Media › Become a Global Leader
In conversationVictoria Rennoldson hosts Become a Global Leader. This conversation was published on 2026-08-07. The whole thing is below as text, including Victoria’s questions, because a page with a player on it and nothing else is a page nobody can read, search or quote.
Written from the transcript below and from nothing else.
Victoria Rennoldson works in cultural intelligence, and that gives this conversation an angle none of the others have: what algorithmic drift does to culture, not just to individuals.
It opens on judgement. Rahim separates it from decision making in the way the book does, decisions being what you do with information and judgement being what is left when the information runs out, and he argues the erosion has been running for years. First the internet took the scarcity out of knowledge. Now AI is taking the judgement, and judgement is built out of who you are, your upbringing, the situations you have been in and the mistakes you made in them. That is the part he does not want anyone handing over.
Victoria pushes on the practical question twice. How do you take agency back, and is it a habit or something bigger? Rahim's answer is that it is not only a personal habit. Organisations issue what amount to edicts, use these tools, without the guardrails to go with them, and people end up sending the default email the tool wrote. He puts the responsibility at the leadership layer as much as the individual one: give someone superpowers with no training in superpowers and you should not be surprised by what happens next.
The most interesting stretch is on culture. Compute, models and data centres sit in three places, so the models most of the world will adopt are trained on cultures that are not their own. He does not claim to know the answer and says so. He also inverts the assumption: people in markets with low adoption may be worse off commercially and better off cognitively, because they are not defaulting.
It closes on his daughters, on what he hopes they take from all this, and on taste as something that makes a person distinguishable when everyone has the same tools.
Spoken on the day and quoted as spoken. Where a line rests on something this research has checked, the research page is linked beside it.
“Decision making is what you do with information. And judgement is about what you do when you don't have any information and you've got the values that you have.”
Rahim Hirji on Become a Global Leader. The evidence is on /research/models-of-judgement.
“We are outsourcing our judgement to AI, and that's a very scary thing to do, because if we don't have judgement, what do we have left?”
Rahim Hirji on Become a Global Leader. The evidence is on /research/human-judgement-in-the-age-of-ai.
“Algorithmic drift, to define it, is that situation whereby you don't know whether you're making the decision or not.”
Rahim Hirji on Become a Global Leader. The evidence is on /research/design-versus-drift.
“You need to have the human making the decision, and the judgement call, at two points at the absolute minimum. One is at the beginning, where I call humans at the start, and one is at the end.”
Rahim Hirji on Become a Global Leader. The evidence is on /research/can-a-human-approve-an-ai-decision-at-machine-speed.
“If you give superpowers to someone who hasn't been trained in using superpowers, what happens?”
Rahim Hirji on Become a Global Leader. The evidence is on /research/how-do-you-build-judgement-in-an-organisation.
“The models that they move to at a certain point in time are not going to be models based on their culture.”
Rahim Hirji on Become a Global Leader. The evidence is on /research/superskill-global-adaptability.
Victoria’s questions and the answers given, shortened and not rewritten.
It has been going on for a while. Decision making is what you do with information. And judgement is about what you do when you don't have any information and you've got the values that you have had for many years. What has happened recently, and it is escalating at a rate, is that we are outsourcing our judgement to AI, and that's a very scary thing to do.
Algorithmic drift, to define it, is that situation whereby you don't know whether you're making the decision or not. That is very easy to explain when you talk about something like Google Maps. I want to go from X to Y, here's the route for you. Is it the best route? Is it the fastest route? Who is it the best route for?
Take that step back and actually say, okay, did I make that decision? Once you realise that algorithmic drift exists, whether it's in Google Maps, or in picking a thirty-minute meeting by default, or going to Netflix and just watching the next thing, you won't be able to stop seeing them everywhere.
People talk about human in the loop. The way I look at it is that it's one part of many, and you need to have the human making the decision, and the judgement call, at two points at the absolute minimum. One is at the beginning, where I call humans at the start, and one is at the end. In the middle you've got humans in the loop.
There's a level of ownership at the organisational level, at the C suite. People leaders, team managers, human resources, that becomes a very important layer that people often ignore. If you give superpowers to someone who hasn't been trained in using superpowers, what happens?
I think at the moment there are elements that the machine has. It has elements of empathy, but it won't have lived experience of empathy, and it'll never have lived experience of empathy. Being able to console someone whose loved one has passed away, the AI will never have that, because it's a very human trait.
The full conversation. Timing marks and filler removed, wording left alone. 1 automatic-transcription correction(s) are recorded in the source file.
The short answer is, it's been going on for a while. Judgement is coming to the fore right now, not because we haven't been good at judging stuff, but because things are taking away our judgement. I like to take a step back and say, decision making is what you do with information. And judgement is about what you do when you don't have any information and you've got the values that you have, that you've had for many years.
Judgement is not something that comes in and out. It's about who you are as an individual, your cultural upbringing, what makes you as a person. That's the landscape of where judgement goes. It's what you build upon, what you've seen, the mistakes that you've gone through.
I've written in the past around knowledge. I have this thing called knowledge is no longer power, because information is wholly accessible. And whilst I don't think there is any power with knowledge anymore, I think wisdom is a very different thing. Having gone through the process of seeing situations and making judgement calls, that's what this is all about.
What has happened with AI is that AI has taken our information from us. It started off with the internet, and it became very easy to access information. We didn't really do much about it at that point in time, because we knew that it was there, but we still thought it was important to learn, and the education system remained the same. What has happened recently, and it is escalating at a rate, is that we are outsourcing our judgement to AI, and that's a very scary thing to do, because if we don't have judgement, what do we have left?
There's a framing that I look at for slicing up what you do, what you outsource, how you go about your day. One is an appreciation that these algorithms exist. In my book I talk about this concept of drift versus design. Algorithmic drift, to define it, is that situation whereby you don't know whether you're making the decision or not.
That is very easy to explain when you talk about something like Google Maps. I want to go from X to Y. Here's the route for you, go down that route. Is it the best route? That's the first question. Is it the fastest route? Who is it the best route for? There are lots of different permutations of that.
What I would encourage people to do is take that step back and actually say, okay, did I make that decision? Once you realise that algorithmic drift exists, whether it's in Google Maps, whether it's in picking a thirty-minute meeting by default when you should be picking a seventeen-minute meeting, whether it's going to Netflix and just watching the next thing that's showing up and saying, well, this is the top ten. Is this the top ten for me?
I've got to a point on Spotify where I've just decided that I don't want to listen to any more new music. I want to listen to the music that I want to listen to, and I forget about the AI-created playlists, and I listen to the classical epic film scores that I love listening to on day one, and day two might be nineties hip hop. That's what I want to listen to. I don't want to listen to what the algorithm tells me I need to be listening to, because there's a new artist and it keeps me locked in.
So take a step back, realise that algorithms exist, and that it's part of your day-to-day life. Once you have a look, you won't be able to stop seeing them everywhere.
There are also different ways to address this. People talk about human in the loop in organisational settings. The concept of human in the loop was really about judgement. We're going to make sure that we are overseeing. So people think it's judgement, but it's actually just, are we overseeing what's going on? The way that I look at human in the loop is that it's one part of many, and you need to have the human making the decision, and the judgement call, at two points at the absolute minimum. One is at the beginning, where I call humans at the start, and one is at the end. And in the middle you've got humans in the loop. You need these multiple touch points to know that what you're doing is the right thing, and that what you've outsourced, you still have control over.
I think it goes beyond all of that, especially when you're in the workplace. I worry that we have edicts, they're not really edicts, but organisations saying, okay, we will use these tools. What happens is people are using the tools, but they don't really have the guardrails or the guidance on how to use the tools. Ultimately, before you know it, they're writing emails. Well, actually, they're not writing emails, they're taking the default emails that come from the tools.
There's a level of ownership at the organisational level, at the C suite. I think it's very important, and this is where leaders and people leaders, team managers, human resources, that becomes a very important layer that people often ignore. It is going to be the imperative that will define the success of organisations over the future. That's really setting up the guidance for everyone as an individual.
If you're a team manager, if you're an individual within an organisation, you need to lead by example, and that example has been built from the ground up over the last two to three years, because there hasn't been any guidance. The first real moment that we saw of this was ChatGPT coming out. Everyone was scared about it taking their jobs. But there was no guidance around it. Can you use it, can you not use it? Sometimes they were saying you cannot use it because it's not safe. And when there was no guidance, people were using it in their own way.
These LLM companies are developing these superpowers to use in the workplace. And the problem is, if you give superpowers to someone who hasn't been trained in using superpowers, what happens? They become a kind of nemesis of sorts, because they could do whatever they want to do. But if you do give them guidance and you put the human in the centre and say, here are some superpowers to really accentuate yourself and do really amazing work, that's a very different thing from saying, here are some tools, go and use them.
They come sequentially in the book. It starts off with curiosity as the first one and ends with one I call the augmented mindset. Curiosity and change readiness are for you as an individual. Then there are three which are around how you deal with others. And then augmented mindset and principled innovation are how you define the future and how you exist in this new space.
They are almost as important as each other, but some are more difficult, some are new. The question that I get is, isn't curiosity inherent in everyone? And I say, okay, well, prove it. How do you prove your curiosity? Invariably people don't prove their curiosity. They are curious enough, but they're not super curious. In this world that we are in right now it is very important to be curious, find out the depth of understanding, ask the right question all the time, because if you don't ask the question, the answer that you're going to get is coming from an LLM.
The one for this age is the augmented mindset. In very simple terms it's about using AI, but it's also about the decision to use AI. I am pro-human and I'm pro-AI at the same time. You can be both.
I'll give a personal example. For a period of time I was going straight to AI. I'd walk around the park, I'd talk into my phone, and I would use AI almost immediately and ask AI to make the decision. So I fell into the trap of algorithmic drift myself, because I was defaulting to Claude setting up my day for me. What I would encourage people to do is take a step back, have a piece of paper, old school piece of paper, pencil, mind map, pen. There's this point in time now where you've got to take a step back and go back to the things that actually promote cognitive capability. I found personally that drawing mind maps and thinking about the problem set first, before you go to the AI, is very important.
I'm not a cognitive scientist. I figured this out because I was falling into different traps all the time. Some people don't even realise they're falling into the trap. You'll see it in the book, where I talk about awareness versus agency. If you are not aware and do not have any agency, you become this thing that I call a sleepwalker. If your brain is still working, and you're not turning into a machine yourself, because the flip is we default to the machine and the machine turns us into robots, because we're doing what it tells us to do.
I think at the moment there are elements that the machine has. It has elements of empathy, but it won't have lived experience of empathy, and it'll never have lived experience of empathy. Being able to console someone whose loved one has passed away, the AI will never have that, because it's a very human trait. You need to have seen that through another individual and yourself.
There are elements that it will learn, because in a very crude way AI is a massive autocomplete. The more information that you give to it, the more it will realise this is the stuff that is important. And there is this question of whether we will get to AGI. The question then becomes, when the machine is faster and more powerful, how do we as individuals and humans remain clear? Do we have clarity of thought versus the speed of thought, which is already going to happen? So it's not a question of whether it's going to have some of the super skills or not. It's about whether we can, as individuals, at home, in the workplace, remain clear in our thinking.
I'd say that if we don't build the muscle, we will start to become enclaves, doing different things in different worlds. Humanity is more powerful together than it is in a separate way, especially in this new world.
The thing that worries me a little bit is that power in this AI sphere is very concentrated in North America, a little bit in Europe, and in China. If you look at where all the data centres are for AI, the majority sits in the US. There are some in Europe and some in China. So where you look at AI adoption, it's predominant in those places. And if you look at where the models are, they're predominantly in those places. And those models will be based on those cultures.
If you were to take somewhere like Afghanistan or Tajikistan, where there's very low internet penetration at the moment, and they move to this AI model, the models that they move to at a certain point in time are not going to be models based on their culture. They're going to be models based on a combination of a multitude of cultures that doesn't include them. There is this scary moment that we just turn into three different cultures. I don't know what the answer to that is, but I do know that we are better if we appreciate culture and the differences in culture.
The thing I've seen in adoption is that in the beginning days, when ChatGPT first came out, there were countries that said AI is banned, ChatGPT is banned in our countries. As things have taken a step forward they've lifted those bans. They've realised this is the new power. Are they behind in the race? I don't know. Would you consider people living in those places to be worse off? I don't know. Are they actually better off because they're not defaulting and outsourcing their brains? A lot of people that I see in Europe and in North America just default to moving to the AI and they're not using their brains.
I do fear this next phase, because we don't have a blueprint for what's happening. People say we had a blueprint for what happened after the internet, and the internet was very different to this. This is technology taking some of our tasks away from us. So what does that do to the world of work? We see the hard cold face of that, not just here in the UK but elsewhere: those entry rungs to the job ladder have dissipated. Companies are going from pyramids to inverted pyramids, outsourcing huge functions and then having to rehire people back.
What happens if we only need fifty per cent of the workforce in ten years' time? What happens to humanity? Those are the kind of things that I worry about with this new age. If you read things like the World Economic Forum, they talk about these new jobs coming out. We'll start to see these new roles. The question will remain whether these roles and this future is a good replacement for what we're doing right now.
I do think that we have been living in this world where we have been excusing busy work for actual work. I always give the example of spending a whole day putting together a PowerPoint because you're trying to make everything align and make everything look good. Right now if you've got all of your information you just press a button and it can create that for you, and you can do some tailoring, but you save a bunch of time. So we've gone from busy work to this new age where the busy work is starting to go away. I just don't know about the future. I'm hopeful for it. I think we have to be hopeful for it. And we can do all of the things that are within our power, and that is investing in ourselves as human beings.
Both of them have read my book. My eldest, who's nineteen, read it in one or two sittings. The thing I would hope for them is that they realise the differentiation between the skills of the now and the skills of the future. And some of the skills of the future are the skills of the past. This real thing about being human and authentic and who you are, and leaning into those traits. Things like taste, having something that you like and you don't like. Those are the things that are going to be important as you go forward. Those are the things that make us different as individuals.
I hope they realise that there are technical things that are important, and having the knowhow to use them, but it's not necessarily about the specific tool. It's about the ability to be adaptable, to say, okay, I might be using ChatGPT today, but tomorrow I'm going to flip to using Claude, and then I might use Grok, and I might use four or five at the same time. And having that level of adaptability, and then also for two weeks saying, I'm not going to use any AI at all. That's a very human trait.
I really hope that both of them, my youngest is fourteen, go through this education system and that it gives them not just the academics but also the experience that they have with their friends, with joining clubs, with just trying new things, because those are the things that are going to build us. As an adult it becomes difficult to try new things. We have less time, we have responsibilities, so this experimentation time is less. What I say to them is just try and do as much as you can, whether it's travelling or not, but just doing new things, having projects, being curious, going into these deep enclaves of a project that they wouldn't necessarily have done in the summer holidays. And just be curious about the world, and be good citizens of the world.
The first thing I'd say is to check yourself. Are you making the right decision? Are you making the decision? Just to figure that out for yourself as an individual. The second thing is to think about AI adoption yourself. If you have been scared to date and are using AI in a very transactional way, in the same way that you use Google, have a rethink. Go onto YouTube, figure out how people are doing it, find a coach to help you and support you, just in that initial part where it gives you a level of confidence.
But also think about those human skills. There are hundreds of human skills. When I first started doing this research, about ten years ago and then more concertedly over the last three years, there are lots of skills. I got down to twenty skills and then to ten. And these are my seven skills that I think are really meta skills. Look at those things, read the reports that are out there from people who've got the resources, the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, BCG. If you don't believe in curiosity, believe in another skill. If you don't believe in global adaptability, find another skill that's important for you, because those human skills are the stuff that's going to be important. And just be hopeful about the future, because if we're not hopeful, then it just goes downhill.
Published here 2026-09-27. The episode was published by Culture Cuppa on 2026-08-07. Anything said in a conversation is speech, dated and attributed, and is not restated as a claim anywhere else on this site. Keynotes · Advisory · Boards