It’s been a pretty … crazy … few weeks here on the American-politics beat. I personally can’t remember the last time I refreshed my browser so frequently.

I know, I know, nobody comes to Kellogg Insight for political hot takes. But there are some leadership lessons to be found in President Biden’s historic decision not to seek reelection. This week, we’ll hear from Harry Kraemer about a big one: the importance of a succession plan.

Plus: Are we all doomed to be fooled by political deepfakes? Or do we have more agency here than we realize?

What’s your succession plan?

Leaders in all industries and organizations must take seriously how their teams could continue on in their absence, says Kraemer, a clinical professor here at Kellogg and the former CEO of Baxter International.

“You can gauge a CEO’s success by whether they have several people in the wings who could immediately take their place if, God forbid, they got hit by a truck or wanted to step down tomorrow,” he recently told Ruth Umoh in Fortune.

In Kraemer’s view, Biden fell short when it came to paving the way for his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to ultimately take the reins. It’s a common mistake. “Unfortunately, leaders get used to being at the top and everybody telling them how great they are. They start to believe they’re the only one who can drive the company forward, the only one with the right answer….”

Kraemer explains that, during his tenure at Baxter, he would frequently call out specific individuals below him who’d contributed to various projects. In addition to helping them advance in their careers, it had the benefit of helping him advance, too. After all, it’s a lot easier to get promoted into a new role when you’ve already trained others to step into your shoes.

You can read more from Kraemer about navigating the succession challenge in Fortune. (Or, for a family-business-specific take, here are tips from Matt Allen in Kellogg Insight.)

Trust your (human) instincts

They’re coming. The deepfakes, that is. From AI-generated robocolls to doctored videos and images. And they could have the power to shape elections. Just … not yet. At least not if we slow down and think critically about what we’re perceiving.

This is according to research by Kellogg’s Matt Groh. Groh and his colleagues find that we are about 74 percent accurate at distinguishing between real video clips (with sound) and fake ones. This makes humans better at detecting deepfakes than the leading algorithms.

Slowing down and leaning into our human intuition can reduce the chances of taking the bait on a deepfake, Groh explains.

In a video from the AI software Sora, a short clip generated from the phrase “woman walking down the street of Tokyo” looks startlingly real, until a moment about 15 seconds into the video where the woman’s legs do an odd (and physiologically impossible) gliding swivel as she strides. That, Groh explains, is an example of how an AI tool that arranges pixels based on rules of pattern detection will ignore the limits of reality. Knowing this makes these blips easier to spot.

“We know rules about how a human probably should behave, whether it’s socially or physiologically or whatever else, but we also know that the model doesn’t necessarily know those rules—it just knows the patterns of those rules,” Groh says. “When that funny business emerges, that’s where being a human with common sense actually comes in handy.”

One takeaway, then, is that simple verbal or textual content—what you say—may actually be less instructive for spotting deepfakes than the nonverbal and visual cues around that messaging.

For more advice on spotting deepfakes in the wild, read Kellogg Insight.

(Do you care about the American healthcare system? Do you want to learn more about how it got this way—and how it can be improved? Please check out our fabulous new podcast miniseries, Insight Unpacked: American Healthcare and the Web of Misaligned Incentives.)

Jessica Love, editor in chief
Kellogg Insight