Pick one workflow and decide, step by step, what a machine takes on and what stays with a person. It takes about ninety minutes, alone or with the team, and ends with a one-page brief for every machine step: the rule it follows, what catches a mistake, and who can switch it off.
Start with something the team does every week: chasing an unpaid invoice, answering a complaint, bringing on a new hire. Write down how it really happens, not how the process doc says it does. Then ask one question of every step: is this a rule, or a judgment call? The answers decide where a machine goes. Once it’s there, steps can move, merge, or disappear.
It started as a deck of cards on a conference table. Dozens of teams, from retail to asset management, have used it to redesign real workflows and pilot them. The deck is a free PDF.
No server, no account, and no AI reading your answers. Everything saves in this browser. It leaves only if you share a link, save a file, or paste the brief into your own AI.
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Here’s a worked example — the Associated Press’s earnings desk, a real newsroom that really did automate this — after one afternoon with the cards: which step a machine takes over, what it reads, how we know it got it right, and who can pull the plug. Yours will look like this.