As 2025 wheezes toward the exit, I am sitting in my beloved Normandy, rain on the windows, Christmas carol muzak leaking softly from some forgotten speaker, like a bad plumbing decision. I’m doom-scrolling the usual LinkedIn slurry of AI-vomited beige optimism and dead-eyed “leadership quotes.” You know the stuff: stock photos of mountains, verbs doing unpaid labour, captions that say absolutely nothing, silly emoticons à go-go and a overenthusiastic girl shouting she’s now making 6 figures after her near burn-out. Good for her.
And then, unexpectedly, something actually lands. It is a piece by Brian Solis, a digital analyst and anthropologist who has spent years studying how technology rewires human behavior, and also, full disclosure, my SXSW buddy. Brian currently runs global innovation at ServiceNow, which means he is paid to stand at the fault line between how work is imagined and how it actually breaks.
He has this infuriating ability to describe what is coming next while everyone else is still litigating the past. In this piece, he names something I have been circling for months without quite pinning it down. He calls it the Work Chart. And once you see it, you cannot unsee how wrong the old corporate picture has become. I feel it in client meetings, in operating reviews, in those awkward pauses where everyone knows the org chart is lying but nobody wants to poke it. AI, and especially GenAI is making organizations uncomfortable. We keep snobbishly treating artificial intelligence like a smarter calculator or a fancy browser plugin, when what we are actually need to be building is a hybrid workforce. Humans and agents, side by side, stepping on each other’s toes because the floor markings are from another era. Most organizations are still staring at their enterprise stack, wondering where to bolt on the new toys, missing that the piping system of work itself has been rerouted. The map on the wall no longer matches the terrain, and people keep walking into doors.
Solis is right (he usually is): the competitive advantage in the next 24 months won’t come from deploying intelligence; it will come from orchestrating it.
Solis points to Moderna, the mRNA cowboys who helped save our collective skin with the first mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, as an early signal that the org chart era is wobbling. At Moderna, silos have already started to melt. Tracey Franklin carries the title Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, and that is not a cosmetic tweak. It is a flare fired straight up into the C-suite sky. It acknowledges that once agents stop being polite chatbots and start executing real, multi-step work, they stop acting like tools and start acting like staff. Jensen Huang, the leather-jacketed co-founder of Nvidia, has been blunt about where this goes, suggesting that the teams managing infrastructure will end up managing populations of AI agents the way HR manages people today.
Quick primer for normal people with jobs: Your new intern is made of code, works for pennies, and doesn’t sleep, but you still have to tell it where the digital coffee machine is and stop it from accidentally deleting the database. Onboarding, training, integrating, supervising. Sounds familiar?
This is why the Work Chart matters more than another reorg. The Org Chart is that brittle Christmas tree of boxes and lines, updated once a year to reflect who won the latest political knife fight. It tells you who reports to whom, and absolutely nothing about how value (you know, that EBIDA shifting stuff) actually moves through the building. Worse, it is a warrior map of power, allegiances, and a plethora of intrigues, throbbing on acid powerlines of spot bonuses and title inflation. It rewards defensive behavior, hoarding, change aversion, and the kind of internal posturing that looks busy while quietly strangling outcomes. If you have ever watched smart, middle (r)aged and slightly overweight adults protect a box of corporate nostalgia instead of solving a problem, you know exactly what I mean.
I slogged through The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone twice over the past 5 years. And honestly, it annoyed the hell out of me. I pushed through it expecting some operational insight, sound advice, maybe a different angle on leverage or execution, and what I got instead was a megaphone full of right-wing motivational blahblah, hustle-as-morality, volume replacing thought. Everything is louder, harder, more, all the time, as if shouting at reality long enough counts as a system. It gave me nothing I could actually use in the messy middle of real work. Meanwhile, my handful of Yoda-trained agents are already letting me move faster in that so-called “10 X area”, not by chest-beating, but by quietly removing friction. They don’t preach scale, or innovation, or outside-of-the-box thinking… they create it. They don’t demand intensity, they free up attention. That contrast was brutal. Having a machine nudging up your adrenaline, handing you insights and contrarian thinking, delivering momentum and a fresh angle, forcing you to enter in your A-game state. Once you experience speed and relevance that comes from flow instead of force, books and old corporate thinking like that start to feel like old Travolta gym posters yelling at a factory line.
Solis’ Work Chart flips the lens, and then keeps turning it until you’re finally looking at work as it actually happens on the floor and in the office, not how it is imagined in slide decks. It is a living map of tasks, decisions, hand-offs, outcomes, bottlenecks, weak spots, quiet heroics, and recurring screw-ups, indifferent to whether the work is done by a human, an agent, or an uneasy alliance of both. It charts the real terrain, the pitfalls, the strengths, the opportunities, the workarounds people invented because the official process never worked. And crucially, it creates safe distance from C-level decisions warped by multi-million-dollar consultancy interventions, triggered by all-knowing outsiders who have never done the job themselves, never felt the friction, and wouldn’t last a week inside the workflow they’re “optimizing.” When the marginal cost of a task done by silicon versus a carbon-based lifeforms starts to diverge meaningfully (how about 10x), pretending all work is the same becomes financially and structurally absurd. You either see the flow, or you subsidize waste. And something genuinely useful happens when you manage from this view. Time gets freed instead of filled. Focus sharpens. Client satisfaction stops being an abstract KPI and becomes an observable consequence of better flow. Teams retro-engineer result-driven approaches from what actually works, instead of complying with what sounded clever in a boardroom. Quality matters again, because you can see exactly where it degrades. Social dynamics improve, because humans can finally concentrate on the right, value-adding problems instead of clocking endless timesheets to justify their existence.
I have seen this up close with my IPG SpecOps team. We rolled into a Work Chart way of thinking a while ago, almost by necessity. When you combine human creativity and ingenuity with genuinely powerful agents, you can punch way above your org chart weight. Titles matter less. Flow matters more. The work tells you who should be in the room, human or digital, and who really does not need to be there at all. (And coffee, don’t forget the coffee)
Telling and accepting the truth about how work now happens. Hybrid human–AI agent teams are no longer a slide deck fantasy, they are turning up to work every day in an office near you. Fine-tuning that mixed workforce is empowering, and oddly fun, because it forces you to rethink collaboration from the foundation up. Reinventing work and flow. Some tasks do not need empathy, taste, or judgment, they need to be done correctly and repeatedly. Others absolutely do. The organizations that win will be the ones that protect human attention for the messy, ambiguous, creative work, while letting agents chew through the grind.
It’s Frederic Laloux’s “Reinventing Organizations” energy all over, but on steroids, dropped into a very actual context where the “new colleagues” don’t need nicotine breaks but absolutely do need guardrails. You end up redesigning roles around judgment, taste, ethics, and human glue, and you stop wasting precious human attention on repetitive sludge that machines handle better anyway. It is time to stop looking at the hierarchy and start looking at the flow.
