About
Theory of Work is an independent research publication about how work is changing and what happens when organisations designed for an older world fail to change with it.
That gap is the subject. New tools can reshape what one person is capable of almost overnight. Roles, layers, decision rights and habits change far more slowly. The result is a kind of organisational drift: structures that made sense for one kind of work now govern another, and nobody has updated the blueprint.
AI is part of this story, but it is not the whole story. It is one of the fastest accelerants, and it is a rich source of evidence about how work actually gets done. But the same tensions show up in management layers, operating models, coordination costs, incentives, job design and bureaucracy. We cover those too.
We publish three things. Frameworks, which are instruments you can pick up and run on Monday. Essays, which are the arguments the frameworks came out of. And a glossary, which fixes what the words mean so the arguments hold.
Why this is independent
Almost everything written on this subject has something for sale behind it. Consultancies publish to win the engagement. Vendors publish to sell the tool. Analyst houses publish behind a licence. The work is often good. The incentive is always there, and it shapes which questions get asked.
We sell nothing behind an article. No paywall, no sponsored content, no gated download, no pitch at the end. The whole method is public before a dollar changes hands, which means you can judge it before you decide whether to trust it.
How the work is made
Every framework carries a version number, a revision date, and a section called Where It Breaks that names the conditions under which the framework is the wrong tool. That section is never optional and never softened. A framework that cannot say where it fails has not been thought through.
When we get something wrong we publish the correction rather than quietly editing the page. A framework at version two says what changed and why version one was wrong.
Research is published with its instrument and its sample alongside the finding, so you can argue with it rather than only cite it. Where a claim rests on something we have not measured, the page says so.
Commitments
No sponsored content. No paywalled frameworks. No gated downloads. No ad tech, no third-party trackers, privacy-respecting analytics only.
These are commitments rather than preferences. If any of them ever changes, this page changes first.
The editor
Get in touch
This is the only contact form on the site. A question, a correction and a flat disagreement are all equally welcome.