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 New Friction series from the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Darren Cambridge, Managing Director of the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS) at the University of Maryland. They start from Darren's framing that the next decade's central question is capabilities and authentic humans together, not humans fitted in around AI. Darren distinguishes agency (having a voice) from autonomy (freedom within boundaries), and explains how explicit guardrails can support autonomy while still leaving people a say in where the lines are drawn. He draws on aviation, basketball, and football to argue that safety practices and rules evolve through iteration, and he warns that participation theater, where organizations listen but don't share power, does more harm than good. The two discuss productive versus unproductive friction, how efficiency-first AI strategies can erode skill development and produce too much low-value output, and why organizations with strong participation and deliberation habits will handle AI more steadily. Darren closes with an invitation for practitioners to partner with researchers at TRAILS.
In this episode of the New Friction series from the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Daniel Elizalde, VP of Product and Technology at ReUp Education, about why faster AI-powered building doesn't automatically produce business results. Daniel describes the "speed fallacy" in B2B, where long sales cycles, security reviews, and limited customer attention cap how fast products can be adopted. He explains how he now treats product and engineering as a portfolio, pausing roadmaps and moving teams to wherever the real bottleneck sits, anchored by a shared company vision that his team communicated through an AI-generated video. The conversation covers misaligned incentives in sales and marketing, the risk of everyone vibe coding their own tools without a shared data layer, and the standardized agents and skills his engineers use with Claude. Daniel closes with the F1 analogy that a faster engine means little if the rest of the car and the track can't keep up.
In this episode of the New Friction podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Bryon Jacob, a technology advisor and AI strategist who previously co-founded data.world as CTO and spent a decade at HomeAway. Jacob argues that the teams succeeding with AI-assisted software development share one thing in common: rigorous governance — including near-100% automated test coverage, strictly enforced architectural standards, and code bases deliberately organized for agentic development. He explains why zero tech debt has shifted from aspirational to economically necessary, since AI amplifies good patterns and railroads bad ones, making clean, well-documented, thoroughly tested code the prerequisite for real productivity gains. The conversation examines how leaders are rethinking code review, prototyping, and the entire software development lifecycle, including why a CEO drafting a pull request in Claude Code is a fundamentally better spec than any design brief. Jacob closes by drawing the arc from assembly language to compilers to natural language programming, framing today's moment as the natural next step in a decades-long evolution — and a preview of the governance-driven transformation already coming for legal and every other structured profession.
