A mindset cannot be paged at six in the morning

In August 2025 Workday published its answer to the question this series is about. It is called the Chief Work Officer, and Workday is careful to say what it is not: "not a single role, but rather, a crucial mindset and collective effort," to be held by an individual or by a cross-functional team, and in any case "not a CHRO torch only."

Much of what Workday describes is sensible. The five areas it lists, human-machine collaboration, the redesign of roles, strategic readiness, the spread of skills, and responsible governance, are the right areas. The insistence that every executive must participate is correct; a chief human resources officer cannot do this alone. And the vocabulary of designing work rather than reacting to technology is the right vocabulary.

The flaw is in the one word Workday chose to avoid. A mindset cannot be held accountable. When an agent in customer operations gives a thousand customers the wrong answer overnight, or an agent in recruitment screens out a class of applicants for a reason nobody can reconstruct, someone has to get the call at six in the morning. A mindset does not get the call. A cross-functional team does not get the call; it convenes a meeting at nine. The call goes to a person, and in most organisations today that person has not been named, which is why the first response to an agent failure is almost always a search for who was supposed to be watching.

There is an old principle in organisation design that responsibility distributed to everyone is held by no one. It is not a cynical principle. It describes what happens to well-meaning people when a task belongs to a group: each assumes another is attending to it, and all are partly right. Workday's "collective effort" is an invitation to exactly that failure, dressed as inclusiveness.

I should be fair about why a software company might prefer a mindset to a role. A role implies a buyer, a budget and a set of responsibilities that a product can serve or fail to serve. A mindset implies that everyone should be thinking differently, which conveniently means everyone should be using the platform. Workday launched a product to manage all of an organisation's AI agents in one place earlier the same year. The Chief Work Officer as mindset is not a cynical construction, but it is one that fits the vendor's interests better than the organisation's.

The alternative is to accept the five areas and give them an owner. The Chief Workforce Officer I have proposed holds the composition of the workforce, the allocation of work between people and agents, the measurement of the whole capacity's performance, and the governance of the agents' lifecycle. The CWO does not do this alone, any more than a chief financial officer runs the finances alone. But the CWO is the one who signs, and the one whose phone rings.

Workday's version gets one thing exactly right: it says this is about designing work, not adopting tools. Then it declines to say who designs it. That is the sentence the organisation most needs, and it is the one a mindset cannot supply.