AI - If the governance system needs to change, what does it need to change into?

In my last post on APRA's letter to industry on AI, I asked whether the governance system has been built for the world we are now operating in. It prompted a follow up:
❓ If the governance system needs to change, what does it need to change into?

📖 I have been coming back to this book, "Team of Teams" by General Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal commanded the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq in 2004. He found himself in charge of a highly capable and well-resourced organisation, structured for efficiency. Problem was ... they were losing the war.

They were encountering complexity, speed and networked threats that moved faster than their own decision cycles could handle.

The answer was not to do the same things faster. It was to change the relationship between information, decision-making and action. The organisation had to become less like a machine, and more like a living system capable of sensing and adapting in real time.

📽️ The video is a visual embodiment of Team of Teams ➡️ thousands of birds working simultaneously with a shared consciousness and distributed judgment.

AI introduces risks that are networked, fast-moving, emergent and cross-cutting. But the deeper lesson wasn't structural. McChrystal solved it by making the organisation more human:
🪶 More trust.
🪶 More information flow.
🪶 More distributed judgment.
🪶 More genuine connection across silos.

And that points to a big question for Boards today:
❓ The governance question and the human question have become the same question. What do we bring that no system can?

The organisations navigating AI risk well will be the ones that invested in the human conditions that frameworks cannot codify. The core capabilities; shared consciousness, genuine trust, distributed judgment, and the courage to look at the whole rather than just the parts.

Some questions worth considering at this time:
❓ Are we investing in the human conditions that foster trust, judgment, shared consciousness, as we are investing in our AI capability?
❓Do the people closest to AI risk have the authority, trust and information flow to act on what they are seeing?
❓Is our risk function operating to sense and adapt, or to report and comply?

(Credit: Starling murmuration from Jan van Ijken’s ‘The Art of Flying’)
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