Here’s how leaders can see work in its truest form
Executives rarely lack data. Dashboards, KPIs, benchmarks: the modern C-suite lives in metrics. Yet one of the most crucial elements of performance and transformation remains strangely opaque: the reality of what work actually happens inside our organizations.
We know job titles and role descriptions. We know costs per head, attrition rates and productivity ratios. But these abstractions often conceal more than they reveal. They create a comforting fiction: that work is neatly contained within roles, hierarchies and functions.
In truth, work lives in tasks: the emails written, the client calls made, the spreadsheets updated, the insights developed, the experiments run. It is at this atomic level of work that we start to understand both value creation and waste. Indeed, the entire shift toward skills-based organizations is built on the deconstruction of jobs into tasks.
This is the essence of Task Intelligence: the capacity to see, map – and make sense of – work at the level it is actually delivered.
The strategic shift from jobs to tasks
For decades, we built structures around jobs – bundles of responsibilities formalized through contracts and titles, arranged into hierarchies. But in an age defined by agility, automation and shifting skills, those bundles are fraying.
AI doesn’t take jobs; it takes tasks. Automation targets repeatable activities, not whole professions. Likewise, reskilling must begin with an understanding of what people do, not what their titles imply.
Task Intelligence is the missing link between traditional operating models and the more adaptive organizations now required. It complements concepts like skills-based organizations, polymorphic structures and organizational oscillation. All point to the same realization: the future of work demands that we unbundle, reconfigure, and continually reimagine how value flows through systems.
When leaders begin to view their organization through tasks, rather than jobs, several things become possible.
Clarity of value Which activities genuinely align with strategy, and which are relics or distractions?
Liberated capacity Studies suggest 20–30% of effort is spent on low-value work. Task Intelligence surfaces it, creating opportunities to redeploy without blunt cost-cutting.
Future readiness As AI advances, knowing the distribution of tasks helps leaders plan thoughtfully. Which should be automated, augmented, or remain deeply human?
Human engagement People thrive when time is spent on meaningful contributions. Removing low-value tasks is not just efficiency; it is cultural.
A systems lens
For systems thinkers, Task Intelligence is a natural progression. It traces flows of energy, effort and attention through a living organization. If we see the organization as a dynamic system oscillating between expansion and consolidation, continually morphing to meet new challenges, then tasks are the currents within it. They show where the flow is smooth, where it eddies, where it is blocked.
Traditional operating models provide the scaffolding: roles, divisions, reporting lines. Task Intelligence reveals the movement within: the lived reality of how work gets done. Only by seeing both can leaders redesign for resilience. It is not about surveillance or atomizing work into soulless spreadsheets. It is about surfacing patterns, creating a shared language of value, and enabling evidence-based choices.
Practical steps often begin with lightweight mapping – surveys, digital tools, or workshops capturing how time and effort are distributed across key roles. From there, sharper questions follow. Which tasks should we stop? Which should we streamline or automate? Which should we amplify and invest in because they create disproportionate value?
The answers rarely demand wholesale role rewrites. Instead, they create a living basis for adaptation. Leaders can reallocate, reimagine and redeploy
with confidence.
Ultimately, Task Intelligence is less about technology than perception. It teaches us to see organizations not as static arrangements of jobs, but as dynamic flows of tasks. Once that perceptual shift occurs, the possibilities for reimagining work – and building more adaptive, humane, and future-ready enterprises – expand dramatically.
Perry Timms is founder and chief energy officer of PTHR, a consultancy aiming to create better businesses for a better world. He is a TEDx speaker, top-selling author, and a member of HR Magazine’s Most Influential Hall of Fame
