For Keren-Amy Laughton, partner at digital experience consultancy, DY|DX, and an industrial-organisational psychologist, the explanation lies in a growing mismatch between how organisations still manage people and how work has fundamentally changed.
Speaking at the recent Knowledge Resources Conference, Laughton argued that organisations must learn to “unlearn” long-standing assumptions about engagement, leadership and change if they want to remain effective in the next decade.
“Global engagement has hit its lowest point in years, and the evidence is clear that doing more of the same is no longer working,” says Laughton. “Organisations have responded by adding more initiatives, more programmes and more technology, but these are too often layered on top of an unintentional strategy or an outdated way of doing things. ”
According to Laughton, the instinct to add more is deeply ingrained and it is precisely that instinct that organisations must learn to resist. “Unlearning is not about abandoning what has worked. It is about recognising when the conditions have changed so fundamentally that old assumptions are no longer serving you. That is a much harder thing for most organisations to do than simply launching the next initiative.”
This need to unlearn is felt at every level of an organisation.
Research from Gallup shows that manager engagement has dropped sharply in recent years, falling from 30% in 2023 to 27% in 2024 and just 22% in 2025 - including a five-point decline in the last year alone. Laughton argues that leaders themselves are operating from an outdated playbook. “When managers are overwhelmed, it is often because they are still trying to lead in the way they were taught to lead. That model no longer fits the world they are operating in.”
The challenge is compounded by the increasing pressure placed on leaders in an environment defined by rapid change, technological disruption and growing emotional strain within teams.
“In more stable times, leaders were expected to have the answers. Today’s leaders, however, are navigating constant uncertainty. The leaders who will thrive in the next decade are those who can lead through ambiguity rather than pretend it does not exist.”
This shift requires organisations to rethink how they approach transformation itself. The unlearning Laughton describes is not simply about updating processes or adopting new tools but rather about dismantling the mental models that have shaped how organisations operate for decades. Traditional change management models assume that disruption has a clear beginning and end, followed by a “new normal”.
Laughton explains, “The reality is that there is no ‘other side’ anymore, change is continuous. Organisations need to stop treating change as something that happens to them and start building the capability to move with it constantly.”
Nowhere is the need to unlearn more urgent than in how organisations are responding to artificial intelligence. Technology is not simply accelerating change, it is exposing how ill-equipped many of our existing systems are to absorb it. An example of this is in the recruitment process.
Laughton argues that many organisations are attempting to apply AI to hiring processes that were designed for a very different era of work. “The CV has been the cornerstone of hiring for over a century, but it is rapidly losing its value as a reliable signal of capability. With candidates using AI to write applications and companies using AI to screen them, organisations risk entering a cycle where technology simply amplifies the weaknesses of a broken system.”
Instead, organisations should rethink the hiring process itself. “Automation can introduce structured, skills-based assessments earlier in recruitment, while AI can help identify patterns across large datasets. But human judgement must remain at every critical decision point. Recruitment is ultimately a deeply human process, and technology should support that judgement, not replace it.”
Ultimately, Laughton believes the thread connecting engagement, technology and recruitment is the same: organisations are applying old thinking to new problems. The most important shift they can make is to challenge the instinct to constantly add more solutions, and instead ask which assumptions need to be discarded altogether.
“If leaders had to unlearn one thing tomorrow, it is the belief that more is always better. Organisations have been responding to declining engagement by adding more - more initiatives, more programmes, more change projects. The real question leaders should be asking is not ‘what more can we do?’ but ‘what should we stop and rethink?’”
“The organisations that succeed in the next decade will not necessarily be those that do more. They will be the ones that unlearn what worked in the past, rethink what is needed for the future and execute that exceptionally well,” concludes Laughton.
For more information on DY|DX and the services offered, head to the website.
