You can't steer a stopped bike

That memory sits underneath everything Ryan does now. With AI, he sees the same shift arriving, this time across the whole working world rather than one mill town. AI is taking over the routine work that filled people's days, and the pressure to adapt is back and everywhere at once. His conviction, built over a career spent watching technology change jobs, is that the value of technology is in how it's used, not how it's made. The people who lean into that tend to come out ahead. The ones who wait get left behind, the way his town did.

A rerun of an old shift

The shift Ryan is describing had been building for a couple of years, as the big platform vendors, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Microsoft, wired AI into their products alongside the ChatGPTs of the world. Then, about a year ago, it hit an inflection point. AI tools matured enough that an ordinary person, doing an ordinary job, could get real value out of them. He calls it a shock moment, for everyone, because so much of what information workers had trained decades to do was suddenly up for grabs. The work still needed doing. What changed was the method.

He had seen a version of it before. The Covid pandemic taught the industry something that people often mislabel. Most remember it as the season everyone learned to work remotely. Ryan remembers it as the season everyone learned to change quickly, to set aside years of habit and adapt in weeks. The tools then were Zoom and Teams. This time the tool is AI, and the lesson carries straight over. It's possible to drop the old way of working and move.

The value shift

The deeper change is in what work is worth. For a long time the currency of a job was hours and attendance, time spent at a desk. Ryan argues that currency is moving to outcomes, the results a person actually produces. It stops mattering whether a task took an hour or a hundred hours. What matters is what came out of it. Tasks that used to fill a week can take an afternoon now, because the tools handle the heavy lifting a person once did by hand.

The obvious pushback is that the process matters, that doing the work by hand is how you catch mistakes. Ryan doesn't dismiss it. Manual inspection has real value in creative work and in quality control. But if a better tool reaches that same outcome faster, the case for grinding through it by hand falls apart. Even the people most attached to the process, he says, land back at the outcome the moment they ask why the hours were worth it.

That lands differently depending on where you sit. Employees hear it and get scared, many of them for their jobs. Managers hear it and get stuck in the middle, pulled several directions at once, aware that a good deal of their own work could be automated too, and still on the hook for doing right by the company. The shift is real for both, and neither group gets to opt out of it.

Ryan put all of this into a book called The Value Shift. It goes after the feeling underneath the change, the fear and the paralysis that show up when the ground moves, and works through where that reaction comes from and what to do with it. It is more a way of thinking than a set of instructions and is built around the central idea Ryan swears by, which is that the danger isn't AI, it's what happens when people stop moving.

The freeze

The most dangerous response to AI, Ryan says, is the one that feels safest but is actually far from safe. Faced with a shock, people don't fight or flee. They freeze. And right now a lot of people are frozen, waiting to see what happens before they decide what to do.

What makes the freeze so costly is speed. The technology and the business around it are moving fast enough that waiting is its own decision, and every day spent still is a day of ground lost to the people who kept moving. The freeze also tends to deepen, because the longer someone stays in it, the further behind they fall and the more paralyzing the gap starts to feel.

Ryan is quick to say the freeze is natural. A shock like this hits people emotionally, and that part is real and has to be dealt with. But there comes a point where you have to give yourself permission to start moving again.

The adaptation trap

Getting moving is the start, and it comes with a trap. It's easy to mistake activity for adaptation. People pick up the new tools, feel like they're changing, and quietly carry the old way of working straight into them.

Ryan points back to when spreadsheets first arrived. Accountants who had kept their books by hand built spreadsheets that looked exactly like the paper ledgers they were used to. They typed a column of numbers into the screen, reached for a calculator to add them, and keyed the total into the next cell. They were holding one of the most powerful tools of the era and using it like a sheet of paper. The software only earned its keep once someone stopped and asked a different question, "how could this actually change the way I work?".

AI is sitting at that same point now. The tools are capable and everywhere, and most people are still using them to do the old job a little faster instead of rethinking the job itself. The change Ryan is pushing for is a mental one, from seeing AI as something that replaces you to seeing it as something that makes you better at the job, once you learn how to apply it. The value gets unlocked when someone lets the work itself change shape around the tool, rather than dressing the old process up in new software, he points out.

Start moving

Giving yourself permission is one thing. Actually moving is another, and Ryan has a simple picture for what it feels like. It is like what happens when you're learning to ride a bike. You can't steer a bike that's stopped. Sit still and you just fall over. It's only once you're moving that you can turn, correct, change direction, pick a better line. Frozen, you have no control over what happens to you. Moving, even unsteadily, you get choices back. What gets people rolling is usually a single realization. Once you understand what AI can actually do for your work, you can't stop seeing it. Every task starts to look like something the tools could take on or speed up, and the old way of doing the job stops feeling inevitable. The dread about the future turns into concrete choices about the work in front of you, and that is enough to get moving.

So how do you actually start moving? Ryan's answer is a method he calls the Nova Circle method, built for people who are stuck and deliberately simple, because anything heavier just becomes another reason to stall.

It runs on four questions, worked in order. What problem are you actually trying to solve, what are the pieces of the puzzle, the resources you have and the constraints you're under, what is the target, and by when specifically, and what are the options for getting there, because there is always more than one.

The order is the point. Skip the first question and you wander, busy without direction. Skip the target and the date and you have no way of telling whether you're making progress or just moving. Work the four in sequence and something shifts. The vague, total dread of "AI is coming for my job" becomes a set of concrete, answerable questions about the work in front of you. That is the whole trick. The freeze feeds on how big and shapeless the threat feels. The method shrinks it down to something a person can take hold of and act on this week.

None of the four questions tells anyone what to do, and Ryan is clear that they can't, because the right answer changes from person to person and situation to situation. What they give you is a way to think when your instinct is to stop thinking. It's the same thing his company does at larger scale, with leaders handed impossible mandates and teams trying to rebuild how they work around AI, but stripped to its core it's four questions and a decision to keep pedaling.

The stakes behind all four questions trace back to the town in the mountains. It didn't fall apart because the mill automated. It fell apart because no one there understood, in time, that they needed to think differently, and by the time it was obvious the choices were gone. He doesn't want anyone else caught the same way, unaware until it's too late to move. That is the whole reason he keeps saying the same thing. The work still matters. What's changing, and all that's changing, is the way it gets done. The people who see that early get to choose what comes next. The ones who wait have it chosen for them.