The Part of Your Work That Can’t Be Automated
September 23
9:00a - 1:00p ET
Location TBD
Alison Rand
Senior Director, Head of Design Operations
About this workshop
There is a part of your work that doesn’t fit in a prompt.
The reading of the room. The timing you feel before you can explain it. The knowing that something is off in a system long before the data says so. You have been trained to treat this as background — the soft part, the instinct, the thing you leave at the door to focus on the real work.
It is the real work. And it is precisely what the systems being built right now cannot do.
Agentic AI is reorganizing what work is, who does it, and what it’s for. It is optimizing for the legible, the repeatable, the extractable. What falls outside that optimization is the sensemaking that happens in the white space. You cannot automate it. You can only automate around it, which is what most organizations are currently doing, and in doing so they are losing something they cannot recover by adding more tools.
This workshop is about that something. What it is, why it matters more now than it ever has, and what you owe the systems you are already shaping.
Target Audience
<p>Anyone whose work introduces a force of change into a system that people live inside. Whether that system is built from code, policy, concrete, curriculum, or capital.</p><p>If you are building models, drafting policy, designing cities, running operations, shaping learning, or making decisions that will outlast you, you are shaping a system. The question is whether you know what it carries forward, who benefits, who bears the cost, and what you owe in return.</p><p>This is a working session in which participants will spend four hours doing real thinking about their own real work. You will leave with two things you can use the next day and one question you will carry much longer than that.</p>
Pre-requisites
<p>What to bring:</p><p>One real thing. A current project, research question, or decision that is actively in motion. The more specific, the more useful.</p><p>A short reading, sent when you register. Ten pages. Not an assignment. An orientation.</p><p>One question to arrive already sitting with: what system are you currently trying to shape, and what is it doing to you in return?</p>
Takeaways
- A systems map of the structures shaping your work, drawn by hand — the nested scales and the places where power actually moves, not where the org chart says it does.
- An accountability framework you build in the room, from honest answers to four questions about your actual work. Portable. Something you can return to at any decision point.
- And one sentence, written and spoken if you’re willing: what does the system require of me, and what do I require of it.
Session speaker