We’re All Feeling It
A recent poll shows how speed, orchestration, and judgment are reshaping our work
These days I’ve been thinking about how my own work is changing. I’ve got new tools, the pace is speeding up, and team dynamics seem just a little out of the ordinary. Once I noticed it in my day-to-day work, I began to wonder whether other people were feeling it, too.
I decided to run a short poll on LinkedIn to find out. It seems like we’re in transit, but to where I’m not exactly sure. I wanted to take a snapshot of this moment, so I asked, “Compared to two years ago, which part of your work has increased the most?”
The most striking thing about the results is that almost nobody reported “no change.” We’re all feeling it. Work is changing.
Speed (42%): Many of us say we’re getting more done faster.
Orchestration (31%): We’re working across systems, tools, and people.
Judgment (23%): Some of us are spending more time on sense-making.
My hunch is that many of us are leaning into our existing strengths while also expanding into areas that used to belong to other roles. For example, an automation-minded data engineer might start building agents, only to find they’re spending more time on coordination - work that used to fall to managers.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that these changes are not separate from one another. Instead, they form a sort of domino effect. As we find ways to get more done faster, the surface area of our work expands and we spend more time coordinating across systems, tools, and people. Then, because all that activity produces more output, it becomes increasingly important to focus on judgment.
I wasn’t surprised to see that “getting more done faster” was the winner. That said, I was hoping “judgment” would have ranked first, because I believe it will become even more critical as we all produce higher volumes of output over a wider range of work.
To put a slightly more alarmist spin on it, if we’re not focused enough on sense-making we’ll be left with a real mess. If we’re just churning through work faster and running our armies of agents, but not focusing on whether it’s right or good, we risk creating chaos.
All this might seem obvious in hindsight - who knows. A year from now this poll and my observations about the results may seem quaint. At the moment, though, this is what we’re living through.