It is commonly assumed that human qualities in the AI era come down to warmth: the kind word, the steady smile, the empathy a machine supposedly cannot imitate. It is a flattering idea, and it misses the point. In 1716 the French diplomat François de Callières published a treatise on the qualities of the ideal negotiator. What he treated as essential was the confidence an envoy inspires, and he warned that trickery destroys it.
Software now drafts, summarises and translates within seconds. For executive leadership, the question is no longer who can produce the words, but who answers for them.
This article sets out what the diplomatic tradition has always asked of a person who speaks for others, what research on trust and automation shows, and four moments an executive cannot hand to a machine. It is written from the standpoint of ICPA, the International Protocol Academy of Japan, founded by Cecilia Mirei Shiraha to teach international protocol to executives and diplomatic professionals.
Human Qualities Are Not Softness: What the Diplomatic Tradition Has Always Required
Human qualities, in the diplomatic tradition, are qualities of conduct. They are tested under pressure, and they are measured by what others can rely upon.
Callières’s treatise sets out the qualifications, duties and conduct of the ideal negotiator, and it treats the confidence of the counterpart as the envoy’s working capital. Deceit spends it.
Two centuries later, the British diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson distilled the same inheritance in Diplomacy (1939). His ideal diplomatist is defined by seven qualities: truth, accuracy, calm, patience, good temper, modesty and loyalty. Intelligence, knowledge and industry, among other gifts, he set aside as presupposed, and he named character instead.
That choice matters in the AI era. Knowledge and industry are precisely what software now offers on demand. What distinguishes a person is what Nicolson chose to name: whether you tell the truth, whether you remain exact when exactness is inconvenient, whether you stay calm and modest when others do not.
These qualities are old. The case for them today rests on evidence.
What the Evidence Says About Trust, Judgement and Automation in the AI Era
Research on automation, labour markets and trust points one way: as routine work is automated, coordination and trustworthiness carry more of the value.
The economist David Autor argued in 2015 that automation replaces tasks which can be written out as explicit rules, but struggles with those that depend on tacit knowledge, the limit that Michael Polanyi expressed in the observation that we know more than we can tell. Autor’s essay predates today’s generative systems, and machine capability will keep moving. The argument here does not depend on where that line falls. It rests on accountability, not on capability.
On the labour market, David Deming found that between 1980 and 2012 jobs demanding a high degree of social interaction grew by nearly twelve percentage points as a share of the US labour force, while mathematics-intensive jobs with little social content shrank by 3.3 points. His explanation is practical: social skills lower the cost of coordinating with other people.
On trust itself, Mayer, Davis and Schoorman (1995) described trustworthiness as three components: ability, benevolence and integrity. Trust, in their model, is the willingness to be vulnerable to another party whose actions you cannot monitor or control. A tool may contribute to ability. Benevolence and integrity are perceptions of a person’s intentions and principles. The counterpart across the table is extending trust to you, not to your software.
Employers report a similar pattern. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, drawing on more than 1,000 employers, ranks analytical thinking first among core skills, followed by resilience, flexibility and agility, and then leadership and social influence. Leadership and social influence shows the largest rise in importance since the 2023 edition.
These findings describe whole labour markets. An executive meets them one moment at a time.
Four Moments Executive Leadership Cannot Delegate
Delegation ends where accountability begins, and four moments show exactly where.
1. The rule and its exception. Article 16 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) ranks heads of mission within their class by the date and time they take up their functions, a rule simple enough for a spreadsheet to apply. The same article leaves the precedence of the Holy See’s representative to the practice accepted by the receiving State. The rule can be automated. Knowing which practice a host has accepted, and honouring it gracefully, is a judgement someone must own.
2. The pause. Edward T. Hall’s Beyond Culture (1976) placed Japan at the high-context end of the spectrum, where much of the meaning sits in the situation rather than in the words. A translation can carry words faithfully. Whoever sits at the table in your organisation’s name must decide what a silence means and what reply it deserves.
3. The message sent in your name. A drafting tool may supply the sentences. The signature supplies the commitment. In the terms of Mayer and his colleagues, the recipient is making themselves vulnerable to the signatory, not to the tool, and the signatory must be able to stand behind every line.
4. The hour when the plan fails. Nicolson placed calm, patience and good temper among his seven qualities. A collapsed negotiation, a public error, a guest who has been offended: none of these can wait for a better prompt. It is the leader, not the system, who must remain steady while others look on.
Each moment begins with a rule, a script or a draft, and ends with a person who is answerable. That pairing of rule and responsibility is the substance of protocol.
Protocol Thinking: Where Accountability Stays Human
Protocol exists to secure fairness and consistency between states and institutions, and someone must answer for applying it alike to all.
The distinction from etiquette is worth stating precisely.
| Etiquette | Protocol | |
|---|---|---|
| Operates between | Individuals | States and institutions |
| Varies with culture | Yes | Seeks consistency across all parties |
| Core purpose | Conduct appropriate to a given culture | Fairness and consistency |
The Regulation adopted by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the first international instrument to codify any aspect of diplomatic law. It simplified the complex rules on the classes of heads of mission and set precedence among them by date of arrival at post: a single criterion, applied to every envoy alike. A criterion is worth only as much as the consistency with which it is applied, and applying it is an act someone answers for.
Joseph Weizenbaum reached a related conclusion from the opposite direction. The creator of the ELIZA program was startled by how quickly and how deeply people became emotionally involved with it. In Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) he argued that whether a machine can perform a task does not settle whether it should be given that task, because defining tasks and their criteria is an act of human values. His point was ethical, not technical.
Japan has its own long record of codifying conduct. Ogasawara Nagahide set down the first comprehensive text on etiquette, the Sangi Itto, around 1380, and the Ogasawara-ryū still treats conduct as a discipline practised daily: sitting, standing, walking, bowing. In 1871 the Iwakura Mission set out for the United States and Europe to prepare for treaty revision and to study the institutions and cultures of other states. Japan came to the international table with a codified tradition of its own, and sent its leaders to study the others.
Protocol thinking can be put as three questions asked before any act in an organisation’s name. Whom does it serve? What precedent does it set? Who answers for it? ICPA teaches protocol not as a table of rules but as a discipline of self-formation, and presents the Japanese tradition as a lineage in its own right, standing beside the European one.
Three points are worth carrying out of the room.
In Summary
- Human qualities are conduct, not softness. From Callières in 1716 to Nicolson in 1939, the diplomatic tradition has asked for truth, calm, modesty and reliability, with knowledge and industry presupposed.
- Trust and coordination gain value as routine work is automated. The research of Autor, Deming, and Mayer and his colleagues, and the World Economic Forum’s 2025 survey of employers, point the same way. Machine capability will keep changing; accountability will not.
- Protocol is where accountability becomes visible. A machine can recite a rule. Fairness and consistency require a person who answers for applying it.
From today, before anything leaves your hands in your organisation’s name, ask whether you would stand behind every line in the presence of the person who receives it.
Continue at ICPA
ICPA prepares executives who are not merely correct but trusted: people who can answer for what they say, decide and sign.
- Global Business Protocol (The Global Authority): the foundation of international protocol for those who lead across borders. Explore the programme
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Related Reading
- What Is International Protocol?
- A Gentleman Is Made, Not Born
- Beyond Translation: The Human Protocols AI Can Never Replace
Sources
- Autor, D. H. (2015). Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), 3–30. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.29.3.3
- Callières, F. de (1716). De la manière de négocier avec les souverains. Paris: Michel Brunet. English edition: The Art of Negotiating with Sovereign Princes. London, 1716. Text: Project Gutenberg, On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68987 ; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “François de Callières”. https://www.britannica.com/print/article/89900
- Deming, D. J. (2017). The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132(4), 1593–1640. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx022
- Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond Culture. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
- Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709–734. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1995.9508080335
- National Diet Library, Japan. Iwakura Mission. Modern Japan in Archives. https://www.ndl.go.jp/modern/e/cha1/description07.html
- Nicolson, H. (1939). Diplomacy. London (3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 1963).
- Ogasawara-ryū. History. https://ogasawara-ryu.gr.jp/english/about.html ; Koryu.com, “Bowing: Ojirei”. https://koryu.com/?p=649
- Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
- United Nations (1961). Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, Article 16; and UN Audiovisual Library of International Law, introductory note on the Convention and the 1815 Regulation. https://legal.un.org/avl/ha/vcdr/vcdr.html
- Weizenbaum, J. (1966). ELIZA: A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine. Communications of the ACM, 9(1), 36–45.
- Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
- World Economic Forum (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025. Geneva, 7 January 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/3-skills-outlook/
