# Get Outside the AI Noise Long Enough to Establish Your Own Position

Category: AI Strategy
Published: 2026-09-21
Author: Jean Dorff
Publisher: Jean Dorff Consultancy

> When AI decisions arrive faster than leadership can create shared criteria, more information does not create clarity. Leaders need enough distance to establish a position from which to judge what to pursue, defer, reject, monitor, or leave unchanged.

![Decision framework showing competing AI inputs flowing through shared criteria into overview, position, direction, and deliberate choices.](/__l5e/assets-v1/0fd24737-8bc6-4b8b-80fa-0056c058fb09/shared-decision-criteria-ai-strategy.png "From AI Noise to Shared Decision Criteria")

There is a moment I keep seeing in established professional services firms and owner-led businesses, and it usually arrives on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

Nothing dramatic happens. Three perfectly reasonable things happen instead.

One team asks you to approve an AI tool that will save them hours every week. Another team raises a legitimate risk concern about a similar tool already in use. A vendor calls and promises a competitive advantage if you commit now.

Each conversation makes sense on its own. Each has its own logic, its own evidence, its own urgency.

> There is no shared logic across them.

You are still making decisions. You said yes to one initiative two months ago and no to something comparable the week before last, and if someone asked you to explain both with one consistent set of criteria, you would struggle.

At some level, you already know that. The criteria were not written down anywhere. They existed in the room, in the moment, shaped by whoever was most prepared that day.

That is the fracture point. I would describe it this way:

> The organization has started creating AI decisions faster than leadership has created the criteria to judge them.

This is a failure of neither intelligence nor effort. The leaders I meet in this situation are experienced, capable, and fully engaged, and the AI conversation has been particularly relentless over the past eighteen months, precisely because the technology has been moving faster than any reasonable organizational response could match.

The discomfort they feel is specific. It is the discomfort of being unable to explain why a decision was right, even when it probably was.

Handling one proposal at a time stops feeling responsible and starts feeling arbitrary. The problem has moved. It is no longer the next tool or the next pitch.

> The problem is that there is no position underneath the decisions.

## This Is What Capable Leaders Actually Do Next

The business refuses to pause while you think, so you do what any capable leader does.

You keep going. You take the next meeting, answer the next question, make the next call. You ask someone internally to “look into it,” and that person comes back three days later with a twelve-slide summary that adds four new variables and resolves none of the original ones.

This is not a failure on their part. They did exactly what you asked. The problem is that the question you gave them was answerable, and the question you actually needed to resolve was not.

You postpone one decision, approve another provisionally, and tell yourself you will come back to the bigger question when there is more time.

Then you do what feels responsible. You read more articles. You listen to more podcasts.

You sit through another vendor demo because someone on your team forwarded the calendar invite and canceling felt like willful ignorance.

> This makes it worse.

Now there are more inputs and still no common frame to judge them by. So a quiet substitution takes place. You start leaning on whoever sounds most confident in the room, because confidence temporarily works as a stand-in for a decision rule.

Authority drifts toward the strongest opinion of the week. Outwardly, leadership continues to function. Internally, you feel yourself reacting when you want to be steering.

And then a thought arrives that has less to do with AI than with leadership itself:

> I need to get above this for a moment and look at the whole thing.

## Why Capable Leaders Stay Inside the Noise

Most leaders feel that thought and keep going anyway. Three assumptions hold them in place, and each one sounds sensible.

> I should be able to figure this out myself.

You are used to being the person who creates clarity for others. Needing distance can feel like a failure of leadership rather than an exercise of it. That interpretation is commonly mistaken, and I will come back to why.

> If I get a little more informed, the answer will become obvious.

So you keep reading and asking for input, waiting for the picture to settle. AI does not settle. The stream keeps moving, and every new input arrives without a frame to hold it.

> Stepping outside takes time I do not have right now.

Reacting to the next issue feels immediately productive. Stepping back feels like a delay, and in a business that is running, delay has a cost. So the urgent repeatedly defeats the important, not once but every single week, until the important stops feeling like a category that belongs to you.

A CFO of a mid-sized advisory firm said something to me recently that I have not been able to improve on: “Every time I try to get above it, something pulls me back in before I finish the thought.” That is not a failure of discipline. That is what the environment does when there is no position underneath the decisions to hold you steady.

Underneath all three assumptions sits one misdiagnosis. Leaders in this situation believe the problem is insufficient knowledge. The real problem is insufficient perspective.

The distinction matters because the two require completely different actions. Knowledge is something you acquire. Perspective is something you find by stepping back.

Acquiring more knowledge from inside the stream, more articles, more expert opinions, more vendor comparisons, leaves you exactly where you were, with a larger pile of inputs and the same absence of a frame to hold them.

I want to be honest that even the leaders who eventually step outside and establish a clear position do not always find the process tidy. The landscape keeps shifting, the framework requires updating, and the discomfort does not fully disappear.

What changes is that the discomfort is now organized. You know which parts of it deserve your attention and which parts are noise that can wait. That is a different condition from the one you started in, and it is the only realistic one the environment permits.

> They stay inside the noise trying to solve the noise with more noise.

It compounds.

Every move inside that pattern looks correct. More information feels responsible. More meetings feel thorough.

More input feels inclusive. The pattern is the trap, and it is almost impossible to see from inside it.

## A Position From Which to Judge

When a leader does step outside the stream, the work follows a simple sequence. I think of it as Overview, Position, Direction.

Overview. What is actually changing in your market and your operation? What is noise? What matters specifically to this business, with these customers, these capabilities, and these constraints?

Position. Given your objectives, customers, capabilities, risks, and resources, where does AI belong in this business? Where does it clearly belong nowhere? A position gives you standing criteria against which future pitches and proposals can be judged.

Direction. Based on that position, what do you pursue, defer, reject, monitor, or deliberately leave unchanged? That last category deserves emphasis. Leaving something unchanged on purpose is a legitimate strategic decision, and it is commonly overlooked.

What that conversation actually delivers is worth being precise about, because it is not what most leaders expect.

> It delivers organized uncertainty.

Answers go stale, because the environment keeps changing. A position from which to judge holds. The decisions stop feeling scattered.

You can see the different pressures in relation to each other instead of as separate demands landing on your desk one at a time.

With that distance comes judgment. The feeling leaders describe at this stage is specific: “I can see what matters now.”

You stop borrowing confidence from the loudest voice in the room. You recover your own basis for saying yes, no, not yet, or this matters more. Control returns.

Uncertainty remains, and now it has a structure you can work with.

## A Change in Vantage Point

I want to say something directly here, and I recognize it has a commercial dimension.

The leader who most needs this perspective has to decide to seek it. And seeking it runs straight into the first assumption: “I should be able to figure this out myself.”

I have heard versions of that sentence in almost every initial conversation I have had with a leader in this situation. It does not feel like a trap. It feels like professional self-respect, which is exactly what makes it worth examining.

I understand that. I am not dismissing it. But consider what it actually means in practice.

You already bring in outside perspectives for legal decisions, financial decisions, operational and strategic ones. AI belongs on that same list. The act of seeking that perspective says something specific:

> I am not going to let the quality of this decision depend only on the voices already inside the system.

The outside perspective has value precisely because it sits outside the competing interests, the enthusiasm, the fears, and the partial views inside your company. Every internal function brings a partial view. That is normal.

It also means the internal conversation shapes your thinking more than you notice.

You remain the one making the call. What changes is that you have created better conditions for your own judgment.

When someone reaches out after recognizing themselves in this, the first conversation is not a briefing and it is not a pitch. It is a chance to look at the whole situation with someone who has no tool to sell, no department to defend, and no internal argument to win.

We look at the business first and the technology second, which already makes it different from most conversations a leader is having about AI right now. You bring the context, constraints, and priorities. I bring distance, structure, and a view from outside the system.

The purpose is a coherent basis for your next decisions. If, by the end, you can say “I know where I stand and what deserves my attention next,” the conversation has done its job.

> That outcome is modest on purpose. Orientation, for someone who has been inside the noise for months, is the most valuable thing available.

## One Question to Sit With

Some readers will recognize every part of this, the Tuesday afternoon, the drift toward the most confident voice, the pile of inputs without a frame, and still decide to handle it alone. That is a legitimate choice, and I am not arguing against it.

You are certainly capable of thinking it through. That was never in doubt. The more useful question is whether your current environment gives you enough distance to do that thinking well.

Leadership sometimes means deciding that your own judgment needs better conditions. And if the noise itself is shaping how you think, more effort inside the noise will fail to solve it.

So I would leave you with the question I would ask across the table:

> Are you making these decisions from a position you have chosen, or is the next request, opinion, tool, or urgent claim still setting the agenda for you?

If the agenda is still being set from the outside in, the next move is not another AI decision.

> It is to establish the position from which those decisions should be made.

And if you need an outside perspective to do that, that is the conversation I offer.