In the early 2000s, Great Ormond Street Hospital in London — one of the world's leading centres for children's heart surgery — had a problem that had nothing to do with surgery. It was in the handover that followed, when a child was moved from the operating theatre to intensive care. A human-factors researcher observing those transfers counted an average of about five technical errors and two missing pieces of information per child. Everyone involved was an expert at their own part. The handover between them belonged to no one — the same gap that quietly undermines cross-functional teams in every industry.

The fix started on a Sunday, when surgeon Martin Elliott and intensive care consultant Allan Goldman, exhausted after a night of operating, watched a Formula One pit stop on television and recognized their own handover, done far better.

Ferrari stepped in — hosting the team at Silverstone and Maranello, and helping the hospital win the grant that restarted the work.

What came out of it was a seven-page protocol. A transfer form goes to intensive care thirty minutes before the child arrives. The handover then runs in three phases that never overlap: equipment first, then information delivered without interruption, then a discussion led by the receiving doctor. And it ends with a formal moment when ownership passes from the anaesthetist to the intensivist. Technical errors fell by 42 percent and missing information by about half, with no added time.

This video unpacks why that gap existed in the first place, what the protocol actually changed, and three ways to redesign the handoffs on your own team.

// CHAPTERS

0:00 Great Ormond Street Hospital

2:10 The most dangerous ten minutes in the hospital

4:08 The trouble with handoffs

5:54 The seven page protocol

9:05 The project that almost stalled

14:30 Making Better Handoffs Happen// LEADERSHIP LESSONS

- Every part performed by an expert doesn't add up to a handoff performed well — the seam between teams needs an owner of its own

- Watch the small slips, not just the big failures — nobody recovers from an error they never saw

- Sequence beats speed: move the assets, then transfer the context, then plan, instead of collapsing all three into one meeting

- Good design doesn't make your stars better, it makes the outcome less dependent on them having a good day// NEWSLETTER

Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/youtube

// SPEAKING

Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/

// ABOUT DAVID

One of the world's leading business thinkers, David's forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration.

An organizational psychologist who serves on the faculty at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the best-selling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world's top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS This Morning.

David works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David's keynotes aren't just entertaining and enlightening, they're evidence based and immensely practical—offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately.

// CONNECT

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/

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In 2017, Tesla set out to build a car factory so automated that people would barely be needed. The target was five thousand Model 3s a week. Across the entire third quarter, the line produced 260 cars. It remains the best-documented attempt we have at replacing people with machines at scale, which makes it the right place to start if you're worried about AI replacing jobs.

The popular version of this story is a redemption arc. Musk owns the mistake, tears out the machines, puts people back on the line, and production recovers. All of that happened. It's also the least transferable lesson in the story, because the fix only worked for a reason most organizations won't have next time: the skill was still in the building.

What I study is where teams actually build judgment, and the answer is almost never the training program. It's the routine, repetitive work — exactly the work that's easiest to automate. A five-page paper from 1983 explained why that's a trap, and Ford recently ran into it with AI, after years of quietly losing veteran engineers to ordinary attrition.

This video covers what broke at Tesla, the research that explains it, what Ford faced next, and two questions to ask before you automate anything on your team.

// NEWSLETTER

Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/podcast

// CHAPTERS

0:00 Everyone's worried about the wrong AI risk

2:44 Tesla & The Alien Dreadnought

6:57 The Ironies Of Automation

11:19 Automate Last

17:05 Ford & When The Bill Comes Due

// LEADERSHIP LESSONS

- Automation doesn't shrink the human role — it concentrates it into the exceptions nobody designed for

- The danger of AI isn't losing the job, it's losing the place people learned to do it

- Ask what someone learns from a task before asking whether a tool can do it

- Treat routine work as tuition, not overhead — it's where pattern recognition gets built

- A process can be un-automated in a season; a talent pipeline has to be rebuilt one person at a time

- Expertise rarely leaves by decision. It leaves at a normal rate, and no dashboard reports it.

If you're rolling out AI on your team, planning around retirements, or wondering where your next experts will come from, this isn't a car story. It's a warning with a checklist attached.

Comment below: what routine work taught you the most early in your career?

// SPEAKING

Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/

// ABOUT DAVID

One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration.

An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings.

David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately.

//CONNECT

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus

Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

AI might make management more efficient. But efficiency isn’t the same thing as leadership.

In this video, I break down four parts of management I would never delegate to AI and why keeping them human matters more as artificial intelligence becomes embedded in the workplace. AI can summarize meetings, organize information, draft emails, analyze data, and take a lot of administrative work off your plate. That’s a good thing. But there are some responsibilities managers shouldn’t automate away.

00:00 AI can do many things...but not everything.

00:10 Meet Dr. David Burkus

01:05 Don’t Let AI Decide “What”

02:28 Don’t Let AI Judge Your Team

04:44 Don’t Let AI Outsource The Conversation

06:11 Don’t Let AI Create Meaning

// NEWSLETTER

Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/youtube

// SPEAKING

Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/

// ABOUT DAVID

One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration.

An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings.

David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately.

//CONNECT

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus

Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus