Most people agree we are entering a new age, perhaps it will be called the age of intelligence. Fewer stop to reckon with what that actually means. An emerging age doesn’t arrive cleanly. It arrives by dismantling the one before it. And the one before it, the Industrial Age, built more than an economy. It built a set of beliefs about how people should learn, work, and contribute that are now so familiar they are nearly invisible. Before we can step into what comes next, we have to see clearly what we’re still carrying.
Schools taught us to follow instructions. Organizations taught us to follow processes. Managers made decisions and employees executed them. The model wasn’t perfect, but it worked reasonably well in a world where change moved slowly enough that a single set of skills could carry you through decades of work. Doing your job well and staying loyal was enough to feel secure.
AI didn’t break that model. It just made the cracks impossible to ignore.
For a stretch, the cracks in the old model felt like openings. New technologies created new careers. Workers gained leverage. Between 2021 and 2023, millions of workers quit their jobs in what became known as the Great Resignation, signaling that people were ready to trade stability for something more meaningful.
That confidence has quieted. A January 2026 report on workforce priorities found that workers are now placing more emphasis on job security, steady pay, and employer support for adaptability than they have in years. Growth and meaningful work still matter, but they have become secondary to predictable income and employment certainty. When change feels navigable, people seek opportunity. When it feels unpredictable, they seek grounding.
What has also shifted is the nature of what makes someone valuable. Harvard Business Impact recently argued that in an AI-driven environment, being change-ready is no longer enough — organizations need people who proactively scan for opportunity, challenge assumptions, and move before disruption demands it. The person organizations need today isn’t the one who knows the most. It’s the one who can see new possibilities before they’re obvious and move them through the politics and emotions of an organization without losing momentum. That’s not a credential. It’s a capability. And it was never on the syllabus.
Agency Isn’t a Mindset. It’s a Practice.
Agency is the ability to act without being told to. To learn before you are required to. To ask the questions no one is considering yet. To participate in shaping change rather than waiting for it to be handed down. It is not a personality trait. It is not something you either have or lack. It is a learned capability. It develops through practice, through exposure, through being in environments that reward curiosity over compliance. It’s a learned capability, which means it can be cultivated. And for most people working inside organizations today, it never was.
For generations, the expectation was the same: know the answer, follow the process, stay in your lane, and execute the plan.
For a long time, organizations at least held up their end of that bargain. They provided the training, the structure, and the roadmap that compliance required.
Then they stopped.
In last week’s article, ‘Your Next Change Initiative Could Break Your Organization,’ I wrote about what happened when organizations decided that developing their people was no longer their responsibility. Training budgets were cut and never restored. People had to figure out how to teach themselves, find the resources, evaluate them, apply them, and keep up, all while working, all while the tools kept changing. That exhaustion is real. And it matters here because you can’t develop agency in isolation. You can’t practice participation when you’re spending all your energy just keeping up.
That exhaustion is precisely why participation has to be redefined — not as more effort on top of everything else, but as a different way of working entirely. Keeping up and participating are not the same thing. One is reactive. The other is how you stop being caught off guard.
Participation means showing up before you’re told to. It means contributing ideas before they’re solicited, engaging with change before the mandate arrives, and taking enough interest in where things are heading to have something to offer when they get there.
Participation is becoming the new form of job security. Not because participation guarantees employment. Nothing does. But because participation builds capabilities that remain valuable regardless of what changes next. Curiosity. Adaptability. Pattern recognition. The willingness to learn in public and contribute before you have all the answers. Those transfer from one wave of change to the next.
The Gap Between What Organizations Need and What They Built
A recent article in Inc. argued that AI adoption is stalling, and the constraint isn’t the technology. Only about a third of employees are actively using AI at work, not because the tools are too complex, but because employees lack direction, clarity, and a clear sense of how AI applies to their actual work rather than in theory.
That’s true. But it doesn’t go far enough. Most organizations have treated AI like a software implementation — roll it out, train people on the features, measure adoption, declare victory. But AI isn’t a software implementation. It’s an ever-changing intelligence layer that requires people to think differently about their work, not just learn a new tool. The deeper issue isn’t that people need better explanation or more visible wins. It’s that the humans being asked to adopt AI were never equipped with the mindset or the conditions to engage with something unfamiliar and unfinished. You can’t shortcut your way to that behavior. You have to build it.
Resistance lives in the gap between where the technology is and where human understanding, culture, and confidence are. Closing that gap requires more than training. It requires trust, psychological safety, and structures that help people move from passive recipients of change to active participants in shaping it.
Organizations are telling employees they need to be more innovative, more adaptable, more entrepreneurial, more proactive, more strategic. What they are really saying is: we need you to exercise more agency.
But you cannot ask people to exercise a skill they were never taught and then treat the gap as a motivation problem.
I see this every time someone says they are waiting to see what happens before they engage with AI. Or when someone says leadership should tell them exactly what skills to develop. Or when someone dismisses AI entirely because they are convinced it will not affect them. All of those responses have something in common. They are waiting for someone else to determine the future. That is what compliance conditioning produces.
20+ years ago, the people who benefited most from the rise of social media were not always the ones who understood every platform. They were the ones willing to participate. They experimented, showed up to conversations before there was a roadmap, learned in public, and stayed curious enough to engage before anyone knew exactly where it was heading. Many of them built entirely new careers because they were close enough to the change to recognize opportunities before others saw them.
AI will create similar opportunities. But only for people willing to engage before they are told to, and only in organizations willing to make that engagement feel safe and worth the risk.
The Gap Is Not a Personal Failure
This matters because the distance between what organizations need and what most employees have been taught to do is not a character flaw. It’s the predictable result of a system that rewarded execution over initiative for a very long time.
In “Learn to Love the Roller Coaster,” I write about the shift from a survival mindset to a creator mindset. Survival says: I need to stay alert, stay useful, and avoid getting left behind. Creator says: I can help shape what comes next. Most people operating inside organizations today are still in survival mode, and understandably so. They have been conditioned into it by decades of systems that measured compliance more reliably than contribution.
The organizations building for participation are not just chasing productivity. They are building environments where people have enough stability to take the risks that learning requires. That stability is not a luxury. It is a precondition for the kind of engagement organizations say they want.
Understanding that the gap exists because of conditioning, not character, changes what is required to close it.
Why Organizations Cannot Simply Demand Agency
Agency cannot be mandated. You cannot ask people to take initiative while punishing mistakes. You cannot ask people to experiment while rewarding compliance. You cannot ask people to think independently while controlling every decision.
If employees need to develop agency, leaders need to create the conditions where agency is possible.
In “Transition, Trust, and the Future of AI Adoption,” I introduced a framework built around three interconnected roles. I applied it for AI adoption specifically, but the logic applies to any moment requiring people to exercise agency in the face of uncertainty.
Buddies are peers navigating the same uncertainty at the same time, figuring things out together rather than waiting for someone with all the answers. When someone learns alongside a colleague rather than alone, fear drops and agency returns. The learning becomes something that happens with another person rather than something being done to them.
Coaches help people move from occasional use of new tools to genuine integration, shifting from asking what something can do to redesigning how work actually gets done. That shift does not happen through a mandate or a training module. It happens through experience, and coaches create that experience by helping teams redesign workflows, surface friction that never reaches executive dashboards, and connect daily experimentation to outcomes the organization actually cares about.
Mentors translate what is being learned across the organization into norms and practices that reflect the real experience of the workforce, not just the priorities of the executive team. Real governance does not begin with policies written in isolation. It begins with shared understanding, and shared understanding only happens when people doing the work are invited into the conversation early enough to shape it.
Together these three roles form a system that develops agency rather than demanding it. The distinction matters. One approach treats agency as a trait employees either have or lack. The other treats it as a capability that organizations either cultivate or neglect.
The Future Belongs to Participants
The people who will thrive in the years ahead are not necessarily the smartest or the most technically skilled. They will be the people willing to participate. Willing to learn before they are forced to. Willing to ask questions before they have all the answers. Willing to help shape what comes next rather than waiting for someone else to do it.
For employees, that means stop waiting and start participating. Ask questions about where your organization is headed. Learn AI before someone tells you that you have to. Contribute ideas. Develop skills ahead of the mandate. The people closest to change have always had the most influence over it. That has always been true. What has changed is how quickly the distance between engaged and disengaged becomes consequential.
For leaders, it means stop expecting agency to appear on its own in people who were never given the conditions to practice it. Instead, build the conditions that allow it to grow. Create psychological safety. Provide direction and context. Invest in learning structures before the stakes are high. Support experimentation before it is urgent. Recognize that many of the people you are counting on were shaped by a system that rewarded exactly the opposite of what you are now asking for.
This is not a technology transition. It is a human one. The Industrial Age needed workers who could follow instructions. The age of intelligence needs people who can help write them.
That skill was never on the syllabus. But it is the one that matters most now.
If you want a clearer picture of where your organization stands and what it would take to move, that’s exactly the conversation I’m built for. Reach out.
