When the work no longer has to pass through the other part, what else do we stop producing?
AI can do the job.
It can’t be the other party to it.
a debt forms
Every team carries some. We show you where it has accumulated, and what can be taken out of the pile. See where yours sits.
Three moments take thirty seconds, anonymous · team maps for 10–150 people
Try it on three ordinary moments.
Not a crisis. A Tuesday. Place each one where it sits from where you sit.
No name, no job title. Your position is kept only so the answers can be read by role.
Place the moment.
That’s where you put them.
That’s one position in the work.
Where would your team put them?
Put the same moments in front of your team and watch what happens. The same moment lands in different places, because different roles see different work.
Where the differences repeat, the map begins.
Your answers are anonymous. No name, no account, no tracking: they are counted by position and nothing else.
What you just placed has a name.
In each of those moments the work got done. But something the team still needed wasn’t made.
- relational debt
- Relational debt forms when the work moves on without something it needed from the other part: your role, a colleague’s difference, the group and its task. It accumulates when that way of working becomes what is valued, what is allowed.
It forms in ordinary moments of work. It isn’t a crisis: the work seems to close, and nothing really breaks.
But it accumulates, because it becomes
- a habit,
- what is valued,
- what is allowed.
And then it turns into:
It comes back wearing a different face.
It turns into “we went ahead on a guess”; “juniors are lazy”; “what are we actually saving?”; “nobody said anything”; and one person still chasing it at nine at night. It comes back wearing a different face.
We map the pile with your team, and take something out of it.
- See where it sits
Sixty minutes, across roles. Read by role, never by person.
- See what it’s turning into
The faces it wears in your team, and who is carrying it.
- Take one thing out
The team picks one passage in the work to automate, protect or redesign.
Start with a map of your team.
Sixty minutes · 10–150 people · in person or remote. You leave with the map, and one moment to work on.
£2,500 up to 50 people
£3,500 above 50
Why should I bother? Most organisations already pay for all five of these.
What if five separate costs begin in the same missing production?
- Retention & wellbeingPeople / HRBurnout, turnover, the same few people always stretched.Too much was carried by too few people.
- Learning & developmentL&D“Juniors are lazy.” Skills don’t transfer.The doubt went to the AI, not to a colleague. Nobody became able.
- AI adoptionAI / transformationTools are used, but privately. The ROI doesn’t show.A tool filled a gap the team never named.
- Operations & deliveryOperationsRework. Checking, chasing, signing off.Nothing came back, so the work went ahead on a guess.
- Strategy & alignmentLeadershipTeams can’t act together on the same plan.A difference was never worked.
AI can do the task.It can’t be the other party to it.
- It canbut not be the one who
- answer the question.asks why.
- write the decision.stands behind it.
- fill what you don’t know.holds you to knowing.
This was always possible. AI made it the normal way to work. And keeping a human in the loop doesn’t settle it.
Approving is not producing.
Work produces two things at once: the output, and what makes producing again possible. Only the first is counted.
What if the ROI doesn’t add up because the organisation runs on two economies?
- Outputcounted
- Time saved by AIcounted
- Cost per taskcounted
- Speedcounted
- Judgementnot recorded
- Ownershipnot recorded
- A colleague who became ablenot recorded
- The capacity to keep producingnot recorded
ROI that counts one economy is borrowing from the other.
Start with a map of your team: sixty minutes, across roles, and one moment to take out of the pile.
Book a callaltraparte
altra parte: the other party. The one we can’t make it without.
I’m Bianca, an organisational psychologist. For fifteen years I’ve worked in the gap between what organisations say, what they measure, and what they try to change. I’ve made it my work to help them see that gap, and work with it, now that AI is widening it.
I teach on the Tavistock’s programme in consulting and leading in organisations, looking at what happens beneath the formal structure of work.
altraparte is how I bring that into teams: in the room, by role, on ordinary Tuesdays.
A presto, Bianca
London · working with teams across Europe · LinkedIn
altraparte × Deft
With Deft, the AI transformation studio, we bring this work to marketing teams, where the output arrives fastest and the passages close first.
They redesign how the work gets made. We map what the work stopped producing between the people making it.
What still needs the other part?
Thirty minutes about your team, what AI is changing in it, and whether a team map is the right next step. If it isn’t, I’ll say so.