As AI reshapes the workplace, many organisations are focused on future skills gaps.
But as Laura Thomson-Staveley, Phenomenal Training and co-host of Secrets from A Coach podcast, writes below, the real problem started years ago — when the pandemic eroded the human judgement, trust and informal learning that businesses still rely on today…
Ask most people what they miss about how their workplace used to feel pre-pandemic and they won’t mention a process or a system. They’ll describe an atmosphere, the energy of a busy environment, in-person colleague connections and the confidence that came from watching someone more experienced navigate a difficult situation and learning, by osmosis, how to do it yourself.
The recent World Economic Forum’s (WEF) whitepaper on ‘New Economy Skills: Unlocking the Human Advantage’, makes a point that I think many leaders will find quietly validating: the erosion of human-centric skills in organisations is not a new problem, and it didn’t start with AI.
It accelerated dramatically during the Covid 19 pandemic, as teams fragmented, institutional knowledge walked out of the door, and the informal proximity that had always transferred judgement and culture between people simply stopped.
For many organisations right now, the real challenge isn’t preparing for a future skills gap. It’s closing one that already exists, an issue we’ve been facing for five years.
The cost of the grey disappearing
Before the pandemic, a huge amount of organisational capability lived in the ‘grey’. This is the unwritten knowledge of how things get done, the unspoken read on a customer’s mood, the instinct that something needs escalating before anyone has put it into words. It wasn’t in job descriptions or measured, but when teams dispersed in 2020, it largely disappeared with them.
This matters more than ever, because the WEF is clear that the future of work will demand more ‘grey’, not less. Roles that are highly defined, tightly measured and process-driven are precisely the ones most vulnerable to automation and AI.
The jobs, and the people, that will be hardest to replace are those operating in the spaces between the rules: exercising discretion, reading context, making calls that require lived experience rather than a decision tree.
If your team has spent the last five years in an environment that rewarded compliance and predictability over judgement and initiative, rebuilding that capacity won’t happen by announcing a new set of values or rolling out a training programme. It requires something more fundamental: giving people the conditions in which those capabilities can safely re-emerge.
Going back to the future
I’ve recently been using the phrase ‘back to the future’ with some of the organisations I work with. People are hungry for something that was working before and got lost, rather than another new thing to wrap their heads around.
The great place to work, the service culture that felt effortless because everyone understood it intuitively, and the morale that came not from a wellbeing initiative but from people genuinely enjoying each other’s company and feeling trusted to get on with their jobs.
For leaders, the starting point is an honest audit. Not of skills gaps in the abstract, but of what specifically changed in your organisation between 2019 and now.
Where did the informal knowledge transfer used to happen, and does it still? Who were the unofficial culture carriers, the people newer team members watched and learned from, and are they still there? What decisions used to get made at team level that now get escalated, and why?
The answers tend to point to the same set of solutions. Teams need offline time together not for social events, but for the kind of unhurried, sideways conversation where institutional knowledge gets shared and trust gets rebuilt. Line managers need to be equipped not just to manage performance but to coach and to ask questions that build their team’s capacity to think independently, rather than always providing the answer.
And organisations need to consciously protect space for this, because when things get busy, the first thing that gets cut is always the thing that looks least like work but is, in fact, doing the most work.
Empowerment is the missing piece
There’s a particular challenge for leaders in safety-critical or high-compliance environments, and it’s one the WEF report gestures at without naming directly.
When accountability is high and the consequences of error are serious, the instinct is to tighten control, to add process and to make sure every decision has a sign-off.
But taken too far, that instinct produces the opposite of what you need: teams that wait to be told rather than act, line managers bombarded with questions they shouldn’t have to answer, and a culture where nobody feels empowered to use their own judgement.
The antidote isn’t less accountability. It’s clearer empowerment helping people understand not just what the rules are, but the remit they have within them. Where can they make a dynamic decision in the moment? What falls within their discretion, and what genuinely needs to go up? When people know the answer to those questions, they stop escalating everything and start exercising the kind of contextual judgement that no process can replicate and no machine can replace.
The WEF report frames all of this in terms of future readiness. I’d frame it slightly differently. This is also about right now, about recovering something valuable that many organisations have lost, and that their people are quietly waiting to be given permission to bring back.
Your team isn’t waiting to be upskilled. They’re waiting to be trusted. What people want from their working lives hasn’t fundamentally changed. They want to feel trusted, connected and good at what they do. The pandemic disrupted all three.
The future of AI threatens to disrupt them further, unless leaders make a conscious choice to go in the opposite direction. More human connection, not less. More discretion, not more process. More of the grey, not less.
That’s not nostalgia, it’s a winning strategy to thrive in our imminent AI-driven future of work.