Removing Friction From “Junior Work” Has Unintended Consequences

I started consulting in 2000, working almost exclusively with small businesses. The projects I was hired to complete were remarkably consistent: organizational structure and job descriptions. That was it. There was some process work and, occasionally, a review of financials, but for the most part we were helping clients establish clarity around accountability. One hand to shake. One throat to choke. It was our bread-and-butter work, and it mattered far more than most people realized.

Most of those companies already had “job descriptions,” at least technically. When ISO 9000 became a popular marketing tool in the 1990s, organizations pursuing certification were required to have job descriptions that could be audited, so they created them. Or, more accurately, they acquired them. Quality Managers would go to the public library or download collections from the internet. Titles like “Machinist,” “Safety Inspector,” and “Shipper/Receiver” were assembled into binders with minimal customization. These documents existed primarily to satisfy the auditor. It was possible, but unlikely, that the employee would receive a copy. More often, the job description sat untouched until the next audit, at which point it was updated to reflect whatever work the employee was actually doing. The document followed reality; it did not shape it.

These job descriptions were not tools for management. They were artifacts. Their existence satisfied a requirement, but they did not create understanding. No one thought deeply about them because no one needed to. They served their purpose by existing.

The work we did was fundamentally different. Writing job descriptions was how we trained junior consultants. It’s how I was trained. As the ink on my MBA dried, I found myself sitting in borrowed boardrooms across Western Canada, interviewing people whose jobs I did not yet understand. I spoke with foremen, funeral directors, chemists, administrative staff, project managers, estimators, salespeople, controllers, and owners. I asked them what they did, how they did it, and what happened when things went wrong. At first, the work felt disorienting. I was not confident I was asking the right questions, and I was not certain I understood the answers. But gradually, patterns began to emerge. The apparent chaos of daily work resolved into something intelligible.

My first project was with a cardboard box manufacturer. They purchased corrugated board and cut it into shapes for custom boxes. In one part of the facility, a group of workers, mostly Russian women, pulled apart the scored cardboard, separating usable sections from scrap. When I documented the role, I named it based on the activity I observed. I called them “Strippers.” The title was approved by management and, to my relief, enthusiastically received by the women themselves. It was an innocent mistake, but it illustrated something important. I was not copying a template. I was attempting to describe reality. In doing so, I was learning how organizations actually function.

We relied heavily on a tool called the organizational matrix, which was universally disliked. It was cumbersome and inelegant, an Excel file stretched well beyond its intended purpose. However, it forced us to examine how responsibilities were distributed across roles and where gaps or redundancies existed. Every few years, someone would propose replacing it with a library of standardized job descriptions. They were correct that templates could be created. Templates would have been faster. But speed was never the point. Templates produce documents. They do not produce understanding.

The junior consultants responsible for writing job descriptions were not merely recording information. They were developing judgment. They were learning to see patterns that were invisible to the untrained eye. After documenting enough roles across enough organizations, they could identify structural weaknesses and unclear accountability almost instinctively. This capability did not come from reading job descriptions. It came from creating them.

Clients paid us to write job descriptions, but the document itself was never the true deliverable. The value lay in the thinking that the process required. Writing a job description forced the consultant, and later the manager, to confront reality. It required them to articulate what a role existed to accomplish and how it contributed to the organization’s success. The document was simply the artifact left behind after the thinking had been done.

Today, that thinking is no longer required in the same way. Job descriptions can be generated instantly. The resulting document is often competent, sometimes excellent. The output has been preserved, but the process has been removed. What disappears with that process is the slow accumulation of understanding that once accompanied it.

The struggle of creating job descriptions was never merely administrative. It was developmental. It forced junior professionals to grapple with ambiguity, to synthesize incomplete information, and to impose clarity where none existed. Through that process, they developed the ability to understand organizations at a structural level.

This pattern extends beyond consulting. Junior programmers learn by writing imperfect code. Junior analysts learn by building flawed financial models. Junior lawyers learn by drafting contracts that must be revised. These early efforts are inefficient, but they are formative. They build the pattern recognition and judgment that define professional competence.

When that formative work disappears, the consequences are not immediately visible. The documents still exist. The systems continue to function. But over time, the pipeline that produces experienced professionals begins to weaken. The next generation inherits the outputs without inheriting the understanding that created them.

The ease with which job descriptions can now be produced is, in many ways, an achievement. It eliminates tedious work and accelerates execution. However, it also removes one of the mechanisms through which professionals learned to understand the systems they were responsible for managing.

What we lost when job descriptions became easy was not the document itself. It was the struggle that forced us to learn how organizations actually work. That struggle was never a defect in the process. It was the process.