Complacency is the enemy of innovation

In the past two years, I have had the same conversation more than 150 times. A CEO or senior leader sits across from me. Smart. Experienced. They genuinely care about their people. And within ten minutes, unprompted, they have told me that their workforce development systems either don’t exist, or aren’t working. That “people aren’t growing the way they need to”. That they can see AI coming and “aren’t sure their teams are ready for it”.

Then I ask what they’re doing about it. And the conversation goes quiet. This article is about that silence.

Because I’ve come to believe it is not confusion, not a resource problem, not even a priority problem - not really. It is something more dangerous, more insidious, and much harder to fix.

It is complacency. And complacency – is the enemy of innovation. And this time, it could cost you more than ever before.

The Blockbuster problem

Most people know the Blockbuster story. A dominant, profitable, famous business. A technology shift on the horizon they could see coming.

A rival - Netflix - offered to sell itself to them for US$50 million in the year 2000. Blockbuster laughed it off.

What you may not know, is Blockbuster had the answer in its own hands.

By 2004, senior leaders inside the business had proposed eliminating late fees and launching a competitive online service. They had the vision. The plan. The budget.

The Board said no - too risky, too expensive, too much change too fast. The CEO who championed it was fired. His successor dropped both initiatives. Within six years, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy.

There is one Blockbuster store left in the world. It is in Bend, Oregon.

The Blockbuster story is not really about streaming. It is about what happens when organisations understand the need for change - and choose not to act on it.

I am watching the same story play out right now. In boardrooms. In HR departments. In the working lives of millions of people who know, quietly and uncomfortably, that what they are doing today will not be sufficient for what is coming tomorrow.

The industry at risk this time is not video rental. It’s human potential.

A decade of evidence we have chosen to ignore

The evidence is not secret. Most leaders I speak with have seen some version of it. Many have commissioned their own internal research that tells them the same story. They know. And yet. Still aren’t acting.

Gallup’s January 2026 data shows US worker engagement has fallen from 36% in 2020 to 31% in 2025 - 8 million fewer engaged workers in five years.

Globally, employee engagement has hit an 11-year low. The stat that should stop every business leader in their tracks though: the percentage of workers who agreed they had opportunities to learn and grow at work dropped to 37% in 2025, down from 48% in 2020. A ten-point freefall.

Gallup now estimates disengagement costs the global economy US$8.9 trillion annually. This is not a new finding. It has been reported, discussed, and worried over for a decade. And the number keeps moving in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, the WEF’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 39% of core skills will need to change by 2030. Sixty three per cent of employers already cite the skills gap as their primary barrier to business transformation. 120 million workers are at medium-term risk of redundancy.

And our own data at Actvo shows that 75% of mid-level and senior knowledge workers cannot name a single meaningful technical skill they have developed in the last five years.

We are not facing a skills shortage. We are facing a complacency crisis - decades in the making, now colliding with the fastest technological shift in human history.

So why isn’t anyone moving?

After speaking with over 150 CEOs and senior leaders, I have identified three distinct groups - all experiencing a version of the same paralysis.

CEOs and senior leaders: They understand the system for learning in their organisation is absent, or broken. But fixing it competes with everything else - revenue targets, market pressures, customer contraction, regulatory demands etc. The quiet hope is that it will resolve itself. Or that “it’s really an HR problem, and they will eventually fix it”. And so the year passes, the conversation happens again, and the room goes quiet again.

HR and people leaders: They often know exactly what needs to change. But they lack the mandate, the budget, the time or the political will to redesign the systems they inherited, or built from the ground up. For a different time. Managing compliance, responding to crises, holding culture together in an environment of constant change always take precedent - redesigning how learning works is a project that never reaches the top of the list.

Employees: Everyone knows they need to reskill. We know AI is changing almost all industries. But almost all of us are time-poor, uncertain where to start, and afraid of what we might discover about ourselves if we look too closely. The gap – might seem like a chasm. So most people stay where they are (“job-hugging”) hoping it will miraculously change - or simply, go away.

This is the psychology of complacency. It is not laziness. It is not stupidity.

It is a uniquely human response to a problem that feels too large, too complex, and too threatening to tackle head-on.

Blockbuster’s board felt the same way. And they were wrong.

This time Is different

Every major technological shift in modern history has disrupted work. Automation displaced factory workers. Globalisation restructured supply chains. The internet rewrote entire industries.

But those transitions played out over decades. People and organisations had time - not always enough, not always distributed fairly, but time.

AI is not offering the same courtesy.

The pace of change is not linear. It is exponential. The window for being an early mover in an AI-augmented workforce development is not measured in decades. It is measured in the next two or three years, and it’s rapidly closing.

The organisations that are systematically developing their people’s ability to learn, adapt, and work alongside AI today are not just ahead of the curve - they are building a structural advantage that will compound, fast.

The organisations that are waiting - hoping the problem resolves, assuming their people will “figure it out” - treating workforce development as an unnecessary cost centre rather than a competitive asset - are building technical debt, in human capital.

And unlike financial debt, you cannot refinance your way out of it.

Unlike Blockbuster, you won’t get a chance to file for bankruptcy and start again. When AI makes your workforce’s skills-obsolete, there is no restructuring plan for that. It’s a restart.

The question you need to consider

The complacency I am describing is not a passive feeling. It is an active design decision.

It is what happens when systems are built that make inertia easier than action - and when leaders mistake the absence of a life or death crisis, for the presence of things working well.

The machines are not waiting. The workforce disruption AI is bringing is not a forecast anymore - it is already well underway. The organisations that are thriving are not necessarily the ones with the most advanced AI tools.

They are the ones with the most learning-ready, growth-oriented, self-directed people.

That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design.

So the real question is are you designing it in - or designing it out?

The architecture of learning: what leaders need to build right now

You see, here is the uncomfortable truth about learning in most organisations: it is designed as an add-on to work, not as the work itself. Traditional L&D systems were built for the organisation’s convenience first - not the learner’s real human growth. Scheduled, standardised, mostly passive. Something done to people on a ‘Tuesday afternoon in a conference room’, or assigned via an e-learning platform that nobody opens – or recalls - once the mandatory module is completed.

That model was never particularly effective. Efficient – yes. But did it really enable people to grow inside the company and stay engaged? No, or we wouldn’t have the rising dis-engagement rates we have.

Most HR people know this now. And in the AI era, it is actively dangerous. Because the learning now required is not about completing a course. It is about building a living, adaptive capability for continuous growth - individually and collectively. What we don’t need is more training.

What we need is a new relationship with learning itself.

Start with the person, not the organisation

The dominant design logic of most HR and talent systems on the market today starts from the same assumption: h ere is what the organisation needs, here is the pathway we have mapped for you, here is the role we see you progressing into. The employee is a variable in the organisation’s plan.

Their own ambitions, their own sense of direction, their own definition of meaningful work - rarely asked about, rarely mapped, rarely acted on.

What I am advocating for is a different starting point - what designers call ‘empathy-based design’.

Instead of beginning with what the organisation needs the workforce to learn, to grow into what they need - we should begin by genuinely understanding what each person already knows about themselves: what they are curious about, what they are afraid of giving up on, what they are uniquely good at, and where they want to go in their future. And why.

And treating that data not as a nice-to-have, but as core strategic intelligence - the foundation on which a real workforce development strategy can be built.

I have seen what happens when people are actually invited to do this work.

Recently, I worked with a senior leader - over a decade in the same industry, good at their job, respected by peers, quietly certain their best years were behind them. Feeling lost. Over several weeks, we mapped their actual capability - clearly and honestly.

We identified what they were genuinely good at, what skills they had been building without realising it, and what kind of work gave them real energy. What lit them up, and made their work feel meaningful. Within three months, they had a clear direction, a learning plan, and the confidence to pursue a role available in their own organisation, they had previously assumed was out of reach. They are now doing that role.

Across thousands of people I have worked with over eight years, the pattern is consistent: when people are given the tools and the space to understand their own talent - clearly, without fear, with genuine support - they do not drift.

They act. Transparently and swiftly. The real question is – will they stay or go.

The paradox leaders need to sit with

Here is where most leaders get uncomfortable. The majority of people I have worked with who do this work - who genuinely invest in understanding their capability and activate a clear direction - end up leaving the company they were in, when they started.

Not immediately. Not always by choice. But once a person has genuine clarity about what they are capable of and what they want, they begin to measure their environment against that clarity.

If the organisation cannot meet them there - cannot offer the growth, the mobility, the purposeful work they now know they are ready for - they will find somewhere that can.

That sounds like an argument against investing in your people. It is the opposite.

The people who leave are the ones you failed to engage before they reached that point of clarity. The talent leaves either way - just slowly, invisibly, through disengagement and lowering of productivity, rather than resignation.

The ones who choose to stay, and who grow, who bring new capability forward inside your organisation, are the ones you must meet at the halfway mark. When they are wondering what’s next. If you go first - if you build the conditions for self-directed growth before your people reach their own tipping point - you become the organisation worth staying for.

This is not soft. It is not ‘HR touchy-feely’. It is a system for growth, by design.

And the organisations that build it well end up with faster, more adaptive workforces - not because they have better people, but because they have better systems for unlocking the people they already have.

Find your early adopters

Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Model’ (Everett M Rogers, 1962) tells us that large-scale change doesn’t begin with the majority. It begins with a small group of early adopters - people already self-teaching, already experimenting, already finding ways to do their work differently. They exist in your organisation right now.

They are completing LinkedIn Learning courses in their own time. They are building prompts in ChatGPT before your AI policy has been written. They are vibe-coding new ideas for themselves, in their spare time.

And they are customers of platforms like Actvo – self-funding, their own Learning & Development. They are reimagining their own roles - quietly, not waiting for permission.

The question is whether you are letting them lead - or asking them to follow you and wait for the authorised learning systems and plans you have for them.

Early adopters validate change and accelerate adoption across the broader organisation. They are motivated by the real value of what they are discovering, and they are natural social influencers. When organisations identify these people and give them permission - resources, time, visibility - they become the mechanism by which a new way of working spreads through the majority.

Just as companies create innovation labs and R&D teams to test new business models, we need to do the same with learning. Find your early adopters. Give them the tools and the time.

Let them show the organisation what is possible. Let them build the new model - from the inside. Let them lead, you follow. And in a world of predominantly mid-sized businesses, with low/no L&D or HRIT resources, this becomes a powerful upward cycle of growth without having to invest in additional HR resources or building a new layer of cost.

It’s simply, about enabling humans to do what they will do naturally – self-direct their own learning & growth.

Three things you can do right now

1. Enable your people to learn about themselves
 

Before you design any learning programmes, give your people the tools, time and the space to understand their own capability - clearly, honestly, and without fear. What are they genuinely good at? What skills have they built in the last three years? What work experience has generated natural learning competencies? What kind of work gives them energy?

This is not a performance review. It is a conversation – and the foundation of a growth pathway. And most people have never been invited to have it.

2. Protect time for learning - don’t just allocate budget

Stop treating learning as a scheduled event. Stop treating it as effort to be prioritised. Start treating it as a daily practice. Start making it part of the job. That means actively protecting time for people to develop new skills during the working week - not just funding a content library nobody opens.

Measure learning engagement as seriously as you measure any other performance metric.

3. Let people design their own growth pathway - then respond to it

This is the hardest shift. It requires leaders to relinquish some control over the development narrative and genuinely listen to what their people say they need in order to grow. Not so that every request is automatically granted - but so that the conversation happens, the data is gathered, and the organisation’s decisions about talent and investment are grounded in reality rather than assumptions. People will be patient, if they know they have been heard.

It requires system change, and the intention to find true alignment between your people, and the organisations values and vision.

Find your early adopters. Give them permission. Watch what they can build. Then scale it.

The organisations that will win the transformation race

AT&T’s Workforce 2020 program - later rebranded Future Ready - albeit a little old now, is one of the most studied examples of proactive, large-scale workforce reskilling.

Facing the discovery that 100,000 of its 280,000 employees were in roles likely to become obsolete within a decade, AT&T invested over US$1 billion to retrain from within rather than hire externally.

Retrained employees went on to fill half of all new tech management roles. The programme became a Harvard Business School case study.

It is a rare example of a legacy organisation choosing to act before the cliff edge - and the results demonstrated what is possible when learning is treated as a strategic investment rather than a compliance function.

That is the choice in front of every people leader right now.

The complacency crisis is real. The AI disruption is already underway.

So I’ll say it again, for the people in the back.

The organisations that will thrive in the future will not be the ones with the most advanced tools - they will be the ones with the most learning-enabled, growth-oriented, self-directed people.

That doesn’t happen by accident.

It happens by design.

Melissa Jenner is the founder & CEO of Actvo and author of Emotional Leadership – a New way to Inspire Growth in the Age of AI