You think it would be easy. All of that energy and enthusiasm from the AI experience or Summit creates a lift in people that surely will sustain. Yet despite how vivid our dreams and designs for the future are, we can find that sustaining the momentum we need to realize that future to be quite elusive. Quite often, organizations see the Summit as the pinnacle of the change process while leaving out the important step of building the “AI muscle” in their leaders and others strong enough to hold this perspective needed to sustain energy for positive change.

This AI “muscle” strength takes time to build because unless we practice something new at least 3,000 times we do not get to mastery - the point at which we embody new thinking and action. We need a change of mindset (our ways of knowing), body “set” (our ways of behavior and action) and heart “set” (our spirit of connection) to fully master and embrace something new. After the AI summit, where dreams and designs are vibrant and energizing, we rejoin our colleagues and resume activity in the existing system or culture that created what we wanted to change. Some designs lose momentum as people come back into a system that embodies something quite different than what was experienced during the Summit. The loss of ground can feel uncertain, especially when reality hits that to implement our boldest designs will truly disturb the status quo, present risk, or may require us to fundamentally shift our current way of knowing, being and doing.

We know that “people do what they help create”. We know that as we engage in implementing designs to support the dream concerns can arise that were unforeseen in the excitement of the Summit activity. As implementation begins it seeps in that our boldest dreams and designs my provoke anxiety for they may require new behaviors, learning new disciplines, and/or leading others in unfamiliar ways. Unless AI principles and practices are built into the “AI muscle ” it’s easy to slip back into problem solving and only achieve incremental change. So how do we keep momentum while building the “muscle” for sustaining positive change thinking, behaving and action toward the future we desire?

We can encourage and propose capacity building programs and processes that help build a bridge between dreams and fear. Capacity programs that build leadership “muscle” from the positive core, gain grounding in the principles, and let go of ways of knowing, being, and doing that no longer support positive change or the road to the future we desire. More, we, as catalysts of AI and positive change, can build “AI muscle” and embody the principles into our own way of knowing, being, and doing such that we exemplify what we are helping them to do.