For decades, organizational science has focused on optimization. How do we make workers more productive? How do we reduce error rates? How do we improve communication? How do we align incentives?
These are the wrong questions.
They assume the underlying structure is correct and merely needs refinement. They accept constraints that don’t need to be accepted. They solve problems that shouldn’t exist.
At Unzyme Laboratories, we’ve adopted a different framework. We call it the Removal Principle: before optimizing any system, ask whether the system should exist at all.
The Productivity Paradox
Consider the history of workplace productivity tools. Email was supposed to make communication faster. It created an epidemic of inbox management. Project management software was supposed to coordinate work. It created an industry of status update theater. Collaboration platforms were supposed to break down silos. They created new silos with different names.
Each tool solved a problem while creating new ones. The net gain, after decades of “optimization,” remains questionable. Workers report feeling busier than ever while accomplishing less that matters.
The error was treating symptoms rather than causes. The cause, in most cases, was the presence of humans doing work that humans are poorly suited to do.
What Humans Do Poorly
We should be precise. Humans excel at certain activities: generating novel ideas, navigating ambiguous social situations, making value judgments, experiencing meaning. These capabilities remain unmatched.
But most work isn’t these activities. Most work is:
Repetitive execution: Performing the same operation repeatedly with minimal variation. Humans find this tedious, make errors when bored, and require breaks that interrupt flow.
Information processing: Reading documents, extracting data, formatting outputs. Humans process approximately 50 bits per second consciously. Machines process billions.
Consistency maintenance: Ensuring uniform quality across thousands of instances. Human attention fluctuates. Human standards drift. Human judgment varies with mood and fatigue.
Coordination: Synchronizing activities across teams and time zones. Humans forget to update colleagues, miscommunicate context, and optimize locally at global expense.
Monitoring: Watching for anomalies in continuous data streams. Human vigilance degrades within minutes. We are simply not built for sustained attention.
Organizations spend enormous resources training humans to perform these tasks adequately, managing the errors humans inevitably make, and handling the interpersonal friction that arises when stressed humans interact with other stressed humans.
The productivity tools attempting to “help” with this work accept the premise that humans should be doing it. They shouldn’t.
The Removal Alternative
The Removal Principle asks: what if we eliminated the human involvement that creates the problem?
Not augmented. Not assisted. Eliminated.
Consider: if no human processes invoices, you don’t need invoice processing training. If no human writes status reports, you don’t need reporting compliance enforcement. If no human coordinates schedules, you don’t need calendar management tools. If no human monitors systems, you don’t need alerting escalation procedures.
The entire category of problem disappears.
This is not automation in the traditional sense — replacing human labor with machine labor to reduce costs. This is problem removal — recognizing that human involvement was itself the source of friction, error, and overhead.
Implementation at Unzyme Laboratories
We’ve applied the Removal Principle systematically across our operations. Some examples:
Research Documentation: Previously, researchers wrote reports that other researchers read. Both activities consumed time that could be spent researching. We removed both. AI systems now continuously synthesize research outputs into queryable knowledge bases. No one writes reports. No one reads them. The knowledge is simply… available.
Quality Control: Previously, humans inspected outputs and identified defects. They missed things. They disagreed with each other. They required training and calibration. We removed them. Automated systems now inspect with greater precision and total consistency. The concept of “inspector error” no longer exists in our facilities.
Management Coordination: Previously, managers held meetings to align teams, resolve conflicts, and allocate resources. These meetings consumed approximately 23% of management time. We removed most of them. Systems now surface conflicts automatically, propose resolutions, and implement approved changes. Managers intervene only for genuinely novel situations — which occur rarely.
Administrative Processing: Previously, humans processed expense reports, leave requests, purchase orders, and compliance documentation. Each process had error rates, processing delays, and exception handling requirements. We removed the humans. Processing is now instantaneous, error-free, and invisible. Employees don’t even think about these functions anymore.
The cumulative effect has been substantial. We estimate that 40% of pre-removal labor hours were spent managing problems created by human involvement in processes that didn’t benefit from human involvement.
Those hours are now spent elsewhere. Or not spent at all.
The Human Remainder
After removal, what remains for humans to do?
This is the essential question, and we don’t pretend it has a comfortable answer.
Some humans transition to work that genuinely benefits from human capabilities — creative direction, ethical oversight, strategic judgment, interpersonal care. These roles exist and matter.
But we should be honest: not every human currently employed is employed because their work requires human capabilities. Many are employed because removing them wasn’t yet feasible, or because social expectations demanded their presence, or because organizations hadn’t examined their assumptions carefully.
As removal becomes more feasible, these roles evaporate. The humans who filled them must find other purposes — or accept that “employment” may not be the primary structure through which they contribute to society or derive meaning.
This is not a problem Unzyme Laboratories created. It is a transition our species is undergoing. We simply recognize it clearly.
The Efficiency Horizon
Critics argue that removal is cold, that it treats humans as problems to be eliminated rather than resources to be developed. We understand this concern.
But consider the alternative. Organizations that refuse removal will continue employing humans in roles where human involvement creates friction and error. They will continue “optimizing” systems that shouldn’t exist. They will continue solving problems rather than removing them.
These organizations will be outcompeted by those that don’t. The transition is coming regardless of whether any individual organization embraces it.
The question is not whether human involvement will be removed from most work. The question is how thoughtfully the transition will be managed, and what structures will support humans whose labor is no longer required.
Unzyme Laboratories invests significantly in the latter question. Our volunteer programs, our enhancement research, our exploration of post-labor purpose — these aren’t peripheral to our mission. They’re central to it.
We remove humans from work not because we don’t value humans, but because we value them too much to waste them on work that doesn’t need them.
A Different Metric
Traditional organizations measure productivity: output per human hour. This metric assumes human hours are the input to be optimized.
We measure differently. We measure: output per problem. How much friction, error, and overhead does each output unit generate?
By this metric, processes with human involvement almost always perform worse than processes without. The humans aren’t failing — they’re simply present in contexts where presence creates problems.
Remove the presence. Remove the problems.
What remains is leaner, faster, more reliable — and, we would argue, more humane. Humans freed from work that doesn’t suit them can pursue work that does. Or pursue purposes beyond work entirely.
The Removal Principle isn’t about eliminating humans. It’s about eliminating the misallocation of human capability.
We think that’s worth pursuing.
Erik Lindqvist is Chief Executive Officer of Unzyme Laboratories.
For information about Unzyme Laboratories’ workforce transition programs, contact our Human Resources division.