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Making People Matter in AI Era

Three Key Global Trends

According to Udemy’s 2024 Global Learning and Skills Trends Report, three key trends are core to the future of work, stating that organizations and their leaders must:

Understand how to navigate the skills landscape and why it is essential to assess, identify, develop, and validate the skills their teams possess, lack, and require to remain innovative and competitive.
Adapt to the rise of AI, focusing on how generative AI and automation disrupt our work processes and their role in supporting a shift to a skills-based approach.
Develop strong leaders who can guide their teams through change and foster resilience within them.

Five Key Global Crises

1. Organizational engagement is in crisis.

Recently, Gallup reported that Global employee engagement fell by two percentage points in 2024, only the second time it has fallen in the past 12 years. Managers (particularly young managers and female managers) experienced the sharpest decline. Employee engagement significantly influences economic output; Gallup estimates that a two-point drop in engagement costs the world $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024.

2. People are burning out, causing a crisis in well-being.

In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Three dimensions characterize it:

Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
Reduced professional efficacy.

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”

They estimate that globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety, costing US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

Burnout is more than just an employee problem; it’s an organizational issue that requires a comprehensive solution. People’s mental and emotional health and well-being are still not prioritized or managed effectively. Well-being in the workplace is a complex systemic issue that must be addressed. Making people matter in the age of AI involves empowering, enabling, and equipping them to focus on developing their self-regulation and self-management skills, shifting them from languishing in a constant state of emotional overwhelm and cognitive overload that leads to burnout.

3. The attention economy is putting people into crisis.

According to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book, “Stolen Focus,” people’s focus and attention have been stolen; our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we must intentionally reclaim it. His book describes the wide range of consequences that losing focus and attention has on our lives. These issues are further impacted by the pervasive and addictive technology we are compelled to use in our virtual world, exacerbated by the legacy of the global pandemic and the ongoing necessity for many people to work virtually from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate. He suggests that to regain your ability to focus, you should stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Yet, in the Thesaurus, there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as listen and give heed.

4. Organizational performance is in crisis.

Research at BetterUp Labs analyzed behavioral data from 410,000 employees (2019-2025), linking real-world performance with organizational outcomes and psychological drivers. It reveals that performance isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about shifting fluidity between three performance modes – basic: the legacy from the industrial age, collaborative: the imperative of knowledge work, and adaptive: the core requirement to perform effectively in the face of technological disruption, by being agile, creative, and connected. The right human fuel powers these: motivation, optimism and agency, which our research has found to be in short supply and BetterUp states is running dry.

Data scientists at BetterUp uncovered that performance has declined by 2-6% across industries since 2019. In business terms, half of today’s workforce would land in a lower performance tier, across all three modes, by 2019 standards.

GenAI relies on activating all three performance gears, and the rise of AI-powered agents is reshaping the way teams work together. Research reveals that companies that invest in adaptive performance see up to 37% higher innovation.

5. Innovation is in crisis.

According to the Boston Consulting Group’s “Most Innovative Companies 2024 Report,” Innovation Systems Need a Reboot:

“Companies have never placed a higher priority on innovation—yet they have never been as unready to deliver on their innovation aspirations”

Their annual survey of global innovators finds that the pandemic, a shifting macroeconomic climate, and rising geopolitical tensions have all taken a toll on the innovation discipline. With high uncertainty, leaders shifted from medium-term advantage and value creation to short-term agility. In that environment, the systems guiding innovation activities and channeling innovation investments suffered, leaving organizations less equipped for the race to come. In particular, as measured by BCG’s proprietary innovation maturity score, innovation readiness is down across the elements of the innovation system that align with the corporate value creation agenda.

You can overcome these crises by transforming them into opportunities through a continuous learning platform that empowers, enables, and equips people to innovate today, making people matter in the age of AI. This will help develop new ways of shaping tomorrow while serving natural, social, and human capital, as well as humanity.

Current constraints of AI mean developing crucial human skills

While AI can perform many tasks, it cannot yet understand and respond to human emotions, build meaningful relationships, exhibit curiosity, or solve problems creatively.

This is why making people matter in the age of AI is crucial, as their human skills are essential.

Some of the most critical human skills are illustrated below.

Some of the Most Critical Human Skills

These essential human skills are challenging to learn and require time, repetition, and practice to develop; however, they are fundamental for creating practical solutions to address the three trends and four crises mentioned above.

Making people matter in the age of AI involves:

Providing individuals with the ‘chance to’ self-regulate their reactive responses by fostering self and systemic awareness and agility to flow with change and disruption in an increasingly uncertain, volatile, ambiguous, and complex world.
Inspiring and motivating people to ‘want to’ self-manage and develop their authentic presence and learning processes to be visionary and purposeful in adapting, innovating, and growing through disruption.
Teaching people ‘how to’ develop the states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills that foster discomfort resilience, adaptive and creative thinking, problem-solving, purpose and vision, conflict negotiation, and innovation.

Human Skills Matter More Than Ever

The human element is critical to shaping the future of work, collaboration, and growth. The most effective AI outcomes will likely come from human-AI partnership, not from automation alone. Making people matter in the age of AI is crucial as part of the adoption journey, and partnering them with AI can turn their fears into curiosity, re-engage them purposefully and meaningfully, and enable them to contribute more to a team or organization. This, in turn, allows them to improve their well-being, maintain attention, innovate, and enhance their performance. Still, it cannot do this for them.

Making people matter in the age of AI by investing in continuous learning tools that develop their human skills will empower them to adapt, learn, grow, and take initiative. External support from a coach or mentor can enhance support, alleviate stress, boost performance, and improve work-life balance and satisfaction.

Human problems require human solutions.

Our human skills are irreplaceable in making real-world decisions and solving complex problems. AI cannot align fragmented and dysfunctional teams, repair broken processes, or address outdated governance. These are human problems requiring human solutions. That’s where human curiosity and inspiration define what AI can never achieve. It is not yet possible to connect people, through AI, to what wants to emerge in the future.

Making people matter in the age of AI can ignite our human inspiration, empowering, engaging, and enabling individuals to unleash their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation. We can then harness people’s collective intelligence and technological expertise to create, adapt, grow, and innovate in ways that enhance people’s lives, which are deeply appreciated and cherished.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack . It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

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Implementing Successful Transformation Initiatives for 2024

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Implementing Successful Transformation Initiatives for 2024

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Transformation and change initiatives are usually designed as strategic interventions, intending to advance an organization’s growth, deliver increased shareholder value, build competitive advantage, or improve speed and agility to respond to fast-changing industries. These initiatives typically focus on improving efficiency, and productivity, resolving IT legacy and technological issues, encouraging innovation, or developing high-performance organizational cultures. Yet, according to research conducted over fifteen years by McKinsey & Co., shared in a recent article “Losing from day one: Why even successful transformations fall short” – Organizations have realized only 67 percent of the maximum financial benefits that their transformations could have achieved. By contrast, respondents at all other companies say they captured an average of only 37 percent of the potential benefit, and it’s all due to a lack of human skills, and their inability to adapt, innovate, and thrive in a decade of disruption.

Differences between success and failure

The survey results confirm that “there are no shortcuts to successful transformation and change initiatives. The main differentiator between success and failure was not whether an organization followed a specific subset of actions but rather how many actions it took throughout an organizational transformation’s life cycle” and actions taken by the people involved.

Capacity, confidence, and competence – human skills

What stands out is that thirty-five percent of the value lost occurs in the implementation phase, which involves the unproductive actions taken by the people involved.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) supports this in a recent article “How to Create a Transformation That Lasts” – “Transformations are inherently difficult, filled with compressed deadlines and limited resources. Executing them typically requires big changes in processes, product offerings, governance, structure, the operating model itself, and human behavior.”

Reinforcing the need for organizations to invest in developing the deep human skills that embed transformation disciplines into business-as-usual structures, processes, and systems, and help shift the culture. Which depends on enhancing people’s capacity, confidence, and competence to implement the “annual business-planning processes and review cycles, from executive-level weekly briefings and monthly or quarterly reviews to individual performance dialogue” that delivers and embeds the desired changes, especially the cultural enablers.

Complex and difficult to navigate – key challenges

As a result of the impact of our VUCA/BANI world, coupled with the global pandemic, current global instability, and geopolitics, many people have had their focus stolen, and are still experiencing dissonance cognitively, emotionally, and viscerally.

This impacts their ability to take intelligent actions and the range of symptoms includes emotional overwhelm, cognitive overload, and change fatigue.

It seems that many people lack the capacity, confidence, and competence, to underpin their balance, well-being, and resilience, which resources their ability and GRIT to engage fully in transformation and change initiatives.

The new normal – restoring our humanity

At ImagineNation™ for the past four years, in our coaching and mentoring practice, we have spent more than 1000 hours partnering with leaders and managers around the world to support them in recovering and re-emerging from a range of uncomfortable, disabling, and disempowering feelings.

Some of these unresourceful states include loneliness, disconnection, a lack of belonging, and varying degrees of burnout, and have caused them to withdraw and, in some cases, even resist returning to the office, or to work generally.

It appears that this is the new normal we all have to deal with, knowing there is no playbook, to take us there because it involves restoring the essence of our humanity and deepening our human skills.

Taking a whole-person approach – develop human skills

By embracing a whole-person approach, in all transformation and change initiatives, that focuses on building people’s capacity, confidence, and competence, and that cultivates their well-being and resilience to:

Engage, empower, and enable them to collaborate in setting the targets, business plans, implementation, and follow-up necessary to ensure a successful transformation and change initiative.
Safely partner with them through their discomfort, anxiety, fear, and reactive responses.
Learn resourceful emotional states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and human skills to embody, enact and execute the desired changes strategically and systemically.

By then slowing down, to pause, retreat and reflect, and choose to operate systemically and holistically, and cultivate the “deliberate calm” required to operate at the three different human levels outlined in the illustration below:

The Neurological Level – which most transformation and change initiatives fail to comprehend, connect to, and work with. Because people lack the focus, intention, and skills to help people collapse any unconscious RIGIDITY existing in their emotional, cognitive, and visceral states, which means they may be frozen, distracted, withdrawn, or aggressive as a result of their fears and anxiety.

You can build your capacity, confidence, and competence to operate at this level by accepting “what is”:

Paying attention and being present with whatever people are experiencing neurologically by attending, allowing, accepting, naming, and acknowledging whatever is going on for them, and by supporting and enabling them to rest, revitalize and recover in their unique way.
Operating from an open mind and an open heart and by being empathic and compassionate, in line with their fragility and vulnerability, being kind, appreciative, and considerate of their individual needs.
Being intentional in enabling them to become grounded, mindful conscious, and truly connected to what is really going on for them, and rebuild their positivity, optimism, and hope for the future.
Creating a collective holding space or container that gives them permission, safety, and trust to pull them towards the benefits and rewards of not knowing, unlearning, and being open to relearning new mental models.
Evoking new and multiple perspectives that will help them navigate uncertainty and complexity.

The Emotional Cognition Levels – which most transformation and change initiatives fail to take into account because people need to develop their PLASTICITY and flexibility in regulating and focusing their thoughts, feelings, and actions to adapt and be agile in a world of unknowns, and deliver the outcomes and results they want to have.

You can build your capacity, confidence, and competence to operate at this level by supporting them to open their hearts and minds:

Igniting their curiosity, imagination, and playfulness, introducing novel ideas, and allowing play and improvisation into their thinking processes, to allow time out to mind wander and wonder into new and unexplored territories.
Exposing, disrupting, and re-framing negative beliefs, ruminations, overthinking and catastrophizing patterns, imposter syndromes, fears of failure, and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.
Evoking mindset shifts, embracing positivity and an optimistic focus on what might be a future possibility and opportunity.
Being empathic, compassionate, and appreciative, and engaging in self-care activities and well-being practices.

The Generative Level – which most transformation and change initiatives ignore, because they fail to develop the critical and creative thinking, and problem sensing and solving skills that are required to GENERATE the crucial elastic thinking and human skills that result in change, and innovation.

You can build your capacity, confidence, and competence to operate at this level by:

Creating a safe space to help people reason and make sense of the things occurring within, around, and outside of them.
Cultivating their emotional and cognitive agility, creative, critical, and associative thinking skills to challenge the status quo and think differently.
Developing behavioral flexibility to collaborate, being inclusive to maximize differences and diversity, and safe experimentation to close their knowing-doing gaps.
Taking small bets, giving people permission and safety to fail fast to learn quickly, be courageous, be both strategic and systemic in taking smart risks and intelligent actions.

Reigniting our humanity – unlocking human potential

At the end of the day, we all know that we can’t solve the problem with the same thinking that created it. Yet, so many of us keep on trying to do that, by unconsciously defaulting into a business-as-usual linear thinking process when involved in setting up and implementing a transformation or change initiative.

Ai can only take us so far, because the defining trait of our species, is our human creativity, which is at the heart of all creative problem-solving endeavors, where innovation can be the engine of change, transformation, and growth, no matter what the context. According to Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, and co-director of AI4All, a non-profit organization promoting diversity and inclusion in the field of AI.

“There’s nothing artificial about AI. It’s inspired by people, created by people, and most importantly it has an impact on people”.

Develop the human skills

When we have the capacity, confidence, and competence to reignite our humanity, we will unlock human potential, and stop producing results no one wants. By developing human skills that enable people to adapt, be resilient, agile, creative, and innovate, they will grow through disruption in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, that are appreciated and cherished, we can truly serve people, deliver profits and perhaps save the planet.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning and coaching program for leadership and team development and change and culture transformation initiatives.

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Beyond Scrum – The Human Skills That Make Agile Work

The Illusion of Mechanical Agility

Mechanical Agility is the systemic dysfunction that occurs when an organization focuses only on adopting the nomenclature and processes of a framework. This structural compliance often masks critical human failures, leading to common dysfunctions:

The Daily Status Meeting: Daily Stand-ups become formal status reports delivered to the Scrum Master or management, rather than collaborative planning sessions owned by and directed for the team.
The Product Owner Bottleneck: The Product Owner acts as a sole gatekeeper, centralizing every micro-decision and effectively recreating the same Paradox of Control that Agile was supposed to eliminate.
The Ceremonial Retrospective: Retrospectives are passive, rushed, or devolve into superficial complaints, lacking the essential psychological safety required for deep, honest, and transformative institutional learning.

To move beyond this mechanical trap, we must focus on mastering the human skills that underpin the Agile Manifesto’s core values (e.g., Individuals and interactions over processes and tools; Collaboration over contract negotiation).

Key Human Skills for True Agility

True agility is built upon a foundation of psychological safety and communication mastery. These are the skills that enable the machinery of Scrum and other frameworks to function as intended:

Conflict Literacy: The ability for team members to engage in direct, constructive, and productive disagreement without fear of retribution or damaging relationships. This is crucial for vetting ideas, challenging assumptions, and avoiding harmful groupthink.
Radical Transparency: Not just making the backlog visible, but making intentions, risks, and assumptions visible across the team and with stakeholders. Leaders must share what they truly know and what the organization truly fears.
Proactive Feedback Loops: Establishing a culture where constructive feedback is given continuously, immediately, and empathetically, rather than being saved for formal reviews. This requires emotional intelligence and clear, non-judgmental communication protocols.
Distributed Facilitation: Moving the responsibility of meeting guidance and decision-making facilitation beyond a single role (Scrum Master or PO). Every team member should be skilled at guiding group dialogue, ensuring inclusion, and driving collective decisions.
Contextual Leadership (Servant Leadership): Leaders must transition from issuing commands to setting clear Guardrails and North Star objectives, then trusting and empowering the team to determine the “how.” This requires immense trust and a willingness to let go of granular control.

Key Benefits of Human-Centered Agility

When an organization masters the human skills of agility, the benefits are profound and measurable, extending far beyond predictable sprint cycles:

Sustainable Velocity: Teams maintain speed not because of mandates, but because they self-organize, proactively remove their own systemic impediments, and burn less energy on internal friction or political maneuvering.
Enhanced Resilience: Teams can adapt quickly to unexpected changes and market shifts, as they are skilled at honest, difficult conversation and rapid, collective problem-solving, making them robust to external shocks.
Deeper Innovation: Psychological safety allows for necessary risk-taking and the sharing of nascent or “bad” ideas that often lead to truly great ones, accelerating the path to breakthrough concepts.
Improved Morale and Retention: Team members feel respected, trusted, and empowered to own their outcomes, significantly reducing burnout and turnover.
Higher Quality Decisions: Decisions are made by the people closest to the information (the teams), supported by transparent conflict and rigorous challenge, resulting in more effective solutions.

Case Study 1: The Insurance Giant and the Conflict-Averse Team

Challenge: Feature Delivery Slower than Waterfall

A large insurance firm’s newly “Agile” claims processing unit had adopted Scrum perfectly, yet their feature delivery was slower than their old Waterfall model. Quantitative data showed high technical debt, but the root cause — a human one — was hidden.

Human Skills Intervention:

The intervention focused not on optimizing sprint length, but on Conflict Literacy and Psychological Safety. Through targeted, facilitated workshops, the team learned to use structured protocols for difficult conversations (e.g., using “I observe X, I feel Y, I need Z” statements). They uncovered that mid-level technical experts were afraid to challenge senior architects on technical debt issues, leading to flawed designs being pushed through every sprint. Leadership then explicitly coached the senior architect to adopt a Contextual Leadership style, actively rewarding technical disagreements.

The Agile Realized:

By fixing the human operating system — the fear of conflict — technical debt discussions became rigorous, not aggressive. The team’s improved ability to challenge poor design decisions led to an immediate dip in velocity (as they fixed old code), followed by a 40% sustainable increase in speed and a drastic drop in post-release bugs. The human skill of constructive conflict unlocked their technical potential.

Case Study 2: The E-Commerce Platform and the Product Owner Gatekeeper

Challenge: Stagnant Idea Flow and Low Team Ownership

An e-commerce platform’s core development team had a single, highly competent but overwhelmed Product Owner (PO). The PO’s backlog management was flawless, but teams felt like “code monkeys” simply executing tickets. Innovation ideas died on the vine, as the PO became the sole point of decision, resulting in the dreaded PO Bottleneck.

Human Skills Intervention:

The change focused on Distributed Facilitation and Contextual Leadership. The PO transitioned from being the “Decider” to the “Vision Holder” (Contextual Leader). The responsibility for initial idea vetting, risk assessment, and technical trade-off decisions was formally delegated to the development team leads. The PO trained the team in high-quality decision-making protocols and delegated specific budget allocation rights to the development team for small, experimental feature tests. The team practiced running their own refinement and planning sessions, ensuring all voices were heard.

The Agile Realized:

The team immediately began proposing and implementing small, high-value ideas without needing PO approval for every detail. The PO’s time was freed up to focus on market strategy and customer validation — true Product Ownership. The transition from centralized command to distributed empowerment significantly increased team ownership, leading to a 25% jump in measured team engagement and the launch of three highly profitable, team-led features within six months.

Cultivating True Human Agility

Leaders must stop treating human skills as peripheral “nice-to-haves.” They are the essential engine of organizational performance. The strategic investment must shift from expensive framework certification to robust training in: negotiation, difficult conversations, active listening, and distributed leadership.

Agile frameworks give us the map and the rules of the road. But the human skills — the trust, the communication, the willingness to engage in constructive conflict — provide the fuel and the steering wheel. We must cultivate a culture where human relationships are prioritized over rigid procedures. That is how we move beyond simply doing Scrum to being Agile.

“If your team can’t argue well, they can’t innovate well. Conflict literacy is the true measure of Agile maturity.” — Braden Kelley

Your first step beyond Scrum: Identify the meeting in your organization that suffers the most from poor participation or passive agreement (often the Retrospective or Planning meeting). Introduce a structured, facilitated protocol (e.g., using anonymous input tools or a “Decisions/Assumptions/Learnings/Experiments” structure) specifically designed to foster transparent feedback and constructive conflict, and delegate the facilitation responsibility to a different non-leader team member each time. This distributes the power and builds essential human skills.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Innovation, change and transformation thought leadership, lovingly curated by Braden Kelley

Tag Archives: human skills

Making People Matter in AI Era

Three Key Global Trends

Five Key Global Crises

1. Organizational engagement is in crisis.

2. People are burning out, causing a crisis in well-being.

3. The attention economy is putting people into crisis.

4. Organizational performance is in crisis.

5. Innovation is in crisis.

Current constraints of AI mean developing crucial human skills

Human Skills Matter More Than Ever

Human problems require human solutions.

Implementing Successful Transformation Initiatives for 2024

Beyond Scrum – The Human Skills That Make Agile Work

The Illusion of Mechanical Agility

Key Human Skills for True Agility

Key Benefits of Human-Centered Agility

Case Study 1: The Insurance Giant and the Conflict-Averse Team

Challenge: Feature Delivery Slower than Waterfall

Human Skills Intervention:

The Agile Realized:

Case Study 2: The E-Commerce Platform and the Product Owner Gatekeeper

Challenge: Stagnant Idea Flow and Low Team Ownership

Human Skills Intervention:

The Agile Realized:

Cultivating True Human Agility