The Best Workflow Practitioners Are Invisible

Every company has one.

The consultant who walked into a mess of spreadsheets and Slack threads and left behind a system people actually use. The ops lead who quietly redesigned intake so requests stopped falling through the cracks. The automation builder whose Make scenarios save a team fifteen hours a week — and whose name nobody outside that team knows.

This work is some of the most valuable in modern organizations. It's also almost completely unrecognized. There's no award for it. No list. No moment where someone says: you made work work, and that mattered.

Starting today, there is.

Introducing the Workflow Watchlist

The Workflow Watchlist is an annual recognition program honoring 25 standout practitioners — the Workflow Watchlist 25, Class of 2026. It's presented by the Work Management Institute and published by work.management, and I'm proud to serve as its founder and curator.

The list recognizes four kinds of practitioners:

Workflow Consultants — the people organizations bring in to untangle how work gets done, and who leave things genuinely better.

Workflow Architects to Watch — rising practitioners designing the systems, structures, and handoffs that let teams operate at scale.

Work Management Leaders — the executives and operators championing work management as a discipline inside their organizations.

Workflow Automation Innovators — the builders turning platforms like Make, n8n, and Zapier into real operational leverage.

How it works

Nominations are open now through September 15 at workflowwatchlist.com. Anyone can nominate — a colleague, a client, a consultant you've worked with, or yourself.

There is no fee to nominate and no fee to be selected. There never will be. Recognition that can be purchased isn't recognition, and this program exists to honor real work.

The Class of 2026 will be announced in mid-October.

Why a newsletter?

Because a list that appears once a year isn't enough. Between now and October — and beyond — this newsletter will spotlight the people and practices shaping how work gets managed: profiles of standout practitioners, what great workflow design actually looks like in the wild, and updates from the Watchlist as the inaugural class comes together.

If someone came to mind while you read this — the person at your company who makes work actually flow — nominate them at workflowwatchlist.com. It takes five minutes, and it might be the first time anyone's formally recognized what they do.

See you in the next edition.