The best thing a leader can do is try.

Today, I did something I never expected to do. I set up Git, GitHub, and Claude Code for the first time — and used them to publish this blog. I generated every prompt by speaking out loud — no keyboard, just my voice.

I have never installed a developer tool on my desktop. I have never written a line of code. I have spent my career in leadership, not engineering. And yet here I am.

That's the power of AI. And it's also the point.

For most of my career, I've worn something as a quiet badge of honour: I have a software engineering degree, and I struggle to write a single line of code. There's something almost liberating about that — proof, perhaps, that leadership is a discipline in its own right, not a consolation prize for engineers who drifted sideways.

But something shifted today. I've come to believe that you don't need to write code to lead an AI transformation — but you do need the penny to drop. You need to feel it, not just understand it conceptually. The leaders who are getting this right aren't the ones who've outsourced their curiosity. They're the ones who've sat down with the tools and let themselves be surprised.

The irony isn't lost on me. I still haven't written a line of code. But I feel a bit closer to it, at least.

An unlikely evolution

Let me be clear about what happened. To publish this blog, I had to:

• Install Claude Code — a command-line AI coding tool — for the first time
• Set up and use GitHub to manage and publish content
• Generate every instruction and prompt entirely through voice, not a keyboard

None of this is how I imagined I'd spend a Tuesday. All of it was new. And all of it worked.

I'm not sharing this to impress anyone. I'm sharing it because I lead AI transformation — and this experience taught me something important about what that actually requires.

You cannot lead what you haven't touched

There's a version of AI leadership that looks like this: reading reports, attending briefings, sponsoring programmes, nodding along to demos. Staying informed at a comfortable distance.

I've been guilty of that. Most senior leaders have.

You cannot credibly lead AI transformation if you haven't felt the friction, the surprise, and the possibility of it yourself.

Not because you need to become an engineer. You don't. But because:

• Friction is where the insight lives. The moment I wasn't sure if a voice prompt would work, or whether GitHub had saved correctly — that's exactly where most employees will get stuck. If I've never been in that moment, I'm guessing at the change management challenge.
• Confidence is contagious — so is avoidance. When leaders visibly engage with AI tools, it signals that curiosity is valued. When they delegate all experimentation downward, it signals something else entirely.
• The technology is more accessible than the narrative suggests. I set up Git and published this blog without writing a single line of code. If I'd only read about what Git requires, I might never have tried. Personal experience cuts through the intimidation.

What this journey is teaching me

Using voice to prompt AI, watching Claude Code interpret my instructions, seeing a blog appear in GitHub — this isn't just a novelty. It's recalibrating my mental model of what's possible, what's hard, and what the real barriers are.

The real barriers, it turns out, are rarely technical. They're about willingness to try something that feels outside your identity. For me, that meant accepting that a senior leader could — and should — sit with beginner's discomfort.

That's the same barrier our organisations face in AI adoption. And the best thing I can do as a leader is demonstrate, visibly and honestly, that I'm working through it too.

A note on the irony

The article you're reading was conceived through voice prompts, shaped with AI, and published via tools I'd never used before this month.

That's not a disclaimer. It's the whole story.

AI transformation isn't something that happens to your organisation while you watch from the boardroom. It happens when leaders — at every level — decide to pick up the tools, feel the awkwardness, and keep going anyway.

I'm still very much in that process. But I'm in it.

Written by a leader in AI transformation who is, slowly, becoming the change he's asking others to make.