On the human side of disruption

I love technology. I’ve spent the past few decades at companies like Microsoft, Oracle, GE, and Red Hat, which means I’ve learned this: every supposedly frictionless innovation creates an astonishing amount of human friction.

That’s what fascinates me.

What happens to people when the world around them changes faster than they expected? And how do you lead them through it when you are not entirely sure where “through it” leads?

Moore’s Law trained us to expect technology to advance exponentially. Unfortunately, no one invented the equivalent for human adaptation. Technology compounds faster than people can absorb it.

From a distance, the progress that technology offers looks exciting. Up close, it looks like someone reorganized your company, automated part of your job, placed an expiration date on skills you spent years (and perhaps your life savings) learning, and then scheduled a town hall to explain why this is all a tremendous opportunity.

“Please hold your questions until the end.”

The conversation about technological disruption usually starts with economics – markets, competitive advantage, and the redistribution of value. But what we too often miss is how people experience disruption: their confidence, identity, and sense of relevance when the ground is moving beneath them.

And the ground is moving beneath all of us right now.

AI is creating extraordinary possibilities – while also raising extraordinarily difficult questions. How will we work? Will we still work? Which skills will matter? Will mine?

No one can predict every shape the future of business will take. But leaders do not get to wait for certainty.

So, we start with what we know: every period of technological disruption has been followed by human adaptation.

Never neatly. Never painlessly. And almost never according to the original PowerPoint.

Change creates friction. It challenges our confidence. It forces us to reconsider who we are, how we contribute, and sometimes whether we matter at all.

For the record, we do. You do.

Not everyone adapts at the same pace. Not every institution survives. And adaptation is not the same thing as avoiding loss.

But history offers us some encouragement. People learn. We adapt. We find new ways to contribute, create, connect, and lead. We persevere.

I see it every day at Lumen, where we’re building new muscles as we transform a legacy telecom company into the trusted network for AI.

There are plenty of conversations about AI infrastructure, models, data centers, chips, and energy. Those conversations matter. But they don’t tell the full story of this moment.

The fuller story is the human side – what we fear, what we learn, what we lose, what we build, and how we help one another adapt when the future arrives faster than our confidence.

These are the stories I’ll share in a new series called Daring Diaries.

Consider the diary open. Wherever you sit in this change – leading it, learning it, questioning it, or worrying about it – I hope you will add your voice to the conversation.