The Song of Significance

by Seth Godin

The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. BEN ZANDER, BOSTON PHILHARMONIC 28. Stakes and Trust When we consider the four kinds of work, we can lay them out in a two-by-two grid with stakes and trust as the two axes. High-stakes, low-trust work is the work assigned by the industrialist. This is meeting spec. Test and measure. Surveillance. Traditional management lives in this quadrant. This is how you successfully run a fast-food franchise. Every customer is important, and every output needs to be identical. Low-stakes, low-trust work is similar, except it’s easily outsourced. This isn’t work your organization needs to take seriously or personally. When Amazon needed to label ten thousand images, they built the Mechanical Turk, a program that allows anyone in the world to make a few pennies doing piecework. Now work like this is done by AI and machine learning. Assign the same work to one hundred bots and, sooner or later, it’ll get done. The next quadrant is for work that is low stakes but high trust. This is the work of culture creation, of community, of people we care about showing up each day to contribute a bit to the whole. The work is consistent, but it’s human, not industrial. The shifts caused by pandemic disruptions, outsourcing, work from home, and AI have disrupted this quadrant. And the final quadrant, the most important one, is the work with high stakes and high trust. This is s...