You can’t have it both ways

Welcome to The Fixer, a weekly newsletter from The WayFinders Group. We’re organisational repair specialists. On Fridays we break down the corporate fiascos that happen when damage goes unrepaired.

Author

Leah Brown FRSA
March 06, 2026

Friday’s fiasco: the real AI washing risk

On 27 February, the BBC reported that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey had told shareholders his payments company, Block, was cutting almost half its workforce because artificial intelligence "fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company." The company’s headcount will fall abruptly from 10,000 to less than 6,000.

image source: block.xyz

4,000 gone and the market cheered as Block’s shares rose more than 20% in extended trading after the announcement.

Bloomberg reported the announcement landed at the centre of a debate between genuine fear that AI will displace jobs at unprecedented scale, and deep cynicism that companies are exploiting that fear to dress up old-fashioned cost-cutting as technological futurism. 

The actual cause of Block's restructuring was not AI. Block grew from 3,835 employees in 2019 to over 10,000 during the pandemic; years of decisions that accumulated quietly, without anyone measuring what they were doing to the organisation's human system, until desperate measured required halving it at a restructuring cost of $500 million. 

Yes, AI is transforming how we work, how we build, how we run companies. But Block is not a technology story. Analysts have described Block’s layoffs as "more about the business being bloated for so long than it is about AI." But AI washing, by definition, allows accountability to disappear into the slipstream and Block has given it a very public, very expensive face.

Dorsey chose one clean break over repeated rounds and said he would rather get there honestly and on his own terms than be forced into it reactively. I will give him this: he did not pretend it was easy. But he did pretend he is doing it honestly. This fiasco starts in the gap between where leadership thought the organisation was and what happened when reality hit.

There is no evidence of accountability for the structural decisions that caused over-hiring. No apology for the leavers, especially those whose jobs were to build the AI tools Block has claimed render their roles obsolete. Dorsey did offer workers 20 weeks of severance, six months of healthcare, and $5,000 per person which is more than most in this economy. But amends is rarely transactional. It is about changing the conditions that created the damage in the first place. 

Block has made no commitment to how AI adoption decisions will be made differently henceforth, no transparency about which roles were simply surplus to a structure that had grown unchecked. According to The Guardian, AI seems to be adding more work than it automates for the majority of workers.

It is also worth noting that Dorsey was a vocal critic of Elon Musk's handling of the Twitter layoffs in 2022; the speed, the disregard for institutional knowledge, the engineering teams gutted overnight. He is now presiding over cuts of equivalent scale, with the same delivery risk concentrated in exactly the same place. The AI washing narrative has attached itself to this story, but not all publicity is good publicity.

If we applied The WayFinders Group’s Organisational Repair Index (ORI™) to Block based on what is publicly known, the picture is stark. Trust among the 6,000 remaining employees is fragile and unlikely to recover. Stakeholder confidence has been traded for a short-term share price bump. Damage sits amongst the people who remain, calculating not whether their heads will be on the chopping board next, but when.

The risk is not that your best people walk out. It is that they stay but are paralysed, disengaged, and disconnected. 

Should we be invited to advise Block, we would point to what accountability requires in situations like this: name the full picture, not just a convenient narrative. Take responsibility for the structural decisions that got you here, not just the AI efficiency story. Rather than assuming that employees and stakeholders have accepted the narratives internal and external communications have delivered, construct a transparent accountability framework that involves genuine consultation. It will pay dividends. Show that you have accepted that your leadership ought to have known better in the way this story unfolded, and acknowledge that all publicity is not good publicity. 

The reputational story is the one the market is watching. The human story is the one that will determine whether Block can actually deliver on what Dorsey has promised. Because the biggest risk of layoffs is not the reduction in headcount. It is the damage that lingers in the people who remain; living in the gap between what they have been told and what they feel, no longer sure where they belong.

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For chairs, CEOs and senior partners

Every board is having the AI and headcount conversation this quarter. Most are not asking the harder question underneath it: is this genuinely about AI, or is it about structural problems that have been quietly compounding for years and now have a convenient narrative to hide behind?

AI washing is the emperor's new clothes of corporate restructuring. And the boards most exposed are not the ones who have already made the announcement. They are the ones who do not yet know what is in their human system; the accumulated damage, the information asymmetry, the slow erosion of trust that will not show up in a board paper until it is already a crisis.

The ORI™ closes that gap. A one-week human risk scan across nine dimensions. A clear, evidenced picture of where damage is live, where trust has eroded, and what the distance is between where your organisation thinks it is and where it actually is. 

You will receive a clear picture of your human risk, in writing, before the conversation goes any further. Email [email protected] to make a start.

The WayFinders Group unearths risk, quantifies human damage,
and repairs for organisational resilience.

For chief people officers

The risk facing the 6,000 people left at Block exists in your organisation too. The question is whether you know where it sits and how close it is to becoming an incident rather than a risk.

The ORI™ measures that gap across nine dimensions of human risk. It tells you which side of the line your organisation is on, before the damage compounds further.

The first step is a 30-minute diagnostic conversation with our Head of Client Engagement. You will leave knowing where repair is possible, and what it looks like for your organisation. Email [email protected] to take the next step.

Further reading

If you are a leader sitting with questions this newsletter has stirred, my Substack this week is for you. It is called "Am I safe?" and it exists to help leaders understand their own role in repair. Read it here.

Forthcoming research

If you work in a regulated organisation, this one is for you.

When a workplace investigation closes, the paperwork is filed and the recommendations are noted. But what actually happens to the people? The staff who raised concerns. The leaders left holding the damage. The teams who watched and drew their own conclusions about whether speaking up was worth it.

We're building the evidence base on exactly this; and we need your data to do it. "The investigation paradox: why regulated organisations fail to repair human damage after formal processes close"will be published later this year. 

Survey closes 31 March.

Leah Brown FRSA is the UK's leading specialist in organisational repair and founder of The WayFinders Group.