No doubt Sam and Earl would recognize CCLA’s definition of leadership: the process of getting people to move along together with you—and each other—with competence and full commitment to achieve a goal.

Please take a look at our brand mark above for a moment.

Most people comment that it’s colorful, seems to move from left to right, and feels “directional.” We agree.

But the mark is much more than the decorative part of our logo. It’s a visual expression of how we understand leadership.

It appears on the cover of our book Leadership Actually, on our business cards, and on most of our correspondence.

Bonfire Burrito has become something different.

People come for more than the food. They come for the experience—an experience shaped by people who are encouraged to contribute, to try something, to add something of their own.

Leadership is a craft, and developing agency is one of its critical elements. Leaders who cultivate agency consistently practice a few disciplined habits.

When a team is really vibing — everyone working toward a shared vision, bringing their unique energy and commitment — it’s easy to forget that a team is still a collection of individuals. Each one with their own inner world, their own questions, their own relationship to the work.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been exploring agency — particularly its interweaving with choice, consequence, and accountability.

We’ve argued that leadership is not the accumulation of authority, but the cultivation of agency — in ourselves and in others.

That brings us to a couple of simple-sounding questions:

Where does agency begin?

And what does it look like when it does?

On Monday, we explored what the AI-driven acceleration and leveling up of capability means for leaders, teams, and organizations. We also offered some ideas about what leaders can do to help people match that speed instead of becoming prey to it.

The same thing that’s happening almost everywhere is happening with us at the Co-Creative Leadership Alliance, too. So we decided to use our own process questions—the same ones we wrote about in Leadership Actually—to help us get a handle on this phenomenon.

Every so often, a person, a team, or an organization experiences a step-change in capability.

A highly capable CEO replaces one who was simply getting by.
A new technology enters the workflow.
A team member arrives whose thinking stretches the room.

The effect is not just speed.
It’s also expansion.

Standards rise.
Options increase.
The ceiling lifts.

His point was simple: AI is changing the way we work, and the organizations that learn it early will have an advantage. The important thing right now is to get started.

He also offered us a practical frame I can’t stop thinking about: treat AI like an intern—the best and smartest intern you’ve ever seen. Give it tasks, but don’t hand over your judgment. Check the work. Revise it. And when it misses, use the miss to teach it what “good” looks like in your context.

Many professionals, leaders included, are having a new experience right now: they try AI on a real piece of work — a draft, an analysis, a plan, a messy problem — and it doesn’t just “help.” It moves the work.

Sometimes by a little. Sometimes by a lot.

That can feel exciting. It can feel unsettling. Often it’s both.

For leaders, the question isn’t whether AI is useful. The deeper questions are human and organizational:

•             What happens when a new “team member” enters the room who isn’t a person?

•             How does AI change the leadership work we do with real people?

•             Who is accountable for what AI produces — and for how it shapes our team’s behavior?

I arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina in January 2000 to assume command of a Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force—an operation involving multiple NATO partner nations, along with other U.S. military forces.

The situation was difficult, the terrain unforgiving, and the winter was brutal. In fact, the worst snowfall in more than 30 years had blanketed the entire region.

In the first days after arriving, I did what leaders do in unfamiliar terrain: I got out of headquarters and went to see people.

Ash Wednesday surfaces three questions that feel deeply relevant to leadership:

Where has my life drifted?
What have I hardened toward?
What do I need to put aside so something truer can live?

These are not religious questions. They’re adult questions. Leadership questions.

Last week, we talked about how the lyrics of a song reminded us of one of the key themes of our work—personal agency.

To “welcome the morning” is to remember that you have a say in how your day will go. It’s to claim responsibility for how you’ll step into it.

But where, exactly, does that sense of having a say begin?

It begins with something you may be taking for granted—and something many of us lose touch with more often than we realize.

Smaller than vision.
Smaller than courage.
Smaller even than self-confidence.

It begins with the realization that you have the power to choose.

Leadership Begins with Welcome

Earlier this week, we welcomed you to this new space. Today, we want to explore another kind of welcome — the kind that sometimes reveals itself in the songs that stay with us for years.

One of those songs is John Denver’s Welcome to My Morning. It has always stirred something deep — a melody that feels both simple and profound. Only recently did we recognize why: its essence is about personal agency, a theme central to our work at the Co-Creative Leadership Alliance and in Leadership Actually.