The Opening Act: Welcome to the Absurd
Picture this scene playing out right now in corporate offices across the globe: employees gathering for the 47th “alignment meeting” this month, discussing initiatives that will never launch, while genuinely urgent decisions remain trapped in approval chains that would make Kafka weep. Meanwhile, the very technology that could solve these problems – artificial intelligence, sits underutilised because we’re too busy performing our corporate roles to recognise the revolution happening around us.
This isn’t just workplace dysfunction. This is the death throes of an industrial-age operating system trying to process information-age realities. And AI isn’t just another tool to bolt onto this broken theatre, it’s the force that will finally tear down the curtain and demand we build something entirely new.
Act I: The Script That’s Killing Us
The Anatomy of Corporate Absurdity
Every day, millions of knowledge workers participate in what can only be described as elaborate performance art. We attend meetings that could have been emails, create reports that no one reads, and follow processes designed to manage problems that technology solved years ago. The cost isn’t just productivity; it’s human dignity and potential.
Consider the modern meeting epidemic: research shows that executives spend 72% of their time in meetings, with 67% reporting that meetings prevent them from completing their actual work. We’ve created a culture where being busy has become more important than being effective, where visibility matters more than value creation.
The Agency Crisis
But here’s the deeper tragedy: this theatre has systematically stripped away human agency—our capacity to make meaningful decisions, influence outcomes, and contribute genuinely to organisational success. When employees feel like actors reciting someone else’s script rather than authors of their own work, we get disengagement, burnout, and the quiet resignation of human potential.
The data is stark: 68% of employees report struggling with the pace and volume of work, while 46% feel burned out. This isn’t a people problem, it’s a systems problem. We’ve designed work environments that treat humans like expensive, unreliable machines rather than creative, adaptive intelligences.
Act II: The AI Awakening – Why This Time Is Different
Beyond the Automation Trap
Most organisations are making a fundamental error: they’re using AI to optimise the absurd rather than eliminate it. They’re automating the creation of reports no one reads, making inefficient processes slightly faster, and adding chatbots to customer service journeys that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
This misses the revolutionary opportunity. AI doesn’t just offer better tools, it offers a completely different way of organising human effort. When machines can handle information processing, pattern recognition, and routine decision-making at superhuman speed and accuracy, the question isn’t “How do we make our current jobs more efficient?” It’s “What should humans actually be doing?”
The Four Zones of Transformation
Recent research from Stanford University identified four distinct zones where AI intersects with human work preferences :
🟩 The Green Light Zone: Tasks that workers want to automate and AI can handle effectively, predominantly routine information processing, scheduling, and basic analysis.
🟥 The Red Light Zone: Tasks that workers want to keep human-controlled, regardless of AI capability, creative strategy, relationship building, and ethical decision-making.
💡 The R&D Opportunity Zone: Tasks where AI capability exists but workers resist automation, often due to trust concerns or unclear value propositions.
🪫 The Low Priority Zone: Tasks that neither urgently need automation nor represent high-value human work, these often represent the “corporate theatre” that should simply be eliminated.
The Agency Renaissance
Here’s what’s exciting: when AI takes over the mundane, it doesn’t diminish human agency, it amplifies it. Workers report that AI tools allow them to focus on judgment, creativity, and strategic thinking rather than information gathering and processing. This isn’t job displacement; it’s job elevation.
Act III: Redesigning Work for Human Flourishing
From Process to Purpose
The organisations that thrive in the AI era won’t be those that automate existing processes, they’ll be those that redesign work around human strengths. This means:
Dynamic Work Allocation: Instead of fixed job descriptions, we need fluid systems that optimally distribute tasks between humans and AI based on capability, preference, and strategic value.
Outcome-Driven Culture: Moving from measuring hours worked or meetings attended to measuring value created and problems solved.
Continuous Learning Systems: Building organisations that learn and adapt as quickly as the AI systems they employ.
The New Human Competencies
As AI handles more information processing, human work is shifting toward distinctly human capabilities :
- Contextual Judgment: Understanding nuance, reading between the lines, and making decisions with incomplete information
- Relationship Architecture: Building trust, facilitating collaboration, and creating human connections that drive business outcomes
- Creative Problem-Solving: Identifying new opportunities, reframing challenges, and innovating beyond existing patterns
- Ethical Leadership: Ensuring AI systems serve human values and organisational purpose
Act IV: The Implementation Revolution
Starting the Transformation
This isn’t about waiting for perfect AI solutions, it’s about beginning the cultural shift now:
- Audit the Absurd: Identify which meetings, reports, and processes exist purely for organisational theatre rather than value creation
- Pilot Human-AI Collaboration: Start with high-impact, low-risk tasks where AI can demonstrably free humans for higher-value work
- Measure Agency: Track employee autonomy, decision-making authority, and creative contribution alongside traditional productivity metrics
- Design for Dignity: Ensure AI implementation enhances rather than diminishes human capability and workplace satisfaction
The Leadership Challenge
The biggest barrier isn’t technological, it’s cultural. Leaders must have the courage to question fundamental assumptions about how work gets done, what meetings are actually necessary, and which processes serve human flourishing versus organisational inertia.
This requires what I call “AI-native thinking”, designing from first principles rather than automating existing dysfunction. The most successful organisations will be those that use AI as an excuse to eliminate corporate theatre entirely and build something genuinely human-centred.
The Final Act: A Call to Creative Courage
We stand at an unprecedented moment. For the first time in human history, we have the technological capability to eliminate the mundane aspects of knowledge work and focus human energy on what we do uniquely well: create, connect, and solve complex problems.
But this requires courage, the courage to admit that much of what we call “work” is actually performative busywork, and the vision to build something better. AI isn’t just changing what we can do; it’s forcing us to confront what we should do.
The future belongs to organisations that stop asking “How can AI help us do our current jobs better?” and start asking “If AI can handle the routine, what meaningful work should humans actually be doing?”
The corporate theatre is ending. The question is: will you help write the script for what comes next, or will you keep performing in a play that no longer serves anyone?
The choice is ours: we can use AI to optimise the absurd, or we can use it to build workplaces worthy of human potential. The curtain is falling on corporate theatre. What will we build in its place?
