Your people and your AI agents now produce together. Most performance systems can’t tell you who contributed what and pay, promotion, and accountability decisions are still being made as if they can.
Contributive Value is a measurement architecture built to answer that question. It measures contribution across six dimensions on a single objective basis, including the contribution people make alongside AI agents. OUTSMART is the readiness work that prepares an organization to use it.
To see what that would look like in your organization, start with a 30-minute scoping conversation with Rod Brown, Founder of S/BES and author of the forthcoming Don’t Let AI Eat You Alive.
Traditional performance systems focus heavily on tasks and outputs. Contributive Value expands the picture by making the human contributions behind innovation, trust and lasting value visible.
We offer four ways to engage, with each one designed to connect and build on each other. A talk creates awareness. A workshop builds readiness. A pilot proves the model in one environment. Consulting scales it across the enterprise. Each step de-risks the next — so you never have to commit to the largest step first.
What it does: Names the problem and stakes the claim.
Best for: Event organizers, executive teams.
What it does: Prepares people to navigate AI-era work.
Best for: HR, Learning & Development, people leaders.
What it does: Measures value in a bounded environment.
Best for: Operational sponsors and division heads.
What it does: Rolls CV out across the organization.
Best for: Operational sponsors and division heads.
Rod Brown speaks on the measurement crisis facing every organization deploying AI — and what employees, leaders, and enterprises must do before the systems scoring them are set by someone else. The talks turn an abstract anxiety about AI into one concrete, answerable question: Can your organization actually see what its people contribute?
A shared vocabulary for a problem they’ve felt but couldn’t name, and one question sharp enough to repeat in their own meetings.
Don’t Let AI Eat You Alive. Why every system we have measures what people do, and nothing measures what they’re worth — and why AI industrializes that blind spot rather than creating it.
Who Did the Work? When a person and an AI agent produce something together, who contributed what — and how will your pay, promotion, and accountability decisions survive not knowing?
Leading When the Scoreboard Changes. How to lead people through AI-driven change without losing the ones who make the organization work.
When you’re ready to move from awareness to action, OUTSMART + CV Workshops provide a logical next step with a hands-on working session. Participants leave having built their own readiness plan with the elements of OUTSMART — and understanding how Contributive Value will make the contribution they’re now prepared to offer visible to their organization. Available as an all-employee readiness track and a leadership track.
The session then bridges to CV: how the six dimensions — Insights, Trust, Communication, Adaptability to Change, Strategic Initiative, and Accountability — translate that readiness into contribution the organization can see and reward.
A personal OUTSMART readiness plan they built themselves — the artifact that makes the workshop stick.
Read the field | Orienting · Timeline
Assess honestly what’s changing in their role and set the clock they’re actually on.
Build the value | Upskilling · Systems
Identify the capabilities AI amplifies rather than replaces, and work at the system level where contribution compounds.
Map the terrain | Access · Resources
Diagnose who and what they can reach, and the tools, capital, and time they can deploy.
Sustain the effort | Self-Nurturing · Teamwork
Protect the human engine against burnout and build the coalition contribution depends on.
The CV Dashboard is in development. Design partners are the organizations it gets built with.
A design partner provides one bounded part of the organization — real teams, real hybrid workflows — and works with S/BES to instrument contribution across the six dimensions, including contribution produced alongside AI agents. In return, they shape the architecture before it’s fixed and they get the first honest view of what their current systems can’t see.
This is a founding cohort, and it closes when the platform ships.
What comes out of the engagement is specific to your environment: a view of contribution your existing systems can’t produce, and a defensible basis for distinguishing what your people contributed from what your agents did.
Illustrative view of the CV Dashboard, currently in development.
Determine fit, identify a candidate environment and define meaningful results.
(30 minutes, no cost)
Define the pilot population and clearly positioning your direction within the changing AI landscape.
Instrument the six dimensions in the selected environment, with human and agentic contribution attributed separately.
A structured review of what the measurement surfaced and a clear scale, refine, or stop recommendation.
Where design partner work proves the model in one environment, enterprise deployment extends Contributive Value across the organization. The division of labor is deliberate. S/BES owns and governs the measurement architecture. Implementation is delivered by the global partner best positioned in the client’s environment, with OUTSMART as the change infrastructure that keeps a measurement rollout from becoming a chaotic technology deployment.
S/BES does not compete for delivery. The architecture is ours. The delivery capacity is our partners’.
Organizations rebuilding how they measure and reward contribution across the enterprise, and the implementation partners who serve them.
Every path starts with a conversation, and every offering connects to the next. Tell us what you’re trying to accomplish within your organization, and we’ll help you determine the right starting point.