Hi ,
Over the last fortnight we’ve travelled a little. Two weeks ago, we said that knowing your Sparketype® was never the destination, just the trailhead. Last week, we widened the frame: your job is not your only work, and the person who does the paid work gets fed by everything else you pour yourself into.
This week, I want to sit with the question underneath a lot of the somewhat anxiety I’m noticing right now. Not the loud, headline kind. The kind that shows up at your desk on an ordinary Tuesday.
The problem: “If a machine can do what I do, what am I for?”
We’ve built machines that can do the doing. Drafting. Summarising. Analysing. Designing. Coding. At three in the morning. For free.
And so capable, accomplished people, people who are genuinely good at what they do, feel a small voice at the desk. How long before this needs me less?
It doesn’t announce itself as a crisis. It looks like a productivity story. Faster reports. Cleaner decks. More done before lunch. But underneath the efficiency is something quieter and more personal. An identity question.
Here’s the thing. The machine can do what you do. That’s only frightening if you’ve confused what you do with who you are.
For most of history, we answered “who are you?” by naming a job. Try it now. Tell me who you are without naming what you do for a living. Most people can’t get three sentences in.
Somewhere along the way, we handed our identity to the very thing the machine is now coming for.
A thought leader worth hearing on this:
The researcher Amy Wrzesniewski once studied hospital cleaners. Same job title. Same mop. Same corridors. Same pay.
And she found two very different groups of people.
One group described the work as exactly what it said on the roster. Cleaning rooms. Emptying bins. Doing the tasks and going home. Fair enough.
The other group, in the identical job, told a completely different story. They talked about caring for frightened patients. Timing their work so they wouldn’t wake someone who’d finally fallen asleep. Brightening the room of a person who hadn’t had a visitor in weeks.
One group was cleaning. The other, in the very same job, was healing.
The insight: The difference wasn’t the job. It was who they were being inside it. Who you are doesn’t decorate your work. It changes it. Wrzesniewski and her colleague Jane Dutton gave this a lovely name, “job crafting”: reshaping the work you already have so more of you comes through it. Same role. More of you in it.
The implication: In a world where the machine can copy the tasks, the most durable, valuable thing you own is who you are and how you bring it to the work. Your judgement. Your taste. Your imagination. Your care. The way you read a room and decide what actually matters.
That isn’t code. That’s you.
How this actually gets solved — in the real world.
Let me offer you a reframe, because I think it matters.
You’re not being made redundant. You’re being made available.
As the machine gets better at the doing, value doesn’t vanish. It moves. It moves to judgement, to taste, to imagination, to deciding what’s worth deciding, to being unmistakably human. Picture the person who stops spending their afternoons formatting the report the machine can now write, and starts spending them on the problem nobody has cracked yet. They didn’t lose their job. They finally got to do the part of it worth having.
The machine takes the tasks. You get yourself back.
This week, write down the tasks in your week a machine could do, or soon will. Then, on a separate list, write what only you bring. Your Sparketype® in action. The second list, is where to invest.
Think of your Sparketype® as a compass, not a map. A map gives you one route, and that route is obsolete the moment the ground shifts. A compass just tells you which direction is true for you, however the ground moves. And right now, the ground is moving.
And then the bigger turn, the one this whole arc is quietly walking toward.
You’re not a noun. You’re a verb. You’re a becoming.
Which changes the question. Not just who am I? but who am I becoming?
Sit with that one. We’re not done with it yet.
Tie the bow: what the machine can’t take, for each Sparketype®.
• The Maven (I live to learn): a machine can summarise anything, but it can’t love learning, or bring back the question nobody thought to ask.
• The Maker (I make ideas manifest): it can generate endlessly, but it can’t care what’s actually worth making.
• The Scientist (I figure things out): it can process, but it can’t feel the itch of the problem that matters.
• The Essentialist (I create order from chaos): it can sort, but it can’t build order that serves people and meaning.
• The Performer (I turn moments into magic): it can perform, but it can’t be alive in the room, in the live moment, with you.
• The Sage (I awaken insight): it can explain, but it can’t feel the moment someone else finally understands.
• The Warrior (I gather and lead people): it can organise, but people don’t choose to follow a machine. They follow a person.
• The Advisor (I guide to grow): it can advise, but it can’t walk beside you as someone who truly believes in you.
• The Advocate (I’m your champion): it can argue, but it can’t bring conviction and courage on someone’s behalf.
• The Nurturer (I’ve got you): it can respond, but it can’t be a human who chose to care for you.
Same machine. Ten different things it can never be.
The Practical Move
Something to sit with this week.
Write the two lists. What a machine could do in your work, and what only you bring.
Then look at your week honestly and ask yourself:
Which list is getting most of my hours?
In November, something we’ve been building opens its doors, built for exactly this question: who am I becoming? Next week, I’ll tell you what it is.
The machine can have the tasks. We’ll keep the becoming.
Talk soon,
Mark & The Sparked Team
***
One more thing, for the coaches, leaders, and people-practitioners reading.
Your clients and your teams are carrying this one, mostly in silence. The quiet voice at the desk doesn’t tend to say itself out loud in a one-on-one.
Helping someone separate what they do from who they are, and then helping them invest in what only they bring, may be among the most important work of this decade. It’s not a soft skill anymore. It’s the skill.
That’s the heart of our Certified Sparketype® Advisor (CSA) program. It’s a 12-week certification. The current cohort is underway, and applications are now open for the next one, starting in the new year. [Learn more ]
PS – For more daily ‘sparks’, follow @sparked.nexton Instagram
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