3, September 2026
by: Arreoblue
“Physically you get really, really strong, but mentally you get much more stupid, very quickly.”
Charlotte Fuller wrote The Achievement Algorithm, a book on sustainable leadership and nervous system regulation, and has spent years as a corporate consultant working at the sharp end of technology and AI transformation. She’s also worked alongside Arreoblue for some time.
In this episode of the Arreoblue podcast, she spoke about why the people side of transformation still gets treated as the soft side, what’s actually happening in the body when a change programme starts to go wrong, and why leaving room for instinct matters just as much as trusting the data.
Charlotte’s view is that technology transformation has always lived or died on the people involved, AI or otherwise. “The technology side of things, we can work it out,” she said, “we’re smart people, we know what we’re doing, it’s quite logical in a way. The people side of things isn’t that.” It’s historically been treated as the softer skill set, but in her experience running actual organisations through actual change, it’s the part that decides whether anything sticks.
What she sees most often at leadership level is priorities shifting daily, sometimes within the same day, as leaders themselves struggle to hold a clear line through a turbulent environment. For the people underneath them, that inconsistency doesn’t read as flexibility. It reads as instability, and it tends to produce the opposite of engagement.
Charlotte talks about psychological safety and physiological safety as two halves of the same problem, not separate concerns. “It’s not just up here or just down there,” she said, “it’s both, and we can’t forget that.” The nervous system, as she describes it, is effectively the operating system running underneath people’s unconscious reactions, including how they behave under pressure.
When that system doesn’t feel safe, people don’t necessarily show it. More often, she said, it shows up as a freeze response, someone told a different version of the plan every day, quietly becoming despondent rather than raising it. That’s a problem for any transformation programme chasing value from its people, because a workforce that’s dysregulated doesn’t produce much of anything. “You just get someone sat there freezing, not really knowing what to do.”
Charlotte was direct about what she sees leaders get wrong: announcing change with language built to sound decisive, when what people actually need is honesty about the uncertainty. “We’re going through this change, we’re not a hundred percent sure what that looks like, but we’re looking to go on it with everyone here today,” is the version she recommends, one that treats the ambiguity as something to work through together rather than something to paper over.
Small, low pressure experiments help too, something as simple as ten minutes a day trying a new AI tool, followed by time to regroup and share what was learned. It keeps people inside a guardrail while still giving them room to test things for themselves, which she frames as a kind of focused play rather than another mandated initiative.
Charlotte is clear that she isn’t arguing against data, quite the opposite. “I love data,” she said, “it gives us the ability to make decisions we’ve never been able to make before, in much faster time.” Her point is that data and instinct aren’t in competition, and leaving space for the second one matters more than people tend to admit.
She described a trip to Scotland with friends, planned down to the minute by someone brilliant at planning, where the best part ended up being the ten minutes they got lost and stopped for sandwiches by the water. Her advice is to use the data as far as it takes you, and if something still feels off, to trust that enough to follow it. “Sometimes you just know it, at a gut level.”
As roles shift away from routine productivity tasks toward more strategic thinking, Charlotte thinks emotional intelligence becomes the thing that actually determines performance. Under pressure, she explained, blood moves away from the brain and toward the jaw, arms and legs, the body’s old response to a physical threat. “Physically you get really, really strong, but mentally you get much more stupid, very quickly.” A workforce operating in that state, even at a low, constant level, loses access to exactly the strategic thinking and creativity that AI transformation is supposed to free people up for.
Charlotte’s interest in this started with watching people a few rungs ahead of her in her own career and not liking what she saw. They’d hit the milestones she was supposed to want, and none of them seemed happy. She went through her own version of it too, an optimised, dialled-in routine down to a 5:08am alarm, that produced good output and made her ill. What she’s landed on since then isn’t doing less but building a system, in her words, that can withstand pressure without constantly feeling it.
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