Perspective
Self-running does not mean empty
A self-running company is not a company without people. It is one in which people have stopped being the connection between its systems, and we would rather say plainly what that changes than let the phrase be read the wrong way.
Atlas exists to build self-running companies. When people hear that sentence, many of them hear a company without people in it. That is not what we mean, and we would rather say exactly what we do mean before somebody else says it for us.
A self-running company is one in which people have stopped being the connection between the company’s own systems. The work that keeps a company moving from one step to the next is carried by the company itself. The people in it spend their time on what only people can do.
What most working days are actually made of
Ask anybody in a company of a few hundred people what they were hired to do, and then ask what they did yesterday. The two answers rarely match.
The gap is filled with a particular kind of work. Finding the current version of something. Copying a figure from one system into another. Asking who owns a decision. Waiting for the answer. Checking whether the thing that was agreed actually happened. Reminding somebody. Reconciling two records that disagree. None of it appears in a job description, almost none of it appears in a process map, and all of it has to be done, because without it the company stops.
Companies spent decades giving every function its own software. Finance, sales, procurement, support and HR each have a system that is good at its own half of the work. What none of them owns is the space in between. That space is held together by people, most of whom are very good at it, and almost none of whom took the job in order to do it.
Part of why this work survives is that nobody sees it whole. Each person sees their own share of it, a handful of messages here, a status check there, and each share looks small. Added up across a company, and measured in the days that work spends waiting rather than the minutes somebody spends on it, it is usually far larger than anybody would have guessed, and it is one of the few things the organisation has never measured. We have written separately about how to estimate it, because a problem with no number attached tends to stay exactly where it is.
This is the work we are building Atlas to carry.
What we mean by self-running
A company runs itself in the sense we mean when it can understand its own state, notice what is changing, judge what that means and carry out what follows, without every step waiting for a person to push it along.
That does not mean without direction. People decide what the company is for, which customers it serves, what it will and will not do, and what counts as success. It does not mean without judgement either. The decisions that shape a company, that carry real risk or that cannot be undone stay with people who can be held to them.
What changes is the connective work. The questions a company asks itself thousands of times a week, namely what happened, what it means, who needs to know, what should happen next, whether it happened and whether it produced the result it was supposed to, stop being answered by somebody reading five systems and writing an email. They are answered by the company’s operating layer, continuously, and acted on within limits people have set.
One principle guides everything we build around this. We do not build another tool that employees have to operate. We build the system that operates the tools. The distinction matters because the software industry’s usual answer to every coordination problem has been one more application, and one more application is one more thing a person has to keep in step with everything else.
What we will not pretend
There is a comfortable sentence that almost every company in our field uses. Technology like ours augments people and replaces nobody. We do not think that sentence is honest, and we would rather not start by saying something we do not believe.
Some roles exist mostly to move information between systems. Where that is the substance of a role, a company that no longer needs information moved by hand will need less of that role. Saying otherwise would be easier for us to publish and harder for anyone to trust.
What we can say, and what we believe, is narrower and more useful. Very few people spend their whole working day on connective work. For most, it is the part of the job that crowds out the rest of it. Removing it does not remove the person. It removes the reason their actual work keeps getting pushed to the evening.
We also accept that we are responsible for how we describe this. We will not market Atlas as a way to cut headcount, and we will not pretend it has no effect on how work is distributed. Both would be easier. Neither would be true.
The part we are taking away was never the job.
What stays with people, by design
Some things a well built system should never do on its own, however confident it is, and we treat that as a design decision rather than a limitation to be engineered away later.
Every consequential action traces back to a person who is answerable for it. Permissions, approvals and a complete record of what the system did, on which information and under which rule, are part of the foundation of every Atlas deployment. They cannot be switched off, because a system that can act without an accountable person behind it is not one we are prepared to build.
Autonomy, in our view, is not something you configure. It is something a system earns, one kind of decision at a time, by showing that it gets that kind of decision right and that its reasoning can be checked. The companies we work with will decide how far that goes. We will make sure they always can.
The objection we take seriously
Every generation of workplace technology has promised that the time it saved would be spent on better work. Often it was spent on more of the same work, or on new work nobody had asked for.
We think that criticism is fair, and we do not have a technical answer to it. What a company does with the hours it gets back is a management decision, not a software feature. What we can do is make sure the hours are real, that they are visible, and that nobody has to guess where the coordination work went. The choice about what comes next belongs to the people running the company, which is exactly where it should sit.
What the time is for
The companies we admire most are not the ones with the most software. They are the ones where people spend their days on customers, on judgement, on building things and on each other, rather than on keeping the company’s systems in agreement with themselves.
That is what we mean by self-running. Not a company that no longer needs people. A company that no longer needs people to hold it together, so that they can spend their time on everything else it needs from them.
Read next
The piece this one refers to: what connective work costs a company, why nobody has counted it, and how to put a number on your own before deciding what to do about it.