Hi Reader,

Yesterday I sat with the leadership team of a nonprofit. They were building their first AI governance structure.

They already have tools in place. A bit here, a bit there. And then came the question I keep hearing in different forms:

“We probably want more governance around all of this. But how do we even start? What’s the starting point for something that’s changing faster than we can keep up with?”

It’s a fair question. And the answer tends to surprise people.

You don’t start with a policy. You don’t start with a tool. And you definitely don’t start by hiring a Chief AI Officer and hoping they’ll carry the whole thing on their own.

You start by assembling a team.

Because AI governance is not a job, it’s a system. And no single person — however senior, however brilliant — builds a system alone.

Why this matters more every year

The cost of getting AI wrong keeps climbing. And the gap between organizations with a clear strategy and those improvising is widening fast.

The ones who know what they’re doing — who’ve built actual structure — land near an 80% success rate. And those without are closer to 37%.

My co-authors and I dug into the deeper pattern in a peer-reviewed chapter, The AI Governance Paradox: Ethical Awareness Without Operational Clarity (now open access, part of the forthcoming volume Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Law, and Policy).

The paradox is this. Awareness of AI’s risks keeps rising — everyone knows the stakes now. But operational clarity barely moves. Who is accountable. Who provides oversight. Who owns what.

We’re getting more worried and no clearer. And worry without clarity doesn’t govern anything.

So where do you start? You start by deciding who

You find those people by understanding how they're wired to contribute — their energy for impact. Skills and experience matter, of course. But energy is the part most leaders overlook. And for that, you need organimetric - a solution that makes it a useful data point for understanding people's roles in the organization and how they can contribute best to strategic initiatives - the GC Index.

The GC Index doesn't measure personality, skill, or competence. It measures the kind of impact a person is naturally driven to make. It sorts that energy into five proclivities — and when you lay them against the stages of a transformation, the fit is hard to miss.

BCG maps successful transformation across five stages: idea generation, business case, implementation planning, execution, and impact validation. Each stage asks something different from the people running it. And each one calls for a different kind of energy.

Idea Generation → the Game Changer. The person who sees what AI could make possible before anyone else does.
Business Case → the Strategist. The one who clarifies direction and pressure-tests whether the idea actually serves the organization’s goals.
Implementation Planning → still the Strategist. Turning ambition into a plan with a real shape.
Execution → the Implementer. The person whose energy converts plans into action. Milestones met, targets reached.
Impact Validation → the Polisher. The one who refines and asks whether the impact is real and sustainable, instead of declaring victory and moving on.

And you don’t have to stop at five roles for five stages. Depending on what you’re building — governance, adoption, a full transformation — you add the energies you need. If the work depends on people communicating and sharing what they know, you bring in someone more collaborative — a Play Maker, in GC Index terms. If things keep stalling in execution, you add another Implementer.

The stages tell you what each phase demands. From there, you shape the team around your actual goals.

So when you look at the people around you, the question changes.

It stops being “who’s available” or “who’s most senior.” It becomes: what does this stage need, and who is naturally wired to give it?

You may find your Game Changer is brilliant at sparking the idea and absolutely miserable once execution starts. So put them where their energy lands.

The nonprofit I spoke with didn’t need a huge budget or an extensive document. They needed to see the people they already had through a different lens.

That’s usually where it starts.

See you next week.

Daria

P.S. Curious where your own energy for impact lands — Game Changer, Strategist, Implementer, Polisher, or Play Maker? You can book your personal GC Index assessment here. It's the clearest way I know to see how you, and the people around you, create value at each stage.