was reached, why should anyone have confidence in it?

Along the way, Margaret reflects on creativity, storytelling, learning from failure and the importance of surrounding yourself with people who are prepared to challenge your thinking rather than reinforce it.

It’s a wide-ranging conversation, but one that continually returns to a simple idea. Leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about creating the conditions to make thoughtful decisions when certainty simply isn’t available.

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