In my previous article, Revolution, Evolution and the Rebirth of Job Types, I explored how artificial intelligence, automation and robotics are changing the work people do, the skills employers value and, ultimately, the jobs themselves.

If we accept that work is changing, there is a bigger question we need to ask:

What happens to the organisations built around that work?

There is a tendency to think of AI as just a technology project. Businesses invest in the tools, technology teams implement them, employees are trained to use them and leaders measure adoption and productivity. AI isn’t simply changing the technology organisations use. AI is changing the work itself, and that means it will ultimately change how organisations are designed.

AI will influence what people do, how teams are structured, what managers manage, how decisions are made, which capabilities matter and, ultimately, what an organisation needs to look like.

Having spent many years leading a recruitment business and sitting at the frontline of conversations with employers about their people, skills and future workforce needs, I am seeing this shift begin to emerge.

Let’s not underestimate just how significant this could be.

Are We Still Organising Around Yesterday's Work?

We keep asking: “Which jobs will AI replace?”

A better question is: “If AI changes the work, why as organisations would we continue to organise ourselves around the jobs we have today?”

For decades, organisations have been built around functions, departments, reporting lines, job descriptions and layers of management. Those structures made sense when work was relatively stable and expertise was tied closely to specific roles.

But, what happens when technology removes a significant amount of work from those structures?

For example, when responsibilities that once sat across several roles can increasingly be brought together? When technology allows one person to operate across several disciplines? When routine analysis, administration, research or processing can be completed in a fraction of the time? What does this mean? 

The answer cannot simply be fewer people doing the same jobs. The bigger opportunity is to rethink how the organisation creates value in the first place.

That means business leaders at the forefront of these changes across all functions asking what the organisation exists to achieve, what work genuinely needs to be done by people and what the organisation should look like in two, four, six, eight or ten years’ time.

Organisations must invest in starting to designing for the future rather than continuously optimising the organisation we have today.

From Jobs to Capabilities

One of the biggest changes we expect to see is a move from thinking about a workforce of roles to thinking about a workforce of capabilities.

The conversation has traditionally been: “We need to hire a Head of X.”

Increasingly, we believe it will become: “What capability do we need to create the outcome we want?”

This marks the beginning of a vastly different approach to workforce planning. For example, it may mean fewer traditional roles. Or it may mean combining disciplines that have historically sat separately. It could also mean smaller teams with significantly greater capacity and management and leadership roles with broader spans of responsibility. Sitting across several functions and/or it may mean people moving between disciplines rather than remaining within one defined functional lane.

For leaders, workforce planning can no longer simply be a question of how many people we need and which positions we need to fill; leaders will need to understand what capabilities the organisation will require short-term to long-term, where those capabilities should sit and how they will integrate align and to work together.

The Employer Proposition Is About to Go Deeper

For years, candidates have told us they want a great culture. Don’tget me wrong, culture still matters. That is not changing but we do believe the employer proposition is about to become much deeper.

It will increasingly be about:

• Purpose

• Identity

• Organisational DNA

When AI increasingly starts to perform many of the tasks that once defined someone's job, employees will want to understand something more fundamental. Why am I here? What am I uniquely contributing? What does this organisation stand for? And perhaps most importantly: What kind of person thrives here?

Every leadership team will be on the journey of thinking about the DNA of its future workforce.

Do we need people who are comfortable with ambiguity? People who challenge rather than simply accept? People who learn continuously? People who can use AI but also know when not to trust it? People who may not have the experience that are smart enough to interpret the information coming from AI!

What do we require in our future workforce? Do we need exceptional relationship builders, commercial thinkers, people who can connect ideas across traditional organisational boundaries, or people who bring judgement, curiosity, creativity and empathy?

The answers will be different for every organisation.

I believe the organisations that take the time to define those answers will be better placed to build the workforce they actually need in a fast-changing paradigm

The More Technology We Introduce, the More Human Capability May Matter

There is an irony at the heart of the AI revolution. The more technology we introduce, the more valuable certain profoundly human capabilities become.

AI can process information at enormous scale and speed. It can identify patterns, generate content, analyse data and increasingly undertake complex tasks.

But organisations are not simply a collection of tasks.

They are made up of relationships, competing priorities, difficult conversations and decisions where there is rarely a single objectively correct answer. Judgement matters, as does empathy, curiosity, leadership, communication, creativity and the ability to understand context. The human factor. 

The most valuable employee of the future may therefore not be the person who can perform one particular task faster than everyone else but the person who understands when technology should perform that task, knows how to assess the result and can apply experience and judgement to what happens next.

Recruitment Will Have to Change Too

What implications will this have on recruitment? 

To start with, we cannot continue hiring for yesterday's organisation and expect tomorrow's organisation to emerge.

The perfect candidate may no longer be the person who has done the job before, but the person with the capacity to learn, adapt, influence and create value in a role that does not yet fully exist.

This will change how we assess talent. Moreover, it changes traditional succession planning, leadership development, job descriptions and what we mean by “high potential”.

A CV can tell us what someone has done but it tells us considerably less about what they are capable of doing specifically when the environment around them changes at a rapid pace and furthermore doesn’t stop changing.

That distinction is going to become increasingly important.

The Leadership Challenge Is Not Predicting the Future

So the burning question for many business leaders is what do we do with the current workforce capability when we don't know exactly what the future organisation will look like?

I definitely don't think we can wait for certainty because there won’t be any. Instead, leaders need to start building organisations that are capable of adapting continuously and at pace.

That means:

• Reshaping the work.
  Understanding which tasks genuinely require human input, which can be augmented by technology and which can be automated.

• Rebuilding around purpose, value and capability.
  Asking whether structures that have always existed still serve the organisation's purpose.

• Recalibrating leadership.
  Managers may increasingly need to lead broader teams, work across functions and manage a combination of human and technological capability.

• Redefining the employee proposition.
  Being clear about why people should want to work for the organisation and what they can uniquely contribute.

• Reconsidering the DNA of the workforce.
  Identifying the human qualities, behaviours and capabilities that will matter most as roles become more fluid and cross-disciplinary.

And, above all, creating an organisation that is comfortable with constant change and capable of changing again.

Because perhaps the most important capability an organisation can now possess is the ability to continuously reinvent itself.

The Organisation of the Future May Look Very Different

It would be laughably easy to pass this off as saying we’re automating work. We’re not. We are redesigning the relationship between humans, technology, knowledge and organisations.

That is a much bigger proposition.

The question cannot simply be: “Where can we use AI?”

It needs to become: “If AI changes what is possible, what should our organisation become?”

That requires leaders to think beyond technology and consider operating models, organisational structure, leadership, talent and purpose.

From the talent conversations we are currently having with New Zealand employers across all sectors, we believe many organisations are somewhere between knowing change is coming and knowing exactly what to do about it.

That is the leadership challenge. We can’t predict the future perfectly, so we need to build an organisation capable of finding its new shape while the future is still moving.

In my previous article, I described the changes taking place across the world of work as a combination of revolution, evolution and rebirth.

The revolution is already underway. The evolution is happening inside jobs, teams and functions. The next stage is the rebirth of the organisation itself.

For CEOs, CTOs, CFOs, CPOs and business leaders and owners, overall it means starting the conversations now.

If you were building your organisation from scratch today, knowing what AI can do, what would you design differently? Which roles would still exist? Which capabilities would you bring together? What would managers be responsible for? What would you expect your people to be uniquely good at?

Those are difficult questions. They are nonetheless the natural next questions in the revolution, evolution and rebirth of work.

The organisations that thrive in the AI era will be the ones willing to rethink what an organisation is for, how it creates value and what it needs to become next.