More Productive. Less Engaged. Trouble for teams.
Video Transcript
There's a shift happening inside teams right now and most leaders can't see it because the dashboards look great. AI has made the easy stuff even easier. And when something gets easy, we often stop paying attention to it. It's the same reason research shows that most driving accidents happen in the last 5 minutes of your commute.
You'd think it shouldn't happen because you're very familiar with the route, but the opposite is true. You switch your brain off when something becomes more autonomous. We've all experienced getting home but having no recollection of the act of getting home because our brains were able to drive home and think about a lot of other stuff without crashing. But another way to see this is that you switched your brain off for the driving task.
That's what I think is happening at work. AI took the friction out of thinking and your best people have basically switched off as a result. When you're in familiar territory, doing work you know intimately, your brain's automatic processing can work against you, creating a false sense of security that masks real danger in your work. And we don't notice because it doesn't look like disengagement.
It looks like productivity. Activity is up, output is up, road maps are moving forward, and everything looks like it's going up and to the right. But something's off and you can feel it. It feels like everybody's phoning it in or has checked out in some way or another.
There's one metric that is collapsing underneath all that output in progress. Engagement. Research tells us that nearly 1 in4 of your people is disengaged at work right now. And you can't see it because AI is masking the signal.
This is what I call the output paradox. you become more productive but at the same time disengaged in the work and your job. And to be clear, this isn't a vibe that I'm feeling. It's actually there in the data.
Active Track tracked 443 million work hours across more than 1,000 companies. And after AI was rolled out, email went up 104%, chat went up 145%, and weekend work went up 40%. But focus time, the thing that actually produces good work, hit a three-year low. They gave this phenomenon a name, amplified work.
AI doesn't reduce the load. It just lets you carry more of it faster and with less meaning attached. AI isn't the only culprit here. There are many reasons this happens in an organization, but I want to tell you about just two of them in this video.
First, legacy incentives are moving your teams in the wrong direction and at the wrong speed. Misaligned incentives aren't new either. Steven Kerr wrote about this in 1975. Organizations have known for 50 years that they were rewarding one thing and hoping for another.
In 2026, we just built a faster engine for the same old mistakes. Thanks, ChatJPT. And second, curiosity dies and leaves people uninterested in deep work. Curiosity dies in part because of the first problem we just spoke about, misaligned incentives.
More often than not, curiosity is never incentivized specifically in any organization. mostly because it's tough to validate and measure using old metrics and legacy thinking. So the great decline starts with curiosity dying and curiosity doesn't just vanish overnight. It erodess slowly.
Curiosity turns to boredom. Boredom turns to apathy. And apathy turns to indifference. And by the time you notice the indifference, your best people are already gone in every single way except their exit from your organization.
And why? Well, because with AI, the easy version of the work is done in 10 minutes. Nobody is incentivized to explore the hard work. So, people tick the box to put on a show and then disengage.
Artificial intelligence will not kill your business. It's the other AI that you should be worried about. Apathy and indifference. Around the office, you might start to hear phrases like, "Stay in my lane." Becoming a war cry very silently.
Teams waiting instead of initiating. You get this alignment meeting that crops up with no real ownership of outcomes ever presented. Output becomes the drive across the business at breakneck speeds. And leadership talks about innovation but does very little about actually becoming innovative.
And your top people, your top performers underperform on purpose, often after being put back in their place one too many times from leadership that's not listening. That's not a people problem. That's a system doing exactly what it was built to do. So, you can't fix this by putting up cheesy value posters in the hallways or tweaking your mission statement at your next all hands meeting.
Here are three things you can do right now to start moving your teams away from the output paradox. One, audit your incentives against KUR test. What are you actually rewarding versus what you say you want? Close that gap first before you buy another AI tool or push people to move fast and break things.
Two, find out who is sitting in the wrong seats in your organization. And I'm not talking about performance reviews. I'm talking about being a real adult and a real human and actually asking human beings what they enjoy doing and if they think they're in the right role. This matters because curiosity isn't infinite and applicable to any topic at any time for any person.
My favorite simple definition of curiosity is an intrinsic desire to close the knowledge gap. And if you have a creative person sitting in the finance department, then they're not going to be that curious about how to make the numbers make the most sense. They're going to want to make the numbers look pretty, which is definitely not going to push them to go deep into their financial work. They're going to do the easy thing quickly and spew out work slop.
Three, remove one layer of decision-m from one team. I'm not talking about a restructure, just a little simple experiment. Remove the decision friction. Empower the team to make decisions on their own and see what moves when the gates disappear.
Re-engaging teams is not an optional extra anymore. Passivity is the default state for most people's brains. And when we're turning our brains off and going into autonomous mode, like when we're driving home in the afternoons, we're going to default to being passive at work. Apathy and indifference are the biggest threat right now to you and your organization.
A human who loves your job more than you do is going to beat you at it. The best organizations aren't the ones that use AI the most or have the highest output or the most productive. A company that understands how to correctly incentivize people is going to win. Don't mistake output for engagement.
One goes up on a dashboard and the other keeps people interested in their work. If this is playing out in your organization, I talk about this in full in my new keynote, the output paradox, how to engage teams in the age of AI. If you've made it this far in the video, congratulations. And here's my offer to you.
I want to do a free 10-minute version of this talk for five organizations virtually or in person depending on where your team is. Contact me by scanning the QR code that you can see right now or visiting the link in the description.