Hey Reader,

Welcome to the 19th edition of the 3-2-1 (check out previous issues here).

One post on LinkedIn last week would not stop moving. It was about AI making your people more productive and more likely to quit. Ninety thousand people saw it, and the comments improved my thinking on it. The version they argued me into is the one idea below.

Let's get into it.

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3 Things for Work (in L&D)

In the workforce, AI is having the opposite effect it was supposed to, UC Berkeley researchers warn (Fortune)

• An eight-month UC Berkeley study found that AI increases output while creating implicit pressure to fill every freed hour with more work, producing burnout and thinner quality rather than relief.
• 🏋 Effort ≈ 5 min read

IC work is the new career flex (Elena Verna)

• Experienced ICs can now run full-scope projects that used to need a team, which makes the management track an outdated proxy for impact and argues comp should follow scope, not headcount.
• 🏋 Effort ≈ 6 min read

Bloom's Taxonomy Needs an Update for the AI Age (Education Week)

• AI automated the bottom of the pyramid, so the defensible human layer is now iterative synthesis and knowing when to trust or question an output, not recall or first-draft creation.
• 🏋 Effort ≈ 4 min read

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2 Things for Life

Jacob Collier Improvises With Orchestra (Live in San Francisco)

• Watching a room full of strangers make beautiful music together like this was the best thing I've watched in ages. This will bring a smile to your face, I guarantee it.
• 🏋 ~22 min watch

Ursula K. Le Guin on listening:

"Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don't so much respond as join in — become part of the action."

That line is the whole Collier video in one sentence. The audience orchestra is not reacting to the music. They have joined in and become it.

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1 Idea from Me

AI is making your people more productive and more likely to quit

AI raises everyone's output floor at the same time. An analyst with two years experience and one with ten now hand you the same decent first draft. That looks like a win until you see the cost. The floor rose, but the ceiling that used to separate your strong people from your average ones got harder to see.

Because volume isn't value. When everyone can generate a decent first draft, the work that's left is the work AI can't do: framing the right problem to analyze in the first place, or getting a stakeholder to act. Almost no team has a shared name for that work, so they can't see it, coach it, or reward it.

Do nothing and the cost lands in two places.

First, your highest-impact ICs are already doing that nameless work two levels above their title. Running real budgets, agents, cross-functional calls, without the title or the words for it. They don't leave because the work is hard. They leave because the growth went unacknowledged. Recognition is one of the strongest levers we have for changing behavior, something I was reminded of at a conference in Toronto last week. But when the capacity has no name, the lever never gets pulled.

Second, your managers can't coach what they can't name. A manager with shared language can say "your framing was sharp, but you dove right into implementation with the exec team instead of explaining why it matters." A manager without it says "that didn't land" and moves on. One builds capability. The other watches it stall.

So the fix is not another promotion cycle or a wider salary band. It is giving your team a shared language for the work AI can't do, so that capacity becomes visible, coachable, and acknowledged before someone has to quit to get it noticed.

None of this shows up as a fire. It shows up as your strongest people getting faster at work that doesn't move the business, and your succession bench quietly thinning. That is the real cost of waiting to build team capability.

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That's it for this week - enjoy your Sunday!

I'll be back in two weeks ✌️

Andrew

P.S. 👉 If your best people are getting faster at work that doesn't move the business, that's the problem I spend my days on. I do a few free 30-minute strategy calls each month for L&D leaders working through it. Reply and I'll send a link.