Not everything’s a crisis. But we’re in the middle of two sea changes, only one of which people are talking about.

That one is AI, naturally.

The other is that, as machines take over more of the work of efficiency, humans are free to stop being machines.

And we’re probably not ready.

For almost 200 years, since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve organized human work around efficiency: measuring, standardizing, repeating, optimizing. We’ve gotten remarkably good at doing things the way they’re supposed to be done.

We’ve gotten much less good at seeing what else might be possible.

The obvious thing we’ve overlooked. The thing in the distance.

Even the back of our own heads.

Our assumptions. Our habitual blind spots. The hunches we sense but haven’t yet learned how to see clearly enough to test. What hasn’t yet been said out loud—or tried.

AI will make us better at being faster and more comprehensive. That means humans will need to get better at what makes us most human: perceiving, imagining, discerning, questioning, and solving problems whose answers aren’t already known.

If technology is going to change everything, perhaps the opportunity is to make human work more human—not less.

I enjoy conversations with people who are wrestling with how organizations can become even more human as technology changes everything. If that’s a question you’re carrying, let’s talk.