The Intelligence a Crisis Cannot Automate

Eric M. Johnson is comfortable with systems. He studied information systems, worked in finance, and leads Arnold Motor Supply, an automotive distribution company with roughly 1,000 employees and 80 locations, according to his remarks at the 2025 Ignite Kingdom Conference. He likes technology enough that, while visiting Phoenix, he summoned a Waymo simply to experience an autonomous ride.

The empty driver’s seat gave him a picture of delegated control. The vehicle accelerated, braked, turned through downtown traffic, and delivered him to his hotel. Johnson had entrusted the trip to a system he could not personally steer.

That experience became more consequential when he considered a different kind of uncertainty. Less than a year before his talk, a flood had sent about 10 feet of water through Arnold Motor Supply’s flagship location, corporate office, and primary distribution point. Johnson said 22 company vehicles and millions of dollars in inventory were lost. More than 40 employees experienced damage to their homes. Every computer and file in his office was gone.

A leader can prepare for disruption, insure assets, establish recovery procedures, and assign decision rights. Then a crisis arrives with more decisions than the plan anticipated. Johnson remembers the strain as nearly continuous, “a decision every five seconds,” made while absorbing the personal losses of people whose livelihoods he felt responsible to protect.

His argument is not that technology or established business practice becomes irrelevant in such a moment. He used artificial intelligence to create an earlier version of his conference presentation and called AI “a wonderful tool.” But he also drew a boundary around what a tool can provide.

An AI interaction, in Johnson’s framing, is transactional. A leader supplies an input expecting an output. The system is useful precisely because it produces something the user wants. Johnson contrasts that exchange with what he calls divine intelligence, a form of wisdom grounded in relationship rather than extraction.

The distinction challenges a familiar executive habit. Highly driven leaders can approach every resource, including faith and other people, as something to activate when a result is needed. A crisis exposes the weakness of that posture. Trust cannot be generated on demand. A spouse, colleague, adviser, or community cannot be treated as an emergency input and expected to provide the wisdom of a mature relationship.

Johnson’s hardest moment after the flood forced this principle out of abstraction. It also changed how he understood guidance, the value of a leader, and the difference between requesting an answer and being accompanied through the decision. The full member edition examines that moment and the disciplines that help leaders build relational intelligence before the next crisis arrives.