Logistics at a Crossroads:🎙️Volume 50 — The Space Between the Robot and the Worker



We’ve gotten very good at measuring progress in logistics.
We measure it in fractions of a second shaved off a pick time. In percentage points of efficiency gained from a new algorithm. In the quiet, steady hum of an automated facility running 24/7.

We have dashboards for everything. We can track a container from Shenzhen to Sheboygan, monitor fuel consumption in real-time, and predict demand with startling accuracy.
We have mastered the language of optimization.

But we’ve become less fluent in the language of development. Not business development. People development.
Somewhere along the way, we started treating our people like we treat our assets: something to be managed for maximum efficiency, depreciated over time, and eventually replaced with a newer model.
We invest in the robot, the software, the scanner. We celebrate the ROI of technology.

But what is the ROI of a person’s confidence? What is the metric for a team that feels seen, valued, and prepared for what’s next?

In the latest podcast episode—our Season 1 finale—we dive into the numbers. We talk about the staggering gap between the jobs we’re changing and the people we’re training. It’s a story told in data.
But this… this is about what that data means. It means we’ve started to see training as a cost to be minimized, not an investment to be nurtured. It means we’ve accepted that people should just “figure it out” as the world changes around them.

Confusion, no matter how professionally packaged, is still confusion. And asking someone to do a job with tools they were never taught to use isn’t a test of their resilience. It’s a failure of our leadership.
The most important space in logistics right now isn’t the warehouse floor or the truck cab. It’s the space between the technology we’re implementing and the worker we’re asking to run it.

What we build in that space—be it training, mentorship, and trust, or anxiety, uncertainty, and neglect—will define the future of our industry.

The choice is ours.

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