Thesis 001/Work Architecture
The Job Is No Longer the Unit of Work
Nobody knows what work a company actually contains.
Jeff Wald. Public draft, emerging confidence. Counterargument owed. Review six months from publication.
The argument
Org charts list people, not work. No company holds an inventory of the work it contains, so it cannot say which tasks are duplicated, which are obsolete, which are load-bearing, or what any of them are worth. The system is a work architecture that inventories, classifies and prices work at the task level. It is the replacement for the job description.
This is the opening argument. It is a public draft: the claim is stated and the institute is assembling the evidence, the counterargument and the field test behind it. No thesis launches at Strong.
What supports it
Evidence is being assembled. Under the institute's grading, a thesis reaches Developing only on two or more independent sources across tiers, with at least one serious counterargument answered.
Institute, in progress. Emerging.
The strongest case against
The counterargument has not been written yet.
Every thesis carries a counterargument written by a named fellow who is not its author. Until that is written, this thesis stays a public draft and the gap is recorded here rather than hidden.
The fellow roster is the blocker. No fellows, no counterarguments, no published theses.
- A field study that fails to reproduce the mechanism the claim rests on.
- A larger sample in which the relationship reverses or disappears.
- A working system inside a real organization that solves the problem without the claim being true.
What follows if it holds
Treat this as a working hypothesis, not a recommendation. It is a public draft at Emerging confidence.
What we do not know yet
- What is the smallest intervention that would falsify this claim inside a real organization?
- Which of the other six problems does this one depend on?
Research, field studies, arguments, theses
What changed and why
- v0.1
Opening argument, in draft.
Confidence: Emerging