In one, organizations seek to atomize the work and the worker, deconstructing both into their component parts (tasks or projects, skills and capabilities), and then using new advances in technology to rapidly match the “pieces” of work and worker based on evolving needs and interests. To move beyond the industrialization of work and jobs, organizations are generally moving in two directions. How do we go about organizing work beyond the constraints of the traditional job in a way that creates a kind of dynamic stability that unleashes the potential of both organizations and people at scale and speed? For many of us, the pandemic enabled work to become more emergent than engineered. Forced to become more agile, organizations fluidly moved people to where the work was created agile, cross-functional SWAT teams to tackle complex problems and experimented with new work models. If anything has shown the need for greater agility, it has been the pandemic. And the world is simply changing too fast to go through this process again and again each time a new technology emerges, markets shift, or new opportunities emerge. Too often, the focus is on chasing efficiency and cost reduction instead of opening up new opportunities to unlock growth and value. Employees are then reskilled, upskilled, or outskilled to once again meet the needs of the newly reconfigured job, with automation substituting for, augmenting, or transforming the human worker’s role (figure 1).īut this approach is a top-down, engineering-like approach still rooted in a mechanistic mindset that doesn’t give workers much choice or agency. The reasoning goes like this: As alternative approaches to work have emerged such as artificial intelligence, automation, and off-balance-sheet talent, we need to disaggregate the job into component tasks, determine which tasks can be performed more optimally by smart machines or alternative talent outside of the organization’s walls, and then reassemble the remaining tasks with new ones to create a newly reconfigured job. In recent years, the thinking on the future of work has focused on the need to reconfigure jobs-not to reimagine or replace them entirely. To adapt to a changing world, we need to build something far more fit for a world in which speed, agility, and innovation rule the day, and in which people expect more meaning, choice, growth, and autonomy at work. If there’s a single thread running through the narratives on the future of work, it’s that we’re moving away from the mechanistic, industrial models of the past to a more fluid, human, and digital future in which our organizations, people, and work organically adapt in real time-and one with an ever-expanding portfolio of stakeholders, workforces, work options, workplaces, and strategic futures that can no longer be categorized into simple boxes. This approach worked well when organizations were stable and predictable, and when they competed more on scalable efficiency than on speed, innovation, and agility. But the very notion of the job is increasingly becoming a relic of the industrial era.