Ashley Goodall is a longtime consultant, Fortune 50 executive, speaker, researcher, and writer in the areas of leadership and human resources. His two books are Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World and The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance.
Greg and Ashley discuss how rapid transformation, especially with AI, often worsens work because human employees are wired for stability, ritual, predictability, and belonging. Change and improvement are not synonyms. They discuss creating “equilibrium under varying load” by making decision processes transparent, offering voice without confusing it with vote, and giving people information to improve predictions, since bad news is often preferable to no news.
Ashley notes how leaders underinvest in people due to short-termism, and layoffs and constant uncertainty damage both remaining employees and health. He emphasizes building many great teams, choosing and training team leaders well, recognizing excellence publicly, making contributions legible to boost self-efficacy, and reorienting HR toward long-term human performance and organizational prosperity as administrative work is automated.
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Episode Quotes:
Transparency matters during change
17:35: I find the most effective sort of safety signal at work is not, "Trust me, it'll be fine," but, "Here's what we're wrestling with." I think you can substitute transparency into what factors leaders are juggling for a promise that it'll all turn out well. I think the challenge with lots and lots of organizational leadership is leaders feel they can't say what's going on. And in the absence of an understanding of what's going on, employees are like, "Listen, I don't trust the beautifully wordsmithed stuff that your communications people write for you to say to me, and that seems to be intended to avoid lawsuits, not intended to help me understand the world.”
Why people struggle with change
04:04: Whether we like it or not, change makes life difficult for people. We are wired as a species in a way that appreciates stability, appreciates knowing where we are, appreciates knowing where things are going.
The complicated reality of AI at work
02:49: Now we're talking to one another in a world where digital transformation is, you from our current attention span, about eighty-nine percent AI. That's what's transforming stuff. And the experience of AI in the workplace is deeply complicated. I don't see workers, employees rushing around going, "This stuff is fabulous. Give us more of it." The sentiment is, "I'm burned out. I've got to manage all these agents all the time. I didn't sign up to be a manager. I don't know whether this stuff is any good. My company is forcing me to use it irrespective of whether I think I should use it." So, the on-the-ground experience of these tools is decidedly mixed.
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