Position crafting
A task pile is what your job description says. A position is what breaks if you leave.
Dorka Nagy-Józsa, Horizontal Thinking (2027)
AI might not take your job. But if your job is a pile of tasks, nothing else, your job is gone. Horizontal Thinking doesn't stop at the diagnosis: it gives the way out a name and five steps. Position crafting.
The short version
Stop defending your tasks. Start building your position.
The two halves are not equally hard. Stopping the defense is an afternoon's decision. Building the position is a practice - which is the good news, because practices can be started on any given Monday.
The pressure is already in writing. Gartner predicted in October 2024 that through 2026, 20 percent of organizations would use AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of their current middle management positions. PwC's 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer found job ads asking for AI skills carry a 56 percent wage premium, up from 25 percent a year earlier. Middle management was invented as infrastructure for information - summaries up, instructions down. Now information moves by itself.
Why defending feels rational
Everywhere, people defend tasks that are already dead: Excel reports with the open rate of a cookie policy, approval chains guarded like family land. They believe, sincerely, that this is job security. It's the opposite. Every defended dead task is a countdown.
The defense has well-documented psychology behind it. Thaler's endowment effect: we overvalue whatever is already ours - my report, my approval step, my meeting. Add years of sunk cost, and you get the cruelest pattern: the better someone is at a dying task, the longer they defend it. Skill becomes the sedative.
What a position actually is
Test the difference on anyone in your building. If a person disappears for three weeks and the workflow hiccups but recovers, that was a task pile with a salary attached. If a person disappears for three weeks and two departments stop understanding each other, a client relationship cools and three decisions stall for lack of one person's read on the data - that's a position.
A position has exactly two components:
- Outcomes you ownNot things you do. Things where, if they fail, the failure is yours by name - not by committee.
- BridgesConnections you personally built across teams, functions and domains. Two years of small kept promises. They live in people, not in any system of record.
- Everything elseCargo. Owned outcomes plus bridges is the position; the rest of your calendar is what the machine will carry.
The five steps
- Run the ruthless audit.Label two weeks of calendar - every meeting, task and email - Automatable, Augmentable or Human-only. Overrule your gut when it lobbies for the third tag. If more than half lands in the first two, you've found your vulnerability. Act on it before your CFO does: finance runs the same audit, and their version has no Human-only column.
- Sprint toward what the machine can't do.AI can describe an ambiguity beautifully; it can't sit inside one with people who have something to lose. Forty minutes in a room with one human who can hold the discomfort changes what a twelve-second summary can't.
- Build functional bridges.Don't be the one who organizes the meeting. Be the one without whom the meeting has no point. “I've scheduled the follow-up with logistics” is automatable. “I talked to logistics and finance before this call - here are the two options that survive both” is a bridge.
- Become the visible face of AI literacy.Take the report you tagged Automatable, automate it with your company's approved tools, and show the room exactly how. The person who brings AI competence to the team is the one the restructuring consults, not the one it removes.
- Make the invisible visible.Mentoring, de-escalating conflicts, connecting departments - if your boss can't list a single one, then on the org chart you do nothing. One evidence paragraph in your monthly report: facts, not adjectives. Six minutes to write.
From things you do to things you own
Deciding is easy. Owning is the part we build whole org charts to avoid.
A task can be delegated - to a junior, a supplier, and now an agent. A problem can be delegated too. Ownership can't: when something breaks, the consequences need somewhere to live, and they live at a name, never at a committee. AI will out-analyze you by breakfast. It will never outbid you on “mine.”
That is why the book's inversion matters for every career: the job description of 2030 is not a list of things you do. It's a list of things you own. Rewrite one job description as five owned outcomes instead of twenty tasks, and watch how fast the salary conversation changes.
Shortage people
The market already pays for the finished product. In 2022 a former client of Dorka's walked out of a final-round interview for a senior executive role - sky-high salary, large company car - at the moment the dress code came up. One sentence from the piece she wrote about him outlived the rest:
We don't have shortage professions anymore. We have shortage people.
The shortage person's profile holds across industries: experienced, decision-capable, able to place a diplomatic question mark under the CEO's favorite idea, pushes things through resistance, learns something new every day, and spots work lying on the ground without anyone handing over a list. Not one tool, certification or task in it. A task pile is something you are handed. A position is something you find on the ground and pick up.
Building across domains like this is horizontal thinking in practice.
In the book
This page draws on Chapter 5 (Owning - The Last Human Act) and Chapter 6 (Position, Not Task Pile) of Horizontal Thinking: Leadership after the end of the specialist era by Dorka Nagy-Józsa, PCC, published by Y2Y Ltd. on January 1, 2027. The book has fifteen chapters and two letters from the future, and every chapter ends with something you can actually do on Monday.
Dorka Nagy-Józsa is CEO of Y2Y Ltd., an ICF PCC coach and an international keynote speaker on AI and leadership.
Questions
What is position crafting?
Position crafting is Dorka Nagy-Józsa's five-step method, from her book Horizontal Thinking, for turning a job made of tasks into a position AI can't replace: run a ruthless audit of your calendar, sprint toward what the machine can't do, build functional bridges, become the visible face of AI literacy, and make your invisible work visible.
What is the difference between a task pile and a position?
A task pile is what your job description says; a position is what breaks if you leave. A position has two components: outcomes you own by name, and bridges - the connections you have personally built across teams and domains. Everything else on your calendar is cargo the machine will increasingly carry.
How do I make my job AI-proof?
The book argues there are no future-proof skills; tool skills now have a shelf life of months. What lasts is a position: owning outcomes with your name on them and building bridges between people and domains. Hand over the automatable tasks voluntarily, publicly, and invest the freed time in owned outcomes.
Will AI replace middle managers?
The book cites Gartner's October 2024 prediction that through 2026, 20 percent of organizations would use AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions. Middle management was built as infrastructure for moving information; managers whose work is mostly moving information are most exposed, while those who own outcomes and build bridges become more valuable.
Where does position crafting come from?
From Chapter 6 (Position, Not Task Pile) of Horizontal Thinking: Leadership after the end of the specialist era by Dorka Nagy-Józsa, PCC, published by Y2Y Ltd. on January 1, 2027.
Read the whole argument.
Horizontal Thinking is published on January 1, 2027. The Kindle edition is open for pre-order now; the paperback goes on sale on Amazon the same day.