Module 2The triage method30–35 min

Which work is ready — and which stays yours

Module 1 said an agent should take the routine and defer the rest. The hard part is telling which is which in your own business, where nothing is labelled. This module gives you a way to look — five questions you run over your work — so the decision is yours, made with your eyes open, not handed to a tool. It ends in a worksheet you can run across the whole business.

2.1 From a principle to a method

A principle you cannot apply is just a slogan. This module turns "let agents take the routine" into something you can do on Monday: take the recurring work of your business — the steps you repeat, the work of delivering your service — and ask five questions of each. None decides on its own. Together they give you a reading.

Teaching point: The method surfaces your judgment about your own work. It is not a machine that sorts for you, and it does not pretend the answer is the same for every business.

Step zero — question the process first: Before you ask which agent could do a task, ask whether the task should be done at all, and in this shape. A process you would not design today is a candidate for redesign or removal, not automation. Triage a broken process and you only automate the breakage (see Module 1.2). The triage assumes you are deciding about work worth keeping.

2.2 The five questions

Ask of each piece of work

One — rule or judgment? Could you write down the rule by which it's done, or does it "depend"? Rule-bound work an agent can learn; work that depends stays with a person.
Two — reversible? If it goes wrong, can it be undone?
Three — who does a mistake land on? No one much, or a client, a colleague, money?
Four — does it need the picture? Does doing it well require foreseeing what the action does to someone, or knowing this particular client? That foresight is the world model the machine lacks (Module 1).
Five — and the person? If an agent takes it, where does the person who did it go? If there is no good answer, that is a signal to slow down, not a detail to settle later.

Why the fifth matters most: Most triage tools skip it. It is the question that keeps the method people-first rather than a redundancy calculator.

2.3 Three readings, not rulings

The five questions give a reading, not a ruling.

Agent: routine, rule-bound, reversible, low-consequence, no picture needed — the agent does it, every step logged, a human reachable.

Augment: the agent drafts, surfaces, or watches; the person decides.

Human: judgment, relationship, the irreversible, the high-stakes — a person decides; an agent may prepare, but not act.

The override: if question five has no good answer — nowhere for the person to go — hold, whatever the other four say.

2.4 Most work is "augment"

Most of your work will land in the middle. That is the realistic shape of the years just ahead — not businesses run by agents, but people whose reach is extended by them, holding on to the decisions that matter. If your reading sends most things to "agent", look again; you may be answering the questions you wish were true rather than the ones in front of you.

Discussion topics

Which of your processes feel "obviously automatable" — and do they survive question three and four?
Where could augmentation — agent prepares, you decide — actually help, and where would it just add a step?

2.5 A reading for now

Mark every reading provisional. The tools will improve, the market will move, and the power Big Tech's AI will exert on your trade is not yet known to anyone. Work that belongs with a person this year may be ready for augmentation the next — or the reverse. Set a date to run this again. The worksheet is a habit, not a one-time sort. There are more unknowns on the road ahead than knowns, and the method is built to be re-run as the ground shifts.

Teaching point: A triage that pretends to be permanent is a triage that will mislead you. Provisionality is the point, not a weakness.

2.6 A worked example

Take a small bookkeeping practice. Keying figures from receipts is rule-bound, reversible, low-consequence — an agent can do it, every entry logged, the bookkeeper reviewing the exceptions. Advising a client whether to restructure turns on judgment, relationship, and that client's history — it stays with the person. The year-end letter sits in the middle: the agent prepares a draft, the accountant judges, corrects, and signs. And the person who once keyed receipts moves to checking the agent's work and learning the advisory side — a better job, if the practice plans for it.

Questions by role — not by rank

These are grouped by role, not by rank — and roles are flattening. In many small businesses one person already holds several of these; in a one-person-plus-agents business, you hold them all. What matters is that every question stays open to everyone who works here, and the newest person is meant to speak. A triage done without the people who do the work is built on guesswork.

Direction

(a board, the owners — or you.) Which of our work is strategically core, and must stay excellent, and which is commodity? What do we owe the people whose work moves?

Stewardship

(whoever runs the change — or you.) Run the triage; set the readings; plan the "and the person" column; choose the pace, and the ground the work runs on.

Frontline

(team leads — or you.) Supply the ground truth — which processes really work, where they break, and who holds the knowledge no system has.

Doing the work

(the people closest to the task — including the newest.) You can contribute: "I run this — here's where it's broken, and I'd not design it this way" (that is step zero), and "where would I move?" You're entitled to see: that the triage is being done with you, not to you.

Self-check

1. What does the five-question method produce?

A reading, not a ruling, and a reading for now — re-run it as the ground shifts.

2. What is the "override" rule?

The fifth question keeps the method people-first; with no answer to it, you hold.

3. What does this module call the realistic near-term shape for most businesses?

The module's claim is augmentation over replacement — for your own business that's a question to test, not a forecast to accept.

Run it on your own business

The Process Triage Worksheet puts the five questions, the three readings, and the override on one page you can run across everything you do.

Open the worksheet →

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