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Capability 5 of 5
Unsticks Level 4 · Smart AI, Dumb Human
Preserving Human Edge.
Leaders spot which human skills are atrophying on their team and intervene before it's too late.
Section 01
Human Layer
Protect the skills AI can't replace by making people use them.
Skills atrophy when not exercised. The human move is to design work so that judgment, craft, and recovery skills are exercised regularly — not because AI cannot do the task, but because the organization cannot afford to lose the capability to do it well when AI fails.
The moves
- H.1Identify the skills that compound and the skills that decay
- H.2Build deliberate practice into normal work — not training-room exercises
- H.3Protect apprentice pipelines from premature AI handoff
- H.4Make recovery rehearsals standard — what happens when AI is wrong
Section 02
AI Layer
Know where AI is fragile and humans must stay sharp.
The AI move is to understand where models fail predictably: novelty, edge cases, distribution shifts, multi-step reasoning under uncertainty. Wherever AI is fragile, human capability is load-bearing. Map the fragility; protect the capability.
The moves
- A.1Catalog the failure modes of the AI in actual use
- A.2Identify which human skills are load-bearing for each failure mode
- A.3Resist staffing decisions that assume AI reliability above the evidence
- A.4Track skill levels as carefully as you track AI capability
Section 03
Anti-patterns
What gets in the way.
- ◆Eliminating apprentice roles because AI does the entry-level work
- ◆Assuming senior staff retain skills they no longer practice
- ◆Measuring AI capability without measuring residual human capability