Most executive teams are currently focused on the same question: how quickly can we implement AI?

One of the most significant things happening inside organisations right now is also one of the least openly discussed.

AI anxiety.

Not public anxiety or media commentary, but quiet organisational anxiety, the kind that rarely appears in executive reports but absolutely shapes behaviour.

Something fundamental is shifting in the white collar workplace, and most leaders are sleep-walking off a cliff. AI is coming for jobs - not in some distant sci-fi future, but right now, in the form of tools that can write reports, analyse data, draft contracts, summarise meetings and produce strategies faster than any human team.

Have you ever wondered why so many change efforts fail? This is why. Maslow was wrong.

Humans want to belong.

One of my favourite thinkers is Yuval Noah Harari, author of the seminal work Sapiens – highly recommended if you’re interested in the human condition.

There are lots of important dimensions of culture, but few have such a profound impact as candour – the extent to which people say what they really think.

Concepts such as ‘collaboration’ can have such an innately positive connotation that increasing them can appear to be an obvious goal.

The degree of autonomy that makes sense for any given team at any given time will be different depending on the context.

Think back to the last time you tried a new approach at work, and it wasn’t successful. Did your boss and colleagues criticise you?

Humans want to belong. In fact, humans want to belong so strongly that they will do almost anything to ensure they do.

The human brain is a threat detection, pattern recognition machine. Its main job is to continually scan your environment for any threat of physical or social pain, and help you avoid situations that put you at risk of either.

I recently heard that phrase from a colleague. Turns out it’s the name of a self-help book designed to guide individuals through a personal crisis, but it’s also the perfect way for organisations to think about Covid-19.