A New Week | June 16th, 2024

A New Strategy: Raising companies and children in times of AI

Raising Children and Companies in Times of AI

On a weekly basis, I get to witness, strategize, work in and with founders, executives, solopreneurs, non-profit leaders, and deeply ambitious, caring, and conscious parents. These humans are my clients. They are people who hold a lot of responsibility, no matter the rooms they enter - the living room, the bedroom, the kids’ room, the kitchen, the meeting room, the board room, their own office.

I can relate. There’s not a single room in my house and office, as well as virtual meeting rooms with team members and clients where I am not holding the responsibility of seeing someone, witnessing someone, asking attuned questions to create clarity for someone, hold space for someone who doesn’t need advice or learning but just a place to be and also sometimes be angry, frustrated, sad, exhausted.
Or also witness someone in the way they are growing, celebrating them when they can’t or don’t know how, seeing a new version of themselves peeking through the edges of their bodies. Sometimes I am the first one to see it, and it delights me to give them the chance and space to feel it too.

Some days feel like leadership, some days feel like overwhelm, some days feel like a balancing act, some days feel like pure delight.
But one thing is never present: victim consciousness.

I never fall (or not anymore) into the trap of believing that any of this is happening TO ME, because every single piece, every human in my life, the place I now live, the people I love and invest in and and and… these were all conscious choices and choice is an active, vibrant, alive part in my body. Choice reminds me that EVERYTHING is a matter of perspective, intimacy, and consciousness in life. It reminds me that I can choose how I relate to my feelings, emotions, situations, people, and my own inner dialogue.

And that continuous relating to emotions, feelings, situations, people, and our inner dialogue is the deeply humble process of unfolding and becoming.

As leaders and parents, we hold a unique position where people look up to us, seek answers from us, and rely on us without expecting anything in return. Their personal or professional development, unfolding, and growth are our return, our success, and, in fact, our unfolding too.

And so whether we are leaders of teams, companies, families, or partnerships… growth is always relational.

Yes…growth is collective, it’s deeply nuanced, it’s so damn repetitive at times, it’s messy, it’s exhilarating, it’s non-linear, it’s deeply uncomfortable until we call it a breakthrough over night.

How we relate and are in relationship with others gives us real-time feedback on how we relate to ourselves and where we have met or have not met parts of ourselves.

Over the last few months, I have given considerable thought to how our relational dynamics are evolving in the context of AI and its everyday use.

And while I don’t have all the answers (like never :) ), something that I have arrived at is that (and maybe different to other technological evolutions because of its rapid and wide applications in sooooo many areas of our lives all at once) our responsibility is not of keeping up with it, but of choosing what we won’t outsource.

Hmmm…. let that settle for a moment. Does that resonate?

1. Teaching Discernment Over Speed

In a world optimized for efficiency, automation, rapid solution-ing, both children and adults, as well as organizations, must learn to pause.
To ask not can we do it faster with AI, but should we? What would it costs us? Or is there a hybrid?

What do we lose when we delegate our decisions to algorithms, and what do we gain when we stay in conscious authorship of our thought process, our discernment, our reflected choices based on multi-layered knowing?

For children, this means:

• Delaying gratification in a world of instant answers.
  Ask them: “What’s your
  theory?“, “How does that feel?“, “What would it mean to take a next step?“

• Teaching them how to listen — not just consume:
  Read books together and ask them about their favorite parts, let them choose a sport, or two, or three, let them ditch it, pick up an art, expose them to real life skills, let them get confused and irritated learning something and hold them through it.

• Ensuring they remain creators, not just users and consumers:
  We have a rule in our home — Physical before digital. Our kids have a very limited amount of screen time, and no access to social media or are allowed to just turn on the TV or computer on their own. And even then, we all have to have had a physical activity before sitting down. We also consume things that teach them how to do things in real-life — our eldest is currently obsessed with graffiti art and does a lot of it himself. So (as an example), his digital activity evolves around getting better at it and watching other artists, joining communities, and finding out about workshops locally. (see below some of his work from last week — proud mama moments :) )

For companies, it means:

• Valuing wisdom over immediate output:
  Automation creates speed, intentionality creates excellence. What parts of the process you are working on in your team are ripe for automation, which parts need human intentionality?

• Using AI to enhance human decision-making, not replace it:
  Are you using AI to replace yourself or to tickle the edges of your knowing?

• Investing in institutional knowing and the collective emotional intelligence, not just artificial intelligence:
  More than ever, investing in your talent on a “multidimensional knowing“ -spectrum will become more and more important. Multidimensional knowing in leadership refers to a leader's capacity to access, integrate, and act from multiple layers of intelligence simultaneously — cognitive, emotional, somatic, relational, and even intuitive or existential — rather than relying solely on linear logic or data-driven reasoning. It’s the art and ability to access and hold paradoxes, read subtle human cues, sense context beyond the obvious, and aligning decisions with values and deeper purpose. It means knowing through the body, heart, mind, relationships, and the broader system, simultaneously. I think of it as a shift in leadership priorities in times like now. So, as AI becomes more capable of replicating rational tasks, what sets leaders apart is not their ability to out-calculate machines, but their capacity to:

  • Read the room beyond words: Co-regulate a tense team, catch what’s unsaid, sense fear or resistance.

  • Hold complexity: Make decisions when data is incomplete or ambiguous.

  • Stay rooted in ethics and meaning: Anchor actions in shared humanity and future impact.

  • Access inner knowing: Trust intuition and embodied signals that point to what’s aligned or off-course.

    AI handles facts; humans hold wisdom.
    
    How would you bring this mantra alive in your team? (good question for the next company retreat btw :) )

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2. Preserving the Nervous System

AI is built for scale, speed, and patterning.
Humans are built for nuance, relationships, and depth.

When raising children:

• We must protect their attention spans, bodies, and sensory integration from digital overload.

• We must teach them to regulate in complexity — not react in chaos. AI simplifies, lays out nice structures, plans and concepts. Instagram and Co. make human complexity seem hilarious, easy, or instant (depending on the context).
  What we strip our kids is the ability to find a center inside of themselves and instead create illusions of how deeply uncomfortable AND regenerative and beautiful shared living and consensus may be. The body needs to move through discomfort to access and build safety around resilience.

When raising companies:

• The leadership nervous system must remain co-regulated. AI can quickly serve as a crutch for relational dynamics that seem tricky and challenging. We ask our psychologistGPT, and it tells us exactly what we should say, and yet the space remains tense, offensive, passively aggressive. What we need is actual practice of harmony, not plans on how to get there.

• Leaders need to be more anchored than ever — AI can predict trends, but it cannot hold presence. Period.

3. Centering the Human in the System

Both children and organizations are ecosystems.
In the AI era, we’re being asked:

What does it mean to be human at the center of technology, not a servant of it?

For families, this means rituals, embodied learning, touch, and storytelling.
For businesses, it means values-led strategy, capacity building, and nervous-system-informed leadership.

And if you ask me, both areas can benefit from each other :).

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Final thought for today:

Raising children and companies in the age of AI is a form of stewardship.
It’s not just about preparing them for a tech-driven world —
It’s about ensuring they remember their own source code.
Not the digital one — the human one.
Curiosity. Integrity. Imagination. Dignity.

All the love, all the power and happy Monday,
Franzi