From the book · Collapse or Collapse
The end of the department
Departments exist because no single person could hold every skill a result needs. So companies cut work by skill and hired managers to pass it between desks. Collapse or Collapse argues that AI agents have removed that constraint, and with it the reason for the department.
The workaround
From Adam Smith’s pin factory to the modern org chart, each generation added a layer to the cut, honestly, because each was answering the same constraint with the best tools it had. The business school taught the workaround as a science.
The price
Every time an outcome crosses from one desk to the next, three things leak: context, urgency and ownership. The customer feels the sum as delay; inside, everyone did his part and nobody owns the whole.
Why AI inside each department is not enough
Putting an agent at every desk is a motor where the steam engine stood. Every desk gets faster and the customer still waits, because the time was lost between the desks. The gain comes when the work is rebuilt around the outcome.
What replaces it
Outcomes, each a result someone outside the company would miss, run as vectors: chains of agents held by a pair of humans at the gates. Every former function becomes either an agent or an Outcome. A longer page on the same argument is The End of Departments.
Read more in the book
Questions this page answers
Will AI agents replace departments?
Collapse or Collapse argues they remove the reason for them. Departments were a workaround for the fact that no one person could hold every skill a result needs; a chain of agents can.
What happens to the work a department did?
Work that produces a result becomes an Outcome; work that serves a result becomes an agent inside the chains that need it. There is no third thing.
Why isn’t adding AI to each department enough?
Because the delay is between the desks, in handoffs and queues, not at them. The book calls this paving the cow path.
A short guide to one idea in Collapse or Collapse by Vinay Pasricha. The book’s own words are in the chapters linked above. The full text, as plain text.