We can make work more efficient on paper while making the organization less capable in practice.

In A City Is Not a Tree (1965), Christopher Alexander argued that living cities depend on overlapping systems that neat hierarchical plans fail to accommodate. A street supports commerce, friendship, movement, and belonging all at once. The overlap is part of what makes it work.

I see a similar risk in how we’re redesigning work around AI. We break jobs into tasks, map skills, and redistribute activities, but a conversation that resolves a project issue may also build trust, develop someone’s judgment, and reveal a problem nobody knew to look for. Those things happen together.

Decomposition helps us understand the parts. It doesn’t guarantee we understand what holds them together.