Lesson 6 of 8 · 8 min read · last verified 2026-08-26
Automation and the people around you
In this lesson you will:
- Consider the effect on colleagues before automating shared work
- Distinguish removing drudgery from removing someone's contribution
Most of this curriculum has been about your own work. This lesson is about the moment your choices land on someone else, which happens sooner than people expect and usually without a decision being made.
The quiet version
Nobody announces a restructure. It goes like this.
You automate a report you used to ask a colleague for. Then the summaries someone else prepared. Then the first draft that used to come from the junior member of the team.
Each step is sensible on its own. Nobody decided anything. And a role that consisted of those tasks has been hollowed out by a series of individually reasonable choices, one of which was yours.
That is worth noticing while it is still a series of choices.
Drudgery is not the same as a role
The strongest case for automation is removing work nobody wants: retyping, reformatting, copying between systems. Genuinely good, and often the thing people are most relieved to lose.
But be careful about what surrounds it. A task that looks like drudgery from outside frequently carries things that are not:
Judgement. The person “just formatting the report” is often catching errors in it.
Relationships. The person who chases the numbers knows who to ask and what their answer means.
Visibility. Junior roles are partly a way of being seen. Remove the visible output and the person becomes invisible, which affects them long before it affects the work.
Learning. That is how the next senior person is made. Automate the whole apprenticeship and the pipeline stops, quietly, several years before anyone notices.
Ask the person
The practical rule, and it is not complicated:
Whose work does this change, and have they been asked?
Not told afterwards. Asked, while it is still a proposal.
Sometimes they will be delighted — it was the worst part of their week. Sometimes they will point out what the task was actually doing, which you did not know. Both are outcomes you want before the change, not after.
This is not a veto. It is the difference between a decision made with people and one made about them, and that difference is remembered.
Do not hide it
Automating part of your own job and not saying so is tempting, and it creates two specific problems.
The expectation is now permanent. Output went up. Nobody knows why, so the new level becomes the baseline — including on the day the tool changes, breaks, or costs money.
The knowledge does not exist. When it fails, the person holding it is you, and you may never have learned the task properly. E4·L8’s third category, arriving with a deadline.
If the decision is not yours
Often it will not be. You may be the person whose work is being automated, or the one asked to implement it.
Two things remain available. Ask what happens to the people — a question that has to be answered aloud, and is frequently one nobody has asked. And name what the task carried — the judgement, the checking, the relationships that were never in the job description and will be missed when they are gone.
Neither guarantees an outcome. Both put information into a decision that was going to be made without it.
Try it now (5 minutes)
Think of one thing you automated in the last few months that touched someone else’s work.
Did you ask them? If not, ask now — not for permission, but to find out what that task was carrying that you could not see.
Check your understanding
Recap
Roles get hollowed out by a sequence of individually reasonable choices, so notice while it is still a sequence. Ask whose work a change affects before making it, and look for the judgement, relationships, visibility and learning that a “drudgery” task may be carrying. Do not hide your own automation — the expectation outlives the tool.
🗂 3 flashcards from this lesson join your daily review.
Previous: The costs not on the invoice · Next: Learning to refuse