If you’d asked me 10 years ago to predict what my career would look like today, I’m pretty sure I would have gotten it completely wrong.

Back then, I thought I knew how careers worked. I was the quintessential corporate poster girl - working hard to climb that fabled ladder. Not afraid to move to another company when the opportunities weren’t there internally.

When I left corporate life a few years back, there was a range of reasons behind my decision. First and foremost, I wanted more time with my young son. I was also deeply burned out and knew that corporate life no longer worked for me. I wasn’t sure how successful I’d be as a self-employed consultant, nor did I have the emotional bandwidth to think about what my life would look like in five years. Even if I did, I doubt I would have conceptualised where I am.

Today, I spend my time running a content, communications and marketing agency, writing books and guides, publishing this newsletter, building digital products and occasionally designing slightly sassy coffee mugs (because work should be allowed to be fun).

There are a few different names for this sort of career, and the names seem to change week to week. At the moment I’m seeing “portfolio career” and “involuntary entrepreneur” (which makes me smile). The point is that I didn’t set out with the current destination in mind. Like many people, I adapted as the world of work changed around me.

Last week I wrote about what happened to the corporate ladder. This week I want to explore a bigger question.

If the ladder isn’t coming back, what can we build instead?

If video format is more your thing, here’s some of the content I shared on Instagram… otherwise, read on!

What career assumptions do we need to revisit?

One thing I’ve realised while researching this series is that we keep trying to solve today’s workplace problems with yesterday’s assumptions.

We ask how to create more management opportunities or improve career progression, or how to make organisations look more like they did 15 or 20 years ago.

To be frank, that’s a pointless conversation to be wasting our time on. If technology, changing business models and AI are fundamentally reshaping work, perhaps we need to ask much bigger questions about the kind of economy we’re trying to build.

Who benefits from the current system?

At the top of the list of questions is whether we've unintentionally created a system that increasingly favours people who have already finished their careers over those still trying to build theirs.

For decades, the corporate ladder was one of the primary ways people accumulated wealth. Promotions led to higher salaries, company shares and eventually retirement savings.

Many of the people who benefited from that system are now retired or approaching retirement. Their wealth sits in superannuation funds, investment portfolios and other assets that depend on companies continuing to maximise returns.

That changes incentives. When you’re building your career, you want better pay, more opportunities and greater job security. When you’ve built your wealth and left the workforce, your focus naturally moves towards protecting and growing those assets.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a secure retirement. The problem is that those incentives don’t always align with the interests of people entering or moving through the workforce today.

Reducing management layers, outsourcing work, offshoring and now AI can all improve shareholder returns while making career progression harder for employees.

I think we’ve gradually created an economic system that overwhelmingly rewards people who have already climbed the ladder, while removing many of the opportunities for those still trying to climb it.

Who gets a seat at the table?

So how do we rebalance the system?

Assuming there’s no practical way to decouple retirement savings from the share market, I think the answer starts with who gets a seat at the table.

Corporate boards exist to represent shareholders, and for good reason. Investors take risks and deserve representation. However, we often lose sight of the fact that company outcomes don’t just affect shareholders. They also shape the lives of employees, customers and the communities they operate in.

As work changes, perhaps it’s reasonable to ask whether corporate governance should evolve too. Countries such as Germany have experimented with giving employees formal representation in corporate governance through co-determination, which is a good reminder that the way we govern companies isn’t fixed in stone.

Different voices around the board table might also help rebalance our expectations of the share market itself. Investing has always been considered a higher-risk asset class. Some years deliver exceptional returns, others don’t. That’s part of the bargain investors make in exchange for the potential of higher long-term growth.

Yet somewhere along the way, we’ve started behaving as though companies have an obligation to maximise shareholder returns every quarter, regardless of the broader consequences.

When that becomes the overriding objective, employees can start looking less like people to invest in and more like costs to reduce. Perhaps a broader mix of voices at the governance level would remind us that long-term business success isn’t measured only by shareholder returns. It also depends on developing capable people, creating opportunities and maintaining a healthy economy that gives the next generation a chance to build wealth as well.

That feels like a healthier balance than simply asking companies to keep squeezing more from fewer people.

The big AI question

Then there’s the billion-dollar question around AI. If AI allows companies to create significantly more value with fewer people, what does society expect in return?

For generations, businesses earned their social licence in more ways than simply generating profits. They created jobs and helped people build careers, buy homes, support families and participate in the economy.

AI has the potential to change that equation. If organisations can continue growing while employing fewer people, we need to ask whether the old social contract still works.

I’m not suggesting companies should avoid AI or artificially preserve jobs that no longer make sense. Technological progress has always reshaped work, and in the long run it has often created new industries and opportunities.

The difference is the speed and scale of what we’re seeing right now. If productivity increases dramatically while employment opportunities become more concentrated, who benefits from those gains?

Do they primarily flow to shareholders through higher profits?

To consumers through lower prices?

Or should some of that value be reinvested into the workforce and the communities affected by the transition, for example through adjusted rates of taxation based on human participation in the workforce?

These are questions for governments, business leaders, investors and all of us as citizens. Unfortunately, right now, it seems to be the technology companies making these decisions for us, and that’s not going to result in a balanced outcome.

Stop measuring yourself against yesterday’s career model

None of those “big picture” debates will be resolved any time soon. That doesn’t help you if you’re wondering what to do with your own career right now.

I’m not a career coach, and I don’t position myself as one. I share what I’ve learned as someone who successfully transitioned out of corporate life, and on that basis here’s the advice I’d give.

First, stop assuming you’ve failed. I speak to so many capable people who feel like they’re falling behind because they haven’t reached the role they expected by now. Maybe you’re measuring yourself against a career model that no longer exists.

The old corporate ladder rewarded depth within a single organisation or industry. Today’s environment increasingly rewards adaptability. That doesn’t mean everyone should quit their job and start a business, but it does mean thinking differently about security.

Maybe security isn’t one employer anymore. It might be transferable skills, multiple income streams or investments. Perhaps you need to go back to the fundamentals of building your professional relationships and reputation.

What that looks like will be different for everyone, but I suspect very few of us mid-career professionals are going to close out the second half of our careers inside a single organisation.

One day, it will be our turn

A final thought on this topic. It’s a little nebulous, but I wanted to put it out there.

Many of us who feel frustrated by today’s corporate system will eventually become the people making the decisions.

We’ll become business owners, executives, investors and business owners. Over the next decade or so, we’ll inherit wealth. We’ll be the ones in charge.

When that happens, we’ll face exactly the same choice every generation faces. Do we recreate the system that benefited us? Or do we build something better for the people coming after us?

It’s easy to criticise a system when you don’t hold the power. The real test is what you do when you finally have it.

I hope our generation remembers what it felt like to build a career at a time when the old rules no longer seemed to apply. If we’re serious about creating a better future of work, we won’t achieve it by rebuilding yesterday’s corporate ladder or focusing on maximising our own comfortable retirements at the expense of younger generations.

Perhaps we should start thinking now about designing something that gives the next generation the opportunities we never had.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

My son turned 10 a few days ago. It’s one of those milestones that makes you stop and wonder where the time went.

When I left corporate life more than five years ago, he was a big part of that decision. I wanted more control over how I spent my time and more freedom to be present during the years that matter most.

Financially, it wasn’t the obvious choice. Professionally, it certainly wasn’t the conventional one. Looking back now, I’d make the same decision again.

One of the themes running through this two-part series has been that many of us are still measuring ourselves against an old definition of career success. Promotions, titles and climbing the ladder became the benchmark, because that’s the world we inherited.

However it’s easy to forget that careers are only one part of life. As I’ve watched my son grow up over the past decade, I’ve realised that some of the biggest returns on the decisions we make never appear on a payslip or a LinkedIn profile. Things like time, flexibility and being there for the moments that don’t come around twice.

Those things are harder to measure than a promotion, but they’re just as valuable when you’re measuring the success of your career - if not more so.

Things I’ve made (and you can buy)

If you enjoy my content and would like to support my work, here are a few things I’ve created.

🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs for corporate rebels
📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

Over the past week I’ve been running a four-part series of reels on Instagram called What Went Wrong With the Corporate Ladder. The response has been much bigger than I expected, which tells me this conversation is hitting a nerve with lots of people out there.

Instagram is great for testing ideas, but there’s only so much you can cover in a 60-second video. So over this issue and next week's I'll explore these ideas in more depth. This week I’m looking at what happened to the corporate ladder and why career progression feels so different today. Next week we'll turn to the harder question: what can we actually do about it?

If video format is more your thing, here’s some of the content I shared on Instagram… otherwise, read on!

The corporate ladder is a quaint relic

Without turning this into a history lesson, I need to give a little context around the whole concept of the corporate ladder for everything that follows to make sense.

It emerged after World War II, during decades of economic expansion when large organisations needed people to stay for years, or sometimes entire careers to support progress and innovation.

Knowledge was valuable, but unlike today it was difficult to capture. Processes lived in filing cabinets, and relationships and details often lived in people’s heads. Experience accumulated over time and companies had a strong incentive to retain it.

The ladder was one way they did that. Employees were rewarded with promotions, higher salaries and greater responsibility. In return, organisations kept the institutional knowledge they depended on. Climbing the ladder was a two-way exchange of value, and an important part of how companies preserved capability and created continuity.

For many people, it worked remarkably well. For decades, many of us entered the workforce with the implicit understanding that this was how the corporate world worked.

Post-WWII conditions are gone

The problem is that the conditions which created the ladder no longer exist.

Over the past decade or so, technology has steadily reduced the amount of knowledge that needs to live inside individuals. Companies have undertaken projects to digitise records and knowledge, and new systems capture processes that once depended on experienced managers. And now, AI is beginning to capture expertise that previously took years to develop.

At the same time, organisations have spent decades redesigning themselves. Management layers have been removed in the name of efficiency, while outsourcing and offshoring moved work outside traditional corporate structures. Then there are the various management philosophies like agile, which encouraged decisions to move closer to frontline teams rather than travelling through multiple levels of management.

Many of these changes have delivered real benefits around agility, autonomy and all those other corporate buzzwords we love to throw around. Technology has removed unnecessary administration and increasingly, much of the grunt work we used to delegate to younger people entering the workforce.

However, cumulatively these factors have fundamentally altered the shape of organisations.

The traditional corporate ladder has gradually become more like a pyramid. There are simply fewer management roles than there once were and more people competing for them. The further up you go, the steeper it seems to get. If you’re not careful, you’ll slide right off and land on your backside.

I think this helps explain why so many capable people are looking outside corporate for the next stage of their careers. The workforce most of us entered no longer exists.

A change in incentives

While thinking about this, I found myself wondering about some bigger picture changes that have been happening over the last few decades.

The people who climbed the corporate ladder over the past 40 years and who are now retired or close to it haven’t lost their influence over the corporate world. Many also became investors. Through superannuation and other investments, millions of ordinary workers now own small pieces of the companies they once worked for. The vast majority of that influence sits with older people, as they’ve had longer to accumulate assets.

That creates an interesting tension. As employees, we generally want higher wages, more opportunities and greater job security. As shareholders, we want companies to become more efficient and generate stronger returns.

Those incentives and interests rarely point in the same direction. Labour is one of the largest costs for most organisations. Reducing management layers, outsourcing work and using technology to improve productivity can all increase returns for investors, even when they reduce career opportunities for employees.

Nobody sat down and designed this outcome. It emerged gradually as technology advanced, financial markets expanded and companies became increasingly focused on shareholder returns.

Yet the effect is becoming difficult to ignore.

Many younger workers entered the workforce expecting careers that resembled those of their parents or mentors. Instead, they find themselves competing inside organisations with fewer leadership positions, flatter structures and growing pressure to do more with less.

We can hardly be surprised that so many people feel frustrated. Meanwhile, we continue to give career advice based on a model of work that’s slowly disappearing. And most importantly, we continue to judge ourselves against that model.

Developing new skills and building strong relationships still matter, but the environment those skills operate within has fundamentally changed.

Before we can have an honest conversation about the future of careers, we first need to acknowledge that the corporate ladder was never permanent. It was a product of its time. The question now is what replaces it?

I’ll explore that question next time. If the ladder isn’t coming back, what should we be building instead?

One thing I’m thinking about this week

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been on the warpath about bad faith arguments. As a professional communicator, there is absolutely nothing that frustrates me more than any argument in the bad faith family (whataboutism, tu quoque, appeals to hypocrisy).

Recently you might be seeing more discussion around AI’s environmental impact. Raise concerns about the industry’s water or energy use and someone will inevitably respond, “What about meat production?” or “What about the textile industry?”

It sounds like a reasonable rebuttal, but unfortunately it misses the mark. It’s usually designed to deflect from the original point of discussion.

Here’s the cold hard truth. Questioning AI’s environmental impact does not require every other industry to have solved theirs first. We can scrutinise multiple industries at the same time. In fact, we probably should.

Add to that, scrutiny is the same as hypocrisy. Most of us rely on systems we can’t realistically opt out of. Many of us eat meat and all of us wear clothes. It’s not realistic for us to go and live on a farm and wear a burlap sack.

At the same time, we can still ask those systems to improve. We still expect companies to reduce waste, improve safety or lower emissions, even if we continue using their products.

Emerging industries have an opportunity that older industries never had. They can learn from decades of environmental mistakes instead of repeating them.

And I want to close out with another related point.

I’ve seen remarkably similar talking points (“but the meat processing industry”, “but the textiles industry”) appearing across multiple content creators over a short period. That may simply reflect people repeating an argument they’ve heard elsewhere. It may be something more organised. I don’t know for sure, but having worked in public relations for the past two decades, I have my suspicions.

Either way, it’s a useful reminder to pay attention not only to the argument itself, but also to where it originated and whose interests it serves.

Remember… good debate engages with the issue that has been raised. Bad faith debate tries to change the subject.

Things I’ve made (and you can buy)

If you enjoy my content and would like to support my work, here are a few things I’ve created.

🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs for corporate rebels
📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

Over the past few months, you might have noticed a particular type of content appearing everywhere on social media: the great Millennial career crisis.

The name changes, but the themes are the same. Millennials are burned out and want out of corporate. Everyone is having a midlife career crisis. At the extreme end, some Millennials think they’ve been sold a lie.

Clearly, something is striking a nerve.

I speak a little about this on my social channels, but in the interests of full disclosure… I’m not actually a Millennial. I missed the cut-off by a handful of months. Depending on who you ask, I’m part of the micro-generation known as Xennials, which means I have a foot in both the Gen X and Millennial camps. Honestly, I identify with both.

Even so, I’ve found myself paying close attention to these conversations because I think they’re pointing to something real that many people are feeling right now.

Where I disagree is the idea that this is primarily a generational story. I will say that generational labels are useful shorthand. They help us describe broad patterns quickly, however the trouble is that they can also distract us from what’s really happening underneath.

The more I’ve thought about it, the less I’m convinced that this is a Millennial problem. I think it’s a mid-career professional problem.

I’m talking about people who have spent 10, 15 or 20 years building a career. People who followed the advice they were given about navigating corporate life when they were starting out, and since then have invested in their skills and kept moving forward in good faith.

Many of them are now looking around and wondering why the future they expected feels so different from the one that’s actually arrived. I don’t think that’s because an entire generation suddenly became fragile and too focused on avocado toast, as some people would like to suggest. I think something much bigger has changed.

This week’s piece explores this in greater depth, however I do want to say this is a big topic and there’s more to be said beyond this - particularly in terms of what we can do to survive this moment. It started life as a short Instagram video, so here’s the 90-second version if that’s your preference… otherwise, read on!

The corporate rules have changed

A few years ago, I think most mid-career professionals had a fairly clear picture of what the next stage of their career would look like. For most, it was some version of more responsibility and a more senior title, with a higher salary attached to it. For some of us, there was a pathway to the leadership table.

The details varied, but the general direction probably felt reasonably predictable.

Today, I’m not sure that’s true. Increasingly, I find myself talking to people who have done everything they were supposed to do. They’ve built experience and delivered results. Many have spent years progressing through their organisations, and yet there’s an increasing number who seem less certain about their future than they did a decade ago.

I don’t think this can be attributed to individual failure. I think it’s fairly obvious that the environment around us has changed. I think that’s the real missing piece when we talk about burnout, career crises or generational dissatisfaction.

It’s not just that work has become harder or more demanding - although for many workplaces, that’s probably true. It’s also that many of the assumptions we built our careers around no longer feel as reliable as they once did.

That kind of uncertainty takes a heavy psychological toll. It’s like having the rug pulled on your career halfway through (or the ladder kicked out from underneath you by a bunch of robots, if you will).

Then the ground started moving

The workforce most of us entered is not the workforce we have today. What’s made this uniquely challenging is that the changes didn’t happen overnight. We’ve been boiling the proverbial frog, one degree at a time, for the past decade or so. That’s part of what makes the changes difficult to recognise.

Most of us were busy building careers, managing families, paying mortgages and getting on with life. We adapted as things changed around us. A new technology here, a restructure there. Perhaps a few more responsibilities added to your role as jobs were left vacant, or more management layers were removed.

Each change probably felt manageable on its own. Taken together, they’ve fundamentally altered the environment around us.

Organisations have become flatter. In many businesses, there are fewer management roles than there were 20 years ago. The traditional progression from specialist to manager to senior leader may still exist, but the path is often narrower and more competitive.

At the same time, the relationship between employers and employees has changed. Many of us grew up with the idea that loyalty, experience and tenure would eventually translate into greater security. Today, long-serving employees can find themselves impacted by restructures just as quickly as anyone else.

Now AI has entered the picture.

Whether AI ultimately creates more jobs, fewer jobs or simply different jobs is still up for debate. What’s already clear is that it’s introduced another layer of uncertainty into professions that once felt relatively stable. For the first time in a long time, many knowledge workers are being forced to ask questions they’ve never had to ask before.

Which parts of my role are genuinely valuable?

What skills will matter in five years?

What does career progression even look like from here?

Many of us are having the assumptions on which we built our careers tested to their very limits. And that’s where I think much of today’s frustration comes from.

Many mid-career professionals are arriving at the point where the rewards were supposed to become more visible, just as the ground beneath us is changing. That’s a difficult moment to navigate.

If you’re feeling this way, I hope I can give you some emotional and mental relief here by saying I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. For most of you, I believe the environment you prepared for no longer exists.

Why this feels so personal

When people talk about burnout, career dissatisfaction or the desire to leave corporate life, it’s tempting to focus on the practical factors like workload and culture. While those things definitely matter, I don’t think they fully explain the strength of the reaction we’re seeing.

Most of us can cope with hard work and setbacks. We have before and we will again. We can even cope with uncertainty - as long as we understand the rules of the game.

What’s harder is discovering that the rules themselves are changing. Many mid-career professionals have spent years building expertise, relationships and experience within a particular model of work. We made decisions based on that model. We invested considerable time and energy into it.

Then, just as many were approaching the stage of their careers where we expected greater influence or reward, the environment started changing. That creates a unique kind of tension and psychological impact, because it raises a fundamental question of whether both the journey and destination still look the way you expected them to (if indeed they still exist at all).

I think that’s why so many conversations about work have become so emotionally charged. People are questioning assumptions they may have held for decades. Assumptions about what success looks like and what experience is worth.

That’s uncomfortable and yes, it can feel unfair and disorienting.

I’ve seen some members of older generations suggesting that anyone questioning the current state of things is somehow weak and should have seen the disruption coming. That to me shows a shallow understanding of the situation.

As a human being, it’s completely reasonable for us to have some confidence that the effort we’re putting in today will help us build the future we’re working towards - particularly if we’ve been told that’s how things work. When that confidence starts to fade, it’s natural to stop and reassess.

Perhaps that’s what we’re really seeing right now. Beyond the talk of career pivots and burnouts, or of people becoming less resilient, here’s the real crux of the issue:

A growing number of experienced professionals are looking around and asking whether the map they’ve been following still reflects the territory ahead, and whether that’s a fair exchange after years of contributing value to the workforce.

What happens next?

I don’t think the answer is to panic or quit your job. It’s tough times out there and you still have to survive, so don’t make any sudden decisions. And I certainly don’t think the answer is to spend our time arguing about which generation is to blame.

The more useful question to consider might be: if the environment has changed, what assumptions do we need to revisit?

For decades, many of us were taught to think about careers in relatively linear terms. Build experience and move upwards; keep moving towards the next rung of the ladder.

That model may still work for some people. For others, it may no longer be enough. If that’s you, maybe it’s time to think about throwing out the old playbook - or even recognising that the playbook itself is evolving.

That could mean building skills in new areas; it could mean thinking differently about flexibility and security. It could mean creating additional income streams, exploring new career paths or redefining what success looks like at this stage of life. The specifics will be different for everyone.

For those of you who are casting yourself as being in a “mid-career crisis”, what if you flipped that narrative on its head, and instead thought of yourself as being in a period of adjustment?

It’s uncomfortable, sure. But it could also be the beginning of a more honest conversation about work, careers and what comes next. Once we accept the reality that the map has changed, we can start deciding where we want to go from here.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

I’m late to the party on this one, but I finally watched The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix. I’d somehow managed to avoid it for several years, despite being a fan of Mike Flanagan’s work and somewhat of a Victorian era tragic (yes, I was the girl in high school who read Wuthering Heights multiple times).

On the surface, it’s a gothic horror series inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Underneath that, I think it’s a story about assumptions that really captures the moment we’re in right now.

The Usher family becomes extraordinarily successful under a particular set of conditions. Over time, they begin to treat those conditions as permanent. Wealth, power and influence start feeling like something they’re entitled to.

The problem, of course, is that the world keeps changing whether we acknowledge it or not.

Watching it this week, I was struck by how relevant that feels to the conversations we’re having about work. While I know most of us are not indeed billionaire pharmaceutical executives, it’s still very easy to assume the environment that helped us succeed will continue indefinitely. Sometimes the ground moves underneath us and we don’t feel the consequences until much later.

That feels like one of the defining challenges of modern careers - paying attention to when the assumptions we’ve been relying on stop matching reality.

Worth a watch if you haven’t seen it!

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

Things I’ve written and made

🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs designed for corporate rebels
📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

When ChatGPT arrived on the scene a few years back, I had a fairly personal reason to pay attention. I make my living mostly from writing.

Like many people in creative and knowledge-based professions, I watched as headlines declared that AI could now write articles, marketing copy, emails and reports in seconds. Almost overnight, it felt like everyone had decided they were a writer.

I had a few sleepless nights of existential panic as a wondered what this meant for me. If a machine can produce thousands of words at the click of a button, surely that changes the economics of writing? Surely it changes how clients think about value? For a while, it seemed as though the conversation was heading in one direction: AI would make human writers less relevant.

What I’ve found since then is a little more nuanced than that. Sure, AI can create content. It can create words. Lots and lots of words. The cost of producing content has fallen dramatically and it continues to fall.

What fascinated me was what happened next. People are now more attuned than ever to bad content and “AI slop”, potentially in a way they weren’t a few years back. That’s actually opened up the path for great writers to shine once again.

Right now in the corporate world, and indeed across much of society, we’re about to grapple with some important questions about what happens when something that used to be scarce suddenly becomes abundant. It applies far beyond writing. It affects careers, businesses and the way we think about value itself.

This week’s piece explores this in greater depth, including what it means for you. It started life as a short Instagram video, so here’s the 90-second version if that’s your preference… otherwise, read on!

AI will change the way we perceive value

Every major technology wave makes something easier to do, and by extension, it makes it cheaper.

The internet made information cheaper. Spreadsheets made calculations cheaper. Streaming made access to entertainment cheaper.

Right now, AI is making things many things easier to do, and therefore cheaper to produce. Content, images, code, analysis… you name it, AI is here to do it.

When that happens, it’s easy to focus on what’s being lost. The more useful question might be where value travels next.

There’s a psychological concept called the Scarcity Principle, which I briefly discussed in the video above. Put simply, humans tend to place a higher value on things that are rare than things that are abundant.

It’s why people pay more for handmade products than mass-produced ones, and why limited-edition items command a premium. The scarcity itself becomes part of the value.

Technology has a habit of changing what’s scarce. It’s a pattern we can see throughout history.

The accountants who didn’t disappear

Before Excel and other spreadsheets became commonplace, accountants spent a significant amount of time performing calculations manually. The work was labour-intensive and often repetitive.

Then spreadsheets arrived and dramatically reduced the time required to perform those tasks. Calculations became easier and cheaper to produce.

At that point, the value of the accountant changed.

Businesses still needed people who could interpret the numbers, identify risks, evaluate options and help leaders make decisions. In many cases, accountants became more influential because they could spend less time producing information and more time helping organisations understand it.

The value of the role moved from calculation to interpretation.

The travel agents who survived

Travel agents experienced a similar disruption a few years back. Before the internet, travel agents held something valuable: access to information.

If you wanted to compare flights, hotels or holiday packages, you needed a travel agent to do it for you. They had access to systems and information that most consumers didn’t.

Then the internet arrived, and suddenly everyone could compare flights from their lounge room. Many travel agencies disappeared because their competitive advantage disappeared.

However, there were travel agents who not only survived, but prospered. These were the ones who found a different source of value. They specialised in complex itineraries, luxury experiences, difficult logistics and personalised advice.

People stopped paying for access, and started paying for for taste and experience.

Again, the value moved. Neither profession disappeared; the source of value changed.

AI is creating a similar moment across many professions

I think AI is creating a similar moment across a broad range of professions. For the first time, we’re making certain forms of knowledge work dramatically more abundant: content, images, code, research and even basic analysis. The cost of producing these outputs is falling rapidly.

That doesn’t automatically mean the people who work in those fields become less valuable; more often it means that the source of value changes.

As AI makes production easier, the opportunity may move to the layer above production. That’s the space where humans decide what matters. Where we build trust.

How to apply this thinking to your own career

Think about your own job or business for a moment. Whatever it is you do to make money.

How much of your work involves producing something? That includes things like:

• reports

• presentations

• spreadsheets

• proposals

• even emails

Now ask a different question. How much of your value comes from deciding what should go into that deliverable in the first place? Those are not the same thing.

AI is becoming increasingly capable of helping us produce work. And before you come at me with a “but… but… AI agents” - no, AI agents can’t make the same kinds of judgement calls that humans can.

AI is far less capable of understanding organisational politics, navigating competing priorities, managing relationships or deciding which of ten possible options is the right one.

This is why I’m becoming sceptical of the idea that becoming more machine-like is the best response to AI. The people who thrive in periods of technological change are often the people who move towards the next layer of value first.

For instance, the spreadsheet automated calculations, while the valuable work became the interpretation.

Similarly, search engines gave everyone access to information. The people who benefited most became the people who could analyse information, connect ideas and make better decisions because of it.

AI is automating parts of production. The valuable work may increasingly become deciding, prioritising, connecting and influencing.

A simple career audit

Here’s a simple exercise you could try this week. Make a list of the tasks you perform most often, and mark up the ones AI could plausibly help with.

Then look at what’s left. It might include things like conversations to gather knowledge, making decisions, influencing people in the organisation or interpreting context. Even things like the ability to connect dots that others can’t see.

That list of leftovers is probably where your future value sits.

For employees, this might mean investing more heavily in communication, influence, problem-solving and decision-making. For leaders, it may mean spending less time creating information and more time helping people make sense of it.

For business owners, it raises a different question. If every competitor in your industry had access to exactly the same AI tools tomorrow, what would still make customers choose you?

Your relationships?

Your reputation?

Your expertise?

Your understanding of customers?

Your ability to solve difficult problems?

Those are much harder to replicate than any standalone deliverable.

What’s about to become scarce?

Every major technology wave creates anxiety because it changes the rules. People naturally focus on what’s becoming cheaper. History suggests it’s equally important to pay attention to what’s becoming more valuable.

AI is making many forms of output abundant. If everyone is producing more, the greater value could be focusing on what’s becoming scarce and invest there first.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

This post popped into my Instagram feed this week and I just couldn’t help myself.

I know, I know. I’m not as funny as I think I am. But seriously… a classic example of why you need to have a human overseeing your content. Someone with an understanding of cultural nuance, because otherwise you leave yourself wide open for f**k ups like this.

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Most of us know when we’re having trouble with someone at work - whether that’s a manager, a client, a colleague or anyone else. It’s much harder to make the other person care about how we’re feeling.

Sometimes that’s because the other person doesn’t care or has limited empathy. More often, it’s because companies (and people who are in “work mode”) make decisions through a different lens. While we’re worried about how we’re feeling and whether something is fair, decision-makers are thinking about something else - value.

Over the years, I’ve worked in large organisations, government agencies and now I run my own business. One thing that always surprises me is how many of the skills that help you survive corporate life are exactly the same skills that help you run a business: negotiating priorities, managing expectations, pushing back without damaging relationships and having difficult conversations.

This week I wanted to share one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received in my professional life when I was dealing with a difficult corporate environment. I still use this strategy today, and I hope it helps you too.

I originally shared these thoughts on Instagram recently. If you'd prefer the two-minute version before diving into the longer written version, you can watch it below.

Learning the right language at work

Years ago, I was venting to a boss about something happening at work. I can’t remember the specific issue, I only remember being frustrated. Something felt really unfair.

After listening to me for a few minutes, he gave me a piece of advice that instantly annoyed me, mainly because I just wanted him to agree with me and tell me he was going to fix the problem. He said:

“When you don’t like something at work, stop arguing about fairness and start talking about value.”

At the time I thought he’d completely missed the point. To me, fairness was the issue. Why would I stop talking about something that was clearly wrong?

However, the more experienced I became, the more I understood what what he meant. Most organisations don’t make decisions using the language of fairness. They make decisions using the language of value.

Every organisation has its own language. Some talk about customer outcomes. Others talk about growth, risk, productivity or performance. Whatever the language, decisions tend to get made through that lens.

Once you start paying attention, you can hear it everywhere: in executive presentations, town halls, strategy documents and even in team meetings. The key words and phrases echo through the organisation. The language that leaders use repeatedly tells you how decisions are being made in very high-level meetings.

How to speak the language of value

Consider the difference between these two statements.

“It’s not fair that my workload has doubled.”

The statement may be true, but when you say it you immediately enter a debate about perception between you and your manager. It may even put them in a defensive position, which forces a “win/lose” negotiation, and you’re probably not going to win that argument. They’ll probably decide the workload increase is reasonable or point out that everybody is busy.

Now compare it to this:

“My workload has doubled over the last six months and I’m concerned that it will affect the quality of service outcomes. Which priorities would you like me to focus on?”

You’ve raised the same concern, but your framing is completely different. You’ve moved the discussion from emotion to consequence. You’re no longer asking someone to agree that the situation feels unfair; you’re asking them to make a decision about priorities.

Here’s another example:

“I’m tired and stressed and it’s not fair that we are understaffed.”

Versus:

“We’re operating with fewer resources and I’m seeing increased risk around what we’re delivering.”

Again, same problem, different language. One argument asks for sympathy while you vent, the other asks for action.

How this works outside corporate

The reason I love this piece of advice is because it also works far beyond corporate environments. I use the same principle in my business.

When a client asks for something outside scope, I don’t talk about fairness or personal impact. Instead I talk about delivery, timelines, priorities and commercial impact.

Let’s say they ask me for more work or to change the scope of a project mid-flight. I know this is going to cost me time, and in my business, time is money. I might say:

“I can absolutely do that. It sits outside the current scope, so I can prepare a revised quote for your approval.”

Or:

“If we add that piece, we’ll need to adjust the timeline.”

The underlying issue is identical, but the conversation is framed around outcomes rather than emotion.

What this does (and doesn’t) do for you

It’s important to note that this approach doesn’t guarantee you get what you want. Some organisations remain dysfunctional and some clients are unreasonable. No communication technique fixes every situation.

What it does do is increase your influence. You’re speaking the language decision-makers already use, which makes it easier for them to understand the consequences of their choices. Yep, if you’re a parent, you can probably recognise that you already do this with your kids.

This is a simple skill that can change your career. It can help you negotiate better conditions, or push back without creating unnecessary conflict. It can help you survive difficult workplaces while you decide what comes next.

Should we forget about fairness at work?

Absolutely not. Fairness still matters. In a healthy workplace we wouldn’t need to translate our concerns into business language just to be heard.

There’s also a difference between navigating normal workplace frustrations and dealing with genuinely unacceptable behaviour. If you’re experiencing discrimination, bullying, harassment or chronic unfair treatment, the answer is to make a formal complaint, escalate the issue or start thinking seriously about whether the environment is right for you.

However, most workplace frustrations sit in a grey area somewhere between ideal and unacceptable. That’s where this skill becomes valuable.

If you want influence, learn the language decision-makers respond to. Learn how your organisation thinks about value, risk, priorities and outcomes.

It won’t solve every problem, but it will give you a better chance of being heard. It’s one of the most valuable professional skills you can develop.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

This week's post was partly inspired by a recent re-read of the classic book Getting to Yes.

First published in 1981, it remains one of the best books on negotiation I’ve come across. If you’ve never read it, I highly recommend it.

One of the book’s core ideas is the distinction between positions and interests. People often reach a dead-end arguing about what they want instead of discussing why they want it. Once you understand the underlying interests on both sides, it becomes much easier to find a path forward.

The workplace advice above follows a similar principle. When we focus exclusively on fairness, we’re often arguing from a position.

When we talk about value, priorities, risk and outcomes, we move the conversation towards interests and consequences. That gives decision-makers something they can evaluate and act on.

Whether you’re negotiating with a manager, a client or a family member, that’s an invaluable skill to have.

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Corporate life feels a lot colder right now than it did a few years ago. If you spend enough time listening to earnings call or leadership messaging, you’ll start noticing the same patterns appearing over and over again.

People are discussed in increasingly mechanical terms, often during a period where many workers already feel exhausted, financially stressed and emotionally detached from their jobs. Many are experiencing burnout.

While I don’t think the rise of AI in the corporate workplace has created this dynamic, I do think it’s been a heavy contributing factor. As many organisations build confidence in their ability to automate certain roles (although how successful that will be in the longer term remains to be seen), they’ve also inadvertently created an environment where certain leaders feel more empowered to act a little differently than they might have done five years ago.

There’s a much-discussed study from 2016 that found around one in five corporate executives display elevated psychopathic traits. Whenever this statistic gets discussed online, people immediately jump to images of serial killers and violent criminals, which is part of the reason I don’t really love the sensationalist framing.

However, that’s not really what researchers are talking about in corporate settings. In a clinical sense, a diagnosed psychopath is someone who displays traits like low empathy, emotional detachment, manipulativeness, superficial charm and a highly transactional view of other people.

Still not ideal personality traits, but it also doesn’t automatically mean someone is an imminent danger to society if they’ve learned to mask and behave in a socially acceptable manner.

The performance of empathy

For a long time, corporate culture created fairly strong social pressure around how leaders were expected to behave publicly as companies competed for the best talent. Executives learned the language of empathy, culture, wellbeing, psychological safety and diversity because those were the norms of the environment.

You got ahead partly by speaking that language fluently. Some leaders genuinely embraced those ideas, while others learned how to perform them convincingly because it was professionally advantageous to do so.

What I think we’re witnessing right now is some of those social pressures to perform getting weaker in real time.

The return of ruthless efficiency

We’re in an economic environment shaped by cost pressure, AI disruption, layoffs and investor anxiety. Efficiency has become fashionable again, and so has the language that comes with it.

You can hear it in the way some leaders now talk about people.

“Lower-value human capital.”

“Headcount reduction.”

“Replacing inefficiencies.”

It’s a giant red flag to hear a person talking about other people as if they’re an operational burden, rather than human beings. That sort of behaviour is pushing towards anti-social, and it really shouldn’t be normalised.

I’ll be the first to admit that businesses absolutely need to make hard decisions sometimes. Companies are not charities - efficiency and profitability matter. Technology changes industries. None of that is controversial to me.

What feels different right now is the level of emotional detachment we’re seeing from some executive leaders. You might have heard about Standard Chartered’s CEO Bill Winters, who recently said this on the subject of the bank’s AI strategy:

”It’s not cost cutting: it’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital.”

This is the sort of language that reveals how some leaders understand the people inside their organisations. Not as workers with lives, families, obligations and financial realities, but as units of value in the broader system.

At the same time, some organisations have started framing ordinary human needs as inefficiencies to be engineered out of systems - people needing flexibility, or asking questions about the future. Or people who are burning out and want more stability and balance in their lives.

Increasingly, these things are discussed as friction points rather than normal conditions of human life.

That is not normal. It should not become acceptable in our society.

Corporations don’t exist outside society

Right now, it’s critical to remember that corporations do not exist outside society. Businesses rely on social trust, public infrastructure, educated workforces and functioning communities. They depend on people feeling invested in the system itself.

This is the social contract between corporations and society. If one side wants to change the terms, there needs to be a process of renegotiation and rebalancing. That hasn’t happened yet.

Instead, workers are being asked to absorb the consequences of technological change that has never been renegotiated and agreed, while corporations describe those consequences as efficiency gains.

To put it in commercial terms, if this becomes normal in the social contract, it becomes precedent. If people accept the idea that human needs are just inefficiencies, then that becomes the accepted operating logic. If we wait too long to renegotiate, we lose our standing.

Human beings aren’t operational inefficiencies

For years, companies understood there were reputational and cultural consequences attached to openly treating workers as expendable inputs. Now some executives appear to believe the market will reward ruthless optimisation more than relational leadership.

Maybe in the short term it will, but over the longer term, organisations still need legitimacy and trust. They still need people willing to contribute more than the bare minimum.

And contrary to what some corners of corporate culture seem to believe right now, humans are supposed to have emotions. We’re supposed to need rest, and we’re supposed to ask difficult questions. That’s the very nature of humanity, and it’s also the foundation of creativity, innovation, collaboration and social stability in the first place.

Right now I feel that companies that lose sight of that may eventually discover that highly optimised systems can also become extremely fragile ones.

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There’s something in the air recently, and it feels like it’s gathering steam. I think we’re witnessing the real-time collapse of the decades-long emotional contract between corporate employees and their employers. You might even call it the end of trust.

While I’m more than five years out of corporate life, I still speak to a lot of people who are immersed in that world and there are a few themes that are growing clearer with each passing day. The main one is that there seems to be a growing disconnect between leadership messaging and how people are experiencing work.

The mood right now feels different from anything I’ve ever really seen before. It feels super cynical and jaded, and I’m not really sure if companies know how to fix it.

To be frank, from what I can gather, a lot of companies don’t even know they have a problem yet, let alone the will to fix it.

The psychological contract is breaking down

Right now we’ve got a few factors converging at once that are contributing to this mood:

• Burnout remains widespread. Around three-quarters of employees report experiencing it.

• Trust in leadership continues to fall. According to recent Gartner research, only 48% of employees trust their senior leaders.

• One recent study found around a third of employees admitted they were actively resisting or sabotaging AI initiatives inside their organisations, because they don’t trust what’s coming next. And honestly, with what companies like Meta are doing right now, who could blame them?

This is not simply resistance to a new technology. It reflects a broader breakdown in workplace trust.

For decades, work operated on an unspoken emotional agreement between employees and employers.

Employees gave extra effort, emotional energy and loyalty. They stayed late when needed, took on additional responsibilities above and beyond their job description when asked. Many were true believers in company culture and direction. In return, they expected some version of stability, career progression, belonging or meaning.

The arrangement was never perfect. Corporate life has always involved trade-offs and power imbalances. Still, many people believed the exchange was fundamentally fair -or fair enough not to disrupt the status quo too heavily.

That belief has started to fracture in recent times. Companies that used to call their staff “family” have resorted to layoffs over Zoom. And right now we’re hearing more and more companies talk about their new “AI first” cultures, after years of promoting their “people first” approach on LinkedIn.

The about-face - and dare I say it, the hypocrisy - is truly astounding.

People notice that disconnect, and once they do, it changes how they engage with work.

Employees are reassessing the deal

Many employees are no longer emotionally investing in organisations the way they once did. They’re pulling back to protect themselves, and approaching work more cautiously and transactionally.

In practice, that looks like doing the job and getting paid, then going home. Keep your boundaries where you can.

Many employees are no longer willing to provide unlimited discretionary effort simply because the company asks for it. If overtime becomes routine, they expect to be compensated. If organisations demand loyalty while offering less stability in return, employees can (and should) reassess the arrangement accordingly.

The biggest disconnect comes when leadership teams frame this as disengagement, poor attitude or even laziness. You know the ones - they complain about not being able to find good people, after years of treating their people worse than strangers.

That interpretation is not just tone-deaf, it completely misses the point. What many organisations are seeing is employees undertaking a highly rational recalibration of risk and reward, even if they don’t realise they’re doing it.

Employees watched repeated rounds of layoffs affect high performers and long-tenured staff alike. They saw companies praise resilience while laying people off in record numbers. They watched organisations celebrate flexibility before introducing aggressive return-to-office mandates. Now many are being told AI will reshape their roles, while leadership struggles to clearly explain what that means for their future.

Under those conditions, emotional withdrawal becomes a form of self-protection.

Why AI resistance is really about trust

That context also explains why AI adoption is becoming far more complicated inside organisations than many executives expected.

Leaders often assume employees resist AI because they fear change or lack technical understanding. In reality, many employees simply don’t trust leadership to deploy AI in ways that genuinely benefit workers. Resistance is predictable if employees believe productivity gains will primarily lead to workforce reductions, cost-cutting or unrealistic performance expectations.

Trust shapes adoption. Without it, even strong technical initiatives will inevitably fail.

Culture can’t survive on messaging alone

The long-term risk for organisations is the gradual loss of the discretionary effort companies have relied on for decades to be profitable or successful.

Many corporate cultures depend on employees giving more than the formal employment contract technically requires. The unspoken assumption has always been that strong culture, purpose and values would sustain that investment.

That only works while people believe the relationship is reciprocal. Once trust disappears, culture starts to look performative rather than genuine.

Branded values can’t compensate for that loss. Neither can free lunches, wellbeing webinars or another internal campaign about purpose.

Rebuilding trust comes first

If companies want employees to contribute discretionary effort and engage meaningfully with the future of work, they need to rebuild trust and credibility first.

Right now, many employees are rejecting an arrangement that no longer feels mutually beneficial. And once trust is gone, it takes a lot of effort to get it back.

I remember saying, “I’m about to go into surgery and there’s a chance I don’t make it out. I’m trying to enjoy some time with my son. Could you please call someone else?”

This was back in 2019. At the time, the interaction barely even registered as strange to me. It was just part of doing business - or so I thought.

Looking back now, that probably tells you everything you need to know about how normal burnout had become in my life.

The strange thing is, I was successful in my career.

I’d spent years building a career in high-pressure corporate and government environments. I was respected and trusted in a crisis. From the outside, I probably looked highly functional.

Internally, I was slowly burning through every reserve I had.

The environments that rewarded me were also exhausting me

The warning signs started well before my 2019 health crisis. Earlier in my career I’d worked in professional services for a few years. As anyone who has worked in that sector knows, it can be competitive and emotionally draining. For the most part, people inside those environments often treat that intense status quo as normal.

Long hours were expected and many people ended up on stress leave. Drinking culture was common, particularly across shared and corporate services teams. There was an unspoken understanding that people were replaceable and that pressure was simply part of being ambitious.

I survived two or three team restructures in my short, three-year tenure at this firm. I remember one colleague telling me “I never keep anything in my office except for my bag in case my role is made redundant, then I can just grab it and go”.

At the time, I thought I was built for it. Or that I could at least survive it, because it was good for my skills and CV.

Part of that was true. I now understand that my ADHD traits can make me very effective in high-pressure situations for short periods. Tight deadlines energised me, and crisis situations give me a bit of a dopamine hit. That means I could solve problems quickly and perform well when things got messy.

In certain environments, that tends to get rewarded. I was promoted and trusted, having built a reputation as someone who could handle difficult situations.

What I didn’t understand back then was that the same brain that performed well in intensity also struggled with sustained overload.

I know now that I’m autistic as well as ADHD, although I was only properly assessed much later when my son was going through his own assessment process. Noise, interruption, constant meetings, fluorescent lighting, emotional management, office politics and being socially “on” all day took a huge amount out of me. I could tolerate it temporarily, but not indefinitely.

So I did what us neurodivergent folks tend to do in those situations. I masked, so I could keep functioning and delivering. Then I would go home and feel completely depleted. Before having kids, there were days when I would get straight home and go to bed without eating. More days than I care to admit.

At the time I assumed everyone felt that way, and that this was just how working life was.

Burnout became my normal state

Years later, I moved into a senior government media and communications role during a particularly difficult period for the organisation.

When I joined, it was already coming out of a major restructure. While I was there, the organisation underwent a significant culture review linked to historical allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct. I managed the internal and external communications response around that review, which meant I was exposed to a lot of emotionally heavy material for extended periods.

At the same time, it was effectively a 24/7 media environment. The organisation delivered essential services around the clock, which meant that my team was expected to be responsive around the clock too. There was always another issue to deal with, and my phone seemed to ring constantly.

For a while, I still convinced myself this was just what high-performing careers looked like. Then it started bleeding into the rest of my life.

One of the clearest memories I have from that period is sitting in the car crying before my son’s second birthday party because work had been calling me all morning about an issue. All I wanted was one peaceful Saturday with my family.

That was probably the first time I consciously thought: this can’t be right.

Not long after that, I became so run down that I ended up in hospital with a severe sinus infection my body couldn’t fight off properly. It escalated into major head surgery and a month in hospital away from my little boy.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I still thought answering work calls was normal. That’s probably the part I find hardest to explain to people now.

High-functioning burnout is difficult to recognise

One of the reasons burnout lasted so long for me is because I never stopped functioning externally.

I had always been a high achiever academically. I’ve learned to be quite articulate when I’m masking (although naturally my mouth is a little clumsy), and I’m good at solving problems. I could talk a good game in meetings and think quickly under pressure. The same traits that made me successful also made it easier to hide how much I was struggling.

Many people think burnout looks like collapse. Instead, mine looked like competence.

I kept delivering work and being dependable. I kept pushing through exhaustion because I thought that was what capable adults were supposed to do.

Looking back, I can see how much of corporate culture rewards that behaviour. If you’re productive, responsive and useful in a crisis, very few people stop to ask whether the environment itself is sustainable for you. Often you don’t ask yourself either.

I also think neurodivergent people can become especially vulnerable to this trap. Some environments genuinely suit certain nervous systems better than others. I actually perform very well in high-intensity environments for short bursts because novelty and urgency stimulate me. It’s only after a little while that I start fading into dysfunction, as the autism side of my brain starts kicking in and craving stability and safety.

The moment I knew I couldn’t keep doing it

By 2021, after the first year of COVID chaos, I was exhausted in a way that felt deeper than incidental stress. I took a month off work over the Christmas break.

The first week I mostly lay in bed staring at the ceiling. The second week I kept bursting into random crying fits. I felt melancholy and listless. I was probably depressed.

Somewhere during that break, I finally admitted to myself that I couldn’t continue living the way I’d been living. This wasn’t some inspirational breakthrough moment where I suddenly knew what came next - probably because I was still in deep burnout.

I just knew corporate life was no longer compatible with how I functioned, and that realisation changed almost everything afterwards.

I redesigned my life

Today I work for myself and my life operates very differently.

I only work school hours. I’m at the school gate. I structure my work around my actual energy levels instead of pretending I have unlimited capacity.

I rarely schedule meetings longer than 45 minutes because I know that’s close to the edge of my concentration and sensory tolerance. If a meeting runs over, I leave. I don’t need to make an elaborate excuse to do so, I just say “I have to go”. I no longer answer unexpected phone calls. If someone wants my attention, they need to book time in advance so I can prepare mentally for the interaction.

I also choose work differently now.

Certain environments are simply not a good fit for me. Disorganised teams, chaotic communication and constant interruption create a level of cognitive load that I now recognise as harmful for my nervous system.

For years I interpreted those struggles as weakness, however getting properly assessed for autism and ADHD after suspecting it for a while helped me understand that a lot of what I was experiencing was actually chronic mismatch.

Corporate life isn’t inherently toxic

I write a lot about corporate life, and from the context of what I write you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m against it as a concept. This is not the case. A lot of corporate environment aren’t toxic and everyone experiences work in different ways. Some people genuinely thrive in high-pressure settings. I can even thrive in them myself temporarily.

What I can’t do anymore is ignore the cost. I think more people are reaching that point now, which is why I’ve decided to start speaking up about my experiences and advocating for things to be done differently.

Modern knowledge work increasingly rewards constant responsiveness, emotional availability and uninterrupted productivity. AI will probably intensify some of those expectations, not reduce them. Faster systems rarely create slower workplaces.

In that context, the classic 9-5, “command and control” model of work is outdated and excludes talented people from our workforce. That in itself is a productivity and innovation risk.

For a long time, I thought resilience meant overriding my limits. Now I think it probably means understanding them properly in the first place.

Why in 2026 is the four-day work week still treated like some unrealistic fantasy?

We have AI tools capable of automating hours of administrative work. Teams already answer messages from their phones late at night. Productivity software tracks everything from response times to output. Entire industries now run on digital infrastructure that allows people to work from almost anywhere.

Work has fundamentally changed, yet many companies still expect people to organise their lives around a five-day work model built for a completely different economy.

For decades, we’ve been told that technology would eventually reduce the amount humans needed to work. Automation was supposed to remove repetitive labour, and digital systems were supposed to increase efficiency. Over the past few years, we’ve heard from tech leaders including Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Eric Yuan that AI was going to free people up to focus on more meaningful tasks, and condense the working week.

Instead, right now, many workers feel more stressed and overloaded than ever. Around three-quarters are reporting they’ve experienced burnout.

So what’s gone wrong here?

Productivity up, freedom down

This is a contradiction that sits at the centre of the modern work conversation. Productivity has accelerated dramatically, but the average worker doesn’t feel like they’ve gained more control over their time. In many cases, the opposite has happened.

The workday now spills into evenings, weekends and family life. Responsiveness has become part of expected performance, and people are expected to be permanently reachable while also maintaining the appearance of enthusiasm for increasingly demanding workloads.

Most knowledge workers are not doing deep, focused work for forty hours a week. They’re also sitting in meetings that could have been an email, or managing ever-increasing volumes of communication across an array of channels. Many are navigating fragmented systems and endless notifications.

A lot of organisations still measure visibility more comfortably than they measure outcomes. That matters because the resistance to the four-day work week is often less about productivity and more about management culture.

Many leaders still feel uneasy when they can’t physically see people working. Entire corporate systems were built around presence and time spent at a desk. Even in hybrid environments, many workplaces still reward performative busyness over meaningful output.

If somebody can do their job well in four days, why should the fifth day exist simply to satisfy an outdated expectation around visibility?

AI is intensifying workloads

The uncomfortable reality is that many companies haven’t fully adapted to the type of work knowledge workers actually do now, and AI is making that very clear.

One of the more interesting recent findings came from an eight-month Harvard study of workers at a US-based tech company. Researchers found that AI tools often intensified work rather than reducing it. Employees completed tasks faster, then absorbed broader workloads and longer hours as a result.

That probably feels deeply familiar to many workers already living through this reality.

The promise of AI was increased efficiency. The lived experience for many people is that efficiency simply raises expectations. If you finish work faster, more work appears. If you automate one part of your role, the scope expands somewhere else. If a task takes half the time, companies often treat that as an opportunity to increase output rather than return time back to workers.

This is probably why so many conversations about AI currently feel more stressful than exciting. Right now it feels like race to the bottom for many of us.

Workers are hearing less about improved quality of life and more about headcount reduction and doing more with fewer people. Instead of asking how technology could improve human life, many organisations appear focused on how aggressively they can optimise labour costs.

At some point, we need to ask a bigger question about the purpose of all this technology:

If productivity keeps rising while burnout rises alongside it, what exactly are we optimising for?

Capability isn’t the problem here

We already have evidence that alternative working models can succeed.

A large-scale four-day work week trial highlighted by the World Economic Forum found participating companies reported reduced burnout, stress and fatigue among employees, alongside improvements in mental and physical health. Companies also reported revenue growth during the trial period, with most choosing to continue the model afterwards.

Why hasn’t that success meaningfully transferred to mainstream work structures? For me, it suggests that the barriers are probably cultural and economic rather than operational.

A genuine move toward shorter working weeks would require companies to rethink how they evaluate performance, structure management and distribute productivity gains. It would require leadership teams to focus more heavily on outcomes and less on time spent appearing busy.

For some organisations, that represents a significant loss of control.

Who is carrying the cost?

There’s also a deeper social layer underneath this conversation: the people most exhausted by performative work culture are often those already carrying significant responsibilities outside work, for example:

• Women are still disproportionately managing caregiving labour.

• Parents are balancing increasingly expensive and demanding family logistics.

• Neurodivergent workers are navigating workplace environments that often require constant masking and social performance on top of their actual jobs.

For many people, the issue is sustained overload, and that overload has become normalised.

Modern corporate culture often frames exhaustion as a badge of honour. Being permanently available gets interpreted as commitment, and working through evenings becomes a sign of being valuable.

For me, this is why the conversation around the four-day work week matters so much symbolically. It challenges the assumption that work should consume the majority of a person’s energy and identity.

I fundamentally disagree with that assumption.

Who benefits from AI?

The four-day work week debate should also make us think about who should benefit from productivity gains created by technology. Right now, many workers don’t feel like they are benefiting very much at all.

The strange thing about modern work is that technology keeps making tasks faster, while somehow making workers more available at the same time.

We now have tools capable of reducing administrative load, accelerating production and automating routine work across huge parts of the economy, yet many people feel less in control of their time than they did a decade ago.

For me, that suggests that the technology may not be delivering on its intended promise and benefits. However, beyond the tech it’s also a leadership and economic choice.

Until organisations are willing to prioritise outcomes over visibility, the four-day work week will continue to be treated like a radical idea instead of what it probably is - a reasonable and even expected response to how work has already changed.

Recent research on people experiencing burnout at work has been eye-opening, to say the least. Several studies have found that the rate of burnout has increased year-on-year and is now the top challenge employees face.

It’s easy to dismiss burnout as someone who is just feeling tired or a bit over it, but that underplays the seriousness of the issue. Proper burnout is chronic stress that doesn’t switch off. It shows up as exhaustion, detachment and a drop in performance -even when someone is trying to keep up.

A recent report by Spring Health found that up to 74% of employees have experienced it, which suggests to me that we’ve moved beyond the remit of the HR department and wellbeing programs, to the point of needing to have a discussion about design and what’s going wrong in the wider system.

Here are a few thoughts that I’d put on the table for consideration.

Disappearing workloads that don’t actually disappear

Let’s start with what’s quickly becoming standard operating practice, particularly in the current economic environment - workforce cuts and restructuring to take costs out of the business.

However, in a lot of cases, the work doesn’t go anywhere after the person doing it has departed the organisation. It gets redistributed across the people who remain.

Organisations rarely say this explicitly. The language is usually efficiency, optimisation, or doing more with less. In practice, it means the same output is expected from a smaller base.

Spring Health’s data points to unmanageable workload as a primary driver of burnout. That isn’t surprising to me, because many workplaces I’ve seen now assume stretch as a baseline, not an exception.

Redundancy used to imply a reduction in scope and roles that were “genuinely surplus to requirements” (yes, you can tell I used to be a senior manager in the government sector!). Now it often signals a redistribution of effort.

If companies that are still posting profits are taking roles out of the workforce and giving their work to AI, then AI should be handling that work - not the people left behind.

The workday no longer ends

Now consider what’s happened to our time and boundaries over the past few years.

Technology has removed most of the natural boundaries around work. For many people, there’s no clear start and finish; no no real separation between being available and being off.

Too many people feel pressure to “stay across what’s happening” and keep things moving. It might feel reasonable at the time, especially if something urgent has come up. Collectively, those moments create a workday that never properly stops.

Technology has effectively put many of us into a constant state of alert, where people feel connected but depleted. Work spills into evenings and weekends because the signals that used to mark the end of the day have disappeared.

Remote and hybrid work amplified this. Flexibility increased, but the trade-off has been weaker boundaries.

The result is both longer hours and fragmented time. Attention is constantly pulled back into work, even when the day is technically over. Without proper recovery, stress accumulates.

Technology raised the baseline

AI and automation are primarily framed as productivity tools. Which they can be, because they make it possible to do more in less time.

However, they also change expectations. If something can be done faster, it is expected to be done faster. If a tool can increase output, output becomes the new baseline.

At the same time, AI introduces uncertainty. People are aware that parts of their role could be automated or redefined. That awareness creates a low level of fear and shapes behaviour.

Many people respond by pushing harder to prove themselves valuable. They might feel the need to be more visible and produce more, or to keep up with the new tools and platforms.

Often you end up with a combination that is difficult to sustain:

• higher output expectations

• fewer people doing the work

• constant connectivity

• ongoing pressure to stay relevant.

I read an interesting article in Forbes recently which framed technology as something that keeps the brain in a loop of checking and scanning. AI extends that loop, because it adds performance pressure on top of attention pressure. This is where burnout starts to accelerate.

Employees are absorbing the cost

Put all these pieces together and a pattern starts to emerge:

• workload increases without a corresponding increase in capacity

• time boundaries disappear

• performance expectations rise again.

The system might look more efficient on paper, but it becomes more extractive in practice.

The cost of that extraction doesn’t sit on the balance sheet. It sits with employees. It’s visible in exhaustion, disengagement, sick leave and attrition. It shows up in people who are still doing their jobs, but with less energy and less margin.

All too often, companies treat burnout gets treated as an individual issue to manage. People are told to take some paid time off, or call the employee assistance program. These things have a role in addressing the symptoms, but they don’t address the underlying mechanics.

People aren’t fixing their burnout

Much corporate thinking assumes that burnout can be solved at an individual level with wellness programs and support. What I’m seeing instead is people starting to question whether the model works for them at all. They’re asking whether they want to keep operating in an environment where this level of pressure is normal.

We could be in the early stages of something broader - not a mass exit from the workforce overnight, but a steady reassessment of what work is worth.

Finally, burnout is often framed as a warning sign for individuals, but it’s also a signal for organisations. When most of the workforce has experienced it, the model itself might be broken.

There’s a conversation happening right now about women “falling behind” with AI and honestly, I’m finding it really unhelpful.

High-profile voices have joined in to reinforce the message, with a mixed response. Reese Witherspoon has encouraged women to engage with AI to avoid being left behind. Her efforts have been received poorly in many quarters, particularly considering her role as a book-to-screen producer and the fact that AI is trained on copyrighted works.

At the same time, Sheryl Sandberg of “Lean In” fame has been speaking out in support of initiatives to address the growing gender gap in AI usage. (I’ve got my own set of issues with the whole “Lean In” philosophy, but that’s another article for another time.)

Right now, all the data is suggesting that women are reporting lower daily use of AI tools than men. Meanwhile, we’re also hearing speculation that women’s roles are more likely to be taken or transformed by the technology. From here, it’s logical to conclude that we have a problem that’s going to impact women and their career progression.

That assumption needs closer examination.

What no one is questioning

This narrative relies on a set of assumptions that haven’t really been questioned, being:

• It treats AI adoption as inherently beneficial (to whom?).

• It presents participation as necessary for relevance.

• It interprets lower usage as a problem that requires correction.

Most commentary presents these positions as facts, rather than arguments.

A group with a long history of managing the consequences of poorly designed systems, such as women have in the workforce, have every right to approach a new one with caution. That response is likely to reflect their experience, rather than a deficiency.

Hesitation is not the same as being behind

Many women manage the realities of how work operates in practice. Caring responsibilities, administrative load and the ongoing negotiation between professional and personal demands shape how they assess new tools.

According to the UN, women do around 75% of unpaid care work globally, which is worth around 40% of the global economy. It’s the work that keeps everything else moving. We manage households and schedules, kids and ageing parents. And just to underline that word in the first sentence of this paragraph, in case you missed it, we don’t get paid for it.

In some cases, hesitation to adopt AI might be due to concerns around privacy, sustainability, creativity or ethics. For others, it might also reflect a clear assessment of time, effort and trade-offs.

The current narrative removes that nuance, because it reduces the issue to a single variable: adoption speed. That simplification limits the conversation.

The pressure to keep up

Currently we’re seeing pressure to “keep up with AI” aimed at a group of people who already manage significant demands.

Experimenting with new tools and integrating AI into workflows adds to existing responsibilities. Those responsibilities often include raising children, running a business, managing health and handling daily logistics. Sometimes getting through the day is enough, without adding the need to develop one’s AI skills on top of that. In that context, deprioritising AI reflects a rational choice.

Honestly, your average woman might be forgiven for wondering why AI can’t be tuned to meet us where we are, and solve some of the problems we’re currently facing. Why are we being burdened with yet another responsibility to carry, when the fundamental role of any technology is to make life better in some way?

Where is the actual benefit?

There’s also an elephant in room that we simply don’t talk about enough. We’ve been promised that AI is going to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. So far, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, I’d argue that the world is in worse shape than it was when ChatGPT arrived a few years back.

Some organisations are seeing improvements. They’re reducing costs and claim to be improving efficiency. At an individual level, the value is less clear. Many people struggle to identify consistent, tangible benefits. Learning the tools requires time, and outputs vary in quality. There are significant concerns about environmental impact and workforce implications.

When individuals carry the burden of adoption while organisations capture most of the benefit, the entire premise deserves scrutiny. Why are we doing this at all, if it only benefits the few, rather than the many?

A position based on experience

At this point I also want to note that my perspective doesn’t come from AI hatred or avoidance. I adopted AI early because it directly affected my work. Writing was one of the first functions to face disruption, so engaging with the tools made sense. I even wrote a book about it last year.

Over time, my usage has changed. I now apply it selectively. In my process, the outputs aren’t always reliable, and after a while every piece of copy starts to sound the same, no matter how much I try to tune the model. Now I’d rather spend that time tuning my brain instead.

I think it’s a useful technology that isn’t being harnessed to its full potential right now. If as a society we were to create a balance sheet of pros and cons, I feel that it would be weighted to the con side right now. That’s something that could be corrected with greater public engagement in the development and adoption, plus regulation and oversight to manage the environmental, workforce, creative and ethical issues.

The question we should be asking

The current framing doesn’t distinguish between lower usage and deliberate choice. It treats every gap as a problem that requires correction.

I’d argue that a more useful line of inquiry is to examine what’s driving the push for universal adoption, which outcomes organisations prioritise and who benefits from those outcomes.

We also need to assess whether the expectation that everyone integrates AI into their work reflects genuine need or a combination of commercial incentive and momentum.

Let’s park the conversation around “women being left behind by AI”, take a step back and have this conversation instead:

Until a clear answer emerges, the focus on who is ahead and who is behind remains premature.

I posted something recently on Instagram about AI, cost cutting and corporate decision-making. I didn’t think it was anything particularly controversial - until the comments started.

My argument was that companies looking for ways to reduce overhead in a tighter economy should consider options such as flexible work for eligible staff, which has been demonstrated to deliver savings of up to $11,000 per worker annually through reduced overheads and real estate costs. What’s more, these options should be considered and tested before mass layoffs are rolled out as part of doing business ethically and sustainably.

(I also think companies should be made to demonstrate they’ve done everything they can to manage costs before cutting staff en masse, but I know that’s never going to happen.)

I found myself getting involved in a bit of back and forth with one person who took it upon himself to explain to me, in some detail, that payroll is the biggest cost for most companies, so of course companies cut people first. Most importantly, he really wanted me to know that if AI allows you to do more with fewer people, it’s a cost lever that should be pulled immediately.

His position was that it’s simply how businesses need to operate, especially listed ones, because that’s what fiduciary duty requires. And to be fair, none of that is wrong. I work on investor reporting and communications, so I know and understand that logic from inside the company. Your number one focus needs to be reducing costs and maximising profits to deliver to your shareholders. That means reallocating capital when it’s required and investing where the returns look stronger.

You can defend every step of that. What’s there to argue with, really?

What I’d like to argue with here

Mansplaining aside, it took me a little while to work out why I was so bothered with what he was saying. It wasn’t the logic, it was the boundary of the argument. The “shareholder value always comes first” argument only works if you treat the company as a closed system, and that is simply never the case.

Companies draw on shared infrastructure all the time. They benefit from public roads, energy systems, communications networks, regulatory stability and education systems that produce skilled workers. None of that sits on the balance sheet in the same way payroll does, but it’s foundational to how businesses operate.

When things are going well, the returns are clear. Company revenue increases without having to pull too many cost efficiency levers, which means more profits and benefits to shareholders.

Friction appears when the economy is tighter, like we’re experiencing right now. When decisions are made to reduce cost, the impact doesn’t stay neatly inside the organisation.

People lose income, which means households adjust spending. Communities absorb the change and governments pick up second-order effects through support systems and reduced economic activity.

Of course, no single company is responsible for that entire chain. However, they all contribute to it in some way, and it still exists. If multiple companies are trying to optimise at once to protect themselves, everyone carries the burden of that.

What gets measured, what gets absorbed

We have a system that measures and rewards financial outcomes very precisely, and treats everything else as secondary. Workforce impact is acknowledged, sometimes reported, but rarely carries the same weight in decision-making.

Decisions that are rational at the company level can produce outcomes that feel increasingly uneven at the system level. You can see it more clearly right now because of how those decisions are playing out.

It’s harder to ignore when those decisions aren’t even driven by acute cost pressures. We’re seeing companies that are delivering strong results and still reducing their workforce at scale. Oracle is one example.

Those moves are often framed as strategic. In Oracle’s case, they are cutting workers to redirect investment toward areas like AI and infrastructure. The forward story makes sense for the company. However, what’s missing from that story is the fact that these outcomes don’t happen in isolation, and the company’s current success has only been possible because of the support of the shared systems, resources and infrastructure that underpins growth - even if that’s not directly accounted for in financial reporting.

When decisions are made to reduce workforce at scale, the impact extends beyond the organisation, while the gains remain tightly held.

AI is accelerating the pattern

Right now, AI is increasing the perceived replaceability of labour. It strengthens the case for structural cost reduction and then allows those decisions to be executed faster and at greater scale.

The logic might be easier to apply, but the consequences don’t become easier to absorb. Far from it.

None of this means companies are acting irrationally. In many cases, they are doing exactly what the system asks them to do. And that is my point in a nutshell.

When every company optimises for its own position, using the same set of incentives, the effects accumulate across the system. They don’t remain within the firm. We’re starting to feel that accumulation right now, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

That gap has always existed to some extent. What’s changing now is the speed and scale at which it’s playing out. AI is making it easier to reduce labour, while market pressure is making it easier to justify.

Meanwhile, the systems that absorb the impact (households, communities, governments) don’t move at the same pace so the imbalance becomes more visible.

Where to from here

This isn’t about asking companies to act against their own interests. It’s about recognising that the current definition of those interests is incomplete. If companies rely on shared systems to grow, then the consequences of their decisions can’t sit entirely outside those systems. Right now, that’s exactly what happens.

Until that changes, we’re going to keep seeing the same pattern repeat: rational decisions inside the business, uneven outcomes everywhere else.

A lot of what we’re being told about work right now doesn’t hold up under scrutiny - particularly when it comes to corporate and white collar work.

We’ve reduced complex, structural changes to simple and often heated debates that are easy to argue about, but harder to act on. Office versus home; AI versus job security; flexibility versus productivity.

These are important conversations, but they’re also incomplete. Right now they tend to focus on what’s visible (the impact on individuals), while the underlying mechanics stay largely unexamined.

Meanwhile, people are trying to make real decisions about their careers based on incomplete information and the debates they’re hearing in the public domain.

The problem is not where you work

The work from home debate is a good example.

We’ve framed it as a question of location, as if performance is determined by whether someone is sitting at a desk in an office or at a table at home. This is simply not the case.

We don’t all work the same way, or need the same conditions to do our best work. Some people, like me, need quiet and stillness; others need collaboration and energy. Most need a mix that changes depending on the work they’re doing.

For a lot of organisations, the push back to the office has been framed about collaboration and performance, but there are also underlying concerns about visibility and control. It’s also about what leaders feel comfortable managing.

That’s a different conversation about trust, and whether employers have trust in their employees to do the right thing. And going one layer deeper - if employers don’t trust their employees to do the right thing, why are they hiring them in the first place and then retaining them in the workforce, rather than managing their performance?

Until that’s addressed, changing location won’t fix anything.

The AI conversation is running ahead of reality

At the same time, we’re being told that AI is about to fundamentally reshape the workforce. I believe it will, over time.

We’re already seeing tech companies like Oracle and Amazon laying staff off, and blaming AI for it. However, there’s a real question around what’s really driving those layoffs. Are the roles really being replaced like-for-like by AI, or are companies taking the opportunity to cut costs and redirect that budget into speculative AI investments, in the hope they pay off?

While it’s difficult to make any sweeping statements on this, the evidence suggests that the gap between what AI is promising and what’s actually working inside organisations is still pretty significant.

Most companies are still figuring out how to use AI properly, and the vast majority of AI pilot projects are failing. The workflows aren’t fully there, and the outputs still rely heavily on human judgement. In other words, they’re just not scaling into something usable.

Yet we’re already seeing decisions being made as if the capability is mature, with little to no public accountability for those decisions, which impact numerous lives. Not only in terms of those who have lost their jobs, but also the remaining team members who have to take on more work to pick up the slack, because AI isn’t capable of operating at the level of the worker who has been replaced.

Meanwhile, work might get faster, at least temporarily, but it doesn’t necessarily get better. The company loses capability and context gets lost. Shareholders might be happy with the numbers presented at the next quarterly update, but I don’t think they’re going to like the longer-term story.

Flexibility has been reduced to a policy tweak

We also need to continue the conversation around flexible work.

Several years ago, we were talking about how work was going to evolve to fit around people’s lives. Flexibility was meant to open up access for people who couldn’t operate within rigid, office-based structures.

In many organisations, it’s been reduced to a single day at home - if that option is even offered at all.

For people with caring responsibilities, for people managing complex lives or disabilities, or for people whose energy and focus don’t follow a standard pattern, that gap determines whether work is sustainable or not.

Individuals shouldn’t have to solve structural issues

A lot of this gets pushed back onto individuals to solve. We’re told to work it out ourselves, adapt faster or find something else to pay the bills.

However, many of the tensions people are feeling are not personal failings. And when so many people are feeling it at once, it’s reasonable to conclude this is the result of systems that have not kept up with how people actually live and work.

The friction often becomes visible at particular moments and life stages:

• When children start school and the structure of the day no longer aligns with corporate roles.

• When flexibility becomes something you have to negotiate rather than something built into the design of work.

• When there’s significant change ahead in the workforce, but no one is telling you what’s really likely to happen.

People feel like they’re struggling to keep up, when in reality they are operating inside systems that weren’t really built for them.

Why I’m launching Track Changes On

I spent years in senior corporate roles. I left to start my own consulting business, because the reality of corporate life no longer worked for me. With some distance, I’ve had an opportunity to look at what’s going in in that world with an impartial eye, and I can see there are some very deep flaws in what we’re being told and how we’re expected to operate.

I also work with a number of corporate clients on projects involving brand, change, AI adoption and culture, so I’m exposed to these discussions every day. I think a lot about how organisations communicate, how they adopt new technologies and how they structure work.

I know from first-hand experience there is often a gap between the narrative and the reality, and that it’s employees who are likely to suffer most because of that gap. This is why I’m going to try to fill in some of the blanks.

I’m building a place to go deeper on what’s happening at work and what it means for you. That includes:

• How AI is being used in practice, not just what’s being promised.

• How corporate structures are changing, and where we need more visibility and accountability.

• What flexibility actually looks like inside organisations.

• What to pay attention to if you’re starting to question your own path inside the corporate world.

Ultimately I want to help you make sense of the environment you’re operating in, so you can make better decisions as you navigate it.

If you’re starting to question things

If you’re starting to feel like there’s a gap between what you’re experiencing and what you’re being told, that’s probably not your imagination. You may also be feeling like corporate work no longer fits the shape of your life. You’re definitely not alone there.

If you’re trying to work out whether to stay, change roles, or do something else entirely, we should find strength in numbers. Many are walking the same path as you right now, and many have gone before you. I was one of them.

In my experience, most people don’t talk about what they’re feeling that openly. We tend to sit with our dissatisfaction, or make moves behind the scenes. I think it’s time we have more frank and open discussions about what’s really going on in corporate life, and what people are feeling right now.

Track Changes On is here to host those conversations. Subscribe to join the discussion and support my work.

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