Many of us have heard of boomerang employeessomeone who leaves a company and later returnsbut theres a newer version showing up in the workplace: the layoff boomerang.
Maybe youve seen it yourself. A coworker disappears after a round of cuts, only to show up again a few months later. Same desk. Same job. Sometimes even a bigger paycheck.
According to research done by Dr. Andrea Derler at workforce analytics firm Visier, 5.3% of laid-off employees now get rehired by the same organization after a layoff.
But the most surprising part isnt the numberits that its been happening for years.
We just didn’t know.
What surprised me the most was that this has been happening for the last several years. The 5.3% isnt just a recent figure; consistently, organizations seem to be rehiring after layoffs, she says.
While it might feel more prevalent now, with AI adding confusion and uncertainty for business leaders, it was happening during the pandemic as welland maybe even before then.
Change has always happened, Derler said. “We’ve always had those crisis moments, but things just come out into the open more nowadays. We have the data.
So why is this happening? Are companies realizing they let valuable talent go too quickly? And is the rise of AI making this more common?
To find out, Fast Company spoke with Derler about her research, as well as several employees who shared their boomerang experiences anonymously to avoid potential retaliation.
Why layoff boomerangs happen
Many employees who return after a layoff come back within six to 10 months. Derler says that window isnt randomit lines up with how long it often takes organizations to realize they still need the skills of the people they let go.
Part of the issue is that most companies only plan six to 12 months ahead, which leaves little room for long-term strategy. Which is not long enough, Derler says. With such a limited horizon, companies may not fully understand which skills theyre losing during layoffs.
There’s a lot that gets lost in that time because they don’t have a really good sense of what skills these employees have, that theyre about to let go, Derler said. You may be losing employees only because you don’t know what else they could be doing for the company in the meantime.
By the time companies realize they still need certain skills, six to 12 months may have passedwhich coincides with the window in which layoff boomerangs typically occur. That time window makes sense, because strategic changes and restructuring of a department or a whole business unit takes that long, Derler says.
In other words, by the time the dust settles, companies often realize they never shouldve let those employees go in the first place.
Then, they want them back.
The disruption for the employee
Beyond the emotional toll, layoffs disrupt not only the person being let go but entire teams. And according to Derler, layoff boomerangs are often high performers.
That means you’ve done your best, you’ve performed highly on the scale of performance ratings, and you still got let go. So that’s tremendously traumatic, Derler says.
But the ripple effect doesnt stop there.
Imagine the people on the other end suddenly get this call back and are asked or offered a job back at the company. It’s tremendously disrupting for the teams who are losing colleagues . . . [and] for the person who is actually losing the job, Derler says.
Even for those who do return, the move isnt always a long-term solutionits often just the next step in navigating an unpredictable job market: If the person hasn’t found a new job in the meantime, they may come back, but they may not stay long, because they’re really still traumatized for what you did to them a year ago, Derler says.
One worker described her experience as a layoff boomerang: “When I was first laid off from this company in March 2018, I was completely blindsidedit was my first time ever facing a layoff. The website I was writing for shuttered entirely, so we were all out of a job, the worker says.
After the site was purchased and relaunched by another company, several of the original employees were rehired. The former employee reached out to a rehire to see if there were opportunities available.
They werebut on a contractor basis. I was underemployed, freelance is not for the weak, and needed the money. So I agreed to sign on. My pay as a contractor was close to what I was paid when I first worked at the site, but I didnt have any benefits, she explains.
After several months working there as a writer and editor, she was brought on officially as a staff member. But a few months later, another round of layoffs hit, and she was let go for the second time.
I wasnt intending to stay there longer than I had toI was applying for other jobs almost the entire time. When I was laid off the second time, I had actually been in the process of interviewing for another job. Thankfully, I got that one, so after a month break in between jobs, I started the new one, she says.
One Reddit user details their experience as a layoff boomerang. They were let go from a company where they had worked for over six years.
I was very loyal, but also know when you work for a company with 350k+ employees that layoffs happen. I left in very good standing and had a stellar reputation there. But head counts get reduced, they explain.
Months later, they received an offer to return. Fast forward to [receiving] an offer from the very company that laid me off in October. Different boss, different department, more pay, they say.
Another worker has boomeranged back to her old companykind of, and hopefully.
I was laid off quite unexpectedly in February. I had been there for 3.5 years and survived at least two other layoffs. As a technical writer, layoffs seldom surprise me. We’re always some of the first cut, she explains.
The employee did not expect to ever hear from the company again, but a new opportunity emerged unexpectedly, much like the layoff itself. She agreed to join for a three-month contract while the company worked on approval for a permanent headcount in the 2026 budget.
To be perfectly honest, I’d been out of work for almost 10 months. I was out of unemployment, my savings were gone, and I was borrowing money to pay my rent. That was the real driver for taking the role, she explains.
Still, she loved the job and the team, and embraced the chance to contribute. I poured my soul into building that help center, enabling a chatbot for the help center. It was a real passion project for me. I actually accepted a cut in pay to get my foot in the door with the contract, she says.
Her teams positive reaction to her return convinced her that she had made the right choice, and bolstered her confidence that a full-time, permanent position was in her future.
Before considering being a boomerang yourself, Derler advises asking for a reentry interview, or at least considering one. This is where youcan have a proper interview with the hiring manager to find out the details of the role.
Here, you can ask yourself: How solidly sure is my employer that they need this role filled, that I’m the right person for the role?
And that another layoff isn’t on the horizon?
The disruption for the employer
By laying off employees without expecting to bring them back, there are unintended consequences that organizations may or may not be aware of, Derler says. If companies understood this, she argues, they could use data to reduce the unnecessary disruption. If we already know we’re going to rehire some of them, why cause all that disruptionthat additional uncertainty?
The first disruption after the layoff itself is the turnover contagion. This happens when one employee is laid off and others leave because they perceive the environment as unstable. Employees often notice that if one team member is let go, it could signal uncertainty for themselves. This is becoming an uncertain role for me; Id better look elsewhere, she explains.
This ripple effect can disrupt teams, hurt productivity, and further increase the financial and operational costs of layoffs.
The second disruption comes in hiring them back. It’s actually a lot more expensive to rehire people. They earn 3% more than those who have stayed at the company, and they earn 5% more than when they’ve been let go. So the financial implications of the rehiring of previously laid off employees is also not nothing, Derler says.
When an employer realizes they need to bring someone back, they may have to pay a premium. It’s possible that these employees have found another role. We don’t know what happens in those six to 10 months before the rehiring, she explains.
Layoffs are not collateral damageand they shouldnt be viewed that way, Derler says.
We’re talking about humans and people and career-minded individuals. It’s a clear failure of workforce planning. It is a failure of leadership strategy setting. It’s a failure to be more long term-minded. It’s a failure to understand the employee skills, she said.
At the end of the day, layoff boomerangs show just how tricky workforce decisions can be.
For employees, coming back can feel like a second chancebut it also brings questions about trust, commitment, and whether the role is really solid. For employers, theres the costboth money and disruptionto think about.
Paying attention to skills, data, and planning ahead can help make sure everyone comes out ahead when the workforce shifts.
One of the most pervasive rules of business is compete-to-win or perish. But as more organizations struggle to navigate an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous landscape, some innovative leaders are choosing to collaborate over compete.
This is particularly necessary within the organization, where collaboration may be considered beneficial in theory, but in practice, the rules of engagement still revolve around competition: colleagues become rivals over promotion opportunities, recognition, and advancement. The competition within the organization makes it harder to navigate the disruption and certainty on the outside.
How do leaders banish in-house competition? They create and model a culture that uncompetes. To uncompete is to intentionally choose to reject competition and actively design for collaboration.
Heres how.
Harness two types of envy
Team collaboration increases when we feel psychological safetylike our team has our back. Competition and envy among colleagues can reduce psychological safety and create a hostile environment if not managed well by leaders. Managing envy to motivate teamsnot sabotage each otheris a skill.
Organizational psychologists broadly characterize envy as falling under two categories: benign and malicious envy. Benign envy motivates us to work harder toward a goal when we see someone else achieving it, malicious envy can be destructive and often results in us wanting to sabotage or undermine a colleagues success.
A powerful way to cultivate benign envy is to focus on the hard work a team member did to achieve a goal, rather than just focus on the achievement itself. Leaders can harness benign envy to create a culture of motivation and collaboration by highlighting the effort it took over outcomes, particularly team-based efforts.
Implement rewards for collaboration
Many workplace cultures are individualistic, where only individual wins are celebrated. This makes it more attractive for employees to prioritize gaining individual success over collaborative ones. Instead, leaders must implement recognition and reward systems that emphasize collaboration and teamwork. Leaders can verbally name collaboration as an organizational value. Collaboration must also be defined explicitly as a metric for rewarding career development, advancement, and recognition.
For promotion and other career development conversations, list “examples of collaboration” as one of the metrics being considered. In addition, group incentive programs are another way to operationalize collaboration, when rewards are pegged to team performance and meted out among the group rather than just individually.
Incentivized teams increased their performance by 45%, compared to a 27% increase for individual incentives, according to a study by the International Society for Performance Improvement. Organizations that implement a peer-to-peer recognition program also benefit from creating a culture of shared success.
Set reasonable work boundaries
In the race to beat competitors, more organizations are normalizing always on work cultures. Silicon Valley, in particular, is popularizing a 996 work expectation of working 12-hour shifts six days a week in the race to innovate on AI. When leaders model that workers must be always-on, it creates and exacerbates a scarcity mindsetthat theres never enough time or resources in a day to complete tasks, so we have to keep working more.
It also often fosters the belief that employees must compete against their colleagues to demonstrate dedication and competence. When leaders model reasonable work hours and expectations, the message gets communicated that employees dont have to hustle for rewards.
This looks like visibly and vocally taking time off, working reasonable hours, and not penalizing employees when they dont respond immediately. Hustle culture often leads to burnout, another side effect of competitive environments. By comparison, in collaborative work cultures, employees feel supported to work reasonable hours without fear.
Consider job-sharing and other collaboration models
Nobel prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin discovered a surprising way to reduce the gender wage gapjob-sharing. A lack of flexibility (also a challenge in always-on cultures) impacts womens earning potential. But when theyre able to work part-time and trade off their shiftsparticulary common for pharmaciststhe wage gap almost disappears.
What if more leaders could explore some roles at the organization being set up for job-sharingsuch as two colleagues who work closely together and could substitute for each other easily when the other is out? This can help foster team ownership and collaboration versus individual priorities.
One company, Jotform, moved to create small, cross-functional teams when their leaders noticed the company was growing but output wasnt. These cross-functional teams of 35 people each would focus on a single product instead of bouncing between priorities. Each group was paired with its own designer and given ownership.
Almost overnight, the quality of our work improved. The teams moved faster, communicated better, and felt more motivated. Since then, cross-functional teams have become a core part of our cultureand one of our biggest competitive advantages, writes CEO Aytekin Tank, reflecting on the past decade since the company moved to this model. Of course, establishing a number of collaboration norms, particularly around communication, was key to making it a success.
Co-leadership models
A compelling case for co-leadership, particularly organization co-CEOs, is emerging. One study of 87 public companies led by co-CEOS between 1996 and 2020 found they had better shareholder returns (9.5%) compared with similar companies who only didnt.
Co-CEOs are not common nor without controversy, but done right, theres evidence that collaboration at the highest levels can truly drive innovation. Take Netflix, where Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings were able to leverage complementary skills to grow the company. Management professor Michael D. Watkins lays out seven norms of how a successful co-CEO partnership could operate, including designing clear conflict-resolution mechanisms, creating a leadership charter, and dividing responsibilities by expertise, not convenience. This is even more necessary as AI continues to disrupt many industries.
A nonprofit organization I was involved with in the past, Upaya Social Ventures, also transitioned to a co-CEO model last year. Collaborating with their complementary skills has been necssary to serve the organizations mission of creating dignified jobs for people living in some of the poorest regions of India.
Left to chance, many organizations default to competitive norms, where collaboration is often stalled because of internal rivalries. Thats why its necessary to uncompetefor leaders to intentionally prioritize and design norms that make collaboration supported, rewarded, and institutionalized. Only then can we reduce inter-organization competition and move towards true collaboration.
It’s almost the end of the year, and for many, that means health flexible spending account (FSA) funds are set to expire. FSAs allow employees to set aside pretax money to pay for healthcare expenses such as copays, some medications, and deductibles. But many people aren’t aware that the funds don’t always roll over into the next calendar year after December 31.
Sometimes, employers will provide grace periods of up to two and a half months past the end of the year to allow for extra time to use your FSA funds. Others may allow you to carry over up to $660 per year. But 33% of employers have a hard deadline, so if you don’t use your funds by the end of the year, they’re gone. In 2023, around half of all FSA account holders forfeited some funds back to their employers, with the average amount left in accounts being $436.
In general, experts say this is because many Americans don’t know of the deadline. People tell us one of the main reasons they forfeit FSA funds is because they arent aware that they have a deadline in the first place, or they dont know how much they have left in their account, says Rachel Rouleau, chief compliance officer for Health-E Commerce, the parent company of the FSA Store, per CNBC.
Still, even if employers don’t roll over funds or offer grace periods, there are some ways to make the most of your funds before the year is outeven if you don’t have healthcare expenses left to cover. According to Joseph Giordano, compliance manager for Health-E Commerce, there are tons of everyday products that you’d likely be buying anyway that can be covered by FSAs. “We estimate that the average American household spends $1,600 a year on healthcare purchases that are FSA eligible,” Giordano told Yahoo Finance.
The list of items that can be paid for with FSA funds is extensive. It includes baby care items, skincare products (like face masks), high-tech health devices (like foot massagers), telehealth services, acne medication, cold and flu medicines, and more. Find the full list of eligible products on the FSA Store website.
If my three-decade journey in the corporate world has taught me anything, its that in business, as in life, the only certainty is uncertainty. In the past 20 years, periods of upheaval, from pandemics to financial crises to AI hysteria, have restitched the fabric of how we work, travel, and communicate. While this uncertainty can generate tension and turmoil, it also forges the best leaders.
Ive seen bosses and colleagues navigate all types of volatility, where the margin between success and failure can come down to a single action or inaction. So, what distinguishes leaders who can successfully shepherd teams through uncertain times from those who cant?
I believe those who can share these three distinct characteristics.
DOUBLE DOWN DURING DOWN TIMES
Theres a tendency for companies to become ultra-cautious in times of uncertainty. While this may seem prudent, its difficult to get ahead of whats coming with your head down. The best leaders look ahead and make smart investments even when markets are down and sentiment is grim.
In the wake of 9/11, I was at GE Aviation (now GE Aerospace). Overnight, the airline industry was grounded. While other manufacturers hunkered down and leaned on existing IP and products, we increased our budget on new jet engine development. Counterintuitive? Perhaps. But we were confident in one thing: People would fly again.
Typically, a new engine has a combined new product introduction cycle and payback period of 15 to 20 years. With such an extended runway for ROI, manufacturers that dont make a bet to capture market share often struggle to get back into the game. Eventually, airline demand resumed, as did the need for next-gen engines, and we were one of the only companies that could deliver.
ABSORB THE FEAR
In Stephen Kings The Green Mile, prisoner John Coffey has a remarkable gift: He absorbs the sickness and pain of others, assuming their burdens at significant personal cost. Sci-fi? Yes, but it symbolizes a skill every leader needs.
During times of change and anxiety, leaders must absorb the emotionalburdens of their employees, their fear and insecurity, and then project a path forward. The best leaders Ive seen take on their stakeholders doubt and replace it with a clear-eyed vision of the opportunity that exists amid the chaos. Listen, digest the concerns, and replace apprehension with hope.
The pandemic was a period of intense uncertainty for companies, and Twilio was no exception. It was also the catalyst for equally intense growth, as circumstances and shifts in consumer behavior accelerated digital transformation.
Nearly every organization needed a way to engage its customers digitally, and we were there to help build it. But by early 2024, when I became CEO, we had a lingering post-pandemic hangover. We simply werent winning as fast or frequently, and without credible points on the board, I could sense increased anxiety across our employee base.
Hope is the currency that reenergizes teams and reassures external stakeholders, but empty hope is useless without a concrete path forward. I made it my mission to deliver that. For us, hope meant aligning on a clear, measurable vision for continued growth and a roadmap that everyone could get behind. This served as a compass, allowing our 5,500 employees to rebuild momentum and get us to the other side.
CUT SUGARCOATING FROM YOUR CORPORATE DIET
Theres an inclination for leaders to protect their people during periods of uncertainty. Withholding information, changing the message for each audience, or filtering it through rose-colored glasses insulates your stakeholders from the reality of what needs to occur. Fight those urges. Be transparent, while adjusting the altitude of information nuances required for each audience.
In my first year as Twilio CEO, I was on the road meeting with stakeholders roughly 70% of the time. I sat down with customers, employees, investors, and board members to listen and communicate the companys path forward. My goal was to candidly talk about where we were as a company and where we were headed, so that everyone with skin in the game had the same playbook.
Without candor and a consistent message, stakeholders cant grasp the full picture and the steps needed to fix it. You cant obfuscate the truth or change your tune depending on who youre talking to. You have a board, shareholders, hundreds or thousands of employees, and customers relying on your transparency.
Whether its at a monthly town hall, an industry roundtable, or deskside conversations with investors, open and consistent communication simplifies your job as a leader. Thats the real gift of transparency: There are no skeletons to remember to hide or stories to change. Most critically, it reinforces trust, which puts points on the board.
THE UNCERTAINTY IS TEMPORARY
Theres no telling how any leader will respond to periods of uncertainty or hardship until theyre faced with them. No matter how impassable the road looks, the upside of uncertainty is knowing this too shall pass. After 9/11, we flew again. After the pandemic, we gathered again. And even as AI reshapes our work fundamentally, well continue to have meaningful careers.
These periods of uncertainty are temporary, but when you string them together, they make up the long-term success or failure of your company. So, when the future isnt fully written, our job as leaders is to make smart investments, absorb the fear, turn it into clarity, and build trust. Do that, and in my experience, there are always better days ahead.
Khozema Shipchandler is the CEO of Twilio.
The narrative is familiar: Revolutionary technology arrives, promising to liberate women from domestic drudgery and professional constraints. The electric oven would free housewives from coal-burning stoves. The washing machine would eliminate laundry day. The microwave would make meal preparation effortless. Yet as historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued in her landmark book, More Work for Mother, these innovations didnt reduce womens workload. They simply shifted expectations, creating new standards of cleanliness and convenience that often meant more work, not less.
So when we speak of AI as the solution to professional and personal burdens, skepticism is warranted. After all, technology has repeatedly promised liberation while delivering new forms of constraint. The question isnt whether AI will change professional and personal work; its whether this change will finally favor womens autonomy rather than merely reorganizing their obligations.
Recent data Duckbill collected alongside Harris Poll reveals that 47% of women avoid asking for help to prevent burdening others. This hesitation reflects not just conditioning around self-sacrifice, but hard-won wisdom about technological promises that rarely materialize as advertised.
SELF-LIMITATION ISNT ALL ON US
The reluctance to seek assistance isnt a character flaw; its a rational behavior within systems that have historically penalized women for taking up space. When 31% of women aged 18-34 procrastinate on booking their own medical appointments, and 76% report that even in their free time it feels like there is something they should be doing, were witnessing the manifestation of decades of messaging that female needs are inherently secondary.
This isnt about women doing it wrong. Its about women making calculated decisions within structures that werent designed for their success.
AI PROVIDES AN ALGORITHMIC ADVANTAGE
What makes AI uniquely positioned to address this dynamic is its fundamental departure from human-built social contracts. Theres no emotional labor required, no reciprocal obligation, no concern about imposing on someones bandwidth. Theres no judgment. The technology can exist to purely augment human capability, making it perhaps the first truly guilt-free form of assistance available at scale.
Consider the surgeon who uses AI to optimize her schedule, allowing her to focus on life-saving procedures, rather than administrative minutiae. What if that surgeon also used AI to handle her insurance claim after a kitchen flood, researching coverage details, coordinating with adjusters, and handling repairs? Or the venture capitalist who has AI analyze market trends and simultaneously asks for it to research the best schools for her daughter, approaching both with the same fidelity and precision.
These are examples of resource allocation that refuses to compartmentalize professional efficiency and personal fulfillment. Unlike previous technologies that further entrenched women in prescribed roles, AI has the potential to follow women across all domains of life.
So, how do we fix this?
1. Redefine productivity as self-care
When 78% of young women report they are simply trying to get through the day, were looking at a crisis of sustainable solutions. AI offers an alternative: What if getting things done could be both excellent and guilt-free?
This shift requires a fundamental reframing for women. Instead of asking Am I capable of doing this myself? the question becomes Is this the highest and best use of my capabilities and time? Suddenly, outsourcing restaurant research or flight refunds isnt lazy, its strategic.
And when tasks are streamlined and coordination becomes effortless, the mental bandwidth that was once consumed by logistics is freed up for vision, creativity, and genuine rest. Unlike previous technologies that created new forms of performance pressure, AIs most radical feature could be its indifference to human social hierarchies and gendered expectations.
2. Shape the algorithm to work for us
For AI to truly serve womens needs rather than simply digitizing existing biases, women must be active participants in shaping these tools. Women are adopting AI at rates 25% less than their male counterparts. That adoption gap isnt just a missed opportunity for individual efficiency; its a systemic risk that AI development will continue to prioritize male perspectives and use cases.
Every time a woman trains an AI assistant on her specific work, teaches it to understand her communication style, or provides feedback on its suggestions, shes contributing to a more inclusive technological future.
This is not just about representationits about functionality. We cannot afford to let this technology develop without us, only to discover later that it replicates the same systems that have historically constrained us.
WOMEN DESERVE SUPPORT WITHOUT LIMITS
In a culture that has long demanded women take on more tasks to become more, AI represents something revolutionary: technology that encourages taking up space by alleviating pressures. Its permission to ask for what you need without apology, to optimize for you rather than survival, to treat your time and energy as genuinely valuable resources.
The women who understand this arent just early adopters of technology, theyre pioneers of a new paradigm where support isnt scarce, help isnt shameful, and free time is not a luxury, but a human right. In embracing AI, theyre not just changing how shit gets done, theyre modeling what it looks like when women are able to be as big as their ambitions demand.
Meghan Joyce is cofounder and CEO of Duckbill.
ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.
How many times have you seen that message? More importantly, how many times have you actually stopped to consider what it means?
No doubt youve noticed italong with millions of others who now rely on AI for everything from planning product launches and rewriting emails to turning their beloved pets into cartoons.
The adoption speed has been remarkable. In just a few years, AI has gone from a buzzword to a daily fixture in countless workplaces. And for many, its already hard to remember what work looked like without it.
Like anything that makes life easier, its easy to see why it caught on so quickly. Whats harder to see (and easier to forget), though, is how quickly weve tuned out can make mistakes.
Thats why business leaders must be deliberate about how they integrate AI into their operations and clear about where human judgment must lead.
SPEED AND THE ILLUSION OF INTELLIGENCE
AIs value is undeniable. It can summarize meetings, analyze data, write copy, solve coding problems, create images, and so much more. That amounts to real progress, unlocking hours that can be focused on more creative and strategic work.
But as AI becomes increasingly embedded in our lives, and its work becomes better and better, it also becomes easier to overestimate what it can do. Part of that stems from fear. If we believe it can replace us, we start to believe it can think like us.
We need to be clear-eyed: AI does not actually think. Not yet, anyway. It predicts what words are likely to come next. Its a mirror into the ideas, concepts, and content that already exist in the world.
When we forget that, we stop questioning. We assume that because something sounds smart, it is smart. And thats where mistakes begin.
WHY HUMAN JUDGMENT WILL ALWAYS BE A DIFFERENTIATOR
The more powerful AI becomes (and it will!), the more tempting it will be to pass off not just the underlying tasks, but also the reasoning behind them.
If judgment were as simple as analyzing data and making a decision based solely on that, wed be in trouble. The reality, however, is that judgment requires interpretation, empathy, and lived experience.
As a communications professional of nearly 20 years, its easy for me to imagine how badly AI overreliance could go wrong.
Picture a company embroiled in a public controversy. Rather than consulting with someone who has years of experience navigating corporate crises, the in-house team turns to AI for a statement. Absent context or emotional intelligence, even a well-phrased message can make a bad situation worse. Not to mention those excessive em dashes in the company statement will be an obvious flag to anyone whos read copy drafted by AI.
Its not just outlier events, either. Every day, business leaders must decide how to communicate sensitive changes, interpret market signals, and navigate nuanced situations, all of which require perspective.
AI can tell you whats been said or done before, in whatever format you wantand what a useful tool that is alone. It can surface information, make suggestions, and help speed execution, but human oversight will always be crucial. What if the right course of action based on a lifetime of experience is to take an approach thats never been done before? If we can only look back and use that intel to inform decisions, how do we truly evolve?
BUILD A TRUST, BUT VERIFY CULTURE
AI is the first technological innovation that appears to possess true intelligence, which makes maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism essential.
Trust, but verify isnt about second-guessing technology, its about recognizing how AI can make our lives easier and more efficient without losing what makes us unique: Our lived experience. That starts with everyday habits. Remember, AI is a starting point, not the finished product. Encourage your team to ask: Does this sound right to me? Would I stand by this if my name was attached to it?
Whether verifying facts and stats, confirming sources, or reviewing tone and feel, these actions prevent speed from turning into sloppiness.
As leaders, we must set the tone. By framing AI as a tool for making us more efficientnot a replacement for human judgmentwe reinforce what will always drive great work: judgment, creativity, and accountability.
Grace Keith Rodriguez is CEO of Caliber Corporate Advisers.
Why do some climate innovations fail to deliver? Not because theyre flawed, but because the business world misjudges their economics.
From hydrogen to EV infrastructure, carbon-capture startups to precision farming tools, companies around the world are pouring money into climate tech. But for every promising climate innovation that scales, several more fizzle out too soon. Not because the science doesnt work. But because the business case was either overestimated or underestimated at the wrong time.
In the race to build the future, too many businesses are still blowing it on climate economics. Some assume customers will pay for green solutions at any price. Others abandon high-potential technologies too early. And many charge ahead without evaluating the unintended consequences of their choices.
THE COST MISCONCEPTION
A persistent myth in climate innovation is that virtue sells and customers will choose sustainability regardless of cost. In my years of working as an innovation leader, I have discovered how wrong that is. According to Boston Consulting Group, although up to 80% of consumers say they care about sustainability, only 1-7% have actually paid a premiumfor green products. Industrial buyers also hesitate to switch to cleaner inputs that cost more upfront. In other words, climate friendliness alone rarely triggers a purchase.
Its not that people dont care. Its that price sensitivity hasnt vanished just because climate urgency has arrived. A mistake many innovators make is assuming that having a good solution is enough, that if the environmental benefit is clear, customers will adopt it, no matter the cost. This is often not the case, especially in markets without subsidies, mandates, or strong brand loyalty.
Weve seen this play out in everything from early EV adoption gaps in rural regions, to low uptake of biodegradable materials in price-sensitive markets. Companies often overestimate what their customers will pay, and as a result, misalign their go-to-market strategy from the start.
THE EARLY-STAGE TRAP
On the flip side, some climate solutions get written off too early. When a solution looks expensive or inefficient at first, companies often pull the plug before the technology has a chance to evolve.
But thats exactly how breakthrough technologies start, and it also takes time and so you need a lot of patience. The most promising climate solutions usually have three things in common: They target a big problem worth solving, they take a radical or unconventional approach, and they rely on some kind of revolutionary technology with a testable hypothesis.
Too often, we stop pursuing technologies simply because we assume they’ll never become economical. But that thinking ignores historical proof. Take solar panels. Once madly expensive and reliant on subsidies, their cost has plummeted so much that theyre now among the cheapest energy sources globally. Battery storage, wind power, and electric vehicles are a similar case in point. Costs dropped drastically only after years of heavy investment, iteration, and learning.
Not every climate innovation will scale. But the ones with game-changing potential often look uneconomical in their early phases. The winners are the companies that know how to identify which uneconomical ideas are worth nurturing and stay disciplined in how they invest in them.
THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Another costly mistake? Focusing so narrowly on solving one climate problem that you accidentally create another.
When businesses obsess over metrics like CO reduction without examining broader impacts, innovation can backfire. A climate solution that reduces emissions but compensates by heavy use of rare earth minerals may come with geopolitical risks or social and environmental harm elsewhere in the supply chain. But climate innovation isnt a one-variable equation. Companies that want to lead in this space must ask the harder questions about systems impacts.
TOWARD SMARTER EVALUATION
For companies looking to avoid these costly mistakes, it all begins with how climate innovations are evaluated not just in the lab, but in the boardroom. That means beyond gut instinct or conventional ROI models.
In practice, it translates to using tools like scenario planning to anticipate how potential policy changes. Raw material prices or consumer attitudes might affect the solutions economics. Or scorecards that keep track of multiple criteria simultaneously over time. Or portfolio approaches that consider long-term impact alongside short-term feasibility.
Most importantly, businesses need to embrace a degree of uncertainty. Not every innovation needs to deliver immediate profit to be worth pursuing, but not every green idea deserves a blank check either. The challengeand the opportunitylies in making smarter, more nuanced investment bets.
FROM BLIND BETS TO SMART BETS
The pressure to deliver climate solutions is only going to grow. And thats great! But beware that good intentions dont guarantee good outcomes. Too often, businesses fall into one of three traps Ive discussed: overestimating willingness to pay, underestimating long-term potential, or failing to think systemically.
The companies that will lead in the next decade will be the ones that avoid those traps. The ones that approach climate innovation with clear-eyed economics, strategic discipline, and a willingness to learn over time will be the ones to succeed.
Lets look at the big picture: Misjudging the economics of climate innovation doesnt just waste money. It delays progress. It undermines trust. And it squanders real opportunities to build a future thats both sustainable and successful, one where innovation delivers both to drive profits and preserve the planet.
Anantha Desikan is executive vice president and chief research development & innovation officer at ICL Group.
Accessibility used to mean compliance. An installed grab bar, an added ramp, a resized font. But meeting physical standards is only half the challenge. The other half, the part that truly changes lives, is how design makes people feel.
Thats where emotional accessibility comes in. Its what Michael Graves taught us to do 40 years ago. We believe it is the next frontier of design: creating experiences that dont just accommodate users but also affirm, reassure, and delight them.
When we talk about accessibility, were really talking about belonging. And belonging is emotional. A product can meet every ergonomic and ADA guideline yet still make someone feel excluded and unhappy. Poor design like this eliminates a products potential utility gain, if the experience of using it blocks adoption. Conversely, an object thats emotionally intuitive, clear, comforting, and joyful, invites people in before they ever touch it. For instance, we think about the affect our products will have when someone is out using them. We want the response a C-Grip Cane user gets from others to be ooooh nice product rather than awwww whats wrong?
At Michael Graves Design, weve spent decades proving that good design isnt a luxury; its a right. But as the democratization of design has evolved, so too have consumer expectations. People no longer want just functional enhancement; they want emotional inclusion. They want to feel seen and feel good.
THE LIMITS OF UNIVERSAL DESIGN
These are the well-known Seven Principles of Universal Design: equitable use, flexibility in use, simple and intuitive operation, perceptible information, tolerance for error, low physical effort, and appropriate size and space. They remain foundational to accessibility and their influence on architecture, product design, and public spaces is profound.
But heres the paradox. Products that fully embody those principles often work well, yet fail to connect. They can feel sterile, institutional, even medicalized. Users may appreciate their utility but reject them emotionally. The result is a design ironyperfectly universal products that no one wants to use.
Universal Design succeeds at the bottom of Maslows hierarchy of needs, addressing physiological and safety needs. But to destigmatize aging and disability, and to earn genuine consumer buy-in, design must move up the pyramid, to love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
Thats where emotional accessibility lives. It bridges the gap between function and feeling, making accessible products not just usable, but desirable, just like every great consumer product.
DESIGN FOR THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID
Heres how we approach it at Michael Graves Design. We begin with empathy and end with emotion. We ask not only how a product works, but how it feels to use it.
Our line of bathroom safety products for Pottery Barn meets ADA and Universal Design benchmarks. But it also meets a higher human need: dignity. By integrating safety into standard objects like towel bars and toilet paper holders, and by designing with finishes like polished nickel and matte blackmaterials associated with lifestyle-based bathroom design, not limitationwe transformed necessary aids into objects people want in their homes.
Customers tell us they feel proud of these pieces. Emotional connection leads to real adoption, which means the products actually achieved their purpose. Emotional accessibility doesnt just enhance desirability, it is the key that unlocks utility.
WHY FEELINGS ARE FUNCTIONAL
The case for emotional accessibility isnt sentimental; its strategic. As AI and automation permeate all facets of life, including product design, consumers crave something technology cant simulate: empathy.
Brands that design for emotion build trust and loyalty. Think OXOs Good Grips, which made universally loved ergonomic tools, or Apples tactile, intuitive products that make people feel capable rather than confused. These succeed because they feel human.
Emotional accessibility acknowledges that comfort, delight, and pride arent luxuries. Theyre essential enablers of adoption. When people feel good using a product, they use it more often, for longer, and with deeper attachment. These are the highest benchmarks in brand building.
COMPLETE THE UNIVERSAL DESIGN FRAMEWORK
Emotional accessibility doesnt replace Universal Design; it completes it. Together, they meet the full range of human needs, from survival to self-expression. Here are three ways to integrate it into any design process:
1. Design with emotional verbs
In every design brief, define not only what the product does, but how it should make people feel. Should it reassure? Inspire? Empower? Delight? These verbs guide form, material, and personality.
2. Prototype for emotion
Test for more than usability. Observe posture, expression, and language. Ask, How did this make you feel? Answers like comfortable or proud, as compared to stable or competent, show that the product has reached higher up Maslows pyramid.
3. Translate dignity into design language
Balanced proportions, tactile warmth, and intuitive gestures communicate respect. They tell users, You belong here.
THE FUTURE OF ACCESSIBLE DESIGN
The Seven Principles of Universal Design built the foundation for access in the built environment. Emotional accessibility adds to that foundation to create connection.
As AI accelerates efficiency, the next design revolution cant just be faster, it must be warmer, an essential human contribution.
If Universal Design made products usable by everyone, emotional accessibility will make them desirable to everyone. Its how we move from safety to self-expression, from compliance to connection, from design that works to design that cares.
Because in the end, the most universal design is the one that makes everyone feel welcome and represented.
Ben Wintner is CEO of Michae Graves Design.
If you were to join a team meeting at Parity on any given day, you might sense something unusual. One colleague may have just returned from a strength session. Another might be joining from an airport between competitions. Someone else might be analyzing sponsor data mere hours before competing in a world-class event.
This is what it looks like to lead a company where a significant portion of the workforce comprises elite women athletes. And I believe it represents a powerful window into the future of work.
At most companies, people point to a visionary founder or a breakthrough product as the thing that makes an organization stand out. At Parity, the differentiator is the people themselves. Our team includes a current WNBA player, a Canadian two-time Olympic runner, a nine-time U.S. waterskiing champion, a former NWSL soccer player, and a two-time Paralympic gold medalist in sitting volleyball. Others have competed professionally in pro tackle football and track and field (including pole vault). Twenty-six percent of our team even have Wikipedia entries (and no, Im not one of them).
While some team members have retired from sport, many still train and compete at the highest levels while simultaneously shaping our business strategy. They broker partnerships with esteemed brands like Microsoft, M&T Bank, LinkedIn, and AdventHealth. They manage our community of 1,200 pro women athletes while developing smart content and winning creative strategies for clients. And they bring a lived understanding of what it means to operate under pressure, to persevere, to adapt, and to collaboratethe very skills business leaders often spend years trying to cultivate inside corporate environments.
WHY WE HIRE ATHLETES
When I joined Parity, our mission was clear: Close the income and opportunity gap for women athletes. That mission shapes everything, including how we think about talent.
If were going to build a company dedicated to advancing women in sports, why wouldnt we build it with women in sports?
Every athlete who joins our team brings something that leaders often talk about but rarely see themselves: firsthand experience with inequity. Our own research underscores the challenges professional women athletes face.
58% earn under $25,000 annually from their sport
50% dont net income after training and competition expenses
Many juggle full-time jobs while maintaining elite training schedules
These athletes arent theoretically aware of the pay gaptheyve lived it. Theyre not generically familiar with underinvestmenttheyve had to fight through it. And them having lived the reality of our mission creates a real workforce advantage.
When a brand asks how to build authentic partnerships with women athletes, our team can speak from experiencesometimes literally from the Olympic Village. When we advise marketers on what resonates with womens sports fans, our experts understand the community because they are part of it. This model isnt manufactured through training sessions or leadership offsites. Its the natural outcome of building a company around people with lived expertise.
THE ATHLETE ADVANTAGE
One of the most important things Ive learned as a CEO is that skills do not automatically translate across contextsbut values and instincts do.
Elite athletes possess certain foundational strengths that prove invaluable in business:
Resilience. Athletes experience failure and setbacks more frequentlyand more publiclythan most professionals ever will. They do not crumble when they lose. They study. They iterate. They try again. This mentality fuels a culture of experimentation and growth at Parity.
Adaptability. When you compete on the world stage, you get used to constant change: Schedules shift, travel goes awry, bodies dont always cooperate. Adaptability becomes a core
competency. In a fast-moving, early-stage company, that skill is priceless.
Team mindset. Elite women athletes in particular know the experience of achieving something remarkable with scarce resources. They understand the power of collaboration and the importance of elevating others. That ethos is foundational to how we operate.
Pressure performance. Athletes are accustomed to performing with something on the line. In business, pressure often derails people. For our athlete-employees, it sharpens them.
When people ask me how Parity has built deep credibility in the womens sports ecosystem in such a short time, the answer is simple: Credibility builds when the people driving the strategy are the very people whose lives and livelihoods the strategy touches.
REINVENT WHAT WORK CAN LOOK LIKE
Were living through a generational shift in how people think about leadership and talent. The rise of multi-hyphenate careers, nonlinear professional paths, and values-driven workforces are reshaping traditional corporate norms. Paritys model sits at the intersection of these trends.
Our team members dont have to choose between competing at the highest level and building a career. They can do both, because our flexible model makes part-time work an option for those at the height of their athletic careers, when 40-hour weeks arent feasible. When organizations allow flexibility, the outcomes are profound: stronger culture, greater loyalty, and better results.
A MODEL FOR THE FUTURE
Not every company will hire Olympians or Paralympians. But every company can learn from the underlying philosophy: The most powerful innovation occurs when the workforce reflects the mission.
If youre a healthcare company, hire people who have navigated the healthcare system.
If youre building products for parents, bring caregivers into leadership roles.
If your mission is environmental sustainability, elevate people who have worked on the front lines of climate impact.
Experience breeds insight. Insight breeds innovation. Innovation breeds impact.
At Parity, integrating athletes into our workforce hasnt just strengthened our business. It has created a culture defined by resilience, empathy, excellence, and purpose. It has helped us close the opportunity gap in womens sportsnot just through partnerships and research, but through the very structure of our company.
If the future of work is about rethinking who gets to participate, whose experiences shape strategy, and whose voices fuel innovation, then companies everywhere would benefit from following the athlete playbook.
Which, if you ask me, is a winning strategy.
Leela Srinivasan is CEO of Parity.
When AWSs US-East-1 region went dark in late October, followed just a week later by a Microsoft Azure outage, it was yet another stark reminder that even the worlds biggest cloud vendors are not immune to failures. A simple DNS failure in AWSs Route 53 rippled outward, knocking out applications, disrupting database services, and reminding us how dependent our tech infrastructure has become on a handful of cloud regions. With an inadvertent tenant configuration change, the Azure outage further highlighted the instability of some of these systems, once again demonstrating how small changes can have quite a large impact.
With CyberCube estimating that the cost of the AWS outage could run between $38 and $581 million, the economic and operational toll of that outage cant be overstated. Thats especially true for smaller and midsize organizations that lack the resources to absorb multi-hour or multi-day downtime. For many businesses, this latest disruption exposed the hidden cost of cloud centralization: When one region falters, everything can grind to a halt.
Outages are inevitable. Even AWSs own CTO has said as much: Systems will fail, so they must be architected to expect and withstand failure. Yet too many organizations still design as if the cloud itself is infallible. They assume redundancy, backups, and recovery are baked in automatically and discover far too late that they arent.
The good news is that resiliency can be built in before the next failure strikes.
PRE-OUTAGE DIVERSIFICATION: DONT WAIT FOR THE NEXT OUTAGE
The first line of defense is simple in concept, but hard in execution. You must diversify before disaster strikes. Think of it as an investment portfolio. You wouldnt put all your money into one single account; its spread across a variety of options to give your investment the best chance of success. This means designing for failure across multiple availability zones or regions. AWS even recommends doing so in their AWS Well-Architected” guide.
A well-architected system should be able to shift traffic from one region to another (say, US-East-1 to US-West-1) in seconds. Outages rarely take down multiple regions at once, so a multiregion architecture remains one of the most effective defenses against downtime.
TURN TO MULTICLOUD AND ELIMINATE WASTEFUL SPEND
Some organizations take this even an extra step further, distributing workloads across multiple cloud providers. Multicloud designs offer additional resilience, but they require significant complexity and technical skills, as well as potentially higher costs. The key here is to start small and move only your most critical workloads or control planes into redundancy. Then, once youve evaluated the complexity and costs involved, you can expand.
Most companies will find multiregion diversification within a single cloud more practical, but whichever route they choose, the mindset must be the same: Assume something will break, and plan accordingly.
Equally critical is identifying and eliminating wasteful technology spend. Not every workload needs to run in the most expensive, high-availability configuration. Through a proper business impact analysis, organizations can align investments with risk, spending where failure would truly hurt the business, and economizing where theyre able. For smaller firms, this understanding of whats mission-critical and what can wait to come back online is key to cost-efficient resiliency.
BCDR TO MANAGE DATA CENTER AND NETWORK RESILIENCE
If your organization has already diversified across different geographic regions or even different cloud providers, its crucial to recognize resilience does not end with those infrastructure choices. This is where business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plans come into play. Diversification helps reduce exposure. But without a tested plan to respond when things go wrong, even the most well-architected environment can falter. When youre prepared for anything, nothing can phase you.
Whatever your organizations BCDR plans may be, an easy way to build your resilience is by testing those plans regularly. Netflix famously uses a tool they refer to as Chaos Monkey that randomly disables production instances to ensure systems can withstand unexpected failures. Theres no telling how or when the Chaos Monkey may strike. By intentionally injecting chaos, teams must build fault-tolerant architectures that can recover quickly and continue operating under stress. This is an extreme example.
Smaller organizations can start with once- or twice-yearly tests, refining plans as they grow. Larger organizations may want to run these kinds of tests on a more frequent basis, like quarterly, before following in Netflixs footsteps. Either way, dust off the binder and give that plan an upgrade that accounts for any and every situation.
A FORWARD-LOOKING RESILIENCE MINDSET
Just as we dont build cities on single bridges, we shouldnt anchor the digital economy on a handful of hyperscaler regions. The recent AWS and Microsoft outages werent the first of their kind, and they certainly wont be the last. The difference between these and the next ones will be how prepared organizations are.
The hidden cost of centralization isnt just downtime; its the fragility baked into modern digital systems. If youre not spending money up front in architecting for failures and outages, youll lose out on more in the long run. But with smart architecture and disciplined investment, we can turn past fragility into future resilience and save on costs in the long term.
The next outage is not a matter of if, its when. The question is, will you be ready or caught flatfooted?
Juan Orlandini is chief technology officer of Insight Enterprises.
