About this episode

Todd Henry discusses the impact of AI on creative work and the importance of agency and vision in leadership.

AI is now embedded in the daily workflow of nearly every creative team, and with it has come a quiet crisis. The pressure from the top is for speed and scale, but the question your most talented people are silently asking is far more personal: Does my judgment still matter here? When a creative pro starts to feel like a prompt operator instead of a creator, you rarely get a dramatic exit. You get safe work, quiet disengagement, and tigers who stop hunting. In this episode, Todd opens with the story of the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike — 148 days that shut down Hollywood — and the AI provisions the writers won in their contract. Their fight was never about banning the technology. It was about agency: who gets to decide how the work gets made. That same fight, in quieter form, is happening on your team right now. In this episode Speed is not the same as progress. AI removes friction, but friction is where thinking happens. Leaders must protect the difference between faster output and better work — and decide explicitly where recovered time goes, rather than letting every velocity gain become a higher quota. Brave teams need an Optimistic Vision. Drawing on the framework from…

People in this episode

Host: Todd Henry

Topics covered

• AI in creative work
• leadership
• agency
• creative teams
• optimistic vision
• Writers Guild of America strike

Keywords

• AI
• creative leadership
• Writers Guild of America
• agency
• optimistic vision
• creative teams
• brave decisions

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Brave Habit

More episodes of Herding Tigers: The Creative Leader Podcast

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• The 3 Things You Own as a Leader · May 7, 2026 · 7 min
• Optimizing: You're Probably Playing Different Games at the Same Table · April 30, 2026 · 10 min
• 5 Conversations To Have With Your Team · May 24, 2022 · 14 min
• Self-Care For Leaders · May 13, 2022 · 6 min
• Exorcise The Ghost (Rules) · May 5, 2022 · 6 min

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