Work-slop Is Flooding Your Organisation. Borrowed Coherence Built It.

The word of the moment in corporate America is work-slop: AI-generated output that looks like finished work and quietly transfers the real work to whoever receives it. Researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford found the phenomenon widespread, with employees describing polished but hollow content that forced them to decode and often redo what a colleague appeared to have completed (Niederhoffer et al., 2025). The productivity the sender claims becomes a productivity tax the receiver pays.

Most executives treat workslop as a junior problem, something for line managers to police. That is exactly backwards. In my research across 6,000 executive leaders, the most consequential slop in any organisation is produced at the top, because seniority strips away the people willing to challenge it. A graduate\'s hollow memo gets caught in review. A chief executive\'s hollow strategy paper gets adopted as direction.

The mechanism

The engine underneath work-slop is what I call borrowed coherence. AI supplies fluency on demand, and fluency has always been the currency of executive credibility. A document can now carry the rhythm and confidence of deep thought without any thought having occurred. The board reads conviction, and the organisation executes conviction. Nobody notices that the conviction was never earned, and that is the quiet failure in its purest form: no incident, no alarm, just an institution slowly running on prose instead of judgement.

I remember reading a strategy paper that had come up to an executive committee I was advising for an Energy sector client in the Middle East. It was, on the surface, the best-written paper in the pack: crisp, structured, quietly authoritative. Something about it was too smooth, so I asked the author to talk me through the trade-off it rested on, away from the document. He could not. The paper had been generated around a conclusion nobody had actually reasoned toward. Had I not asked, the business would have committed real money to the confident-sounding output of a machine that had never been near the actual decision.

Fluency is no longer evidence

For as long as anyone can remember, a well-argued document has been a reasonable proxy for a well-reasoned mind. That proxy is now broken. The polish of a paper tells you almost nothing about the thinking behind it, which means the old instinct to trust the articulate memo is quietly leading boards astray.

The instinct will be to reach for detection tools and disclosure policies. Useful, but they attack the artefact rather than the cause. Work-slop is not a technology problem. It is a cognitive agency problem. People produce hollow work when they are permitted to skip the thinking and rewarded for the surface, and that permission structure is set from the top.

My recommendation is a single discipline. Make reasoning inspectable at senior level. Any material recommendation that reaches the executive committee or the board should arrive with its logic exposed: the position the author held before consulting AI, and what changed once they did. Leaders who cannot supply that trail are not using AI. They are being used by it, and the organisation is paying the tax either way. The reasoning behind a document now tells you everything the fluency of it used to.

References

• Niederhoffer, K. et al. (2025). AI-Generated \'Workslop\' Is Destroying Productivity. Harvard Business Review, BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab.
• Kosmyna, N. et al. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. MIT Media Lab, arXiv preprint.
• Barker, K. (2026). Hidden Power: How Boards and CEOs Win the AI Era. Amplify.