Work is changing faster than organisations are.
New technology can change what one person is capable of almost overnight. Organisations change more slowly. Roles linger. Management layers survive. Decisions keep following structures built for a different kind of work. Theory of Work studies that gap: how work is evolving, which assumptions are becoming obsolete, and what organisations may need to become next.
The library
| No. | Instrument | Artifacts | Version, revised |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | The Delegation Ladder Six rungs of machine autonomy, each one changing who owes the check. | v0.9, revised 12 Aug 2026 | |
| 02 | The Verification Stack Five ways to check machine output, matched to what it costs to be wrong. | v0.4, revised 9 Aug 2026 | |
| 03 | The Work Architecture Canvas One page showing what a function actually does, who or what does each piece, how it is checked, and where it is remembered. | v0.2, revised 4 Aug 2026 | |
| 04 | The Decision Record Stack The paper trail that lets someone reconstruct, a year later, why the call went that way. | v0.2, revised 4 Aug 2026 | |
| 05 | The Coordination Tax Audit Where individual speed gains are eaten before they ever reach the team. | v0.3, revised 7 Aug 2026 |
Domains
- Decision Systems
Somewhere in your company a person signs off on a machine's recommendation several times a day, and nobody has told them what signing means.
- Human + AI Collaboration
Human + AI Collaboration is about what happens to a person whose colleague is a model.
- Knowledge Infrastructure
Knowledge Infrastructure is about what a company remembers.
- Operating Models
Operating Models is about the shape of a company and the rhythm it runs at. How teams are cut. How many people one manager can hold. What happens weekly, what happens quarterly, and which decisions belong to which. Most of it was set years ago by someone who has since left, and it has been inherited ever since.
- Work Architecture
Ask two people on the same team how a weekly report gets made. You will get two answers, both partly right, and neither of them written down anywhere.
Essays
- The Memory Problem When Work Happens in Chats
- The Verification Gap: Who Checks the Machine's Work?
- Individual Gains, Team Losses
- What Delegation Assumes
Research in field
- Verification practice across 40 operations teams
- Where the coordination tax lands after AI adoption
Studies appear here before they have results, so you can see what we are asking before you see what we found. Nothing cites a study still in the field.