- What is the five questions that keep you human?
- What questions keep judgement human when work speeds up?
When work accelerates, systems grow confident and decisions start arriving pre-made, five questions to stop and ask. They are not metrics, and they resist becoming metrics by design.
The answer, in one line
Who is actually deciding here? What stayed human when speed took over? What changed because we learned something real? Where did judgement travel and automation take over?
Definition#
The five questions that keep you human: five bearings for judgement under acceleration, each answered in a sentence about a specific decision rather than by a number.
Who is actually deciding here?#
Not who approved it. Not who executed it. Who shaped the choice. The three are routinely confused, and the confusion is what allows a decision with a signature on it to have had nobody behind it. In a system that presents options, the shaping happened earlier and elsewhere, often before anybody in the room was involved.
What stayed human when speed took over?#
The judgement, the care, the responsibility. Or nothing at all, which is an available answer and the one worth recording honestly when it is true. This is the question behind the first of the four receipts at Hand, Head, Hours, Heart.
What changed because we learned something real?#
Not what was discussed. What was done differently afterwards. The gap between those two is where most organisational learning is lost, and the loss is invisible from inside because the discussion felt like the learning.
Where did judgement travel and automation take over?#
Did judgement move with the work, or did it disappear into process? Work rarely leaves an organisation cleanly; it moves, and judgement either moves with it to a person who now holds it, or it dissolves into a procedure that nobody owns. The distinction is the subject of custody.
What would I still stand behind in a year?#
With names attached. Without context. In daylight. The three conditions are the test: most decisions can be defended with the context, by somebody unnamed, privately. Removing all three is what makes this the last question rather than the first.
Why bearings rather than measures#
A measure gets optimised. Turn any of these five into a number on a dashboard and within two quarters the number will be healthy and the thing it pointed at will not be. Bearings tell you the direction you are facing rather than the speed you are travelling, and the honest use is to answer them in sentences, about specific decisions, and to notice when the answers stop being available.
The team version, three questions at the close of a meeting and callable by anybody in it, is the pause minute.
What this has not been shown to do#
Nothing here has been tested, and by design these questions produce no score, no band and no comparison. A person can answer all five and still have made a poor decision. What they surface is whether anybody was there at all, which is a different and narrower thing than decision quality.
Source#
Rahim Hirji, SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, Kogan Page, 2026, chapter ten.
Related SuperSkills research#
Essay · SS-2026-339 · How I use AI here
Hirji, R. (2026). The five questions that keep you human. The SuperSkills evidence base, SS-2026-339. https://thesuperskills.com/research/the-five-questions-that-keep-you-human. Last reviewed 26 September 2026.
An evidence review by Rahim Hirji, not peer-reviewed research. For a material claim, cite the underlying study as well; every study here carries its own permanent link.
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