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by Clare Dygert, 2026 –

 “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” ~ Mary Oliver

The Moment We’re In

Something unprecedented is happening to knowledge work, and we’re mostly having the wrong conversation about it.

AI is absorbing an increasing share of routine cognitive labor. The drafting, the summarizing, the analyzing, the generating, the coordinating. Not in some distant future. Now. Across every discipline: engineering, law, medicine, finance, design, research, learning and development. The proportion of knowledge work that requires a human being is shrinking, and it’s shrinking fast.

Most of the conversation about this shift falls into one of three ruts. There are the efficiency enthusiasts who want to use AI to do the same work faster and cheaper. There are the people who are genuinely afraid, worried about losing their jobs, their expertise, their sense of professional identity. And there are the people who’ve decided AI itself is the problem, a force causing disruption and harm that needs to be contained. All three groups are focused on AI as a thing to be managed. None of them are asking the more interesting question.

If AI handles the routine cognitive labor, what becomes possible for the humans?

For the first time in the history of knowledge work, we have the opportunity to focus our energy on the problems that actually require human cognition. The wicked problems. Rittel and Webber (1973) gave us that term to describe challenges that resist straightforward solutions: problems with no definitive formulation, where every attempt at a solution changes the problem itself, and where the causes are so tangled that no single perspective can see the whole. Climate change. Healthcare systems. Educational equity. Organizational transformation. These are the problems that have always deserved our best thinking but rarely gotten it, because we’ve been too busy with everything else.

Now the “everything else” is migrating to AI. We have a choice about what to do with the capacity that frees up.

But wicked problems can’t be solved by individuals, no matter how brilliant. They require collective intelligence. They require people thinking together, not just working alongside each other. They require team cognition. And most organizations have no idea how to build it.

There’s another dimension to this that should concern anyone responsible for the future of an organization. Knowledge work has always had a natural pipeline: you enter at the bottom, doing the routine tasks, and you develop expertise over time through practice and mentorship and increasing responsibility. If AI absorbs that bottom layer, it blocks the entry point. The training ground disappears. Where do the next generation of experts come from? As I’ll describe later, the team structure offers an answer to this question, but only if the team is actually thinking together.

One more thing before we proceed. If we evaluate the future of work using the mental models we’ve developed in the current world of work, we will draw the wrong conclusions. The nature of the work is changing, and our frameworks for understanding it need to change with it. This paper asks the reader to hold that ambiguity and to consider the possibility that the answers might not look like what we expect.

The question Mary Oliver posed was about a single life. The question we face today is the team version: we have this extraordinary human capacity, creativity, judgment, imagination, moral reasoning, and for the first time, we have the freedom to aim it at the wicked problems that matter. What will we do with it?

What Team Cognition Is

Most people hear “team cognition” and think I’m talking about teamwork. I’m not.

Teamwork is coordination: who does what, when, how the pieces fit together. It’s essential. It’s also not what I’m describing. Team cognition is emergent. It means the team produces thinking that no individual member could produce alone. Not just better thinking, but fundamentally *different* thinking, the kind that wicked problems actually require: ideas and insights and solutions that didn’t exist in any of the individual minds and couldn’t have been generated by any of them working independently.

Team cognition happens in what I call the liminal space, the threshold between one mind and another. Liminal space is where creativity and innovation actually live. It’s unstable, generative, and a little uncomfortable. It’s the place where your half-formed idea meets my different perspective and something neither of us expected comes into existence. That’s not coordination. That’s emergence.

Vygotsky (1978) gave us a way to understand why this space is so productive. His zone of proximal development describes the gap between what a person can do alone and what they can do with the support of others, the space where learning and growth happen precisely because you’re reaching beyond your individual capacity. The liminal space in a team is a collective version of this: the zone between what any individual mind can produce and what becomes possible when different minds meet at the threshold.

The research literature identifies three foundational constructs that make team cognition possible. They develop over time through shared experience and can’t be produced by a training event or a workshop. But they can be intentionally cultivated, and the distinction between those two statements matters enormously.

Mental Models: The Lens

A mental model is the lens through which a person sees the world. It’s how you predict what will happen next, how you interpret new information, how you decide what matters and what doesn’t. You’re using mental models right now, reading this paper. They’re shaping what you notice, what you agree with, what you resist.

Mental models are formed by experience plus reflection. They don’t change because someone presents a better argument or gives you new information. They change when lived experience creates enough of a mismatch with the existing model that the model has to update. And that update requires reflection, some space to make sense of what the experience meant. Cranton (2006), building on Mezirow’s (1991) theory of transformative learning, describes this as critical self-reflection triggered by a disorienting dilemma, an experience that simply doesn’t fit the existing frame. The frame has to shift to accommodate the new reality. You can inform someone all day long. Transformation requires experience.

A shared mental model on a team means the members’ lenses are compatible enough that they can anticipate each other, interpret situations similarly, and work from a common understanding of reality without renegotiating every interaction from scratch. When shared mental models are strong, the team flows. When they’re weak, every conversation is a negotiation (Cannon-Bowers, Salas, & Converse, 1993; Mathieu, Heffner, Goodwin, Salas, & Cannon-Bowers, 2000).

Transactive Memory: The Directory

A transactive memory system is the team’s shared understanding of who knows what (Wegner, 1987). Not everyone needs to know everything. But everyone needs to know where knowledge lives in the team and how to access it.

Think about the best team you’ve ever been on. You probably knew, without thinking about it, who to go to for different kinds of problems. You knew who had the technical depth, who had the client relationships, who could see the political landscape, who would catch the detail you’d miss. That was your transactive memory system at work. The team’s total knowledge was far greater than any individual’s, but only because the directory was accurate and people trusted it enough to rely on each other (Lewis, 2003; Hollingshead, 1998).

Transactive memory takes time to develop. It grows through shared experience: working together, seeing what each person contributes, learning who knows what and how they think.

Team Situational Awareness: The Pulse

Team situational awareness is the team’s shared, real-time understanding of what’s happening, what it means, and what’s likely to happen next (Endsley, 1995). It’s what separates a team that can handle complexity from one that falls apart when conditions change. It depends on the other two constructs: you need shared mental models to interpret what’s happening the same way, and you need transactive memory to know who to turn to when something unexpected comes up (Salas, Prince, Baker, & Shrestha, 1995).

How They Work Together

These three constructs are deeply intertwined. Shared mental models make transactive memory possible. Transactive memory supports situational awareness. And all three develop through the same mechanism: shared experience over time.

This is why team cognition can’t be produced by a workshop or a training module. You can’t explain these constructs into existence. They have to be grown through the lived experience of working together, reflecting together, and building a shared history. But team cognition *can* be intentionally cultivated. Not by training it directly, but by designing the conditions under which it naturally develops. The distinction is between installing a capability and preparing the soil for one to grow.

The Conditions

Team cognition doesn’t just happen because you put smart people in a room. I’ve seen rooms full of brilliant individuals produce nothing but frustration and mediocre output. I’ve also seen teams of ordinary people produce work that genuinely surprised everyone, including themselves. The difference isn’t the people. It’s the conditions.

Cognitive Diversity

Teams need members who think differently. This begins with demographic diversity: differences in race, gender, gender expression, culture, age, neurodiversity, and life experience, which is valuable in its own right and also produces cognitive diversity because people with different lived experiences develop different lenses (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010; Page, 2007). Cognitive diversity extends beyond demographics to include differences in disciplinary training, problem-solving approaches, and professional background. It’s worth noting that formal education is only one path to developing a valuable lens. What matters is curiosity, thoughtfulness, wide reading, and genuine engagement with perspectives different from your own. A person without a degree who has spent years learning through practice, conversation, and self-directed study may bring exactly the cognitive diversity a team needs. A team needs richness from who people are and range from how they think, and neither is the exclusive product of a credential.

Homogeneous teams converge too quickly. They feel efficient, but they miss things. The liminal space collapses because everyone’s already in the same place. There’s no threshold to cross, no productive collision of different lenses, and nothing genuinely new emerges.

Cognitive diversity also keeps the talent pipeline open. A team with room for the apprentice alongside the master, someone at the beginning of their expertise who brings fresh eyes and learns by participating in the team’s thinking, is a team that’s developing its own future (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Trust Architecture

Every team operates within what I’m calling a trust architecture: the set of norms, structures, and boundaries that determine what knowledge flows where, and who controls that flow. This builds on Amy Edmondson’s foundational research on psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999), which demonstrated that the most important predictor of team performance is whether people feel safe taking interpersonal risks. Google’s Project Aristotle confirmed this at scale (Duhigg, 2016).

I want to extend the concept. Psychological safety describes the climate, how it feels to be on the team. Trust architecture describes the infrastructure that supports or undermines that climate. It’s the designed element: who has access to what information, how feedback flows, what’s private and what’s shared, and who controls those boundaries.

Good trust architecture makes it safe to think out loud, to share half-formed ideas, to admit what you don’t know, to surface problems early. This is where the real cognitive work happens, in the messy middle of sensemaking, not in polished deliverables. The liminal space only works if people feel safe being in it.

Bad trust architecture drives cognition underground. Surveillance, punishment for mistakes, forced transparency that serves management control rather than team learning: these cause people to retreat to safe, defensible outputs. The team gets dumber because the best thinking never enters the room.

A critical element of trust architecture is the commitment to explicit communication. Teams that rely on implicit communication, on assumptions, hints, and unspoken expectations, are building on sand. This matters for every team and matters especially when neurodiversity is present.

Explicit communication means saying what you mean, making expectations visible, and giving feedback based on shared, explicit standards rather than subjective opinion. When a team has agreed on clear standards for its work, feedback becomes about the work measured against those standards, not about one person’s reaction to another person’s output. That depersonalization makes honest, continuous feedback possible without threatening relationships.

Clear Agreements

Teams need to know how to make agreements with each other and how to hold them. Most teams skip this. They assume alignment rather than building it. They start working before they’ve clarified who’s responsible for what, how decisions will be made, what the norms are for communication, and how they’ll handle it when things go wrong.

Trust is built on a track record of commitments made and kept. Agreement-making is a competency, a skill that needs to be developed and practiced. Teams that can’t make clear agreements will never build the trust architecture they need.

Equally important is the ability to renegotiate. Rigid agreements become brittle. Living agreements adapt. A team that can say “the situation has shifted, we need to revisit what we agreed to” is a team that can handle complexity.

Shared Purpose and Strategic Clarity

Without a compelling shared understanding of what the team is trying to accomplish and why it matters, cognitive diversity becomes noise. Different perspectives are only productive when they’re pointed at a shared problem.

Shared purpose has to be connected to organizational strategy, where the organization is headed and how it plans to get there. If the team doesn’t understand the strategy, they can’t align their work to it. And sometimes the problem is upstream: the strategy itself is absent or incoherent, and the team is left trying to create meaning in a vacuum. That’s a leadership accountability (Hackman, 2002).

The Manager as Doula

The manager’s role in a team built for strong team cognition is not to direct the thinking or surveil the process. It’s to reduce unproductive friction and create the conditions for the team’s best work.

I borrow the doula metaphor intentionally. A doula doesn’t deliver the baby. The doula supports, coaches, clears obstacles, and creates an environment where the natural process can unfold. The manager’s job is the same: make sure resources are available, keep the team connected to vision, protect the liminal space, and get out of the way.

Not all friction is bad. Productive friction, the cognitive challenge of working with people who think differently, the discomfort of having your mental model challenged, the effort of integrating perspectives that don’t fit neatly, is essential to team cognition. It’s the inherent discomfort of the liminal space itself, and it’s where learning and innovation happen. That’s what Bjork (1994) called desirable difficulty.

Unproductive friction is something else. It’s extraneous cognitive load (Sweller, 1988): trying to figure out how to log onto a system, hunting for a report template, navigating unclear processes. This wastes the team’s cognitive capacity on things that have nothing to do with the work. The manager’s job is to eliminate as much of it as possible.

Reflective Practice

Teams develop their cognition through cycles of action and reflection. The reflection is where learning happens: the team updates its mental models, refines its transactive memory, and makes sense of what just happened (Schön, 1983; Kolb, 1984).

Most organizations get this wrong. The only reflection many teams ever do is a postmortem at the end of a project, and those sessions tend to be socially constrained. People are reluctant to name specific problems because they’ll have to work with these colleagues again. The “lessons learned” stay vague and diplomatic (Edmondson, 2012).

The more powerful form of reflective practice is continuous: micro-corrections as the work unfolds rather than a debrief when it’s too late to change anything. But continuous reflection only works when the team has shared, explicit standards and enough trust that someone can say “this isn’t meeting our agreed standard” without it feeling like an attack. When both conditions are present, reflective practice becomes part of how the team works, not a scheduled event everyone dreads.

The Organizational Operating System

There’s a practical question that anyone leading project-based work will immediately raise: if team cognition requires shared experience to develop, what happens when teams reform for every new project?

This is a real concern. In organizations where teams are assembled and reassembled based on project needs, utilization requirements, and available talent, no team stays together long enough to build full transactive memory from scratch. But the cross-pollination that comes from fluid composition is itself valuable. People carry mental models, strategies, and ways of working from one team to the next. That movement injects cognitive diversity.

The answer is that certain conditions for team cognition can live at the organizational level rather than the team level. If trust architecture, agreement-making practices, communication norms, explicit standards, and reflective practice habits are part of the organization’s shared operating system, then reformed teams aren’t starting from zero. They’re assembling new configurations of people who already share a common foundation. The specific transactive memory of who on *this* team knows what still has to develop through working together. But the infrastructure for how we work together travels with each person.

This has a significant secondary benefit. When teams have agency over their own ways of working within this shared framework, change becomes emergent rather than imposed. The organizational cost of adaptation drops, because the people making decisions about how to work are the people doing the work. They have the context, they own the agreements, and they don’t need to be “change managed” into something they created themselves.

When These Conditions Are Absent

When these conditions aren’t present, team cognition doesn’t emerge. What you get instead is predictable: groupthink, where cognitive diversity is suppressed because disagreement feels unsafe. Star culture, where one or two voices crowd out everyone else. Revolving doors without shared infrastructure, where no team ever develops real collective intelligence. Task focus without purpose, where people know what to do but not why.

The cost is not simply underperformance. It’s wasted human potential on a scale we can no longer afford. Every team that fails to achieve real team cognition is a group of people whose best thinking never made it into the room. The wicked problems, the ones that will shape whether our organizations, our institutions, and our communities thrive or decline, are waiting for exactly the kind of collective intelligence that these failed teams were supposed to produce. The talent is there. The capacity for creativity and moral imagination is there. It’s not making it into the room.

That is the urgency. Not that AI is coming. AI is already here. The urgency is that we have an extraordinary opportunity to focus our collective human intelligence on the problems that actually matter, and we are squandering it on teams that can’t think together.

The AI Extension

Everything I’ve described so far applies to purely human teams. If you stopped reading here, you’d have a useful framework for building teams that think together. The research behind these concepts has been accumulating for decades.

What’s new is what happens when AI enters the picture.

Many people have strong emotional reactions to AI. Fear, distrust, hostility. I’ve sat in rooms full of smart, experienced knowledge workers and listened to them describe AI with the kind of language you’d reserve for an invasive species. That fear is real. People are worried about losing their jobs, their expertise, their sense of professional identity. I don’t dismiss any of that.

But the fear, and the mechanical, transactional way most people use AI as a result, is preventing us from seeing something important. Most people treat AI as an efficiency tool, a faster way to draft or summarize. That’s not wrong, but it’s radically incomplete. It’s a mental model problem, and it changes the way all mental models change: through experience plus reflection, not through argument. Nobody has ever been talked out of their fear of AI. The people most afraid are the least likely to have the experience that would shift their understanding. The mental model protects itself.

The Human-AI Dyad

What I want to propose is a different orientation: AI as cognitive partner. In this framing, the human and the AI form a dyad, a thinking partnership in which each contributes capabilities the other lacks. The human brings judgment, values, lived experience, creativity, ethical reasoning, and embodied cognition, the thinking that is grounded in having a body in the world, in sensory experience, in the felt sense of a situation that no algorithm can replicate (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). The AI brings processing capacity, pattern recognition, breadth of information, and the ability to hold and organize vast amounts of complexity.

This isn’t a utopian fantasy. It’s a description of what already happens when someone develops a genuine thinking relationship with an AI. The experience is qualitatively different from transactional use. It changes how you think, not just how fast you produce.

In an AI-augmented team, the unit of participation is not the individual. It’s the dyad. Each person brings their AI partner’s capabilities into the team the way they’d bring any other form of expertise. Shared mental models now include the understanding that develops within each dyad. Transactive memory expands because each dyad accesses vastly more knowledge than any individual, though the team still needs to know which dyad has worked through which problems. The directory function remains human.

Cognitive diversity becomes richer. Different people develop different relationships with AI. Some use it for analysis, some for creative exploration, some for research, some for reflection. This variation produces genuinely different cognitive configurations at the dyad level, which enriches team cognition at the team level. The variation isn’t a problem to be solved through standardized training. It’s a feature. The floor for meaningful participation is basic skills and an open mind. Curiosity and a willingness to engage.

The talent pipeline reopens here too. A person at the apprentice level, paired with an AI, can participate meaningfully in a team’s thinking much earlier than traditional development paths would allow. They bring a different dyad configuration to the team, and that difference is valuable. The team becomes the training ground, not through isolated entry-level tasks that may no longer exist, but through participation in collective thinking augmented by a cognitive partner.

Trust Architecture and AI

Trust architecture becomes even more critical when AI enters the team. The dyad needs to be a safe container for thinking. When I work with my own AI partner, the conversation includes

half-formed ideas, wrong guesses, exploratory tangents, and the kind of raw sensemaking that could be embarrassing if taken out of context. That’s not a failure of discipline. That’s the liminal space within the dyad. That’s where the cognitive work happens. If I thought someone else was reading those conversations, I would immediately change how I use AI, and everything I brought to a team would diminish.

Multiply that across an organization and the stakes become clear. When people self-censor with their AI, you’ve degraded every dyad. You’ve made the entire team less intelligent to satisfy one person’s need for control. Surveillance of AI use isn’t just ethically questionable. It’s cognitively expensive.

The manager-as-doula model applies here directly. The manager’s job is to support people in developing productive dyadic relationships, not to monitor them. Clear agreements about what knowledge is shared at the team level and what stays within the dyad are essential. Privacy should be the default. The human decides what surfaces.

This leads to what I think is the most important design principle for AI-augmented teams: **the human controls the permeability of the dyad boundary.** The AI doesn’t decide what becomes team knowledge. The person does.

As AI capabilities continue to develop, the systems themselves should be designed to support trust architecture natively, giving humans clear and reliable control over what stays within the dyad and what gets shared with the team.

Transparency as Intellectual Honesty

There’s one area where transparency isn’t just appropriate but necessary. In many organizations today, people use AI quietly. They think with it, draft with it, research with it, and then present the output as entirely their own. This is not a fringe behavior. A 2025 global study by KPMG and the University of Melbourne found that 57% of employees have concealed their AI use from managers and colleagues, and 55% have presented AI-generated content as their own without disclosure (KPMG, 2025). A separate WalkMe survey found that nearly half of employees hide AI use to avoid judgment, with C-suite leaders even more likely to conceal it than their teams (WalkMe, 2025). The reasons range from fear of looking replaceable to shame to the simple absence of any organizational norm about it.

For teams working on wicked problems, this secrecy undermines the team’s ability to evaluate its own thinking. If nobody knows AI was involved in shaping an idea, nobody can ask whether biases were introduced, whether assumptions were challenged, or what data the AI was drawing on. The analogy is scientific method: scientists publish their methods alongside their results so that the community can evaluate the rigor of the work. A team working on complex, high-stakes problems needs the same ethic. Not surveillance, but transparency. Not “show me your AI conversations” but “be explicit about how your thinking developed, including the role your AI partner played.”

This is explicit communication as a trust architecture norm. The team agrees that AI use is visible not because anyone is being monitored, but because the quality of the team’s collective intelligence depends on being able to evaluate how ideas were produced.

A Call to the Room

We are living through a moment when the nature of knowledge work is changing fundamentally. The routine cognitive labor that has defined most knowledge jobs for decades is migrating to AI. What remains is the work that requires human judgment, human creativity, human conscience, human imagination. The wicked problems. The ones that matter.

That work is too important to waste on teams that can’t think together.

The constructs described in this paper, shared mental models, transactive memory, team situational awareness, are not new ideas. The research has been building for decades. Edmondson, Wegner, Salas, Woolley, Cranton, and many others have laid the foundation. What’s new is the urgency, and what’s new is the possibility that AI, understood as a cognitive partner rather than a tool or a threat, can amplify what teams are capable of in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

The work ahead is deeply, irreducibly human. Building trust. Cultivating diversity of thought and experience. Making clear agreements and honoring them. Designing the organizational infrastructure that lets team cognition develop even as teams reform and reconfigure. Creating the conditions for people to think together in the liminal space, that uncomfortable, generative threshold where something new becomes possible.

Every knowledge work discipline faces the same question right now: what are the wicked problems our expertise could help solve, if we organized our collective intelligence to tackle them? The specifics differ across medicine, engineering, education, finance, law, and design. The underlying challenge is the same. The problems are too complex for individuals. They require teams that can actually think together.

So here is my invitation. Start with your own team. Look at the conditions described in this paper and ask which are present and which are missing. Start with your own relationship with AI, not as a task machine but as a thinking partner. Start with curiosity, which is always the lowest barrier to entry and the most powerful catalyst for change.

The liminal space is waiting.


Author’s note:

This paper developed through a series of conversations between the author and Claude, an AI thinking partner built by Anthropic, in the spring of 2026. The ideas, arguments, and frameworks are the author’s own; Claude served as a collaborative partner in developing and articulating them. This is, in itself, an example of the human-AI dyad at work.*

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body river surrounded by dressWhite Paper by Clare Dygert, AI Learning Systems Architect –

Abstract

The dominant change management frameworks — Lewin’s Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze, Kotter’s 8-Step Process, and Prosci’s ADKAR Model — share three structural flaws that help explain why organizational change efforts are so widely experienced as costly failures: they treat change as a bounded event, locate design authority at the top of the hierarchy, and apply undifferentiated strategies to fundamentally different types of change.

This paper proposes a learning-led alternative grounded in continuous change theory, distributed governance, and instructional content-type analysis. Rather than managing change as an episodic disruption requiring top-down orchestration, this framework positions change as the natural state of a healthy organization — and positions learning strategy, not project management, as the discipline best equipped to sustain it.

The Problem with Existing Models

A 70% failure rate is frequently attributed to organizational change initiatives. The statistic has been cited by McKinsey, Kotter, Gartner, and Deloitte, among others, and has become axiomatic in the field. However, as Mark Hughes demonstrated in a critical review published in the *Journal of Change Management* (2011), there is no valid and reliable empirical evidence supporting this figure. The number traces to Hammer and Champy’s 1993 acknowledgment that their estimate was “unscientific,” and it was subsequently repeated by Kotter and others as though it were research-backed — each source citing the previous in a self-reinforcing loop.

We do not need to defend the precision of this statistic to accept its signal. The fact that the narrative of change failure is so persistent and so widely believed tells us something real about how people experience organizational change. The question is not whether the number is exactly right, but why the experience is so consistently negative. This paper argues that the answer lies in three structural flaws shared by every dominant change management framework.

Flaw 1: Change as Bounded Event

All three major frameworks treat change as a discrete initiative with a beginning, middle, and end. Lewin’s model unfreezes a current state, transitions to a new state, and refreezes. Kotter’s eight steps move from building urgency to anchoring new approaches in culture. ADKAR walks individuals through five psychological gates from awareness to reinforcement.

In each case, the assumption is that the organization exists in a default state of stability that is periodically interrupted by change. But organizations are in continuous flux. Workflow drift, incremental adaptation, unmanaged degradation of systems and practices, emergent innovations at the team level — the most consequential changes often happen outside any formal change effort. The dominant models have no mechanism for addressing this ambient, ongoing change.

Karl Weick and Robert Quinn identified this distinction in a landmark 1999 paper in the *Annual Review of Psychology*, contrasting episodic change — “infrequent, discontinuous, and intentional” — with continuous change, which is “ongoing, evolving, and cumulative.” They argued that the two types follow fundamentally different sequences: episodic change follows unfreeze-transition-refreeze, while continuous change follows the inverse — freeze-rebalance-unfreeze. In the continuous model, the intervention is to pause and make visible what is already happening, rebalance it, and then resume improvisation and learning.

The dominant frameworks are built entirely on the episodic model. They assume a default state of frozen. This paper assumes a default state of flow.

Flaw 2: Top-Down Locus of Design

Even where these models acknowledge the need for buy-in or individual psychological readiness, the design authority remains with leadership. People experiencing the change are positioned as subjects to be moved through stages, not as agents capable of generating and navigating change themselves. This frames resistance as a problem to overcome rather than a signal to read.

These are fundamentally patriarchal models. Authority flows downward. Compliance is the measure of success. The people closest to the work have the least agency in shaping the change. Even Kotter’s language of “coalition-building” and ADKAR’s focus on individual readiness maintain the assumption that the locus of design stays with leadership. The people experiencing change are still subjects of someone else’s plan, not co-designers of adaptive capacity.

This top-down orientation generates the very resistance it then seeks to manage. When people feel acted upon rather than empowered, they push back — not because they oppose the change, but because they have been denied agency in shaping it.

Flaw 3: Undifferentiated Change Types

The dominant frameworks apply a single methodology regardless of the nature of the change. But consider the range of changes organizations regularly face:

– A knowledge management system migrates to a new platform.
– A new procedure is established for requesting PTO.
– The organization fundamentally reimagines how it relates to its customers.
– An AI automation initiative transforms core workflows.

These are not the same kind of change. Borrowing from instructional content-type analysis — a taxonomy distinguishing among facts, concepts, processes, procedures, and decision-making frameworks — we can see that some changes are factual or procedural (the knowledge base moved; here is how you request PTO now) while others require deep mental model shifts (rethinking the customer relationship; integrating AI into creative work).

Applying the same eight-step process to a knowledge base migration and a cultural transformation is both wasteful and counterproductive. It over-engineers simple transitions and under-supports complex ones. An unnuanced approach to change types is nearly a guarantee of failure — or at least of wasted resources and unnecessary friction.

Core Principles of a Learning-Led Alternative

Change Is Continuous and Synonymous with Innovation

If we accept that the irreducibly human contribution in an AI-augmented workplace is creative and innovative work — what this paper terms the 15% thesis, referring to the proportion of work that AI cannot perform and that represents uniquely human judgment, creativity, and relational intelligence — then a healthy organization is constantly producing change from within.

Change is not a disruption to be managed. It is evidence that people are doing the work that matters.

The organizational question shifts from “How do we get people through this change?” to “How do we build the conditions where people generate and navigate change as a normal part of their work?” An organization oriented around innovation is an organization that has made change its operating rhythm rather than its occasional crisis.

Unlearn — Innovate — Integrate

Rather than a one-time unfreeze-refreeze sequence, teams in this framework operate in a continuous cycle of unlearning outdated models, innovating new approaches, and integrating new understanding into practice.

This cycle is metabolic, not episodic. And the concept of unlearning here departs significantly from how the change management literature typically frames it. Unlearning is not a discrete, painful cognitive act — stop believing X, start believing Y. It is a disposition: holding knowledge lightly, treating the space between one’s ears as liminal space where reframing, re-examining, and shifting are always possible.

Research on organizational unlearning supports the importance of this capacity. Sinkula (2002) suggests that organizational unlearning begins with changing cognitive structures, mental models, and dominant logics. Empirical studies have found that daily routines and risk aversion are barriers to unlearning, while providing temporal and spatial freedom and facilitating an error-forgiving climate support teams in breaking free from obsolete patterns (Klammer et al., 2020; Amaya et al., 2022). Research on technology implementation specifically identifies prior knowledge and established mental models as critical barriers to change and positions unlearning as a way to address this resistance (Becker, 2010).

But these studies still tend to treat unlearning as an event — something triggered by a crisis or mandated by leadership. This framework reframes it as a practiced skill and an ongoing state. When the Eastern sages say that nothing is unchangeable except the reality of change, there is something profoundly stabilizing about internalizing that message. You no longer have to worry about change because it is simply a given. The anxiety that traditional change management spends enormous energy trying to manage — through communications campaigns, urgency-building, and reinforcement — dissolves when people live in a state where transition is normal rather than exceptional.

Integration, the final phase of the cycle, replaces Lewin’s refreeze. There is no new frozen state to arrive at. Integration means absorbing new understanding into the way work gets done — and continuing to move. The river does not stop flowing because it navigated around a rock.

Distributed Governance and Matriarchal Leadership

This framework rejects the patriarchal assumption that change must be directed from above. Instead, governance is distributed. The locus of control for change sits at the point of change — with the teams and individuals closest to the work.

This is not leaderlessness. It is a matriarchal model where leadership means creating the conditions for others to act, not commanding action. Authority is relational and situational rather than positional.

The research base for distributed leadership is substantial and growing. Harris, Leithwood, Day, Sammons, and Hopkins (2007) found a positive relationship between distributed leadership and organizational change, with coordinated patterns of distribution yielding the strongest results. MIT Sloan’s Deborah Ancona has argued that the future of management requires a shift from command-and-control to distributed leadership, emphasizing autonomy to innovate and noncoercive alignment around common goals. Research published in *Frontiers in Psychology* (2021) found that distributed leadership positively influences proactive behavior and meaningfulness of work among employees, and that during periods of organizational change, it can help overcome the limitations of pyramidal leadership structures.

Distributed governance also serves as a retention strategy. When people feel autonomous and empowered — when they are agents of change rather than subjects of it — they stay. Traditional change management creates turnover by making people feel acted upon. Distributed governance prevents it by making people feel like co-creators of the organization’s direction.

The Manager as Change Doula

A doula does not deliver the baby. The mother does. A doula creates the conditions, reduces friction, provides support, reads the situation, and adapts in real time. The doula is not in charge of the process; the process is natural. The doula’s job is to make sure nothing gets in the way and to know when something needs a different kind of intervention.

The manager or team lead in this framework operates the same way. They do not drive, sell, or orchestrate change. They support a process that is already happening. And their first move — the skill that makes everything else possible — is diagnosis.

The Doula’s First Move Is Diagnosis

Not all changes are the same, and they do not warrant the same response. The doula’s essential competency is the ability to read the environment and diagnose what kind of change is actually in play. This is the foundational act — before any strategy is selected, before any support is provided, the doula asks: what are we actually dealing with here?

The diagnosis distinguishes among fundamentally different types of change:

Factual and procedural changes — a system migration, a new policy, an updated process — call for updated job aids, adjusted links, and frictionless access to information at the point of need. These are embodied cognition tools, not communications campaigns. If the knowledge base moved from one platform to another, the doula’s job is to analyze where people currently look for the link and make sure it is updated. No town hall required. No urgency to build.

Mental model shifts — new ways of thinking about customers, markets, collaboration, or the role of AI in work — require space for unlearning, dialogue, practice, and reflection. These changes cannot be accomplished through information delivery. They require the kind of supported cognitive and social process that learning design is specifically built to facilitate.

Getting the diagnosis right is what makes proportionate response possible. Applying a procedural response to a mental model shift will fail. Applying a mental model intervention to a procedural change wastes resources and generates cynicism. The doula who misdiagnoses the type of change will provide the wrong kind of support — and the change will stall, not because people resisted it, but because the support did not match the need.

This diagnostic capability is trainable, and developing it at scale is one of the most high-leverage investments an organization can make. It is also where learning strategy stops being a support function and starts leading. The doula-as-diagnostician is the primary mechanism through which learning design becomes the engine of organizational adaptability.

Friction as the Primary Diagnostic

Where traditional models add layers of process — communications plans, training rollouts, reinforcement campaigns, stakeholder management frameworks — this framework treats friction as the enemy. The question is always: what is getting in the way of people doing what they are already trying to do?

Transaction cost economics, originating with Coase (1937) and developed by Williamson (1975, 1985), provides the theoretical language here. Transaction costs are the costs of dissipation in resource exchange — what Stigler (1972) explicitly compared to friction in physics. In organizational terms, friction shows up as coordination overhead, information latency, approval bottlenecks, and redundant process.

Research on organizational coordination suggests that companies waste as much as 80% of their time on coordination tasks — meetings, approvals, handoffs, and rework. Research on information management in organizations finds that fragmented knowledge, inconsistent taxonomies, and disordered data are direct sources of friction that impede transformation.

Much of what passes for change management actually introduces friction. Every communications campaign, every training rollout, every reinforcement checkpoint is a process layer that costs time and attention. The goal of this framework is to identify and remove barriers, not to build elaborate scaffolding around them.

Reduced Information Costs

When the locus of control for change sits at the point of change, information costs drop dramatically. The traditional model requires information to travel up the hierarchy, get processed into a change plan, and be communicated back down. Every step adds latency, distortion, and cost.

When the people closest to the change have the authority and capability to respond, the signal-to-action distance collapses. The team that notices a workflow problem can address it directly rather than escalating it through three levels of management, waiting for a change initiative to be designed, and then receiving instructions on how to change.

This is one of the core economic arguments for distributed governance: it is not just more humane, it is more efficient. The cost of change drops when you stop routing every adaptation through a centralized change management apparatus.

The Flow Metaphor

Unfreeze-change-refreeze assumes a default state of frozen. This framework assumes a default state of flow.

A river does not stop moving when it encounters an obstacle. It flows around it. The people in the current do not need to be unfrozen, motivated, or driven through stages of psychological readiness. They need a clear channel and the absence of unnecessary obstruction.

When a person is walking through a crowded city and encounters someone standing still in the middle of the sidewalk, the traditional change management approach would be to assess the blockage, build a coalition of fellow pedestrians, communicate the urgency of moving, develop a plan to convince the person to step aside, execute the plan, and celebrate the short-term win. The alternative — flow like the river — means the current was already moving. Just keep moving.

The organizational implications are profound. An organization in flow does not need to spend money boiling water to unfreeze its people. It invests instead in maintaining the conditions that keep people moving: clear information at the point of need, distributed authority to act, managers who read the environment and reduce friction, and a culture where holding knowledge lightly is a practiced skill rather than a terrifying demand.

Connections to Existing Theory

This framework does not emerge from a vacuum. It builds on and extends several significant bodies of work.

Weick and Quinn (1999) provide the foundational distinction between episodic and continuous change, and their description of the continuous change process — freeze-rebalance-unfreeze — aligns closely with this paper’s unlearn-innovate-integrate cycle. Their observation that continuous change is characterized by “recurrent interactions, shifting task authority, response repertoires, emergent patterns, improvisation, translation, and learning” essentially describes the organizational culture this framework seeks to create.

Peter Senge’s learning organization (1990) provides essential groundwork, particularly the five disciplines of systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning. Senge argued that the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. This framework extends Senge’s vision by distributing the learning function to the point of change rather than requiring organization-wide transformation initiated from the top — addressing a known limitation of Senge’s model, which critics have noted is difficult to implement in bureaucratic organizations through learning initiatives alone (Finger and Brand, 1999).

The organizational unlearning literature — including work by Hedberg (1981), Nystrom and Starbuck (1984), Tsang and Zahra (2008), and the recent comprehensive review by Grisold et al. (2024) — supports the centrality of discarding outdated mental models as a precondition for adaptive capacity. This framework’s contribution is to reframe unlearning as a continuous disposition rather than an event-driven intervention.

Distributed leadership research — notably Harris et al. (2007), Spillane (2006), and Ancona at MIT Sloan — provides empirical grounding for the claim that distributing leadership authority to the point of change produces superior organizational outcomes, increased proactive behavior, and greater meaningfulness of work.

Transaction cost economics — Coase (1937), Williamson (1975, 1985), Stigler (1972) — provides the theoretical vocabulary for the friction diagnostic and the information-cost argument for distributed governance.

Implications for Practice

For L&D Leaders

Learning strategy is not a support function in this framework. It is the primary discipline through which organizational change capacity is built. The chief learning officer — or whatever the role is called — becomes the architect of the organization’s adaptive infrastructure: the systems, tools, and cultural conditions that allow teams to unlearn, innovate, and integrate continuously.

This means L&D must move beyond course design and content delivery into organizational design, team cognition analysis, and the development of manager learning-design literacy.

For Managers and Team Leads

The manager’s role shifts from change driver to change doula, and the doula’s first move is always diagnosis. What kind of change is this? Does it require a job aid or a conversation? An updated link or a team dialogue about mental models? The ability to diagnose correctly and then select a proportionate response is the core competency. It is trainable, and it replaces the need for expensive, centralized change management infrastructure.

For Executives

The economic case is straightforward. Traditional change management is expensive — not because the consultants cost too much, but because the model itself generates friction, latency, and resistance as structural features. Distributed governance reduces information costs by collapsing the signal-to-action distance. Investing in adaptive capacity at the team level is cheaper and more sustainable than funding episodic change initiatives.

It is also a retention strategy. People who feel like agents of change stay. People who feel like subjects of change leave.

Areas for Further Development

This framework opens several lines of inquiry that warrant deeper exploration:

Team cognition as the unit of change capacity. If change happens at the team level, then the team’s collective cognitive capacity — not individual readiness — is the relevant unit of analysis. How do teams develop shared mental models, and how do those models adapt?

Transactional vs. transformational learning. Not all learning is created equal. How does the distinction between transactional learning (information transfer) and transformational learning (mental model shifts) map onto the change-typing framework proposed here?

Measurement. If change is continuous rather than episodic, traditional change management metrics (adoption rates, milestone completion, stakeholder satisfaction surveys) are insufficient. What does measurement look like for an organization in flow?

Conclusion

The dominant change management frameworks have been justified for decades by a failure statistic that nobody can substantiate, applied through models that treat change as an event to be managed rather than a condition to be embraced, and implemented through top-down processes that generate the very resistance they seek to overcome.

A learning-led alternative starts from different premises: change is continuous; it emerges from within; different types of change require different responses; the people closest to the change are best positioned to navigate it; and the leader’s role is to create conditions, not command compliance.

Flow like the river. The current is already moving. The work is not to push the water — it is to clear the channel.

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