Taste as a Work Skill

The elusive sense of human judgment is becoming increasingly vital in great organizations. Do you understand how to harness it?

Taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. —Susan Sontag

For much of human history, work was synonymous with physical effort. From tilling fields to assembling cars, the output of labor was tangible, measurable, and generally correlated with the number of hours spent toiling.

Then things changed.

The rise of knowledge work meant that a lot of us do our jobs without breaking a sweat, at least not literally. These “knowledge” jobs, by most estimates, make up 50-60% of employment in the US, and they are very different from their manual counterparts:

• The output isn’t easily defined. A Ford F-150 should come off the line looking the same every time, but a sales presentation could excel (or fail) in a million different ways.

• One person can outperform others by orders of magnitude. One employee may be able to dig, weld, or bolt faster than another, but the range of low to high performance is pretty small—maybe a difference of a few widgets per hour. But one visionary software designer could be a determining factor in a product that changes the market and brings in billions of dollars.

• The worker often knows more about their job than the boss does. Knowledge work is often intricate and highly specialized, and the supervisor of the knowledge worker can’t tell when something will be done—or, often, explain exactly how it is done. This is a sharp contrast to the old days of watching workers labor on a line. The manager of a knowledge worker cannot hear or see when a key breakthrough is about to be made, or sense how a problem will be overcome just by watching the employee at their laptop.

These factors have been in play for decades, of course. But now things are changing again.

Yes, AI is here.

Rote, predictable work of all kinds is up for replacement by AI. But now even work once considered highly “creative” is being outsourced to a rapidly growing army of LLMs and other AI-enhanced tools. Writing, designing, coding, even coaching and strategizing, are all being done, with varying degrees of effectiveness, by digital brains.

These tools are already making fundamental changes in how we live and work. Any business leader would be a fool not to actively learn and apply AI as it develops.

But at the same time, I think we need to remain aware of what makes human talent valuable in the workplace. As I’ve thought about this in recent months, the word that keeps coming to mind is “taste.”

The Value of Taste

As CEOs, HR leaders, or managers of any kind, I think we need to recognize the indispensability of human taste—the highly personalized judgment our employees rely on in their work. If we don’t, we risk building businesses that churn out slop, lazily relying on tools that don’t align with business goals, and hiring people who tinker with AI rather than harnessing it for purposeful ends.

Increasingly, I believe we’ll hire primarily for the employee’s taste—their judgment of what works and what doesn’t, their uncanny ability to spot the “right” answer among many possible ones, and their sense of what resonates with their fellow humans.

Here are some of the facets of “taste” at work that I believe make it so critical.

Taste Draws in a Unique Target Audience

A person with taste knows how to anticipate the ideas, words, images, and other signifiers that will pull the attention of a unique audience. The person with real taste has confidence that their work product will have its intended effect on its reader, viewer, listener, or user. They have a model in their head of how those other people—whoever they are—think and will react, perhaps because they share some facet of the employee’s own taste. Taste can read the room. It can do more than just communicate information. It can influence people to act.

Taste Knows How to Surprise

AI is many things, but it is not usually surprising. When it is surprising, it’s usually in a random, out-of-left-field way. But true surprise comes from taste: from knowing a rule to break it, from knowing a trope to twist it, from inverting a common business model. These surprises help us arrive at an innovative new place no one else would’ve thought of. Someone with taste can look at a lot of ideas that might at first seem silly and discern which of them might, just maybe, have something to it.

Taste Weeds Out the Trite

AI trawls through great universes of human output and looks at the most common patterns. It then gives the most weight to the patterns repeated most. This is why AI writing, images, and video, for example, are often most identifiable for their use of well-worn cliches. In writing, ChatGPT loves the rule of three; it loves em dashes; it loves constructions like “X is not Y—it is Z.” These things all work well rhetorically, and we shouldn’t just throw them out because LLMs like them. But we should recognize that a human with taste knows these are constructions that have become threadbare with use.

Taste Stays Ahead of the Crowd

A person with taste, knowing when something has become stale—be it an idea, a color palette, a marketing tactic—forges into new territory in search of something better. An AI tool could forge ahead and look for novel approaches, but it is inherently backward-looking. It operates, again, by sorting through all its innumerable inputs and trying to extrapolate based on what happened in the past. Taste, by contrast, looks boldly ahead. It has vision.

Taste Has Mysterious Sources

Not to get too philosophical, but we humans often have the feeling we are in communion with indescribable forces that influence us. We rely on intuition, which is closely related to taste. Some see it as the work of God, some see it as the collective unconscious, some see it as simply our shared humanity or an accumulation of life experience—or as an unsolvable mystery. No machine will ever share in this part of the human experience, and it is, at the end of the day, what forms our taste and judgment. There’s an it-factor that each of us has as part of humanity that’s hard to describe. But our fellow humans sense it when they experience it through our work.

Taste Works on Its Own Schedule

Taste thrives under conditions that look different from traditional work. Research shows that breakthroughs often emerge from downtime, collaboration, or even play—activities that might appear wasteful to a manager steeped in the old industrial model. Organizations that insist on rigid schedules and constant output risk stifling the very innovation they claim to seek.

Taste Starts and Ends Well-Done Tasks

When completing a task with the help of AI, you need taste at the beginning, to decide what you want the tool to do and why. If you let AI define the goal for you, you’re usually going to get thrown off course. A good employee sets the AI tool up for success with clear and detailed instructions. Likewise, taste is required at the end of the task, to give the polish so many AI outputs need. That could be removing an awkward phrase, adding a design flourish that brings it all together, or telling the AI it did a bad job on the code and needs to go back to the drawing board.

A New Approach Is Needed

Given the growing primacy of taste, a new approach to leading, managing, and coaching people is needed. Well, maybe not an entirely new approach, as the points below are good advice in just about any circumstance. But today we can’t just view the following as best practices. We must apply them to survive:

1. Ingrain the mission and vision. Since creative flashes can come at any time, it is important that modern workers are bought into the mission and vision in a way that causes their brains to constantly churn on the problems they confront. The old model was about getting people to work hard from 9:00 to 5:00 and then forget about work for the rest of the day. The new model needs workers who are bought into the mission in a way that their brains are churning in the background even when they are out on a 5-mile hike. (See the Severance Problem.) This allows them to apply their taste when the moment strikes.

2. Hire for taste. Hiring for taste means looking for people with a track record of discernment. Ask what work they admire. Look at how they critique. Do they know what NOT to say in a deck? Can they spot what’s off in a logo? Can they tell when an idea has power even if it’s not quite ready? Taste doesn’t always show up in degrees or resumes. More often, it shows up in side projects, portfolios, writing samples, and in conversation.

3. Focus on outcomes, not inputs. Shift the emphasis from hours worked or tasks completed to the impact delivered. This requires defining clear goals and trusting workers to find the best path to achieve them. They will need to rely on their taste to figure out the how, but they need your direction on the why.

AI is changing how we work, but it hasn’t changed what makes work good. That still comes down to human judgment. The people who will thrive in this next chapter aren’t necessarily the ones who know how to use the tools but the ones who have the taste to make those tools sing.