The corporate ladder is what we called the vertical distance between you and where you beleive you’re going. We presented it as a meritocracy with rungs. The rungs were real. The meritocracy was a way of explaining how the people already at the top kept finding the next ones suitable.
Now we have replaced it with “the climbing wall”, which has been described as giving workers more agency, more flexibility, and more control over their paths. What the climbing wall actually does is distribute the uncertainty more evenly. On a ladder, at least the direction was clear. The climbing wall has holds going sideways, diagonally, and in some configurations, back down, all of which can be reframed as growth.
Someone in HR has a framework for this. We now encourage workers to break their jobs into tasks and identify which ones AI can absorb. We call this strategic self-awareness. A person who has done it carefully has written their own replacement brief.
What the ladder and the wall share is the part we do not put in the deck: that the climbing is voluntary but the surface is ours.
