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Future of Work · Advanced organisation design

Integrated systems of work

The right actor, with the right capability, in the right place, at the right time, at the right cost. Designed as one system, by a team with no mandate to sell you people, technology or AI.

Start with the question

Flagship work in education · aviation · defence · global logistics

01 · Where it starts

Same discipline. A bigger ‘who’.

Strategic workforce planning has always asked: do we have the right people, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time? The discipline still holds. But the question itself has grown. The ‘who’ is no longer only people, and cost now sits alongside capability, place and time.

Rightpeople actorPersonAutomationAI
Rightcapability
Rightplace
Righttime
Right newcost

The same discipline, extended to every actor that now does work.

02 · The unowned middle

Every role holds part of the answer

Technology has moved on, but most organisation charts, and the way design decisions get made, have not. The skills to decide who or what should do each piece of work already exist. They rarely sit together in one neutral mandate.

CHROBrings

Workforce, roles and capability

Outside the remit

Which work should go to automation or AI

CTOBrings

Systems, data and AI platforms

Outside the remit

How roles and decisions change around them

Chief AI OfficerBrings

AI capability and governance

Outside the remit

Where AI isn’t the right answer

COOBrings

Delivery and process

Outside the remit

How people and technology combine across functions

CFOBrings

Cost, return and risk

Outside the remit

Risks not yet on the register, from compute costs to explainability

Owned by no oneOrganisation design and actor selectionDeciding which work goes to a person, a rule or a model, and how they hand work to each other, across the whole enterprise.
  • Organisation design
  • Operating model
  • Job design
  • Process improvement
  • Transformation
  • Technology selection

In principle it is the Chief Executive’s question. In practice no one holds it, and the smaller the organisation, the fewer specialists there are to share it. Until organisations create that mandate, we fill it for our clients.

03 · More than A to Z

Every process now has its own operating model

Getting from A to Z is no longer the hard part. Each process needs its own decisions about who or what does each step, weighed against real unknowns: future liability, future compute costs, and whether each decision can be explained. The temptation is to let AI run the whole thing. That is a decision made on today’s limited understanding of tomorrow’s risks.

A notional ten-step customer application, run by AI end to end

Things to build, evidence and maintain10
Steps using AI compute10

Every decision AI makes has to be defensible: evidence that it doesn’t discriminate, an explanation for each outcome, an audit trail, a route to human review, and monitoring as the model drifts. The engineering stops being A to Z. It becomes A to Z plus everything needed to defend every step.

In the hype, that finer detail is being lost. In larger organisations, the knowledge to spot it should exist somewhere in the leadership team. In smaller organisations there may be no one to ask, and the risks become more acute.

04 · Decisions about people

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

In Mobley v. Workday, a US federal court has allowed claims that AI screening tools discriminated against job applicants to proceed. Workday denies the claims, and the case continues. Whatever the outcome, the lesson stands: intent isn’t the test, outcomes are. Believing a model doesn’t discriminate is not the same as being able to show that it doesn’t.

Shortlisting: clear rejections, clear strengths, and the marginal middle

Clearly unsuitableMarginal, qualifiedClearly strong
Decisions you can explain
Marginal calls made with context
Compute used on

AI has its place. So do rules, and so do people.

The skill is putting each one at precisely the right step, balancing cost, speed, risk and outcomes to your priorities, and being able to explain every decision. That is what we mean by right actor for the task. How we do it →

  • Cost
  • Speed
  • Risk
  • Outcomes

05 · Full circle

Back to workforce planning: the work that’s left

Once each piece of work has the right actor, the work left for people changes shape. That is where much of the value, and much of the risk, really sits.

  • Roles redesignedaround judgement, context and relationships, the work only people do well
  • Skills and capabilityrebuilt for what the new roles demand
  • The transition plannedso people move with the change, not behind it

06 · Why 10k

A neutral team, across every discipline

We cover the whole circle: workforce planning, organisation design, actor selection and the technology to build it. Our Human Performance and Technology practices sit under one roof, with no mandate to sell you people, systems or AI.

The evidence

Organisation Maturity Assessment

Where your organisation really stands across 42 capabilities, before anyone decides what to buy.

Proof that we build what we design

NasIQA

Our in-house execution, governance and orchestration platform, live across any business process and designed around the right actor for every task.

100,000+employees supported

  • People for judgement and relationships
  • Automation for rules
  • AI where it genuinely adds value
24 → 5 days

Offer to deployment for overseas employees at a large outsourcing organisation, across a workflow that ran through several functions.

Integrated systems of work

Let’s talk about how work really gets done in your organisation.

A focused briefing for any member of the leadership team: who or what does the work today, where the decisions sit, and what the right configuration could look like.

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