Making consequential decisions: where humans still have an edge over AI

In Toronto at yesterday’s 15th annual graduation event for entrepreneurs supported by NEXT Canada, I was struck by chair Reza Satchu’s keynote:

Leaders, your job is to make decisions of consequence, and take full accountability for those consequences. It’s the one chance humans still have to outperform AI.

This rings true for me as an entrepreneur. It also strikes me that it is extremely relevant at all levels of more established organizations. There’s a kind of “thud factor” when a decision is really consequential.

You feel it in your gut. While it can be surprisingly easy to avoid decisions, our future depends on each one of us stepping up to make decisions for the greater good.

Decisions where AI can help, and where it can’t

Where many people have been employed in one way or another for centuries to process materials or data, those tasks are increasingly being taken over by faster, cheaper and better machines. Scarcely a day goes by without news of the astonishing progress made by agentic AI to make decisions within certain parameters. From robotaxis to service bots to weapons of war, AI’s capability for remarkably sophisticated decision making grows every day.

Yet machine intelligence is still notoriously unreliable at making decisions of consequence. Crucially, it is extremely bad at detecting its own mistakes in this regard.

I’m happy to see NEXT Canada promoting risk taking, particularly in this risk-averse culture. And I am happy to see them consistently pointing entrepreneurs towards the bigger decisions that remain best taken by people.

When last did you make a bold decision of significant consequence? How did it feel for you? Did you embrace the opportunity or defer the decision?

To make good decisions, you have to also be willing to make mistakes and correct them. As Reza said, in these regards humans are still capable of outperforming machines.

Entrepreneurial leadership

I was at the NEXT Canada entrepreneur’s graduation event yesterday because I’ve volunteered to join their panel of business leadership mentors. I was happy to see this year’s cohort pushing boundaries and relentlessly pursuing opportunities without their ambition being limited by their current resources. This is for me at the core of entrepreneurial leadership.

Too many people – whether in startups or established businesses – let the harsh realities of funding and budgets curtail their thinking. I’m not advocating tearing up all budgets. However I do see that those whose thinking spans both sides of any budget are those who grow businesses. It’s not just about “how can we deliver more within the budget.” Just as much thinking needs to be about “how can we expand our revenue so that we can deliver more.”

Of course it’s easier to see both sides of the income-and-expense see-saw if either your enterprise is small, or you are at or near the top of the organization. But I believe leaders at all levels of large organizations can benefit from stretching the span of their thinking in this entrepreneurial way.

For an extreme example, consider a facilities manager I spoke to this week. If ever there was a budget-constrained role, it’s managing facilities across 16 countries in an efficient and cost-effective way for a large business. Yet what impressed me as we explored the reasons for his exceptional success, is the way he leverages culture to expand productivity. He can’t directly increase revenue. But by drawing people together across multiple countries, time zones, languages and cultures he shifts the level of collaboration and shoots the lights out in productivity.

The power of relationship

What the speakers didn’t name at yesterday’s event, but what is nonetheless baked into every aspect of entrepreneurship, is the power of humans to build consequential relationships across radical differences. Probably the biggest decisions of consequence being made by leaders today are whether to build life-giving relationships across barriers, or to retreat behind narrow national or sectarian boundaries and build bigger border fences. Collaboration is what enabled our species to be so successful over thousands of years. It is the key to our survival.

It’s not just the politicians who are deciding our future in this regard. Each one of us has the opportunity to reach out further in who we choose to work with, who we choose to trade with, who we chose to hire and promote as leaders.