I spent fifteen years in commodity trading before I became a coach. I write this newsletter for people making real decisions.
By the end of 2026, roughly one in five companies expect to significantly cut their middle-management ranks, with AI absorbing the coordination work that used to justify the layer. (Reported widely now as "the Great Flattening").
Most of what's being written about this treats it purely as a threat: fewer safe rungs on the ladder, more competition for what's left, a title that used to feel solid now looking temporary.
That's real. It's also not the only thing that's true.
Herminia Ibarra's research on career change in her book “Working Identity” found something that applies directly here: people don't discover who they're becoming next by thinking about it in the abstract. They find out by acting, testing a version of themselves in the world, in small, low-commitment ways, before they have any proof it will work.
For most of the people I coach who've built fifteen years of identity around "I'm the person who manages this," that thinking-first approach was never really available anyway. The job was stable enough that the question of what else they might want never felt necessary to ask.
The flattening removes that stability. It doesn't remove you.
What it actually does is force a question a lot of capable people have been quietly avoiding: if being "the manager" is no longer the safest, most obvious path, what were you actually good at underneath that title, and is there a version of your work that doesn't depend on a layer that might not exist in two years?
Here's the concrete version of Ibarra's finding, applied to right now: don't wait for a definitive plan before you move. Pick one small, real experiment, a project outside your usual lane, a conversation with someone doing the kind of work you're curious about, a skill you test on a side initiative, and run it this quarter, without needing to know yet if it's "the" answer.
This is uncomfortable. It's also the closest thing to a real opening most people get. Nobody hands you permission to rethink your career while everything is going well. The flattening, as disruptive as it is, is handing you exactly that.
If you're watching the ground shift under a role you built your identity around, that's exactly the kind of question I help people work through. Book a discovery session or send me a direct message.
If the layer you've built your identity around disappeared tomorrow, what's the one small experiment you'd finally let yourself run?