Ask better questions to navigate change more effectively

What is ‘high-value’ work?

“AI will free people to focus on high-value work” is becoming one of the defining phrases of the gen AI era.

By shifting tasks that can be easily automated to AI, workers will be left to concentrate on higher value work.

Understanding how this work is defined will be central to what happens next for work and workers. So, digging into what it actually means is a valuable exercise. Definitions of value are political, cultural and organisational – not objective.

It gets interesting when you ask this question in your organisation. In particular:

• Who asks the question?
• Who gets invited to answer it?
• What assumptions underpin the discussion?

Is high value . . .

• Strategic thinking?
• Relationship building?
• Creativity?
• Emotional labour?
• Decision-making?
• Revenue generation?
• Work done by senior people?
• Work AI simply can’t yet do?

Organisations are assuming they can have collaborative conversations about AI transformation at a time when many employees fundamentally distrust leaders. According to Edelman trust at work research, only 25% of the UK workforce fully trusts their company leadership, and over a quarter do not trust their CEO to be open and honest.

Does that mean you should ignore the question? Probably not.

One of the strongest findings in Microsoft’s recent research into AI and work is that organisational culture matters more than individual enthusiasm. Microsoft’s analysis found organisational factors such as manager support, AI culture and talent practices accounted for 67% of reported AI impact, compared with 32% for individual mindset and behaviour.

AI success is less about the tools and more about the culture.

AI transformation is a whole organisation change – that’s systems, processes and people. So how are organisations going to be able to do that successfully if they can’t have open conversations about the role of AI and humans at work and the idea that higher value work might be what differentiates who does what?

And what if the definition of higher value work turns out to be everything an AI can do?

That would change the economic definition of value entirely.

These discussions will be messy. But by engaging the whole organisation in them in an honest and open way there is an opportunity to build a different type of change – one that happens with workers rather than to them and one that gives different outcomes to all the change programmes that have gone before (and usually with limited success).

Better questions may be one of the most valuable tools organisations have for navigating the relationship between human work, AI and change.

We help organisations bring people into those conversations in more open, constructive and practical ways.