Who decides how fast humans must adapt to progress?

There is a tension I have been observing for some time in my role. Transformation moves at one speed. Humans move at another. And no one seems to truly decide who arbitrates between the two.

This is not a rhetorical question. I have carried it for several years, from inside an organisation that has led reskilling and upskilling programmes at a scale few companies have attempted. Thousands of employees guided toward new professions, new skills, new roles. I have witnessed profound successes. I have also seen the other side of that narrative. I think it is time to say so out loud.

The structural gap between Technology speed and Human pace

Technological transformation does not wait. It sets new demands before the previous ones have even been absorbed. Each wave, whether cloud, data, or generative AI, arrives with its own timeline, its own skills requirements, its own rhetoric of urgency.

The organisation sets the direction and imposes the schedule. The employee operates on their own timeline: the way they build a skill, integrate a new role, find meaning in what they are being asked to become. These two rhythms are not the same.

This gap is structural. It is permanent. It is largely invisible in transformation narratives. And it produces real effects on individuals that organisations rarely speak about.

The question I keep asking myself, as CPO of a 30,000-person company operating across 65 countries, is this: who, within the organisation, actually holds that gap? Who names the fact that the pace of technology and the pace of human beings are not aligned? And who consciously decides what to do about that misalignment?

The real role of HR in worforce transformation : HR is not the execution arm of transformation.

There is a structural misunderstanding about the role of HR in this context. I will address it directly.

In many organisations, the implicit answer to the question of pace goes something like this: HR is there to make transformation happen. It accompanies, trains, communicates, and creates the conditions for people to change. And if it does not work, it simply means things were not explained well enough, or quickly enough.

I do not believe that is the right role. It is an incomplete one. It leaves something essential unaddressed: whether the transformation being asked of people genuinely connects with their aspirations, whether they are truly given the means to succeed, and whether they are helped to take risks rather than simply absorb them.

HR is the guardian of a balance that few people in organisations name clearly: the balance between the short-term pressure to change and the long-term nature of genuine commitment. Being under pressure to transform is not the same thing as understanding why you are doing it, finding real value in it, seeing a trajectory that is also your own.

When HR asks these questions, when it slows down on certain points, when it sets guardrails, it is sometimes perceived as a brake. That framing is wrong. HR that insists on these conditions is not an obstacle to transformation. It is the condition for transformation to last.

What Reskilling programs do not tell you

Here is something I have observed directly in our reskilling programs at Orange Business. I want to share it, with the necessary care.

People enter a reskilling journey with genuine commitment. They work hard, they progress, they acquire new skills. And then, when they step into the new role, they discover something they had not seen coming. Certain dimensions of this new job, dimensions that had seemed minor from the outside, turn out to be central to what actually matters to them in their relationship with work. And those dimensions do not match what they had expected.

Some of these people return to their original position. These stories exist. I have lived them. They are never told publicly, because the transformation narrative is built on success stories. I understand why. You need to inspire, to give others the courage to take the leap, to avoid undermining programmes that do produce real results.

But something is lost when these stories stay in the shadows. They say something true about what human transformation actually is: it does not work one hundred percent of the time. That is not a failure. It is a reality organisations need to learn to manage better.

There is a distinction I want to name here, because it matters. The difference between the aspirations a person expresses and the aspirations they discover when they confront reality. You can genuinely, sincerely want to change careers, and then realise, once you are there, that the day-to-day of that new role is nothing like what you had imagined. That is not a personal failure. It is the encounter between a vision of yourself and the reality on the ground.

The role of the CPO, in those moments, is to create the conditions for that encounter to happen without the person being broken by the distance between the two.

How to De-Risk reskilling: Secure the job before the training

In our programmes at Orange Business, we did something that I believe is philosophically sound. I want to make the logic explicit, because it deserves to be shared more widely. We made sure that people entered a reskilling journey having already secured a position at the other end. Not: you train, then you apply. The reverse: we secure the destination before the journey begins. De-risk first. Train second.

Not because we want to shield people from risk. Because we want them to be able to take it fully, eyes open, knowing there is a way back if things do not go as planned. The ability to step back is not an admission of failure. It is a condition for success. It allows people to engage more deliberately, because the risk is no longer existential.

The role of the CPO is not simply to create the conditions for people to succeed in their transformation. It is also to create the conditions for them to fail and keep going anyway. For failure in a reskilling journey not to become a permanent signal, a lasting mark on someone's career, but a stage: one that is named, accompanied, and turned into learning.

How AI shapes, and limits, Employee career trajectories.

There is a third observation I want to share. It relates directly to the role of artificial intelligence in everything I have just described.

AI is a statistical tool. It produces what is most probable, what is closest to the mean. That is its nature, and also its limit.

In a world of work where employees use AI to think, to produce, to solve everyday problems, I wonder whether organisations are quietly creating an additional pressure toward the smoothing of career trajectories.

When a tool constantly points you toward what is statistically likely, toward what people with your background, your skills, your experience tend to do, you eventually internalise that this is where you belong. You stop fighting for a different path. You manage your ambitions downward. Not out of a lack of will, but because the tool has gradually narrowed the field of what seemed possible.

This is a human cost that organisations are not yet measuring.

For the CPO, the question that follows is direct: how do you create the conditions for individuals to keep thinking for themselves, to develop their own reasoning, to take initiative, in a world where the tool they use every day structurally tends to produce what is probable, average, and consensual? How do you preserve people's capacity to think beyond what AI suggests, when AI is precisely what they now think with?

When progress becomes a constraint: the human cost of transformation

I want to close with an intuition I have been carrying for some time. One I am prepared to stand behind.

Progress has changed in nature, in the way people experience it. For a long time, sociologically, it was perceived as something positive, something desired, anticipated. Today, in the organisations I work with, I observe something different. Progress is increasingly lived as a mandate, a constraint, a pace imposed from the outside.

People move from one transformation project to the next without ever reaching the horizon they were promised. Over time, they lose faith. Not in their own ability to adapt, but in the promise itself.

There is a communication strategy around transformation that I have started to question. We make the destination sound compelling and we minimise the cost of the journey. But people are not naive. They eventually learn to anticipate that the promise will not be kept. They manage their effort downward. Not because they are unwilling to adapt, but because they have learned to distrust horizons that shine too brightly.

My conviction, built from direct experience of these programmes, is this: a leader's credibility on this subject is built by naming that cost, not concealing it. Speaking about what does not work, carefully, with respect for the people involved, without undermining what does, is a stronger posture than only talking about success.

HR has a unique role to play here. It alone sees the organisation from the inside. It alone knows what this truly costs.

The question of who decides the pace of transformation has not yet been genuinely raised in the public debate on work and the future of work. We talk about skills, training, organisational agility. We do not talk enough about who chooses the tempo, and what it does to people when no one really does.

These are not comfortable questions. They are not comfortable for me either. But organisations that avoid them, that continue to speak about transformation as though the human cost did not exist, end up losing something essential: the trust of the people living through it.

That is something I am not willing to accept.