It was working. Nobody could tell.

A twenty agent real estate brokerage automated part of its nurturing sequence. Every message went out on schedule, correctly formatted, with every field populated from the right record. Nothing in the system reported a fault.

What the sequence had stopped carrying was what the agent knew about the family. That had never been written down as a step, because to the people doing it, it was not a step. It was what you say to someone you met on a Saturday.

Automation almost never fails at the task. It fails at the check. And whether anyone can still run that check depends on whether anyone left in the building could do the work themselves.

What is in it: three conditions that decide whether a task is eligible for automation, and a fourth that decides whether it stays eligible. Why the tasks people most want to automate are the ones that qualify least. A 1983 control engineering paper arguing that the supervisor of an automated process must be more skilled, not less. The randomised trial in which expert developers were 19 percent slower and believed they were 20 percent faster. What the 47 percent employment figure actually says, and the backtest it failed.

One chapter argues against the author. It carries a controlled result that contradicts his position on expertise, presented as a correction rather than buried. Another credits its central mechanism to a paper he had not read until this book was researched, and says so in the text.

Volume VI of Principles of Practice, published by the National Board of Operations Professionals, a standards body for business operations practice.

Purchase of this book is not required in order to sit any National Board of Operations Professionals assessment and confers no advantage. The assessment is built from the published standard, not from this book.