Can CHOB Find My Work?
This investigation was about me.
Not my CV.
Not which advertised job I should apply for next.
Me.
The starting problem was practical.
I need income.
I have spent years working as a service designer, design researcher and researcher across healthcare, culture, housing, transport, academia, technology and other fields.
I can research.
I can make sense of complicated situations.
I can facilitate.
I can design services and systems.
I can make diagrams, prototypes, websites, publications and experiments.
But none of that automatically produces paid work.
The conventional answer is to look for vacancies.
Find an organisation that has already decided what work it needs.
Wait for it to write a job description.
Apply.
Compete with everyone else who saw the same advertisement.
Hope to be selected.
CHOB was supposed to begin somewhere else.
So the question became:
Could CHOB find my work instead?
That changes its role considerably.
CHOB would not simply search for jobs that already exist.
It would look for substantiated problems.
It would investigate them.
It would decide whether there was a bounded piece of useful work that could be done.
It would identify who might value that work enough to pay for it.
It could help scope the work, price it and present it.
Only then would capability enter the picture.
In this experiment, that capability happens to be me.
This reverses the usual sequence.
Instead of:
PERSON → SKILLS → VACANCY → APPLICATION
the sequence becomes something closer to:
PROBLEM → EVIDENCE → WORK → CAPABILITY → OUTCOME → STOP
That distinction felt important.
CHOB should not begin by asking what I am good at and then search for somewhere to sell it.
That would simply recreate recruitment with an AI in front of it.
It should begin with the world.
Find something that appears to need doing.
Establish whether the problem is real.
Work out what useful intervention might actually help.
Then ask who could do it.
Sometimes that might be me.
Sometimes it should not be.
There was also a more ambitious possibility.
Could CHOB become sufficiently independent that it did most of the opportunity-making itself?
Find the problem.
Gather evidence.
Define the work.
Find the commissioner.
Propose the price.
Bring the opportunity to the person who could undertake it.
Perhaps eventually collect the money and pay the worker.
That begins to look less like a job board and more like an economic agent.
For the experiment, I am the first participant.
That makes the test unusually clear.
The question is not whether CHOB can generate interesting ideas.
It already can.
The question is whether those investigations can cross the boundary into paid work.
A concrete number helps.
£2,000 a month would be useful.
£3,000 a month would be good.
£4,000 a month would be excellent.
So £3,000 a month became a useful experimental target.
Not a promise.
Not a salary.
A test.
Could CHOB originate enough genuinely useful paid work to produce something approaching that amount?
There is an obvious danger.
If CHOB begins with my need for £3,000, it can easily start inventing reasons why people should pay me.
That would reverse the experiment.
The evidence has to come first.
A problem does not become real because I need work.
A CHOB does not become authorised because I would like the money.
And an interesting conversation is not the same thing as a commissioner.
So the experiment has an uncomfortable requirement.
CHOB must be willing to investigate something and conclude:
There is no paid work here.
It must also be willing to find work for which I am not the right person.
Otherwise it is not finding opportunities.
It is manufacturing justification.
The investigation therefore produced a different way of thinking about my own employment.
Perhaps the unit I need is not a job.
Perhaps it is a succession of bounded pieces of useful work.
Some may last an hour.
Some a day.
Some several weeks.
Some might develop into longer relationships.
The continuity would not necessarily come from an employer.
It could come from the process that keeps discovering the next useful thing to do.
That is a considerably harder test for CHOB.
It is also a much more interesting one.