Do you want to know how your job, and those within your organisation, will be affected by automation? Take the pins out of the box and deconstruct a job into its composite tasks. In this way, you can see how each will evolve away from traditional employment or towards automation, explain Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau, co-authors of Reinventing Jobs
If you are a leader wrestling with where, when, and how to apply automation in your organisation, you’re in good company. Leaders everywhere are asking how automation will affect their organisations and how jobs— those of their teams, bosses, colleagues, friends, and families as well as their own — might change or even be eliminated. Optimists say that machines will free human workers to do higher- value, more creative work. Pessimists predict massive unemployment or even an apocalypse in which humans merely serve the robots. Of course, both the optimists and the pessimists are partially correct and partially wrong.
But what everyone gets wrong is asking, ‘in which jobs will automation replace humans?’ We see smart and well-meaning leaders get stuck in the typical discourse about job replacement. It’s a dead-end conversation. Simply asking which humans will be replaced fails to take into account how work and automation will evolve. You can’t solve the ‘how to automate work’ problem by thinking only about automation replacing jobs.
The first step is to deconstruct jobs into component tasks. This step recognises that ‘in which jobs will automation replace humans?’ is the wrong question. Jobs contain many tasks that have different automation compatibility and payoff. You can see these patterns only when you deconstruct jobs into tasks. The better question, therefore, is which job tasks are best suited to automation?
Here’s a brainteaser: You are given a candle, a box of pins, and a book of matches. How do you attach the candle to a wall so that you can light it without dripping wax onto the floor below?
The solution to the candle problem [also known as Duncker’s candle problem] is to deconstruct the box of pins into its parts (box, pins). Then you’ll see that the pins can attach one side of the box to the wall and attach the candle to the bottom of the box. In experiments, people who receive the box with the pins inside solve the problem far less often than those given the box with a separate pile of pins next to it.
What does this have to do with work automation? Work is constructed into job descriptions similar to the box full of pins. The job descriptions become a repository of competencies, performance indicators, and reward packages. Soon, leaders, workers and others see the job and its components as one indivisible thing, like seeing the box full of pins as one thing. This tendency to think of jobs as fixed repositories obscures powerful opportunities to optimise work automation. It leads to the common but overly simplistic question: ‘How many workers doing a job will be replaced by automation?’ The true pattern of work automation is only revealed in the deconstructed work tasks, not the job.
Just as you must take the pins out of the box to solve the candle problem, you must take the tasks out of the job and then reinvent the job to solve the work automation problem.
We can then describe tasks in terms of their automation compatibility using these three dimensions:
1 Repetitive/variable: is the task more repetitive, with predictable routines and success criteria, or more variable, with unique and unpredictable routines and changing success criteria, requiring innovation and perhaps the application of decision rules to new or unique circumstances?
2 Independent/interactive: is the work task performed more independently by a single person or more interactively with others, involving communication and empathy?
3 Physical/mental: is the work task more physical, using strength and manual dexterity, or more mental, using cognition, creativity and judgment?
You can apply this framework to your own work and career, deconstructing your job into its tasks and considering how each will evolve.
To find your work tasks, start with your job description and its tasks, outcomes and competencies. Also, consider how you actually do the work, particularly if that’s different from the formal job description. Describe the additional tasks and add them to your list.
Evaluate each work task against the three dimensions of work elements, to see which may evolve away from traditional employment or towards automation.
The more repetitive, independent and physical the task, the more likely it can already be automated or will be soon. Even mental work, if it’s independent and repetitive, can be automated by RPA [robotic process automation] and AI. Physical work will probably be automated by robotics.
Now, write the job description as it might appear in two, five, and 10 years. Remove the tasks where automation will substitute for humans. Keep those tasks where automation will augment the work and consider how your work will change with augmentation. Finally, what tasks are humans likely to do for a long time? Which of those tasks are regular employees likely to do, and which might be done through arrangements other than employment?
Once you deconstruct and reinvent your job, you will probably find that your reinvented future job contains a fraction of the tasks that you do today. What work elements might be added to your job as it evolves (i.e. new work that will be created)? Can you reconstruct a job from the work that remains plus the new work? How does that align with your unique skills? Could you do some work through freelance platforms, gigs, contracts, or other engagement models either in your organisation or elsewhere?
Automation will significantly disrupt and potentially empower the global workforce. It won’t happen all at once or in every job, but it will happen. That does not mean that jobs will disappear, but rather that they will be reinvented, as work that was aggregated into a ‘job’ is constantly reconfigured and continuously deconstructed and reconstructed.
This is an edited excerpt from Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work by Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau. Courtesy of Harvard Business Review Press.
AMBA members can benefit from a discount on this book, as part of the Book Club. Click here for details.
Ravin Jesuthasan is Managing Director at Willis Towers Watson. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Steering Committee on Work and Employment.
John Boudreau is Professor of Management Organization at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Research Director at the university’s Center for Effective Organizations.
