Opening montage
Amanda Schneider
We are now operating with analogue-era rules in a digital-speed world.
Brian Elliott
The world feels more out of your control, whether it's tariffs, whether it's inflation, whether it's AI, all these pressures coming down on you and the business, and so you start grasping for things you can control.
Julia Hobsbawm
I worry like we all do about whether we are literally dismantling things faster than they can be rebuilt.
Dave Coplin
The same things that held us back when we were looking at digital transformation over the last 10 or 20 years are the same things that are holding us back when it comes to AI and agentic AI.
The Reflection Section returns
Chris Moriarty
Hello and welcome to Workplace Geeks. A very special episode of Workplace Geeks here in series five, because this is something we've not done before.
This is the close of Act One of Series Five. Now, we didn't plan to have a pause or plan on breaking up the series into acts, but we couldn't help feeling that perhaps this was an important moment to pause and reflect. So we're a few months in and after five conversations with some brilliant guests, something’s starting to take shape.
Now, let's have a quick reminder for who we've spoken to. We've got Dave Coplin, who we spoke to on technology and agentic AI, Julia Hobsbawm on trust and the workplace narrative. Margaret Heffernan on Uncertainty and Leadership, Brian Elliott on hybrid work and what leaders actually control. And Amanda Schneider on the how versus the where.
Now when we booked them, on paper, five very different prescient topics, but it’s only when you step back and look at them back to back, you see that they start rhyming with each other in ways I didn't fully clock while we were recording them. We've got a habit of doing that, right, of talking about all this stuff separately.
AI over there, hybrid work over here, offices, productivity management culture, different panels, different headlines, different experts, but nobody actually experiences it in that way. Not least the people not really thinking about this on a conference stage. If you are running a team just trying to do your job well, all of it lands on you at once.
You don't get a quiet week to think about hybrid work, then a separate quiet week to think about AI. It's Monday morning, someone's asking you why the office is half empty. Someone else is asking why nobody's using a new AI tool properly, and someone else, again, is quietly wondering if their job still makes sense in 18 months.
Now, treating those as unrelated problems with unrelated owners and unrelated meetings might be part of why none of them are getting properly solved. So this episode is a pause, not a new interview, not a new guest, just me going back through what Dave, Margaret, Julia, Amanda and Brian actually said, and trying to work out what it adds up to.
We cannot go back, but what comes next?
Chris Moriarty
What have we learned so far, and maybe more importantly, what should we actually do next? So the first theme that really comes through is we can't go back, but we don't know what better is yet. And it's not a comfortable place to be in. In their own ways, all our guests are describing the same thing. We know the old way isn't coming back, but nobody can quite describe what better looks like yet.
Amanda Schneider
We can't go back, but we don't quite see what better looks like.
Chris Moriarty
And maybe that's the bit we need to accept. Uncertainty isn't a temporary problem you solve and then move past. It might just be the operating condition. Now leaders have to work inside it and they can't wait for it to end, which sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but watch what actually happens.
In most organisations, a strategy gets written down like the ground is about to stop moving. Plans get built for a stable state that isn't coming, and when the ground keeps moving anyway, the plan doesn't get questioned. People just quietly stop trusting it and start making decisions off the side based on what they can actually see in front of them.
The risk, I think, is what we do. When that's uncomfortable, we grab for control, tighter rules, simpler answers, things we can measure, and whilst it might feel like progress, it might actually be the opposite. There's an amazing thread in Margaret Heffernan’s conversation that I think explains why we reach for control in the first place.
Her argument roughly is that we've spent decades being trained by data, by dashboards, by forecasting tools to expect a level of certainty about the future. That was never actually real. We just got good at not noticing how much we were guessing.
Margaret Heffernan
So a lot of the technology that's been developed over the last 30 years has promised us degrees of certainty really never before available to us.
GPS, for example, will promise that I can get from my front door to the university where I teach in 34 minutes. That's super persuasive. But most people believe it.
Chris Moriarty
Take that comfort away. And the instinct isn't to get better at guessing. It's to grip tighter onto whatever still looks measurable. Which leads us to theme number two.
Are we asking the wrong questions?
Chris Moriarty
We might actually be asking the wrong questions. So what's happening here is a lot of energy is going into questions about where, where people sit, how many days, how full the office looks, and now increasingly whether people are even using the AI tools we've bought them. And you can see why days in the office is a number.
Logging activity on an AI tool is a number. Token usage is a number, and these are far easier to put in a slide than “Is this person doing good work?” or “Do they trust their manager?” So the numbers win the attention, even when everyone looking at them half knows they're not really the point.
Amanda Schneider
We can't solve a how problem with a where solution.
Chris Moriarty
But visible behaviour is just easier to count than good work.
And it always has been. And I wonder if that's actually the flaw sitting underneath a lot of this. We keep trying to bolt new technology and new expectations into a system that was built to watch people not to think about them. And that's true whether we're talking about desks or about AI adoption.
Brian Elliott
The surface level reaction to AI, in a lot of companies unfortunately, has looked like the surface level reaction to workplace flexibility, which is, I'm gonna put in place a policy and I'm gonna measure something visible. So in the case of workplace flexibility, it was, I'm gonna put in a 3, 4, 5 day week policy and I'm gonna measure compliance with it, right?
And I'm gonna hold you accountable to, you know, your butt being in a seat, at which point you can get a butt in a seat. You may not get their brain engaged, you may not get their trust, but you’ll get, you know, some degree of compliance. At least on AI, the same thing is happening, right? So we wanna see activity and usage.
Chris Moriarty
Brian's point about hybrid work that you can get somebody's body in the seat without getting their brain engaged, without getting their trust. That's not really a hybrid work problem. It's a measurement problem. And we appear to be making exactly the same mistake again, one technology cycle later, just with a slightly shinier dashboard.
What still matters?
Chris Moriarty
So theme three really is a question, what still matters? If where isn't the answer and control isn't the answer what's left? Maybe it's the stuff that sounds almost too basic to say out loud. What matters I think is fundamentals, which are nothing to do with the bricks and mortar. In other words, are people motivated?
Are people well remunerated? Are people well managed and is there purpose in what they do? And all of those questions remain. Now, Dave puts this quite sharply:
Dave Coplin
If we're still measuring people on a Victorian principle, if time is money, we’re never gonna really live up to the opportunity the technology actually brings us.
Chris Moriarty
And Amanda's argument sits right next to that.
Amanda Schneider
As AI takes on more of this technical work, you know, human skills like empathy, coaching, judgement, psychological safety, like those are all going to be the differentiator.
Chris Moriarty
Brian says similar that people mistake that kind of leadership for the soft stuff when actually it's some of the hardest management there is.
Brian Elliott
People mistake empathy and human-centred leadership for being soft. It's not. It's actually hard. It's setting goals. It's setting aspirational goals and saying to people, “Hey, I know this is gonna be challenging. what do you need in order to get the job done? How can the organisation support you and support your team in accomplishing these goals?”
What do we need to change and what do we need to do in order to get there? But that doesn't mean that it's soft. That just means that you've gotta have clarity of purpose, clarity of goals, and a willingness to actually listen to your team about what's getting in their way.
Chris Moriarty
Now, none of this is new, but I don't think it gets less important as everything else changes.
In fact, there's an argument to say it gets more important. The more technical work gets automated, the more human stuff becomes the actual differentiator, not nice to have sitting next to it.
Dave Coplin
The big change in the world of AI is actually finally realising that knowledge isn't actually all that valuable.
Don't get me wrong, it's important, but wisdom is the currency.
Shaping the future
Chris Moriarty
Now, if that's right, it's a strange moment to be cutting the management layer or treating people skills as the bit you get to after the real work is done. So moving on from that, how do we shape it rather than predict it? Pulling these together five separate conversations.
There's one thread running underneath them. We can't go back to how work was organised before it all started. Now nobody's arguing for that, not even the guests who are most sceptical about where things are heading. But we also don't have a finished tested model for what comes next. Whatever the keynote slides suggest, we're building the plane and flying it and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
AI, hybrid work, leadership, workplace design and changing expectations aren't separate problems. The future isn't approaching from a safe distance. We're already living through the transition now, and none of them hand us a tidy blueprint for how work should look. And frankly, I've stopped expecting one.
What they're describing instead is a way of paying attention, questioning your own assumptions. Actually testing things instead of announcing them. Being honest about what you don't know yet.
Margaret Heffernan
But I'm a very big believer that mistakes are learning, which sounds super trite 'cause it undervalues how extremely painful failure is.
But the only thing worse than failure is failure to learn from it.
Chris Moriarty
It's a less satisfying answer than a five point framework I know, but it's also, I think, probably an honest one and it puts more weight on judgement and on people actually talking to each other properly than another policy document.
There's an amazing line in Julia Hobsbawm’s conversation that stuck with me since we recorded it. You have to look at the past to understand the present and to shape your future. It's not about predicting the future, it's about shaping. It's about having agency with what is available and what you know.
And that distinction really matters because a lot of what gets sold to us in this space, including if I’m honest, sometimes on this show, is prediction, dressed up as certainty. Five year forecasts, definitive takes on where work is heading. I think the more useful posture is smaller and a bit less comfortable than that.
Keep questioning, keep experimenting and notice when the industry itself is narrowing the conversation down to something easier to sell. I'll put my hand up here too. A podcast by its nature likes a clean take. A guest with a strong quotable line does better than a guest who says it depends. And here are six variables.
So part of what I'm trying to do with this pause is to resist that pull a bit, including in my own thinking, rather than hand you a neater story than the one that these five conversations actually told. So as Act One closes, what does Act Two bring us? So we're five conversations in, and Act One’s summary is basically quite a lot is changing and it's landing on people all at once.
Act Two: living through the transition
Chris Moriarty
Act Two starts from here with a slightly different question. How do we live through that transition? Not what's changing anymore, but what does it actually take to work, lead, and make decisions while it keeps changing underneath us? So who have we got lined up? Well, some of you'll remember, Sam Coniff, the bestselling author of Be More Pirate, and the Uncertainty Toolkit opens up by asking what do we do when the old rules stop offering certainty, and how do we recover a sense of agency?
Sam Sahni, a workplace strategist and author of Destination 2.0 asks whether the workplace conversation has drifted away from the lived reality of doing the work. Phil Kirschner, a workplace strategist whose career has taken him through Credit Suisse, WeWork and McKinsey, zooms out to the system. What happens when workplace HR and IT tackle connected problems in separate rooms?
We've got Elizabeth Nelson, a biomedical engineer, who studies our biological responses to work. She turns the lens from the organisation to the organism. What are stress, attention, and our nervous systems telling us about whether humans are actually ready for the future we're building? And Isabel Berwick, who leads the Financial Times’ Working It coverage and wrote The Future-Proof Career helps us take stock of where all of this leaves workers, managers, and careers.
There'll be more Workplace Leaders episodes too: field reports from people actually making these calls inside organisations right now, not from the comfort of a podcast studio.
We'll be back in November starting with Sam Coniff and sitting beyond Act Two. We do feel like there's another act, one that asks a bigger question that we're not gonna answer just yet, frankly, because the lineup for it isn't locked in. But we'll be exploring is the model of work itself still fit for what comes next?
We're not waiting for change. We're already inside it. Speak soon.
Closing reflection
Amanda Schneider
I think we're gonna stop designing workplaces around where people work and start designing them around how people work and that gets me really excited about the future because I think there's a lot of opportunity.
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