Think of a situation in your work that once felt clear and no longer does. What changed, and when did you notice?
Perhaps a task that once justified a morning now takes a few minutes. Maybe report that would have had months of value becomes obsolete in a month. Perhaps someone no longer needs your help with something they once depended on you for. Or perhaps the work seems much as it was, and yet you have begun to wonder what it will be worth in a few months’ time.
The unsettling part is the space between something changing and our recognising what the change means. We may not recognise a revolution until we are already living with its consequences.
Perhaps epochal change always feels like this, and we happen to be here for this one. What we will later recognise as a decisive break, we live through as a succession of manageable developments. We accommodate each one. We update our tools, adjust our routines, keep calm and carry on. Only later do we see the pattern.
There is a useful analogy in earthquakes. P-waves are the first seismic waves to arrive, ahead of the stronger shaking. They do not precede the earthquake; they are evidence that it has already begun. Sensing them is close to what John Boyd, borrowing from German military usage, called Fingerspitzengefühl: fingertip feeling, an awareness of the whole system shifting rather than of any single disturbance.
In that sense, perhaps the examples we reach for, the internet and the World Wide Web, were not the earthquake we take them to be. Perhaps they were only the first waves of a longer disturbance: changing first how information travelled, then how it was organised, and now what we can ask machines to do with it. What happens when the technology no longer needs us to instruct it?
“An internet given a synthetic mind” is one way of describing the feeling. It is not a literal account of the technology, it describes a change in our relationship with it. Something we once instructed increasingly appears to answer back, or to disregard us altogether.
And we are experiencing this change from inside structures built for a different set of conditions.
We call them jobs. A job is a construction, a kind of building. It puts walls around a collection of activities and gives them a name and a location. Inside are our responsibilities, relationships, routines and the expectations of others. We have an address on the organisation chart, a salary attached to our contribution, and a reasonably settled answer when someone asks what we do.
Over time, we furnish it. Qualifications on the walls, experience in the cupboards, and a reputation built through years of showing up and doing the work. It becomes more than somewhere we earn a living. It becomes somewhere we belong, and where we take shelter.
Which is why a change in the work can feel so much larger than a change in the tools. A new piece of software we can learn. What we are beginning to question is whether the structure we built for our working lives still holds.
We wonder which parts of the job are still load-bearing, and which are still standing only because we have grown used to them. What happens when an activity that supported our income, or our authority, becomes something almost anyone can do, or worse, a digital agent?
Our building may still look the same from the street. The address is unchanged. The meetings continue, and the routines and ceremonies with them. Inside, some of the walls have cracked as the ground moves beneath us.
Our instinct may be to defend the whole structure. We have invested too much in it to welcome the suggestion that it needs rebuilding. More insidiously, we may mistake a threat to the job for a verdict on ourselves.
Yet the building and its occupant are not the same thing.
A job is only one arrangement of what we can do, shaped by the needs, technologies and institutions of a particular period in a particular place. That arrangement does not exhaust our abilities, and the job description has never recorded all of our value.
Some of what matters most may have been hard to see precisely because the building had become so familiar to those around us: the judgement behind a recommendation, the trust behind a difficult conversation, or the tacit understanding of why a technically correct answer would be wrong for a particular situation.
None of this guarantees that those capabilities will be recognised or rewarded. Leaving a structure we know is frightening, and not equally possible for everyone. Income, obligations, health and opportunity determine how much room we have to move.
But it changes the question.
We have learned to design buildings for ground that will move. Perhaps we need to learn to design jobs on the same assumption. Filling the cracks will not do. A job needs a durable purpose, more than one way to contribute, strong connections and room to change.
A job built around producing a particular output is vulnerable when that output becomes cheap. A job built around understanding and meeting a continuing need has somewhere to move, provided the organisation gives its occupant the authority, time and support to move with it.
None of this means everyone should become endlessly adaptable. Nobody expects a building to survive an earthquake because its occupants were told to be resilient. The capacity to withstand the shock is designed into the structure.
The same responsibility belongs with those who design work.
And sometimes a structure cannot be saved. Then the test is whether those who designed it have provided a safe way out.
The aim is not to preserve every job unchanged. It is to preserve people’s capacity to contribute when the work changes around them.
Sources
John Boyd, Patterns of Conflict (briefing, 1986), where he discusses Fingerspitzengefühl in the context of Blitzkrieg and manoeuvre warfare. Boyd’s own slides spell it “Fingerspitzengefuehl”.
On P-waves and earthquake early warning: United States Geological Survey, ShakeAlert programme materials. P-waves travel faster than the S-waves and surface waves that cause most of the damaging shaking, which is what gives early-warning systems their few seconds.