We all know the line usually (and wrongly) pinned on Einstein that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. But here’s the thing few people in business truly understand when it comes to the products and services they deliver: “The enemy of delivering quality is doing different things yet expecting the same result.”
Improvement requires change; quality requires consistency. The art of leadership is knowing when to do which and building the muscle to do both on purpose.
Some have identified this current period in business as the Great Flattening, where AI puts vast reservoirs of knowledge at everyone’s fingertips in just milliseconds, making many middle managers and other knowledge workers obsolete. Gartner found that through 2026, 20% of the organizations they surveyed will use AI to flatten their organizational structure, eliminating over half of their current middle management positions. I expect this to only grow—and accelerate—in the coming years.
The upshot is this: if you’re a middle manager, you may already be on your organization’s endangered species list. The knowledge that used to differentiate you from everyone else will soon be table stakes. If your edge is “I know more,” prepare to be leveled.
The new differentiator is whether you can turn your knowledge into utility—the ability to do things that need to be done. It’s through utility that you create value by transforming the what into the how and why of systems, and execution that produce quality on demand, without drama. Value will be created in the new economy not by knowing the answer, but by knowing the question. Utility is the ability to execute, to know the problem, to have the question.
That distinction came home to me while coaching a team, a customer complaint led to a project to find the root cause. As the team peeled back the potential causes a pattern emerged. Each operator altered the equipment to run “according to their training,” it became clear that we all used the same machine and materials but used different methods. Each person followed the knowledge they received from different trainers.
Make no mistake: Everyone believed what they were doing was correct. Knowledge was scarce and highly specialized in the hands of a variety of experts and trainers. “We were doing different things but expecting the same result”. It is a cautionary tale; you can delight once, but a system will deliver every time.
As I tell clients, you can’t sustain what you can’t explain. If you don’t know why a win happened, you can’t own it next time—let alone extend it across a network of sites, lines, or teams.
The elephant in every boardroom
Now add AI, that great big elephant in every boardroom. For a century, firms built moats around knowledge, their “Intellectual Property,” the experts in the middle who “Had the answers.” That layer, today mostly comprised of middle managers, is being thinned from the herd. Organizations that understand that AI will become the ultimate keeper of organizational knowledge, a resource for learning and standardizing on best practices, will be the winners.
In the Great Flattening, the premium shifts to utility and the hard, unglamorous capacity to execute with consistency. Front‑line leaders become pivotal; they’re the translators who turn “standards” into “how to adapt to this situation” through knowing how to ask the right questions, to read the situation, and to apply standardized knowledge. My complaint team failed because of variation in knowledge, the risk shifts in the new reality to successfully applying that knowledge, to recognizing deviations and asking why?
This is not semantics. Value is what the customer actually receives. Utility is your organization’s ability to create and deliver that value on demand—on time, in spec, every time.
If that sounds rigid, remember that standards are how you earn the right to improve. Once you can do “Tuesday” on command, then you can experiment with a better Wednesday—because you’ll know what changed. That’s where standards shine they force questions that create clarity, reveal causes, and keep adjustments anchored in the work, not in a PowerPoint. The aim isn’t to freeze the world; it’s to stabilize what works and then extend it—across shifts, across sites, across partners—until your best performance becomes your normal performance and your new baseline for the next step up. You move from miracles to method.
Which brings us back to the twin aphorisms that began this piece. Einstein’s misattributed “insanity” quote warns against rituals that produce nothing new. My corollary warns against novelty that produces nothing reliable. In the Great Flattening, both traps are career‑ending. If you do the same thing and expect difference, you’re dreaming. If you do different things and expect sameness, you’re gambling with your reputation.
So, by all means, keep learning and experimenting. There’s value in discovery. But don’t mistake experiments and opinions for standards. Your customers don’t come back for surprises; they come back for promises kept. In a world where AI collapses the cost of knowledge, the scarce resource is the ability to execute—to make the same promise and keep it again and again. Utility creates value. Utility scales. Utility survives the Great Flattening.
And one last perspective worth taking to work tomorrow morning: if you want it to be there next week, capture the root cause of your success to establish the knowledge AI may hold for your organization, because you can’t sustain what you can’t explain.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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