TLDR: Brooks is right that volition is the new edge in the AI age. He’s wrong that it’s a personal trait. It’s a leadership condition, which means it’s your job.
Remember when AI was going to give us all a shorter workweek and a longer lunch? Funny how that turned out.
Then he makes the point the whole piece turns on. “When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable.” When the machine can do the thinking, the scarce human thing is the willingness to wrestle with a hard problem instead of handing it off. The drive to stay in the fight when it would be easier to let the bot finish it for you.
David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic, walks through the research and lands on the opposite result. When people adopt AI, their work gets more intense, not less. They take on more. They multitask harder. They squeeze work into the gaps that used to be rest. The tool that promised to lighten the load mostly raised the ceiling on howmuch we are expected to carry.
He’s right. And if you have read anything I have written, you already know this rhymes with something I care about. My book is called Effective. Efficient. Engaged. Measuring What AI Can’t. Brooks is describing the exact thing I have been trying to measure.
So this is the rare post where I open by agreeing. Then I get off the train.
Where I Get Off
Brooks treats volition as something close to a personality trait. Some people have a high need for cognition, he says. They love hard thinking the way some people love long runs. He sorts the workforce into types. The Productive Passengers who let AI think for them. The Mental Marathoners who use it to get sharper. And he warns this could split society into two groups that barely resemble each other.
I understand why he frames it that way. But I have watched the same person show up as a Passenger one week and a Marathoner the next. Same brain. Same job. The variable that moved was not their DNA. It was how they were led.
In my book I describe a moment I have never forgotten. A VP I worked for came into a room to share the quarter’s objectives. She was upbeat. The list was clear. And as she read it, I watched the energy leave the room the way pressure drops before a storm. Nobody argued. Nobody pushed back. They just quietly checked out. Because what she handed us was a task list, not a problem to solve. We had been assigned to deliver. We had not been invited to care.
That is not a need-for-cognition problem. That is what happens when passion gets processed. The volition was in the room. The leadership squeezed it out.
Volition Already Has a Name
At the team level, volition is the third dial of the 3E Framework. We call it Engagement. And the most useful thing I can tell you about Engagement is that it is not a trait you screen for in interviews. It is a condition you create.
People bring their full volition to work that meets three conditions. They have real ownership over how it gets done. They are solving a problem that actually stretches them. And their judgment changes the outcome. Strip those away, hand someone a fully solved roadmap, and you will get compliance. You will not get volition. Not because they lack it. Because you built a room that has no use for it.
Brooks, to his credit, half admits this himself near the end. Willpower, he writes, is sensitive to context, and institutions can build it back up. That sentence is the whole ballgame. If volition were fixed, context could not move it.
And the data is blunt about how much context moves it. Gallup’s research across more than 183,000 teams found the manager accounts for about 70% of the variance in team engagement. Read that again. If volition were something people are simply born with, the person in charge would not swing it by seventy points. The manager is not a bystander to a team’s volition. The manager is the weather.
The Leadership Version Nobody Talks About
Brooks gives individuals good advice. Ask the bot for hints, not answers. Start with a blank page before you reach for the prompt. Rotate AI work with un-aided work so the muscle stays alive. All of it is useful. Keep it.
But there is a leadership version of every one of those, and almost nobody talks about it. Stop handing your team answers. Hand them problems. Stop reading the roadmap like a grocery list and start framing the outcome you need, then leave room for them to work out the how. Reward the person who surfaces a better path, even when it dents your plan. Every one of those moves protects volition instead of processing it.
The leader who does this is not being soft. They are doing the one thing AI cannot do for them. AI can generate the plan. It cannot make a human being care about it. That part is still yours.
Coach’s Challenge
Pick one piece of work your team is carrying right now, and ask an honest question about it.
If you lead the team: Did you hand them a mission or a task list? If it was a task list, take one item back to the drawing board and reframe it as a problem they own. Then watch whether the energy in the next conversation goes up or down. That movement is your real engagement metric.
If you are on the team: Where have you slipped into Passenger mode, letting the bot or the boss decide so you do not have to? Pick one thing this week you choose to wrestle with on purpose. Volition is a muscle. Use it before you lose it.
If you coach or support leaders: Find the room where the energy left. Help the leader see that the silence they read as agreement was resignation. That is usually the most valuable conversation you will have all month.
Brooks is right that the AI age will reward volition. He just left out who is on the hook for building it. When intelligence is cheap, the human work is wanting the right things and caring enough to chase them. You cannot outsource that to a model. You also cannot leave it to chance and hope your people were born with it.
Volition is not a trait. It is a condition. And the condition is yours to set.
We all win together!
Coach Dan
P.S. This is the idea the whole book is built on.
