Research program 01
Work doesn't stay still.
This program studies what happens after work begins moving through people, decisions, tools, roles, and systems.
What this program studies
The Life of Work studies how work moves, changes, and continues in organizations.
Work is often described as though it stays inside a task, role, process, or project. But the work an organization depends on is carried across all of them. It moves when someone interprets a decision, makes a judgment, hands something over, enters it into a system, or acts without the original conversation present.
The program follows that continuation. It asks what the work was meant to carry, what it encounters as it moves, what changes, and what reaches the next person or moment.
Three anchors
These are not three separate kinds of work. They are three ways of paying attention to what may be happening to the same work.
A decision made in one room can move through conversations, messages, handoffs, documents, tools, and people. Each passage becomes part of the work, even when the original decision is no longer present.
As work moves, it is interpreted and carried under different conditions. It may be clarified, reduced, expanded, separated, delayed, redirected, or joined with other work before it reaches what happens next.
Work continues through what people remember, repeat, complete, reopen, preserve, or pass forward. What follows may still carry the original purpose, or it may carry something the origin never intended.
Why follow the work
Everyone leaves knowing what was agreed.
The decision meets another role, system, priority, or condition.
The work moves forward, but not always in the form that first left the room.
This doesn't mean someone failed. It means clarity at the start is only one part of what determines what the work later becomes.
Evidence from adjacent research
These findings do not validate The Life of Work as a complete framework. They show that information movement, shared understanding, and coordination are already consequential subjects across adjacent research.
Across the Microsoft 365 applications studied, the average employee spent 57% of observed time communicating through meetings, email, and chat, compared with 43% creating in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
Measured within the Microsoft 365 applications studied. Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2023A meta-analysis covering 4,795 groups and 17,279 people found that information sharing positively predicted team performance. It was also related to cohesion, decision satisfaction, and knowledge integration.
Mesmer-Magnus & DeChurch, 2009In Microsoft's 2026 global survey of 20,000 AI users, organizational factors such as culture, manager support, and talent practices accounted for more than twice the modeled importance associated with reported AI impact compared with individual mindset and behavior: 67% versus 32%.
Based on self-reported measures. The result shows statistical association, not a causal effect. Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2026Each finding points beyond the isolated task. The Life of Work studies that wider movement: how information, decisions, and responsibility travel through people and systems, and how that movement shapes what the work becomes.
These findings support the importance of studying what happens between people, decisions, and coordinated action. They don't establish The Life of Work as an empirically validated framework.
Current development
The Life of Work has an established conceptual foundation. Its current framework has been shaped through organizational observation, existing scholarship, and sustained conceptual development.
Formal empirical study is still being developed. TISIC doesn't present organizational observation as though it were a completed empirical research program, and the framework remains open to testing, refinement, and revision.
The framework has been shaped by sustained attention to what happens around decisions, handoffs, coordination, and the continuation of work inside organizations.
The program develops in conversation with established work across organizational studies, management, systems thinking, communication, and related fields.
Language and relationships are refined as the framework becomes clearer. A useful concept should help us notice more without pretending to explain more than the evidence allows.
Research being shared
The framework is being shared in conceptual and leadership settings while its formal research program continues to develop.
Scheduled for a private online publication event. Public access is not available for this event.
ICLM 2026: 20th International Conference on Leadership and Management · Amsterdam, Netherlands · Online
Conference detailsFrom research to application
Selected ideas from The Life of Work inform applied organizational work offered through the private consulting firm led by Dr. Liz Núñez. TISIC develops and studies the research. The consulting firm determines how selected ideas may be used with organizations.
Explore applied workContinue through TISIC