You’re Only as Good as Your Last Game: Leading Through the Uncertainty of AI
A month on from the Socceroos' performance in the FIFA World Cup, one moment has stuck in my mind.
Like millions of other Australians, I pulled myself out of bed in the early hours of a freezing Saturday morning to watch the Socceroos’ heartbreaking loss to Egypt in the Round of 32. Our dream of a first-ever knockout win came to a devastating end with scores tied 1-1 after regular and extra time, and Australia falling 4-2 in penalties.
AUSTRALIA VS EGYPT PENALTY SHOOTOUT VIA FUTBOL PLUS
After the match, commentators and pundits were quick to scrutinise a pivotal coaching decision in the late stages of the match. In the 120th minute, coach Tony Popovic subbed young keeper Patrick Beach off for veteran Mat Ryan right before the shootout. Beach, who had just made one of the great Socceroos saves of the tournament to drag the game into extra time, told reporters, “I found out the same time you guys did”.
No other player was aware of the plan. Ryan said he was told to keep warm 15 minutes before the end of extra time. Popovic states, “it was always an option", leaving it unclear whether the plan was ever fully communicated, or whether the story is being reconstructed after the fact.
Four years ago, Graham Arnold made an identical call. He swapped Ryan for Andrew Redmayne as Australia qualified for the 2022 World Cup in a penalty shootout. Again, the plan was known to no one. But in this instance, Redmayne saved the decisive penalty, danced his way into folklore as "the Grey Wiggle," and Arnold became a genius.
Same decision. Same lack of communication. Same uncertainty going in. One coach's instincts get immortalised, the other's get torn apart, and the only thing that changed was the result.
I keep thinking about this because it's exactly the dynamic we’re witnessing at Interchange as we support more and more organisations with their AI transformation.
Every leader making a call on AI right now (how fast to adopt, whether to cut roles or redesign them, how much to trust its output), is making that call under immense uncertainty. No one has any experience in navigating a shift of this size. Popovic’s situation is probably enviable compared with the level of inexperience leaders are dealing with at the moment. Any group facing this level of uncertainty tends to unconsciously offload that discomfort onto an individual, rather than examining the system that produced the outcome. Idealising a leader and scapegoating one are the same defence pointed in opposite directions. Both let the group avoid a harder truth: that a decision made under real uncertainty was always going to look either brilliant or reckless, but solely dependent on the result, not how sound the thinking behind it actually was.
This is what we saw in the Socceroos, and it’s what will continue to happen in systems unable to manage anxiety effectively.
The way to shift an organisation out of defensive, blame-driven patterns is a structural solution, not a mindset shift. People need a relationship or space where someone can voice an uncomfortable thought or feeling and have it received without judgement. The structures that make this possible we call “holding environments”, and they occur on three levels:
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This has to be built by senior leadership, and it comes down to three things: give the work a bigger reason people can anchor to (purpose); build real structures and processes to support people through anxiety; and model the standard yourself by being visibly honest about your own uncertainty. A leadership team that only ever shows resolved conviction teaches everyone else to hide their doubt too.
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Alongside that, create small, trusted groups filled with the people closest to the change where the task is simply understanding and processing difficult feelings. Done well, this replaces defensiveness with a more complex, honest understanding of colleague’s situations. This level works best with a skilled facilitator, as a leader running their own group tends to unintentionally shut down the harder disclosures.
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The final layer sits between groups experiencing the same shift from different perspectives, as these are often the relationships where blame arises first. A deliberate space to reflect together can prevent a functional gap from turning sour. In practice: build this into work that's already happening; project reviews, resourcing calls, performance conversations are great opportunities to open two-way communication across groups.
The job of a leader isn't always to make the right call. It's to build a team that can hold the uncertainty of that call together, win or lose. Popovic didn't have that system in place before his shootout. Arnold, four years earlier, got lucky. The teams who get through the AI shift well won't be the ones who get lucky most often. They'll be the ones who read their wins and losses as a signal about the system.
Uncertainty isn't going away. Whether your organisation can hold it is up to you. Reach out to discuss what that looks like in practice:
