A new series from Douglas Ferguson on the real organizational challenges of AI adoption — premiering May 26th
“AI just made execution almost free. So why are most organizations still stuck? Because the hard part was never building the thing. It’s getting two hundred people to agree on what to build, how to govern it, and who’s responsible when it breaks. That’s the new friction.” — Douglas Ferguson
Something has been bothering me for the past year. Every organization I work with is adopting AI. The tools are getting better, the pilots are expanding, the budgets are growing. But most of them are stuck. Not because the technology doesn’t work. Because the people problems got harder.
When execution becomes almost free, every other friction in the organization gets amplified. Decision-making friction. Governance friction. Trust friction. The friction of getting two hundred people to move in the same direction when the ground keeps shifting under them
This episode is part of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. See all episodes
That’s what I’ve been calling the new friction. And it’s what our new podcast is about. New Friction is a series of conversations with leaders who are living this right now. Not thought leaders theorizing from the sidelines. Practitioners who hit the wall and built something on the other side of it. Each episode, I sit down with someone navigating the real organizational challenges of AI transformation. We talk about what broke, what they tried, and what actually worked. What we’ll be exploring
The bottleneck that moved from building to deciding
The 4x perception gap between leaders and the workforce on whether AI is delivering value
The shift from individual “AI wizards” to multiplayer organizations
The slow erosion of how the next generation of professionals learns judgment
These aren’t hypothetical problems. They’re the conversations I’ve been having with leaders at some of the most ambitious organizations in the world at our executive dinners, in our consulting work, and in late-night strategy sessions. I’ve been capturing them. And now I’m turning them into something you can listen to.
Episode 1 drops May 26th. You’ll be able to find it wherever you listen to podcasts, and on our YouTube channel. Subscribe now so you don’t miss it.
Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to New Friction. I’m Douglas Ferguson. AI just made execution almost free. So why are organizations still stuck? Because the friction didn’t disappear. It moved and it multiplied. It’s no longer in building. It’s in deciding what to build, how to align, and how to move forward when the path isn’t clear. That friction, the human side of change, it’s what this series is about. Each episode, I sit down with leaders who are living it, navigating the real challenges of AI transformation, not the tools, the people. The task that took two weeks now takes two minutes. The work isn’t the bottleneck anymore. The conversation before the work is. That’s the work this show is about. Hey folks, I’m super excited to launch this series and the truth is I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I started out as a CTO, which many of you may know, and AI has been on my radar for years.
(01:13): Back in 2018, my friend Steven was launching Kung Fu AI, and I came on as an advisor. In fact, we launched our companies right around the same time, and we were there together. He went deep tech, and I went deep human because I could see this coming. The technology was going to get extraordinary. The hard part was going to be us. By 2019, we had Cam Hauser demoing an AI facilitation tool built on GPT2 at one of our facilitation lab events. That’s how early this conversation started for us. So when AI broke into the mainstream a couple of years later, I wasn’t totally surprised. I didn’t exactly see it coming in the way it came, but I was ready. And for the last two years, I’ve been in the rooms where AI transformation is actually happening. Boardrooms, workshops, executive dinners with leaders across the country, and the same thing keeps happening.
(02:08): The tools work, the pilots succeed, and then organizations grind because nobody can answer the human questions underneath. Who decides? Who’s accountable? How do we know it’s working? What do we do with the people whose jobs just changed? That’s the conversation nobody’s having out loud. Everyone is having it in private. So we’re going to have that conversation here in public. Honestly. In this series, you’re going to hear from heads of product and VPs of engineering who deployed AI and watched their teams get faster and somehow worse at the same time. Transformation leaders who had to rebuild trust after a rollout went sideways. Researchers who can tell us what’s actually true versus what’s hype, and builders who figured out something that worked and are willing to say what it cost them. No frameworks for sale, no predictions about AGI, no vendor pitches dressed up as wisdom. Just the conversations I wish I’d had access to five years ago.
(03:08): The first series drops soon. If the friction I just described sounds like the friction now emerging in your work, you’re exactly who I made this for. Subscribe wherever you’re listening, bring a colleague. And if you’re a leader who’s living this and you’d want to come to the show and talk through what you’re seeing, reach out. I’d love to hear from you. You can find me at voltagecontrol.com or on LinkedIn. Let’s go figure this out together.
(03:35): Thanks for listening to New Friction. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a leader who’s in the middle of this right now. They’ll thank you for it. And if you want to go deeper, we bring leaders together through executive dinners and virtual masterminds. To learn more about our work or to inquire about exclusive executive events, visit voltagecontrol.com. I’m Douglas Ferguson. See you next time.
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Kristi James, a Lead Change Manager at the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme in Berlin. Kristi traces her facilitation instincts back to childhood event planning and an early corporate career at DHL, where she discovered that sketching out processes and user journeys helped teams see where they belonged, resolve role confusion, and surface disagreement productively. She describes how a coach, Mary Beth Maines, helped her recognize creativity she had dismissed in herself, and how that shift now shapes the way she draws out scientists and doctors at WHO who are more comfortable debating than co-creating. Kristi walks through concrete practices, from visual cues and whiteboards that anchor group memory to 1-2-4-All exercises that convert passive listeners into active participants, and a recent example of using a user-journey diagram to unstick a stalled budget negotiation. The conversation closes on her core belief that visualizing a process doesn't just clarify tasks, it gives groups a safer, more concrete way to name resistance and work through conflict together.
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Joe McLean, Group Product Manager for the AI Stream at Miro, who led the overhaul of Miro's Sidekicks and Flows AI surfaces launched at Canvas 25. Joe traces how his hobbyist love of Eurorack modular synthesizers shaped Flows, arguing that visible, patchable connections reveal what a chat box hides, and that a good tool's structure can enable rather than constrain creativity. He and Douglas dig into what he calls the "visual trace" - treating an AI agent like a new hire who needs onboarding, check-ins, and a replayable record so a whole team, not just one operator, can trust and build on its work. The conversation covers how cheap execution is reshaping product development, from teams showing up to meetings with working prototypes instead of slide decks, to Miro's internal VibeLab tool solving the "Git problem" of AI-generated design branches, to the rise of throwaway personal software built for an audience of one. They close on a candid discussion of the switching costs of chat-interface lock-in and Joe's conviction that the healthiest relationship with AI comes from building things with it, not just asking it questions.
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Taran Lent, Chief Technology Officer at Illumia, about how his organization moved from individual AI experimentation to enterprise-wide capability. Lent describes building an "enablement task force" that deliberately avoided becoming a governing bottleneck, instead creating conditions for employees to play, learn, and share what worked, before this year's push to elevate personal AI habits into shared team and company-wide skills, standards, and vetted tools. He talks about using AI as a contrarian thought partner and even having it grade his own interviewing and meeting behavior, while cautioning that transcripts alone miss tone and body language. The conversation also covers the governance side of scaling AI, including a stakeholder review process for new tools and skills, the four-to-six-week approval timeline for new vendors, and guardrails to prevent incidents like an unauthenticated internal dashboard. Lent connects this to Illumia's recent merger of Transact and CBORD, crediting a shared "humble, hungry, smart" culture for making the integration smoother, and closes by arguing that judgment, creativity, and human discernment remain the differentiators as AI adoption accelerates.
