A friend wrote something today that named a feeling I haven’t seen named much: the quiet grief of losing the teamwork, not the work itself.
The relationships that used to form around solving something hard together. She described co-working with AI more than collaborating with humans now, and feeling that community go quiet.
I think a lot of teams are sitting in this and not talking about it.
It reminds me of the early pandemic. We had the tools to keep working, but none of the connectors yet — no muscle memory for how presence, trust, or creative friction worked without a hallway or a lunch table. We were disoriented for a while before we built new norms. I think we’re in an equivalent moment now, just with a different kind of room going quiet.
This matters for managers because ambiguous loss — loss without a funeral, without a clear ending, the thing that just stops being true one day — is cognitively expensive precisely because there’s no ritual to process it. Nobody told your team to grieve the version of collaboration that’s disappearing, so they haven’t. And a team quietly carrying that has less bandwidth for the creative risk-taking you’re asking of them, even though nothing on the org chart looks different.
Your job isn’t to fix this feeling or rush people through it. It’s closer to a doula’s: stay present and skilled through a process that’s happening regardless, and help people move through it rather than freeze in it.
Two concrete moves. First, name it. Say out loud in a 1:1 or team meeting that working with AI has changed something about how the team experiences creative work together, and ask what they’ve noticed. Naming creates the ritual that ambiguous loss doesn’t come with built in.
Second, engineer the collaboration back in since it’s no longer going to happen by accident. One example: a recurring “no-AI hour” where the team works a hard problem together, out loud, the old way — not because AI shouldn’t be used, but because the muscle of building something alongside another person needs somewhere to keep living.
We got through the last version of this. We’ll get through this one too.