We’ve designed organisations and jobs. We never really designed the work.

There is a layer beneath organisation and job design that determines whether performance holds under pressure; how work really produces outcomes.

We’ve got well‑established disciplines for organisation design and job design. Organisation design defines structure, authority and governance. Job design defines roles, responsibilities and scope. What we’ve largely assumed is that work itself would be taken care by human pace and judgement.

By work, I mean where decisions are made;
– how judgement is exercised under uncertainty
– how work flows across roles
– how human and non‑human effort combine to produce outcomes.

Most organisations were never explicit about this. They didn’t need to be - people took up the slack. AI removes that slack.

That’s why the question isn’t “how do we adopt AI?”, or even “how do we redesign the organisation?” It’s whether the way work is designed can operate when there’s much reduced margin for error.

That layer - work design - has always been there. We’re just being forced to look at it now.