Inside The Messy Middle - The Gravity of the Old Way

Inside the Messy Middle is a special series from The Inner Game of Change

This fortnightly short series is for people who carry responsibility inside complexity.
 Between strategy and delivery. Between intent and impact. Between what was imagined and what must now be made real.

In this episode of Inside the Messy Middle, I explore a salient idea:

What if organisations are not resisting change…
but being pulled back by the gravity of the current way of working?

As AI enters workplaces, many organisations are introducing new capabilities while still operating inside environments designed for older workflows, behaviours, incentives, and assumptions.

Through stories from business and history, including the arrival of electricity in factories and the persistence of the QWERTY keyboard, Ali explores why transformation often stalls even when people are willing to move.

This episode is about:
• behavioural gravity
• environmental design
• AI adoption versus workflow redesign
• why old systems keep pulling people back
• and the hidden tension between movement and stability inside organisations

Because sometimes the challenge is not the future itself.

It is the environment still rewarding the past.

Transcript

Welcome To The Messy Middle

Ali 0:05

Welcome back to Inside the Messy Middle, which is a special series from the Inner Game of Change podcast. This fortnightly short series is for people who carry responsibility inside complexity between strategy and delivery, between intent and impact, between what was imagined and what must now be made

The Gravity Of Old Work

Ali 0:26

real. In this episode, I will cover the gravity of the old way. You know, one thing I keep noticing in organizations is this strange tension between what people say they want and what the environment actually rewards. Leaders talk about innovation, transformation, AI adoption and new ways of working, but then people return to workflows, systems, meetings, approvals, reporting structures and expectations that quietly pull them back toward the current way of operating. And I do not think this is simply resistance. I think it is gravity. The gravity of the old way, or maybe more accurately, the gravity of the current way of working, which eventually becomes the old

Tech Does Not Change Behaviour

Ali 1:20

way. And frankly, AI adoption is exposing this everywhere right now. I think of the biggest misunderstandings in organizational change is assuming that new behavior automatically follows a new technology. It does not, because people do not work inside strategy documents. They work inside environments and environments shape behavior powerfully. People follow least friction, least social risk, existing incentives, available time and whatever feels safest in the moment of work, which means organizations can introduce entirely new capabilities while still surrounding people with conditions designed for the previous way of working, and then leaders wonder why adoption feels slow.

Electricity And Factory Redesign

Ali 2:14

There's actually a brilliant historical example of this. When electricity first arrived in factories, many companies initially replaced the large central steam engine with a large electric motor, but kept the entire factory layout exactly the same. Same workflows, same physical design, same operating assumptions. The technology changed, but the logic of the system did not, and it took years before organizations realized the real power of electricity was not simply replacing steam, it was redesigning the factory itself. Smaller distributed motors, flexible layouts, different production flows, entirely new ways of working.

AI Speeding Up Broken Work

Ali 3:02

And frankly, I think we are living through a very similar moment with AI. Many organizations are trying to place AI into workflows designed for a completely different era of work. So instead of redesigning work, we often accelerate the current system. Faster documents, faster emails, faster meetings, faster reporting. Sometimes AI is being used to speed up workflows that probably needed redesign long before AI arrived. I see this everywhere. AI summarizing meetings that maybe should not exist in the first place. People generating reports faster than nobody really needs. Teams experimenting privately with AI while public workflows remain unchanged. Leaders encouraging innovation while rewarding risk avoidance. And employees quickly learn something important. The new behavior may be encouraged, but the old behavior is still safer. That is gravity.

The System Negotiates With Itself

Ali 4:11

I sometimes think organizations are in permanent negotiation with themselves, part of the system trying to imagine a different future, while another part quietly works to keep the current world stable and recognizable. And frankly, both forces are usually acting with good intentions. Maybe this is the real messy middle. Not change versus resistance, but movement and stability pulling against each other inside the same system at the same time.

Leadership That Changes Conditions

Ali 4:45

I have mentioned this example before too, but I always find it fascinating. Early cars were often described as horseless carriages. Think about that language for a moment. Even when humanity encountered something fundamentally new, we still interpret it through the logic of the old system. And organizations do this constantly. Many organizations today are still treating AI as faster old work instead of asking what should work look like now? This is a very different question and frankly a much harder one. I think this is why so many AI rollouts feel confusing for employees. People attend workshops, experiment with tools, get excited about possibilities, then they return to environments still optimized for old approval structures, old workflows, old assumptions about productivity, old measures of performance and old definitions of value. And over time the environment quietly pulls behavior back toward itself, not because people are lazy, because gravity is powerful. I think this is where leadership and change management become incredibly important, not simply introducing tools, but redesigning conditions around work, reducing friction, creating legitimacy, making experimentation visible, adjusting incentives, allowing people to learn publicly without feeling exposed. Because if the surrounding environment never changes, the current way of working will almost always win, no matter how exciting the technology appears at the beginning.

The Future Arrives Before Readiness

Ali 6:36

Maybe this is the deeper challenge with the transformation. The future often arrives before the environment is ready for it, and until organizations redesign the conditions around work, the old way will continue pulling people back towards it. Not because people fear the future, but because the environment still rewards the past. Until next time.