This Thursday, the SS United States is scheduled to be sunk off the coast of Florida.
When she launched in 1952, she was the fastest ocean liner ever built. On her first voyage she crossed the Atlantic faster than any passenger ship before her, and that record still stands today. She carried presidents, movie stars, and families starting new lives. She was the best way to cross an ocean.
Then the jet came along.
Within a few years, a trip that took days took hours. By 1969 she was out of service. For decades she sat tied to a pier in Philadelphia while people tried to find her a new purpose. Now she will go to the bottom of the Gulf to become the world’s largest artificial reef.
The jet was a real advance. It still meant something was lost.
Advancement and grief travel together
We usually tell stories of progress as straight lines. Something better arrives, and the old way fades out. But the people who loved the old way, built careers on it, or simply felt at home in it experience that change differently. For them, progress can feel like loss.
That is true even when the change is good. Maybe especially then, because it is harder to admit you are grieving something everyone else is calling an improvement.
AI is moving the cycle faster
I am seeing this right now with AI, and at a speed I have not seen before.
Roles are changing. Some people are worried their jobs will be replaced. Many more are living with uncertainty: they do not know what their work will look like next year, or whether the skills they spent years building will still matter.
In mission-driven organizations, this runs deep. The person who has run the reports for fifteen years is not just doing a task. They are the one who knows which numbers to trust, which ones need a footnote, and the story behind the dip in March. When a tool can produce that report in seconds, it is fair for them to wonder where they fit.
Where leaders get it wrong
Most leaders do not make the mistake of ignoring the change. They make the mistake of rushing past the loss.
The new system gets announced. The training gets scheduled. The benefits get explained: faster, easier, more accurate. And nobody says out loud what people are giving up.
When the loss goes unnamed, it does not go away. It shows up as resistance, quiet workarounds, slow adoption, or good people pulling back. Leaders read that as people being stubborn about change. Often, it is grief that never got acknowledged.
What the reef can teach us
The SS United States is not being scrapped. She is becoming a foundation.
Divers will explore her. Fish and coral will make her home. Researchers will study the life that grows on her. What she was will hold up what comes next.
That is a helpful picture for leaders bringing AI into their teams. The experience your people built is not something to throw away. Their judgment, their knowledge of your community, and their sense of what matters are exactly what a new tool cannot supply. Those become the foundation the new work grows on.
But people can only believe that if you first admit something is ending.
Name it before you ask for change
If you are bringing AI into your team this year, start here: acknowledge what people are losing before you ask them to change.
That might sound like:
“The way you have done this work for years mattered. It got us here.”
“Some of what you are good at will look different now, and that is a real loss.”
“I do not have every answer about what your role will become, and I want to figure it out with you.”
None of that slows progress down. It makes progress possible, because people follow leaders who see what they are giving up.
A question for your leadership team
Before your next change, ask: What are we asking our people to leave behind, and have we said it out loud?
