Earlier this year, I introduced what I call the “Three Horizons of AI Maturity.” I was looking for a way to explain how I see a company maturing with its use of AI. I used McKinsey’s Three Horizons model, introduced by Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley, and David White in The Alchemy of Growth (1999), as a starting point because it was originally a way to think about how companies should balance attention to their core business, emerging opportunities, and future growth possibilities, working across all three at once.

The three horizons of AI maturity are individual capability, team and process integration, and organizational intelligence. At first, they can sound like progressive degrees of the same problem, but they’re actually not. Each horizon is a fundamentally different kind of problem, and the move from one to the next requires a fundamentally different kind of work.

Horizon 1 solves a skills problem. Horizon 2 solves a structure problem. Horizon 3 solves a belief problem. It's the third horizon that I want to focus on here, and I want to start with this question: can leadership see what the organization could become, and are they willing to change how they run the business to get there?

Beyond Skill and Structure

What I mean when I talk about belief is less about belief in what AI can do and more about belief in what an organization can become. Furthermore, as people become more capable and as the organization starts to learn, can leadership recognize possibilities that weren't apparent before? Are they willing to reconsider assumptions about how the business should work? Are they open to leading differently?

Imagine an industrial company using AI to help estimators find information from previous projects. It's not a bad use of AI, and it could be useful on its own, since someone would spend less time looking through files and more time applying their experience to the job at hand.

But I think there's an even more interesting possibility inside that use case. What if that same industrial company could consistently use what it learned on one project to improve how it scopes, prices, and plans the next one, even when a different team or location is doing the work?

It would require rethinking parts of the workflow, but the company would be getting better at using its accumulated experience. (As opposed to, say, the experience of one person or one team.) The company of tomorrow would benefit from what the company of today learned.

That requires more than a search tool. Someone has to capture the lessons, verify the information, and make sure it reaches the people who need it. Teams have to be willing to incorporate what another team learned. Leaders have to make that work part of how the business operates, rather than something people do if they have time left over.

What Belief Requires

This is where belief becomes consequential. The structure problem is figuring out how to make that knowledge available and useful. The belief problem is whether leadership can see the company becoming something more than a collection of experienced people and teams. Can it become an organization that learns across projects and locations, and consistently puts that learning to work? And if leaders believe that is possible, are they willing to change how they run the business to make it happen?

Leaders have to be open to the possibility that they may need to change what gets measured, or who owns a process, or how their most experienced people spend their time. The executive team doesn't have to do all of the work, but they do have to stay involved in what's happening and get obstacles out of the way so that the organization can act on what it learns.

However, believing the company can become something different doesn’t mean believing every idea will work. It means being willing to investigate the possibility and let the evidence influence what you do next.

You don’t have to know exactly what your company will become before you begin. But you do have to believe something about what it could become.