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 Yvette Cronje, Head of UX Design for HP's unified consumer app experience, about how design leadership is shifting as AI compresses production time. Cronje argues that AI hasn't removed the hard part of design so much as relocated it: craft is shifting from executing pixels to judgment, taste, and critique, and teams need shared principles and decision frameworks in place before they diverge into AI-generated options, or misalignment simply accelerates alongside execution. She and Ferguson trace how this plays out in practice, from workshops that align teams on principles before production, to using AI as a critique partner and coaching tool rather than a production shortcut, to the delegation and communication skills leaders increasingly need as ICs manage AI collaborators. They also discuss trust, both customers' trust in AI-driven product features and organizational trust in people through constant change, as a central design and leadership problem. The conversation closes on reframing AI anxiety as an opportunity for curiosity and growth rather than a threat to craft or job security.
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Alyssa Coughlin, Director and Chief of Staff for Autodesk's Data, AI, and ML Platform organization, about what it actually takes to move a large engineering company from AI-enabled to AI-native. Coughlin describes how bottlenecks have shifted away from writing code toward code review, deployment permissions, and design decisions now that AI has made execution fast and cheap. She walks through concrete changes her org has made, including abandoning two-week Scrum sprints for Kanban flow, moving from PRDs to spec-driven development consumable by both humans and AI, and building shared "knowledge graph" brains to catch duplicated work before it ships. Throughout, she frames change management as a balance of carrot and stick, arguing that engineers aren't losing their jobs so much as shifting from author to orchestrator, and that managers themselves must stay hands-on with the tools to coach effectively. She closes by describing AI as an amplifier that exposes organizational seams rather than a fix, so the real work is continuously finding and addressing the friction it reveals.
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Jeff Chow, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Miro, about where friction is showing up inside product teams as AI reshapes how work gets done. Jeff describes how PMs prototyping in high fidelity, designers coding, and engineers orchestrating agents are collapsing old role boundaries, and argues the underlying tensions — who owns a decision, who gets paged at 2am, how a designer receives feedback — aren't new, just amplified. Much of the conversation centers on decision-making as the real bottleneck: Jeff makes the case that 10x individual output doesn't translate into 10x business results unless organizations can also accelerate cross-functional alignment and cascade decisions with their underlying context, not just their conclusions. He and Douglas dig into Miro's bet that a shared visual canvas — carrying both artifacts and a decision log of why choices were made — is the connective layer that keeps AI-assisted work and human teams moving together instead of fragmenting into isolated single-player sessions. The two also trade observations on viral AI adoption patterns inside organizations, the psychology of design crits applied to AI-generated work, and the early signs of "ephemeral UI" and custom, vibe-coded widgets reshaping what software teams expect to build for themselves.
