Leading Leaders in the Age of AI: The Top Gun Problem

After the response to my Jurassic Park / AI leadership post, I realized people seem to enjoy the collision of movie concepts with what’s happening in software engineering right now.

So I’m going to run with it for a bit.

This time: Top Gun: Maverick.

On the surface, it’s a movie about old-school pilots proving they still matter in the age of advanced technology. But I think the deeper lesson is actually about leadership during periods where the environment changes faster than organizations are comfortable adapting.

There’s constant tension in the movie around automation, compressed timelines, changing expectations, and whether old operating models still work. Sound familiar?

That honestly feels a lot like software engineering leadership right now.

A lot of organizations are still managing engineering teams like execution is the bottleneck. Increase velocity. Improve output. Measure productivity harder. But AI is changing that equation incredibly fast. When code, tests, documentation, and prototypes can suddenly be generated at near unlimited speed, the bottleneck moves somewhere else.

It moves to clarity.

It moves to validation.

It moves to leadership judgment.

That’s why the advice I keep giving leaders feels very different than it did even a year ago.

First, optimize for organizational clarity, not just developer activity. As I talked about in my previous post, learning and requirements are starting to move further upfront because unclear intent compounds much faster in AI-assisted systems.

Second, build validation systems, not just generation systems. Generating software is becoming cheap. Validating correctness, edge cases, architectural consistency, and operational risk at AI speed is becoming the harder leadership challenge.

Third, help leaders become comfortable operating without stable playbooks again. Expectations are changing monthly, weekly… sometimes daily. The leaders who seem most effective right now are not pretending to have certainty. They’re adapting publicly while keeping organizations aligned through the uncertainty.

That’s the part Top Gun: Maverick actually got right.

The future wasn’t about replacing people. It was about redefining what leadership and judgment looked like once the environment changed underneath everyone.

And if you play this out, I’m not sure the organizations that win will simply be the ones with the best AI tooling.

I think they’ll be the ones whose leaders adapt fastest while keeping teams aligned at speed.

#AI #Leadership #SoftwareEngineering #EngineeringLeadership #ArtificialIntelligence #TechnologyLeadership #TopGunMaverick #FutureOfWork