What AI will reveal in your organisations – that you are probably not ready to look at.
Two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, established, from 250.000 data points collected from 2.250 people, that our minds are not focused on what they are doing 47% of the time. Rumination, symbolic presence in meetings, autopilot.
This figure has a real, measurable financial cost for organisations. And yet it rarely makes it onto executive committee agendas.
By taking over automatable tasks, it will expose what was hiding behind them: the real quality of human attention in our organisations. And that quality, in most cases, has never been worked on.
This is one of the reasons why 88% of transformations fail, according to Bain & Company. Processes were being transformed while people were operating at reduced capacity. Tools were being changed without truly touching what drives decisions: the quality of presence of those who make them.
Previous revolutions redistributed what humans do: the steam engine took the arms, electricity eliminated the nights, the internet reduced distance.
Each time, organisations responded the same way: train, adapt, reorganise. Change what people do. Far more rarely who they are.
Nicolas d’Hueppe, founder of Alchimie, listed on Euronext Growth, survived a cardiac arrest in 2021. Fifty-three minutes clinically dead. Six weeks of rehabilitation, then an immediate return to the office… as if nothing had happened. A depression followed, repeated fractures, a long denial.
It was only in hospital, during neurological tests, that he understood: it would no longer be possible to operate as before.
In organisations, this kind of shift is more discreet. But the logic is similar: when what one used to do disappears, the question of who one is without it eventually imposes itself.
The title, the meeting as proof of presence, overload as a signal of value, complexity as a demonstration of expertise – these are identity crutches built up over decades. They are beginning to crack. And change management programmes do not replace the work of individuals.
The tools exist. They are not esoteric.
Neuroscience research is clear: eight weeks of mindfulness practice are sufficient to develop interoception – our capacity to read the signals the body continuously sends to the brain. At nine months, the development becomes structural, documented by brain imaging. These are published data, not self-development.
The organisations that will endure this period will not be the most technologically equipped, they will be those that have invested in what AI cannot replicate: the capacity of their teams to be genuinely present, to decide with discernment, to hold their ground under pressure — including when the familiar reference points are gone.
This moment is probably not the moment for resistance. It is more demanding than that:
It forces us to look at what organisations have, until now, managed to avoid.
This column was published in the 10th edition of Forbes Luxembourg.
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