AI can generate strategy decks. It cannot create organisational coherence.
One of the things I’ve come to dread is sitting on a steering committee and watching a project go AMBER, sometimes RED, and knowing I can’t ask the question that actually matters.
The programme manager or project manager gives the update. The status is AMBER. As a committee member who isn’t in the programme day to day, I can’t ask, “What’s the smallest next step that would move this from AMBER to GREEN?” because that’s not a question the report is built to answer. The answer to that question lives with a development team somewhere, and the person presenting to the committee doesn’t have it either, not in the room. They’ll go back, check with the team, and come back to the committee, usually at the next monthly meeting, with more information.
It’s a show. I don’t mean that unkindly, everyone in the room is doing exactly what the format asks of them. But the format itself is built for visibility, not for progress. It exists so that senior leadership is aware something is happening, and so that some form of governance can say it’s watching. It was never built to surface the bottleneck.
I see the same instinct well beyond steering committees. When governance feels weak, the instinct is to add more governance, another sign-off, another layer of review. When accountability is unclear, the instinct is to add more reporting, more dashboards, more visibility, as if seeing a problem more clearly were the same as fixing it. Usually this comes from smart, well-intentioned people reaching for the lever that’s actually within their control, because they can’t always fix the trust deficit or the unclear ownership three layers down, but they can build a dashboard.
I’ve sat in that room at ANZ, at Inland Revenue, at Stats NZ, and going back further, at ABN AMRO too. Different organisations, different programmes, same shape. When you’re invited as a specialist or a senior leader but you’re not in the programme itself, you are, by design, removed from the day to day. The report is the only window you get, and the report operates at a macro level because that’s the altitude the committee operates at.
The clearest version of this for me was when Stats NZ put me forward as an external steering committee member for the Department of Corrections, on a programme migrating their infrastructure to the cloud. My role was to provide independent advice. And what I found was that the questions the committee actually spent time on were almost always about cost, where the budget sat, what the forecast was, rather than about the next concrete step that would unstick the work. Whenever the conversation drifted toward the nitty-gritty, what’s actually blocking this, the chairperson would, gently but consistently, pull us back to the governance agenda. Cost, status, risk register. Not “what do we do on Monday.”
And to be fair to everyone involved, some of that is the nature of the work. Legacy systems, especially in government, need a lot of fine tuning and conversion effort before something genuinely moves from RED to AMBER to GREEN. That’s real. But the steering committee, as a format, has almost no line of sight into that fine tuning. It sees a colour and a sentence, once a month.
I see the same pattern across programme management more broadly, on high-value programmes run under a formal methodology, a programme board, a risk register, stage gates, sign-off criteria at every milestone. I’ve wondered more than once whether the methodology itself is built the wrong way round. It exists to provide assurance: a defensible record that decisions were made properly, risks were logged and treated, money was spent against an approved budget. Removing the actual roadblock in front of the people doing the work was never really part of the design. The methodology can tell you, accurately, that a stage gate was passed on schedule. It has very little to say about what it took to get there, or what’s quietly still broken underneath the tick.
None of this is a criticism of the programme managers running these things. Most are doing exactly what the methodology asks of them, properly, under real pressure. The bigger comment is about what the methodology itself was built to optimise for: assurance and audit trail on one side, delivery speed and blocker removal on the other. They aren’t the same job, and most high-value programmes are structured to do the first one well, because that’s the one funders, auditors, and boards actually ask to see evidence of.
Here’s the part that I think matters most, and it’s the part that’s different from Agile.
What’s actually happening on the ground moves faster than what the steering committee sees. The report is a snapshot, taken at a point in time, and by the time it’s presented, the ground has often already moved, the team has hit a different blocker, solved a different problem, found a workaround for a third thing nobody reported on. The feedback loop back to the committee is the next steering committee. A month, sometimes longer.
In Agile, the whole design is to shorten that loop, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews every two weeks, the team surfaces blockers in near real time. Steering committees don’t work that way, and structurally can’t, because the people on them have their own jobs, their own functions, and following up between meetings isn’t something most of them have the bandwidth or the mandate to do. The exception is when a committee member has genuine skin in the game, when the outcome affects them directly enough that they chase progress between meetings rather than waiting for the next snapshot. In my experience that’s rare. It’s the exception, not the rule.
So you end up with two timelines running in parallel. The real one, on the ground, fast, messy, full of small decisions nobody upstream sees. And the reported one, monthly, macro, AMBER-to-GREEN, cost-and-risk, several steps removed from whatever actually moved the needle that month.
Now bring AI into this picture.
AI is very good at producing the second timeline. Feed it the underlying data, the status updates, the risk register entries, and it will generate a steering committee pack that reads better than most humans could write under time pressure. Clean summaries. Confident language. A narrative that ties the quarter together. The report gets faster to produce and more polished to read.
What AI cannot do is shorten the first timeline’s distance from the second. It doesn’t put the committee any closer to the ground. If anything, a more polished, more confidently-worded AMBER status is easier to nod through than a rough one, because it reads like someone has already thought it through. The committee spends the same amount of time on cost and risk register, the chairperson still pulls the conversation back when someone asks the awkward question, and now the summary in front of everyone sounds more finished than the situation actually is.
This is the version of organisational theatre that worries me most with AI. Not that it’s used to deceive anyone, nobody sits down and decides to make AMBER sound like GREEN. It’s that AI closes the gap in how things read while leaving completely untouched the gap in how things are. The report and the reality were always two different things. AI just makes the report a much better-written version of the wrong altitude.
I wrote in the first piece about situations where three different parties end up steering the same change, the team, the leadership that announced it, and an external mandate sitting above both. The steering committee is often where those three voices are supposed to meet. If AI is producing the pack that frames that meeting, and the pack reads more confidently than the underlying programme deserves, the committee’s already limited line of sight gets shorter still, dressed up to look longer.
I don’t have a tidy fix for this. The steering committee format exists for a reason, visibility matters, governance matters, and most of the people in that room are doing their jobs properly. But if AI is going to sit inside that format, generating the packs, summarising the updates, someone needs to keep asking the question the format was never built to answer. What’s the smallest next step. Who’s blocked, on what, right now. Not at the next meeting. Now.
I asked that question more than once, in more than one of those rooms. Mostly I got told we’d come back to it.