Scott Jancy

The first question most people get asked about work is: what do you do? It’s a reasonable question, and it’s also the wrong one to start with. scottjancy.com/the-wrong-fir…

Systems can organize work. They can't bring it to life. That part was never the system's job.

Jane Jacobs looked at the same cities Le Corbusier designed and saw something completely different. That tension is worth thinking about right now with AI and work.

"What do you do?" is the first question most people get asked about work. It's reasonable. It's also the wrong place to start.

Titles get reorganized away in a Tuesday afternoon meeting. How you create value doesn't disappear that fast.

Climbing and navigating are not the same thing. One of them describes how careers actually work.

When cities were treated purely as machines, something human got lost. Streets became systems. Neighborhoods became zones. Life became optimized, but often less alive. AI may do the same to work. scottjancy.com/systems-optim…

Only 15% of graduates work in fields related to their major. We spend four years optimizing for specificity. 85% pivot. And work is being redesigned faster than education can keep up. We're preparing people for stability that doesn't exist, in jobs that might not either.

A ladder assumes the destination is up and the path is straight. Most careers don't work that way.

Systems optimize work. Humans create value. The opportunity right now is remembering those aren't the same thing.

Le Corbusier tried to make cities run like machines. They did. They also became less alive. AI and work is starting to feel similar.

As AI does more of the talking, the things that are unmistakably human start to carry more weight, not less. You know them when you encounter them: The handwritten note... scottjancy.com/the-human-sig…

Career readiness gets you through the door. Career preparedness determines what you do after you walk in.

The handwritten note. Showing up in person. The unrehearsed moment. As AI does more of the talking, those things carry more weight, not less.

Every architecture student learns to draw by hand. Not because firms still draft by hand. They don’t. The industry runs on BIM software now — complex, powerful, collaborative platforms that produce things no hand drawing ever could. But schools still start with a pencil and trace paper. And they’re right to... scottjancy.com/the-pencil-fi…

Two people can hit identical numbers and be completely different. The system treats them the same. They're not the same.

When you only measure output, you can tell what someone did. You can’t tell much about what they’ll do, or why, or in what environments they’ll do it well. The organizations that figure this out aren’t smarter. They’ve just learned to look at something the standard system isn’t designed to see. scottjancy.com/the-measureme…

Output tells you what happened last quarter. One's behavior tells you what's going to happen every quarter after that. Most systems only measure one.

Architecture schools still start with pencil and trace paper. They're right to. There's a lesson in that for what's happening with AI right now.