CONCEPT
Grief Literacy
The institutional and cultural capacity to acknowledge loss without being paralyzed by it — the missing skill in AI-era organizations that distinguishes those that can build wisely from those that cannot.
Grief literacy is the capacity, in individuals and institutions, to name what is being lost in a transition without the naming collapsing into either denial or despair. It is the applied form of Macy's second stage of the spiral — a skill that most contemporary organizations have systematically untrained in their members. The absence of grief literacy in AI-era workplaces is not incidental; it is the consequence of decades of cultural conditioning that treats negative emotion as unprofessional, productivity as the sole measure of engagement, and any acknowledgment of loss as resistance to necessary change. An organization that cannot name what it is losing in the AI transition is an organization building on a foundation that includes a fissure it cannot see, because it has numbed the capacity that would detect the fissure.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept is developed in Macy's simulated volume as the operational form the second stage of the spiral takes inside institutions. Individual grief