Org design lives in three systems that do not talk. Workday owns headcount and reporting lines. Lattice owns performance and engagement signal. Visio owns the chart the CHRO shows the board. Dock is where an agent reads across all three, drafts a reorg rationale for a span or layer, and routes it to the exec team for approval before any line moves.
The architecture
Workday, Lattice, and Visio stay the system of record for the raw data: employee records, performance ratings, engagement scores, reporting lines, chart geometry. Dock is the system of record for what the agent interprets from that data. Each Dock row carries pointers back to the platform records (workday_worker_id, lattice_review_id, visio_shape_id), the agent's identity, the proposed decision, the reviewer, and the timestamp. When the agent revisits a proposal, it re-fetches Workday and Lattice through fresh API reads. Dock caches the reasoning, never the personnel data.
One Dock surface: the reorg proposal table
| proposal_id | scope | workday_org_id | current_span | proposed_span | rationale_summary | lattice_signal | agent | reviewer | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RG-0142 | Eng Platform | ORG-77821 | 11 | 7 + new lead | Span exceeds healthy range; 3 ICs flagged "unclear direction" in Q1 Lattice pulse | engagement 62, 4 low-clarity comments | org-design-agent-v3 | cto@ | approved |
| RG-0143 | CX Tier 2 | ORG-77904 | 5 | merge into Tier 1 | Volume down 38% YoY in Zendesk; 2 leads doing parallel work | perf calibration overlap, 2 "ready for stretch" | org-design-agent-v3 | vp-cx@ | pending |
| RG-0144 | RevOps | ORG-77555 | 8 (split 4/4) | unified under 1 director | Two managers, one workstream; Lattice 360 shows redundant 1:1s | engagement 71, manager NPS split | org-design-agent-v3 | cro@ | revise |
The workflow
The agent runs quarterly. It pulls every people-manager record from Workday, computes span and depth, then joins against the last two Lattice review cycles and the most recent engagement pulse. Where it sees a structural signal worth a human look, it drafts a rationale row: which org, what change, which signals support it, which Visio shape would move. It tags the responsible exec and waits.
The exec opens the row, reads the rationale, and clicks approve, revise, or reject. Approval triggers a consent gate before the agent touches Workday position management. No reporting line moves without a named human signature on the Dock row. Visio updates are downstream; the chart follows the record.
Why this matters
Reorgs fail when the rationale is invisible. Six months later, no one remembers why the platform team was split or who signed off on collapsing a CX tier. Dock makes that history queryable. Rejected proposals stay in the table too, which is where institutional memory lives.
Deloitte's 2026 Human Capital Trends report finds seven in ten leaders prioritize becoming "fast and nimble," yet 59% take tech-focused AI approaches that underperform human-centric ones by 1.6x (Deloitte). Josh Bersin's guidance is sharper: redesign jobs around AI, do not run the "chainsaw model" of headcount cuts (Bersin). The Dock pattern fits that brief.
This is cloud 2.0 applied to people ops: the agent has its own identity, audit trail, and lifecycle. It does not borrow a human Workday login. The broader pattern lives in Dock for HR and the people ops pillar.
CTA
If you run org design out of three tabs and a deck, give the agent a row to write in. Start with the people ops pillar.
FAQ
Does the agent ever move a reporting line on its own? No. It drafts a proposal row. A named exec approves. Only then does the agent call Workday position management, and the API call carries the approval pointer.
What if Workday data changes after the proposal is drafted? The agent re-fetches Workday at approval time. If the org has shifted, the row is flagged stale and re-drafted.
How is this different from a Workday report plus a Lattice export? Reports show data. Dock stores the agent's interpretation plus the human decision against it. The audit answers "why did we do this" six months later.
Who can see the proposal table? Access mirrors existing Workday and Lattice permissions. The CTO sees engineering proposals, the CRO sees revenue proposals. Dock does not widen the blast radius.
