Workflow engineering is a leadership job – it depends on seeing the entire end-to-end value creation chain, and having the power to change it.
This was one of the nuggets shared by Grisha Pavlotsky, Miro’s Chief Transformation Officer, at the Accelerate Tomorrow conference in Berlin.
1. Scaling AI brings challenges. Miro identified that adopting AI at scale can cause an acceleration in misalignment and silo-based working. It stems from the fact that many AI tools are ‘single player’, leading to ‘silos of one’. And the agent-to-agent collaborations of the future will compound these silos further.
2. A shared place to work. For Miro, the solution was obvious. Since their core product is canvas-based, this was the starting point for a persistent, shared, AI-powered workspace. Collective intelligence that understands how the work happens in your organization is the key. This lets you accelerate the work today. And create a proprietary data set for training agents tomorrow.
3. Politics is a challenge. In Miro’s experience, re-engineering workflows surfaces a lot of political issues that need leadership involvement. IC’s will never be able to resolve these issues on their own. I don’t know whether this applies for every organisation equally. And I wonder how it will affect smaller companies, who don’t actually have well-defined workflows in the first place.
“Workflow engineering is a leadership job – it depends on seeing the entire end-to-end value creation chain, and having the power to change it.”
I suspect it will evolve into its own role and discipline, just as User Experience did in the 1990s. Maybe Grisha Pavlotsky is going to be the Don Norman of workflow engineering.