CANCELED #COVID-19: Most discussions of automation (everything from using macros to artificial intelligence) and organizational design focus on top-down situations. There are some great books on this (e.g., Reinventing Jobs), but we also need to be supporting people to work from the bottom-up. Think about how computers were used when they were mainframes bought by the company. Then think about what happened when we all got personal computers. We all were able to think up new ways of using these powerful tools.

The trouble is, most people aren’t organizational design professionals and today’s automation isn’t as easy to see as a personal computer. Research shows that most people don’t make adjustments to their work practices, and even if they do, they don’t do a good job. We can help. We can help trigger more “work crafting” and help people make good decisions about how they apply automation, crowdsourcing, and the like, in their work. My hypothesis is that the “doom and gloom” scenarios around automation, for example, are more likely if we only work from the top-down. Where we have seen work crafting, we also see people performing better and having better employment options.