Monster. Talent2. Allegis. QuantumWork Advisory. Now back home in Melbourne.
I’m Mark Condon — a designer of work, by training and obsession. I run workXdesign.ai from Melbourne — a senior advisory built for the moments that matter to a CEO, CPO, or CHRO. Founder‑led. AI‑native by design. Specialist partner network for the build. The work shows up at the difficult turns: an AI transformation, a talent function rebuild, a skills strategy, an M&A integration, an operating model redesign. Twenty‑two years in the room — drafting the work, running the workshops, sitting with the team in the harder calls.
Most recently, I co‑founded and grew QuantumWork Advisory into a global boutique — winning Fortune 10 engagements against the world’s leading strategy houses and Big Four consultancies, and delivering major strategy and execution programmes across banking and financial services, healthcare, and aerospace.
Before that, the global consulting, technology, digital, and solutions function at AGS — work that doubled the business over three years. The foundation: twenty‑two years at Allegis Group, the largest privately held human capital firm in the world, advising Fortune 500 organisations on workforce, talent, and the architecture of work. Earlier still, a day‑one director at Talent2 in Melbourne. MBA from Melbourne Business School; design thinking at MIT and IDEO.
AI modernisation is a work design problem, not a platform purchase.
That’s the conviction the practice is built on — and why an experienced, independent advisor, accountable through delivery, matters more in this cycle than the last.
Synthetic organisations — designed around AI from the foundation up, not retrofitted around it — are emerging. While incumbents struggle to absorb AI into existing operating models, the gap widens. Most of that gap is operating‑model debt, not technology debt.
The last decade moved work to cheaper geographies for a twenty‑to‑forty percent cut, and called it done. The next is harder — not how do we add AI, but how we want decisions made, work to flow, and people to engage where software can act.
Every large organisation has one: layers of process, governance, and incentive built to protect stability. AI transformation is unfamiliar by definition, so the immune system neutralises it. The work is redesigning the operating model while that system is still running.
That’s the work I’m useful for.
A designer's playbook for AI disruption.
Twenty‑two years of work design, operating-model design, and human-technology design. Four sample toolsets, applied as the work demands.
Personas, journey maps, service blueprints. The lead toolset — it surfaces what process maps miss: the friction operators feel, the value leaking between teams, the workarounds nobody talks about.
Optimise the whole, not the part. Maps how work, technology, and data connect — and stops the common AI failure where a use case wins locally but quietly breaks something downstream.
Inventory the work task by task, then decide — Remove, Reduce, Reallocate, Redesign. Grounded in Sharon Parker's SMART Work Design, so the future state is work people actually want to do.
Once the work is redesigned, the capability has to come from somewhere. The 5B framework decides each piece — Build, Buy, Borrow, Bot, Bundle. Sequenced, costed, owned.
Twenty‑plus years across APAC, the US, and EMEA — ASX Top 200, Fortune 500 boards, C‑suites, and global functions.
Each model of delivery is senior-led and executed. No consulting bait and switch.
Defined scope, defined deliverables. The most common mode — used for diagnostics, operating model redesigns, technology selection, and skills strategy work.
A senior operator sits in the seat alongside your team — interim CHRO, CPO, or programme director, guiding your workforce or people capability modernisation. Full‑time or fractional, scoped to the role.
Safe hands through a major recruitment, restructuring, or M&A event. Mark runs or guides the programme on behalf of the client, with clear executive sponsorship and a defined outcome.
Senior advice.
Real outcomes.
A 60‑minute scoping conversation is complimentary.
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