Let's Pause Before We Build Another Babel: Calling All Remarkable Leaders

By Sarah Feely

AI isn't merely a technology challenge. It is the fall guy for a broader leadership deficit. The question is whether remarkable leaders can step forward, pairing ambition with accountability, progress with human flourishing. 

Let me briefly introduce myself. I’m Sarah Feely, President of Compassionate Leaders Circle. I spend much of my working life developing remarkable leaders–people at every level with the skills and mindsets to lead with purpose and compassion, grow the people around them, and create business value. My husband is from New York; I’m from San Francisco; and somehow, we’re here in the middle, Dallas, with our three awesome kids, ages 4, 6, and 9.

At CLC, we work with leaders and organizations who are working hard to deliver real business results without treating people as collateral damage. Compassionate leadership is not soft or sentimental. It requires the discipline of practicing candor and care, and developing strategy with a clear line of sight into the human consequences of our choices, both near- and long-term.

This matters especially now. AI presents a real, consequential risk. Pope Leo XIV, Barack Obama, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and many more have voiced aligned concerns. Accountability matters. Guardrails aren’t optional. Capability must not outpace governance. And human judgment is, well, deeply and necessarily human.

But this article is not about whether AI is good or bad. It’s a challenge to leaders to ask more consequential questions: What kind of future are we building, who is it for, and what collateral damage are we willing to accept?

An elementary-school chapel visit this week gave me a beautifully unexpected lens for considering these questions.

I’m not a frequent church-goer. Though I’d like to go more often. I don’t know the Bible well, though I wish I did. But my son goes to an Episcopal school and attends chapel four days a week, so I'm happily along for the journey.

We attended said chapel last week, where I learned about the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis. One lesson feels especially timely, and I feel compelled to share it here.

For anyone who, like me, needs a Babel refresher:

This story is in the Book of Genesis, the opening book of both the Christian Bible and the Jewish Torah. After the flood, all of humanity was unified, settling together and sharing one language. The people decided to build a city and a tower “that reached to the heavens,” both to maintain unity and to “make a name” for themselves. 

Mid-construction, God came down to see the city and tower. He saw that their unity and skill had become driven by pride. This was only the beginning of what they would try to do together—for better and for worse. So he changed their language, leaving the people unable to communicate or work together, and they abandoned their project and dispersed throughout the world. The city became known as Babel, a name associated with confusion.

When humans work cooperatively, we can build extraordinary things. To be clear, the story does not condemn ambition, innovation, or collective effort. The warning is more nuanced and especially timely. It warns against pursuing innovation without humility, moral purpose, or reverence for limits.

As the chaplain put it to a room full of elementary students: “Just because we can do something, should we?”

It brought me to two fundamental questions:

1. Are limits good–not because we lack capacity, but because ambition and capacity without judgment can become dangerous? 
2. Is the reason we do something as important as the fact that we can?

I suspect that we, in modern Western society, have developed such a reverence and blind ambition for innovation—in the name of progress—that we’ve forgotten the most important questions: Why? For what? At what cost?

AI, I’m looking at you. 

But you’re really just the “fall guy.”

Leaders, I’m looking at us: those building, buying, scaling, and deploying it.

As our technical capabilities expand faster than our collective wisdom—and the wisdom of many of our leaders—our questions about AI need to shift. Less about how much faster, how agentic, how capable, how competitive. And more time asking: What human problem are we solving? Who benefits? Who bears the cost? What are the costs? Who should be held accountable?

Compassionate, purpose-driven leadership asks leaders to hold capability and conscience in tandem. It measures achievement and growth not only by what is gained, but by whether they elevate people and planet.

Purpose is not amorphous, overly lofty, or a nice bumper sticker. Purpose-driven leadership requires discipline: continually reflecting on the human consequences of our actions, both at small and large scales. It considers the human consequences of giving or withholding honest feedback; the human consequences of lifting safety measures in the name of speed; the consequences of an untethered expansion of AI’s capacity without clarity about the intended human good it advances or the harm it may cause.

Back to Babel. The story doesn’t warn us about innovation. It certainly doesn’t warn us about unity. Shared language, technical capability, a shared vision and resolve – not inherently bad. We need these things to solve many of our most pressing problems.

That warning is what happens when their project, their Tower to the Heavens, became unmoored by pride. They lost their purpose. So focused on their capacity, they lost sight of who it was for and why.

We don’t need to reject the proverbial Tower, nor romanticize a world of horse and buggy or dial-up internet. We need remarkable leaders–those asking the tough questions. 

At Compassionate Leader’s Circle, we use the term remarkable leadership very deliberately. It’s the ongoing practice of knowing oneself, leading with candor and care, and building the capacity of those around you, all while delivering results.

We don’t need average leadership, or leadership shaped by the perfect storm of blind ambition, outsized power, and limited accountability. We don’t need an Industrial-era model that equates throughput with success and more with better.

Our challenges are now global, interconnected, and require rehumanization–a phrase I first heard from my friend and fellow leadership thinker, Hamza Khan, during CLC’s Work on Purpose Summit.

This moment requires systems-minded leaders who can hold seemingly competing necessities in tandem: ambition and accountability, innovation and human flourishing, speed with the discipline to pause. Remarkable leaders know that pausing and contemplation are not retreats from progress, but rather how progress becomes more responsible and sustainable–for financial performance, people, and planet.

Will the remarkable leaders please step forward?