Pondering The counting and the conversation
Before you hand any work to AI, answer the oldest question in management: what, exactly, is the work? A lesson from bank tellers and a carpenter's bench.
When ATMs spread through American banks, everyone predicted tellers would disappear. They didn't. Across the decades the machines multiplied, the number of tellers held roughly steady. The ATMs made each branch cheaper to run, so banks opened more branches, and the teller's job quietly changed underneath its title.
The machine took the counting. People kept the conversation: the customer with a problem, the loan enquiry, the relationship.
Most people took "don't panic" from that story. I think the better lesson is quieter. The job was never one thing. It was a bundle of tasks. The machine took some and left the rest, and the banks that did well were the ones that knew which was which.
Redraw the bench
Picture an old carpenter's workbench. At one end, a vice, the timber around its jaws worn pale by decades of hands. That's where every important cut was judged. At the other end, a jig: a simple fixture that makes the same cut the same way every time, built once so the thinking could be saved for the vice. In between, the long scarred middle, where rough work from the jig was finished by hand. Tools on the wall. Offcuts in a bin underneath.
Almost every organisation now has a new tool on the wall. Very few have redrawn the bench.
The Workbench blueprint asks you to lay your work out task by task, not role by role, and decide where each one belongs: held in the vice, done at the jig, drafted by a machine and finished by a person, or binned because it never needed doing. Then you draw the jagged edge, the uneven line where AI is good at some things and surprisingly bad at others that look similar.
Why start here
Because you can't delegate work you haven't understood, and handing a task to a machine is still delegation. You can't check output from a task you couldn't describe. And you can't grow people into a craft whose parts you can't name, because the parts of the work are also the steps by which people learn it.
A question to take into this week
Which of your team's tasks are the counting, and which are the conversation? And who learns the trade if the counting goes to the machine?
Try the The Workbench blueprint, free
The whole of Chapter 1 is free, blueprint included. Print it as large as you can and grab a pencil, or draw on it on screen and come back to it later.
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