The Script Nobody Handed You

A friend of mine got divorced last year. He is 44. Two kids. A house he cannot afford alone. A career he picked at 22 because a guidance counselor in Hight School told him it was a safe bet.

He told me something that stuck. He said: "I did everything right. I followed the plan. And I still ended up here."

I asked him: whose plan?

He could not answer.

There is a script most people follow. You have seen it. You might be living it right now.

Go to school. Take on debt. Get a degree in something "practical." Land a job. Climb the ladder. Buy a house you cannot really afford. Spend an insane amount of money on a wedding. Have kids. Work more. See your kids less. Realize around age 40 that you and your spouse became roommates somewhere around year seven. Divorce. Start over. In your mid to late 40s. Broke and confused about how you got there.

I see this pattern so often it stopped surprising me. What surprises me is how few people question it.

Nobody handed you this script. But you followed it anyway. Because your parents followed it. Because movies and TV shows told you it was the goal. Because every podcast and self-help book assumes this is the default.

These are not choices. These are inherited assumptions.

And here is the part that gets me. When you ask people why they did it this way, most of them say the same thing: "That is just what you do."

No. That is what you were told to do. There is a difference.

The same script runs inside companies. Different costume. Same blind obedience.

There is an assumption that you need departments. That marketing and sales and operations and finance should be separate teams with separate budgets and separate meetings and separate goals. Nobody questions it. But departments are a constructed fallacy. They exist because humans have cognitive limits. We could not hold enough information in our heads to do everything, so we split the work into boxes. Those boxes became org charts. Those org charts became identities. And now people defend their department like it is a country.

But the reason departments exist is not because the work requires them. It is because human brains required them. AI changes that equation.

There is an assumption that you have to stay in your lane. That the marketing person should not touch the data. That the operations lead should not write code. That the finance person should not redesign a workflow. Where did that come from? Job descriptions. Written by someone who needed to put a box around what one person could do in 40 hours a week. AI just made that box three times bigger.

There is an assumption that you need a meeting for everything. I watched a company last month hold a 45 minute meeting to decide the date of a different meeting. Forty-five minutes. Six people. That is 4.5 hours of combined human life spent scheduling a meeting about a meeting.

If your default response to any question is "let us schedule a meeting," you are not leading. You are hiding.

And here is my favorite one.

There is a general assumption that you have to have one-on-ones with your boss. Recurring. Calendared. Thirty minutes every week or two where you sit in a room and talk about what you are working on.

I stopped doing one-on-ones almost 10 years ago.

When someone tries to schedule one on my calendar, I get annoyed. I cancel it. I send back my phone number and my chat address. I say: if there is a problem, come find me. Or I will find you.

Here is why. A one-on-one assumes that the only time your boss is available is during a scheduled 30 minute block. That is insane. If someone on my team has a problem at 9am on Tuesday, why would they wait until our Thursday one-on-one to tell me? By Thursday, the problem is either fixed (and the meeting was pointless) or it got worse (and the meeting is too late).

The assumption underneath is that leaders are not accessible. So we created a system to guarantee a window of access. But the system replaced actual access. Now you have a meeting where people go through a list of updates that could have been a message. And real problems wait in a queue until the calendar says it is time.

Kill the one-on-one. Be available. When something matters, pick up the phone.

A young woman I have known for 20 plus years just finished her MBA. Smart. Driven. Uses AI constantly in her personal life. Building things. Learning things. Moving fast.

Then she told me her company banned AI.

I told her: if I were you, I would be looking for a new job right now. This will cripple your career.

She works for an industrial company that sells B2B products. Nothing classified. No PII. No HIPAA. No state secrets. Just regular business. Quotes, orders, reports, emails. The kind of work AI was built for.

But someone at the top made a decision based on fear. They do not understand AI, so they assumed it must be dangerous. They do not use AI, so they assumed nobody else should either. And now an entire company full of people is falling behind every single day while their competitors figure it out.

"We do not allow AI here" is not a policy. It is a confession. It says: we do not understand this, and we are too scared to learn.

This is the most dangerous assumption in business right now. Not that AI will replace everyone. Not that AI is overhyped. The dangerous assumption is that doing nothing is the safe choice. It is not safe. It is slow death. And the people who work there are the ones who pay the price.

That young woman has skills that could accelerate her career by years. Instead, she is being told to pretend those skills do not exist. For eight hours a day, she has to forget everything she knows and work like it is 2019.

Let's just get a typewriter out and start mailing letters to each other to communicate. 

The script that says go to college, get a job, buy a house, get married. The org chart that says stay in your lane. The calendar invite that says wait for your one-on-one. The company policy that says do not use AI.

Same thing. Different wrapper.

They are all assumptions. Rules that someone made up a long time ago for reasons that may have made sense then. But nobody went back to check if they still make sense now.

I call this the Constructed Fallacy. The idea that the structures we live inside, at work and in life, feel permanent. They feel like they were always there. But they were built by people. For specific reasons. In a specific time. And most of those reasons are gone.

Departments exist because one person could not hold all the context. AI can hold all the context. One-on-ones exist because leaders were not accessible. Phones and chat fixed that. The life script exists because a single-income household with a 30 year mortgage was the most stable option. That world is gone.

The question is not whether these assumptions are wrong. Some of them served us. The question is: are you following them because they still serve you, or because you never thought to question them?

This week, pick one assumption you have never questioned. Just one.

Maybe it is the recurring meeting that nobody needs. Maybe it is the department boundary that slows everyone down. Maybe it is the belief that your career path has to look a certain way. Maybe it is the company policy that bans the most powerful tool your team could use.

Ask: who wrote this rule? Why? Does the reason still hold? Who is enforcing this rule? 

If it does, keep it. If it does not, burn it.

Kathy
THE AI BOSS