Out of Context: The Unfinished Redesign Work

Previously published as Out of Context: We Built the Future of Work. It Doesn't Work. by Thorsten Fuchs and Anna-Sophie Fuchs. Work became more capable. Why did it become harder to hold together?Cloud and mobile computing became ordinary. Knowledge became portable. Hierarchies were shortened, offices made flexible, and generative AI brings powerful capability directly into professional work. The gains are real. But leaders still have to decide what an AI result warrants for a workflow, a job, or staffing; managers inherit work that disappeared from the chart; and employees lose entry tasks through which judgment once grew.Much of the future arrived as capability. It remained unarrived as a dependable settlement.Out of Context explains why. Capability did not automatically compose with the rights, formation, management, voice, authority, consequence, and correction that make work dependable and good. Removing a structure did not remove its work. Making knowledge available did not reproduce judgment. A choice reversible for the company may remain irreversible for the person.Across four parts, the book shows readers how to: - separate a task result from a workflow, job, staffing, or closure decision;- find hidden work and burden transfer behind a proposed removal;- protect formation when tools absorb entry tasks;- allocate management work, authority, and consequence; and- act under uncertainty without treating uncertainty as permission to abandon responsibility. The book is also a public self-correction. In 2015 Thorsten Fuchs, then publishing as Thorsten Hübschen, co-authored Out of Office with Elke Frank, arguing for flexible, connected, self-directed knowledge work. With Anna-Sophie Fuchs, he returns to that wager: what did its record establish, what did it only hope would follow, and what did the intervening decade teach? Good Work did not become obsolete. Our shortcut to it did.Neither an AI forecast nor a defence of old hierarchy, Out of Context is a research-led business book for executives, managers, organisational designers, employee representatives, advisers, and public institutions facing consequential decisions about how work changes.