As the headlines from the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos settle, a well-known organisational dynamic comes back into view.
Much of the public conversation over the past week focused on workforce readiness. Across panels and commentary, themes of reskilling, adaptability, and preparing people for an AI-enabled future appeared repeatedly. The emphasis was clear. Organisations cannot realise the potential of new technologies unless their people are able to work differently.
That instinct is a sound one. Few would argue against the importance of preparing the workforce for change.
What stayed with me, however, was not the ambition of those conversations, but how often readiness was discussed as something that sits downstream of strategy, rather than as something that must shape how change is introduced in the first place.
What stood out most to me
What stood out most to me was the way workforce readiness was framed primarily as a matter of skills and mindset. The language centred on learning, reskilling, and helping people adapt to new tools and ways of working.
Inside organisations, readiness tends to unfold less cleanly.
People are often asked to operate differently before the surrounding system has changed to support those expectations. New tools are introduced while decision rights remain unclear. New behaviours are encouraged while governance models still reward caution. Leaders are asked to enable learning while operating within structures that leave little room to do so.
In such conditions, readiness becomes difficult to sustain, not because people are unwilling, but because the environment they are working within has not yet been prepared.
Where the conversation often stops
Workforce readiness is frequently discussed as an individual or leadership challenge. Leaders are encouraged to create psychological safety, invest in skills, and support experimentation. These expectations are reasonable, and in many cases necessary.
What is less frequently examined is whether leaders themselves are positioned to act on those expectations.
Leadership accountability only functions when leaders have the authority, clarity, and structural support required to make meaningful choices. When those conditions are absent, responsibility becomes symbolic rather than practical.
This is where organisational design and sequencing begin to matter.
Readiness as a sequencing problem
In many transformation efforts, the order of change works against the outcomes being sought. Strategy is set quickly, tools are selected, and delivery pressure follows soon after. Preparation of the organisation, by contrast, is treated as a parallel or downstream activity.
The result is a mismatch between what people are asked to do and what the system allows them to do.
Leaders are expected to empower teams without clear decision boundaries. Employees are encouraged to experiment while operating under risk frameworks designed for certainty. Learning is promoted rhetorically while delivery expectations continue to tighten.
None of this reflects poor intent. It reflects a sequencing issue.
Readiness cannot be layered on after expectations have already shifted. It needs to be part of how change is introduced, not something applied in response to its consequences.
Why this matters now
The emphasis on workforce readiness at Davos is timely. AI places sustained demands on judgement, prioritisation, and learning in ways that differ from earlier waves of technology change.
When readiness is treated primarily as a training or skills problem, organisations risk repeating familiar patterns. People are prepared in isolation while the system around them remains largely unchanged.
When readiness is approached as an organisational design question, a different conversation becomes possible. Attention turns to when authority is clarified, how learning is supported, and which constraints must shift before new behaviours can reasonably be expected.
Only then does leadership responsibility become actionable rather than aspirational.
Closing reflections
The conversations emerging from Davos point in an important direction. Preparing people for the future of work matters deeply.
The question is whether readiness is being treated as an outcome to be achieved, or as a condition that must be established before transformation begins.
It may be worth pausing to reflect.
- Where in your organisation are expectations changing faster than structures?
- Which leaders are being asked to enable new ways of working without the authority to do so?
- At what point in your transformation sequence does readiness actually begin?
These questions do not require immediate answers. Their value lies in what they help surface.
Share your thoughts and comments below.
More to come.
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