Hey Richie, many thanks for reading and your comment! Appreciate it. I basically agree with you on most of the points.
Really like the additional detail on how engagement should be clearly for the engagement’s sake and not advertised as leading to employment, if it’s increasingly rarely the case, or in the future, when we use it as a tool to keep people in the movement without employment.
Re: management and mentorship: I think I mostly agree with you, but I may be using “management” in a slightly broader sense.
I agree that high-performing, motivated people usually need much less direction and oversight, and that hiring for autonomy matters a lot. In that sense, great people absolutely reduce the need for micromanagement.
Where I still think management remains important, even with very strong people and very advanced AI, is around coordination, prioritisation, decision-making under uncertainty, and looking after the human side of work. Once you have more than a handful of people, someone still needs to hold the whole picture, notice misalignment early, make trade-offs explicit, and ensure people aren’t burning out or duplicating effort.
I also think mentoring and management can blur a bit. Helping people understand context, giving feedback, supporting growth, and creating the conditions for good work are often framed as mentoring, but they’re also core parts of good management.
So I’m less convinced that we’ll “need less management” so much as we’ll need a different kind of management: lighter-touch, more relational, more focused on sense-making and coordination rather than task assignment. AI may reduce some parts of the job, but I’m not sure it replaces the human judgment and care elements that show up as soon as teams scale beyond a few people.
Very much enjoying thinking through this topic and grateful to you for starting the conversation!
Hey Richie, many thanks for reading and your comment! Appreciate it. I basically agree with you on most of the points.
Really like the additional detail on how engagement should be clearly for the engagement’s sake and not advertised as leading to employment, if it’s increasingly rarely the case, or in the future, when we use it as a tool to keep people in the movement without employment.
Re: management and mentorship: I think I mostly agree with you, but I may be using “management” in a slightly broader sense.
I agree that high-performing, motivated people usually need much less direction and oversight, and that hiring for autonomy matters a lot. In that sense, great people absolutely reduce the need for micromanagement.
Where I still think management remains important, even with very strong people and very advanced AI, is around coordination, prioritisation, decision-making under uncertainty, and looking after the human side of work. Once you have more than a handful of people, someone still needs to hold the whole picture, notice misalignment early, make trade-offs explicit, and ensure people aren’t burning out or duplicating effort.
I also think mentoring and management can blur a bit. Helping people understand context, giving feedback, supporting growth, and creating the conditions for good work are often framed as mentoring, but they’re also core parts of good management.
So I’m less convinced that we’ll “need less management” so much as we’ll need a different kind of management: lighter-touch, more relational, more focused on sense-making and coordination rather than task assignment. AI may reduce some parts of the job, but I’m not sure it replaces the human judgment and care elements that show up as soon as teams scale beyond a few people.
Very much enjoying thinking through this topic and grateful to you for starting the conversation!