Some technology changes feel like more power in your hands — a smartphone, a faster laptop, a better search tool. Others feel like they reach inside your work and rearrange what made you good at it. In 25 years of watching people navigate technology disruptions, I've seen both. The first kind people adapt to quickly. The second kind is where organizations lose people — not always to attrition, but to something quieter and harder to recover.
A Senior Director in finance had built the report. Not a report — the report. The one the company ran on. He was first in the office most mornings, often making coffee before anyone else arrived. He stayed late. He bled the company colors. When everyone moved to Google Sheets he stayed on Excel. When everyone moved to Mac he stayed on his PC. He ran the report multiple times a week so others could do their jobs.
In the early days this was exactly what the company needed. Ten years later, with significant investments in ERP and infrastructure, he was still running the report.
When a new finance leader arrived and wanted to modernize the team, he brought in human-centered design to help people rethink how work was being done. The new leader had come from inside the company. He knew the Senior Director. He loved the Senior Director — the loyalty, the early mornings, the way newer employees gravitated toward him. He hoped the design sessions would reduce some of the friction, open things up. He appealed to what he knew: you are a beloved member of this team. I need you to help us move in a new direction.
It was the wrong ask, made for the right reasons. You cannot appeal to someone's identity as a leader when their identity as a leader is what they're afraid of losing.
The Senior Director didn't take to the sessions. The normally collegial person became uncomfortable, then snarky. When they came for his report, he pushed back. He explained why the new approach wouldn't work. He became seen as a liability rather than the loyal team member he had always been.
He eventually asked for a package and left.
If you were that leader, you probably still believe you did most things right. You brought in a human approach. You appealed to his values. You told him he mattered. And you did — you just told him in a way that couldn't reach him.
What the Senior Director needed wasn't a process to participate in. He needed a conversation with no agenda attached to it. Not help me understand how the report works — which, however gently meant, is someone mapping the territory you're afraid of losing. Not I need you to lead this change — which asks the person whose identity is under threat to carry the weight of the transition. Something closer to: I want to understand what you're actually worried about. And I'm not going to try to talk you out of it today.
He wasn't resistant to the new system. He was grieving the old identity. Human-centered design sessions can't touch that. The right tool was applied to the wrong problem — and the gap between those two things cost the company one of the people it could least afford to lose.
AI is doing this at scale, and faster. The people who built your organization — who ran the report, held the institutional knowledge, trained the new hires — are watching their work get reorganized around them. Most of them aren't asking whether they'll have a job. They're asking something harder.