VC Agents

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Sarah B. Nelson, Distinguished Designer at Kyndryl and co-founder of Kyndryl Vital, about why AI's promise to remove friction is actually surfacing the human dynamics organizations have always avoided facing. They unpack how a single word like trust splinters into distinct concerns — model accuracy, data use, organizational credibility — and why treating human in the loop as a rubber-stamp step risks disengagement and stripped-out meaning. Nelson draws on the NeuroLeadership Institute's SCARF model to explain why AI rollouts stall on status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness rather than on the technology itself, and shares stories spanning cybersecurity burnout, Holacracy at Zappos, and the extraction economics behind AI training data. The conversation keeps returning to her insistence on designing with people rather than at or for them, and on imagination as the resource most at risk of being engineered out of enterprises chasing speed. She closes with a Buckminster Fuller line she keeps returning to: that people are called to be architects of the future, not victims of it.

In this episode of the New Friction podcast, host Douglas Ferguson speaks with Peter Bell, founder of Gather.dev and author of the forthcoming O’Reilly book Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering. Bell draws on his work running invite-only peer communities for senior engineering leaders to diagnose why most organizations stall out in AI pilot mode rather than achieving meaningful transformation. The conversation maps three distinct patterns of engineer resistance—skeptics burned by early models, craft-focused developers who resist the shift toward managing agents, and those with principled objections to AI—and offers concrete tactics for reaching each group. Bell and Ferguson explore how AI amplifies existing organizational health: strong DevOps practices compound upward while process debt scales its dysfunction. They examine the mandate trap, measurement via token usage as a diagnostic rather than a performance metric, and the non-negotiable role of psychological safety in any serious adoption effort. The episode closes with Bell’s call for engineering leaders to build hands-on with current models, arguing that firsthand intuition—not secondhand reports from a VP of AI—is what this transition demands.