Narrative Laundering
Workforce risks are real... and we are laundering the hell out of it.
You know my POV on what is really happening in the workforce. If you are new, don’t worry, you will quickly get up to speed. If something is genuinely transformative, you don’t need to shout about it every earnings call. You don’t need to keep telling people it’s inevitable. It shows up. And structurally, it’s how work actually gets done. It shows up in role clarity, in whether teams stabilize, in whether backfills resume, in whether people feel like they’re building something durable or just bracing.
And right now, when I look inside companies… not at stock prices, not at narratives, not at AI demos… AI does not look like clean productivity. It looks like pressure. It looks like organizations trying to run hotter with fewer people and calling that progress because a model says it should work.
That’s the part that gets me.
What makes this especially dangerous is how these assumptions flow through the organization.
What I’m seeing is not companies suddenly operating with more slack or ease. I’m seeing companies compressing the people inside them and then laundering that compression through technical language until it sounds like destiny instead of a choice. And when you start there, the workforce outcomes are predictable… even if the market outcomes lag.
Let me be very explicit about what I actually track, because this matters. I don’t look at headline headcount numbers. Those are blunt, lagging, and easily managed. I look at job architecture. Which roles disappear. Which ones get merged. How spans of control widen. Whether attrition gets backfilled or absorbed. Where contractors appear as pressure valves - because DAMN y’all - it’s such a tell about company health. One entire industry is specifically consistent in their patterns right now, and historically we didn’t see this before.
Across tech right now, the pattern is consistent.
Mid-layer execution roles are really starting to thin out across the board. Managers are seeing twice as many direct reports, and the roles that used to be a bit more distinct are fast becoming hybrid positions with broader scope and less support. Don’t get me started on the ChatGPT style vague job descriptions either… and what I am hearing in the rumor mill is that accountability is harder and harder to trace, which ironically doesn’t help any employee.
Seriously… when productivity is real, you don’t need heroics, you don’t need people doing three jobs. So what I am seeing in the workforce data is consolidation justified by tooling rather than proven output. It’s a weird world we live in right now. AI is being layered on top of work that was already close to capacity, and leadership is assuming the technology will close the gap before the strain shows up.
That assumption is doing an enormous amount of work inside these organizations.
This is where narrative laundering really starts to matter. Narrative laundering is when uncertainty gets cleaned up by a model so no one has to own the downside. It’s not about lying. It’s about taking something operationally messy and reframing it as technically inevitable.
“The model says we have to.”
“This is where the industry is going.”
“We don’t have a choice.”
Those phrases aren’t neutral. You’ve heard CEOs say things just like that recently right? It feels like the new 'cool kids phrase.’ Once these are accepted, responsibility is dunz-o.
AI is being sold as an option-expanding technology. But the way it’s being implemented is option-constricting.
There are some CEOs that shall remain nameless that come across not quite as a villain, but as a signal amplifier. When they goes on stage and talk about the future of compute, markets hear destiny… boards hear inevitability… executives hear cover. Their messaging doesn’t cause layoffs. What it does is synchronize assumptions across companies without coordination. It sets the external clock. It gives internal decision-makers permission to align timing. But what I hear- lies, lies, and more damned lies.