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Traducción hecha con IA: algunos términos pueden no traducirse bien y puede haber errores.
Why this exists
The org chart is a poor map of the work.
For 25 years Mark Maynard has worked inside organisations: police forces, NHS trusts, financial institutions and creative businesses. The same thing kept showing up. The way an organisation describes itself is not the way its work actually runs.
Why we’re doing this
So much hangs on how we work: our futures, our training, our education. It is so fundamental that we have to start discussing it now. We have to plan for the future, prepare our children and make sure they have the right skills, or create alternatives for a world with fewer humans in the work.
Mark’s account
What we kept seeing
Work runs through email, spreadsheets and habits, not through the boxes on the chart. Processes live in one person’s head. Tools are bought one at a time and nobody chose them together. When someone leaves, a piece of the organisation leaves with them.
In Mark’s words: “Organisations didn’t have a full picture of themselves. The real workings of the business were spread across systems, processes, approvals, workarounds and people’s heads, and nobody held all of it.”
Mark’s own accounts from that work are in the flagship paper, quoted from his recorded interview. No client information is used.
Proposal
What we think happens next
AI makes it possible to hand parts of work to software. That shrinks the unit that matters: from the job to the task, and from the task to the capability. We think organisations will be described, staffed and bought capability by capability, and that people will offer themselves the same way: as something that takes an input, transforms it and hands on an output, together with their own tools.
As Mark puts it: “from organisational charts today to blocks of work tomorrow… the organisations that adapt will survive, the others will wither and die.”
Proposal
Why a twin comes first
You can’t redesign what you can’t see. Before changing anything, an organisation needs a live copy of itself, built from its own systems, to experiment on: where to change, what to automate, what breaks if a piece is swapped. The real organisation never changes; only the copy does.
What we are not claiming
- That this is new. Others have taken jobs apart before us, and we credit them.
- That every kind of work can be described this way. Judgement, relationships and taste resist it. See the case against.
- That this is settled research. It is our own: there is no university partnership yet.
Why it’s free
Everything here is free to read and use. Mark is a founding member of Stratapault, a separate business. It puts the ideas into practice. We say so plainly so you can judge what you read.