I spent this past week just walking around. Not with a clipboard, not really with an agenda, just showing up where the work happens and paying attention. Sitting in on conversations. Watching people do the same thing they do every day, except this time I was actually there to see it instead of hearing about it secondhand in a report.
A few things sat with me afterwards. I won’t get into who said what, some of it isn’t mine to repeat, but the shape of what I noticed feels worth writing down.
The first thing that hit me was how wrong I’d been about who’s tired and why. I think I’d quietly assumed that if someone looked worn out, it was because they were putting in long hours. Turns out that wasn’t really it. Some of the most exhausted people I spoke to weren’t working the most, they were doing the same annoying task the hard way, again and again, because nobody had ever shown them a shorter route. That’s not overwork. That’s just doing something clunky, over and over, until it wears you down without you even realising why.
Once I noticed that, I started seeing it everywhere. Someone chasing the same signature twice because the first one got lost somewhere. Someone typing the same numbers into two different places because the systems don’t talk to each other. Someone who’s the only one who knows how a certain process actually works, because it’s never been written down, so every time it comes up they have to drop everything and explain it from scratch. None of that is hard work in any proud sense. It’s just annoying, repetitive, and it eats at people quietly.
The bit that actually surprised me most was AI. Some people had already started using it on their own, quietly, and you could tell, they seemed lighter, faster, less bogged down. Right next door, someone doing basically the same kind of task was still doing it entirely by hand, with no idea a faster way even existed. It wasn’t that one group was smarter or more willing. They’d simply seen something the others hadn’t. And if I leave that alone, the gap just keeps growing, the ones who found it get further ahead, the ones who didn’t fall further behind, and nobody actually chose for that to happen. That one’s on me to fix, not on them.
There was also something in how we sell versus how we make. We’re good, maybe too good, at saying yes to what the customer wants. But saying yes doesn’t ask the floor first. It just lands on them after the fact, and now it’s their problem to make the impossible timeline work. Feels like good service in the moment. Often it just means someone downstream inherits a promise they never got a say in.
I keep coming back to the same thought. A lot of what looks like people working too hard is actually just people working around things that should’ve been fixed a long time ago. And the AI gap isn’t really about who’s clever. It’s about who happened to be shown the door that was already open.
Not sure I’ve got it all figured out yet. But I walked away from that week with a much better sense of where to actually spend my energy.
