What if your superpowerbecame your job?

In the summer of 2025, a question was making its way through our teams.

“Will I still have a job if this AI thing really does what they say it will do?”

People were hearing about AI’s capabilities and reading about layoffs at large technology companies. It was hardly surprising that they were connecting those headlines to their own lives.

A job is personal. It is a mortgage payment, a family’s plans, a place where you belong. For many of us, it is also part of how we understand our value.

I could hear the concern. Leaving it unanswered would only give people more room to frighten one another with possibilities none of us could verify.

So we brought everyone together for a town hall.

And I began with the words they might not have expected: “You are right.”

The jobs we know today will disappear, I told them. At first slowly, and then all at once.

That was how I saw the direction of change. I believed that within 1 to 3 years, about 90% of the work at Encore could be automated. I wanted us to be intentional about getting there.

I could not promise certainty. But I could explain what I believed, what we were working towards and, most importantly, what I saw in them. Because the part that excited me was the 10%.

The work in the work

I believe everyone has a superpower. Something they do naturally well. A way of noticing, understanding, creating or connecting that makes a difference to someone else.

Perhaps you hear what a person is struggling to say. You ask the question that finally makes a problem clear. You bring calm to a difficult conversation. You see a possibility where everyone else sees a dead end.

Sometimes your superpower feels so natural that you assume everyone can do it. They cannot.

Now consider how much of your working day you actually spend using it. How much time goes instead to finding information, managing systems, pulling reports, moving details from one place to another, handing something over and following up to find out where it went?

I call that “the work in the work”. A few minutes here. Another step there. Small tasks that seem too ordinary to question, scattered across so many people and processes that no one quite owns the problem.

Over time, we begin to confuse all that activity with the purpose of the job. But imagine writing a job description consisting entirely of those tasks. Who would apply?

The 90/10 is a vision, rather than a stopwatch measurement of every role. It describes the imbalance I want us to change: too much of a person’s day consumed by the work surrounding their contribution, and too little spent making it.

What if we could reverse that? What if your job required, above all, your superpower? What would work look like? What would it feel like?

You have probably felt it already.

You are working on something that draws you in completely. You know where to put your attention. The challenge stretches you, but you can feel yourself making progress. One thought opens into another.

You stop watching the clock.

For a while, time seems to stop altogether. You are so immersed in what you are doing that there is only the work in front of you and the next thing you want to try.

Then you look up. How can it possibly be that late?

That is the experience I mean when I talk about flow.

It can happen while solving a complicated problem or helping someone through a difficult decision. It can happen in a conversation where you listen so closely that you finally understand what the other person needs.

The work may be demanding. You may finish tired. Yet there is a satisfaction in having used yourself well.

What if we designed more of the working day around the conditions that make that possible? That was the future I wanted our people to consider in the town hall.

The 90% was the work we could take off their shoulders. The 10% was the capability we wanted to give more room. The purpose was flow. Automation was how we intended to make room for it.

An honest answer changes the conversation

Addressing the concern directly made it less concerning. It did not make every question disappear. People still had good reasons to wonder what would change, what they would need to learn and where they would fit.

But now they knew how I saw the future. They understood the intention behind the work we were undertaking. They had something concrete to discuss, question and help shape.

There is a difference between hearing that change is coming and understanding what your organisation intends to do with it.

I did not want our people left wondering whether their capability would still matter. I wanted them involved in discovering how much more they could do.

Of course, a town hall is a beginning. The promise has to become something people can experience. That took us almost 11 months.

We tried different approaches. We failed. We tried another way. Then we failed again.

We could see what we wanted to make possible: an environment in which our people could build solutions to the problems they understood best. But we had not found an approach that worked.

There was something almost funny about it. We had begun with people worrying that technology was about to race past them. Now we were waiting for the technology to catch up with what we wanted our people to do.

Eventually, the capabilities we needed became available. Our latest approach worked. We had a process, an environment and enough support to give people the opportunity to begin.

The bet was simple. Our people were already great at solving problems. They knew which task made their shoulders drop before they opened the file. They knew where information got stuck and which frustration returned every afternoon. Give them the tools and a little support, we believed, and they would fly.

We called it building citizen apps. Just 4 months later, we have almost 30.

The number is encouraging. The discovery behind it matters more.

People can take something they have put up with for years and begin changing it themselves. They try an approach, see what works and try another way when it does not. Eventually, an application takes shape around a task they would happily wave goodbye to.

“Look what I built!”

There is a particular delight in that sentence. You can hear the surprise, the pride and the possibility of whatever they might build next.

The apps still need to prove their usefulness. We need to know whether they save time, work reliably and make the day better. Almost 30 apps does not mean we have achieved the 90/10.

It means our people are helping us find the way. Once you see that capability, you cannot unsee it.

Our sales team found an opportunity in a task almost everyone recognises.

You have just finished a good conversation with a prospective client. You asked questions, listened closely and began to understand what matters to them. Perhaps something they said changed your understanding of their business. Perhaps you found a connection you want to explore.

Then comes the administration. Open the CRM. Write up the conversation. Capture the details. Make sure the information is there for the next person who needs it.

The notes matter. Having someone reconstruct the conversation by hand is another question. Who gets to the end of a promising call and thinks, “Now for my favourite part: updating the CRM”?

Our sales team built a citizen app that summarises call transcripts into CRM-ready notes and posts them automatically.

Yes, there are tools on the market that do this. We knew that. But we had also made a decision: no more third-party tools.

We had experienced what came with each addition. Integration. Maintenance. Training. Another system for people to learn and another relationship to manage.

Too often, we would get 80% of what we wanted and spend our time adapting to the rest. The missing piece might be small, but it mattered to the way we worked. We could request it, explain it and hope it found its way onto the supplier’s roadmap.

Meanwhile, our people worked around it. That becomes its own version of the work in the work.

We wanted to see what would happen if the people who understood the problem could shape the solution themselves. If something needed changing, could they try it, learn from it and improve it without waiting for someone else to decide it was a priority?

Building our own still means taking responsibility for testing, maintenance and improvement. What changes is our ability to decide which problems deserve attention and how the solution should fit the work.

For our sales team, the problem was specific: a valuable conversation followed by administration.

The 10% happens in the conversation. Hearing the hesitation behind an answer. Asking a question that helps someone articulate what they really need. Finding an unexpected way to help. Earning enough trust for the next conversation to be more honest than the first.

That is where relationships and creativity have room to do their work. The app handles the summary. Our people bring their understanding to what happens next.

And consider what it means for the team that built it. They noticed a frustration in their own working day, recognised that it could be different and created something to change it. We did not have to persuade them that the problem was worth solving. They were living with it.

That is why I believe in giving people the tools and support to try. There are possibilities scattered throughout a business that become visible when the people closest to the work can act on what they know.

The 90/10 will take shape through changes like this. A task removed here. Some attention recovered there. More of the day available for the contribution someone is uniquely equipped to make.

Who likes updating the CRM? Our team had a better use for their time. They built a way to get some of it back.

I believe relationships and creativity will have a special value in the years ahead.

As more people gain access to powerful tools, what they notice, imagine and choose to do with those tools becomes increasingly important. So does the trust that allows people to work through something difficult together.

AI can contribute ideas and help us communicate. Its capabilities will keep changing. I would hesitate to build anyone’s future around a confident list of things technology will never do.

But I do believe there is something irreducibly human in being a person who cares about another person: having a shared history, making a commitment and accepting responsibility for what happens next.

There is also something deeply personal in creativity. What catches your attention. The experiences you bring together. The question you cannot quite leave alone. The reason a particular problem matters enough for you to keep trying.

That is where I would begin looking for your superpower. What do people consistently come to you for? When do you become so absorbed that you forget about time? What do you notice that others seem to miss? And which part of your work would you gladly do more of, if the rest of the day would get out of its way?

You may need someone else to help you see it. Often, the thing that comes most naturally to us is the thing we are least inclined to recognise as valuable.

As leaders, we have a responsibility to pay attention. We need to create opportunities, provide support and give people room to discover capabilities that their current job description may never have asked them to use.

The best may still be ahead of us. I believe it is. But that future needs our participation. It asks us to stay curious, to learn and to make room for a more generous view of what people can contribute.

In that town hall, the question was whether AI would leave our people with anything valuable to do. The 90/10 asks us to consider how much valuable work they have barely had the time to begin.