YOU DON’T NEED A NEW MANAGEMENT MODEL. YOU NEED PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHO THEY ARE.

In 2026, AI became an excuse not to think. This article dismantles the illusion of technological management and reveals what truly sustains — or destroys — an organization. — By Marcello de Souza

Let me ask you something directly: when was the last time, in a strategy meeting, someone stopped the discussion about tools, methodologies, and AI dashboards to ask — sincerely — who the people sitting in that room actually are? What they believe. What they fear. What moves them when no one is watching.

If that took more than three seconds to answer, you have just identified the real problem in organizations in 2026.

It is not the management model. It never was.

A Market That Learned to Pretend It Thinks

There is a curious phenomenon in contemporary organizational life: the more sophisticated the tools for analyzing human behavior become, the less interested companies seem in actually understanding the human being. What grows is the interest in predicting, automating, and optimizing. What disappears is the willingness to sit down, listen, and tolerate the irreducible complexity of a person.

In 2026, the corporate market is divided between two types of organizations: those that have adopted artificial intelligence as the solution — and those that have not yet found the budget to do so. In both cases, the question nobody asks remains the same: what for?

It is not a rhetorical question. It is the most strategic question a leadership team can ask — and the most avoided, because it demands a kind of honesty that automated reports are incapable of delivering.

AI can map behavioral patterns with a precision any human manager would envy. It identifies drops in engagement before the employee submits their resignation. It cross-references productivity data with absenteeism. It suggests corrective actions based on global benchmarks. It does all of this — except one thing: it cannot explain why that specific person is hollowing out on the inside while delivering perfect numbers on the outside.

And that is precisely where contemporary management has a problem that no copilot resolves.

The Paradox of Productive Suffering — Updated for the Age of Digital Performance

There is something organizational research revealed decades ago that the market has never truly absorbed — because it is inconvenient: suffering, in managed doses and controlled cycles, increases individual production in the short term. It is not gratuitous cruelty. It is psychic mechanics. When a person is sufficiently pressured, they enter execution mode and stop thinking. They perform. They deliver. They do not question.

The problem is not that this works. The problem is how long it works — and what remains afterward.

In 2026, this mechanism has gained a new layer of sophistication that makes it even more invisible: productive suffering has been digitized. It no longer arrives as pressure from a manager in the corridor. It arrives as a notification. As a deadline appearing on the dashboard at 11 p.m. As an automatic individual performance comparison within the team, generated by an algorithm that has no agenda, no intention — and for that very reason is perceived as neutral, as though neutrality were a synonym for fairness.

It is not.

What changes in the era of data-driven management is that suffering loses its face. It ceases to have an identifiable author and becomes structural. And structural suffering is the hardest to name, to confront, and to heal — because there is no one to address the complaint to. There is only the system. And the system is simply doing its job.

Depression was already, in 2023, the second leading cause of workplace absenteeism in Brazil. In 2026, it continues to advance — now with company: performance anxiety driven by algorithmic pressure, exhaustion from hyperconnectivity, and what some lines of organizational psychology are already calling identity grief — the diffuse sense that the most essential part of who you are has no place whatsoever in the current work model.

The Scene Nobody Wants to See — Because Everyone Is In It

In 2023, during a leadership development training, I went to lunch with thirty high-level professionals. Experienced, articulate, well-positioned people. The table was large. The silence was larger.

Everyone was on their phone.

It was not occasional distraction. It was the pattern. One colleague called another through a messaging app — while sitting two meters away. Nobody opened their mouth to speak directly to the person beside them.

I said nothing. I observed. And I realized that what I was seeing was not rudeness. It was a symptom.

In 2026, that symptom has deepened. The end of compulsory remote work — which many expected would restore in-person bonds — revealed something nobody had anticipated: people came back to the offices, but their relational modes stayed home. Physical presence returned. Real presence — the kind that implies attention, availability, and the risk of genuine exposure — has not.

What is visible in many corporate environments today is not isolation. It is something subtler and more serious: coexistence without contact. People who share the same space without sharing anything of substance. Who talk a great deal — in meetings, in presentations, in structured feedback sessions — but rarely say anything that truly exposes them.

And when AI enters this scene as a communication mediator — suggesting responses, summarizing conversations, drafting emails that nobody writes for themselves anymore — the distance does not decrease. It acquires a veneer of efficiency.

The Thesis That Holds: Identity Before Model

There is a confusion the management market has never resolved — and that the AI era is making even more acute: the confusion between structure and substance.

Structure is what you see in an organizational chart, a culture manual, a flexibility policy, or a performance management platform. Substance is what happens when two people disagree in a room and must decide who yields — and why. It is what moves someone to speak the truth when the political cost of doing so is high. It is what prevents a theoretically humanized work environment from becoming, in practice, a theater of performed humanity.

Structure without substance produces organizations that appear advanced — and function in primitive ways.

The substance of an organization does not come from a management model. It comes from the people who compose it — and more precisely, from how well those people know themselves. How clear they are on what they value and why. How well they can distinguish what they actually think from what they have learned to repeat. How much clarity they have about what they are capable of offering — and what they cannot, yet, give.

That is identity. And identity is not installed through onboarding. It is not measured in climate surveys. It is not replaced by artificial intelligence.

It is built — in long, uncomfortable, and rarely linear processes — from the inside out.

What I have observed over more than two decades working inside organizations, across every sector and size, is that the companies that endure — that survive economic crises, technological shifts, and market upheavals without losing their essence — share not a specific management model, but a human common denominator: their people know who they are. They know what they stand for. They know what they will not compromise. And that clarity, multiplied across the entire structure, creates a coherence that no methodological framework can manufacture.

The Question That Precedes Everything: What For?

In 2023, I proposed a reversal that I still see being ignored in 2026: before asking ‘why are we adopting this model?’, organizations need to answer ‘what for?’

The difference is not semantic. It is philosophical — and brutally practical.

‘Why’ seeks causes. ‘What for’ seeks purpose. And purpose — when genuine, when shared, when embodied in everyday decisions — is the only anchor that prevents any management model from becoming empty ritual.

In 2026, organizations are adopting AI with the same logic they applied to Unbossing, holacracy, and agile methodologies before it: because it seems urgent, because the competitor is doing it, because the consultant recommended it, because the HR event case was convincing.

None of those reasons is ‘what for.’

What AI can do for your organization is a question that deserves to be answered seriously — and it can only be answered after you have answered a prior one: what is your organization trying to be? Not what it produces. Not what it earns. Not what its market positioning is. What it is trying to be — in terms of the kind of human space it intends to constitute, the kind of relationship it wants to cultivate, the kind of person it wants to help grow.

Organizations that can answer this use AI as a tool. Those that cannot use AI as an excuse.

What Was Wrong in 2023 Is Still Wrong in 2026 — and Has Become More Costly

There is something I wrote in 2023 that needed no updating — only confirmation. And the confirmation arrived, unfortunately, in the most expensive form possible: in mental health data, in labor lawsuits, in the departure of professionals who should be at the peak of their careers and who simply stopped.

Companies celebrated as examples of advanced management — impeccable environments, generous benefits, flexible models — continue to report alarming rates of absenteeism due to psychological conditions. The foosball table is there. The beer tap, too. The human being, behind closed doors, is saying something entirely different.

What is wrong is not the foosball table. What is wrong is the belief that a pleasant environment substitutes genuine relationship. That benefits substitute presence. That tools substitute identity.

In 2026, this error has grown more complex because we added another layer: the belief that artificial intelligence can replace the present leader. That automatically generated feedback holds the same value as feedback given by someone who knows you, who has accompanied you, who understands the context that data cannot capture.

It does not.

The leader who delegates to AI the work of knowing the people on their team is not being efficient. They are being absent with technological sophistication.

What Really Distinguishes the Organizations That Last

Over more than twenty-five years of practice — inside global companies, alongside leaders of every profile, in development processes that lasted months and sometimes years — I have learned to distinguish what separates an organization that grows from one that merely expands.

Expansion is quantitative. Growth is qualitative.

An organization can triple in size, automate processes, adopt every available management model, and still not have grown at all — because the people who compose it have not grown. Because the relationships that sustain it have not matured. Because the culture that defines it remains a set of values framed on a wall that nobody applies in real decisions.

The organizations that last — that survive decades, that endure crises that should have ended them — share something that appears in no management ranking: they invest systematically in the self-knowledge of their people. Not in technical skills training. In self-knowledge — in the rigorous sense of the term. Knowing who you are, what you want, what you fear, what you value, how you react under pressure, how you treat others when no one is watching.

This is not a wellness program. It is not corporate mindfulness. It is not yet another culture initiative that lasts until the next budget cut.

It is the most serious — and most neglected — work of contemporary management.

And it is the only work AI cannot do for you. Not because it lacks the technical capability. But because self-knowledge, by definition, requires a subject who turns inward — and that subject can only be you.

In 2023, I ended that article with a sentence I still hold without hesitation: without genuine humanization, neither I, nor you, nor any management model will be sufficient to secure our future — personal, professional, or organizational.

In 2026, I add only one line:

And AI, as extraordinary as it is, is only extraordinary in the hands of extraordinary people — people who know who they are, why they are there, and what they are not willing to surrender in the name of efficiency.

Everything else is the automation of emptiness.

If this text stirred something in you — a question, a certainty, or an unease — that is a sign there is more to explore. On my blog, you will find hundreds of articles on human and organizational cognitive behavioral development, conscious human relationships, and leadership that cannot be sold in a weekend course. Visit: marcellodesouza.com.br

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