How can your team navigate the fast lane of AI without losing control? Without clear guardrails, speed turns into chaos, and crashes are inevitable. To avoid the crash yet maintain pace organizations face a crucial dilemma: how to empower teams to explore AI, while ensuring their efforts remain strategically aligned and ethically responsible. The key lies in setting clear, purpose-driven practices—not as limitations, but as guard rails that empower teams to explore meaningfully and drive positive impact.
The Innovation Dilemma
We’re witnessing a paradox: the more freedom teams have to explore AI, the greater the risk of directionless efforts, diluted resources, and reputational damage. On the flip side, overly prescriptive rules can stifle innovation and crush initiative. AI’s potential lies in how it is explored—unbounded curiosity needs structure to create clarity. That structure shouldn’t feel like control; it should provide a sense of purpose.
A New Lens from NASCAR
To navigate this challenge, we look to a surprising place: the pit lanes of NASCAR. Andy Papathanassiou, NASCAR’s first pit crew coach, didn’t just train athletes—he redefined a system. His philosophy? ‘Set up the parameters… then step out of the way and let the players play.‘ The genius wasn’t in over-prescribing movement, but in defining the lane and trusting the players to innovate within it.
This mindset embodies the BCG BrightHouse ‘Angle and Spine’ approach to AI: the ‘Angle’ being the bold perspectives, and the ‘Spine’ being your unwavering principles and purpose. Andy trusts his team’s talent, and the power of his principles or parameters to take them further, faster. When organizations embrace this duality, they allow for creative freedom that is never unmoored from who they are or why they exist.
By adopting Andy Papathanassiou’s mindset and embracing this duality of creative freedom within clear boundaries, we’ve identified three practices your organization can use to shape your AI strategy.
Practice 1:
Coaches Write the Plays, Teams Run Them
“It is my job to set up the drills that will prepare for the race. But… they have to find their own routes to success.”
– Andy Papathanassiou
Much like a coach can’t step onto the field and make decisions for players during the game, organizational leadership can’t micromanage their teams’ choices. Instead, leaders succeed by defining the objectives and frameworks; then stepping out of the way to let their teams execute and carve their own paths toward achieving these goals.
Tip: Choose leaders who will create a playbook to help their team connect the dots, then give them the space to innovate. This playbook should tell a broader, cohesive story, helping each team member understand how their efforts align and collectively move the organization forward. BCG BrightHouse moved to put the right leadership into place, promoting Mike Lear to Global Lead, Creative Teams and Innovation, and in turn Mike has been working globally and with our BCG partners to set the playbook that defines our AI innovation initiatives.
Practice 2:
AI Demands Principles, Not Prescriptions
“The goal of the team is speed. The culture of the team has to be consistency.”
– Andy Papathanassiou
To achieve speed, NASCAR teams first establish a consistent culture built on clear, adaptable principles rather than rigid instructions. In an environment where AI capabilities shift almost daily, rigid rules become outdated overnight. Principles, on the other hand, adapt. Rooting AI governance in organizational purpose—the ‘Spine’—enables consistency without constriction. When teams are guided by who they are and where they uniquely create value, they don’t need to chase every trend or fear every misstep.
Tip: Rules were made to be broken (or ignored); principles are designed to be lived. To craft principles that stick, start by deeply understanding the real-world experiences of your team—their needs, workflows, and challenges. Combine these insights directly with your organizational strategy and purpose to create AI principles that resonate authentically and intuitively within your company. BCG BrightHouse was an early adopter of the need for AI principles and worked with Steve Mills, the Global Chief AI Ethics Officer at Boston Consulting Group, on several whitepapers and a SXSW panel on AI and Innovation. We believe strongly in the need for principled innovation.
Read about the Six Steps to Bridge the Responsible AI Gap
Practice 3:
Precision Under Pressure: Train for the Unexpected
“You have to figure out a way in our adult, knowledge-based world to have practice time. That’s different from game time.”
– Andy Papathanassiou
Pit crews rehearse for all possibilities. Because on race day they’re going to run into road bumps—flat tires, unpredictable weather, and mechanical malfunctions. Training for those unexpected pitfalls has to happen under low stakes conditions long before the real race. Likewise, your teams needs controlled environments to experiment with AI, so they can recognize and address issues like biased outputs or regulatory violations before they happen in real, high-stakes situations. Build muscle memory now, so when they’re tackling a problem on a real project, your crew isn’t guessing—they’re executing.
Tip: Don’t just roll out AI. Run your org through “pit crew training” scenarios where teams test AI in pressure-cooker moments: under audit, in crisis, or with tight deadlines. At BCG BrightHouse, we hosted initial follow-along sessions with fake projects to test prototyped systems and build confidence in our coworkers. When it came time for BCG’s internal Gen AI Olympics, we were ready—and our own Writing Director, Emily Overcash was one of 12 global winners out of 1100 entries. Confidence comes from practice, not just potential.
Conclusion
AI is not a straightaway—it’s a winding circuit. Instead of exhausting energy trying to predict AI’s every turn, companies can build a system that anticipates evolution with principles broad enough to absorb change yet focused enough to guide action. We don’t need to choose between speed and safety. We need clarity of lanes and courage to play within them.
Just like the pit crews who move in harmony under high pressure, today’s organizations must operate with a shared sense of direction and a trust in each other’s agency. Let your purpose be the spine, your principles be the angle, and your people be the players. Only then can we race toward the future—not recklessly, but responsibly.
For more on frameworks that combine speed with responsibility, see BCG’s recent publication: The Leader’s Guide to Transforming with AI