Episode Summary

In this hosts-only episode, Dan Hammond and Pia Lee start with an uncomfortable question: what's your P(doom), the probability you'd put on AI destroying humanity? They quickly move past it. Their view is that the bigger near-term risk is not the technology but who governs it, and that most leaders can't control that anyway. The question that matters is the one inside your own sphere of influence: how do you bring AI into your team without hollowing it out? Organisations are spending heavily on AI adoption with little clarity about why, cutting roles and then rehiring for them. People increasingly ask AI rather than a colleague, and polished "slop" is moving around organisations with no human owning it.

What changes the picture is treating AI as a team capability rather than an individual productivity hack. Research suggests teams using AI outperform both individuals and teams working without it, and AI can act as a neutral facilitator that helps groups get aligned faster. Pia maps a recent HBR piece on leadership mindset for AI adoption onto Squadify's Three Cs. The pairs are clarity over certainty, exploration over expertise, and emotional insight over emotional control. Together they make the case that AI adoption is a leadership job, not a tooling decision. Dan adds a reminder to look after the whole person, because individualised, always-on AI work can lead to brain fry and isolation.

Key Themes & Takeaways:

• The real AI risk most leaders can influence is not doom but fragmentation: AI can turn a team into a "company of one" where everyone works alone to prove their individual value.
• Teams using AI are significantly more likely to reach high-quality solutions than teams without it, so design AI in as a team sport, not a private shortcut.
• AI can act as a neutral teammate: teams report getting on the same page faster when AI clusters and wordsmiths their ideas, because nobody's ego owns the output.
• Leaders can't offer certainty right now, but they can build clarity, and confusing the two leaves people chasing something that isn't available.
• Exploration beats expertise in new territory; holding tight to past expertise out of fear is how teams go down with the ship.
• You are accountable for your output: if you pass on AI-generated work you haven't owned, you're handing colleagues slop they'll just feed back into AI to summarise.
• When people ask AI instead of a colleague, it is often to avoid wasting that colleague's time; leaders need to judge when a conversation is worth more than the efficiency.

Three Reasons to Listen:

1. Listen if your organisation is spending on AI without being able to say what it's for, or has cut roles it may have to rehire.
2. Listen if you've received a polished document, suspected no human really wrote it, and been tempted to ask AI to summarise it for you.
3. Listen if you think of AI adoption as a tech rollout. Dan and Pia argue it's a leadership challenge, and that the human skills of pausing, reading the room and exploring matter more now, not less.

Notable Quotes

We Not Me turns 150 episodes old this month, and Dan Hammond and Pia Lee are using the milestone to talk about something every leader running a transformation is quietly grappling with: why 88% of organisational transformations fail — up from 70% not long ago. Prompted by a Forbes article on the subject, they dig into why "transformation" so often becomes corporate shorthand for restructuring, downsizing, or otherwise firing people, and why that confusion poisons trust before the real work even starts.

The conversation centres on Charles Handy's sigmoid curve — the idea that any curve of growth eventually turns downward, and that a new curve must be started while the old one is still rising, not after it's collapsed. Dan and Pia unpack why this is so hard in practice: leaders can see the need for change most clearly, but their teams are always a few steps behind on the emotional journey. Drawing on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages of grief and William Bridges' distinction between change and transition, they argue that transformation isn't a communications exercise — it's an individual, leader-led process of helping people let go of identity, status, and habit before they can move toward something new.

Key Themes & Takeaways

• Transformation failure rates have climbed from 70% to 88% — and much of that is definitional: restructuring, downsizing, and "realignment" get dressed up as transformation, which employees correctly read as "you're fired," not "you're transformed."
• Charles Handy's sigmoid curve shows that a new curve must start before the current one peaks — but because performance looks fine on the way up, leaders struggle to convince anyone that change is urgent until it's too late.
• The transition zone between two curves is genuinely painful: old and new parts of the business end up competing for resources and legitimacy, with the "old" side feeling like the unwanted stepchild funding a new venture that isn't yet profitable.
• People don't just resist change intellectually — they move through denial, anger, and bargaining before reaching acceptance, and no two people move through that cycle at the same speed.
• Defining the new curve requires clarity on three things: what you're aiming for (clarity), the climate/culture needed to get there, and the competence — skills and behaviours — the organisation doesn't yet have.
• Leaders often assume the organisation will change while they personally stay the same — a fallacy that, left unchecked, is itself a predictor of ending up in the 88%.
• "Change fatigue" is real, especially when sigmoid curves land too close together — teams that haven't finished processing one change get hit with the next before they've found solid ground.

Three Reasons to Listen

• Listen if you've ever announced a change, moved on, and wondered months later why nothing actually shifted — this episode explains why communication isn't leadership.
• Listen if you're leading a transformation and privately think you'll be able to stay the same while everyone around you changes — Dan and Pia explain why that's a fallacy that quietly sinks change efforts.
• Listen if your team seems to be dragging its feet on a change you think is obviously right — the sigmoid curve explains why leaders are always further along the emotional curve than their teams, and what to do about the gap.

Notable Quotes

"Organizations change and people transition." — Pia Lee, citing William Bridges

"If you're leading change and you haven't changed, well, you're probably going to fit into the 88% (who will fail)." — Pia Lee