AI will teach us about the value of process

At work, you create a lot of documents. Why? Well that's the work. You have to put things down on paper, communicate it to others in your company and beyond.

You need a project plan for this upcoming project. Who can create it? Sarah can.

How long do you need to create that Sarah? Sarah needs two weeks, access to a bunch of people and some resources and we can all meet in two weeks to review her final project plan.

Sounds familiar right?

Before AI, the next two weeks were mostly invisible to anyone not directly involved in the process. Sarah went back to her desk, stared at a blank page for a while, did some reading, thinking. Eventually she emailed a few people in order to setup followup meetings, ask questions. She emailed a few external friends, asking for insights and support. She maybe even searched "project plan format examples" or "how to write a good project plan"

Two weeks pass, we all get back in a room with Sarah and she walks us through a presentation featuring her newly finished project plan. We poke a few holes in it but it's accepted that her plan is good and we'll proceed.

We have the document! We have our project plan.

That was before AI.

AI will soon reduce those two weeks down to the press of a button. It will commoditize perfect project plans, or mostly has already. AI will allow us to understand what Sarah was actually doing during those two weeks and how important those activities really are.

Before AI, we mostly assumed that the final document matters the most, the project plan matters, the output and results matter. While they certainly do, it was never really the point. In truth, like a good legal contract, if anyone has to actually read the project plan after that final meeting then something went wrong.

We're going to learn how important the process really is, how important the journey is. Not simply for the individual for their learning, their growth but also collectively as communities.

What Sarah did during those two weeks was the process. She talked with other people, she negotiated concepts, tradeoffs. She listened to others perspectives, some of which ended up in the plan, some didn't. She taught and shared with others, got people up to speed on the project and the potential plan. She kept her supervisor up to date and allowed for their input. She grew the connective tissue within her organization specific to the success of that project.

The plan matters but not as much as all the work it takes to achieve the plan. That will be startlingly obvious once we can hit a button and get our perfect project plan in a second. That will create a void in us, a void in our team, something will be missing. That void will allow us to realize that our documents never actually mattered. What matters is all the human work we put in to get to the document.

Your resume doesn't matter. What you've done in your work life does.

The menu and sign at your favourite restaurant doesn't matter, how the people in the kitchen are working in this instant does.

Does the book you're reading, or this post, matter? Of course but not in comparison to the journey the authors went through to produce them.

We used to measure success by the documents we produced: the completed project plans, the finalized reports, the perfect presentations. AI will strip away that illusion by making those outputs effortless. What remains is the human work of conversations that build understanding, relationships that enable collaboration, and trust that makes projects succeed. The question isn't whether AI will change our work but whether we'll recognize what was always most valuable about it.