The working life of the office that gave up open plan
Notes from the slower side of the news, where change is easier to see.
What changed
A skilled worker who trains a replacement is making an investment the balance sheet often cannot see.
Look past the launch and the language of transformation, and a simpler question appears: who is doing the work when the attention has moved on?
“Skill is a relationship before it is a certificate.”
What the numbers miss
Automation changes the shape of a job before it changes the number of jobs. The tasks that remain are usually the ones nobody wrote down.
The friction is often social rather than technical. People need permission to change a process, not just a new tool for doing it.
What comes next
Most jobs are learned in the gaps between formal training and the first difficult week. What gets passed on there is rarely in the manual.
The point is not to be certain. It is to leave the next person with a clearer view of the choices available to them.
The point of looking closely at the office that gave up open plan is not to arrive at a verdict. It is to notice the choices that were hiding in plain sight.