How Will You Manage Your Staff

How we think about productivity is going to reach a crossroads in the next 12-18 months

On the one hand, agentic AI is going to continue to evolve and be able to help us do a volume of tasks that would previously have felt ridiculous

I genuinely think people will get to a point where they’ll be able to do in one day, what was previously a whole week’s worth of work.

On the flip side of that, this will likely still involve different digital tools and the management of multiple agents and sub-agents to get the work done

More tabs, more tools and more things running in the background is kind of the opposite of what we’d recommend for productivity.

So it’s going to be a very interesting shift in knowledge work, which is why I’m already thinking about this a lot at the moment.

My thinking at the minute is that the people who struggle with agents, won’t struggle because they won’t keep up.

They’ll struggle because they’ve never been forced to articulate exactly what it is that they want.

Because the fundamental difference between a tool and an agent, is that tools do what you click and get them to do - whereas an agent does what you mean

And most people have never had to be precise about what they mean, because they’ve always been the one doing the work.

Think about how you manage your own day right now.

You sit down, you sort of know what needs doing, you muddle through it. You context-switch between tasks because your brain needs to fill the gaps, you don’t actually need a brief for yourself on what needs done.

It’s very messy and inefficient, but it’s sufficient to get the job done - you end up fried, overwhelmed and unable to see ‘where the time went’ - but it doesn’t affect your work too much.

With agents, we’re going to be multiplying that situation by 5-10x. If you give vague intent to 5-10 agents simultaneously, you get absolute chaos.

So the constraint is clarity of intent, not speed or capability. The people who’ll be brilliant at managing agents, are the ones who can articulate a clear outcome, define what good looks like, and then get out of the way - which is the opposite of multi-tasking, it’s ‘single-tasking.’ Noting your thinking so that agents can parallel-process the ‘doing’

This is basically management - actual management, not micro-management like most people have experienced. The kind where you set direction, context and trust the process.

Most people haven’t ever managed anyone - suddenly they might find themselves managing 20 agents, all needing clear briefs, defined scope and intentional oversight

The question nobody’s asking yet: are you actually good at delegating?

Delegation has never been about doing more things at once. It’s about knowing exactly what needs doing, and being able to say it clearly enough that someone (or something) else can run with it.