I suspect I’m not alone in that. Everyday I hear from people on social media who are all having remarkably similar experiences. Maybe your manager insists they never said something you remember very clearly. Maybe a decision gets rewritten after the fact. Or you raise a concern about something, and somehow end up defending your interpretation of it rather than discussing the event itself.

Gaslighting has become one of those words we reach for when something like this happens. I use it jokingly myself, including with my ten-year-old when he tries to convince me something happened very differently from the way I remember it.

However when I started looking into gaslighting at work, I found the concept was more complicated than I’d assumed. I’d always thought intent was fundamental. Someone had to know what really happened and was deliberately trying to convince you otherwise, just to mess with you.

However, that’s not necessarily the case.

What counts as gaslighting at work?

For background, the term comes from the 1938 play Gas Light, later adapted for film. In the story, a husband manipulates his wife into believing she’s losing her mind. Among other things, he changes the gas lights in their home and then denies anything’s changed when she notices.

The original story captures an important aspect of gaslighting, because it goes further than lying or disagreeing with someone. True gaslighting seems to be when the behaviour starts undermining the other person’s confidence in their own perception of reality.

The workplace version of this is still a relatively new area of research. We don’t have a reliable estimate of how common it is, and researchers are still working through exactly how it should be defined. What we do know is that individual behaviours associated with workplace gaslighting can look… well, pretty ordinary really. Things like:

• A manager making you a promise and then denying it later

• Someone misrepresenting something you said

• Someone senior dismissing a concern you’ve raised or redirecting the conversation to make you the problem instead

• Being told you’re imagining things.

On their own, none of those behaviours necessarily constitutes gaslighting. Researchers highlight the fact that gaslighting sits separately from other forms of workplace mistreatment - such as lying, manipulation and bullying - although there may be some overlap. The key factor to consider is how the behaviour develops over time, and whether it starts undermining your confidence in your own interpretation of events.

Some workplace research allows for gaslighting to be intentional or unintentional. In other words, you don’t necessarily need a manager to be consciously plotting how to make you doubt yourself for it to be classified as gaslighting behaviour. The pattern of their behaviour tells you far more.

How you might experience gaslighting

Unfortunately, the impacts of this sort of behaviour can extend well beyond an irritating relationship with a bad manager. Research into gaslighting describes increasing self-doubt and reduced trust in your own ability to make decisions and interpret reality.

In a practical sense, it can really slow you down and make your working day a lot less productive. You may start checking and double-checking emails you would have previously drafted and sent without a second thought. You might start keeping detailed notes because you’re worried you’ll remember something incorrectly. You could find yourself spending time after meetings checking in with colleagues to ask whether they heard the same thing you did.

The emotional and psychological impact can be even more insidious. The workplace literature also discusses people withdrawing, staying silent, taking time off and wanting to leave the organisation. At that point, someone else’s behaviour is consuming your mental energy, even when they’re nowhere near you.

Is it gaslighting, poor management or something else?

It can be very difficult to tell if what you’re experiencing is gaslighting, poor management, a dysfunctional workplace or something else.

Imagine your boss tells you on Monday that a piece of work is due on Friday. On Wednesday, they ask why you haven’t delivered it. They insist the deadline was always Wednesday.

On its own, this doesn’t tell us much. Your manager might have forgotten, or they might have changed their mind and failed to tell you. Perhaps there was a genuine misunderstanding.

Now imagine it keeps happening. When you question the discrepancy, your manager tells you that you misunderstood the conversation. Or perhaps you’re too literal, or you always seem to get confused about instructions. You may even be told that this is something you need to work on. Their mistakes somehow keep becoming feedback about you.

After enough of these interactions, you might start wondering whether they’re right. Maybe you are misunderstanding things. Perhaps your memory isn’t as reliable as you thought.

That cumulative pattern is much closer to what researchers describe as workplace gaslighting. However, it can be very difficult to recognise the pattern while you’re inside it, because each individual incident can have a plausible explanation. It’s often only when you look back that you can see how seemingly unrelated events fit together.

The importance of introducing evidence

One of the key tests you can run to see if you’re experiencing is introducing evidence to each incident. Let’s go back to our deadline example from earlier to see how that would work.

Your manager says Wednesday. You remember Friday. Then you find the email, and it says Friday.

In an ordinary disagreement, that should settle at least the factual question. Your manager might say, “You’re right. I did say Friday. The deadline changed and I should have told you.”

However, what happens if that doesn’t resolve the situation? Perhaps they tell you that they mentioned the new deadline verbally, or that you should have known what they meant. They might even say that everyone else understood and you’re being pedantic by producing the email.

In this situation, the evidence hasn’t resolved the discrepancy. The conversation has moved away from what happened and towards whether you can be trusted to interpret what happened correctly.

If that happens once, I wouldn’t read too much into it. If it keeps happening, you’ve got a pattern that could point towards gaslighting behaviour.

What you can do about it

If you recognise some of this, you’re probably wondering what you can do about it. I should say here that I’m not an expert in diagnosing or supporting people who are experiencing gaslighting or any sort of bad workplace behaviour, so this is general advice only.

First of all, I don’t think your first priority should be proving that your boss is gaslighting you so you can take your case to HR. You don’t need that label to do something about it. You may never know what they intended, after all.

Instead, start documenting what happens. If your manager gives you an important instruction verbally, follow it up in writing. Keep records of significant decisions, deadlines and feedback. When something changes, record the change.

Most importantly, record what happens when you try to correct the record or introduce evidence. Does the other person acknowledge evidence? Can the two of you disagree without your memory or competence becoming the issue? Can a misunderstanding actually be resolved?

If, however, you seem to always end up back in the same place, where somehow you’re the unreliable employee who needs coaching, you might have a problem on your hands.

It can also help to talk through specific incidents with someone you trust. Ideally, you want someone who can give you another perspective rather than automatically tell you that you’re right. Sometimes distance makes a pattern easier to see.

Gaslighting or not, the behaviour is important

If you started reading this article because you were trying to work out whether you’re being gaslit at work, I’m probably going to leave you with a slightly frustrating answer: you may never know for certain.

You may never know what someone intended. In fact, it’s highly unlikely most of us will be able to neatly separate gaslighting from dysfunction, terrible management or some combination of all three. That being said, perhaps you don’t need to.

What you can know is what happened. You can document conversations and decisions, record what changes and pay attention to what happens when you produce evidence. Over time, you can stop trying to explain each incident and start looking at the pattern.

Then you need to look at what that pattern is doing to you. Are you constantly second-guessing yourself? Checking conversations because you no longer trust your memory? Becoming less confident in decisions you once would have made without thinking twice?

You don’t need to prove that someone is gaslighting you before you can decide their behaviour is unacceptable, and you certainly you don’t need their agreement about what happened before you can decide what you’re going to do next.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

Have I ever told you about the pub test?

Some of you in Australia will know the term, or perhaps have another name for it. When I worked in PR and media management, we used it as a pretty simple reputational test for when SHTF and we needed to step in and manage the situation. Forget the internal explanations, policies and carefully constructed talking points for a moment. If you explained what was happening to a bunch of ordinary people at the pub (or bar, if you’re in the US), would they think it sounded reasonable?

Here’s a de-identified example from my own career.

Let’s say you work for an organisation that provides safety-critical rescue services. Some of your employees rescue people from burning structures and vehicles, which means they need to train regularly for dangerous situations.

Now imagine that somewhere along the way, someone injures themselves using a tall ladder during training. The organisational response is that employees can no longer train on ladders above a certain height. Let’s say it’s… oh I don’t know, one metre, or around three feet for our imperial system friends. There’s a whole committee working through the issue. There are safety requirements and risk considerations behind the decision. Inside the organisation, everyone thinks this is hunky dory.

Then the media finds out, and suddenly the story is essentially: people whose job involves rescuing others from dangerous situations aren’t allowed to practise using a ladder more than a metre off the ground.

And now imagine you’re the head media person who has to defend it when the press gets hold of it at 3pm on a Friday (yes, that was me). Good luck with that - there goes your weekend.

We call that failing the pub test. A company can have an entirely rational internal explanation for a certain decision, and it still sounds absurd and indefensible once it leaves the building.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because an extraordinary amount of corporate life fails the pub test. That’s what I’m writing about next week, so I just wanted to give you something to chew on until then.

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These days, because I work for myself, I’m pretty ruthless about what qualifies for one. If we’re going to have a meeting, I want to know what we’re there to work out. Usually I’ll have a set of questions I want answered or there’ll be a specific problem that genuinely benefits from talking it through.

Once we’ve done that, I’m very happy for everyone to leave. Talking for the sake of talking simply isn’t my thing.

I will admit that sometimes meetings are the best way to get something done. However, what I struggle with is meetings that exist purely because someone thinks we should have a meeting, or if they’re obviously trying to find a way to create forward movement on something by pulling me into it - rather than simply sitting down and thinking things through.

If there’s no real purpose to the conversation, my attention wanders pretty quickly. You’ll probably see me looking at my watch and wondering how soon I can politely escape. You can be sure I’m thinking about other things I need to do instead, and adding very little of value to the discussion.

Working for myself has made me much more conscious of this, because every hour I spend in a meeting is an hour I’m not doing something else. However, back when I worked in corporate roles, I didn’t question it nearly as much. I may not have liked meetings, but I accepted that they were part of the rhythm and infrastructure of corporate life.

The thing is, I know that I’m far from alone in my dislike of excessive meetings. We complained about it a decade ago. People are still complaining about it constantly on social media now.

And yet, we keep having meetings anyway. Don’t you think that’s a little… weird?

Meetings are work you can see

My personal dislike aside, do meetings actually provide the collaboration and productivity boost companies seem to think they do? Well, the jury is out on that one.

One 2022 study of more than 600 employees estimated that companies were investing more than US$80,000 per professional employee each year in meeting time. More than US$25,000 of that was potentially tied up in meetings employees felt they could skip, provided someone kept them informed about what happened. These are estimates rather than direct measures of financial loss, but they give some sense of how much paid working time meetings can consume.

So how did something so resource-intensive become such a dominant way of working?

For starters, meetings are very good at making work visible. I’ve written before about performative work and the tendency some organisations have to confuse visible activity with performance. Meetings fit neatly into that category.

Think about the person with the completely full calendar. They’re in back-to-back meetings and almost impossible to get hold of. They certainly look busy. Meanwhile, someone else has blocked out half the afternoon to solve a difficult problem or create something that requires sustained concentration.

Many companies have always had trouble with measuring and appreciating certain types of knowledge work, simply because it’s harder to observe. You can count how many widgets someone produces on a production line. It’s much harder to assess the value of someone thinking through a problem at any particular moment.

A meeting removes some of that uncertainty because everyone is visibly occupied, yet a full calendar tells you very little about the value someone is creating.

Meetings can also create a sense of progress. There’s a difficult problem, so someone gets everyone together to discuss it. You leave with some actions and feel like something has moved forward. That may be true, or it may be that a group of people just spent an hour talking about the work that still needs to happen afterwards.

There’s safety in deciding together

Meetings provide another psychological function, and it’s related to one of the most basic of human needs - safety. Yes, much of the time it feels safer to make a decision together than to make one alone.

Research into collective decision-making has found that sharing a decision with other people can reduce some of the psychological burden of being personally responsible for its outcome. People can also experience less regret following a group decision than when they make the decision individually.

Anyone who has spent enough time in corporate probably recognises some version of this.

“I’ve decided this is what we’re going to do” feels very different from “We discussed it in the meeting and this is what we agreed.”

In the second version, the decision belongs to the group.

There are obviously good reasons to involve other people in decisions. They may have expertise you need or be directly affected by the outcome. However, in many corporate environments is seems to be the case that collective decision-making becomes the default, rather than the exception.

I’ve been in plenty of meetings where I’ve wondered why so many people were required to make a relatively straightforward decision. Bringing more people into a decision may make it feel safer, while making ownership (and therefore efficiency) less obvious.

When meetings reflect status and hierarchy

Then there’s the question of who has influence once everyone gets into the room.

A major review of around 30 years of meeting science found that hierarchy and status can affect who speaks and whose contributions carry weight. Senior people can dominate airtime, meaning something that looks collaborative can still reproduce the existing power structure of the organisation.

Authority and expertise aren’t necessarily held by the same people. Sometimes the meeting is genuinely collaborative; and sometimes it’s performance theatre around a decision, where the direction of that decisions was largely determined by the hierarchy before everyone arrived in the room.

So why don’t we just cancel them?

No, I’m not advocating for a blanket ban on meetings. They’re genuinely useful for some kinds of work. If you’re dealing with a complicated problem, there can be enormous value in getting the right people into a conversation at the same time.

Real-time communication also gives us information beyond the words themselves. We hear tone and see facial expressions. We can notice confusion or disagreement and respond to it immediately.

However, we need to be cautious when “let’s have a meeting” becomes the default response. That’s when the meeting becomes part of the infrastructure of the organisation, and you have what’s called a “meeting culture”.

If you want an update, you wait for the meeting. If you need a decision, you put it on the agenda. If something changes, you organise another meeting to tell everyone.

In some companies I’ve worked with, a recurring meeting gets into the calendar and can stay there for months or years without anyone seriously questioning whether it still serves a purpose. Eventually, the meeting itself becomes the process.

As an employee, it can be difficult to “solve” a meeting culture, because there are complex social dynamics at play. It’s never as simple as hitting “decline” on that invite for a meeting you really don’t need to be involved in.

In practice, if your manager invited you, you probably go. If everyone else on the leadership team is attending, opting out can send a message you may not want to send. Being invited to an important meeting can itself signal that you’re involved in whatever is happening.

Even when you suspect the meeting isn’t a good use of your time, you still know you need to attend. So attend you do - and there goes another hour.

A simple meeting test

In my own business, I have a simple test for whether or not a meeting is required. I always ask the other person:

What are we actually here to work out? What needs to happen as a result of getting these people together?

It’s also critical to understand the difference between a meeting topic and a meeting purpose. A topic tells you what you’re going to talk about. A purpose tells you what needs to be accomplished by getting everyone together.

“Project update” is a topic. The next question should be: what do we need to work out about the project? Perhaps there’s a problem the team needs to resolve or competing views that need to be discussed. Now you have a reason for a meeting.

“Marketing WIP” is also a topic. If everyone is simply going around the room reporting what they’re working on, that information could probably be shared another way. If there’s something the group needs to work through together, the meeting has a clearer function.

If you need to work through a complicated problem together, a meeting might be exactly the right tool. If you need a decision and the people attending have the information and authority to make it, great.

If you simply need everyone to know something, it’s worth asking whether ten people really need to stop what they’re doing at exactly the same time to receive that information.

Before you book another meeting

The more I’ve looked into this, the less I think our meeting problem is really about meetings. It’s about what we’ve come to rely on them for.

We use meetings to make work visible, move information around an organisation and make decisions feel safer. Over time, those habits become embedded in how a company operates. Then we wonder why telling people to “have fewer meetings” doesn’t make much difference.

You can cancel a recurring meeting. It’s much harder to change the culture that made everyone think they needed it in the first place.

I think it’s always worth coming back to one question: what are we actually meeting to do?

If nobody can explain what the meeting is supposed to accomplish, perhaps the empty space in everyone’s calendar would be more productive.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

Well, that didn’t last long.

Last week, I wrote that I was taking a break from thinking about AI because I’d become exhausted by where the conversation was heading.

Literally minutes after I hit publish, news broke that an OpenAI agent had gained unauthorised access to an Australian Government Medicare statistics portal. The agent had been given a research task involving public medicine spending. When it was denied access to information, the Australian Government says it engaged in “misaligned behaviour” and found another way in. No personal Medicare records were accessed, but the agent did access non-public files.

So much for my resolution to not think or talk about AI for a while.

This week I’ve been thinking again about the question of AI’s social licence.

For the first few years of generative AI, I approached the technology with a sense of cautious optimism. I didn’t love the idea of it, but it was here and advancing quickly, so the sensible response seemed to be to understand it and work out how to use it responsibly.

My position has changed considerably over time. I’m no longer convinced adoption should be the default while we work out the consequences afterwards.

There’s a growing trust problem here. People are worried about what AI means for their jobs. Creatives are fighting over copyright and the use of their work. There are legitimate concerns about environmental impact and what increasingly autonomous systems mean for cybersecurity.

The Medicare incident adds another dimension, because the agent apparently crossed a boundary it hadn’t been instructed to cross. The Australian Government has described the incident as serious, even though its impact was relatively minor.

From where I’m sitting, impact is irrelevant. We shouldn’t have to wait for something catastrophic to happen before asking where responsibility sits when increasingly autonomous systems behave in ways their developers didn’t intend.

If AI companies want society to accept more powerful and autonomous systems, I think the burden increasingly sits with them to demonstrate that those systems deserve that trust - or accept heavy regulation or a moratorium.

Technological capability alone doesn’t create social licence. AI now needs to earn it.

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There are some fairly obvious reasons for that. Work is a commercial relationship with boundaries around it. You’re being paid to be there and, unlike your actual family (hopefully!), your employer can get rid of you when the numbers no longer work.

However, when you dig a little deeper, there’s another problem with the family metaphor. If your workplace is a family, who are the parents - and who are the children?

Think about how a traditional family operates. Parents set the rules and make decisions on behalf of their children. Children ask permission. Ultimately, the parent gets the final say.

That dynamic makes sense if you’re raising a child, but it’s a little weirder when everyone involved is an adult. And yet, companies recreate versions of this relationship all the time.

In fact, it’s such a common dynamic that there’s even a term that helps explain it: workplace infantilisation - or when companies treat employees like children by imposing a level of supervision, permission or control that doesn’t match someone’s competence or the responsibility they’ve given them.

“We’re like a family” fits neatly into this dynamic. Researchers have examined how family language can cast managers as parental authority figures and employees as the children expected to accept that authority.

When you start thinking about it that way, “we’re like a family here” takes on a rather different meaning.

We’ve normalised asking permission

Corporate life is littered with examples of the parent-child dynamic. We accept an extraordinary amount of permission-seeking as part of having a job.

Take annual leave (as we call it here in Australia, or PTO for my US audience). An adult asks another adult for permission to take a day out of their statutory entitlement. The manager can say no because the needs of the business take priority that day.

Obviously there’s a genuine operational need for this. A business can’t have an entire team disappear at once and still expect everything to operate normally. However, it’s also worth examining the underlying dynamics, and whether the better approach would be to “inform and negotiate” about taking time off, rather than approaching it as a permission-seeking exercise.

Sick leave is another example. Let’s say you wake up with gastro or a migraine. You know you can’t work that day. Depending on your employer’s policy, your assessment of your own health might not be enough. You may need a doctor to confirm that yes, you really were sick.

Again, employers will sometimes be justified in seeking medical evidence. Extended absences or particular circumstances can justify asking for documentation. However, is it really necessary for a single sick day for a trustworthy employee? Why do some companies still have policies in place that require every employee to prove they’re telling the truth - rather than assuming they can be trusted as a default?

The same dynamic appears in everyday decision-making. Companies hire experienced professionals, give them responsibility for important work, then require approval before they make relatively minor decisions within their area of expertise.

Of course, companies sometimes need controls in place. There will always be situations and decisions where oversight and process are required. However, the fact that a rule or a cultural norm exists doesn’t automatically make it reasonable.

When I was in my last corporate role, which was littered with policies and procedures, I often used to find myself wondering whether the level of control matched the actual business need. Did this decision genuinely require approval? Did that employee need supervision here? What risk were we actually managing?

When you’re routinely asking experienced adults to seek permission to make decisions that sit comfortably within their experience and responsibilities, accountability starts to look a lot more like paternalism.

Take ownership, ask permission

Companies love telling employees to take ownership. You’ve probably heard a version of it if you work in corporate - “be proactive, make good decisions”.

Then it’s so often the case that someone does make a decision and hears: “Why didn’t you check with me first?”

Human beings tend to learn quickly from experiences like that. If making a decision independently gets you questioned, you start checking with your manager. If escalating something protects you from blame later, you take it up the chain. We’ve all found ourselves copying someone senior into an email because you want a record that they knew what you were doing.

Soon, asking permission becomes the safer way to work. When you ask your manager and get approval, you share responsibility for what happens next. If you make the decision yourself and your manager doesn’t like it, you’re suddenly in the position of having to explain why you didn’t ask first.

Companies can effectively train people out of working independently this way - then you often see those same companies complain that employees don’t take enough initiative.

While it may look like individual reluctance to take ownership, what you could actually be seeing is a reflection of what people have learned about the consequences of doing exactly that. When employees discover that independent decisions carry more personal risk than seeking approval, they adapt their behaviour accordingly.

What the research says about this

One meta-analysis I came across brought together 72 studies examining autonomy-supportive leadership. These managers gave employees meaningful choice in how they did their jobs and avoided unnecessary control.

The research associated that management style with higher job satisfaction and employee engagement, along with better wellbeing. It also found an association with lower levels of workplace distress.

It’s also worth noting that the concept of “autonomy” doesn’t mean giving employees permission to do whatever they want. A company can set clear expectations and hold people accountable for meeting them. Similarly, managers can define the boundaries around a role and intervene when someone repeatedly makes poor choices.

However, what happens when companies give people responsibility for an outcome without giving them enough authority to make the decisions required to achieve it? You own the outcome, but someone else still needs to approve every move you make.

As an employee, it’s difficult to take that version of ownership seriously.

The link to workplace trust

I’ve written before about the gap between what an organisation says about itself and what employees actually experience.

Perhaps your company says it encourages innovation, but you have to wait months to get anything new approved. Or it says people are its greatest asset while repeatedly making decisions that suggest otherwise.

Trust and autonomy work in much the same way. A company can tell employees it trusts them as often as it likes. However, if people still need approval for relatively minor decisions, or have to justify where they’re working from, or need to prove they really were sick, those experiences will tell them far more about the organisation than anything written in its company values.

Meanwhile, workplace infantilisation might start with a micromanaging boss, but companies can also build it into the way they operate.

You see it in approval processes that require four people to sign off a decision an experienced employee could reasonably make themselves. You see it when companies monitor whether people are at their desks or online, instead of assessing them by the work they produce.

Trust still needs boundaries

Am I suggesting companies should abandon all controls and let employees go completely “free range” to get the best from their workforce? No, I am not.

Some employees do take advantage of trust. People “chuck sickies”, as we say here in Australia, or take sick leave when they’re not actually sick. Some employees misuse flexible working arrangements and others avoid making decisions because they genuinely don’t want the responsibility. In those cases, managers will sometimes need to intervene to keep the team functioning.

However, the fact that those employees exist doesn’t automatically justify building every workplace process around the assumption that nobody can be trusted. In fact, in my experience the vast majority of people can be trusted, particularly when you treat them like adults.

The key consideration is whether the level of control matches the actual risk or business need. Does the control solve a genuine problem? Or does it exist because the company assumes employees won’t make reasonable decisions without someone watching them?

It’s an important distinction to make, because blanket controls don’t only affect the person who might take advantage. They also affect everyone who would have done the right thing anyway.

They send the long-serving, trustworthy employee to get a medical certificate when they already feel terrible. They leave an experienced professional waiting for approval on a decision they could’ve made yesterday.

Eventually, we shouldn’t be surprised when everyone understands the need to prove they’re trustworthy over and over again, regardless of how long they’ve worked there or how much responsibility the company has already given them.

I don’t need a corporate parent

At the end of the day, most employees need to understand what they’re responsible for and have enough authority to do their job. The employer can then hold them accountable for any decisions made.

That also requires managers to accept something that comes with trusting adults: sometimes an employee will make a decision their manager wouldn’t have made themselves.

There’s also a useful test for how much ownership a workplace really gives people. The next time someone senior at your work complains that employees aren’t taking enough ownership, look at what happens when someone actually makes a decision.

Does their manager accept the decision when it falls within that person’s responsibilities, even if they would have chosen differently? Or does the employee hear: “Why didn’t you ask me first?”

People will always learn from experience what their workplace expects from them. Tell someone to take ownership while repeatedly teaching them that independent decisions cause problems and they’ll start seeking approval. Eventually, the company gets a workforce that has learned to ask permission rather than make the call. Then management wonders why nobody takes ownership.

We don’t need corporate mums and dads. We’re adults. If companies want us to take ownership, they need to trust us to do it.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

Or, more correctly, one thing I’m trying NOT to think about this week.

I’m actually going to stop thinking about AI for a little while. I know that sounds strange given how much I talk about it here, but I’m finding the current discourse genuinely exhausting.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had people involved in building frontier AI publicly discussing the possibility that these systems could pose an existential risk to humanity. We can argue about whether that risk is 10 per cent, 1 per cent or a tiny fraction of 1 per cent. Nobody actually knows.

The only conclusion I can reach is that either the people building these systems genuinely believe there’s a material risk of catastrophe and are continuing anyway, or we’ve reached a point where apocalyptic language has become normalised around an industry with enormous commercial and political power. There are other interpretations, but I can’t find one that makes the situation feel particularly reassuring.

I find it outrageous that this is where the public conversation about AI has ended up, while the broader trajectory remains essentially unchanged.

So I’m taking a break from it. No AI commentary from me for a little while. I’m going to think about something else. There’s plenty happening in the world of work that doesn’t involve debating whether the technology we are enthusiastically building might eventually kill us.

And frankly, I could use the rest.

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Paid supporters also get a more direct line into what I cover, including sending me your workplace dilemmas, career questions and corporate nonsense for possible discussion in the newsletter, podcast or social content. Plus regular subscriber-only live events, if that’s your sort of thing!

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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 and drinkware for corporate rebels

📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

I call this personality based feedback. Perhaps you’re told to watch your tone, because someone thinks you’re too abrasive, bossy or emotional. Or perhaps you need to be more approachable, or you could soften your delivery.

The problem with feedback like this is that it tells you very little about what you actually did wrong.

If I yelled at a colleague, tell me I yelled. If I insulted someone, tell me what I said. If I repeatedly interrupted people in meetings, tell me that. Those are specific behaviours I can understand and change.

On the other hand, if someone tells me that people have concerns about my “tone”, things become considerably murkier. What was wrong with it? What should I have done differently? Was I rude, or simply direct? Did I behave badly, or did somebody dislike the way I disagreed with them?

The gender feedback gap

While many women report anecdotally that they have received personality based feedback at work, there’s also research to support the pattern.

One analysis of performance reviews from 28 technology companies found personality criticism in 71 of the 94 critical reviews received by women. Among men, it appeared in just two of 83. A much larger analysis of more than 23,000 performance reviews found women received 22 per cent more personality-based feedback than men.

The words used are revealing too. In the smaller study, women were described as abrasive, bossy, strident and aggressive. You’ll notice that these are all assessments of how someone is experienced by other people, rather than descriptions of a specific behaviour they can change.

Of course, women can behave badly at work. We can be rude, aggressive and terrible managers, just like our male counterparts. When that happens, it should be addressed. The bigger issue here is the additional judgement women seem to face about the kind of person they are while doing their jobs.

And “watch your tone” is only one version of it. Women can also find themselves being assessed on whether they are sufficiently warm, approachable or likeable. There are expectations around smiling and appearance, and commentary on whether a woman is too assertive or perhaps simply takes up a little too much space.

The extra work of being likeable

For many women, this creates an additional layer of work alongside the job itself. You’re doing the work, while also paying attention to how you’re being experienced by others while you do it.

It becomes particularly complicated for women in leadership roles, because many of the behaviours organisations expect from leaders require authority and assertiveness. Research suggests women can demonstrate those behaviours and be regarded as competent, while still paying a social penalty because they are considered less likeable. This is sometimes described as the competence-likeability double bind, if you’re interested in reading more on that particular phenomenon.

This also might explain why the advice that women need to be “pleasant” to get ahead in corporate life has persisted for so long. And pleasantness at work can encompass far more than the words you use.

There are expectations around smiling and appearing approachable. A large meta-analysis involving almost 60,000 people found women smile more than men on average, with the gap increasing in some situations when people knew they were being observed or were navigating socially tense situations (hello, workplace politics).

The research doesn’t tell us that women who fail to smile are penalised at work, but it does suggest is that smiling itself is gendered social behaviour, which we can reasonably assume carries over into the workplace.

Then there’s the matter of appearance. Women can also find themselves navigating expectations around how they dress and present themselves professionally, adding another dimension to how they’re assessed at work.

Put all of this together and you start to see the amount of monitoring that can sit around an otherwise ordinary working day for your average woman. Am I being too direct? Do I seem approachable? Should I soften this email? Did I come across as rude? Am I dressed appropriately? Should I smile more?

While none of this work appears in your job description, for many women, it can become part of doing the job.

Is there a link to corporate burnout?

It would be too simplistic to argue that these expectations explain why women end up burning out at work. The research doesn’t support that conclusion.

What we can say is that women experience greater emotional demands at work in terms of managing their behaviour and appearance, while certain forms of emotional labour are associated with burnout. Women also continue to do considerably more unpaid work outside their jobs, with recent research from the Australian Bureau of Statistics data putting the difference at around an hour a day minimum among people doing unpaid work, with more for parents of young children.

When you step back to look at the bigger picture, it’s no wonder so many women end up feeling exhausted by the load they’re carrying at work and at home (me included).

Give feedback people can actually use

So should we stop giving women difficult feedback? Absolutely not. Good managers need to address poor behaviour, regardless of who’s responsible for it.

However, they also need to be precise about what that behaviour really was. If someone yelled at a colleague, repeatedly interrupted people in meetings or made an insulting comment, say so. Explain what happened and why it was a problem, so the person has something concrete to reflect on and change.

“Watch your tone” doesn’t do that. Neither does “you’re abrasive”, “you need to be more approachable” or “you can come across as aggressive” without specific examples of the behaviour behind those assessments.

Given what we know about the gender gap in personality-based feedback, managers should be particularly careful about reaching for these descriptions when giving feedback to women.

First, stop and ask yourself what the employee did. Would you describe the same behaviour in the same way if a man had done it? Are you responding to something inappropriate, or are you uncomfortable with the way this particular person exercises authority or communicates? Do you not like the fact that they’re disagreeing with you, or correcting you when you’re wrong?

We all need to be self-aware at work

Self-awareness matters for all of us at work. As human beings, we all have a responsibility to understand how our behaviour affects the people around us. That being said, women shouldn’t have to spend their working lives trying to make themselves sufficiently pleasant and inoffensive while they do it.

We hear companies saying they want strong female leaders who can make difficult decisions and speak with authority. They might need to get a little more comfortable with how those women act and present themselves, and what they really sound like.

A small update to Track Changes On

Track Changes On and the social media content I’ve been making over the past few months started as a side project. I was interested in what was happening to work, particularly as AI started changing the conversation, and I wanted somewhere to talk about it.

I didn’t expect it to grow as quickly as it has. I also didn’t expect it to awaken a part of my career that I thought I’d left behind.

I started my professional life as a journalist. I loved finding interesting stories, or taking a complicated subject and making sense of it for someone else. Somewhere along the way, Track Changes On has brought me back to that.

I’d love to see how far I can take it. I want to do more original reporting and keep building Track Changes On into something that becomes a bigger part of what I do. In that spirit, I’ve switched on a paid subscription option from this week to anyone who is feeling generous and wants to offer some extra support to my project.

I’m not taking anything away from free subscribers. Supporters simply get a little more access and the chance to have a little more influence over what I cover.

So if you like what I’m doing and you’d like to help me keep building it, you can now become a paid supporter for $7 a month, roughly the price of a coffee, or $60 a year.

What do you get?

First, a more direct line into Track Changes On. Paid supporters can send me the workplace dilemmas, career questions, corporate absurdities and subjects you think deserve more attention. I’ll regularly choose submissions to respond to or explore through the newsletter, podcast and social content.

I’ll also run monthly supporter-only live chats and Q&As, where we can get into some of these conversations together.

And then there’s the Corporate Survivor option.

For $120 a year, you get everything above, plus something a little more personal. Tell me the thing about corporate life that drives you completely mad and I’ll turn it in one of my corporate themed mugs, designed specifically for you. I’ll create two concepts, you choose your favourite and I’ll have your one-off mug printed and sent to you.

And if you just want to keep reading and listening for free, please do. Nothing is disappearing behind a paywall. The main Track Changes On newsletter and podcast will stay free.

Paid subscriptions are simply a way for those of you who want to get a little closer to what I’m building to help me take it further, as I go down this new path in my career.

Subscribe now

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 and drinkware for corporate rebels

📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

Now, let me start by saying I don’t generally look to Reese Witherspoon for technology strategy, or know that much about her at all, to be honest. I do know she’s done a lot of work supporting female authors through her book club and production company, which is partly why seeing her talking so positively about AI struck me as an odd fit. After all, authors and writers have been among the creative professionals raising concerns about generative AI and the use of their work.

However, amongst all the oddness, one thing lingered in my brain long after the video itself had disappeared off my screen. That phrase, left behind by AI.

Strangely enough, soon I started seeing it everywhere. It’s not just women who can’t afford to get left behind by AI, apparently. Workers need to reskill or get left behind. Companies need to become AI first or get left behind.

(From the sounds of it, AI might be moving at a pace that simply doesn’t suit the rest of society, but I digress.)

I’ve spent a large part of my career in marketing and communications, which means I know a fear-based sales pitch when I see one. And right now, I think fear is becoming one of the AI industry’s most effective marketing tools.

From FOMO to fear

The first wave of generative AI marketing relied heavily on what you might call fear of missing out, or FOMO. This is the positive side of fear-based marketing, where you tell people what they stand to gain from your product or service.

In this case, we heard a lot about how AI would transform your business, and that early adopters would gain an advantage. The possibilities were enormous and the people and companies that moved first would reap the rewards.

While there’s still plenty of that around, another type of message has become increasingly prominent. It focuses on the consequences of not adopting AI. This is when you scare someone into thinking something is going to happen to them if they don’t consume whatever you’re selling.

Thinking about this in the context of AI, we’re now hearing that companies who don’t go “AI first” will fall behind their competitors. If you work in corporate, you’ve probably consumed some version of the message that your career will suffer or you’ll even become obsolete if you don’t use AI. Essentially, you’ll get left behind.

Then there’s the version of this sentiment that I dislike most of all, perhaps because I question the inevitability of anything in this life apart from death and taxes:

When you think about it, this is actually extraordinarily effective marketing because inevitability changes the burden of proof in the commercial transaction.

Normally, if you want me to buy an expensive enterprise technology, you have to prove why I need it. You, as the person selling me the technology, would need to help me make the business case, which would include the anticipated return on investment.

On the other hand, if your approach is to convince me that your technology is inevitable, suddenly the burden of proof moves solely from the side of the person selling the solution. Your prospective customer is now in the position of defending the decision not to buy it.

After all, no CEO wants to explain to their board why they ignored AI while their competitors embraced it. Fear has started doing some of the work that the business case ordinarily would.

While fear-based marketing isn’t unethical in itself, in this case it should bother us because the business case is far from settled with AI, particularly in terms of its inevitability.

Yes, there’s reasonable evidence that generative AI can improve productivity in particular tasks. There’s much less evidence that those productivity improvements consistently translate into the enterprise-wide financial returns required to justify the scale and urgency behind every AI investment now being made.

Just because a tool can help one employee complete a task faster, it doesn’t automatically mean a company should reorganise its entire workforce and strategy around that tool.

And yet, here we are. Some very big bets are being made right now, with as yet untested returns.

The perfect sales loop

It gets even more interesting when the fear moves from companies to individuals.

There’s credible evidence that women use generative AI less than men. Women are also disproportionately represented in occupations exposed to AI-related disruption.

What the AI industry has done is taken those findings and turned them into a social issue. Lower adoption becomes a gender gap. The gender gap becomes a threat to women’s economic progress. And what do you know, greater AI adoption becomes the solution.

There’s just one problem with this reasoning. We don’t yet have credible evidence that women who use more generative AI get promoted more, earn more or have greater job security because of it. There’s a leap from A to B that’s yet to be proven.

Now, that doesn’t mean learning AI is a bad idea for women. What I have an issue with is the fact that we have turned an observation into a prescription without first establishing that the observation even needs a prescription.

And what should make you very cautious is the fact that the prescription happens to be commercially excellent for the companies selling AI… who are also the ones who created the problem, and are now marketing it to the world as the pressing social issue of our times.

It’s a conflict of interest of epic proportions. The technology creates disruption. The industry warns us about that disruption. The answer to avoiding the disruption becomes greater proficiency with the technology. It’s a near-perfect sales loop.

What makes it even more effective is that AI companies no longer need to deliver the message themselves. We’re seeing influencers on social media repeating it, and consultants telling businesses a version of the message. You might follow career coaches who are talking about it. Eventually we even start repeating it to each other.

That’s how you know marketing has done its job - when the sales proposition starts to feel like common sense.

What if we’re future-proofing the wrong skills?

As anyone juggling a busy life and career will know, professional development has an opportunity cost. Every hour spent learning one capability is an hour unavailable for another.

For someone with limited time, is learning the latest AI tools really a better career investment than deepening their professional expertise? Developing management capability? Becoming better at making commercial decisions?

Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. We simply don’t know the answer to that yet.

There’s also emerging research suggesting we need to consider how AI is being incorporated in our professional development, if we choose to do so. There’s a difference between learning how to perform better with AI; and using AI to become better at the work itself.

AI can help someone complete a difficult task they couldn’t previously complete. Let’s say you previously had trouble writing well - now, you can produce written content with AI. Does that actually make you a better writer, or enhance your writing skills? Almost certainly not. This is because the technology itself can remove some of the cognitive effort through which you learn to complete difficult tasks in your own right.

In one randomised study, students with unrestricted access to ChatGPT performed substantially better while they had it. When the AI disappeared, they subsequently performed worse than students who had learned without it.

This isn’t conclusive evidence that AI will deskill the workforce over time. We simply don’t have enough long-term evidence to know what happens to professional development over a career.

Again, that’s the point. We don’t know yet. So why are we accepting the messaging about AI fluency as though we already know it’s the only way to future-proof a career?

When predictions start creating reality

When you create a narrative around inevitability and urgency without enough evidence, there’s a risk that the prediction starts influencing the decisions that make the predicted future more likely. (Yes, a bit of a brain bender there, I know.)

Tell workers AI skills will be essential and they prioritise them. Companies invest in AI training and redesign jobs around the technology. Work that once developed underlying expertise gets automated and workers become increasingly reliant on AI to perform it.

Eventually, AI proficiency really is essential, and we point to that reality as proof the original prediction was right. Except by then, we’ve helped create the conditions that made it true. And right now, the AI industry has an outsized role in shaping the decisions that will determine what the future of work looks like.

Do we really want to let that happen?

Inevitable is doing a lot of work

I say this often, but I’m not “anti AI”. I think there are many promising applications and I also think companies should experiment with AI and invest where they can demonstrate that it creates value, without losing sight of their broader obligations to society.

What I reject is the idea that because AI exists, the direction of travel has somehow been decided for us.

Nothing about how companies use AI is inevitable.

Nothing about which skills we choose to develop is inevitable.

Nothing about which parts of our jobs we automate is inevitable.

We still have choices. If we treat AI as inevitable, we risk turning those choices into foregone conclusions before we have enough evidence to make the right decisions on our own terms.

At the end of the day, perhaps Reese Witherspoon will be proven correct, and women who don’t embrace AI really will be left behind. Or the companies reorganising themselves around AI today will dominate their industries tomorrow. Maybe the workers spending their professional-development time becoming AI experts are making exactly the right bet.

I’d be the first to admit all of those things are possible. What I find remarkable is how quickly possible became inevitable - and how conveniently that inevitability benefits the very people who are selling us the future.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

I had one of those moments this week when you realise you might be close to making it as a content creator: people have been stealing my content.

To be fair, it’s happened before in isolated incidents. This week there just seemed to be a small outbreak of it across different social platforms.

My first reaction was irritation. My second was genuine confusion. As someone who takes my content seriously and would never knowingly steal someone else’s ideas or words, I don’t really understand the mentality. Have you no pride? Do you not want to have ideas and a voice that are actually yours?

It also felt strangely relevant to this week’s AI discussion. AI has made it easier than ever to replicate and repackage other people’s thinking. Which arguably makes original thinking more valuable.

There’s also a very obvious flaw in building your content around copying someone else. By the time you’ve spotted my idea, copied it and put it in front of your audience, I’m already working on the next one.

So copy someone else if you must. It won’t change the fact that you’ll always be two steps behind them anyway. 🤷‍♀️

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 and drinkware for corporate rebels

📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

Others arrive just as I’m waking up in the morning, or after I’ve spent 20 minutes walking around my house aimlessly because I can’t seem to solve something sitting in front of my computer.

From the outside, none of this looks particularly productive. I’m not typing or moving a mouse. My Teams status, if I had one, would have long since switched to Away.

Yet that time can be the most productive part of my day.

I started thinking about this after reading about how sophisticated employee monitoring has become. Companies can - and are - monitoring keystrokes and mouse movements, alongside the more familiar indicators of whether someone appears to be online through the colour of their Teams status.

Sometimes I can’t help but wonder what we’re actually measuring. There’s a big difference between a performance culture and a performative one. And when organisations confuse the two, I think they’re in danger of encouraging employees to spend more time demonstrating they’re working, rather than doing their best work.

Activity as a proxy for performance

We hear a lot about performance cultures in the corporate world. Usually, the term refers to a workplace where people make a measurable contribution to whatever the company is trying to achieve. (I mean… really? Shouldn’t that be all cultures? But I digress…)

A performative culture is a little different. It becomes preoccupied with whether people look like they’re working or behaving in a certain way. Depending on the company, that might mean keeping track of how often someone is online, how quickly they respond to messages, whether they’re visible in the office or how much activity a piece of software can detect on their computer.

Of course, there are jobs where activity measures are important. If you work in a call centre or contact centre, availability is part of the job. The organisation needs people answering calls at particular times. The same applies to many operational roles, where physical presence or availability forms part of the service an employee provides.

However, what happens when companies take measures suited to activity or availability based work, and apply them to skilled knowledge work? If you’ve hired someone to develop a strategy, solve a complicated problem, write something or come up with an original idea, what do you really learn about what they’re doing by counting the number of times they’ve touched their keyboard or moved their mouse?

I’d argue very little.

When a company employs an experienced professional, it’s purchasing their skills and expertise. If you’re paying someone to think, then measuring how often they touch their keyboard tells you very little about whether they’re doing their job well.

When good work happens away from the desk

There’s research to support the idea that good work can happen away from the desk - and that in some cases, it may be necessary to be away from the desk for better work to happen.

In 2014, Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz conducted four experiments looking at walking and creative thinking. They found that walking enhanced the creative process. Interestingly, walking in the great outdoors and walking on a treadmill indoors produced similar effects.

There’s also a larger body of research into what psychologists call the incubation effect. Essentially, you work on a problem, put it aside for a period when you hit some kind of mental block and then return to it later.

A meta-analysis by Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod found evidence of an incubation effect in problem solving. The effect varied according to the type of problem, with particular benefits for divergent thinking tasks, where people are generating different possibilities or ideas.

This tells us something important about knowledge work. Productive cognitive work doesn’t necessarily look like continuous, machine-like activity. Sometimes stepping away from a problem is part of solving it.

Companies might have become very good at detecting activity; many are yet to understand how they can detect thinking.

What happens when employees know they’re being watched?

In some cases, surveillance could actually be detrimental to employee performance. A 2023 meta-analysis of electronic performance monitoring looked at 94 independent samples covering more than 23,000 workers. The researchers found no evidence that electronic performance monitoring improved worker performance. They did find that monitoring was associated with increased worker stress.

There’s also another problem with measuring visible activity. People tend to respond to what their employers measure.

If a green Teams light is treated as evidence that you are working, you have an incentive to stay green.

If immediate responses to emails and messages demonstrate engagement, you’re likely to interrupt focused work to answer messages.

If staying late signals commitment, people learn to stay late - even when they’re putting themselves at risk of burnout.

Unfortunately, none of these behaviours necessarily improve the work.

In this context, a performative culture becomes more than an annoyance. It also means the company can end up distorting the very behaviour it’s trying to measure. Management sees more activity, but some of that activity now exists only because employees know management is looking for it.

The performance of collaboration

I’m seeing the same problem in the current debate about return-to-office mandates. One of the most common arguments for bringing people back into offices is collaboration.

There’s undeniable value in working with people face to face in particular circumstances. Sometimes I’d much rather sit down in a room with someone and work through a problem than have another Teams meeting. But does office attendance itself provide evidence that collaboration is happening?

A company can bring 500 people into a building on any given day and record every access-card swipe. Ultimately, all it’s demonstrated is that 500 people came into the office. It hasn’t demonstrated that they collaborated more effectively or produced better work.

When the performance starts hiding the real performance

Performative cultures can be genuinely dangerous for companies. Once employees understand which signals management values, those signals become less useful as evidence of performance.

A full office might mean people are collaborating brilliantly. It could also mean they’re sitting in a different building doing exactly what they would have done at home.

A packed calendar might reflect important collaboration. It could also be preventing someone from getting their actual work done.

A green Teams light tells you someone is online. It can’t tell you whether they’re solving the right problem.

Meanwhile, some of the most valuable contributions people make are inherently difficult to observe. Maybe someone spots a problem before it becomes an expensive mistake, or challenges a bad decision. Or someone spends half a day thinking and finds a much better approach. None of those things fit neatly onto an activity dashboard, but for many professionals, it’s where we add the most value.

Measuring the work that matters

Companies need to know whether employees are performing, but they also need to get better at choosing measures that reflect the work itself.

Physical presence matters in some jobs, while others have meaningful activity measures. Skilled knowledge work is harder to observe because thinking and problem solving rarely happen in neat, measurable increments.

A performance culture focuses on the value people contribute. A performative culture rewards them for producing the appearance of work. Perhaps it’s time for companies to stop rewarding the appearance of work and start paying more attention to the value people actually produce.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

Last week I wrote about whether companies still value our time, including my discomfort with the idea of “reasonable overtime”. I questioned the assumption that employers should have an ongoing claim on employees’ personal time, particularly when additional hours become necessary because roles have been cut or workloads have grown.

One commenter responded to this on Instagram by pointing out that reasonable overtime clauses have been standard in employment contracts for decades and changing that would be difficult. While this is a mostly accurate statement, it really bothered me.

“This is the way things are done” has never struck me as a particularly compelling reason to keep doing something. Established practice tells us how the current system developed, but it doesn’t tell us whether that system still works.

And right now, there are plenty of reasons to examine some of our assumptions about work. People are unhappy, and the boundaries of the working day have become harder to maintain. Companies are cutting workforces while expecting productivity to increase. AI is changing how much work one person can produce. We’re still arguing about where people should be allowed to work.

Many of our current employment practices were developed in a world where the working day had much stronger physical boundaries. You went to work and, for the most part, you went home. We now carry work around in our pockets and can be contacted almost anywhere, at almost any time. If the conditions surrounding work have changed that dramatically, I don’t think “we’ve used this wording for decades” is a particularly persuasive argument for leaving the underlying bargain untouched.

A system under this much pressure deserves scrutiny. We should be willing to question the assumptions underneath it and ask whether they remain appropriate for the world we live in now.

Change can’t happen without those conversations. Someone has to question the thing everyone else accepts. People will disagree about the answer, and some ideas will prove impractical. That discussion is part of working out what comes next.

So when I hear “that’s how it has always been done”, I tend to hear the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one. I’m much more interested in asking whether we can do it better.

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 and drinkware for corporate rebels

📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

The first was having a child a decade ago. Before that, staying late at work or giving up a few hours on a weekend didn’t necessarily feel like a big deal. It was my spare time. I might have preferred to be doing something else, but there was always more of it.

Having my son in 2016 changed that calculation. For the first time in my life, I understood the trade-off - an hour I gave to work became an hour I was potentially taking from him. He was only going to be little once, and there was no way to bank those hours and claim them back later.

The second “aha” moment around the value of my time arrived when I left corporate five years ago and started my own business.

Working for yourself gives your time a very obvious economic value, particularly when you’re a provider of any professional services. My time is one of the things my business sells. If I spend five hours doing something for someone for free, that’s five hours I can’t spend doing paid work. There are no magical extra hours in my day.

Somewhere between becoming a parent and starting a business, I became much less comfortable with something I’d accepted for much of my corporate career - the idea that companies are somehow entitled to our time beyond what they actually pay for.

Even more recently, it’s become clearer to me that this is about more than boundaries and respect for other people’s time. I think that fundamentally, companies simply don’t value our time in the same way we do.

When someone else’s time becomes free

Unpaid overtime and asking employees to go “above and beyond” is one thing. However, you can see a clear posture of time being devalued before someone even joins a company.

Many recruitment processes now require candidates to invest a significant amount of time just to be considered for a job. That might look like an initial screening call, multiple interviews, assessments, psychometric testing, presentations and take-home tasks.

For the person who gets the job, some investment of time is reasonable. What about everyone else?

The funny thing is that companies certainly understand the value of their own people’s time. Senior executives have carefully managed diaries, and recruiters have to account for the internal resources required to run a hiring process. And yet candidate time sits outside that calculation, and it’s rarely considered.

I suspect recruitment processes would become dramatically shorter if candidates collectively started demanding compensation once they passed a reasonable threshold. The moment candidate time carries a price, there will be an immediate incentive to use less of it.

But underneath all this behaviour, what’s going on structurally? Why have we become so comfortable with giving up large quantities of our time to companies for little or no compensation?

The work day has lost its boundaries

The historian E.P. Thompson explored the relationship between work and time in his 1967 essay Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.

Before industrialisation, much work was organised around tasks - something needed doing and people organised their labour around completing it.

Industrialisation changed that relationship. Factories needed people in particular places at particular times, because machines operated to schedules. As a result, work became increasingly organised around the clock.

The employment bargain that emerged makes intuitive sense in that environment - you sold your employer a defined block of your time, then eventually you clocked off and went home. You weren’t expected to work once you left the premises, and indeed you couldn’t.

Modern corporate work has inherited much of that model, even though many of the conditions that created it have disappeared. Today, we have laptops and phones. We have email, Teams and Slack. We can work from an office, our kitchen table or an airport lounge.

While that flexibility has brought genuine benefits, it’s also created a fairly large problem. If we can work from anywhere, we can work everywhere. At any time. For many knowledge workers, there’s no physical moment when work actually ends.

In other words, we’re still working under an employment model based on companies purchasing blocks of our time, while progressively dismantling many of the boundaries that once contained the time they purchased.

There’s no such thing as reasonable overtime

In Australia, we often see phrases like “reasonable overtime” appear in our work contracts. I have a major problem with this wording. If I’ve signed a contract saying I work 38 hours a week, surely 38 hours has to mean something.

Of course, urgent things happen. I run a business, and I understand that sometimes a client needs something faster than expected or circumstances change. The difference is that in business, we have mechanisms for dealing with that. We change the agreement, or we swap deliverables. We charge a rush fee or add the additional work to the scope.

If you’re running your business properly, you never give away that work for free. I’d be surprised if your company was comfortable with giving away free time, services or products to its clients or customers. Yet that’s often exactly what many employers seem to expect from their employees.

Doing more with less has a cost

Consider what’s happening in the corporate world right now. Many companies are cutting roles, and people are leaving and not being replaced.

Perhaps some of their work disappears, or some of it may be automated. However, in many cases much of it gets redistributed among the people who remain. Senior leaders then report increased productivity and celebrate “doing more with less”.

Again, I have a problem with this scenario. We need to be careful about what we’re measuring and reporting. There’s a significant difference between productivity improvement and work intensification.

If some improvement in the business allows me to produce the same amount of work with less effort, that’s a genuine productivity uplift. On the other hand, if you remove two people from my team and I have to work harder or longer to absorb a significant proportion of their work, the organisation has achieved something quite different. My personal time has become the buffer between the amount of labour the company purchases and the amount of work it wants completed.

If a role routinely requires 45 or 50 hours of labour every week, we need to stop pretending it’s a 38-hour job. When this happens, the company needs more labour than it’s purchasing, and employees are supplying the difference.

Who gets the AI productivity dividend?

We hear constantly that AI will make corporate workers significantly more productive. What does that look like in practice?

Imagine AI allows me to complete in 30 hours the work that previously took 38. What happens to those eight hours? Do I receive some of that time back through greater flexibility? Does the company receive eight additional hours of output? Do we share the benefit?

I suspect we know what will happen in many organisations - the space will simply be filled with more work. Which leaves us with the question… if becoming more efficient means someone immediately increases my workload, why would I advertise the fact that I can now complete something in half the time?

It also raises a much bigger question about the productivity gains we expect AI to create: who gets them? Particularly when so much of our shared resources as a community are going towards allowing AI to run at scale in the first place?

If AI genuinely allows society to produce the same amount with substantially less human labour, we have a choice about what we do with the time it saves. Companies can capture all of it through increased output; or workers can receive some of that productivity dividend through greater ownership of their time.

What needs to change?

Perhaps the future of flexible work isn’t really about whether we spend two or three days in an office. Maybe we need to think about what we’re actually selling to our employer.

For some forms of knowledge work, we could move towards a model that places greater emphasis on outcomes. The organisation defines what needs to be achieved and establishes genuine requirements around availability, deadlines and collaboration. The company and the employee then sign a contract to that effect. Employees have greater control over how they organise the rest of their time.

Whichever model we use, there’s one question we can’t avoid forever:

Do companies really value our time?

There’s a common thread running through these themes of lengthy recruitment processes, unpaid overtime, workforce cuts and the productivity gains promised by AI.

Companies value time differently depending on whose time it is and who bears the cost. Waste 100 hours of executive time and the organisation has a problem. Waste 100 hours of candidate time during recruitment and it’s not really seen as an issue to anyone bar the candidate.

If a company needs another 500 hours of labour each month after cutting its workforce, hiring people to provide those hours creates a visible expense. If existing employees absorb those hours through heavier workloads or unpaid overtime, much of that cost disappears from the company’s accounts. Meanwhile, the time hasn’t become free. Someone else is paying for it - the employee.

I understand that more acutely now than I did when I was younger. Money comes and goes. So do jobs and clients. Time with the people you care about does not.

Whether you’re an employee or a candidate, the next time a company asks you to donate time it hasn’t paid for, please don’t treat it as insignificant. And perhaps most importantly, we should never view someone’s willingness to give that time away as a measure of their commitment or ambition.

If time is the employment bargain, the boundary around that time needs to mean something. If outcomes are the bargain, people deserve much greater control over the time they use to achieve them.

Perhaps that’s going to be the true definition of flexible work in the future - a move towards giving people greater ownership of the one thing they can never replace. Their time.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

I’m glad I became protective of my time when my son was younger, because at 10, apparently I’m now deeply embarrassing.

My social media content is “cringe”. My mugs “suck”. Everything I do seems to be met with the particular disdain only a 10-year-old can deliver.

Then, every now and again, something happens that reminds me I’m still very much required. Like getting a call at 10am on a random Tuesday to tell me my son had parked himself on the ground in the middle of a street in busy North Sydney on the way to a school excursion to the library. He was refusing to go another step without me. So being the dutiful mother that I am, off I went.

It made me think about all those hours I protected when he was little. The times I chose him over staying late or decided that whatever was happening at work could wait. I’m so glad I did.

Yes, the version of your child who wants all of your time and thinks you’re amazing does eventually disappear. Eventually they’re replaced by someone who thinks your mugs suck.

Then the phone rings on a random Tuesday morning and you remember they still need you. Even when you’re totally cringe. (He’s right, by the way. I probably am.)

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 and drinkware for corporate rebels

📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

And you know what - maybe that’s true… for now. Companies focused on short-term efficiency are already looking at specialist roles and asking how much of the work AI can do instead. If the answer they come up with is enough to reduce headcount and costs, the immediate business case can look pretty compelling.

However, I think there’s a longer-term consideration that many people are missing:

What happens to specialist expertise when fewer people can make a sustainable living developing it?

Can companies really get by without specialists in their workforce indefinitely? And even if they can for a while, what happens in the meantime? What might those decisions cost them - as well as the broader knowledge base that powers our economy - a few years down the track?

Specialist expertise has to come from somewhere

While many specialists produce outputs - whether that be a piece of written content, a design, a piece of code, or anything else that companies are trying to hand over to AI - they also produce expertise. And that expertise takes years of sustained practice to develop.

I know this from my own experience as a writer. I’ve written since childhood and have since spent more than 20 years practising professionally. The writer I am today is the cumulative product of thousands of hours spent doing the work.

If there had been no viable way for me to make money from writing when I entered the workforce, I obviously would have found another career. I might still have written for pleasure when I had time, and I might still have had the underlying talent. However, I wouldn’t have had two decades of practice producing written content in a specialised commercial context.

For many specialists, your skills can wax and wane depending on how often you use them. I’ve experienced this during my career. As I moved into senior leadership roles, management took up more of my time and I wrote less. I could feel the difference. When I eventually returned to writing every day, it took time to get back into the rhythm. My skills certainly had certainly not progressed while I was using them less. If anything, they’d gone backwards a little.

Expertise needs practice. For most of us, paid work is what gives us the opportunity to practise at that level.

Short-term productivity, long-term cost

This is where I think the current corporate productivity equation starts to become more complicated. When a company decides it can operate with fewer specialists because AI can produce more of their work, it’s usually measuring the output.

How many articles can we produce? How quickly can we generate code? How much design work can we get through? How cheaply can we do it if we eliminate humans from the process?

It’s harder to calculate everything else that happens when people spend years developing deep expertise inside an organisation. If I’m writing every day, I’m not just putting words on a page. I’m also learning what works in a particular context. I’m encountering problems I haven’t seen before and working out how to solve them. I’m always learning from other writers and applying what I learn to the work I do.

That’s how much specialist capability develops. You do the work, encounter something difficult and become better at dealing with it next time.

In my experience, AI can produce an acceptable version of something based on knowledge that already exists. However, somebody still needs to know what good looks like. Somebody needs enough expertise to recognise when the answer is wrong or mediocre, or when the way something has always been done could be improved.

Those people don’t magically appear when you need them. They develop over years, and they can fall out of practice just like anybody else if they’re not being used.

Where do the next experts come from?

None of this would be particularly concerning if only a small number of companies were reducing their reliance on specialists. AI is different because the same calculation is being made across industries at the same time.

We’re already seeing concern about the disappearance of junior roles as AI takes on work traditionally given to people at the beginning of their careers. The immediate impact is fewer jobs, but I feel the longer-term consequence deserves more attention.

Junior work is how senior expertise begins. Nobody enters the workforce with ten years of professional experience. People develop it by doing real work in real organisations, initially with guidance and eventually with enough experience to make decisions themselves. If you remove enough of those early opportunities, the effects may not become obvious for years because today’s experienced specialists are still available. But they will become obvious at some point.

The same applies to established specialists. If AI makes their profession less economically viable, some will leave. Their knowledge doesn’t immediately disappear, but they are no longer spending their working lives extending it.

People will continue to write, paint, design and code because they enjoy doing it, however there’s a substantial difference between practising something when time allows and spending thousands of working hours solving increasingly complex problems. Paid work creates the conditions for that depth of practice.

Who keeps producing knowledge in the AI era?

This raises a bigger question about what happens to our collective stock of expertise when AI changes the economic conditions that support its development. In a 2026 working paper, AI, Human Cognition and Knowledge Collapse, economists Daron Acemoglu, Dingwen Kong and Asuman Ozdaglar examine how increasingly capable AI could change people’s incentives to acquire knowledge themselves.

Their work has a broader focus than specialist employment. They model a world in which people can increasingly use AI to access knowledge and make decisions without investing as much effort in learning for themselves.

Under certain conditions, this can eventually produce what the researchers call a “knowledge-collapse” state, where people continue to benefit from AI, even as the stock of general human knowledge declines.

It’s an interesting concept when applied to specialist work. Employment is one of the mechanisms that supports the development of expertise. A scientist can spend years conducting research because there’s an economic structure that supports that work. A writer or developer can spend thousands of professional hours solving problems and improving their craft for the same reason. If you take away enough of that paid practice, you potentially change the conditions under which new expertise gets created.

For organisations, the consequences may take time to become visible. Companies can reduce specialist headcount today while continuing to draw on experienced employees and decades of accumulated knowledge. But what happens, over time, when fewer people inside the organisation are developing the expertise required to improve on that knowledge?

Could organisations eventually create their own form of knowledge collapse?

The AI knowledge problem

There’s another piece of research that’s worth examining here. In 2024, researchers including Ilia Shumailov published a study in Nature examining what happens when generative models are repeatedly trained on data generated by other models.

They identified a phenomenon known as model collapse. Across successive generations, AI models tend to accumulate errors and and information from the original data gets lost. One of the key findings of the study is that continued access to original human-produced data remains important for future models.

Model collapse and the human knowledge collapse examined by Acemoglu and his colleagues are different phenomena, but taken together they expose an interesting dilemma for the future of knowledge and corporate work.

AI has been built using an extraordinary accumulation of human-created knowledge. Future AI systems still need reliable human-produced information to stay viable. At the same time, AI may reduce some of the opportunities and incentives that allow people to spend their careers developing specialist knowledge.

To put it simply, the key question is “who creates what comes next?”.

Fast-forward to 2036

A company that reduces junior specialist recruitment in 2026 may still have plenty of senior expertise available today. By 2036, the people who would have accumulated a decade of experience during that period may never have entered the profession.

Across an industry, fewer entry points mean a smaller future pool of experienced practitioners. If established specialists also leave because their work becomes less commercially viable, that pool narrows further. That means there’s no one to recognise weaknesses in existing approaches and encounter difficult problems that lead to new solutions.

For me, this also raises an uncomfortable question about the so-called corporate commitment to continuous improvement. If an organisation has become so reliant on AI that it’s more focused on reproducing what already works while becoming less capable of developing what comes next, can it really claim a commitment to continuous improvement?

What’s the true cost of cutting specialists?

I believe that company leaders making workforce decisions today must also think beyond the immediate saving.

Where will their specialist capability come from in five or ten years? Who will have enough experience to recognise when AI-generated work is mediocre or outdated? Who will understand the discipline deeply enough to improve on what already exists?

Right now, AI gives organisations access to an extraordinary amount of accumulated human knowledge. For that knowledge to keep developing, people still need the opportunity to become experts.

Cutting specialist capability may be relatively easy in the short-term. Rebuilding it a few years could be considerably more expensive.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

If you watch this week’s video, you may notice a chunk of hair sticking out from the side of my head.

Somehow, I managed to sit in front of a camera and talk for 15 minutes without noticing it. I only spotted it afterwards, and by then I didn’t really have the time nor the inclination to film the whole thing again.

So the hair chunk stayed in. And given what I’ve been talking about for the past couple of weeks, it actually feels quite appropriate.

AI avatars don’t tend to have random pieces of hair sticking out at odd angles. Humans do.

There’s plenty about AI that’s smoother and more polished than we are. I’m increasingly comfortable with the fact that my online presence doesn’t really need to be.

Sometimes the hair sticks out - and that’s perfectly okay.

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 and drinkware for corporate rebels

📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

If you struggled with writing before, you can now produce a passable piece of written content. If, like me, you have zero visual design skills, you can create an image (although the quality might be debatable). If you couldn’t code, these days you can build something that works.

That might feel incredibly liberating for you - a bit like a superpower. However, there are also people out there who have spent years developing those very skills you’re now able to turn over to a machine, and the experience of the last few years might feel very different for them. People like me - a writer who has been writing and reading for as long as I can remember. Someone who fell in love with words at an early age and treats writing like a calling, more than a job to do or something that makes me money.

I’ve been thinking about that difference a lot lately, particularly when I hear people say that it doesn’t matter if AI was used to create something, and that the only thing that matters is the output.

Here’s where I stand on this particular issue. AI didn’t acquire these capabilities from nowhere. They came from an enormous body of human knowledge and creative work - particularly people with specialist skills and subject matter expertise.

And if you ask many of us, it does matter where something comes from. It matters a lot.

Same technology, different experience

I think part of the disconnect comes down to the difference between what I might call specialists and generalists, particularly in the context of corporate or knowledge work.

A specialist has usually spent a significant chunk of their career, or even their life, developing deep expertise in a particular craft, discipline or knowledge area. A generalist works across a broader range of skills, connecting ideas and people without necessarily having the same depth in one particular area.

Most of us sit somewhere between the two - and these days, I probably do too, although I started life as more of a specialist.

My career has broadened considerably over the years. I’ve worked across media, corporate communications, PR, marketing and leadership. Today, I run a business and advise senior executives, which requires me to draw on generalist skills.

However, while I’ve been able to develop those skills across my career, writing remains at the core of who I am as a professional, if not as a human being. It’s the specialist skill I’ve had for most of my life, and long before it became my profession it was something I loved doing.

I know I’m not alone in this. For many specialists, their expertise isn’t simply something they learned because it offered good career prospects. It can be something they’ve been drawn to since childhood. We all know of the musician who plays when nobody is listening, or the designer who works on their art on the weekends. Or even the developer who builds things in their spare time because they genuinely enjoy solving problems.

How the onset of AI felt as a specialist

I would write whether I was paid for it or not, and that’s probably why I found some of the early commentary around generative AI surprisingly difficult. When ChatGPT arrived, I started hearing variations of the same idea: “now everyone’s a writer”, or even “who needs writers anymore?”.

I don’t think the people saying it intended to diminish writers. For someone who had always struggled with writing, it must have felt like a gift from above to suddenly have the ability to produce something they were happy with, without having to pay someone like me to write it for them.

I was anything but happy when ChatGPT arrived. It was devastating for me to see something I had spent most of my life developing, and which formed a meaningful part of how I saw myself, being discussed as a problem technology had solved.

I’m sure there’s plenty of specialists out there, just like me, who recognise this feeling. And many of you may have been wondering over the past few years where the empathy for us has disappeared to, as the thing we love doing gets increasingly handed over to robots - often with a sense of glee and “goodbye to those pesky specialists!”.

AI didn’t learn this by itself

Here’s the brutal truth I need to remind you of, if you’re one of the many people out there who likes to say “it doesn’t matter how the content was created”.

AI isn’t some magic wonder tool that appeared in the world fully formed. Generative AI is only capable of writing, coding, illustrating and answering highly specialised questions because it has been trained on enormous quantities of human-created material. It’s the end product of decades of accumulated knowledge created by people who became very good at what they do.

I’m deliberately not going to get into the legal arguments about how that material was collected and whether permission should have been required. Those questions are being debated elsewhere, and are still being fought through the courts.

The reminder I want to provide today is that AI’s capabilities came from somewhere. They came from people. People who spent a lot of time getting good at what they do, and are now being told in various ways that they no longer matter.

Provenance always matter, even with AI

This is the key reason I struggle with the argument that it doesn’t matter how something was created, as long as the output is decent. We don’t generally think that way about other things we consume - but somehow that’s become acceptable to some people in the context of AI.

We’ve become increasingly conscious of where our clothes are made and the conditions of the people who make them. We want to know where our food comes from. We care whether products have supply chains we’re comfortable supporting. The finished product doesn’t render those questions irrelevant.

While I’m not suggesting the ethical issues surrounding AI training are equivalent to exploitation in global supply chains, I am making a point about provenance. Where something comes from still matters, even when we’re perfectly happy with the thing we receive at the end.

And if you’re a specialist, the phrase “it doesn’t matter where it came from” can land particularly badly - because “what it came from” was people like you.

So when someone says the provenance doesn’t matter because the output is good enough, what they may intend as an empowering observation can sound very different from the other side. It can sound like the original contribution doesn’t matter either.

Am I asking you to stop using AI?

Believe it or not, no. I’m not asking anyone to stop using AI because some specialists are uncomfortable with what’s happening. If AI has given you the ability to do something you previously struggled with, I can understand why you’re excited about it.

What I’m asking for is a little empathy for the people experiencing the same technology from a very different position.

If you’re a project manager who has always struggled to write, having AI help you produce a report might feel like a superpower. If you’re running a small business and can suddenly create your own marketing materials, that might save you money you simply don’t have.

For someone who has spent 30 years becoming a writer, illustrator or developer, things might feel a little more complicated. People like me are watching technology become increasingly capable of producing the kind of work they’ve spent much of their lives learning how to do. At the same time, we’re hearing people celebrate the fact that specialist expertise is becoming easier to access.

You can be excited about what AI makes possible for you while recognising that someone else might feel differently about what it means for them.

If it doesn’t matter, why not disclose it?

This brings me to something I’ve been thinking about more seriously: disclosure. If AI played a significant role in creating something you’ve produced, I think you should consider saying so.

I’m not talking about using AI to check your spelling, help with research or suggest a better way to structure a sentence. I mean using generative AI to substantively create the writing, artwork, code or other work that you’re presenting. If it doesn’t matter where it came from, why not tell people?

There’s no accusation embedded in that question. Using AI isn’t inherently dishonest and disclosure doesn’t need to be an admission that you’ve done something wrong. It’s simply transparency about how the work was produced.

We already accept this principle elsewhere. Labels tell us where products were manufactured. Businesses increasingly provide information about their supply chains because consumers want to understand more than what they see in the finished product.

I think there’s a reasonable case for bringing some of that thinking into AI. Disclosure acknowledges that the process matters alongside the output. It recognises that these capabilities have a provenance, and that human expertise sits behind them. It’s also a small way of showing some consideration for the specialists whose work helped make your current opportunities possible.

If your position is genuinely that it doesn’t matter how something was created because only the output matters, disclosure shouldn’t be a problem. On the other hand, if the idea of telling people you used AI makes you uncomfortable, it could be worth asking yourself why that is.

Perhaps where the work came from matters more than some of us are willing to admit.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

While I was writing this piece, I found myself wondering what’s next.

AI has made specialist capabilities much more accessible, but what happens if that also makes it harder for people to earn a living developing those capabilities and knowledge in the first place? What if the gifted artist no longer makes a living from designing, or the writer from writing, and so on?

There’s some fascinating research emerging around AI’s continued dependence on fresh human-generated knowledge, and the risks of models increasingly learning from synthetic material.

This raises the question I want to explore next. If AI still needs human expertise, what happens if we stop giving people a reason to develop it?

Until next week… I’ve got some research to do!

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 and drinkware for corporate rebels

📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

Back then, we were at the peak of “bring your whole self to work”, “diversity and inclusion” and “psychological safety” fever. (I mean seriously, as we should be. The fact that human beings even need to be told to behave with care and respect in the workplace is a sad indictment on where the world is at right now.)

However, over the past few years I’ve noticed a growing number of commentators and leadership voices arguing that empathy has gone too far - that it makes weak leaders who can’t make difficult decisions, presumably because they’re too busy crying in the corner rather than getting stuff done.

I don’t want to give any of these people more airtime than they’ve already have, but if you search for titles such as The Sin of Empathy and Toxic Empathy, you’ll get a flavour for what I’m talking about.

It’s an idea that’s found its way into the corporate world, too. Every time I share content about empathy at work on social media, someone inevitably pops up to tell me that work is no place for empathy. Apparently it’s only hard-as-nails types who can successfully lead a company. Anyone who cares about other people’s feelings is likely to be chewed up and spat out.

I have to laugh at this take, because I think it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding - that empathy and decisive leadership are incompatible. This is simply untrue, and it’s a dangerous narrative if we want to maintain safe and healthy workplaces.

Empathy isn’t the enemy of good judgement. In fact, it’s a critical enabler of sound and balanced decision-making.

We’ve confused empathy with agreement

This might be controversial, but I believe anyone who says something like “empathy has gone too far” or “there’s too much empathy in the world” probably isn’t familiar with the true definition of empathy.

Empathy isn’t about keeping everyone happy, and it’s not about avoiding conflict. Nor is it about refusing to make difficult decisions because someone might be upset.

In its simplest form, empathy is the ability to understand another person’s perspective before exercising your judgement.

Here’s an example not related to work. I have a 10-year-old son. Like most kids, there are plenty of things he would rather avoid. School can feel overwhelming some days, and other days broccoli is highly offensive to his palate. Dentists and vaccinations rank somewhere between unbearable and catastrophic.

As his mother, and an empathetic person, I understand why he feels that way. However, that doesn’t change the decision. He still goes to school and eats his vegetables, and he gets his flu shot and goes to the dentist.

Empathy changes how I approach those decisions, because it makes me think about how I explain them and how I support him through them. It helps me look for strategies to make the experience less daunting. My empathy hasn’t disappeared because I’ve made a decision he dislikes. If anything, it’s become more important.

Leadership in any form works much the same way - including in the workplace. An empathetic leader may still need to restructure a team or reject a proposal that someone has put months of work into developing. Empathy doesn’t prevent those decisions. It influences how they’re made and communicated; and how the people affected are treated afterwards.

Rather than being a weakness, empathy is one of the foundation stones of good leadership.

Better decisions require better information

One of the biggest misconceptions about empathy is that it somehow overrides commercial acumen. In fact, the two work hand in hand. Empathy gives leaders a fuller understanding of the human consequences before they make commercial decisions.

If you’re in a leadership role, you’ll know you rarely make decisions with perfect information. Every significant decision involves competing priorities and incomplete data. I know from experience that leaders are constantly balancing the needs of employees, customers, shareholders, regulators and communities, all while trying to achieve commercial outcomes.

Empathy helps you fill in some of those gaps before you make a decision. It helps you understand what different groups stand to gain or lose. It reveals unintended consequences that might otherwise be overlooked. It will also highlights risks that don’t appear in the strategic roadmap, but may emerge months later - particularly human risks, which are much harder to plan for.

Empathy in itself doesn’t tell you what to do, but it does allow you to make a more informed decision. Good leadership has never been about seeing only one perspective. It’s always been about weighing competing interests before deciding on the best course of action. Empathy makes that process stronger.

What this means for today’s workplace

Right now, corporate leaders around the world are making decisions with enormous human consequences. AI is reshaping jobs and workforces, and many companies are restructuring and rethinking how work gets done.

It would be incredibly dangerous for company leadership to treat any of this as abstract strategic exercises - shuffling chess pieces on a board to get the right outcome for your investors.

Each decision affects careers, families and communities. And while they deserve to be made with commercial rigour, they also require leaders capable of understanding how those decisions will be experienced by the people living through them.

If empathy is dismissed as weakness, companies put themselves at significant risk of making decisions through an unnecessarily narrow lens. In my view, organisations that rely solely on a commercial lens will never produce a balanced set of decisions.

Every major business decision affects employees, customers, investors, suppliers and communities in different ways. Leaders who fail to understand those perspectives should expect problems further down the track, whether that's lower trust, poorer engagement, reputational damage or unintended commercial consequences.

Choosing the right leaders

Companies routinely assess potential leaders on commercial and technical capability before being appointing them. Can they read a balance sheet and develop a strategy? Do they have the right operational experience?

While these are important considerations, we tend to pay less attention to whether they can genuinely understand the perspectives of the people whose lives they’re about to influence. This feels like a significant omission.

Like it or not, companies are social systems, made up of people and relationships. When leaders make a significant decision, they impact others in and around the organisation. They should be capable of understanding those consequences before they act.

Once again, that doesn’t mean making decisions that will keep everyone happy, but it does mean making every decision with a fuller understanding of its impact.

We’d never appoint someone to the C-suite who couldn’t understand a balance sheet. Perhaps we should be just as reluctant to appoint one who can’t understand people.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

Earlier this week I became irrationally annoyed with social media. More specifically, I became annoyed with everything on social media these days being about selling stuff.

I’m old enough to remember when social media promised something genuinely exciting. It was going to democratise publishing and create a place where ideas could spread without needing the platform of a traditional publishing house.

It wasn’t perfect, but it felt like ideas were the currency. Even the bad ones.

These days, every second post seems to be leading me towards a product, a download, a masterclass or a sales funnel. Sometimes the sales pitch arrives before the creator has even earned my attention.

I recently saw someone ask, “If you’re not selling something, what’s the point?”

That made me a little sad. And then angry, because it made me feel like I was behind because I’m not selling a course or a system, just my ideas (and some totally amazing coffee mugs and tumblers). Then I started thinking… what happened to sharing an idea because it was interesting? Or useful? Or funny? Or simply because it made people see the world differently?

Don’t get me wrong. I run a business and sell services and products too. Businesses have to make money. We’ve all got to live.

I just hope we don’t lose sight of the fact that ideas have value in their own right. Sometimes it’s enough to contribute something thoughtful to the conversation, without turning every piece of content into a step in the sales process.

Call me crazy, but if you have nothing to add to the conversation except hustle… maybe it’s time to stop talking so much.

... also, please buy my mugs. 😄

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 and drinkware for corporate rebels

📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

It’s definitely not perfect - and I’ve already got a list of things I need to do better for next time - but it’s here, it exists and it can be ticked off the list!

To celebrate this auspicious occasion, I wanted to revisit a topic I’ve been talking about for a while now - trust in corporate workplaces. A couple of months back, I posted a short Instagram Reel asking whether trust between companies and their employees is currently breaking down. I honestly didn’t expect to get much of a response from this particular piece of content, but the response ended up surprising me.

The video has now been viewed almost 300,000 times and I still see people from all around the world adding comments every day, each of them describing remarkably similar experiences. They talked about the stress and disruption of repeated restructures, broken promises, workloads that never seem to get any lighter and a growing sense that something fundamental has changed in corporate work.

My initial gut reaction was “there’s a lot of discontent out there”. But was it actually about a loss of trust? The more I read the comments, the less convinced I became. I started looking at the research, and that’s where things get interesting.

The research tells two different stories

The first place I looked was Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report. Every year, it tracks how employees around the world feel about work, measuring everything from engagement to wellbeing.

The findings here are pretty clear. After more than two decades of gradual improvement since the early 2000s, employee engagement has been falling over the past few years - since around 2022, when our satisfaction at work hit its peak. More people are feeling disconnected from their work and less enthusiastic about their employers than they were just a few years ago.

That finding strongly lines up with what we’re seeing on social media right now - discontent, anger, disengagement from employees. However, there’s another study I use quite a bit in my agency work that’s worth considering - Edelman’s Trust Barometer. It tells a slightly different story.

Every year, Edelman measures public trust in four major institutions: business, government, the media and NGOs. This year’s results found that employees still trust their employers more than any of the other institutions measured. In fact, trust in employers has remained relatively strong over the past few years, and has even increased slightly since the early 2020s.

How do those findings fit together? If employees still trust their employers, why is workplace engagement falling?

I think the answer to this lies in organisational psychology. More specifically, in the difference between two types of trust that shape our experience of work - and the dissonance employees experience when those two types of trust fall out of alignment.

The psychology behind the paradox

Organisational psychologists have long recognised that there’s more than one kind of trust at work.

The first is trust in the organisation itself, or what some researchers call institutional trust. It’s whether or not you believe the company you work for behaves ethically, treats its customers fairly and generally tries to do the right thing.

The second type is far more personal. It’s what we might call relational trust, or the trust that exists within our own relationship with our employer. It’s whether or not you believe that your hard work and contribution will be fairly recognised, that promises will be kept, and that your loyalty and commitment will be reciprocated.

One of the foundations of relational trust is what we call the psychological contract between yourself and your employer. Unlike your employment contract, the psychological contract is never written down. It’s the set of unwritten expectations that develops over time; and it shapes how fair and reciprocal the relationship feels on both sides.

When either party fails to live up to their side of this unwritten contract, or the terms are repeatedly broken, a psychological contract breach occurs. And this can be devastating, because it’s where trust is created and lives.

When the two types of trust don’t align

When times are good, these two forms of trust tend to reinforce each other, which is probably what we were seeing earlier in this decade. If you believed your organisation was ethical and well run, your own experience as an employee generally reflected that. The organisation’s values felt real, because you experienced them yourself.

For many people, that no longer seems to be the case. Your employer might still be a responsible organisation, which is what the data from Edelman is telling us. You might think that it genuinely cares about is customers and generally behaves in an ethical manner. There’s no corruption or illegal practices.

At the same time, your own experience may be one of repeated restructures, frozen salaries, increasing workloads or promises that disappear into the ether, almost as soon as they’re made.

From a psychological standpoint, it’s genuinely hard to hold two conflicting views of anything in our heads at the same time - and that includes who we work for. In an attempt to resolve the tension in our heads, we usually resort to a process called sensemaking, which I’ve written about before.

Sensemaking is our brain’s attempt to build a coherent explanation when our experiences no longer match our expectations. Unfortunately, sensemaking adds an incredible amount of cognitive load to your day-to-day existence. It’s invisible work, and you probably don’t even realise you’re doing it.

Not only are you trying to do your job, you’re also trying to interpret decisions, reconcile contradictions and explain away experiences that no longer seem to fit the relationship you thought you had. It’s exhausting, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this process is contributing to the rise in reports of burnout right across corporate right now.

How to protect yourself

My previous article on sensemaking at work offered some advice on how to protect yourself in this kind of contradictory environment. You can try looking for patterns rather than isolated moments, writing things down and talking to someone for an independent perspective.

On top of this, something else has become increasingly clearl to me over the past five years since I left corporate and started working for myself. I really needed a bit of distance to see it, but it’s incredibly important to understand.

Many of us still think about work as though the relationship between employer and employee is built on mutual loyalty. When times are good, and companies are looking to retain and attract employees, that feels like reality. It’s mutually beneficial to go “above and beyond” on both sides.

In reality, the relationship has probably always been more commercial than we’d like to admit. Most of us understand that organisations have responsibilities that extend well beyond any one employee. They have shareholders, customers, regulators and commercial realities to navigate. Sometimes those priorities will conflict with yours - particularly in a tough economic environment.

That isn’t necessarily a betrayal; but it is a timely reminder of the reality of the relationship.

For a long time, many organisations encouraged employees to think of work as family (one of my least favourite things to hear), and to invest emotionally in the organisation’s purpose. To go “above and beyond” when required.

Unfortunately, that kind of extra effort isn’t necessarily being rewarded or even recognised in the current environment. Right now, your employer has moved back into transactional mode, and perhaps you haven’t moved with them.

If your mindset is still in the “people first”, “we value our people” era of 2021-2022, you’re most likely feeling incredibly disappointed right now. Your employer might have moved beyond this thinking to focus on “efficiency” and even being “AI first”.

Adjusting your mindset and boundaries to be more transactional at work doesn’t make you cynical, and it doesn’t mean you’re quiet quitting. You can care about your work and your colleagues; and you can want to do an excellent job.

At the same time, you can recognise that your professional value and your career belong to you. Rather than spending more energy wondering whether you can trust your employer, or hoping they will return to the relationship you once thought you had, a better use of that energy is learning where to place your trust instead.

You can care deeply about your work, but remember that your career is ultimately yours to manage. Organisations will always make decisions through a commercial lens. There’s no reason you shouldn’t think about your career with the same level of care.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

Recording the first episode of my podcast was a fascinating experience, not just because I had to learn the technical side of podcasting (it’s harder than I thought it would be!) - but also because it exposed all the little conversations you have with yourself when you try something new.

Who am I to call myself a podcaster?

Are people expecting something more polished?

Did that edit sound awkward?

Does my voice really sound like that?

Why did my cat decide that the exact moment I hit record was the perfect time to sprint up and down the hallway?

The funny thing is, I know exactly what I’d tell anyone else in the same position. People don’t want perfect. Stop putting yourself under the microscope. And also, just stop thinking about it and actually do it!

I’ve already got a growing list of lessons for episode two. Better microphone placement and editing. Closing the hallway door before recording so my cat doesn’t decide to make himself known would probably help as well. Like most worthwhile things, it’s a skill I’ll develop over time.

Thank you for joining me from the very beginning, and bearing with me while I get things right. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this takes us.

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 and drinkware for corporate rebels
📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment

Find me elsewhere

📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

When ChatGPT arrived back in late 2022, I had one of the biggest professional confidence crises of my career.

I’d spent the past two decades building a career as a writer - first as a journalist, and then in the corporate world of communications, brand and marketing. Suddenly, it seemed as though the skill I’d spent decades developing was being turned into a commodity. More than one person in my professional network asked me whether I thought writers were still going to be needed in five years’ time.

For the first time in my career, I found myself wondering whether the thing that had always made me valuable was about to become completely irrelevant.

After a few sleepless nights, and a lot of soul searching, I eventually realised I needed to reframe my thinking, or I was going to send myself completely mad. It was clear that AI was here to stay, and that it could produce words. But could it really do all the things I was especially good at? Could it decide which stories needed to be told to which audience at which time? Did it really have an instinct for why a particular message would work, and another would fall flat?

There was also another, deeper question I needed to consider. Why had I allowed a new technology, and by extension the workplace I had created as a consultant around it, be the sole judge, jury and executioner of my professional worth?

Interestingly, it was around the same time I was having my professional crisis that research firm Gallup first reported that employee engagement had started falling globally, after years of steady improvement. What’s more, it’s continued to fall every year since 2022.

Which raises the question… what’s been going on in the world of work to degrade the experience for so many of us over the past three or four years? If I reflect on my own situation, I can see that AI impacted my enjoyment of work as I started to doubt my professional worth. Do the declining engagement numbers support that theory, or are there other factors at play?

This week’s newsletter reflects on these questions. As always, love to hear your thoughts, comments and feedback on this!

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t just me

If you zoom out to look at Gallup’s data, there are two clear phases: a long rise from the early 2000s into the early 2020s, then a noteworthy reversal after 2022. The trend spans countries, industries and job types.

Notably, in many countries disengagement has been rising at the same time as engagement has been falling, which means employees haven’t been falling into a state of neutrality - they’re actively checking out.

It’s important to note that engagement is influenced by many factors, both internal to the company (your manager, workload and the culture), as well as external factors (life circumstance, the economy). There’s no single event to explain this global trend.

That being said, it is a trend and it’s difficult to ignore. My theory is that several major challenges hit us at around the same time.

The balance of power changed

During the Great Resignation of 2021-22, millions of workers voluntarily left their jobs looking for better pay and more flexible conditions. Employers were competing hard for talent, and many employees felt like they had options. If they were unhappy, they could find something better.

By late 2022, as the economy slowed down, that era started winding down. Many companies moved focus from growth to efficiency, and we started seeing more layoffs around this time. The return to office (RTO) conversations started to gather momentum not long after that.

It was also around this time that ChatGPT brought generative AI to the public consciousness. Even though it was still fairly rudimentary technology in the early days, many professionals started picking up signals about the future of knowledge work as a result.

By 2023, the mood of the global workforce had changed. The confidence that many of us felt in previous years was fading, and we were starting to hear the old familiar tropes: “efficiency, shareholder value, doing more with less”.

What we were experiencing was the balance of power starting to move back towards employers, and the signals we were receiving about our own value at work as a result.

We stopped feeling like an investment

As a writer, I pay keen attention to language in the workplace and how it affects what we do and the way we feel about what we’re doing. When organisations move from growth to efficiency, you’ll notice a subtle change in the language.

“Our people are our greatest asset” might become “we’re optimising for shareholder value and efficiency”.

And more recently, “people-first” organisations have become “AI-first” organisations. (I think this will become a source of branding regret in the years to come, but that’s another thought for another time.)

People notice when the language of the organisation switches away from investment and development and toward productivity, efficiency and cost reduction. If you’re like me, you notice it straightaway. If not, it embeds in your subconscious and you start picking up the signals over time.

It’s little wonder that many of us stopped feeling like an investment in the future, and started wondering whether we were simply another cost to be managed. And more recently - whether we could simply be replaced by a machine.

Who gets to decide your value?

For me personally, as I look back I think the biggest mistake I made was allowing my current working environment, and even the broader corporate environment I was operating in at the time, to become the main source of my professional self-worth.

Whether you work with clients like me, or for a single employer, that’s an easy trap to fall into. After all, we’ve spent years or even decades building careers around the notion of the traditional corporate ladder, and your progress against that benchmark is typically measured by promotions and annual performance reviews. This really reinforces the idea that work is where we discover our value.

However, there are a few challenges with this mindset. First and foremost, the traditional corporate ladder seems to be disappearing. Secondly, organisations don’t actually exist to validate us - even if we’d like them to do so. They exist primarily to deliver certain outcomes, and sometimes those outcomes are efficiency. When the economy is thriving, we’ll get more validation as companies compete to hire and retain the best talent. When the economy is not so healthy, as it is right now, the opposite tends to apply.

If your sense of professional worth depends entirely on how your employer perceives your value, you’re in for a bumpy ride.

A quick reframe

Looking back, the biggest lesson I’ve taken from the past few years is that I was giving too much weight to the signals I was receiving from the world of work.

When AI arrived on the scene, I interpreted it an indictment on my profession. When companies started talking about its link to efficiency and cost reduction, I interpreted that as a judgement on my value. Neither of these interpretations was true.

Now I understand that companies have every right to change strategy as markets change. There will always be new technologies that change the way we work. It’s naive to think otherwise. What’s really changed for me is adopting this quick reframe:

Your employer (or client) rents your skills. They don’t own your professional identity.

That identity belongs to me. It’s been build over years of experience and the unique composition of my brain. I get to choose the work I put into the world, and no new technology can take that away from me.

If there’s one thing you take away from all this, please let it be this: don’t let your employer become the sole source of your professional self-worth. Businesses and technology will come and go. Your value is bigger than either of them.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

One of the reasons I started this publication is that some ideas need more depth than what I can provide in a 90-second soundbite on Instagram. Now I’ve come to realise that some ideas are easier to explore in conversation than on the page.

In that spirit, from next week I’ll also be publishing a companion Track Changes On podcast to go with each newsletter. It will touch on the same themes as the written version, but with a few extra thoughts that don’t always make it in.

If you prefer listening on your commute or while you’re squeezing in your daily work, I hope it will become another way for you to connect with the ideas I’m discussing right now.

I’m looking forward to sharing the first episode with you next week!

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

About two years into my last corporate role, I reached a point when I realised I no longer really believed the story the organisation was telling.

The irony of this situation was that I was helping to write it.

As the leader of the communications department, the CEO would set the direction and I’d translate it for the organisation. The words were mine, but it no longer felt like they belonged to me.

I found myself trying to reconcile the messages I was crafting with what I was seeing every day inside the business - and things just weren’t adding up for me.

I spent a lot of time wondering whether I was missing something. I have a cynical streak, so I always have to check to see if I’m running hot in that department. I asked myself whether I was being unfair. I even spent many sleepless nights questioning my own resilience and eventually, my perception of reality.

Looking back, I think I was carrying around a form of cognitive load that I didn’t have the language for at the time. My body kept the score, however; as I’ve previously shared, I burned out in spectacular fashion towards the end of my tenure.

As it turns out, I wasn’t alone in struggling with this mismatch between what I was hearing at work and what I was seeing.

Lately I’ve been posting a series of tongue-in-cheek Instagram videos called Corporate Logic. They highlight the common contradictions many of us experience at work, and they’ve resonated far more than I expected.

Why does this affect us so deeply?

Across several videos, the comments revealed that people were describing the same feeling in completely different situations. It wasn’t really about keyboards, strategy offsites or office budgets. Instead, there’s something more fundamental at play.

As humans, we have an entirely predictable reaction when there’s a gap between what organisations say and what we consistently experience.

You’ve probably heard some of these examples…

“We care about wellbeing.”

Then workloads increase because of a hiring freeze.

“We encourage innovation.”

Then every new idea disappears into layers of approval.

“Our people are our greatest asset.”

Then basic requests are declined while money appears elsewhere.

Most of us understand organisations are complicated. We know different budgets exist, and that every decision has context. However, it gets harder to maintain that understanding when those contradictions stop feeling like isolated decisions, and start feeling like a pattern.

That’s when it becomes much harder to make sense of work.

When words and actions stop lining up

Organisational psychologists have a term for this process: sensemaking. It’s how we build an understanding of what’s really happening around us. We listen to what leaders say, we watch what happens around us and, often without realising it, we piece those signals together into a picture of how the organisation really works.

Most of the time, that process happens in the background. When words and reality stop lining up, it comes to the fore. We start asking ourselves questions…

Maybe I’ve misunderstood?

Perhaps there’s context I don’t have?

Am I overreacting?

Those questions don’t just disappear when the work day ends. They follow us home. We replay conversations and look for an explanation that makes everything fit.

The thing is, that process actually requires a fair bit of cognitive effort. It may not even be conscious to us, but it consumes attention and energy all the same. I think it’s one of the hidden forms of mental work we rarely acknowledge when we talk about burnout.

When sensemaking becomes part of the job

Most of us think of work as the tasks we’re paid to do. However, if you’ve ever found yourself replaying conversations on the drive home, trying to work out what someone really meant, you’ve been doing another kind of work as well.

You’ve been trying to make sense of the organisation itself.

That work is invisible. It doesn’t appear on your calendar, and no one thanks you for it. Yet it still consumes time and attention. Every contradiction creates another question to answer.

Did they really mean that?

Why was that decision made?

Am I missing something?

Has the organisation changed, or have I?

Those questions are mentally expensive because they rarely have a clear answer or resolution.

What’s the link to corporate burnout?

Burnout is one of the defining workplace conversations of our time. We usually explain it through workload, unrealistic expectations or constant change. I wonder whether we’re overlooking another contributor.

What happens when people spend months, or even years, trying to make sense of an environment that no longer feels internally consistent? When part of the job becomes working out whether you can trust your own interpretation of what you’re experiencing?

That uncertainty creates mental work. It’s difficult to focus fully on your job when part of your attention is constantly occupied by trying to make sense of the environment around it.

I’m not a psychologist and I’m not suggesting this is the major cause of burnout. I do wonder whether it’s one piece of a much bigger picture.

After all, if three-quarters of employees report experiencing burnout (source: Spring Health’s 2026 Workplace Mental Health Annual Report), we’re no longer talking about individual resilience alone. We’re looking at something systemic. Workload is clearly part of the story, but perhaps the invisible effort of trying to make sense of contradictory workplaces deserves more attention too.

What can you do to manage this?

Looking back, I wish someone had given me permission to trust my own observations a little sooner - just enough to stop assuming I was always the one who had misunderstood.

With the benefit of hindsight, there are a few things I think would have helped.

Look for patterns, not isolated moments.

Every organisation makes decisions that seem inconsistent. One decision tells you very little; repeated patterns tell you much more.

Write things down.

If you find yourself replaying the same meeting over and over, make a few notes while it’s still fresh.

What was said?

What happened?

What felt inconsistent?

It gets the thoughts out of your head and makes them easier to examine objectively later.

Talk to someone outside the organisation.

This was probably the biggest one for me. Find someone who isn’t immersed in the same culture, because they won’t be invested in defending it or criticising it.

You need someone to help you test your thinking and point out context you’ve missed. Sometimes you just need someone to say:

“No, I can see why that doesn’t make sense to you.”

Validation of your experiences can immediately relieve some of the cognitive pressure. Either way, you've stopped carrying the entire burden of making sense of it by yourself.

Wrapping it up

I don’t think organisations will ever eliminate contradictions completely. They’re complex systems made up of people and competing priorities. There will always be imperfect decisions. That’s just life.

With that in mind, the goal can’t be to find a workplace that never sends mixed signals. Hell, I work for myself now and I still receive them. It’s part of working with other people. We all bring different perspectives, assumptions and communication styles.

The difference is when making sense of those signals becomes a job in itself. When you spend more time trying to interpret what’s really going on than simply getting on with your work, that’s something worth your attention.

Invisible mental work is still work, and you’re not officially being paid for it. If you’re carrying enough of it for long enough, it’s time to ask yourself what it’s costing you.

One thing I’m thinking about this week

If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen that I escaped to the Blue Mountains over the weekend.

My son and I are both homebodies, so we don’t take many trips away, but it turned out to be exactly what we needed.

There’s something about spending time in nature that helps quiet all the noise. You stop overthinking and trying to solve every problem. Things that felt complicated a few hours earlier suddenly seem much more manageable.

Maybe that’s why I found myself thinking about this week’s topic while I was there. Sometimes the best way to make sense of something is to step away from it for a while.

And what a place to do it…

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

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.

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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!

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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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Things I’ve written and made

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

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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Things I’ve written and made

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

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.