February 2026 — What the Layoff Needed, What the Slide Did, What the Prophet Forgot, What the Berries Required
Something has been bothering me this month and I haven’t been able to name it cleanly. The closest I can get is this: we are living through a moment in which the future is being used to make decisions about people in the present. Not the actual future of course (we’re not there yet). The promised one. And the people those decisions are made about have first names and last names and lives that extend well beyond their job descriptions.
AI is part of this. But only part. The deeper pattern is older: organizations have always been better at processing objects than hosting subjects. What’s new is the scale, the speed, and the seductiveness of the justification.
Your Job Was Eliminated by a Prediction
“The job losses and slowed hiring are real, even though companies are still waiting for generative AI to deliver on its promises.”
Only 2% of organizations surveyed tied actual headcount reductions to actual AI implementation. The rest were acting on anticipation. On a story they’ve been told, or are telling themselves.
What the authors politely call “anticipatory effects” has a less polite name: AI as cover. The layoff was coming. AI gave it a story.
The Lie That Fits on a Slide
“The compression required to make something shareable destroys the context that made it meaningful. Accuracy is a casualty of format.”
Mehrabian’s website says his 7-38-55 rule doesn’t apply the way everyone uses it. He’s been saying it for decades. The slide keeps circulating anyway.
This is a story about what organizations do to ideas in transit. And why the person who asks questions risks looking like the problem.
The Apparatus You Would Use to Look Is Made of the Same Thing
“It’s undiscussability all the way down.”
Chris Argyris spent his career documenting what he called defensive routines: the organizational habits that prevent people from examining the assumptions underlying their actions. His sharpest observation is that these routines are self-sealing. When you try to point out that a team is being defensive, the team defends against that observation. The meta-level becomes undiscussable too.
Marshall extends this through the concept of the memeplex: the interlocking system of collective beliefs that reinforce one another and form an organization’s unexamined worldview. Pull on any single assumption and the whole web vibrates.
The passage on external facilitation near the end describes the right kind of help: not arriving with a diagnosis and a prescription, but creating conditions for the organization to see itself. Which is, I’d note, a reasonable description of what good management development tries to do.
We Work So That We May Rest
“We shouldn’t be resting so we can work. We work so that we may rest.”
A company gives its people six weeks every three years and gets celebrated for it. Academia has offered a semester (sometimes a full year) as a baseline assumption for generations. Nobody calls it generous. It’s just how the conditions for good thinking get maintained.
The corporate world occasionally rediscovers this and mistakes the rediscovery for innovation.
Twenty-Five Years of Research and We Still Don’t Know
“The science of feedback at work is not yet a story of coherent and cumulative progress.”
Thirty-eight journals, a quarter century of studies, and the field still cannot agree on what feedback is. Because researchers kept using the same word to mean different things and then cited each other as though they were talking about the same phenomenon.
The authors include a passage that has stayed with me. Feedback theory has been governed for forty years by the thermostat analogy: a system detects a gap, adjusts, and shuts down when the gap closes. And then, almost in passing, they note: people are not thermostats. A thermostat cannot ask why the room should be warmer, or whether this is the right career, or what it means that someone looked at them that way.
The field that studies feedback has not, it turns out, been able to learn from its own.
The Spell Belongs to the Audience
“It is recognition on the part of those subject to authority which is decisive for the validity of charisma.”
Charisma is something a crowd confers. Without the recognition, the prophet is just an eccentric in a long coat. The most dangerous leaders are the ones who forget this. They mistake the projection for the person. They believe the spell is theirs to cast rather than the audience’s to withdraw.
What Zadeh does that nobody else quite does: he follows that logic all the way into the algorithm. TikTok is charismatic in the Weberian sense. We feel seen by something that cannot see. The question of what that is doing to our capacity to recognize authority that deserves to be followed is one this piece opens — and doesn’t close.
The Berries Were Never the Point
“It is a problem dressed up as a solution.”
Solnit begins with blackberries. Hours of picking, scratched wrists, purple-stained hands. She went for the fruit. She stayed for what the fruit required of her.
What she’s defending is harder to name than what she’s arguing against: the capacity for something atrophies when you stop practicing it. A bookstore clerk thanks a customer for making eye contact — because people under 30 don’t anymore. He is not describing a generational quirk. He is describing what happens when the practice stops.
Read this one alongside the next piece, which supplies the philosophical architecture.
The Essence of Being Human Is That One Does Not Seek Perfection
“What you lose in optimizing morality is the same thing you lose in maximizing your airline-mile spend. Nothing quantifiable — but precisely the chance to escape quantification.”
Clairmont arrives at his argument through a points guy in an Emirates business class bar. The piece is about optimization as a mindset — and what it costs in domains where the thing being optimized is precisely what resists being counted. OKRs, engagement scores, competency frameworks: the apparatus of modern management rests on the assumption that what matters can be measured, and that measuring it more precisely will produce more of it.
The Orwell line on Gandhi is the sharpest formulation: the essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. Where Solnit makes this argument through loss, Clairmont makes it through absurdity. Same erosion, opposite directions.
In Case You Missed It
Abandon All Hope of Mattering — Three years of thinking about influence led somewhere unexpected: true influence emerges only when you stop trying to achieve it. The moment you intend to matter, you don’t. This one unsettled me to write.
My Success, Your Failure — The pattern only works if nobody names it. I named it.
The Question Behind the Question — A participant challenged a facilitator before the program had barely begun. What happened next is a small lesson in what it means to hold a room.
The Day My Boss Said: Not One of Your Best Performances? — One question. No catalogue of failures. No guided tour through what went wrong. The implicit as an act of respect and, sometimes, mercy.
If any of the patterns above feel uncomfortably close to home, that’s the work.
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