By Alan McCartney
Artificial intelligence may feel like a distinctly modern challenge, but Maj. Gen. John L. Barry, USAF (Ret.), sees another side to technological change: the technology may be new, but many of the leadership questions surrounding it are not.
How do organizations adapt when technology moves faster than established practices? How do leaders make decisions when the long-term consequences of new tools are still unclear? And how can lessons from earlier periods of disruption help people respond to changes happening now?
Those questions are part of the broader examination of leadership, history, technology, and organizational resilience in Barry’s book, Power and Peril.
Barry’s perspective comes from decades spent working across aviation, complex technology, education, and organizational leadership, including more than 30 years in the United States Air Force, where he eventually rose to the rank of Major General.
His career also gave him firsthand experience with what happens when complex technology and human decision-making intersect.
Barry served as a board member and executive director of the Columbia Space Shuttle Accident Investigation following the loss of Columbia in 2003. Earlier in his career, he served as a White House Fellow at NASA during the Challenger disaster.
Those experiences exposed him to questions that remain relevant as organizations confront rapidly developing technologies: how people evaluate risk, how information moves through an organization, how assumptions are challenged, and how leaders respond when complex systems behave in unexpected ways.
Technology has changed dramatically since then. The human element has not disappeared.
That distinction is central to the way Barry approaches subjects such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity in Power and Peril. Rather than treating emerging technology as an isolated subject, he considers it within the larger challenge of how people and organizations respond to change.
History provides part of that framework.
“Too often we treat today’s problems as if they’ve never happened before,” Barry said. “In reality, many of today’s challenges are new versions of very old problems.”
The comparison does not mean that artificial intelligence is simply a repeat of an earlier technological shift. AI introduces capabilities and questions unique to its time, just as cybersecurity presents challenges that could not have existed before interconnected digital systems became part of everyday life.
What history can offer, Barry suggests, is perspective on the human response to disruption.
New technologies repeatedly force organizations to reconsider established practices. They can alter how people work, change which skills are valuable, create unexpected vulnerabilities, and require leaders to make decisions before all of the consequences are understood.
That makes adaptability increasingly important.
Barry encountered the need for adaptability again when his career moved into education. As superintendent of Aurora Public Schools in Colorado, he led approximately 40,000 students across 60 schools and worked with the Community College of Aurora to expand concurrent enrollment, giving high school students greater opportunities to earn college credit while still in high school.
Education gave Barry a different vantage point on technological change. Preparing students for the future means preparing them for careers and tools that may evolve significantly before they enter the workforce.
He later served as president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Denver and as president and CEO of Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum, extending his experience into youth development, education, aviation history, and public engagement.
Across those different environments, Barry saw how organizations can be affected by change long before they fully understand where that change is leading.
Artificial intelligence makes that challenge particularly visible.
AI tools are already changing how people find information, analyze data, create content, automate tasks, and approach decision-making. For organizations, the challenge is not simply whether to adopt new technology, but how to determine where it is useful, where human judgment remains essential, and how people should adapt as the tools continue to develop.
Cybersecurity presents a related problem from another direction. As organizations become more dependent on technology, protecting information and maintaining reliable systems become increasingly connected to everyday operations.
In both cases, technical expertise matters, but Barry’s broader leadership perspective places equal importance on preparation, education, adaptability, and judgment.
That is where history becomes useful—not as a source of ready-made answers, but as a record of how people have responded when familiar ways of operating were disrupted.
Barry’s interest in history remains part of his work today. He served as chair of the Air Force Historical Foundation from 2024 to 2026 and serves as vice chair of the National Aviation Hall of Fame. A 1973 honor graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, he holds a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Oklahoma and continued his education throughout his career.
In Power and Peril, Barry brings together experiences from across those different stages of his career to consider how leadership responds to change. Artificial intelligence and cybersecurity are among the newest examples, but the underlying challenge is familiar.
Technology can change faster than organizations do.
That makes the ability to learn, adapt, question assumptions, and exercise sound judgment increasingly important.
The tools may be new. The need to figure out how best to use them is not.
Power and Peril is available on Amazon.
