AI is putting digital leadership to the test
By Stijn Viaene
Professor of Digital Transformation
Your board was keen to embrace AI. The technology has been rolled out. People are experimenting with it and adoption is growing.
There’s just one problem. You’re not seeing much impact on the business.
It’s a conversation Professor Stijn Viaene encounters frequently in his work, and one that goes to the heart of his newly published book, The Digital Leadership Practice Test.
This practical guide crystallises more than a decade of research and work with organisations by Stijn and his colleagues at Vlerick Business School. At its heart is the 4V framework for digital transformation leadership. But the book goes much further than identifying four leadership contexts. It shows how organisations can put the framework into practice, helping more people contribute to continuous learning, adaptation and business impact.
AI raises the stakes
AI opens up possibilities. It allows us to reshape decision-making and ways of working. It presents opportunities at remarkable speed.
Which means organisations have more to gain from successful transformation – and more to lose when it goes wrong.
AI hasn’t suddenly rewritten the rules of digital transformation. But its scale and pace make getting transformation right more important than ever.
Stijn says: “Technology progress is inevitable, but technology adoption is selective. Digital transformation is therefore the strategic work of deciding what technological progress means for us and what we should do about it. More tech is not necessarily better. But standing still is not an option either.”
In a world of AI, leaders are faced with possibilities that emerge quickly and unpredictably. They have to keep making choices – often without knowing in advance which will create value and which won’t.
So organisations need the agility to keep transforming as opportunities and threats change. And that means learning continuously.
Learning your way into agility
In an environment of almost constant change, organisations need to nurture curiosity and learning. Not just about how to use technology – because AI isn’t simply another tool that teams need to learn to work with. Experimenting with AI can itself reveal new ways of working and create new possibilities.
And this changes what learning means. Instead of identifying knowledge gaps and planning in learning events to plug them, a transforming organisation now needs to “learn its way forward”. What you discover today shapes what you need to explore and learn tomorrow.
So rather than assuming you can know in advance what your transformed organisation will look like, you learn more spontaneously as possibilities emerge.
And this means working with tensions. You need to explore new possibilities that could give you a competitive advantage, while continuing to deliver reliably. You need to think and make sense of unfolding possibilities, while acting quickly enough to learn from doing.
To succeed, you cannot choose one side over the other. You have to do both.
Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable
This brings us back to the organisation experimenting enthusiastically with AI but struggling to see a return.
The company isn’t wrong to experiment. But it does need to work with the tension between experimentation and delivery. You can’t keep experimenting in the hope that value will eventually follow – but nor can you stop experimenting and focus only on delivery.
Working with two seemingly opposing demands can feel inherently uncomfortable. Yet it’s a discomfort that is entirely necessary for success.
Stijn says: “Organisations that successfully transform learn that discomfort is not bad or a reason to row back. Discomfort shows you that you are working in a productive space.”
So the point isn’t to make tensions disappear. It’s to help organisations work with them productively.
This is exactly where the 4V framework comes in.
Four contexts for leading transformation
The 4V framework identifies four permanent contexts in which digital transformation leadership work needs to happen, at every level throughout the organisation.
- Vigilant leadership is about staying alert to what is changing – and helping the organisation make sense of what these changes could mean
- Voyager leadership is about turning possibilities into learning by exploring and experimenting
- Visionary leadership is about creating direction and connecting what is being learned to a shared ambition
- Vested leadership is about turning ambition into sustained value and embedding what works into the organisation
The 4Vs aren’t stages in a transformation programme or project. And they aren’t four fixed types of person. They are four complementary areas of leadership work, each with different things that need to get done, different ways of working, and different qualities that help people do the work well.
And you can’t cherry-pick between the 4Vs. Successful transformation needs all four. Exploration needs exploitation. Thinking needs acting. And vice versa. What is learned in one part of the organisation also needs to connect with what is happening elsewhere.
But recognising these four contexts is just the starting point.
Putting digital leadership into practice
Stijn may be a highly regarded academic, but the 4V framework is firmly rooted in everyday organisational reality.
Over more than a decade, Stijn and his colleagues have continually applied and tested their academic thinking in real organisations. What they learn through practice feeds back into their research, helping them refine the framework and making it increasingly useful in practice. As one of his team’s partners in the business world said: “You haven’t created an approach for businesses, you’ve created an approach with them.”
So the book doesn’t just explain the 4Vs. It helps people understand what needs to get done in each area, what doing that work well looks like, and how to experiment with approaches that fit their own situation.
And it deliberately avoids prescribing universal best practices. Instead, it gives people a shared language and structure for experimenting, learning from what happens and discovering what works in their organisation.
Stijn says: “Understanding digital leadership is useful. But the real test is whether you can put it into practice, learn from what happens and keep getting better at it.”
Leadership at every level
Putting digital leadership into practice across an organisation also changes who’s responsible for leading.
If transformation leadership needs to happen at every level of an organisation, it can’t belong only to the CEO, CIO, transformation team or people with “digital” in their job title.
Instead, the framework of the 4Vs provides a lens through which people throughout the organisation can think and act. They can recognise the kind of leadership work a situation calls for – and feel empowered to do it.
Making the 4Vs work together
There is one more challenge. And it’s a critical one for making your digital transformation work. Having all four kinds of leadership activity in the organisation isn’t enough. They need to work together.
This is why the book also introduces an operating model for connecting them. It helps people working across the 4Vs share what they’re learning, experiment with new practices and make that learning useful across the organisation.
Connecting this activity matters because the tensions don’t disappear. Exploration and exploitation still compete for attention and resources. Thinking and acting move at different speeds. Autonomy can clash with the need for cohesion.
The aim isn’t to make these tensions disappear. It’s to keep working with them and learning from them.
This is how digital leadership becomes an ongoing practice rather than a one-off intervention. Which brings us back to AI…
The real digital leadership practice test
Having an AI strategy matters. So do experiments, adoption and investment in technology. But none of them, in and of themselves, tell you whether your organisation is fundamentally becoming more agile.
The bigger test is whether you can keep identifying what technological change could mean for your organisation, explore the possibilities, decide where to commit, turn what works into value and learn from the experience.
AI didn’t create the need for this kind of digital transformation leadership. But its scale, pace and unpredictability have made it more important than ever.
And this is the real digital leadership practice test: whether people throughout your organisation can keep learning, adapting and turning technological change into value.
The Digital Leadership Practice Test provides a proven practical framework to help them succeed.
Put your digital leadership to the test