It’s time to stop sweating the seating on your corporate Titanic. As another iceberg looms, no one can afford to be a passenger. We all need to learn to build speedboats.
If you’re undergoing any kind of restructure, right sizing or organisational shuffle, you’re in good company:
10 years ago, the average employee faced 2 organisational changes a year. That number has exploded. Most people now face 12 to 14 planned enterprise changes every year.
What’s changed isn’t just the frequency, it’s the cause. A decade ago, restructuring followed market shocks. Now it follows tech cycles. The drive to embed AI; to automate workflows, and “optimise” operations has turned change itself into a continuous operating system.
- Across September 2025, employers announced 946,426 job cuts — up 55 % year-on-year. ‘Restructuring’ accounted for roughly 100,000 of them.
Can you blame people for dreading their next all-hands? Who doesn’t fight a wave of anxiety as they stare at yet another reorg chart? Hope and energy are leaking out of the workforce. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report:
- Four out of five people say they’re not emotionally invested in their work and lack the motivation to put in extra effort.
- Managers are burning out fast. It’s their role to keep everyone motivated, yet barely one in four feel engaged by their job.
- 71% of workers worry AI will put them out of a job.
The personal impact
Living inside a rolling restructure isn’t just demotivating. Organisational changes erode performance, and make people ill.
- When layoffs hit, even those left with jobs don’t bounce back. Job satisfaction among ‘re-structure survivors’ drops 41%. Commitment falls 36%, and performance plunges 20%.
- A 12-year study of 53,295 workers found that people living through organisational change (downsizing, restructuring, new tech rollouts) are nearly twice as likely to report mental-health problems, eg sleep issues, exhaustion, depression.
- The WHO estimates that depression and anxiety at work drain the US $1 trillion in productivity every year.
Why top-down change is failing (especially now)
We’re all fuelled by a sense of progress and personal agency. Small wins light us up. Give us a say in how we work, and we work harder.
If we strip these away and then add uncertainty – you don’t get transformation. You get paralysis.
- In 2025, fewer than half of employees met their set change goals. (Gartner, global research & advisory firm).
- In 2024, 88% of corporate transformations missed their original ambitions (Bain & Company report).
‘Command and Control’ models of change aren’t keeping up with the speed of reality. It’s no surprise the humans in the machine can’t either…
Missing the opportunity
This constant cycle of ‘change and transformation’ doesn’t seem to be working on any level. Yet, and this is the crazy part, the opportunity to influence how we work has never been greater. The same AI technology that’s helping to fuel turbulence also enables reinvention – if we learn to grasp the opportunity.
Large, established organisations won’t survive by acting like AI startups. They need to weaponise what’s unique to them — people, scale, data, distribution, brands, relationships – using AI to supercharge the speed and quality of delivery. That can only happen through high-value, human input: creativity, judgment, and genuine collaboration.
Creativity Conundrum
Now is the time for businesses to reimagine how they compete and add value. The ability to create, adapt and learn has never been more critical to success. Easy to say, but harder to do when worried about job security.
Under stress, our brains flip into threat mode. Cortisol floods our system. Crucially, the prefrontal cortex— the part of our brain that solves problems and makes connections—goes offline. Psychological safety is a critical precursor to creativity and learning. Tough to achieve when no one feels they can afford to make a mistake.
How to turn Passengers into Speedboat Designers
Rebuild safety and spark creativity by allowing people to own the change. Give them freedom to experiment and make meaningful progress around critical challenges fast.
Here’s how to start:
Come clean (and stop the bullshit)
Treat people like adults, and be clear about the real enemy. Our job (if we want to keep it) is to beat the competition, not each other. We ALL need to find new ways to create value to keep our businesses competitive.
Change is inevitable, but don’t gnomically pronounce that “AI will free you to do higher-value work” without giving people a chance to define what that actually means.
If we want to be here to do this higher-value work, we’d better get clear – together – on what it is; why it matters, and how to create it.
Make experimentation the SOP
Most smart people are using the AI tools IT has signed off. Early adopters are quietly tinkering with stuff that’s not been given an official stamp of approval.
Some see the transformational potential of the technology, whilst others highlight limitations and point to its fallibility. Use-cases and productivity hacks are either shared or hidden, celebrated or met with scepticism – depending on the attitude and mindset of the people involved.
All of this leads to wildly varying rates and types of AI usage – within teams and across businesses. The real impact of any of it is hard to discern
Time to set clear expectations: Experimentation and learning is core to the job – not a secret hobby.
Build the safe sandboxes and provide the tools that make it possible.
Old dogs who can’t learn new tricks need to make way for those who can. And if someone says, ‘Wait for the consultants’? Don’t.
Run focused ‘value hunts’
Focus experimental energy around specific ‘value hunt’ challenges. Organise people into temporary, problem-focused project teams with clear learning objectives and the freedom to experiment.
Nobody knows the present reality of your business better than those at the coal face. Give them the chance to take control and re-imagine the future. Try some of these ‘value hunt’ questions to get them started:
- Where are we losing money or customers — and what’s the fastest fix?
- Where can people + AI get things done faster without adding risk?
- Which processes have too many steps — what can we cut?
- Which decisions are stuck for lack of insight — and how do we fix that?
- If this team’s function was delivered by someone/thing else – given our skills and experience – how else could we create value for this organisation?
- How could we get closer to the customer to speed things up?
- What single live metric would turn talk into daily action?
Purposeful Play
Allow ‘value hunt’ teams to play; learn new things and create low-stakes experiments. No KPIs, just prototypes, tinkering, and making weird stuff. This isn’t “soft”, it’s performance strategy.
Play broadens thinking, and fuels idea generation – it’s the mindset that supercharges learning and unlocks creativity under stress. When things feel deadly serious, it’s time to relax and have some (focussed) fun.
Collaboration is your competitive weapon
The hard science is clear: diverse groups with higher social sensitivity and equal turn-taking are consistently smarter at problem-solving than groups stacked with “geniuses.” That’s your edge in the AI era.
When everyone has access to broadly similar tools – being competitive in the world of AI isn’t a technology challenge – it’s a human one. The real question is whether you can create an environment where people with different talents and experiences can collaborate fast, learn in public, and turn that collective intelligence into real value.
Why this approach
Being on the receiving end of change is draining and demoralising. The psychological fuel for doing great work under pressure – agency, play and progress – drives how people perform in uncertain times.
Diverse teams collaborating closest to the work come up with better and quicker answers than any distant change team or technology task force.
New tools? That’s table stakes. The real advantage is how well your people collaborate, experiment, and learn. That’s what wins.
Hope is the performance enhancer
Today’s mood is heavy. Tech titans are touting AI’s bounty whilst doom-mongers muse about Universal Basic Income. You can hear the fatigue: people in their 40s and 50s saying how relieved they are not to be starting out, whilst furiously fretting about what’s left for their kids.
We’re locked into Mad Max’s Thunderdome with no sign of Tina Turner.
In this environment we need hope. The ultimate performance enhancer, it starts when people see how they can make tomorrow better than today. Give them that, and you’ll unlock speed, ideas – and the fight that money can’t buy.
Enough top-down reshuffles and centrally driven change programs. It’s time for leaders to admit they don’t know what comes next – and create space for those who can.
The next generation of workers don’t need another hero; nor do they want another restructure. They need hope, trust, and a chance to build the world they’ll inherit.
