Change management

There's a whole business discipline called change management. Frameworks, certifications, consultancies, the lot. Every big company has someone running it during a restructure or a tech migration. Nobody runs it for you when your life turns over. Which is strange, because the personal version is the harder problem — and right now, more people are facing it than at any point in recent memory. More than 92,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026 alone, bringing the total close to 900,000 since 2020. Meta cut 8,000 jobs last week. Microsoft offered buyouts to 7% of its US workforce — the first time in its 51-year history. Oracle has started cuts that could reach 30,000 by year end. Closer to home, Xero, Sharesies, Spark, One NZ and Eroad have all run their own rounds. AI is the headline reason, but the impact lands the same regardless of the cause: hundreds of thousands of people closing a laptop and discovering their working identity has just been deleted. That's a lot of people…