Psychologist Pauline Boss coined the term “ambiguous loss” to describe a grief with no clear boundaries, like that experienced by families whose loved ones were missing in action and who could neither grieve nor move on. Since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, I’ve seen a version of it every day in my work with people across companies. Nothing has been taken from us, and yet something has disappeared.
Expertise works like territory. Being the person who can do a particular thing marks out our place, and who we are at work depends on holding on to it. So when AI produces the same output we do, it can feel like it’s crossing an invisible line and chipping away at that identity.
Those of us who work in corporate learning, or learning and development (L&D), have long been identified with content production: through training sessions and e-learning courses, we were responsible for gathering information and sharing it throughout the company. Whether any of it changed how people worked was hardly ever how we measured success. But now AI tools can bottle knowledge and deliver it at the right moment, in the form people need it, freeing L&D teams to do something else.
What that something else should be is rarely discussed, and this silence is what makes the loss so ambiguous. For years, L&D has identified with what it does: with the training and workshops it provides, but fewer have been able to see its purpose in what it delivers: more effective people and organizations. I think this is what has caused a lot of the dread in our profession.
The World Economic Forum’s _Future of Jobs Report 2025_ puts systems thinking among the skills that are likely to be in greatest demand through 2030. Systems thinking is the ability to see how the parts of an organization connect and influence each other. For L&D people, this means looking beyond the request for a course to the conditions that prevent performance.
It is the difference between treating a symptom and getting to the root cause. A few years ago, the CEO of a global technology company asked the People & Culture leaders of his organization to teach employees and managers about the concept of accountability. Teams kept making commitments they didn’t keep, so he wanted everyone to be reminded of what accountability means.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
