Leadership is a social process that enables individuals to work together to achieve results they could never achieve working as individuals. We see leadership as an essential part to tackle any challenge an organization (including AI). Why? Our Direction – Alignment – Commitment (DAC)™ framework helps clarify how leadership works:
- Direction is agreement within your organization on overall goals.
- Alignment means coordinated work in your organization.
- Commitment is a feeling of mutual responsibility in your organization.
Strengthening these 3 elements isn’t optional — it’s a leadership imperative for thriving in complexity and uncertainty. At CCL, we have extensive experience evaluating individual, team, and organizational DAC, especially as organizations navigate complexity, uncertainty, and change.
We were curious to understand how Direction, Alignment, and Commitment affect AI integration (or AI maturity). What do organizations seek to gain by using/integrating AI (Direction)? How will organizations and teams work together to effectively leverage AI (Alignment)? And how will organizations foster the trust and psychological safety required to achieve the buy-in to integrate AI (Commitment)?
Why? As our clients integrate AI into their workflows and organizations, we wanted to see if AI maturity correlated with high levels of DAC — our hypothesis being that high DAC would be required to successfully integrate AI.
Understanding AI & DAC: Our Research Process & Findings
Our research found a strong correlation between high levels of DAC and high levels of AI maturity. Here’s how we did it.
We created a survey based on MIT’s CISR Enterprise AI Maturity model, which depicts 4 stages of organizational AI maturity:
- Discovering (Experiment & Prepare) — At this stage, organizations are curious about AI and have started to reflect on the human implications on AI. Organizations in this stage focus on educating the workforce on AI, establishing acceptable use policies, improving data accessibility, ensuring data-driven decision-making, and identifying where human input is necessary in processes.
- Adopting (Build Pilots & Capability) — At this stage, organizations recognize AI’s relevance to their strategy and are starting to experiment and integrate. This includes simplifying and automating processes, creating use cases, sharing data via APIs, leveraging a coaching and communicative management style, and using both traditional and generative AI models to enhance work.
- Transforming (Develop AI Ways of Working) — At this stage, organizations are fully aware of how AI impacts their work and are building new workflows and process for effective AI integration. This involves expanding process automation efforts, adopting a test-and-learn approach, designing for reuse, incorporating pre-trained models and exploring proprietary AI models, and investigating the use of autonomous agents.
- Differentiating (Become AI Future-Ready) — At this stage, organizations are recognized as leading the way in AI transformation and are imagining and prototyping new methods of using AI. This involves embedding AI into decision-making and processes; developing and offering AI-augmented business services; and integrating traditional, generative, agentic, and robotic AI.
We used these stages in our own survey of DAC and AI maturity, measuring both AI adoption and Direction, Alignment, and Commitment within an organization. We found that DAC was a strong and significant predictor of higher levels of AI maturity.
In other words, it’s fair to suggest that organizations need high levels of DAC to progress along their AI maturity journey.
Building Strong DAC & AI Maturity
While the research doesn’t show causation (we can’t say that increasing your organization’s DAC will automatically make AI integration easier), we can say that without high levels of Direction, Alignment, and Commitment, your chances of successfully moving up the stages of AI maturity are much lower.
So, how can you help your organization foster strong DAC, particularly as it relates to improving your organization’s AI maturity?
- Direction: Clearly communicate how AI will empower the business strategy through value creation, innovation, and impact across the organization. Seek out ways to help leaders leverage both AI and soft skills to help them thrive.
- Alignment: Ensure leaders, teams, and systems coordinate in how to leverage AI, creating shared priorities and eliminating silos. To do this, explore what method of governance would work best for your organization. For instance, you could explore a shared decision-making model where overall AI usage across your organization is governed by a cross-functional team. Or, you could have shared policies but a decentralized AI governance structure, where individual functions oversee their own AI usage but align to shared organizational policies.
- Commitment: Foster psychological safety, continuous learning, and a growth mindset to empower your organization to embrace AI-driven change. Consider how AI and culture impact each other. By helping your organization embrace a culture that prioritizes continuous learning, you can help shift your organization to one that can best embrace and leverage what AI can enable.
Embracing AI & DAC
Leveraging AI within organizations requires more than just technological adoption; it demands a robust leadership framework characterized by DAC. Our research underscores the critical role DAC plays in progressing through the stages of AI maturity, revealing that high levels of DAC are strongly correlated with advanced AI integration. Furthermore, MIT found that an organization’s financial performance generally improved as they moved through the 4 stages, which further emphasizes the value of strong Direction, Alignment, and Commitment in navigating AI transformation.
By clearly communicating AI’s value, ensuring coordinated efforts across teams, and fostering a culture of psychological safety and continuous learning, your organization can not only enhance its AI maturity but also thrive in an era of complexity and uncertainty.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Ready to help leaders at every level of your organization understand the DAC model for leadership and learn how to become more effective in setting direction, building commitment, and creating alignment? Partner with us to craft a customized learning journey for your team using our research-based modules. Available leadership topics include Boundary Spanning, Conflict Resolution, the DAC Framework for Effective Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Listening to Understand, Psychological Safety, and more.
