Leadership Summit 2026: Inspiring Grit and Growth Amid Unprecedented Change

July 23, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

“If you are going to cognitively offload everything and choose not to learn and improve, then you will become lazier and stupider. That's absolutely true. But if you choose to free up time, so you can do higher level thinking … then I think the opposite will be true. Laziness and stupidity is a choice.”

That is Angela Duckworth, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who made “grit” a household word. Speaking at the 2026 HBR Leadership Summit, she argued that the real question about AI is not whether it will make us dumber, but how we choose to use it. Her answer depends on a framework that combines grit, goal hierarchies, and what she calls “situational agency”—and on a surprising experiment that suggests AI can actually accelerate learning when used as a coach rather than a crutch.

What grit really is—and why it matters for AI

Duckworth opened by asking the audience to take a quick self-test drawn from her Grit Scale. Two items measure perseverance: “I am a hard worker” and “I finish whatever I begin.” Two more, reverse-scored, measure passion: “I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete” and “I often set a goal, but later choose to pursue a different one.”

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What you'll learn

1 (01:50) **The Core Framework: Grit, AI, and the Three Questions** - Duckworth sets up her talk by linking grit to excellence and AI, asking whether AI helps or hinders grit and how leaders can use it optimally.
2 (02:41) **The Grit Scale: What It Measures and Why It Matters** - Duckworth gives a live test of the grit scale, explaining that grit combines perseverance with passion, where passion means consistency over time, not intensity.
3 (04:55) **The Goal Hierarchy: Stubborn at the Top, Agile at the Bottom** - Duckworth diagrams the mind of a gritty high achiever, showing a top-level goal that gives meaning, with mid-level goals and a flexible to-do list at the bottom.
4 (06:48) **Gen Z's AI Use: Productivity Gains and Deep Ambivalence** - Duckworth shares survey data showing three out of four Gen Z young adults have used AI in the last month, primarily for productivity, but they worry it will make them lazy and stupid over the long term.
5 (08:40) **The Experiment: AI as a Coach, Not a Crutch** - Duckworth presents a controlled experiment where participants rewrote a cover letter either alone, with AI doing the work, or with no practice, finding that AI use actually improved long-term writing skill.
6 (11:43) **The Two Factors: Effort vs. Learning Environment** - Duckworth explains the paradox: AI reduces effort, which should diminish skill, but it also improves the learning environment by showing you what to do, like a great coach.
7 (13:52) **Summary: Three Takeaways for Leaders** - Duckworth concludes her talk with three key points: grit keeps you on a learning curve, young workers are ambivalent about AI, and when AI does something better, learn by example and outsource tedious tasks.

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Guests on this episode

Angela Duckworth

Show Notes

Most leaders are asking the same question about AI: Will it make their teams more productive—or slowly erode the very skills they’re trying to build? In this special episode, as part of the recent HBR Leadership Summit 2026, University of Pennsylvania’s Angela Duckworth says her long-standing research on grit—and the fact the most successful people aren’t simply persistent, they stay committed to long-term goals while adapting their tactics as the world changes—is more relevant than ever in the age of generative AI. Rather than replacing human capability, she explains, AI can become a powerful coach that accelerates learning, if people treat it as something to learn from, not simply something that does the work for them. Duckworth’s new book is Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best.