Navigating the Exoskeletons of Modern Work

If you’ve ever watched those exoskeleton demos, you know the feeling: looks amazing… until it doesn’t. In the video, someone lifts a car. In real life, they can’t climb a curb. That’s how a lot of teams run their day — wrapped in a mechanical suit of tools that slow them down.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we do that to ourselves at work. We strap on an ERP, a ticketing system, a PowerPoint habit, and 12 “just in case” apps. Then we add two-factor everywhere, remote work layers, governance, “quick” reports — and wonder why a simple task moves like a mollusk.

The promise is familiar: “military-grade,” “enterprise-ready,” “future-proof.” The reality is friction. Great people at or near peak performance get encumbered by a shell built to protect leadership comfort more than to enable frontline work.

Here’s where it lands for me: developers often escape the worst of this because their culture rewards repeatability. They can put on blinders and ship. In other functions — marketing, ops, sales — the blinder move is harder. Work becomes reaction, not ritual. And when reporting is king, the process warps to serve the report. The work stops; the report keeps going.

We’ve all lived the absurd version. I once watched a simple improvement get blocked because it would “break the metric.” Automating a response would have dropped measured time from two days to two seconds, which sounded bad on a dashboard designed for a different era. The fix? Make the automation toggleable per client so the report wouldn’t change. That’s not innovation. That’s cosplay.

The turn: exoskeletons aren’t bad. They’re just purpose-built. In nature, shells protect slow, localized organisms. If your strategy is to move fast and adapt, you can’t wear a lobster suit. If your strategy is to survive storms and stay put, a shell works — but don’t expect sprint speed.

So how do you keep structure from becoming shrapnel?

• Start with the motion, not the metric. Define the human movement you’re optimizing: who needs to do what, by when, and what “done” looks like. Tools should amplify that motion, not dictate it.

• Build the ritual with the report inside it. A good ritual contains its own proof. If your stand-up, handoff, QA, or closeout produces the signal leadership needs, you don’t need a separate “TPS” layer. Measure the outcome where the work happens.

• Design for shedding. Exoskeletons fail when you can’t molt. Add an explicit “expiry” to dashboards, workflows, and approvals. If a report isn’t used for 60 days, it goes dark by default. If a rule blocks throughput twice without preventing real risk, it gets reviewed.

• Unblock as a job description. The manager’s #1 role is to remove friction. That means you spend disproportionate time on the shop floor (or Zoom floor) finding the drag and tearing it out — even if it makes a pretty report uglier for a quarter.

• Protect real innovations from bad incentives. When a metric fights a material improvement, change the metric. Institutionalize an escape hatch so teams don’t have to “toggle” good ideas to keep dashboards happy.

If you need armor, choose armor. If you need speed, choose tendons. Just don’t make your best people peel grapes in a power loader.

Process Debt Truth: Most exoskeletons begin as safety and harden into shackles when no one owns the molt.