In 2017 I gave a talk at Facilitation Lab on language models in facilitation. Most people in the room had not heard of GPT. The thesis I put on the screen was simple: the technology side would outrun every organization’s ability to absorb it, and the human side would become the bottleneck. Around the same time I was advising Kungfu.ai with Stephen. His bet was on building AI. Mine was on building the human capability that would have to grow around it. I founded Voltage Control to make that second bet, and I have made it every year since. Eight years later the thesis is no longer abstract. Organizations are not choosing between using AI and not using it. They are being pulled into two different futures, and the middle ground is disappearing. One future is deep tech: organizations that have built genuine infrastructure, deployed agents at scale, automated workflows end to end, and are operating with AI as a core organizational capability, not a feature. The other future is deep human: organizations that have recognized that the hard part was never the technology, that it was always the people, the trust, the identity questions, the way groups make decisions under uncertainty. They are investing in the human capability that makes any technology productive. The space between these two positions is collapsing. You can see it in the data now. I have been waiting for the research to catch up to the pattern. It has.

The Evidence of the Split

Gartner’s Digital Workplace Summit this year surfaced a finding that should land harder than it has: executives are four times more likely to report high AI productivity gains from their AI investments, while individual contributors are five times more likely to say AI made no difference to their work. That is not a technology gap. The tools are the same. The gap is in how the technology is being experienced, and it maps almost perfectly onto the structure of most enterprise AI programs: leadership makes the decision, licenses get purchased, individuals get trained once and then largely ignored, and the two groups live in completely different realities about what is happening. Four out of five employees believe their organization is trying to replace them with AI. Only 12% feel involved in the decisions about how AI gets used in their work. 78% do not know whether they will lose their job to AI. These are not the stats of an organization that is integrating AI. These are the stats of an organization that has deployed AI at its leadership layer and left the rest of the workforce in the dark. And when 14% of leaders believe employees are effectively using the tools they have been given, the people making deployment decisions and the people living with the consequences are not operating from the same reality. This is what the bifurcation looks like from the inside.

What Is Actually Happening

The technology is not the problem. The technology, in most enterprise contexts, is working. 72% of IT leaders say Copilot users struggle to integrate it into their daily routine, but the failure mode there is not the tool. It is the design of how adoption happens. The World Economic Forum projects that 59% of the workforce needs brand new skills in the next two to three years. Gartner estimates that 32 million jobs will be transformed per year due to AI, and that managing this transformation requires 20 times more organizational effort than managing job losses. The effort ratio is 20 to 1. That 20:1 figure is the one that should reorient every AI strategy. Organizations are allocating budget and attention as though this were a technology problem, when the data says it is primarily an organizational problem. The work of transformation is not writing code or buying software. It is the human work: the alignment conversations, the role redesigns, the trust-building, the change management, the process of getting a 40,000-person organization to operate differently. That work does not scale through typical training programs. Without application and practice, half of what people learn from a one-time training session is gone within 24 hours. 90% is gone within six days. Learning decay does not care how good the content was.

Two Organizations, Same Technology

The split is easier to see in examples than in statistics. At Gartner’s Digital Workplace Summit, Ivanti presented their approach to internal AI transformation. They built a centralized AI platform called Ivy and created AI pods, cross-functional environments where subject matter experts, senior DBAs, network engineers, storage specialists, rotate through and imbue AI models with their domain expertise. The output is what Gartner called “cybernetic teammates”: AI agents that carry the actual knowledge and judgment of specific senior practitioners, available to everyone in the organization, not just to the people who happen to sit near the expert. They surfaced approximately 700 AI use cases this way. The mechanism was not a training program. It was a structured process for capturing and distributing human expertise at scale. In Manchester, University NHS Foundation Trust deployed Microsoft Dragon Copilot to give doctors back something they had been losing: full attention on the patient in front of them. The voice AI handles transcription and note-taking in real time. The doctor reviews, edits, and approves. The consultation, the actual human work, is now uninterrupted. Manchester’s Chief Executive has estimated that at full rollout, the trust could see up to 250,000 additional patients per year. That number is a projection, not a measured result, and it depends on redesigning scheduling, staffing, and workflow to convert freed-up minutes into actual appointments. The technology is the easy part. The organizational redesign is the work. These two cases look different on the surface. One is an IT infrastructure vendor restructuring how expertise flows across their organization. The other is a hospital trust giving clinicians room to be clinicians. But they are both illustrations of the same underlying logic: AI works when it is designed around what humans do best, not when it is deployed as a replacement for the conversation about what that even means.

The Wrong Approach

The organizations going in the wrong direction are not doing obviously foolish things. They are doing reasonable things, badly sequenced. They buy licenses before they understand the work. They run training programs before they have addressed the trust deficit. They announce AI strategies without involving the people those strategies will affect. And then they are surprised when license usage stays flat, when the productivity gains are invisible to the people on the ground, when the AI-fluent individuals they develop become isolated experts rather than multipliers. 56% of CEOs plan to use AI to de-layer middle management within five years. The question is not whether that flattening is coming. It is whether anyone is designing what replaces the development pathways that disappear when it does. Middle management is not just overhead. It is the layer through which expertise gets transferred, context gets communicated, and junior people get the reps that build them into senior people. Remove the layer without replacing the function and you have an experience starvation problem: senior experts absorbing work that used to be the proving ground for the next generation. The pipeline for building bench strength quietly breaks. AI is not taking entry-level jobs. Experts are. That is a subtly different problem that requires a subtly different response.

Where Facilitation Lives

I keep coming back to this: there needs to be a function in organizations that lives at the intersection of all the functional groups. Not IT. Not HR. Not change management as it is currently practiced. A function that understands how groups make decisions under uncertainty, how trust is built and broken, how to create conditions where people can learn through doing rather than just through instruction. That is a facilitation function. And AI does not make it less important. It makes it more important. When you deploy AI at speed, you compress the timeline for every organizational friction. Decisions that used to take weeks get made in hours. Alignment gaps that used to surface slowly become visible immediately. The process problems that were tolerable before, the meetings where nothing gets decided, the strategies that make sense to leadership and mean nothing to the people executing them, those problems do not disappear with AI. They get louder. More inputs and faster inputs can slow alignment down if the process is broken. The organizations getting real value from AI have not solved a technology problem. They have figured out how to have the conversations that the technology makes urgent: about what work means, about who has agency over it, about how expertise flows and gets recognized, about what you are actually trying to do when you say you want to be AI-ready. The dotted line between deep tech and deep human is not a gap to be closed by more tools. It is where the work happens.

The Choice

The bifurcation is not a prediction. It is already underway. The organizations making real investments in both the technology and the human infrastructure to absorb it are pulling ahead. The ones waiting for the technology to prove itself before investing in the organizational side are falling behind, and the gap is compounding. You cannot address the organizational side with the same logic you used to deploy the technology. You cannot train your way to psychological safety. You cannot mandate your way to trust. You cannot run a workshop that solves the identity questions AI raises for the people whose work is changing. What you can do is design environments where those questions get answered through practice, where people learn by doing in conditions that are structured enough to be safe and real enough to matter. Where the facilitation is not an add-on to the AI strategy but the architecture that makes the AI strategy possible. That is the choice. Deep tech alone will get you capability without adoption. Deep human alone will get you culture without leverage. The organizations that understand both, and that have someone whose job it is to hold the space between them, are the ones that will compound the gains. Everything else is just expensive licensing. If you are building AI strategy and finding that the human side keeps creating more problems than the tools solve, let’s talk.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between deep tech and deep human organizations?

Deep tech organizations have built real AI infrastructure, deployed agents at scale, and treat AI as a core capability rather than a feature. Deep human organizations have recognized that the hard part was never the technology; it was always the trust, identity, and decision-making capacity that lets any technology produce value. The two are not opposed. The bifurcation is happening because most organizations are investing heavily in one side and ignoring the other, and the middle ground is collapsing.

Why is the middle ground collapsing for organizational AI strategy?

Because AI compresses the timeline on every organizational friction. When the technology was slower, organizations could afford to ignore the trust gap, the identity questions, and the decision-rights ambiguity. AI makes those frictions immediate. The 20:1 ratio Gartner reported, that managing AI-driven transformation requires twenty times more organizational effort than managing job losses, is the quantitative version of this collapse. Half-measures stop working.

How do you build organizational trust during AI transformation?

By involving the workforce in how AI reshapes their roles before deployment, not after. Organizations that get this right, like Ivanti’s AI pods or Manchester NHS’s Dragon rollout, are not announcing AI strategy and asking people to comply. They are bringing subject matter experts and frontline workers into the design of how the technology gets used. The mechanism is structural, not communicative; trust comes from agency, not from town halls.

What does “deep human” mean in organizational AI strategy?

Deep human means investing in the human capability that makes any technology productive: facilitation skills, decision rights design, trust-building practices, role redesign, and the developmental experiences that build judgment over time. It is not the soft side of AI strategy. It is the architecture that makes deep tech work. Organizations that go deep tech without deep human get capability without adoption.

Should organizations invest in AI technology or human capability?

Both, in sequence and in proportion. Most organizations are 95% tech investment and 5% human investment, and that ratio is what produces the executive/IC perception gap, the experience starvation pattern, and the 70% IT-leader concern about agent governance. The organizations pulling ahead invest in both at roughly the level the 20:1 effort ratio implies: most of the work is the human work, and treating it as a side-project alongside the technology budget is the failure mode the bifurcation reveals.

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The 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit brought together eight extraordinary facilitators in Austin, Texas for two days of exploration, practice, and connection. The theme was “Edges” — the spaces beyond the familiar where real change, insight, and belonging become possible. Every session this year built on that idea from a different angle: what it means to step into the unknown, to show up fully as yourself, to illuminate others, to read the room, and to hold space for everything people carry when they walk through the door.

The summit provided an invaluable opportunity for facilitators to learn, challenge their assumptions, and grow. We were privileged to hear from a diverse group of speakers who brought their full selves to each session, modeling the very practices they were teaching. From guided meditations and somatic exercises to live facilitation simulations and fire-based frameworks, every session left participants with tools they could use and questions they are still sitting with. Read on for a summary of each workshop delivered at this year’s summit.

Dan Walker

Unlocking Collective Wisdom

In his session “Unlocking Collective Wisdom,” Dan Walker invited participants into a rich conversation about why we facilitate in the first place. Rooted in his foundational belief that the smartest person in the room is the room, Dan guided the group through reflections on collective process, the tension between urgency and long-term change, and how to maintain wellness when the world feels like it is at an edge. Drawing on a personal story of burnout and a transformative conversation with an indigenous elder who offered one word — patience — Dan helped participants explore the difference between the urgent need of now and the generational nature of real change.

The session closed with a practical focus on navigating turbulence in facilitated spaces, surfacing strategies from the room: slow down and let the turbulence be the wisdom that wants to be heard, set clear containers before anyone walks in, and use the Lewis Deep Democracy practice of “finding the no” to honor the full complexity of a group. Participants left with a reminder that discomfort is not danger, and that collective wisdom, given the right conditions, will always find its way through.

Renita Joyce Smith

The Edge of the Room Is the New Center

Renita Joyce Smith’s session challenged facilitators to stop trying to engineer trust with frameworks and checklists, and start asking a more uncomfortable question: how much of you is actually in the room when you facilitate? Opening with her “welcome mat” slide — a belonging-first introduction that traded resume bullet points for honest self-disclosure — Renita modeled the core thesis of her talk: being real enough so the room can be real back. She shared a pivotal story of missing a moment during an executive retreat when a CFO named a trust problem and Renita moved on to the next activity, a choice that defined the rest of her facilitation philosophy.

Through the Hamilton stage metaphor and a three-part framework of notice, name, and invite, Renita gave participants a practical architecture for being present as a full human while still holding the room. The tip exchange that followed surfaced tools from across the group: stuffed elephants for naming the unspeakable, fist-of-five checks done with eyes closed, ten-second pauses, and the reminder that clarity is kindness. Renita’s closing note: we are never finished becoming, and that is not a problem. It is the practice..

Chris Lunney

Navigating the Unknown with Whole Intelligence

Chris Lunney opened with a blank slide and a question: “What did you just experience right there?” It was the first of many moments in his session designed to demonstrate that navigating the unknown requires more than analytical thinking. Through the concept of whole intelligence, Chris introduced a framework for integrating all four sources of knowing: the analytical mind, somatic and emotional awareness, subconscious and imaginal insight, and personal and collective understanding. His central provocation was that when we try to plan the perfect path from Point A to Point B, we almost always end up stuck, because we are using a map without a compass.

The heart of the session was a guided meditation centered on a simple but powerful image: opening a refrigerator in the middle of the night to find the exact feeling your heart desires. Participants emerged from the exercise with words, phrases, and clarity that surprised them, and several noted that their answers converged with reflections from earlier in the day. Chris then introduced a framework for converting those insights into trackable experiments using Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s approach from Tiny Experiments: small, timed commitments that generate information rather than demanding proof. The takeaway was both practical and poetic. Start with the compass, then get out the map.

Shannon Hart

Innovation: Stepping off the Edge and Leaving the Agenda Behind

Shannon Hart drew on five years of facilitating innovation sessions at Shell International — working alongside geoscientists, petrophysicists, and data engineers on complex energy challenges — to make the case that real innovation does not come from a perfect agenda. It comes from creating the right conditions and trusting what emerges. She introduced a three-part framework built around base camp, unmapped terrain, and emergence, framing the facilitator’s role as less tour guide and more Indiana Jones: there is a north star, the right skills are in the room, but there is no pre-drawn map.

A three-circles co-creation exercise gave participants a visceral experience of how ideas evolve through collective contribution — how unfinished sparks become richer when passed between people, and how human brains are wired to find pattern and meaning even in fragments. A walk and talk sent participants into the literal unknown for 15 minutes to explore how ambiguity feels in the body. Shannon closed with a focus on emergence: the signs that real innovation is happening (including the moment when no one is sure whose idea it was anymore), and the warning signs of convergence happening too fast. Her final challenge to the room was to protect the quiet sparks, the voices that get lost in cultures that reward whoever speaks loudest and fastest.

Joe Randel

Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: Finding Your Voice as a Facilitator Through Metaphor

Joe Randel came to facilitation through music — as a roadie, musician, radio DJ, and talent buyer — and his session explored how adopting a metaphor as a lens can help facilitators find their voice and navigate the unknown. The DJ metaphor took shape for Joe during Voltage Control’s core certification program, watching a facilitator lead a room of strangers through a dynamic, collaborative experience and realizing: he’s like a DJ. That lens has guided his practice ever since, and his session invited everyone in the room to identify their own.

Through the Wimbledon exercise — placing participants first as fans, then as the opponent’s coach watching the same match — Joe demonstrated how powerfully a lens changes what you notice. The session then moved through two tracks: finding your voice (built from preparation and interpretation, the patterned choices that make any facilitation distinctly yours) and reading the room to sculpt the journey (transitions, sequencing, arc, and the whole session as an act of co-creation). A live simulation challenged participants to decide in 10 seconds whether to cut, blend, or let it end as a strategy session went sideways and time ran out. Every answer was different, every answer was right, and every answer revealed something about the person who gave it. Journey, Joe reminded the room, is not what we prescribe in advance. It is what we sculpt together.

Brian Buck

At the Edges of Belonging: Presence Illuminator, Practicing a Value-Directed Facilitation Identity

Brian Buck opened not with a framework but with an invitation to close your eyes and remember someone who truly saw you. Not your performance, not your output, but you. That meditation set the tone for a session about what it means to shift identity as a facilitator from someone who brings the fire to someone who ignites it in others. Through the concept of value directions — ongoing orientations that give goals their meaning and never fully end — Brian invited participants to ask what kind of facilitator they are becoming, not just what skills they are acquiring.

His three-part fire model gave that question a practical frame: ember (the internal work of arriving regulated and grounded), kindle (holding the container, the stage most experienced facilitators live in most of the time), and illuminate (seeing others so fully that their own fire gets called forward). The session included a paired exercise in two rounds — first in kindle mode, then shifting into illumination using a reference sheet drawn from David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person — and the contrast was immediate. Participants emerged with clarity on challenges they had been carrying for months. Brian closed with the question he hopes every participant carries forward: what is waiting to be illuminated through your facilitator presence?

Robin Neidorf

At the Edge of Knowing: Embodied Practice for Whole-Self Facilitation

Robin Neidorf opened her session with the entire room standing and singing “Are You Sleeping” in three-part harmony — a deliberate choice, because embodied sound regulates the nervous system and puts people quite literally in harmony with one another before a single concept is introduced. Drawing on nearly 30 years of parallel practice in facilitation and yoga, Robin made the case that facilitators routinely leave half their instrument behind. If the facilitator’s body is not fully present in the room, participants’ bodies will not be either.

The session moved through a partnered energy-sensing exercise that surprised more than a few self-described skeptics, a chakra-based framework for identifying which energy center is each person’s natural access point for grounding before sessions, and an extended eye-contact exercise across groups of two, three, four, and five that gave participants a felt sense of what each group size does to the relational field. Two is deeply vulnerable. Three is highly creative. Four is suited for convergence. Five is where people begin to check out. Robin closed with a pipe cleaner exercise where participants built physical models of how they want to feel when facilitating, and a collective om chant that asked everyone to let the body’s vibration do the final work of integration.

Trudy Townsend

Facilitating at the Edge: Building Trauma-Informed Spaces

Trudy Townsend closed the summit by going, in her own words, “straight at” the topic every other presenter had been circling. Trauma, she told the room plainly, is already present in every group you will ever facilitate. You do not need to do anything to put it there. Drawing on the landmark ACEs study — which found that two-thirds of the population has experienced at least one significant childhood adversity, with profound effects on adult health and wellbeing — Trudy grounded the room in the science before moving to practice. Trauma, she was careful to clarify, is not the event. It is the experience of that event living in the body.

Using Dan Siegel’s hand model of the brain, Trudy walked participants through how the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus work together to protect us, and how the prefrontal cortex — where learning, reasoning, and connection live — goes offline when the protective response fires. She named five types of safety that facilitators can actively tend: physical, psychological, social, moral, and cultural, while making space for a participant who named clearly that some bodies in the room face threats that go well beyond the discomforts most facilitation training addresses. The session closed with a reframe participants carried out of the room: we cannot guarantee a safe space, but we can invite people into a brave one. Trauma-informed facilitation is not a checklist. It is the sum of everything that has been explored across two days at the edge.

The 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit was a reminder that the most important work in facilitation happens at the edges: the edge of what we know, the edge of who we are, and the edge of what becomes possible when a room full of people truly shows up for one another. We are grateful to every speaker, participant, and volunteer who made this summit possible. We look forward to seeing what emerges from these conversations in the year ahead, and we cannot wait to gather again.

You can read full recaps of each session on our blog. And if you’re looking to keep your practice going, join us at our weekly Facilitation Lab meetups—where the learning never stops.

The post Facilitation Lab Summit 2026 Recap appeared first on Voltage Control.

Most organizations are spending real money on AI adoption and getting almost nothing back. Not because the tools are bad. Because the approach is broken. The pattern is predictable at this point. An organization buys licenses, schedules training sessions, maybe runs a webinar series, and waits for transformation to happen. Gartner’s research shows what comes next: within a day, employees have lost 50% of what they learned. After six days, 90% is gone. License counts rise. Active daily usage stays flat. This is not a training problem. It is a design problem. And the organizations figuring that out are doing something fundamentally different from the rest.

Why Training Doesn’t Work (And What the Data Actually Says)

The evidence against one-time AI training is now overwhelming, and it comes from multiple directions. Gartner’s Digital Workplace Summit data shows that 72% of IT leaders say Copilot users struggle to integrate it into their daily routine. When Gartner surveyed what happens after AI training events, they found the same pattern across enterprises: usage spikes briefly, then drops to near zero. The classroom model produces AI literacy at best. It does not produce fluency. Anthropic’s Economic Index, drawn from over a million real conversations, found that experienced AI users get measurably better results than newcomers, and the gap compounds over time. People who have used AI for six months or more have a 10% higher success rate. The difference is not explained by what tasks they do or what tools they use. It is explained by how they interact.

Experienced users iterate, push back, validate, and treat AI as a collaborator. New users delegate and accept. That gap does not close with more training sessions. It closes with practice. The organizations that participated in our first AI Ways of Working executive mastermind confirmed this from the practitioner side. Leaders from enterprises spanning education, healthcare, gaming, and automotive all reported the same thing: training events produce a temporary spike, not a lasting change. The organizations seeing real traction are doing something structurally different. What emerged from that conversation, reinforced by Gartner’s research and confirmed by Anthropic’s behavioral data, is a three-part framework. Not a training program. A design pattern for how organizations build AI fluency that actually sticks.

Step 1: Leadership Modeling

The first step is the one most organizations skip entirely: leaders must visibly use AI themselves. This sounds obvious. It is not happening. In most organizations, the executives who approve AI budgets and mandate adoption are not demonstrating their own use. They talk about AI strategy in all-hands meetings. They do not show their team what it looks like when they use AI to prepare for a board meeting, draft a strategy document, or pressure-test a decision. The gap between what leaders say and what leaders do is the single biggest reason AI adoption stalls. When employees see their manager using AI as a genuine part of their work, not as a demo or a gimmick, it does two things simultaneously. It signals that AI use is safe, removing the fear that experimenting with the tool will be perceived as incompetence or laziness. And it makes the abstract concrete. A leader showing how they used AI to restructure a presentation or challenge their own assumptions about a market entry gives their team a mental model for what “good” looks like. Gartner’s keynote research named this as one of three cultural pillars for AI adoption: leaders use tools and share stories, not mandates.

The distinction matters. A mandate creates compliance. A demonstration creates curiosity. Cynthia Phillips, an industrial psychologist who presented at Gartner’s Digital Workplace Summit, found that 70% of employees are unsure whether they will lose their job by adopting AI technology. They will not voice this fear publicly. They make a silent calculation: “Is this story going to work out well for me?” When leaders model AI use, they are not just showing a workflow. They are answering that silent question. They are showing that AI is part of how this organization works, not a threat to how people work in it. The standard objection is that senior leaders do not have time to become AI power users. That is the wrong frame. Leaders do not need to be the most fluent AI users on their team. They need to be visible ones. A five-minute story in a team meeting about how AI helped them rethink a problem is worth more than a month of training content.

Step 2: Guided Practice

The second step replaces open-ended exploration with small, specific assignments. Most AI training programs make the same mistake: they give people access to tools and tell them to experiment. This sounds empowering. In practice, it produces paralysis. When someone who has never used AI sits down in front of a blank prompt window, the most common response is to try something trivial, get a mediocre result, and conclude the tool is not useful for their real work. Guided practice means giving people five specific things to try, not fifty. It means designing prompts that connect directly to their actual workflows, not generic demonstrations. It means scoping the initial experience so that success is likely and the connection to real work is immediate. Tori Paulman, the Gartner analyst who authored the executive/IC perception gap research, calls this the difference between AI literacy and AI fluency. Literacy means you can use the tool functionally. Fluency means you can operate in context without consciously thinking about the tool.

Generic training produces literacy at best. Fluency requires daily applied use in the context of real work. Her recommended approach is what she calls the “Option 3” workflow: an expert builds the prompt or template, a less experienced team member executes with AI, and the expert reviews the output. This preserves learning for the person developing skills while capturing the efficiency of AI. It is slower than having the expert do everything with AI alone. It is the only approach that does not hollow out your talent pipeline in the process. The guided practice step is where most organizations fail because it requires design work. Someone has to identify the five most valuable AI applications for a specific role, build the prompts or templates, and create the conditions for people to try them with low stakes. That is not a training department function. It is a facilitation challenge: designing an experience where people can build capability through practice, not instruction. The practical difference is stark. An organization that sends employees to a 90-minute AI workshop gets a usage spike that decays within a week. An organization that gives a team of five a set of role-specific AI exercises to complete over two weeks, with a shared debrief at the end, gets durable behavior change. The content matters less than the structure.

Step 3: Reflection Loops

The third step is the one that makes the first two compound: structured reflection after practice. This is the piece that separates organizations with scattered AI adoption from organizations where fluency is spreading. After a demonstration, after a guided exercise, after someone tries something new with AI, there is a moment where the learning either sticks or evaporates. That moment is the reflection loop. A reflection loop is simple in concept: after experiencing AI in action, teams are prompted to connect what they just saw to their own work. Not “what did you think of that demo?” but “where in your workflow would this apply?” Not “was that impressive?” but “what would you need to change about how you work to use this?” The mechanism is verbalization. When someone articulates out loud how an AI capability connects to their specific context, they are doing the cognitive work that transforms observation into intention. Without that step, demonstrations stay abstract. People walk away thinking “that was interesting” without building a bridge to their own practice. This is not new learning science. It is how skill development works in every domain. Athletes review film. Musicians rehearse, then debrief with their instructor. Surgeons do morbidity and mortality conferences after complex cases. The pattern is always the same: do the thing, then reflect on the thing, then do it again better. AI fluency follows the same pattern.

What makes reflection loops particularly powerful in the AI context is that they surface the real barriers to adoption. When a team discusses where AI would apply in their work, the conversation inevitably surfaces the actual obstacles: “I do not trust the output enough to send it to a client without heavy editing.” “My manager has not said whether it is okay to use AI for this.” “I tried it once and the result was useless because it did not have access to our internal data.” These are not training problems. They are organizational design problems. And they only become visible when people reflect together on their experience. The enterprises in our executive mastermind who are seeing real traction are running these loops consistently. Not as formal programs. As a practice embedded in how teams already work: five minutes at the end of a team meeting to share what someone tried with AI that week and what they learned. A monthly session where a team reviews their AI experiments and decides what to scale and what to drop. A quarterly retrospective where leadership hears directly from practitioners about what is working and what is not. The cadence matters more than the format. Weekly is better than monthly. Monthly is better than quarterly. Quarterly is better than never. The point is not perfection. The point is creating a recurring structure where AI fluency develops through shared experience rather than individual trial and error.

Why This Framework Works (And Training Programs Don’t)

The reason these three steps work where training fails comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding about what AI fluency actually is. Most organizations treat AI adoption as a knowledge transfer problem: teach people how to write prompts, show them the features, quiz them on best practices. But AI fluency is not knowledge. It is a practice. It is closer to fitness than education. You do not get fluent by attending a lecture. You get fluent by showing up consistently and doing the work. The three steps, modeling, guided practice, and reflection, create the conditions for practice to happen. Modeling removes the fear barrier and provides a mental model. Guided practice gives people a specific, low-risk entry point connected to their real work. Reflection loops turn individual experiments into shared learning that compounds across the team. This is also why the “train the champions” approach that many organizations default to consistently underperforms. Champions without a collaborative model become isolated experts. They develop fluency on their own, but they cannot embed what they are learning back into the team. The team’s processes, meetings, and decision-making structures have not changed. The champion ends up on an island. The three-step framework avoids this trap because every step is inherently collaborative. Leaders model in front of their teams. Guided practice is designed for specific roles within a team context. Reflection loops are group activities. AI fluency spreads through the team, not around it.

The Stakes

The urgency here is not abstract. Anthropic’s data shows that the gap between experienced and new AI users is hardening into something structural. The people who started early are pulling further ahead. Gartner projects that by 2027, 75% of hiring processes will include AI proficiency testing. The workforce is bifurcating between people who can work with AI as a genuine collaborator and people who either cannot use it effectively or have let it do their thinking for them. 59% of the workforce needs fundamentally new skills in the next two to three years. That number does not get solved by scaling up existing training approaches. It requires a different design. The organizations that treat AI adoption as a training problem will keep buying licenses that do not get used, running workshops that do not stick, and watching the gap between their most fluent employees and everyone else widen. The organizations that treat it as a practice problem, one that requires visible leadership, structured entry points, and shared reflection, will be the ones where AI fluency actually takes root and compounds. The tools are ready. The question is whether your organization is designed to help people use them. If you are rethinking how your teams build real AI fluency and want to explore what a practice-based approach looks like, let’s talk.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you successfully implement AI in an organization?

Successful AI implementation is a practice problem, not a training problem. The organizations that get it right design three things: visible leadership use that signals AI is safe and valuable, guided practice that gives people specific role-relevant prompts to try, and reflection loops that turn individual experiments into shared learning. Training programs alone produce a usage spike that decays within a week. The three-step design produces durable behavior change.

What role do leaders play in AI adoption?

Leaders do not need to be the most fluent AI users in the room. They need to be visible ones. When employees see their manager using AI to prepare for a board meeting or pressure-test a decision, it answers the silent question 70% of employees are quietly asking: “is this story going to work out well for me?” Modeling is the single biggest determinant of whether AI adoption sticks at scale.

Why do most AI initiatives fail to scale?

Most AI initiatives fail because organizations buy licenses and schedule training, then expect adoption to happen on its own. Gartner data shows employees lose 50% of what they learn within a day, 90% within a week. License counts rise while active daily usage stays flat. The failure mode is structural: organizations are treating fluency as a knowledge problem rather than a practice problem.

How can teams build AI fluency together?

AI fluency builds through shared practice and shared reflection, not through individual training. Teams that build fluency together typically run a recurring structure: leaders show their own AI use in team meetings, team members try role-specific prompts in low-stakes contexts, and the group debriefs together on what is working. The cadence matters more than the format. Weekly beats monthly beats quarterly beats never.

What is the best framework for AI transformation?

The framework that works is one that treats AI fluency as a designed practice rather than a delivered curriculum. Three steps consistently separate organizations where AI sticks from those where it does not: leadership modeling (visible, not mandated), guided practice (specific, role-tied, low-stakes), and reflection loops (recurring, team-based, focused on what to keep doing). All three are required. Skipping any one of them produces the standard failure mode.

The post Three Steps to Make AI Actually Stick appeared first on Voltage Control.

Trudy Townsend closed out the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit with a session that went, in her words, “straight at” the topic every other presenter had been circling. After two days of deep work on presence, belonging, voice, and the edges of facilitation practice, Trudy brought the science: why trauma is present in every room a facilitator enters, what it looks like when it surfaces, and what it actually takes to create the conditions where people can show up whole.

Trauma Is Already in the Room

Trudy opened by noting that trauma does not need to be introduced into a facilitated space. It is already there. To make that concrete, she walked the room through the ACEs study, one of the most consequential pieces of public health research of the past 30 years. Conducted in the 1990s by Dr. Robert Anda of the CDC and Dr. Vincent Felitti of Kaiser Permanente, the study asked 17,500 patients to answer 10 questions about adversity experienced before age 18, covering abuse, neglect, household dysfunction, domestic violence, and other forms of harm. The findings were striking: two-thirds of the population had experienced at least one significant childhood adversity. With an ACEs score of four or more, risk for major diseases was substantially elevated. With a score of six or more, life expectancy was shortened by 20 years.

Trudy was clear that this was just the childhood data. Adults keep experiencing things. And the reason it matters so much for facilitators is the same mechanism that made her opening meditation work: the brain pathways that bring comfort and safety are the same pathways activated by traumatic experience. A scent, a facial expression, a tone of voice, a pattern of behavior in a group can all trigger a response that has nothing to do with what is happening in the room right now, and everything to do with what has happened before.

Her definition of trauma was also worth holding: “Trauma is not the event. It is the experience of that event living in your body. It is what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us.”

Reading the Nervous System

To explain why this matters in practice, Trudy walked the room through Dan Siegel’s hand model of the brain. The thumb tucked against the palm represents the limbic system, anchored by the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the hypothalamus. The amygdala scans constantly for threat and safety. The hippocampus cross-references what it senses against a quick-reference library of past experience, looking for what is familiar. When something registers as significant, the hypothalamus triggers the body’s protective response, flooding the system with hormones. The fingers folded over the thumb represent the prefrontal cortex, where learning, reasoning, and creativity live. When the protective response fires, the prefrontal cortex essentially shuts down. Facilitators have a phrase for this: someone has flipped their lid.

What makes this especially relevant for facilitation is that people with significant trauma histories often walk around in a state of chronic hypervigilance, already partway toward that threshold. They do not signal this. But they do show signs, and part of becoming a more trauma-informed facilitator is developing the ability to notice them. The room surfaced a wide range, including clenched jaws, elevated breathing, redness in the face, crossed arms and averted eyes, sudden withdrawal or silence, nervous laughter, anxious over-participation, thought spirals, and humor used as deflection. One participant offered a crucial caveat: we often do not know what a behavior means. Someone crying might be angry, not distressed. The practice is not diagnosis. It is noticing.

One participant named something the room needed to hear directly: that when we talk about physical safety, we are sometimes talking about different things. For some people in the room, physical safety was genuinely at stake in ways that go beyond room layout or uncomfortable chairs. The conversation did not flinch from that. And Trudy wove it into her central point: trauma-informed practice requires holding the full range of what people carry when they walk through the door.

Safety Is the Antidote

The fundamental antidote to trauma, Trudy argued, is not comfort. It is safety. When the nervous system begins to register safety, the protective response quiets. The jaw loosens. The breath changes. The prefrontal cortex comes back online. Curiosity returns. And with curiosity comes the possibility of learning, of relationship, of productive disagreement.

Trudy named five types of safety she pays attention to as a facilitator: physical safety (freedom from bodily threat), psychological safety (freedom to voice thoughts and opinions), social safety (belonging with the people in the room), moral safety (freedom to do the right thing), and cultural safety (freedom to express one’s true identity and beliefs). Participants worked through table conversations about what builds each type of safety in their practice, and what erodes it.What emerged was practically rich. Physical safety includes room layout, scheduled breaks, sensory considerations, and accessibility. Psychological safety is shaped by how a facilitator responds to contributions, including the ones that do not receive enthusiastic affirmation. One participant named that saying “I love that” in response to some contributions and not others is itself a signal that people will notice and feel. Grounding the voice, slowing the pace, and naming what is happening in the room all contribute to co-regulation. Social and moral safety connect to how clearly shared values and agreements are established, and whether the group is invited to create them rather than simply receive them. And several participants pushed for replacing “safe space” with “brave space,” recognizing that a facilitator cannot guarantee safety but can invite people to commit to bravery together.

Trudy closed with the thread that had run through the entire session: trauma-informed facilitation is not a checklist. It is the sum of everything the summit had been exploring over two days. Showing up regulated. Noticing before interpreting. Preparing well. Asking people what they need before the session begins. Attending to power and agency, because trauma almost always involves a loss of both. And trusting that when people feel genuinely safe, something opens in the room that no technique alone can create.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Trudy’s Session:

Trudy Townsend:
Y’all, what an incredible couple of days. Wow. Thank you for staying for this. I really appreciate it. I know several of you have flights to catch. I have a flight to catch too, so I get it. If you need to get up and leave, I totally understand. I’m not going to be crushed or anything, but thanks for being here to the very end. I just want to acknowledge that we have been holding a lot over the last couple of days. Our brains are full. Our hearts are full. We’ve been doing a whole lot of touchy-feely stuff.

We’ve been sort of pushing ourselves to those edges and that’s a lot. And I just want to acknowledge that. Thank you. They keep telling me it has to be higher and that’s hard for me. Yeah. Thank you all for being such an incredible audience. From every presenter has told me what an incredible audience you are to work with. So thank you for that. And thank you for the hard work you’ve been doing at Getting to Your Edges. As I start, I know that Dan shared some sort of guiding principles. Does it have to be turned on?

No, I don’t know. Dan shared some guiding principles and I want to share some ground rules too. If my slide starts working, that’d be great. But if not, that’s okay. As we get started, I just wanted to share these couple of ground rules. Every other presenter has really danced around exactly what I’m going to talk about today. And I’ve loved it. Thank you all for setting me up so well. But what I’m going to do is go straight at this topic. And some of you have much more expertise in this topic than I do.

For some of you, this topic is really, really difficult. And for some of you, you can’t wait for me to get started. But I really want you to take what fits, what seems to be great. If I say something that doesn’t jive with you, just let it go. Just leave it. Y’all have been such an incredible audience to just go with the flow, and I so appreciate that. I really do. I really want to ask you to do some deep reflection today. And as you do that deep reflection, I also want you to maintain your own safety. So you’re invited to participate with me. I would love it if you do. And if you can’t, that’s okay too. I get it.

As we broach this topic that I’m probably scaring you all about, please try to care for one another, but also care for yourself. If you need to get up, whatever you need to do is okay. And it’s always okay to just pass. You don’t have to share, but you guys are great at it, so that’s amazing. It’s the end of the day, and you guys have been amazing, but I really want to start with yet another mindful moment. Can we do it? Are we able to do it one more time? One more time, one more mindful moment. It’s really going to help set up my talk, so I appreciate that.

I also just want to acknowledge that for some of us, these mindful moments are so Zen and amazing and incredible. And for some of us, an incredibly quiet mind, closing our eyes, sitting next to someone who is very still is scary. And I get that. So if you’re one of those people where it’s kind of scary to have a quiet mind, I’m going to tell you a little trick. If you just gaze down at your feet and let your body be still for a minute, everybody will think you’re doing it.

So if you really don’t want to do it, that’s cool. No problem. So I’d like to start with this mindful moment, and if you will, just get comfy in your chair. Just get comfy. It really helps if you sort of settle into the chair, maybe push yourself to the back of the chair, let the chair support you. Sometimes it helps if your feet are flat on the ground. And often when we’re mindful, we just start by noticing our breath. You don’t have to change your breath. Just notice the inhale and the exhale. Your body already knows how to breathe, so you don’t have to fix it.

There’s no right or wrong way to do it. Just notice your breath. Now, I’m going to invite you to bring to mind a scent, a smell. Doesn’t have to be a strong one, not an intense one. Just maybe something that feels pleasant, comforting, familiar. Some of us lost our sense of scent or smell during COVID. So if that’s not a great doorway for you, you’re welcome to choose a sound, an image, a place. You get to choose. You don’t have to name it. You don’t have to picture it perfectly. Just let something come to you.

As you hold that scent or sound or image, notice what, if anything, comes with it. Maybe it’s a place, a season, a person, or a feeling, whatever it is. If nothing has come, that’s okay. No need to force it. As this moment kind of concludes, I would just welcome you to come gently back to the room. Maybe start to feel the chair underneath you, supporting you, feel your feet on the ground. And when you’re ready, come back to me. Open your eyes.

Oh, thanks everybody. That calmed my nervous system. I appreciate it. Is there anybody who would like to share what came to them in that moment? You don’t have to tell the whole story, but is anybody willing to share maybe the scent or feeling that you had?

Speaker 2:
I thought of wet earth, the smell of wet earth and vine ripened tomatoes, which my grandmother used to grow in our backyard and I used to eat them off the egg, whole tomatoes. And it just always brings me back to a place of getting safe and loved and grounded.

Trudy Townsend:
And also, there’s nothing better than a garden ripe tomato.

Speaker 2:
Oh yeah. Yeah.

Trudy Townsend:
I love that. I love that. Anyone else?

Speaker 3:
I thought about Cincinnati chili. For folks who don’t know is like clothes and chocolates and all spice. And thought about watching the Super Bowl with family and sort of comfort.

Trudy Townsend:
Oh, I love that. Give me some Fritos and chili anytime. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
So I thought of honeysuckle. It could be the beautiful weather, starting to make summer plans, but honeysuckle goes from my childhood even to now and all the places we love to visit. It reminds me of my close friends I grew up with that I’m still in touch with. It reminds me of moments with my child. I just love it.

Trudy Townsend:
Oh, I love that. We have honeysuckle on our ranch and when you’re riding a four-wheeler and you drive right by that, ugh, that’s a great smell. I love that.

Speaker 5:
So I actually didn’t think of a smell. I am a texture person.

Trudy Townsend:
I love that.

Speaker 5:
So I thought of the … There’s this blanket called the Lola blanket and it is the softest thing on the planet. Think bunny ears velvet. It’s worth every penny. It’s not cheap. I’ve discovered it at a friend’s house. She got it for Christmas. And as soon as she let me touch it, I like dove right in. I head first into this blanket. I’m not even joking. And then my friends were laughing and I was like, “Oh my God, what is this blanket?” It’s the best heaven feeling that I can think of. So I don’t get any points for this, but lola blankets if you’re interested.

Trudy Townsend:
I love that. Love it. Earlier yesterday, it was yesterday, I heard somebody, I think from this region of the room, say, “Wow, our brains are really incredible,” and they are. Just a moment of bringing a scent or a texture or a picture to mind and boom, we’re somewhere else in a different time, in a different place, just completely somewhere else in our mind. It’s really, truly incredible. I wish that I was a Dan. I wish that I was a Brian or a Chris and could just really practice mindfulness all the time because it’s incredible. My mind’s frenetic and so it’s hard for me to do, but our minds are brilliant.

The thing about our brains though is these same pathways that bring us comfort, that bring us familiarity, they’re the same neuro pathways that also work for traumatic experiences. And that’s why trauma is so pervasive. It’s in every single group that you walk into. It’s in the room already. Didn’t have to do anything to put it there, even though sometimes I try my best. And it shows up. No matter what we’re doing, it shows up. It shows up not always in words, but it always shows up in nervous systems. And it shows up in how the group engages.

How many of you have heard of the ACEs study? Raise your hands. This group is so informed. I’m loving it. Love, love, love it. This is really funny. I am probably one of the least nerdiest people I know, but I’m going to spend a few minutes talking about data and some science. There’s a couple of you who don’t know about ACEs, and I love it when I’m the first one that gets to tell you about ACEs. When I’m talking about trauma, I think it’s so important to mention this really groundbreaking study.

So the ACEs study was done in the 1990s, and Dr. Robert Anda from the CDC and Dr. Vincent Felitti, who worked for Kaiser Permanente partnered up to do this study. And they had 17,500 participants who were patients of Kaiser Permanente answer a 10 question survey. These 10 questions were about adversity that the patients had experienced in childhood before the age of 18. The questions were about whether the person

had suffered abuse or neglect, whether they were made to feel loved or special as a child, if their basic needs were met.
There were questions about household chaos and dysfunction, divorce, domestic violence, living with somebody who has a mental health condition or maybe who was incarcerated. So that’s what the questions kind of were. And the way that the ACEs study worked is if that happened to you in childhood, whether it happened once or repeatedly, you marked a one. So you could have an ACEs score from 1 to 10.

And what they found was astonishing. They found that two-thirds … so if you look next to you, the people on either side of you, two-thirds of the population had experienced at least one significant childhood adversity in their lives. Then I think what’s really incredible about this study is it was Kaiser Permanente. So they took that data and they compared it with adult health outcomes. And what they found feels a little devastating to me, but what they found was that there was a dose response between adversity you had experienced in childhood and poor health outcomes as an adult.

With an ACEs score of four or more, your risk of heart disease, cancer, emphysema, many of the top diseases we see in the world were highly elevated. And with a score of six or more, your life expectancy was cut by 20 years. Now, this is incredibly depressing and I understand that. Also, you might think it was the 90s. I’m not going to tell y’all what I was doing in the 90s because I like to think the Botox is working. I live in that sort of world, but if you’re worried about that, these questions have been added to all kinds of public health health risk assessment surveys. They’ve been added to birth of state population health surveys, and the results have been crazy consistent over time.

What this study tells me, and the whole point I want you to take home, is that this matters a lot. Childhood adversity, they’ve also found that chronic stress, living in chronic stress and toxic stress, impact your brain in the exact same way that trauma impacts your brain. It leaves a lasting imprint. I also want to mention, holy smokes, this is just what happened to you in childhood. We’re a bunch of grown up people. Stuff keeps happening. I got hit in the eye with a pickleball like two weeks ago. I went to play pickleball again and I was like, “It was hard.”

Stuff happens and it impacts us and that’s important. And when I think about this and I think about how incredible the brain is that we just think about a scent, we just think about it, bring it to mind and all of a sudden we’re in a different place. What that tells me is every time somebody sees a facial expression, look in my eye, I think about my son when I take a deep breath in front of him. They’re getting a message, some kind of message. And I don’t know what that message is, right? But they’re getting some kind of message. And that’s why this is so important to us as we walk into rooms.

So let’s talk about this word trauma just a little bit more. I always like to level set on what it is. When I first came to understand and learn about trauma, and by the way, I’m not a mental health professional. I’m just a regular person who learned a lot about this. But when I first came to understand it, we were talking about trauma as an event. What we’ve come to understand now is that trauma is not the event. Yes, something happened to you, but trauma is the experience of that event living in your body.

It’s what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us. And there’s all kind of different ways you can … Pathways to get to trauma. These are just a few of the types of trauma that we experience across our lives. Shock trauma, that’s like the car accident, the crazy weather events we have these days, that big fire ranch I talked about, ranch, fire, whatever it is. Those are shock traumas, things that happen and sort of out of the blue and shift your worldview or your experience. Relational trauma is the one that most people think of because hurt people hurt people.

Relational trauma is that trauma that happens when you think you’re in a safe relationship and it’s not so safe. So it’s abuse, neglect, the lack of psychological safety. That’s relational trauma. Seriously, chronic stress, toxic stress. Some of us just live in it all day long, every day. It’s bad for you. Vicarious trauma, that’s one that’s a little bit hard to understand, but a lot of caregivers get vicarious trauma. It’s often called secondary trauma as well.

So this is something that didn’t happen to you. It happened to somebody else, but you’ve heard about it maybe so often that now it has shifted your worldview, shifted the way that you think about things. So that’s vicarious trauma. And then there’s historical trauma. There’s this science called epigenetics, which I can’t even talk about it because I’m not that smart. But epigenetics shows us that trauma can live in our bodies for up to two generations.

So what happens to me if I don’t deal with it, happens to my kids and my grandkids. I don’t have any yet. Remember the Botox. So all of these are different doorways. These are not all the doorways. Lots and lots of stuff can happen to us across our life, but we come at it from all different experiences. All of them shape how our nervous system learns to protect us. And that protection is the key word because this trauma, it’s not weakness in the system. It’s literally an adaptation of our system. It is what is keeping us alive.

So we have talked and talked about this. Many of my colleagues have mentioned nervous systems. You as facilitators know this intuitively, but I wanted to really share exactly how it works. Some of you know this better than I do, but I’m going to try to run through it with you all using this hand model of the brain. So a really smart guy named Dan Siegel. Anybody heard of the hand model of the brain? Oh, lots of you. Yeah. So when I get it wrong, help me out. So Dan Siegel came up with this hand model of the brain, and I like it because I think it’s just such a good and easy way to remember this. So if you put your hand up in the air, you can do it or not do it, whatever you want to do. We’re looking sort of at a model of the brain, right?

So this right here is your spinal cord coming up into the base of your skull here. I’m sorry about this. The base of your skull, that’s your brain stem right there. And if you take your thumb and just tuck it in like that, your thumb represents a very small but very powerful region of your brain. This is our limbic system and the limbic system is made up of the amygdala. You all want to say amygdala with me because it’s just such a fun word to say. Amygdala. Yeah. Yeah. The amygdala, the hippocampus, and the hypothalamus. Those are the little organs within the brain.

So the amygdala is our central hub for emotions. It’s crucial at forming and consolidating memories and associating them with feelings or emotions. That amygdala, it’s busy. It’s constantly scanning the environment all the time, looking for cues of safety, looking for threat. That’s what the amygdala is doing. And when the amygdala senses something, anything, it immediately, really quickly, in nanoseconds, sends it to the hippocampus. The hippocampus converts it into short-term memories. They convert short-term memories into long-term ones. And I like to think of it as our quick reference library. So I always think of, I think of this little guy up in my brain just running through the files really, really, really quick, like AI, just running, running really quickly through it. And our brain’s like what’s familiar.

So whatever is going on, that facial expression, a smell, whatever it is, the hippocampus is like, “Woo, I know that. I know what that is. I know how we should feel when I see that.” So that’s the hippocampus. And when the amygdala and the hippocampus sense something really important that’s vital, it sends that message right to the hypothalamus. And the hypothalamus is connected to our nervous system. And the hypothalamus is like, “Oh, I got to do something. I got to protect.”

And all of a sudden, hormones start coursing through my body and releasing all of those things so that I can protect myself. Now it takes really quickly to do that, but it’s a real long time before I’m able to kind of cover that up, shut that down, regulate myself with my prefrontal cortex. So this is your prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex is really important. It’s where you learn. It’s where you think. It’s where you create reason, right? But when this whole thing is going on, the prefrontal cortex literally shuts off.

And that’s when we say people have flipped their lids, right? So if you flip your lid before your prefrontal cortex can kind of come back online, that looks all kind of different ways and groups. So unfortunately for us as facilitators, people don’t kind of walk around with their hands showing us, right? And people who have experienced lots and lots and lots of trauma, or even maybe just trauma in groups, they walk around in a state of hyper-vigilance and that kind of looks like this, right? They’re right on the edge. They’re ready to flip their lid at any moment because they’re already halfway there.

So when you think about that and you think about two-thirds of the population have experienced trauma in childhood, and the rest of us sure got it as adults, this is happening everywhere we go, and nobody’s walking around showing us where they’re at, unfortunately, although we have started to teach children to do it. But you know what? There are signs. There are signs that it’s happening when we’re facilitating. There are physical signs, right? So think about that system, what’s happening in that system when those cortisol and other hormones get released, right? I get hot. My husband calls it hot mad.
So I get really hot. I sweat when I eat cinnamon bears, so it really happens quickly for me. People’s face get a little red. Sometimes their breathing elevates, but there’s lots of physical signs. There’s emotional and psychological signs. People do all kinds of different things, right? Get quiet, get loud, shut down, all kinds of different emotional signs that we see in rooms, and there’s behavioral signs. People fidget, people get up and down, all kinds of things, right?

We’ve seen this in rooms over and over again. You’ve seen this in rooms. And if we can get really good at seeing this in rooms, we can get really good at calming nervous systems. So what I’d love for you to do is just on your own … I’m going to give you two or three minutes, not a very long time, on your own, I’d love for you to just jot down a couple of the signs and symptoms that you’ve noticed when you’re in groups. Some of you have been facilitating forever and you have all kinds of stories in your head about this. For others of you, it might Might be meetings that you’ve been in or one-on-one conversations or family groups. But what I’d love for you to do is jot down one or two symptoms, three or four symptoms, however many you can think of, in each of these categories.

What were some of the physical signs you’ve noticed? What were some emotional or psychological signs that you’ve noticed or behavioral signs? What we’re looking to get at is what do we notice in rooms when nervous systems are dysregulated? How will we know that’s happening? So I’m going to give you a couple minutes. After that, I would love for you to be able to discuss this at your tables. Remember, when you’re writing stuff down and reflecting to yourself, be as open and honest with yourself in those reflections as you can. You only have to share what’s safe.

Okay. Hopefully you have come up with a couple of signs or symptoms. I’d love for you to share those at your table. Just talk together about the kinds of signs and symptoms you’ve seen. All right. Who has a physical sign or symptom that you want to share? By the way, huge shout out to Katie and Mark. Katie and Mark, thank you so much. They have made this possible. Thank you. Who has a physical sign or symptom they want to share? Come on, you all have not been shy. Right behind you, Katie.

Speaker 6:
I had clenched teeth or narrowed eyes.

Trudy Townsend:
Yeah. Yeah. Oh my goodness. That just is me. I just clenched my teeth like this so much and so many people do. Also in our neck, right? That response is muscle tension and it happens so quickly. Thank you for that one. That’s such a good one. Yeah, back here.

Speaker 7:
I’ve heard kind of a bundle of the emotional responses. It’s all being related to protecting the midline. It’s like a very animalistic. So it’s the averting the eyes, crossing the arms, leaning back, and it’s kind of protecting your face and your center body. It’s like-

Trudy Townsend:
Very Right.

Speaker 7:
… the same way you react to any kind of threat, like it’s a physical threat, even if it’s not.

Trudy Townsend:
1,000% because it’s about survival. Such good insight. Thank you for that.

Speaker 8:
I struggle with this a little bit because I’m unsure if I actually know what any signs or symptoms actually mean, unless I actually explore and ask them what it means.

Trudy Townsend:
Right.

Speaker 8:
Because someone could be crying. I think you have an example of a person, a story was shared with me where a person in facilitation was crying and people were really trying to console and help. And then there was a moment where she was like, “Stop. I’m not upset. I don’t need anyone to hold me. I’m actually angry and I’m processing.” So there was an automatic assumption that people knew what the person was experiencing based on a particular behavior or emotion. So yeah, that’s kind of where I am.

Trudy Townsend:
I really love you bringing that up because you’re right. We don’t know. We’ve all been experiencing these two days, every single one of us. And my experience is super different than your experience, right? Some of us are like loving this. Some of us are like, “I got to go home now.” Right? This is about, we don’t necessarily have to know exactly what to do. All we have to do is notice somebody’s experiencing something, right? And as facilitators, that’s what we’re doing. We are fine-tuning our noticing skills, right? That’s what we’re doing. As we interact with groups, we’re noticing. How about emotional? Over here. Wow, you’re ready.

Speaker 9:
Yeah. For me, I tend to overthink a lot of things. I feel like my brain is overloaded with too many thoughts and I would also go into thought spirals, overthink a lot of things.

Trudy Townsend:
Yeah, absolutely. We all have that over thinker in our groups, don’t we? And sometimes overthinking is so hard because your brain’s going so fast and then somebody asks you a question and you’re like, it can look like dissociation. It can look blank. We see those blank faces. And back to your point over there, that’s not a bad thing. You’re diving into whatever we’re doing, right? You’re thinking it through, you’re overthinking it. It’s not bad. There’s nothing I need to do, but I might notice, right? As a facilitator, I might notice that and maybe think, “I should slow down or not.” Yeah. Really, thank you for that. Anybody else? An emotional sign or symptom? Psychological sign or symptom? I know that can be hard. Yeah.

Speaker 10:
Just based on what you shared right now, the thing that came to mind was hyper-vigilance. You mentioned it earlier. Yeah. I think hyper-vigilance can be a sign of maybe some of us that had to be caregivers very early on in our lives. And so we enter teams and we feel like we need to emotionally support everybody and in a large capacity and so a sign of that could be always kind of being hypervigilant. Is this person being included? Is this other person being listened to? And that can be a sign of that.

Trudy Townsend:
I so appreciate that you brought that up. I failed to mention earlier, it’s all about that fight, flight, freeze. What you’re talking about is fawn, right? That need to take care all the time, that need to people please, that need to overdo that, right? That is also a nervous system response. So thank you for bringing that up. Appreciate that. It gets really heavy, doesn’t it? Back here in the very back. Mark, thanks.

Speaker 11:
I think it’s interesting because it’s really about content as well, right? So being a facilitator requires us to pay attention to individuals as they’re coming in the room because everyone and all these physical, emotional responses are so different in every single person. And so when I see this in X person, it might not mean anything. But if you’re noticing something that’s out of the ordinary, then it becomes the sign that’s showing you.

And that’s the, “Hey, let’s pause. I noticed this.” And it’s giving yourself enough grace to be that observer from the beginning because we don’t know and no one’s going to tell you, “Hey, nice to meet you. I have some trauma and this is what I’m going to give you. So please pay attention to this for the next 20 minutes.” So that’s the part of how do we continue to scan the room, sculpt the room, to look for, again, not something that may be obvious to us, but it’s out of the ordinary for maybe that person.

Trudy Townsend:
I really appreciate that. And what you said made me think of another really important point, you and you. Guess what? It’s not just the participant because when you notice something, you’re having a response too, right? And you’re thinking some kind of way that could be totally not the thing, right? But we still need to notice because it is out of the ordinary for the group or for that person, right? So thank you for bringing that up. Appreciate you. Ooh.

Speaker 11:
Got it.

Trudy Townsend:
Over here and then to you, Joe, and then we’ll move on.

Speaker 12:
I think one of the things we need to keep in mind too is sometimes what will show up will depend on the culture.

Trudy Townsend:
I love that. I heard you talking about that back there.

Speaker 12:
So in North America, we’re often a guilt and consequence culture, Western, right? But a lot of my friends who are from Asia are much more of a shame, honor culture. And then other people I work with are a power, fear culture. And so how it shows up will depend on the culture that you’re dealing with and working with.

Trudy Townsend:
So important to talk about. We’re going to talk more about that later. Thank you for that. Joe, and then we’ll try to move on.

Joe:
Yeah. I was just going to mention one that has prompted a lot of reflection for me is humor and how nervous laughter or sort of attempts to redirect conversations always to somewhere humorous triggers for me a series of exchanges and that’s sort of how you respond to them, that it’s something that generally is a positive thing. And so you may give back to it, but in the spirit of what others have said, you don’t know whether it’s sincere humor, whether it’s reflection of something deeper. And so humor is one that to me particularly is complicated to navigate.

Trudy Townsend:
I so appreciate that. I was talking to Brian earlier. He was talking about how much he uses dad jokes, right? And a lot of people, we use all different kind of protection mechanisms. I have another girlfriend that whenever you go to any party with her, she is the show. And I love it because then I don’t have to be the show, but that is a fear response. That’s okay. I love it. I eat it up. That’s great. And I know she needs to be that person. And that’s great.

So thank you for that. It’s true. It shows up in all kinds of different ways. What do you think is the one thing in all these scenarios, whether we know what’s happening or not, what is the one thing that people need when we’re activated, when our nervous system gets activated? What do we need? Anybody got a guess?

Speaker 14:
Awareness.

Trudy Townsend:
Awareness? We as facilitators sure need awareness, right? What do they need when their nervous system is activated?

Speaker 14:
[inaudible 00:41:26].

Trudy Townsend:
Right. What she said is co-regulation.

Speaker 14:
Like a co-regulation.

Trudy Townsend:
Girl, you are working it. Thank you. Yeah. Co-regulation.

Speaker 14:
Attunement of some kind from another human in some way, maybe.

Trudy Townsend:
Yeah. I think what people are looking for is safety because our nervous systems are trying to protect us, right? They’re really trying to get to a place of safety. Listen, this isn’t bad. This is good. It keeps us alive, right? Our nervous system is so important to our survival. It was built for the dark ages where we are running from tigers. So the nervous system is good, but what it is seeking is safety. So safety is a fundamental antidote to trauma. It’s not being more comfortable. It’s not that one person in every room who complains about the temperature that I can’t do anything about.

It’s safety because when the nervous system calms down, lets the prefrontal cortex kick in, it starts to register safety. We naturally shift out of protection mode. Our breath changes. Our jaw loosens. Muscles start to soften. Our attention widens when we feel safe. We’re able to return to curiosity. We’re able to use our words. So safety is what makes learning possible. It’s what makes relationship possible. It’s what makes engagement happen. And it’s what makes conflict workable. For safe, we can engage. We can disagree. If we’re not safe, it’s hard to do that.

Here’s the deal though. There’s not just one type of safety. If you Google safety, guess what? You’re going to get a lot of hard hats. Okay. So there’s not just one type of safety. There’s lots of different types of safety. These are the ones I pay the most attention to when I am facilitating. So physical safety. Are we safe in our body, safe from physical threat? Psychological safety. Are we safe with our thoughts? Do we feel safe enough to voice our thoughts and opinions? Social safety. Do I feel safe with the people at my table? With the people in this room? I feel really safe with this group. You guys are amazing.
And then I feel like I can’t say this one enough in the groups that we’re facilitating. Moral safety. Do I feel safe enough to do the right thing? Cultural safety. Thank you so much for bringing that up. Do I feel safe enough to express my true self, my true beliefs? All right, y’all. Let’s make this real. You guys are professionals. So what I would love for you to do right now, first of all, I need a volunteer at each table. Can you raise your hand if you’re willing to volunteer? One volunteer for each table. Looking at each table? Awesome. Thank you so much.

Your job is not hard. What I’m going to ask you to do is I’m just going to ask you to start the conversation and I’m also going to ask you to make sure that you’re clicking through each type of safety. Okay? So keep the conversation going. We’re not going to have a long conversation. We’re going to have about a seven-minute conversation. But what I want you to do at your tables is I want you to talk through how you, as a facilitator, what are the strategies you use to build physical safety?
What do you do in your planning processes throughout the day? How do you build physical safety for your groups? How do you build psychological safety for your groups? What do you do as a facilitator? How do you make psychological safety happen? Social safety, moral safety, cultural safety. Move through that list and just engage in conversation with one another, sharing the strategies that you use to build safety in the rooms you’re in for each of these types of safety. Okay? Seven minutes, table facilitators. Awesome.

Okay. Are y’all back? Back? Those were good conversations. Really good conversations. This is a talented room. So I’m going to take a couple from each category. There’s a lot of categories. So physical safety. What are some things that you all do as facilitators? What are the choices you make? Conditions that build safety. Got it.

Speaker 10:
So physical safety was one that we initially started talking about … not really sure how to word it, but we dove deeper into it and we thought about intentionally scheduling breaks, making sure that we could, when we’re meeting with people, we asked them about their energy levels, giving them a heads-up that a break was coming up, even going more deeply into also the smells of the shared space, understanding that some people might be more sensitive to smell and that might affect their experience in the moment, making sure that there’s enough chairs so everybody is comfortable. So exploring the idea of comfort and safety together.

Trudy Townsend:
I love that you brought in the senses. That’s beautiful. Thank you so much. Let’s take one more condition that builds safety.

Speaker 4:
Adding to those. We also talked about location and room layout and things like that, that truly physical to the room that might fit that conversation you’re trying to have.

Trudy Townsend:
I love that. I think also where people are at in the room is important, right? Maybe making sure you’re spreading out the power dynamics a little bit across the room. Really good. What are some conditions that erode safety in groups? You don’t have to tell me big stories, but maybe something that you know that really erodes physical safety.

Speaker 11:
It only takes one.

Speaker 6:
I was just going to say, we had uncomfortable chairs at one point and there was different … Just people who were very uncomfortable in certain chairs. And we also were one time at a school that the elevator was not working. And so people who had mobility struggles to get to the second floor of a building that was like right from the very start of the day, put people off in their physical safety.

Trudy Townsend:
Absolutely. What about activities that require physical movement? Yeah. One here, one over there.

Speaker 14:
I was going to say that … Oh, sorry. I was going to say that everybody must stand and stay standing the whole time. I’ve been in workshops where people have done that.

Trudy Townsend:
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 14:
You don’t know what people’s issues are.

Trudy Townsend:
Right. Right.

Speaker 15:
I just, in terms of the elephant in the room, wanted to hold some space for the fact that truly there are some bodies that are not safe. There are some of our colleagues here who are more likely to get rounded up than others. There are some of us who have a historical trauma and some of us who don’t, and it feels like we’re not really talking about safety. And if you’re someone like me and I have to look at my students and say, “Here’s what will happen if someone comes to round you up.” When I have to look at trans faculty and say, “Okay, if they will not let you use your passport, you do not have to go to this thing.”

The physical safety that we’re metaphorically talking about, I just want to say to the people who might not actually be physically safe, I would love for us to talk about actual unsafety, people who are being oppressed physically, women, gender violence. When we talk about bodies being traumatized, I think we’re really talking about survivors of sexual violence, right? So I just want to ground for a second for people who might be sitting like I am going like, “I don’t know if we’re all talking about the same safety.”

An uncomfortable chair is not physical unsafety. That’s a lovely way to talk about safety, but I just want to be sure that if you’re sitting there going like, “Yeah, I just don’t want to get rounded up. I’m hearing you.” And I would love for people to think about those things too. Sorry.

Trudy Townsend:
No, I really appreciate that. Thank you for bringing that into the space so much. There is such a rainbow of things because experiences live in our body, fear lives in our body. So thanks for bringing that up. There is a wide, wide list of things that are our responsibility as a facilitator, no matter what we’re facilitating. We’re facilitating programs, we’re facilitating sessions. So thank you for that. Let’s talk about psychological safety because that matters too, right? Are we safe enough to be here? Yeah. What are some things that we do as facilitators that build safety?

Renita:
I think one thing that we talked about and I was identifying myself of how I maybe inadvertently losing safety is how I’m responding to people’s comments and questions. I’m a very much like, if someone says something, “I love that. I love that.” Then I’m thinking about for the comment that I don’t say I love that.

Trudy Townsend:
Yeah.

Renita:
How is that person now like, “Well, wait, was my comment not valid?” And I just didn’t want to keep overusing. So now I’m trying to find other neutral language of acknowledgement that also doesn’t sound like a robot of like, “Thank you for sharing, thank you for sharing, thank you for sharing.” So making sure there’s like a balance of how I am responding to the group because that evokes all types of trauma and validation and work, all the things that are there.
And then even to the point of making sure my voice is grounded in moments of activation too, because I know that in my past I’ve gotten activated by voices. I’m like, “Oh, you sound like my mom yelling at me.” And so when things get activated, I drop my register down and I slow my tone so that it can co-regulate the group too. So all those little subtle dynamics are alive.

Trudy Townsend:
Using those mirror neurons to help co-regulate with others. Thank you so much too for raising how we interact with groups is really vital to safety. So thank you for that, Renita. Yeah, over here.

Speaker 17:
We talked about the importance of kind of like naming the gaps and when we fail to embody our values and what we say we believe, just to level set and also like create room for that to be acknowledged and maybe ideate on what could that look like if we’re not embodying it, how could it be?

Trudy Townsend:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s beautiful. So much of what we’ve talked about over the last two days really are about how do we show up? How do we demonstrate those values? How do we generate the conditions in the room? Yeah.

Speaker 18:
This is something that I definitely bring into the facilitation practice, but I’ve learned outside of the facilitation practice, which is when you’re in a company of rowdy people, say people who might have drunk too much as well. I remember being at a barbecue once in the mountains in this place in central Italy, and it was like a bike spot and I was brought in by a group of bikers. They were super nice, but they definitely drank too much. They had too much to drink.

And so there was the feeling of the edge was kind of ready to flip. And I had this conversation with one of them who had drunk a little bit less than the others, and he said, “Well, the trick here is just to treat them like gentlemen.” And I was like, “Okay, let’s try it.” And the response was perfect. I mean, they were on edge, but they were like, “Oh yeah, I’m a gentleman. Yeah.” I will stay gentlemenly throughout. And so that’s something I also bring into my facilitation practice by giving people a chance to be generators of safety, psychological safety.

Trudy Townsend:
I love that. You bring up something that I think is vital to safety and that’s respect. People need to be respected in order to feel safe. So thank you for that. Yeah.

Speaker 8:
One here.

Speaker 19:
As facilitators, we all say these catchphrases like, “Let’s create a psychologically safe space or this is a judgment free zone.” Well, we can’t guarantee a psychologically safe space. We can’t guarantee a judgment free zone either. So one thing you said, one thing my group talked about was you had an example is that you say, “Let’s create a brave space.” And would you explain to us what you meant by that?

Speaker 20:
Yeah, this is not my work. If you do a search for a brave space, there’s an awesome quote that goes over it in more detail, but the gist is basically, to that point, we can’t guarantee that something that said is going to make someone not feel safe, but we can all, as part of our agreements, is agree to be brave and to be brave to have these tough conversations.

Trudy Townsend:
I love that. That’s a great reframe. Hi, Dan.

Dan:
Hey. Yeah, I think too, I [inaudible 00:57:20] arrival, just splashed everything everywhere. Yeah, I think part of this we’ve talked a lot about in the session and what we do in that moment, but I also think there’s that piece prior to the session too, how we’re building that awareness together. I find too, we place the burden on the person who’s experiencing the traumatic event and the challenges.

Trudy Townsend:
Right. Point them out.

Dan:
Yeah. Say I’m not. And how do we share that as a collective burden amongst the group so that we can name it too? I think that’s another important piece that I’ve seen work really well.

Trudy Townsend:
Yeah. Yeah. Renita.

Renita:
Sorry. I’m not sorry. I have things to say. But I want to build on what Dan said, because it just brought to my attention something that’s worked in the past, and I’m going to do a Monday as I’m crafting this session, is for people to stop and think about, write down what you need to be safe. I think we are proactively trying to create these things, but people individually haven’t thought like, “Well, I feel safe when, and these are the conditions that I need,” versus, “Well, I don’t feel safe. Well, why?” “Well, I don’t know why. Well, let’s actually take some time to see what safety looks like for you or for what trust looks like.” So that way they can also have a way of taking care of themselves and that can be built into the collective agreements that Dan was also just was talking about too, so letting people have time to think through it.

Trudy Townsend:
I love that. I was running out of time, so I skipped over this. Can I see my slides again really quick? Flynn, like the lights. Oh, good. Renita has taught me so much about interviewing clients, talking with clients, the pre-work with clients. I skipped over this exercise, which was probably a wrong facilitator move, but I mean, maybe we could ask these questions, right? Maybe we could actually ask people what they need.

What I really want to tell you is that trauma-informed care isn’t a list of things, right? It’s not a checklist you can do. It is all the things we’ve talked about over the last two days. It’s being present. It’s understanding the signs and symptoms. It’s preparing well. It’s showing up regulated, whatever that looks like for you. It’s noticing all day long, pre, mid, Post. That’s what trauma informed care is. And all of us are already doing some form of this.

We’re already doing it. But if we can train ourselves to get better at spotting the cues, if we can train ourselves to get better in the interview phase, to get better in the prep phase, to pay more attention to the world around us, what is happening for the people I’m about to encounter? What feels safe for them? What doesn’t feel safe for them? What is their culture? What is their beliefs about safety? If we can get really good at that part, think about the incredible engagement. If I’m safe to engage in a conflict with someone who has more power than me, just think about how we can change the dynamic, change what happens in the world. But in order to do that, we have to access our prefrontal cortex.

We can’t walk around with our lids flipped all the time. It also really matters for us as facilitators to figure out how to regulate in that moment. So it’s noticing ourselves. I love all of this mindfulness stuff that we did. I love the sensing stuff, the embodiment stuff. Not all of us are really good at that. I wish I was better at it. But if we can work on fine tuning those systems within ourselves, creating habits for ourselves, we can get even better at this. Thank you for putting up with my sort of nerdiness. I didn’t get to everything, which is just me. I never get to everything.

Thank you for doing this with me. Thanks for stretching to this kind of hard edge at the very end of a very long two days. I appreciate you more than you know. I am kind of at time, right? 4:30? Yeah. Well, you told me 4:30, buddy. So anyways, oh, I had this whole bit about power. You guys understand that … I just want to say this one more thing. Power matters because when people are traumatized, usually it involves a loss of power, a loss of agency, a loss of control.

So when you’re thinking about those power dynamics, that’s important. It’s really important. And so it’s not only about safety, it’s also about agency. So much about agency. So you guys are already doing this. You know what you’re doing. Let’s just get better at it and better at it. Okay. So I’m going to get to here.

And what I would love for you to do is think about a strategy that you heard at your table. Think about one thing that you’re going to get better at. Put that up on the board. Thank you so much to the whole desk in the back that’s making all this happen. Amazing. Thank you to this incredibly talented graphic recorder. Thank you to the volunteers. We’re going to create brave spaces. We’re going to be more vulnerable. We’re going to think about acknowledging safety. I’m going to regulate myself. I love this, y’all. Thank you so much. Thanks for letting me be here.

The post Facilitating at the Edge: Building Trauma-Informed Spaces appeared first on Voltage Control.

“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

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.

The post Introducing New Friction appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Collaborative AI” is the buzziest term of 2026. Vendors use it. Analysts use it. LinkedIn thought leaders use it. Most of the time it means almost nothing, because the term has been stretched to cover three completely different things at once. A diagram of multiple agents handing tasks to each other gets called collaborative AI. A single user prompting ChatGPT for help gets called collaborative AI. A team using a shared model in a meeting gets called collaborative AI. Three different things, one term. And the thing that actually matters, the thing that is genuinely new about how teams are starting to work with AI, gets buried under the other two. This piece is a working definition. Not the marketing one. The one that lines up with what we actually see when we walk into rooms where teams are doing this well, and what is missing from the rooms where they are not.

The shallow definition (and why it does not help you)

The most common use of “collaborative AI” right now describes a multi-agent architecture. One AI agent generates a draft, hands it to a second agent for review, hands the result to a third for formatting. The agents are collaborating with each other. The diagram is impressive. The phrase has obvious appeal. This is a useful technical pattern. It is not collaboration in any sense that matters for how people work. There are no humans in the loop. The collaboration is between models. Calling this “collaborative AI” is like calling a pipeline “collaborative software.” The work flows through stages, but no one is collaborating. The shallow definition gets worse when it is applied to a single person using a chatbot. Someone types a prompt, the model returns text, the person edits it, sends another prompt. This is not collaboration. It is iterative tool use. Useful, fast, and individual. The output reflects one person’s thinking improved by a model. No one else’s perspective is in the room. If you are looking for what actually changes when AI shows up in a team’s workflow, neither of those definitions will help you.

The working definition

Here is the one that holds up in practice. Collaborative AI is the practice of bringing AI into the room with a team, where it influences collective thinking and output in real time, with shared visibility into how the model is contributing. Three pieces matter, and all three have to be present. In the room with a team. Not one person alone with a chat window. A group, working together, with an AI participating in the work. This could be a workshop, a strategy session, a stand-up, a planning call. The AI is on the screen, not in someone’s pocket. Shapes the team’s collective output in real time. The model is generating, summarizing, surfacing patterns, drafting alternatives.

Whatever the team is producing is being changed by the AI as the team works. Not after the meeting, in someone’s editor. During. Shared visibility into how the model is contributing . This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that determines whether the AI helps the team or quietly hurts them. Everyone in the room knows the model is contributing, knows what it has produced, can see what is generated AI versus team thinking, and has the chance to push back. The AI is a participant, not a hidden assistant. When all three are present, you get something that does not happen with individual AI use or multi-agent pipelines. You get a team that can think faster together, with a shared artifact that captures what the model contributed and what the people contributed, and a record of where they pushed back. That is collaborative AI. Everything else is either delegation (one person and a model) or automation (models talking to models).

What collaborative AI looks like when it works

A leadership team gathers to align on a strategic question. The question is on the screen. So is a model. The facilitator runs the team through a structured divergence: each person types a position privately, the model surfaces themes across the responses, the themes go up on the wall. The team sees the patterns the model found and the dissents the model missed. They argue with the model’s framing. They edit the themes. They re-run the synthesis with their corrections. Two hours in, the team has alignment on a position they could not have produced in two hours without the AI. They also have a record of what the model contributed and where they overrode it. The output is theirs. The model accelerated the path to it. Now imagine the same team, same question, without collaborative AI. Three options.

Option A. Each person prepares their position alone, with their own AI assistant. They come to the meeting with polished drafts that look similar because the underlying models trained on similar content. Discussion devolves into refining the most articulate draft instead of surfacing the real disagreement. The model contributed to each person individually. It did not contribute to the team.

Option B. They run the meeting without AI, fill the wall with sticky notes, take photos for the recap, and the synthesis happens later, in someone’s editor, with a model. The synthesis returns from the model and people argue about whether it captured the room. The model is reading, not collaborating.

Option C. They run a multi-agent system that takes meeting transcripts, summarizes them, drafts strategic options. The output looks like collaboration. No one is in the room with the model. The team is consuming AI output, not shaping it. Each option uses AI. Only the first is collaborative AI as the term should be used.

What it requires from teams (and most teams do not have)

The reason collaborative AI works in some rooms and not others has nothing to do with the model. The model is the same. What changes is what the team brings. A facilitator who can hold the room with AI in it. Most facilitation training assumes the facilitator’s job is to manage human dynamics. With AI in the room, the facilitator’s job expands. Who decides when to use the model? When does the model’s output get accepted, and when does it get pushed back on? Who notices when the model is steering the conversation toward a generic framing the team would not have chosen on its own? These are facilitation moves that did not exist three years ago. Teams that have someone who can run them get collaborative AI. Teams that do not, fall back to one of the three options above. Shared norms about transparency.

The team has to agree, before the session, on what AI use looks like in the room. Is everyone using it? Are some people privately using it while others are not? Is the model running publicly on the screen, or quietly assisting one person? When AI use is visible, the team can engage with it. When it is hidden, it distorts the room. A working understanding of what the model is good at and what it is not. Models are excellent at synthesis, summarization, divergent generation, and surfacing patterns across text. They are bad at judgment under uncertainty, weighing competing values, and noticing what is missing from a conversation. Teams that know this use the model where it helps and override it where it does not. Teams that do not, drift toward whatever the model recommends. These three capabilities are not technical. They are practices. And practices are slow to build, because they require facilitated repetition.

The branding problem

Most “collaborative AI” content you will read in 2026 will be one of the two shallow definitions, dressed up in language that makes it sound like the working one. Vendors have an incentive to call any AI feature collaborative because the word is selling well. The diagram is collaborative. The chatbot is collaborative. The agent network is collaborative. None of them require what real collaboration requires, which is more than one person in the same room making decisions together. The risk for buyers is straightforward: you procure something labeled collaborative AI, deploy it across the organization, and discover that it is a productivity tool for individuals. People use it alone, at their desks, between meetings. The team-level capability you were trying to build never materializes, because the tool was never going to build it. The capability is built by humans, not software. The good news is that the actual practice of collaborative AI does not require a particular vendor. The model layer is a commodity. What is scarce is the facilitation layer on top, and that is what teams have to build for themselves.

Where this fits in the broader shift

This is one piece of a larger pattern. The friction that matters in 2026 is no longer execution speed. AI eliminated that friction. The friction that matters is consensus, alignment, and trust at the team and organization level. AI accelerates execution; it does not, on its own, build alignment. In some configurations it makes alignment harder, because individual users move so fast that the team cannot keep up. Collaborative AI is the response to that. It is what happens when teams refuse to let AI become a private productivity boost and instead bring it into the room as a shared participant. The benefit is real: faster alignment, better synthesis, decisions that more people genuinely own. The cost is that someone has to facilitate it, and most organizations have not built that capability yet. That is the work in front of leadership teams right now. Not picking the right collaborative AI vendor. Building the team practices that make any AI collaborative.

What to do this quarter

If you are leading a team and want to start moving toward collaborative AI:

Pick one recurring meeting. Not a high-stakes one. A regular planning or review session where the team is already aligned on the format. This is your test environment.

Put a model on the screen. Shared, visible, running. The output of the model goes up where everyone can see it, edit it, push back on it.

Name AI use explicitly. When the model contributes something, say so. When someone overrides it, say so. The transparency is what makes the next session better.

Run it for four weeks. The first session will feel awkward. The second will be better. By the fourth, the team will start to develop instincts about when to invoke the model, when to override it, and how to use it without losing their own judgment. After four weeks, you will know if you have built the practice. You will also know what you need from a facilitator, from governance, and from team training to scale it.

The teams that build this capability now will compound on it for the next decade. The teams that wait for the right vendor or the right tool will still be looking for the right vendor when the friction has moved somewhere else. That is the difference between collaborative AI as branding and collaborative AI as a capability. The branding will keep shifting. The capability is yours once you build it.

The post Collaborative AI appeared first on Voltage Control.

Most writing about AI change management is about using AI to do change management work. AI-powered surveys, AI-coached stakeholder communications, AI-generated resistance reports. That angle dominates the top results on this search term. McKinsey, Prosci, IBM, ICAgile, Udemy all lean there.

We mean the inverse: managing the human and organizational change that AI adoption requires.

This is not a semantic distinction. The gap between those two framings is exactly the gap between organizations that get AI working and organizations that stall for two years wondering why. When you treat AI change management as a tooling problem, you solve for the wrong variable. The tool is rarely the reason transformation fails.

The case that makes this concrete involves two trucks and a container port.

Two trucks break down in a port. They are thirty meters apart, on the same lane, carrying the same cargo. One port zone recovers from the disruption in seventy minutes. The other takes more than two hours. The zones share everything that matters: the same bridges, the same lane widths, the same weather, the same sixty-second mechanical fault. The only difference is coordination. In the slow-recovery zone, a single algorithm dispatches every vehicle. In the fast-recovery zone, that same algorithm shares infrastructure with a fleet of trucks driven by independent logistics companies, each operating under its own objectives.

That is the finding M. Dalbert Ma, a researcher at London Business School, reported to the BIG.AI@MIT conference this year, after studying approximately one year of operations at one of the world’s largest container terminals. The autonomous zones ran 3.8% more efficiently under normal conditions. A single sixty-second fault cost them a 12.2% delay on the operations that followed. Rain, which forces every vehicle to slow and creates temporal buffer between sequential operations, erased the fragility entirely.

This is what most AI transformation stories leave out. The efficiency gain is real. So is the cost you pay when something disrupts it. Real AI change management is the work of managing that tradeoff before the fault arrives, not after.

The 5 Frictions of AI Transformation

Every AI transformation engagement we have worked runs into the same five blockers. Not technology failures. Human and organizational frictions that the tool vendors do not mention and the training programs do not cover.

We call this the 5 Frictions framework. Each friction is distinct, each stalls transformation in a different way, and each requires a different response.

The Identity Friction. When knowledge workers are asked to share their specialized knowledge with AI systems, a real fear surfaces. The fear is not irrational. Their expertise is the basis of their value. AI that learns from their domain know-how threatens the moat they have spent years building. At one of our executive dinners this spring, the framing that landed cleanest was this: when people are asked to give their knowledge away, they experience it as becoming disposable. Identity work is not soft. It is the most operational blocker on your AI adoption agenda, and leaders who skip it discover the passive resistance later, when workflows are technically live but adoption stays flat.

The Leadership Friction. Leaders who are not personally using AI cannot guide teams that are. If you are not using AI on the order of every hour, you cannot evaluate which of your teams’ experiments have merit, which are theater, and which represent a genuine capability gain. You are coaching a sport you have never played. The practitioners in the room can tell immediately. This framing has now come up at every executive dinner we have run across Boston, Boulder, Houston, and Dallas, without prompting. The corollary the Boulder room added sharpens it: even when the CEO mandates AI adoption, if there is no facilitation and no design behind the rollout, the burden falls on already-overwhelmed individual contributors and the initiative fails.

The Capability Friction. Every AI-first workflow your organization designs makes a structural tradeoff. When execution time collapses, coupling tightens. When coupling tightens, buffer disappears. The same mechanism that produces the efficiency also produces the fragility. And beneath the efficiency numbers, something is accumulating invisibly: the growing gap between your organization’s apparent capacity and its actual adaptive capacity. JoAnna Vanderhoef named this Capability Debt at the BIG.AI@MIT conference in 2026. We will return to it in detail below, because it is the friction with the most solid research base and the most counterintuitive implication.

The Measurement Friction. The metrics organizations reach for first, time saved, tokens consumed, story points closed, either cannot be measured cleanly or create perverse incentives. At three consecutive dinners this year, we asked the room what they were measuring and whether it was working. Not once did a satisfying answer emerge. What surfaced instead were stories about measurement going wrong: algorithms that extrapolated to billions of hours saved, CEOs who set token-consumption targets that had teams running meaningless jobs at night just to hit the number, story-point metrics that broke down the moment AI made commits larger. The measurement problem is real, and the solution is not a better metric. It is a different understanding of what counts as progress during early-stage AI adoption.

The Sequencing Friction. Who does what, when, in what order? Most organizations have not answered this. They have an AI strategy document and a handful of enthusiastic early adopters and no clear answer to the role questions: who is the AI champion, who is the AI lead, what decisions belong to an AI governance council, what does AI ops mean for their context. Without those answers, every initiative stalls at the first ownership dispute. The sequencing friction is often invisible until it surfaces as a conflict, and by then it has already cost the organization months.

These five frictions do not appear on procurement spreadsheets. They are not solvable with a training event. They are the actual work of AI change management.

What the Evidence Shows

The Capability Friction is worth dwelling on, because it has the most solid research base and the most counterintuitive implication for how organizations should design their AI adoption roadmaps.

JoAnna Vanderhoef’s concept, Capability Debt, describes the growing gap between an organization’s apparent efficiency and its adaptive capacity. It accumulates subtly, as absence. Absence of novelty detection. Absence of the junior employee who stumbled into the strange request and learned how to triage it. Absence of the reviewer who noticed the model’s output was technically correct and strategically wrong. Absence of the senior whose judgment was trained on edge cases the automated pipeline now handles without them.

You do not see the debt until you need to do something the system was not built for. By then, the people who would have done it have atrophied the capability, or have never built it at all.

This is the part of AI transformation that is easy to underweight in a board deck. Efficiency is legible. Judgment loss is not. It hides inside the year-over-year improvement metrics and inside the reduced headcount and inside the deliverables that ship faster and look clean until a situation arrives that needs taste, or context, or the ability to know what is not in the data.

A team of researchers at MIT, Yale, and Microsoft, led by Mert Demirer, formalized the mechanism for where the debt accumulates fastest. They call it AI chains. An AI chain is a sequence of production steps in which the automated steps are contiguous. The human at the end verifies only the final output. The economic incentive is to keep adding steps to the chain until the marginal failure probability overwhelms the saved verification cost.

The jobs that get automated fastest are the ones where AI-suitable work clusters together. Lecture preparation is one such job. Research, drafting, slide generation, and example synthesis are all AI-suitable, and they are sequential. A single verification at the end is sufficient. The chain collapses into one unit of human work.

Tutoring is the opposite. AI-suitable steps are interleaved with diagnostic steps that require real-time human judgment. The chain cannot form.

The second consequence is more important than the first. Jobs that form long AI chains are also the jobs where learning loops get shortest. The junior who used to do the research, draft the slides, and watch the senior edit them loses three apprenticeship cycles per deliverable. What was formerly a sequence of moments where skill formed now happens inside the model.

When your team maps its AI automation roadmap, the blocks to be careful about are the contiguous ones. They are where the efficiency gain is largest. They are also where the Capability Debt compounds the fastest.

What We Actually Saw in the Field

Research describes the mechanism. The practitioners in our dinner rooms describe the texture.

Two patterns showed up without prompting at every table this spring.

The first is the training blip. John Ippolito, at the time VP of Enterprise at Miro, shared a Gartner workplace-event graph at our Boston dinner that became the anchor reference for the rest of the evening. The graph shows a flat line of token consumption over time, with a single one-day spike coinciding with formal AI training, then an immediate return to baseline. Adoption of tools is rising. Real usage is not. Every practitioner at the table confirmed it independently. Rachel Brown from CIBC described what works instead: an every-other-week internal showcase where early adopters demonstrate live, the most junior employees show what they have built, and the room asks questions in a safe space. Not training. Social learning, designed and facilitated deliberately.

The most wasted line item in most AI transformation budgets is the training event that produces a one-day blip and nothing durable. The replacement is cheap and repeatable. But it requires someone willing to design and facilitate it, and that role has no title yet in most organizations.

The second pattern is measurement going wrong, and the stories are consistent enough across cities to treat as a pattern rather than an anomaly. Rachel’s head-of-AI at CIBC built a time-savings algorithm that extrapolated to billions of hours saved company-wide. Obviously wrong, and obvious only after the number became absurd. Jason Fournier, CEO of Imagine Learning, described a split his team lives with cleanly: they can measure curriculum creation precisely (from eighty thousand dollars and eight months down to four hundred dollars and four weeks), but cannot measure knowledge-worker productivity gains with any confidence the numbers mean what they appear to mean. Morgan Brown from Wayfair measured AI coding tools by story points, found the metric broke down, and discovered on further investigation that commits were growing in size even as counts fell. Ben Tao from Rockwell put the early-KPI trap cleanly: codify performance targets too soon, and you suppress the experimental behavior that would have surfaced the valuable patterns. “Do that too early, you’re suppressing the good seed.”

A third pattern, specific to organizations that have worked through the early frictions: the role redesign. At our Boulder dinner, one attendee described a customer service team that celebrates publicly when someone automates a meaningful portion of their work, specifically the phrase “automated 40%” landing in a team all-hands, followed by a deliberate conversation about what that person should do with the freed capacity. Two emergent role shapes are forming in that team: a white-glove tier for the most escalated and complex customer interactions where human judgment is irreplaceable, and an agent-orchestrator tier for the people who supervise and maintain agentic workflows. Those are not job titles they inherited from an org chart. They are shapes the team discovered by working through the frictions rather than around them.

For how to structure measurement that accounts for the phase your organization is actually in, rather than where you wish it were, see our piece on how to measure AI transformation success beyond productivity.

The Design Move Most Organizations Skip

Here is what separates the organizations that stall from the ones that scale.

Renée Gosline, in a MIT study presented at the BIG.AI conference, calls it beneficial friction. Her team ran a controlled experiment. Participants worked on cognitive tasks with AI assistance. In the control condition, the AI made its recommendation and the participant accepted or rejected it. In the treatment condition, before accepting or rejecting, the participant was asked to articulate their own reasoning, or to predict what the AI’s reasoning was. That small intervention, which took thirty seconds, measurably reduced over-reliance on AI and preserved the participant’s critical thinking.

This is the design move most organizations skip. They treat friction as waste. They are correct that some friction is waste. They are wrong that all friction is waste. The friction that forces a human to articulate their own judgment before anchoring on the AI’s output is the friction that carries the capability forward.

At the organizational level, beneficial friction looks like this. Decision rights reviews before an AI pipeline goes into production, where the team has to name who owns the outcome the pipeline is producing. Novelty drills, where a percentage of the work that could be automated is routed to humans anyway, so the capability stays alive. Signal sampling, where humans regularly review a random sample of AI outputs not for QA but for drift. Shadow-session reviews, where someone who has not been in the pipeline’s daily operation comes in and asks whether the pipeline is still doing the right thing.

None of these are productivity moves. All of them are capability moves. The point of beneficial friction is not to make the system slower. The point is to keep the system teachable.

AI Change Management Is a Leadership Problem

The organizations navigating this well understand something the organizations that are stalling do not. The new friction is not a technology problem. It is a leadership problem.

When execution was expensive, leadership’s job was to clear the path: remove the blocker, approve the budget, unstick the review cycle. That job is largely done. The organizations still doing it well at the leadership level are optimizing a bottleneck that is mostly already gone.

The new job is different. When execution is cheap and judgment is scarce, leadership’s job is to carry the organization’s judgment capacity forward. That means designing the decisions that matter, surfacing the dissent that would otherwise stay hidden, ensuring that the people who will need the skill later are getting the practice now. Getting executive buy-in for AI initiatives before the first pilot, not as damage control after, is one of the clearest signals we see between transformation programs that sustain and ones that die in the third quarter.

This is facilitation work. Not facilitation in the narrow sense of running meetings well, although that is part of it. Facilitation in the broader sense of helping groups think together, decide together, and build the shared judgment that a single expert, however capable, cannot hold alone. Why AI amplifies the need for great facilitation is something we return to across multiple pieces in this series, because it is the most consistently underweighted factor in every transformation program we have seen.

The organizations that treat AI change management as a tool rollout are solving for the wrong variable. The tool is the easy part. The hard part is building the organizational muscle that keeps judgment distributed across the people who will need to exercise it when the situation changes. And situations always change.

The port example makes this visceral. The efficiency advantage held until the sixty-second fault. Then the organization that had preserved coordination independence recovered faster, because it had not consumed the slack the recovery required. Your organization is running the same experiment right now. You will not know the outcome until the fault arrives.

What to Do About It

The organizations working through this well share three habits.

They take Capability Debt seriously as an accounting category. Not formally on the balance sheet, but in the same way a good engineering team takes technical debt seriously. They know where it is accumulating. They know what they are choosing to trade for it. They revisit the decision when the debt load feels wrong. How to structure an AI transformation roadmap that actually works is fundamentally a question about which automations to sequence in which order, and that sequence question is not just a technical planning decision. It is a capability preservation decision.

They clarify roles before the conflict forces the issue. The question of whether you need an AI champion versus an AI lead, and what an AI governance council actually owns, is not administrative. It is the answer to who is accountable when the model produces something strategically wrong, and who has the standing to say so before it ships. Most ownership failures in AI transformation are not failures of intent. They are failures of structure that nobody bothered to define in advance.

They treat facilitation as infrastructure, not as a soft skill. The change management framework for AI adoption in the enterprise we work from is built around this premise. It is not a template. It is a diagnostic. Where is the Capability Debt accumulating? Where is the Identity Friction blocking adoption? Where is the Leadership Friction showing up as strategy without the fluency to back it? Running a cross-functional AI alignment workshop before a pilot goes into production costs a day. Running a post-mortem after the pilot fails costs a quarter and the trust of the team that ran it.

The capacity to carry judgment through an organization is the durable advantage. Tools will change. Models will change. The organizational capacity to decide well under uncertainty will not.

What Is at Stake

The organizations that hold the line on beneficial friction will move slower in the short term. They will look less impressive in the quarterly efficiency reports. Their AI transformation stories will be harder to tell in press releases.

They will also move further in the long term, because they will still have the people who can do the work the model cannot yet do, and the judgment that closes the gap when the data does not.

The organizations that optimize everything for speed will discover the fragility on the worst possible day. Not because the AI failed. Because the people who were supposed to catch what the AI missed have atrophied the capability to catch anything.

The new friction is not a problem to be eliminated. It is a signal telling you where your organization’s judgment is concentrating. Work with it, and the organization gets stronger. Optimize it away, and you are running Dalbert Ma’s automated zone, waiting for rain.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is AI change management different from using AI in change management? The dominant interpretation of this phrase, the one that fills the top search results, treats AI as a tool that improves how change management is done: faster surveys, smarter stakeholder analysis, AI-generated communication plans. Our interpretation is the inverse: AI change management is the practice of managing the human and organizational change that AI adoption itself requires. The tool is not the problem. How organizations navigate identity, leadership development, capability preservation, measurement, and role sequencing is the problem.

Why do most AI transformation initiatives fail? Most stall because organizations treat AI as a technology rollout when it is actually a leadership and facilitation problem. The tools work. What breaks is the judgment capacity of the organization, the shared decision-making the model cannot replicate, and the distributed expertise that gets quietly hollowed out when contiguous workflows are automated end-to-end.

What is Capability Debt in AI adoption? Capability Debt, named by JoAnna Vanderhoef in 2026, is the growing gap between an organization’s apparent efficiency and its adaptive capacity. It accumulates when AI absorbs work that used to build human judgment. The debt is invisible in productivity metrics and only shows up when the situation changes and the people who would have handled it have atrophied the skill.

How does beneficial friction improve AI outcomes? Beneficial friction is a small intervention that forces a human to articulate their own reasoning before accepting an AI output. Renée Gosline’s 2026 MIT study showed a thirty-second reasoning step measurably reduced over-reliance on AI and preserved critical thinking. At the organizational level, beneficial friction looks like decision-rights reviews, novelty drills, signal sampling, and shadow-session reviews of automated pipelines.

What role does leadership play in AI transformation? When execution was expensive, leadership cleared the path. Now that execution is cheap and judgment is scarce, leadership’s job is to carry organizational judgment capacity forward: design the decisions that matter, surface dissent, and ensure the people who will need a skill later are getting the practice now. That is facilitation work, not project management.

How do you maintain judgment when automating workflows? Treat AI automation roadmaps as capability preservation decisions, not just efficiency decisions. Be most careful with contiguous AI-suitable steps, since those are where Capability Debt compounds fastest. Build beneficial friction into the workflow as a structural feature rather than a removable safety check. Keep humans in the chain even when the model could handle the step, because the capability is the thing the organization is actually buying.

Ready to work the new friction?

If your organization is navigating these frictions, there are ways to go deeper.

Talk to us about the AI Transformation Program. We will help you map where your organization is accumulating Capability Debt, where the five frictions are showing up, and what to do about it.

Read the full frame. Our pillar page lays out the thesis and the three pillars: New Friction, Multiplayer, and Spark.

Build the capability. Our facilitation certification teaches the skills that matter most when the bottleneck is judgment, not execution.

The post The New Friction appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit, Robin Neidorf did not open with a slide deck. She opened with a song. The entire room stood and sang “Are You Sleeping” in three-part harmony, and by the time the last chord faded, something had already shifted. The vibrations of collective sound, Robin explained, regulate the nervous system and put people quite literally in harmony with one another. It was also a preview of the session’s entire argument: that facilitation is not just a cognitive practice. It is a bodily one. And most of us have been leaving half our instrument behind.

Trying to Help Gravity

Robin came to embodied facilitation the slow way. For nearly 30 years, she has held two parallel practices: facilitation, which she came to accidentally through consulting, and yoga. The two eventually found each other, but not without a lot of resistance. It took her nearly 10 years of yoga practice to learn how to properly do savasana, the pose where you lie flat on your back on the ground. She would lie there with tension still held in her muscles, unconsciously trying to help gravity do its job. It took another five years to learn that leaning into physical discomfort, rather than mentally fleeing it, would produce new knowledge she could not access any other way.

The parallel to facilitation was direct. Too often, Robin said, she enters a room with her head leading, her ego striving, trying to carry everything herself. When she can instead let the body hold her in its strength, something opens. “If I can lean into the discomfort,” she told the room, “perhaps I might be held.” The invitation of the session was to explore what that might look like in practice.

Activating the Body Before You Facilitate

Robin introduced the concept of the body’s energy centers as a practical grounding tool, not as spiritual doctrine but as lived anatomy. Through a partnered exercise in sensing the edge of each other’s energy field, participants discovered which center felt most alive for them: the head (seat of insight), the throat (voice), the heart (connection), or the belly (intuition). One self-described skeptic was visibly surprised to feel a clear tingle at the edge of his partner’s field. Several others described sensing expansion and contraction, warmth, or a shift in the quality of the space between their hands and their partner’s body.

Robin’s point was practical: knowing your strongest energy center gives you a pre-session grounding ritual that actually fits you. Belly people can do belly breathing, feeling the floor press back as the breath drops low. Head people can work the pressure point between the eyes or use scent to activate that space. Throat people can hum or sing. The goal is to arrive with the body already present, because if the facilitator’s body is not in the room, the participants’ bodies will not be either.

What the Numbers Tell You

The session’s most immediately transferable offering was a structured exercise in group size awareness. Robin walked participants through a sequence: make sustained eye contact in a pair, then in a three, then in a four, then in a five. After each stage, she asked what people noticed, and the room was generous with its observations.

Two was consistently described as the most vulnerable configuration. Breathing synchronized, blinking synchronized, and some participants found themselves moved to tears or laughter simply by being fully seen at close range. Robin noted that facilitators should treat pairs with particular care. A minute of sustained eye contact is a deeply personal thing, and an extended pairing activity carries more relational weight than most session designs account for.

Three, by contrast, is a highly creative number. The energy bounces around a triangle in a way that generates ideas, supports brainstorming, and allows participants to find rhythm and mutual support. Four tends toward the functional and decisive: solid, squared off, well suited for sorting through information and reaching conclusions. And five is where Robin observes the first signs of disengagement. The circle grows larger, eye contact becomes intermittent, and it becomes easier for someone to let the group carry the load. That is not always a problem. Sometimes a deliberate five or six gives people who need a mental breath a moment to take one.

The practical takeaway was about intentionality. Most facilitators choose group sizes based on how many people are in the room and how the math works out. This exercise gave participants a felt sense of what each configuration does to the relational field, and the invitation was to let that inform the design choices they make.

Making It Physical

For the session’s final activity, Robin invited participants to build a model of themselves out of pipe cleaners, paper scraps, and whatever else was on the tables. The instruction was not to create something that looked like them, but to create something that expressed how they want to feel when they are facilitating. The result was a room full of quiet, focused construction, followed by small group conversations about what each model meant, and for some, an attempt to physically embody the shape their model suggested.

The exercise pointed to something Robin named directly: that creating a physical object can feel safer than describing a feeling in words. It provides a kind of middle distance. And the act of then trying to move into the shape of the object in your own body awakens something that verbal reflection alone does not reach.

Robin closed the session with a collective om chant, offering it both as a sacred sound and as something purely physical: a vibration that reconnects the body’s electrical field to those around you. For a session that had moved from singing through energy sensing, eye contact exercises, and pipe cleaner sculptures, it was a fitting close. The body, Robin reminded the room, had been present and offering wisdom the entire time. The practice is simply learning to listen.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Robin’s Session:

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here and really quite honored to be in such an illustrious company of the speakers that we’ve heard so far. It’s just an honor. I didn’t have a walk-up song because we’re going to make our own music.
So, I’d like everyone to stand up, please. And here’s what we’re… I mean, if you know the song, you can sing it along with me this first round through. If you don’t know the song, I’m sure you’ll pick it up. We’re going to sing it through all together twice. All right? Ready? One, two, three.

MUSIC:
Are you sleeping?
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Brother John.
Morning bells are ringing.
Morning bells are ringing.
Ding, dong, ding.
Ding, dong, ding.

Robin Neidorf:
Round two.

MUSIC:
Are you sleeping?
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Brother John.
Morning bells are ringing.
Morning bells are ringing.
Ding, dong, ding.
Ding, dong, ding.

Robin Neidorf:
Guess what? We’re going to do harmony now. All right. So, this third of the room here is going to start. This middle chunk here is going to pick up. Do you know your cue, middle chunk? All right. And this chunk, last third over here, is going to be the third group. Again, we’re going to go through it two full times. So, don’t stop after the first one. And if you get lost, just look at your neighbor and smile. All right. Are we ready with group one? One, two, three.

MUSIC:
Are you sleeping?
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Morning bells are ringing.
Morning bells are ringing.
Ding, dong, ding.
Are you sleeping?
Ding, dong, ding.
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Brother John.
Morning bells are ringing.
Brother John.
Morning bells are ringing.
Ding, dong, ding.
Morning bells are ringing.
Ding, dong, ding.

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you. Thank you all. That was even better than I imagined. So, give yourselves a hand. I wanted to start with a song, and particularly a song in harmony, because of what it does to our bodies. What you’re feeling when you’re singing in a group like that is embodied sound, and the vibrations of the music wake up yourselves, regulate your nervous system and put you quite literally in harmony with those you’re singing with.

Now, why does this matter? As facilitators, we don’t always bring ourselves fully as bodies into the spaces we’re working in, to allow our bodies to be present and fully alive in those spaces. And if we don’t, then participants won’t. And there is so much that happens below the surface of the skin for both individuals and for groups. When I was asked to propose a session for the summit, I knew I wanted to try something that I was not 100% sure I could pull off. So, you can tell me in about 80 minutes how it went.

For nearly 30 years, I’ve had two consistent practices in my life. The first is facilitation, though I haven’t always called it that. I’m also an accidental facilitator. I came to this through consulting, and as many of us do, we find our people. The second practice is yoga. When I’m practicing yoga, I can sometimes achieve a state of radical presence, a full embodiment of my physical, mental, and spiritual self, allowing the innate power and strength of my body to hold me.
On the other hand, when I strive too hard for a pose, when I’m in my ego and straining my muscles, I’m trying to hold myself. It doesn’t work. I sometimes think of it as trying to help gravity, which is crazy. It took me nearly 10 years, 10 years of yoga practice, to figure out how to properly do the pose where you lie flat on your back on the ground. I’m not kidding. I’d lie there and still have tension in my muscles as I was trying to help gravity.

It took me nearly 15 to learn that if I leaned into the physical discomfort of a pose instead of mentally running away from it, new knowledge would awaken. How could I bring these very slow lessons of my yoga practice to my facilitation practice, to find the place where my body holds me in its strength so that I could create that space for others?

As facilitators, there are a number of things that you’re probably already doing to figure out how to get to some of that embodied awareness. A lot of us use breathing exercises, box breathing, breathe in for four, hold for four, out for four. Lots of other breathing exercises work. Grounding exercises where you really plant your feet in the ground and maybe shift your weight back and forth. You might even be doing some reflection on an embodied experience. I was doing some reflection on embodied experience before this, walking around, doing some belly breathing, feeling where my body was.
What I know about myself though is this. Too often when I enter a space to facilitate, it’s my head that’s leading. My ego, my striving, trying to carry it all, trying to help gravity. Whereas if I can lean into the discomfort, perhaps I might be held.
If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this session, it’s this. Please remember, your body is alive. It is full of power, quite literally. It has an electrical field. Regardless of its age or its condition, it can hold you as a facilitator, as a human, in its strength.

Who’s ready to practice a little bit more? All right. So, for this one, we’re going to use a partner. We’re going to go through the instructions on the screen. I’ll go through everything that we’re going to do and then you’ll find a partner and go into it. Stephanie, would you mind if I came up here for just a second? I’d like to show what we’re going to be doing. So, you’re going to find your partner and this is going to be hard with both a clicker and a microphone, but we’re going to try. [inaudible 00:07:27].

Hands near the head and slowly move your hands out until you feel the edge of energy. Then the same thing at chest height. Same thing or sorry. Throat first, then chest, then belly. Move your hands slowly and feel where the edge of that energy is. Thank you.

Stephanie:
You’re welcome.

Robin Neidorf:
So, find a partner and we’re going to do this for as long as it takes to have something to happen. We’re going to get some feedback here. What do you notice? What did you notice about any of the stages about being the sensor or the sensee? What do you notice?

Marco:
At first, I had to make sense of what I was experiencing, but then I felt a very, very clear tingle at the sort of edge of my skin, and it would sort of decrease as I went furthest, and then it would increase if I went at the sort of sweet spot. And then yeah, it was really, really, really clear. And I approached this with an open mind, but as a skeptic, and I felt it.

Robin Neidorf:
Wonderful.

Marco:
Impressive. I mean, I’m totally blown away.

Robin Neidorf:
Somebody get on the bucks. Yeah. What else? What else do you notice?

Speaker 5:
It’s like a horse.

Speaker 6:
Yeah. I just felt that where tension, contraction, and expansion happened in every part of the body. And maybe it’s because I do this work on my own anyways, but I can just really sense what parts of each section was expansive or contracting. Yeah.

Robin Neidorf:
Wonderful. Thank you. How about one more? We got one right here.

Speaker 7:
I was also a little skeptical as the person experiencing the closeness, but as the one who had… using my hands, I felt like a heat sensation at my partner’s head. And then I felt a tingle specifically in my index finger when I went to the belly. And then what was interesting is my partner was like, “Is that the root chakra?” I feel like I have really good root chakra energy.

Robin Neidorf:
You’re jumping ahead of me.

Speaker 7:
Oh, sorry. Sorry.

Robin Neidorf:
That’s great. That’s great. Thank you. Love the skepticism. I love that you experience it. Remember, your body is alive and it has this power. In yoga, we talk about the seven chakras or energy centers. We’ve just experimented with four of them, but you don’t have to be a yogi to understand that your body has this electrical field. Your partner feels the tingle and the weight at the edge of that field. And sometimes even as the person who’s being sensed, you can tell when their hands are a little closer, a little further away. It depends on how you’re dialed in.

I’m curious, how many of you felt the most sense of energy when you were at the head chakra? Just raise your hand, please, if that was you. How about those of you at the throat chakra, the voice? Any chest people? A couple? Great. How about belly? Okay. So, a lot of head people in this room, which is interesting.

The head is the seat of insight. The throat is where you have your voice. We’ve just heard beautifully a lot about voice today. The heart is where you really dial into your heartbeat, and the belly is intuition. When you want to facilitate from your greatest strength, you really want to activate that particular energy center before you go and do your thing, because then you’re bringing your body fully in with you and you’re in partnership with it.

For me, it’s always been the belly center that’s the strongest. So, I was doing belly breathing before this session. If you’re a head person, you can use the pressure point between your eyes and do some pulses there. If you’re a throat person, you can hold your fingers up to your throat and feel the vibrations of your voice. You can sing, you can hum something that activates that center. Belly is a great one for belly breathing. If you’re not dressed nicely, you can lie on the floor and actually breathe into the floor and get that immediate feedback from the floor of the feeling of your belly expanding and contracting.
So, there’s all kinds of ways that we can activate that part of our alive body that helps us most do the thing we want to be able to do. This is something you can add to your practice when you’re designing sessions or add it to pre-session grounding rituals. Some of the ways maybe that you’re already using these types of techniques, I’m curious, is anyone using some body techniques to ground yourself, either breathing or one of the things we’ve just talked about or… Want to share? A couple shares? We got one right here.

Speaker 8:
Yeah. So, belly breathing is something I’ve been taught. I have a music background with chorus and also they teach you in theater, and a lot of people breathe incorrectly, if you think about it. So, belly breathing is something I always try to do to calm down.

Also, really good checks if you ever take a deep breath in and you’re breathing with your shoulders. It’s not really what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to breathe through diaphragm. And that’s what Marcos said was my strongest tingly woop-woop.

Robin Neidorf:
Cool.

Speaker 8:
So, I guess I’ve been doing it right.

Robin Neidorf:
Did it make that sound? That’s what I want to know.

Speaker 8:
Yeah, it did.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah, I love it. I love it. Wonderful. Thank you. Couple more.

Speaker 9:
We got one.

Robin Neidorf:
A couple more?

Darcy:
So, I love that she mentioned singing because sometimes I do singing vocal warmups and then the red leather, yellow… And then the other thing I have is this bell that’s like an energy bell. And I ring it in the room and I ring it around my body, and it just seems to settle me. And I bring it with me when I travel, too.

Robin Neidorf:
That’s great. Wonderful. Renita.

Renita:
I have a combination of things. I’m a woo-woo girly. When I’m facilitating, I make sure to stop and ground myself on the floor. I walk a lot, but when I’m pausing or listening to someone, I’m kind of imagining my feet going into the roots of the earth, so I have another source of energy that’s kind of coming up and keeping me really in my body and present. Then I’m a big smells person. So depending on, I put on different types of oils that mean different things in the morning, and that sets another level of intention in my energy of what I’m bringing into a space.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah. Smell is another great one if head is your primary energy source. In addition to the pressure point, things that you can smell that really fill your head are another great way to activate that energy source.
So, our bodies give us wisdom as facilitators, but we can also start to think how we can safely tap into the bodies of our participants. This next activity is to create awareness around the impact of your choices for combining people and their bodies in activities in your session. It can direct your thinking when you’re deciding how to put people into groups for activities, discussions, et cetera.

I’ll talk through the full activity and then we’ll try it and then we’ll debrief. So, to start out with, you’re going to find a partner. And for one minute, you’re going to look each other in the eye. Then you’ll find a group of three, and for one minute, make eye contact with the other two people that are in your group. Then we’ll do the same with a group of four, making eye contact with all of the other people in your group. And finally, we’ll do it with a group of five. Question from Chris.

Chris:
Just clarifying question.

Robin Neidorf:
Clarify.

Renita:
Group of three and so on. Is it just one person focusing and then switching or is it…

Robin Neidorf:
However you can make eye contact with all the people around what’s going to be your little triangle or your circle.

Renita:
And everyone’s doing it at once?

Robin Neidorf:
Everyone’s doing it at once.

Renita:
Cool. Thank you.

Robin Neidorf:
Okay. Great question. Great question. All right. Any other questions? Find a partner for the first minute. I’ll warn you, this one’s the hardest. You can stand up, you can stay seated. Standing up is probably a little easier.
So, now form groups of three. And now you have a minute to look the other two people in your group in the eye. Okay, that’s a minute. Find a group of four. You’ve got another minute. Look each other in the eye. All right. Last one. I promise. Last one. Make a group of five.

All right. I want to do some table talk before we do some whole room debriefing. So, with the people at your table, spend… We’ll take five minutes to do this. Just talk about what you noticed. What did you notice in groups of two, three, four, five throughout the entire exercise? What came to mind? What were you thinking maybe even as a facilitator? What does this tell me about facilitation practice? You can have that conversation at your tables for about five minutes.

Let’s talk about what it feels like to be in a group of two. Who’d like to reflect a little bit on what it’s like to be in a pair? No one wants to talk about this experience. Thank you, Paula.

Paula:
Okay. I’m the person who immediately gets emotional, and I feel very overwhelmed with the depth of the person, even if I don’t know them at all.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah.

Paula:
And then it just goes on and on, and I just can’t stop crying.

Robin Neidorf:
Sometimes I cry at cat food commercials. Yeah. Confession time.

Speaker 9:
All right.

Robin Neidorf:
Another person who wants to reflect on what it felt like to be in a group of two.

Speaker 9:
Right here.

Speaker 14:
I think for me, maybe because I know Jesse, it was just easy. We just dropped into it, but it was very comforting. And then I started noticing… I got into this zen moment and then I noticed like, “Wow, our breathing is even locked in and our blinking.” It was just such a cool vibe, and it happened faster than I thought.

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you for sharing. Yeah. One thing that human bodies are really good at doing is regulating each other. So, when you are in that kind of close dynamic, you will find breathing synchronizing. Yeah. Marco.

Marco:
I just wanted to share that something really surprising happened every time I looked into the eyes of various groups at this point. This is an emotional response, nothing rational about it, but I could see them as children very, very clearly. Yeah, yeah.

Robin Neidorf:
That’s beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Someone over here. Yeah.

Kristen:
So, we laughed most of the time in our shared discomfort. And so I think this sort of emotion over here, we also bubbled over quite audibly and synced up in our sort of giggles and our laughter and our sort of playfulness, but it was really joyful, I found, and very uncomfortable, both in pairs and then also in fives. Also, I’m really sorry we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to talk until the [inaudible 00:21:45].

Robin Neidorf:
Oh, that’s fine.

Kristen:
Thank you for telling me.

Robin Neidorf:
That was probably less clear than it could have been. Remember the part I said with… I wasn’t sure I could pull this off? Well, that’s an emotion. How about three? What did it feel like to be in a group of three? What did you notice? There’s Amber in the back.

Amber:
One thing that I noticed was you always had a break at some point with the threes, that you weren’t always looking into someone’s eyes. You had a moment to take a breath and like, “Oh, okay. All right. I’m not as uncomfortable at this moment.” And then I’m, “Oh, I’m uncomfortable and I’m okay now.” So, it was kind of interesting to go through this being seen and then having a break and then being seen. Yeah. So, I thought that was interesting.

Robin Neidorf:
Great. Thank you. Thank you. Danny.

Danny:
It’s interesting that you experienced that as having a break. For me, the three was the hardest because it felt like someone always was left out. That’s how I experienced that.

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you.

Danny:
Somebody was always being left out.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah. I think I heard that conversation over here too as well.

Danny:
And another thing I wanted to call out, just because I think it’s interesting, demographically, whenever you said, “This is what we’re doing,” I immediately looked for a woman to do the first exercise with.

Robin Neidorf:
Oh, thank you.

Danny:
Because it felt safer.

Robin Neidorf:
Understood. And actually, somebody did come up to me earlier and said in the chakra activity, “Why do it on each other and not on ourselves?” And that there’s a sense of safety there. I do want to say that in this particular room on day two of the Facilitation Summit, I felt a little more willing to try things that are perhaps more vulnerable, but it is a really important call out around safety and how people feel.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen this type of exercise build safety, very quickly when people can see each other, really fully see each other as humans and it’s just eye to eye, breath to breath. That is also a way that safety can be explored and multiplied, even. How about more reflections on three people?

Speaker 9:
I have one. So, I’m going to try and make it quick. I have three things. The first one is that one member of our group did not like eye contact, and I noticed that the other member of the group and I were caretaking. We saw that they were uncomfortable and then we started looking at each other, which is cool.

And then, shocker to most of you in the room, I didn’t like when people weren’t looking at me. I think that’s like very human of like, “I’m not in the group, what’s wrong with me? Why am I not being liked?” And the third thing, which is a facilitation takeaway is that I love that you gave us an opportunity to make you the bad guy of…

Robin Neidorf:
My pleasure.

Speaker 9:
Yeah. Of like, “Oh, we got to do this. Isn’t this so weird?” Because people are begging to connect, and we just need an opportunity to. So, this is a question for me and everybody in the room. How can we make ourselves the bad guy in the room so that people can connect? Yeah.

Robin Neidorf:
Something I haven’t thought about. I think that’s a wonderful takeaway. Thank you for that. One more reflection on three.

Speaker 18:
In my group of three, we definitely noticed a pattern. So, we started to create rhythms and patterns, and we talked about that as a table as they started to feel those natural rhythms and then it might break up and we’d say, “Oh,” and kind of start it again. So, that’s when that… certainly in three more than the others.

Robin Neidorf:
Wonderful. Yeah. That’s that mutual regulation that’s happening again. How about four? What does four feel like?

Speaker 19:
Four was kind of fun because you’re pairing up and a little team up, and then you go find a new teammate and then you team up again. So, nice little rhythm to it.

Robin Neidorf:
More rhythm. Love it. How else does four feel? Here’s one over here.

Speaker 20:
This is less a comment about the number of people as much as Antonio here, and I, we were in each other’s group the whole time, right? And I established more comfort eye-gazing with you than the new people that came in.

Robin Neidorf:
Interesting. Thank you for sharing that. One more reflection on four? Yes. Over here.

Speaker 21:
I think as the group gets bigger, then you kind of realize each person has, you are sharing a specific wavelength with… So, with one person, our eye contact is playful, and then another person is very calming and feels like an old friend. And so it was interesting to notice the, I guess, distinct eye contact personalities or dynamics that were coming through as different people contrasted with each other.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah. You get a lot of personality and relationship just in that. Julie, do you want to add?

Julie:
Yeah, just building on that. I started mirroring. I’m like, someone would breathe in. And then I, “Oh, I should breathe in.” And then I look and they were smiling, I’m like, “Oh.” But I started mirroring my person and I was in sync with them. It was interesting how I followed their patterns.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah. Deeply human instinct to mirror. Deeply human instinct. All right, let’s talk about five, and then we’ll do some overall reflections on what this might tell us as facilitators. Renita.

Renita:
I think for five, we were talking at the table as well. I was exploring my relationship with equity where at first I was like, “Well, I have to give everybody equal time.” I was like, “You don’t have to give everybody equal time. If you look at some persons more than others, trust them to hold themselves and somebody else has got them. We don’t have to make sure no one’s getting left out. People can hold themselves, and they’re part of the group so that you aren’t being left out. So, just enjoy the experience and kind of naturally be in the flow without feeling like you have to give someone equal time.

Robin Neidorf:
Great. Thank you. One over here?

Speaker 23:
Yep. So, I was going to say one observation I made was it felt like Squid Games, like the Mango Game at first. I was like, “Oh, shoot, we’re going to find somebody.” So, I thought that was kind of fun, but then also a more serious tip. I guess I appreciate the fact that the person I was paired with, Catherine, for the two, we actually stayed together all the way to the fifth group. So, I felt like there was an intimate connection even there looking back and saying, “Wow, we made it through all this together.”

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah, you got a buddy. You got a buddy. Love it.

Speaker 23:
Yeah.

Robin Neidorf:
Someone over here?

Speaker 24:
I noticed when we got to five that it wasn’t just about the eye contact, but the physical distance between us was also increased, and that shifted the experience as well. And it certainly wasn’t as intimate even in the one-on-one, with the exception of maybe the person to my left or right, who was about the same distance as they would’ve been at the beginning.

Robin Neidorf:
Great.

Speaker 24:
I was also curious, I don’t know if this is the first time you’ve done this exercise or not. Have you ever gone back to two to see what that shift is to expand and then come back to the original?

Robin Neidorf:
I haven’t. And I will say that I actually, this isn’t an activity that I use when I’m facilitating for real. I do it with the facilitators, not with people in the wild, because that would be weird. So, I haven’t tried that, but I think it would be a really interesting add-on, especially when we get to the next part of our discussion. So, one more, Brian on five.

Brian:
Yeah. What was interesting is Kristen’s eyes have so much joy that when I started staring at her, we just couldn’t help from being joyful. And it was interesting because when Josh and I started, we were really serious about everything, we were following and everything. And then in our discomfort as introverts, we decided to role play. She was Meryl Streep. I was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Robin Neidorf:
I love it.

Brian:
And then we realized we weren’t supposed to talk. And then he’s trying to get serious with us. And then Chris came over and the way he was looking at me, it was like… I can’t keep from laughing. And then this other person, I forget what his name was, came over and he was like, “Oh, you’re the skeptics.” And then what we looked over, we’re like, “And you all are all super serious.”

And we were like, “Oh, we’re bad. And then we’re going to disappoint you, Robin, as a facilitator, because we thought we were being unserious.” And so I felt like this range of performance, shame, kind of. So, I was watching how the group was almost dictating to us what we were supposed to be doing. And maybe we projected that, but I’m glad you left it a little bit vague because I watched how a group can influence someone else.

Robin Neidorf:
Right. Thank you. One more, Darcy.

Darcy:
Thank you. For me, when it got to five is when I started feeling insecurities coming up. With the others, I was feeling all the energy and really into it. And maybe it was the fact that in five, you were the most alone for some of that time, right? Because it’s twos and twos and you’re waiting for those two to finish before it comes to you again. So, I had a hard time finding a flow in the five, where with the others, it didn’t seem to matter as much.

Robin Neidorf:
Interesting. Thank you. I’ll tell you, I’ve done this with groups of facilitators before, and it is one of the things I really like doing. We spend more time on it, in part because there’s so much that we do as facilitators that’s about breaking people into smaller groups. And I found that we can talk about that all day long, or we can try it and actually feel in our bodies what happens when we’re in a group of two, when we’re in a group of three, et cetera.
Two, as has been reflected and I think is really the most consistent experience I’ve heard when I’ve done this with facilitators, is, “Two is extremely vulnerable.” So, you want to be extraordinarily careful when you set up pairs for something, especially for an extended period of time. This was just a minute, but it was a minute of looking into each other’s eyes. That’s deeply, deeply personal.

Three is a highly creative number. When I want a group to brainstorm, I often turn to groups of three. Three bounces energy around a circle or a triangle, I guess, really, really nicely. There’s a lot of ways that groups of three find the rhythm, find each other, help each other, support each other in what they need in that moment. And three is a very creative way to go for brainstorming types of things.

My experience of four, and I’m interested that… I didn’t hear this reflected, but I’m going to share it, which is that four is a very much a getting things done number. Four feels like very solid and square, “We’re here to come to a decision. We’re here to sort through all this information and figure out what the most important things are.” At least that’s the way that I’ve experienced four in my practice.

And then in five, I actually find this is a place where a lot of people start to check out. There’s less energy in the circle because you are further away from each other. There’s fewer times that you’re always making eye contact. There’s times where you’re not being looked at. Sorry, Katie. And it can be easier for someone to say, “Okay, well, the rest of the group will hold this. The rest of the group will take care of this.”

So, I’m just very careful about when I use any of these given numbers to create breakouts, whether I’m online or in person. It does make a difference. I’m curious what takeaways you might have as facilitators, how you might use this awareness in thinking differently about maybe it’s an activity that you do regularly, maybe you hadn’t thought about numbers in this way. I’m curious what your takeaways are on this one.

Speaker 26:
I know people had different ways they experienced the odd numbers like, “I’m not being looked at or I’m being left out.” And there’s also an opportunity there to be the person observing other people. So, assigning that role from the outset, if you’re not part of the active conversation, you play a really important role and that is to observe the conversation.

Robin Neidorf:
That’s great.

Speaker 9:
Over here.

Marco:
I would like to build on your point. I could sense that there was something really powerful about what we were experiencing around the potential for using gaze as a port, as a gateway to empathy, as a shortcut to empathy. Empathy is a hard thing, but it’s something everyone is capable of.
So, this is experimental thinking, but maybe in phases of the design process like in user research and in user testing, there is a space where we can use gaze to see if we can more quickly get the person and the problem that we want to try to solve with design.

Robin Neidorf:
I love that. I love that. Something else you were just… I was thinking as you were speaking was that this is also an activity, if you did want to use it with normal people, it doesn’t matter what language people speak. You can have this gaze moment that builds empathy regardless of other barriers that might be in place. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 9:
The one over here?

Speaker 27:
Yeah, I think it was over there.

Speaker 28:
It just got me thinking with the two person, so 1B1. It got me thinking when I’m doing interviews and always trying to make eye contact. Now, we were talking about it. I didn’t have that discomfort doing interviews because you’re too busy listening and you’re distracted, but it got me thinking when the person stops talking and is focusing on their answer, I don’t want to distract that answer because of my all of a sudden, “Oh, no one’s talking and I’m staring at your eyes and this is awkward.” I don’t want that to confuse them or get them off their thought track. So, it was enlightening for me.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah, I love that. Putting it out to another part of the practice, which is interviews is a really important piece. One over here and then one way back in the corner there.

Speaker 29:
I just think it’s interesting. I mean, for people… some of us have been doing these for a long time. We’ve been teaching them and so forth. And I feel like oftentimes the selection of number is more like how many people are at the table or how many people are in the room? Or so forth. It’s much more mechanical. And I think this is interesting because it’s much more intentional for the kind of emotional state you’re trying to create. And so it’s definitely fascinating. Thank you for bringing it up.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah. Glad you enjoyed it. Thank you. Back here.

Speaker 30:
I think this showed how important it is to build variety in the activities and the people that you’re engaging with. Being in a group and always going back to two and always going back to pairs and doing it over and over again, it can be beneficial, but it’s a bit exhausting and it’s a bit a bit same/same after a while. So, switching it up can lead to much more interesting engagements.

Also, it’s really important with this to design around the energy that people have. If it’s always intense and if it’s continually intense, people are going to just stop disengaging. That’s when people start taking a lot of coffee breaks or a lot of bathroom breaks, and all of a sudden people are not at the tables. There’s only so much energy people have and you have to respect that.

Robin Neidorf:
Right. Great points. And it actually is when I sometimes will deliberately use a five or a six, knowing that that is a place where then people who do need a mental break, can pull back a little bit or take a break or whatever that is they need to do.
And then there’s sometimes the math just don’t math, and you got to do whatever you’ve got to do to make it work. And having this awareness can give you as a facilitator a different sense of what might be happening differently than maybe what your intention was if you have a group of three instead of a group of four or five based on what you’re trying to create. I think that intentionality is really the most important through line here is, how can we be more intentional about the bodies that are in the spaces that we’re facilitating and how we combine them and recombine them. One over here and then we’ll move on.

Speaker 31:
I’m actually holding some curiosity now about when you mentioned virtual facilitation and the consideration of putting people into breakout rooms, and how that energy management kind of can shift because as a virtual facilitator, you hold so much of that or you help to guide so much of that energy without reading the body context cues. So, then thinking about that in the virtual space, I’m just so intrigued. Have you found the numbers to be pretty comparable in the virtual space as they are in the in person space?

Robin Neidorf:
I do find them pretty comparable. I’ve got a longer answer, but I’d actually like to hear from the wisdom of the room. Lots of us do a lot of online facilitation. I’m curious, from what we’ve just discussed, I mean, how might it show up in your virtual practice as well as your in person practice? Anyone? Great.

Speaker 32:
I had to step out… This is not answering your question, so it’s a political answer, “Thanks for asking that question. I’m going to say what I was going to say.” I had to step out-

Robin Neidorf:
Are you in politics?

Speaker 32:
No. I had to step out because I thought I lost my car keys somewhere between here and a parking garage, found them. But when I came back, it was the groups of five. And so I came up the stairs into this room, which was totally silent with 100 whatever people intense… And there was that feeling of being in high school and middle schools like, “I’m the only one left out.” But the energy was just so stable and firm, it was incredible to walk into.

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you for sharing that. Just went over here. There’s one over here.

Speaker 33:
So, to answer your question, also well done on finding your car keys. That is anxiety-producing. I do find that in virtual spaces, how you’re talking about these numbers hold, especially with two, sending folks into groups of two, if you then pull them back in what seems like should be a reasonable amount of time, often they’re like, “We introduced ourselves to each other and maybe got to your first question.” So, that vulnerability feels like it is really turned up, especially because you’re eye contact on Zoom. That’s really very, very present in those screens.

Robin Neidorf:
It’s an excellent point. I don’t know that I ever named it before, but I think I’ve used that in my practice a lot. Very rarely will put people into a breakout of two, unless it’s a group of people that knows each other extremely well. Other thoughts about how this translates to virtual or hybrid even? Hybrid’s just bananas.

So, I can tell you, to answer the question, I mean, most of my facilitation on a weekly basis is probably virtual. So, I spend a lot of time staring at a screen with the Brady Bunch [inaudible 00:42:13] faces up there, and I still find it holds. And even when I’m thinking about the size of my overall group, I’m much happier if I’m facilitating online with up to say, I don’t know, 10 people at most, because they do check out past that point. And so being aware of those dynamics, which I think we all innately are, just if you’ve been doing this for any period of time, you know these things, you notice them. But it is a way of being more deliberate and deliberative about how you want to set up whatever the activity is for the objective that you’re going for.

All right. So, we’re going to do one more activity, and for this one, you get to use the pipe cleaners. You’re going to take the pipe cleaners and any other materials you might have at your table, whether that’s paper or piper clips or empty cans of soda, and create a model of yourself. It doesn’t have to look like you. It doesn’t have to actually even be humanoid. I actually found this one in the bin at my table this morning, and I said, “This is me today. This is what I want to look like today.” So, create a model of yourself and then position the model in a physical expression of how you want to feel when you’re facilitating. Whatever you’d like to do with the pipe cleaners, paper, cans, flame clips, lanyards, whatever you want to create.

Kristen:
I like people that [inaudible 00:44:05].

Robin Neidorf:
All right. Finish up wherever you are. And you can see from my instructions that I had an idea about what size groups to put you all in, but I’d actually like to hear from this group. I want to combine everyone into groups so you can show each other your models and talk about them, and possibly even try to express with your bodies if you feel like it, what that model is. What size group would you propose for this activity?

Speaker 20:
Five.

Speaker 5:
Five.

Robin Neidorf:
Group of five? Three? Okay. Let’s hear from someone who said five. I want to hear your reasoning, please.

Speaker 20:
My take for five?

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah.

Speaker 20:
Sometimes you just need-

Speaker 9:
Hold on.

Speaker 20:
Oh, I’ll shout. I love shouting. Sometimes you just need a good measured amount of chaos.

Robin Neidorf:
All right. Measured chaos. I could go with that. A couple of people said three. Who said three? Who’d like to give your reasoning for three?

Darcy:
Well, you mentioned that it’s very good for brainstorming and creativity. So, if that’s what we’re here for, it felt like the right number.

Robin Neidorf:
Okay. Good question. What’s the purpose? What’s the purpose? Anyone have a vote on something besides three or five?

Marco:
17.

Robin Neidorf:

17. We’ll be here all day. Marco. Marco wants a two? Give us your reasoning.

Marco:
It’s my favorite sort of setup in general, in all aspects of the exchange. Yeah.

Robin Neidorf:
Okay. Yeah, okay. I think I’ve been convinced by the five, but you can certainly stay at your tables of whatever size you like. Break into fives, go into fours, go into threes. I’ll let you use your own bodily judgment here on what is going to work. Show each other your models, and talk about why you did what you did, what it makes you feel, how you want to feel while you’re facilitating. And if you feel so moved, try to hit the physical pose that expresses what your pipe cleaner and canned creation suggests.

All right, let’s come on back. So, abstracting from the actual body to the model can feel safer for a lot of people. Having objects that you can ground with, put into shapes, sometimes creating a shape that you couldn’t actually do with your physical body can feel very freeing. And at the same time, taking those abstract shapes that represent how you want to feel, and then trying to create them physically, also awakens a different kind of experience of what that might be. I’d actually like to hear, if this table wouldn’t mind, you guys were all trying each other’s models, weren’t you? I’d love to know what that experience was like.

Speaker 34:
It seemed the obvious thing to do, so we did it.

Robin Neidorf:
How did it feel?

Speaker 34:
It was fun. It was like trying a little lens on or like trying a different costume on or a different perspective. I did find it potentially a little vulnerable, like creating yourself. It felt almost like… I don’t know. It felt like I could see how someone might feel intimidated or a little naked.

Robin Neidorf:
So, maybe altering it slightly to make a representation of how you want to feel. Would that be less vulnerable or is that still…

Speaker 34:
I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t find it super vulnerable, but I thought others might.

Robin Neidorf:
Okay. Fair enough.

Speaker 34:
Did anybody find it that way?

Robin Neidorf:
What else? What else did you notice from either presenting your own model to everyone else or hearing about the models or maybe feeling your body move a little bit as you were talking about the models? Kelly over here.

Kelly:
I don’t know if this is profound or anything, but just an interesting observation. We had three at our table, and one person’s was their mind space, one was our energy, and one was their current state. So, we used different time and levels of our being that we represented.

Robin Neidorf:
I love that. Thank you. What else? What did you notice?

Speaker 18:
Ours were all very different, and so there was some that was just, “This is where my brain took me and I don’t know what it means.” And then some that were very purposeful in symbols and symbolizing what’s important to us. And some that was just like, “This is an explosion of me.”

Robin Neidorf:
Great. Thank you.

Speaker 18:
Yeah. Very different.

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you. One more. Anyone? Noelle.

Noelle:
We also broke the rules and just kept all six of us because we were so curious to see what everyone was going to… What it was. But it just felt like a moment to celebrate each other, whatever it was they chose to share, whether they used 15 pipe cleaners or three. We all took very different approaches, but it was just an opportunity to, whatever they chose to share, just celebrate what it was that they brought into the space.

Robin Neidorf:
Love it. And from the front of the room, I can tell you that was definitely the energy that I felt. It was a lot of mutual celebration. Really, really wonderful. And I just also want to say, Daniella made this one that I found this morning that spoke to me about how I wanted to feel. And having a physical reminder, it can be a talisman for you. So, I made a very deliberate point of bringing it up here and having a chair where I could keep my talisman of how I wanted to feel as I was working with you all this afternoon. So, thank you for that.

We are going to move on. I really want to thank you for your willingness to experiment with me today. I realize that the body work can be really vulnerable. I will tell you for myself… I mean, I told you about how I can’t lie on the floor. I didn’t even used to be able to say the word body. It was so upsetting to me. So, to be at a different place in my relationship with my body, with the word, I think it’s made me a better facilitator over time. And I also know that it’s healthier for me as a human. So, I’m glad to have an opportunity to share that with you.

If you’d like to scan the QR code, we’re going to do this quick close and then I do want to do one final thing before we move on to the break. So, enter the code, and let’s see, “Listen beneath your thoughts. What is your body asking you to take into your facilitation?” Regulation, groundedness, kindness, energy. More of me. Intimacy and love. This is a job, but it’s also shared meaning-making. Beautiful. Gratitude, patience, spirals, my somatic and intuitive knowledge. More eye contact. Wonderful.

All right. We’ll let these continue to scroll up, but what I’d like to invite everyone to participate, if you’re comfortable, in one chance of the mantra om, which is the sacred sound of the universe. If you prefer, it’s just a vibrating sound that connects your electrical feel to the people around you.

It resets your nervous system and it grounds you in your body. You can also simply choose to listen if you don’t want to join us in the chant. Even just listening, you get the benefit of the vibration. So, if anyone would like to join me, you can close your eyes, if that makes it easier. We’ll take one deep breath together and then chant om. Deep breath in. Om. Thank you so much for coming on this journey.

The post At the Edge of Knowing: Embodied Practice for Whole-Self Facilitation appeared first on Voltage Control.

The data is in, and it confirms what many of us suspected: the way most organizations are approaching AI adoption is fundamentally broken. What looks like an AI upskilling problem is actually a design problem, and no amount of additional training will solve it. What looks like an AI upskilling problem is actually a design problem, and no amount of additional training will solve it.

In the same week, two independent reports landed on the same conclusion from completely different angles. Gartner’s Digital Workplace Summit presented research showing that generic AI training produces generic results, that 72% of IT leaders say Copilot users struggle to integrate it into their daily routine, and that collaboration, not individual tool proficiency, is the #2 skill IT workers need right now. Meanwhile, Anthropic released its Economic Index showing that experienced AI users get measurably better results than newcomers, and the gap compounds over time. People who have used AI for six months or more have a 10% higher success rate in their conversations. The longer you use it, the wider the gap gets.

This is not a training problem. This is a design problem.

Why AI Upskilling Fails: The Training Trap

Here is what most organizations are doing: they buy licenses, schedule a training session, maybe run a webinar series, and call it done. Gartner’s data shows exactly what happens next. License counts rise. Active daily usage stays flat. Within a day, employees have lost 50% of what they learned. After six days, 90% is gone.

That is not a failure of the training content. It is a failure of the approach. You cannot teach AI fluency in a classroom any more than you can teach someone to swim by showing them a PowerPoint about water.

AI fluency is not taught. It is sparked. Nobody learns something they do not want to learn, and nobody retains a skill they do not practice immediately in the context of their actual work. The most common misconception we encounter when a client first engages us: that training is a one-and-done experience. That a small training event is all that might be needed for change. The reality is that AI upskilling that holds comes from stacking small and deliberate work over time, not from a single workshop.

The Anthropic data makes this even sharper. Their report studied over a million conversations and found that the gap between experienced and new users is not explained by what tasks they are doing, what country they are in, or what model they are using. It is explained by how they interact. Experienced users do not just delegate tasks. They iterate, push back, validate, and learn. They treat AI as a collaborator, not a vending machine.

That is a skill that gets built through practice, not instruction.

The Perception Gap Nobody Is Talking About

Gartner surfaced a stat at the Digital Workplace Summit that should alarm every executive reading this: executives are four times more likely to report high AI productivity gains. Individual contributors are five times more likely to say AI made no difference.

Read that again. The people making the adoption decisions and the people doing the adoption are living in different realities.

This is not a technology gap. It is a perception gap, and it is driven by something deeper than skill level. When four out of five employees believe their organization is trying to replace them with AI, and only 12% feel involved in the decisions about how AI gets used, you do not have a training problem. You have a trust problem. And no amount of lunch-and-learn sessions will fix it.

Consider what this looks like on the ground. A VP of digital transformation rolls out an AI copilot and sees her own productivity jump. She assumes everyone else is having the same experience. Meanwhile, 78% of employees do not even know whether they will lose their job to AI. They are not experimenting with the tool. They are watching it with suspicion, trying to figure out what it means for them. The same technology that feels like a superpower to the executive feels like a threat to the person three levels down.

We see this pattern constantly. Teams do not resist AI because they lack skills. They resist because they do not have a vision for what purposeful adoption looks like, and they do not feel they have agency in it because they were not included. It is a mixture of capability gap and design gap, and the design gap is the one nobody is addressing.

The organizations seeing real value from AI share one characteristic that the others do not: alignment. Gartner found that organizations with business-IT-executive alignment on what problems AI should solve are three times more likely to report significant value. Only 14% of organizations have that alignment today. That is not a technology gap. That is a conversation that has not happened yet.

The Experience Starvation Problem

There is a more insidious consequence of getting AI adoption wrong, and most leaders are not seeing it yet.

When senior people use AI to do junior work faster, they are not just being more productive. They are removing the on-ramps that junior employees need to develop expertise. Gartner calls this “experience starvation.” The expert uses AI to absorb tasks that used to be the proving ground for new hires. The new hire never gets the reps. The pipeline for developing the next generation of talent quietly breaks.

Think about what this means in practice. A senior analyst who once delegated data cleaning to a junior team member now does it herself in minutes with AI. The junior analyst never learns the structure of the data, never develops the intuition that comes from wrestling with messy inputs. The senior person is more productive. The junior person is more expendable. And the organization has quietly eliminated the apprenticeship model that built its bench strength.

This is already showing up in the data. Anthropic’s report found that job-finding rates for 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations have dropped 14% compared to 2022. Software developer employment in that age cohort has declined roughly 20% from its late-2022 peak. The junior roles are not being automated away by AI. They are being absorbed by seniors who now have AI doing the work that used to be someone else’s learning curve.

There is a troubling feedback loop here as well. Anthropic’s researchers found that developers who used AI assistance scored 50% on follow-up knowledge assessments, compared to 67% for those who coded by hand. The tool makes you faster today while potentially making you less capable tomorrow, unless the learning environment is designed to counteract that effect.

Gartner projects that 56% of CEOs will use AI to de-layer middle management within five years. The question is not whether the org chart is going to flatten. It is whether anyone is designing what replaces the development pathways that disappear when it does.

The AI-Fluent Island Problem

Here is something we did not expect to find, but now see repeatedly: the teams with the most AI-fluent individuals are not always the teams getting the most value.

When a few people on a team develop real AI proficiency while everyone else stays at the basics, something counterintuitive happens. The fluent members pull ahead in their individual work, but they cannot embed what they are learning back into the team. They are producing faster, thinking differently, using AI as a genuine thought partner, but the team’s processes, meetings, and decision-making structures have not changed. The fluent members end up on an island.

In some ways, this is worse than universal low adoption. At least when nobody is using AI, the team is aligned in their way of working. When a few members leap ahead without the collaborative infrastructure to support it, you get fragmentation. The AI-fluent people get frustrated because they can see what is possible but cannot bring the team along. The rest of the team feels left behind or skeptical. The organization gets pockets of individual productivity gains that never compound into team-level or org-level value.

This is the single biggest blind spot in the “train the champions” approach that many organizations default to. Champions without a collaborative model just become isolated experts.

Why Collaboration Is the Missing Layer

Here is the part that most AI adoption strategies completely miss: the highest-value applications of AI are not individual. They are collaborative.

Gartner’s research ranks collaboration as the #2 skill IT workers need, at 47%, right behind AI/GenAI itself at 53%. That is not a coincidence. As AI handles more of the execution work, the human work that remains is increasingly about alignment, decision-making, and working across functions. The ability to think together becomes more important precisely because the machines handle more of the thinking alone.

The Anthropic data reinforces this from a different angle. Their report distinguishes between “automation” (delegating a task to AI) and “augmentation” (using AI as a thought partner for more complex, creative, or strategic work). On the consumer platform, augmentation already accounts for 53% of usage. Experienced users disproportionately favor augmentation over pure automation. They have learned that the real value is not in having AI do something for you. It is in having AI think with you.

But thinking with AI is a multiplayer activity. When a team uses AI to generate options, stress-test a strategy, or prototype a solution, the output is only as good as the process that surrounds it. More inputs and faster inputs can actually slow alignment down if the process is broken. A team that cannot align on a decision without AI is not going to align any faster with it. They are just going to generate more options to disagree about.

This is where most organizations have a gap they cannot see. They are investing in individual AI skills while ignoring the collaborative infrastructure that makes those skills productive at scale. They are optimizing the nodes while neglecting the network.

What Real AI Upskilling Looks Like

The organizations that are getting real value from AI are not running better training programs. They are redesigning how teams work together. That is what AI upskilling actually looks like in practice.

The shift that matters is moving from AI as a tool to AI as a toolmate, a participant in the collaborative process rather than something individuals use in isolation. This shift is still so new that most teams do not have models for it yet. “Where do we start beyond the single-player approach?” is the question we hear most often. But when you provide those models, when you show teams what collaborative AI actually looks like in practice, excitement builds fast. People can suddenly see what is possible.

We saw this recently with a client whose previous AI training had focused entirely on individual use cases. Adoption was uneven, value was scattered, and the team could not connect their individual AI experiments to meaningful outcomes. When we introduced collaborative AI and AI toolmates, working with AI as a team rather than as individuals, it was a major unlock. Both the teams and executives saw the shift in real time. The difference was not better training. It was a fundamentally different model for how AI gets used.

Different roles also need fundamentally different AI strategies. Experts need AI that extends their capacity. People still building expertise need AI that accelerates their learning without starving them of foundational experience. A one-size-fits-all training program is the opposite of what any of them need.

The Anthropic data points to the same conclusion from the user behavior side. Their researchers found that high-tenure users actually grant AI lower autonomy, not higher. They stay more involved, iterate more, and get better results because of it. The best AI users are not the ones who have learned to delegate everything. They are the ones who have learned when to push back, when to redirect, and when to go deeper.

That kind of fluency does not come from a training module. It comes from practice in a structured environment, with feedback, with real stakes, and ideally with other people learning alongside you. Think of it as AI fitness, not AI training. A gym metaphor rather than a classroom metaphor. You do not get fit by attending a lecture about exercise. You get fit by showing up consistently and doing the work.

The Widening Gap

The urgency here is not abstract. It is compounding.

Anthropic’s data shows that the skills gap between experienced and new AI users is hardening into something more structural. Washington, D.C., where the population skews highly educated, has AI adoption rates four times what you would expect for a city of its size. Globally, the top 20 countries account for 48% of per-capita AI usage, and that concentration is increasing. The people who started early are pulling further ahead. The organizations that figured this out first are building advantages that will be very difficult to close.

Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of hiring processes will include AI proficiency testing. At the same time, the atrophy of critical thinking skills due to GenAI use is already pushing organizations toward “AI-free” skills assessments. The workforce is bifurcating: people who can work with AI as a genuine collaborator, and people who either cannot use it effectively or have let it do their thinking for them.

59% of the workforce needs brand new skills in the next two to three years. That is not a number that gets solved by scaling up existing training approaches. It requires a fundamentally different design.

The Design Problem

The question is not “how do we train people on AI.” The question is “how do we redesign how teams work together when half the team is agents.” That reframing is the gap between AI training and real AI upskilling.

That is a facilitation challenge, not a technology challenge. It requires someone who understands how groups make decisions, how trust gets built (and broken), how to create the conditions for people to develop new capabilities through practice rather than instruction.

32 million jobs will be transformed per year due to AI. Gartner estimates that managing this transformation requires 20 times more organizational effort than managing job losses. That is the single most important stat in all of this research. The hard part is not the technology. It is the organizational design work that makes the technology productive.

Today, 80% of IT work is done by humans without AI. By 2030, Gartner projects that 75% will be done by humans with AI, and 25% by AI alone. That transition does not happen through training programs. It happens through deliberate redesign of how people and AI work together, role by role, team by team, process by process.

The organizations that treat AI adoption as a training problem will keep buying licenses that do not get used, running workshops that do not stick, and watching the gap between their AI-fluent employees and everyone else widen. The organizations that treat it as a design problem, one that requires rethinking collaboration, decision-making, and how people learn together, will be the ones that capture the real value.

The tools are ready. The question is whether your organization is designed to use them.

If you are rethinking how your teams work with AI and want to explore what a design-first approach to AI upskilling looks like, let’s talk.

The post Why Your AI Training Program Is Already Obsolete appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit, Brian Buck opened his session not with a framework but with a meditation. Before a single slide appeared, participants were invited to close their eyes, settle their breath, and bring to mind someone who had truly seen them. Not their performance. Not their output. Them. The exercise set the tone for everything that followed: a session about what it means to shift your identity as a facilitator from someone who brings the fire to someone who ignites it in others.

From Goals to Value Directions

Brian introduced a concept that gave the session its backbone: the difference between goals and value directions. Goals have endpoints. You reach them, and if you’ve built your sense of purpose around reaching them, you often find yourself flat on the other side. Value directions are different. They are orientations you move toward for the rest of your life, never fully arriving, always deepening. Brian’s example was simple: being the best father he can be. That never ends. But inside that direction, he can set annual goals, take specific actions, and measure progress.

The invitation to the room was to apply this to facilitation. What is your value direction as a facilitator? Not what certifications you’re pursuing or what methods you’re mastering, but who are you becoming in this work and why? Brian wove in the broader context of belonging, drawing on recent social science that connects it to engagement, performance, and psychological safety. Belonging, he noted, precedes performance. It’s relational energy. When people feel they belong in a space, they bring themselves into it fully. When they don’t, they withhold. And psychological safety, he reminded the room, is felt, not declared.

Ember, Kindle, Illuminate

To make the value direction of presence illumination tangible, Brian introduced a three-part fire model developed through his capstone work in Voltage Control’s master’s program. The model uses fire as a metaphor for how facilitators can understand both their own internal state and the way they engage the people in their rooms.

The first edge is ember. This is the internal work: regulating before you facilitate, arriving grounded, tending the self before tending the room. Brian was candid about this one, sharing that when he finally accepted a part of himself he had suppressed for years and allowed his full self to show up, his facilitation changed completely. The room could feel it. “Your belonging starts with you first,” he said.

The second edge is kindle. This is where most facilitators live most of the time, holding space, building the container, structuring the session. It’s valuable and necessary. But in kindle, your flame is what people follow. The group is oriented toward you. That works well when you’re the subject matter expert, but it limits what’s possible when the real intelligence is distributed across the room.

The third edge is illuminate. This is the shift Brian was most focused on. Illuminators don’t spotlight answers; they spotlight the people who have the answers. When someone feels seen, Brian argued, they participate differently, contribute differently, and risk differently. That’s how belonging becomes collective intelligence. The model is flexible enough to move between all three edges within a single session. But naming them gives facilitators a lens for asking, where am I right now, and where does this room need me to be?

The Kindle vs. Illuminate Shift

To make the difference between kindle and illuminate visceral, Brian ran a paired exercise in two rounds. In the first round, partners discussed a real facilitation challenge using the skills most experienced facilitators already have: holding space, asking open questions, creating warmth. In the second round, using a reference sheet drawn from David Brooks’ book “How to Know a Person,” participants shifted into illumination mode: listening for who this person is becoming, naming strengths, calling forward potential, reflecting identity rather than just gathering information.

The contrast was immediate and noticeable. One participant said that by the end of round two she had clarity on a challenge she had been navigating for 18 months. Another said that in round one she had been problem-focused; in round two, her partner reframed the same challenge as an opportunity for growth. The shift hadn’t required new information. It required a different kind of attention.

The exercise closed with each partner handing the other a small fire pin and, if they were comfortable, making eye contact and saying three words: “I see you.” Several participants described it as unexpectedly powerful. Brian explained the underlying logic: most difficult facilitation scenarios, in his experience, trace back to people not feeling seen, heard, or valued. Sometimes the real facilitation work happens before the session even begins, in one-on-one conversations that build the trust bridge the larger group will later need.

Brian closed with the question he hoped participants would carry with them: what is waiting to be illuminated through your facilitator presence? Not what tools to add, not what techniques to refine, but what kind of person you are choosing to become in the rooms you enter. The fire, he reminded the room, was already there.irreplaceable.

Reading the Room to Sculpt the Journey

Once you have a voice, the work shifts: now you have to learn when to use it, when to soften it, and when to get entirely out of the way. That’s track two, reading the room to sculpt the journey.

Joe used the image of Questlove performing with one earphone on and one earphone off to illustrate what great presence looks like in practice. The ear with the headphone on is listening to what’s cued up next, evaluating whether it’s still the right move. The open ear is listening to the room, sensing the energy and reading what’s actually happening. Preparation gives you the options, Joe noted. Presence is what tells you which one to choose.

For facilitators, this plays out in every transition. Joe offered three moves drawn from the DJ world: cut (intervene and redirect), blend (carry the current energy into the next activity), or let it end (honor what’s happening in the room even when you’re off schedule). He ran the room through a live scenario. A strategy session, 45 minutes in, a cross-functional leadership team in the middle of something real, and then: you’re 10 minutes over time and the client needs a deliverable by end of day. Cut, blend, or let it end. Ten seconds to decide.

The answers split across all three, and every person had a clear, considered reason. One facilitator said she’d blend because cutting would give her too much anxiety. Another said he’d let it end and let the system see itself, then co-design the path forward with the group. Another called for an “aggressive blend.” One participant named a fourth option entirely: divide, breaking into parallel conversations using remote tools, and compared it to a silent disco. What Joe lifted up was that the diversity of answers wasn’t a problem. It was voice in action. The lens you use guides the choice. The choice reveals who you are.

Joe closed by zooming all the way out to the largest unit of time: the journey. Transitions happen in seconds. Sequencing unfolds over minutes. Arc plays out across tens of minutes. Journey is the whole session, and it’s not something you prescribe at the start and hold to. It’s something you co-create and sculpt. And what people take away from it, Joe reminded the room, is never the specific activities or the particular transitions. It’s how they felt. Whether it meant something. Whether they left changed in some way they couldn’t entirely name. That, ultimately, is what facilitators are building, one choice, one lens, one room at a time.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Brian’s Session:

Brian Buck:
There is a reason why this song is playing. A couple of reasons. It’s going to tie back to later in our session. Not to mention Alicia Keys is an awesome person, but also in Colorado where I’m from, I happen to support a Native American, my volunteer time with a Native American charity in Colorado Springs that supports all of the Native reservations around the US that are going through major hardship. And so, my friends there call me Two-Spirit. And if you know what that means, you know why this girl’s on fire. So, I’ll leave it at that.

And I hope you’re all going to be on fire when we’re finished here. So, I should not put that down. So, what we’re going to do today is about your identity, my identity as a facilitator. It’s not about techniques so much, but I’m going to give you a framework and it’s going to really build on a lot of the discussions that we’ve had so far already. It’s going to be talking about a value-directed way of facilitating. And your value directions are yours as much as I have my own. And we’re going to talk about practicing presence at the edges of belonging. It’s not going to be so much a method, but a stance. And so, Dan talked about our ideas are better than my ideas, our ideas. Renita talked about stop performing facilitator, and start being a person who facilitates. Chris talked about sense making and building a trackable experiments.

Shannon yesterday talked about taking an adventurous approach to facilitation, co-creating and discovering hidden treasure. And Joe just finished talking to us about lens crafting, the power of metaphor and reading the room, which ties to presence. And so, I’m going to be talking about that today. But before we start, here’s some time for you. So, I invite you to get comfortable.

Before we talk about models, frameworks or techniques, I’d like to invite you to begin somewhere more human. Facilitation isn’t about what we do. It’s about how we see people. We have the privilege to be with the people that come into our spaces. We have the privilege and we steward those spaces and hold those spaces. So, before we go into further, I want to invite you to remember something. So, sit comfortably, feet on the floor, have your hands rested gently. Take a slow breath in, and exhale slowly. Again, inhale and exhale slowly. One more time. Inhale, and release.

Let your body settle. If you feel comfortable, close your eyes or just soften your gaze. Bring to mind one person, someone who truly saw you. Not just your performance, not just what you produced, but you. Maybe it was a teacher, a mentor, a leader, a friend, a family member, someone who looked at you and saw possibility. Remember how they listened to you, how they spoke about you, how they held space for you. What did they see in you? Now, notice what happened inside you when you were with them? Did you stand a little taller?

Did you take more risks? Did you try something new? Did you believe something about yourself that you hadn’t fully believed before? When someone sees us deeply, we expand. Stay with that feeling. Hold that feeling for a moment. The steadiness, the confidence, the sense of being known. Now, imagine that person standing just behind you, not speaking, just present, seeing you the way they always have. Let that steadiness settle in your body. And now, without opening your eyes, become that kind of presence for someone else in this room today. Someone here is carrying something invisible. Someone here is waiting to be seen.

Let yourself arrive as the kind of person who sees depth, who assumes worth, who makes space. When people feel seen, something opens. Let that openness be here. And open your eyes when you’re ready. So, like a lot of you, I’m on a facilitation journey. I think I call myself like an accidental facilitator. Does anybody else relate to that? This wasn’t like a major I picked in college or something, but I end up really… It’s encompassed my whole career now and I’m hooked and I’m in. And like a lot of you, I want to go deeper. And here, there’s a picture here I like to show you as we talk about illumination. My friend Zach Connor, you can Google him on Zach Connor photography on… He does a lot of outdoor photography in Colorado. The four people there are myself and my three sons camping in Marble, Colorado.
A little bit trivia about Marble, that’s where we harvest, those Coloradans know this, all of our white marble for our monuments in Washington DC. And so, we were camping here and if you notice, it might be hard to see, maybe you can see it better over here, the stars were literally like that with the naked eye. And it just was stunning. And the illumination against the backdrop, Eric talked about sometimes with the cracks of light. That’s what it was in real life. But what Zach did as an illuminator photographer is he said, “Just stand here,” myself and my three sons. And we each had a flashlight and he said, “Okay, Brian, you make a backwards B.” And then he handed the flashlight to my other son and my next son, and it was a U and C and a K. And I didn’t know what he was doing, frankly, until the picture came.

And it shocked me how awesome it was. And sometimes when we’re facilitating, people don’t need to always understand exactly how we’re doing things, but it’s the effect that we have. And often it’s when we bring light and we bring illumination. So, we’re going to talk about that today. I think for me, and I’m not making a plug just for the core and the cert programs, but it was very illuminating for me as a facilitator. Core was, “Oh, my gosh, everything I’ve been doing for the last five years actually has a term for it. There’s an actual science and oh, I could probably tweak it and be even more effective.” And then master’s recently in the last part of 2025 opened up a whole new vista of how I’m looking and practitioning as a facilitator. And I’m going to share that with you today. And I’m going to invite you to consider this for yourself as a model or think about and spark, “Hey, am I thinking in this same kind of way of how are I approaching my craft?” So, this is more of a personal evolution and not a theory.

I invite you to join me as I evolve. We’re all in this together, so here we go. So, when we were given the option to pick our themes, I don’t know if anybody’s seen some recent studies. We did some work inside Progressive around belonging. It’s a powerful concept and there’s a lot more social science around it. You can see where belonging is powerful for positive things. And if you’re trying to understand other things that are going on our society right now, you’re going to see that there’s connections on belonging there. So, you can’t underestimate the power that it has. But what I want to suggest today and introduce a concept to you is around belonging, a concept called a value direction. So, value directions is something that you never stop doing until maybe the day you take your last breath.

Goals, you nest in through the value direction. So, a lot of times we only set goals for ourselves and we end up with goal depression, which is once we reach the goal, it’s like we got it done. You hear the stories like people got the Oscar or they got the Grammy or they get something and they’re like, “I didn’t feel satisfied.” It’s because we end up only setting our lives around goals. Value directions are we’re always doing it. Me, I want to be the best dad I can be. That’s the value direction. I’m never going to stop working on that, right? But every year I’m going to set a goal of what can I do with my children that I can be a better father. So, I’d like to invite you to think about what is your value direction as a facilitator and how does that attach to your identity as a facilitator?

I’ve heard a lot of conversations these last, gosh, it feels longer than 24 hours, but of people feeling like, where do I fit? Where do I understand these terms? How do I see myself in my journey of maturity? And I want to share that a value direction could be a really good way for you to understand where you want to go. But here’s the change. I want to introduce the concept of illumination and we’ll talk about what that means, but it’s through presence working on ourselves, but the internal integrating to the external that we illuminate the people that are in the space with us, not the answers. A lot of us started facilitating because we were experts at something and they’re like, “Oh, why don’t you go in front of people?” And next thing you know, it keeps going, right?

But where do you transition from, everything is on me. Everybody’s looking at my fire and how could I be igniting others? So, we’re going to talk through that. And I just love high-performing teams because that’s really the outcome. Why does belonging matter? It precedes performance. Anybody that’s been on a high-performing team, there’s this thing that happens where everybody just feels connected. Hopefully you’re feeling belonging here, being part of Voltage Control’s facilitation lab in some way, either locally or on the larger ones. Engagement is relational energy. It’s energy. So, when people feel like they belong, they bring energy into your sessions. So, if you’re not having the energy you think, there could be a belonging issue. Psychological safety is felt not declared. We love, facilitators love to share that we build psychological safety.
Is belonging part of what we’re doing there? Or the people there are just an ingredient for us to get to our… Are they a cog to get to our goal? And then lastly, high performance is a byproduct of belonging. I’m sure all of you can think about the best outcomes you’ve had as a team. More than likely, you all felt like a strong sense of belonging during that period. And you can see some of the other definitions there. So, it’s really kind of transitioning from an expert. And there’s context for that. I’m going to talk a little bit about that, where it’s not that you can’t be an expert any longer, but understand where you may need to adjust and flex. So, flexing from I have the answers to illuminating the answers within others. Okay? It’s from defining content to focusing on the container where then the magic happens on the content.

And then lastly, from dominating the space, I don’t think any of us really show up going, “I want to dominate this space with all this group of people.” But I’ve learned being in community with a lot of you, those of you that are independent contractors, I’ve heard people say, “I have pressure when I show up. All eyes are looking at me, I’m supposed to deliver.” So, what happens is it almost puts you in this position of, “I got to do things,” versus inviting people in. And so, the shift that I’m going to talk about is not necessarily… It’s holding something different. It’s not giving up, it’s letting go and holding onto something that’s even more powerful.

So, thank you, Joe, for introducing the concept of metaphor. I’m going to introduce fire as metaphor. Think about fire when it’s tended. It’s powerful. How did most of us get here? With tended fire inside two circular things flying in the air? How did all of us stay warm last night wherever we were? Contained fire in a furnace. Who took a shower this morning, hopefully? With warm water, contained fire, tended fire. And I think through the master’s program, Mark Dressler’s book was introduced and for me, I learned that fire wasn’t destructive. It can be when it’s not tended. Intending is watching closely without smothering. Tending is protecting the flame, not dominating it, looking for derailments and distractions that could disrupt the flame that’s present and creating conditions for group thinking to ignite.

So, let’s pause for a minute. As I talk about belonging or this idea of shifting your stance from feeling like I have to have all the answers, has some of you gone through a shift and what do you think about that fire metaphor? What does it resonate with you? Let’s have three people. Let’s do a plus add. So, I’m going to go each section so we get equal distribution. Someone down here, what’s coming up for you when you hear some of these terms? Anything resonate? Yeah. Daniela.

Daniela:
You remember my name. The fire metaphor really resonated with me. I’ve been thinking about it from a different stance, but I think they’re very related. I come from a background in theater and when you’re on stage, the director will tell you, “Find your light.” So, you need to find your place on stage where the light hits you. And as a facilitator, I kind of reframe that as finding your light within. And that’s something that we want to do with other people and for other people as we’re facilitating, helping them find their light as a person and as a group. And so, I think it’s very close to this metaphor that you’re proposing and it’s-

Brian Buck:
Cool. Cool.

Daniela:
… nice.

Brian Buck:
How about someone here in the middle of the room?

Chris:
I grew up going to visit family in Toronto and they have a cottage north of the city by like three hours. And as a kid, you kind of do whatever you wanted in the woods and they would teach you how to light a fire. So, it was a very fun thing as a kid to like light a fire… You’re in the middle of the daytime, lightening tiny little fires in the woods, but quickly it became your chore too. If you’re going to cook that night, “Hey, Chris, would you go start the fire?” And you’re all excited because you’re like, “Yeah, totally. We get to burn something big now.” But you quickly understand the way that that fire is built and the materials around you, this aspect of like how to initiate a flame constructively, and then actually the intention of what that fire’s for at different times.

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Chris:
A cooking fire is different than a marshmallow roasting fire, is different than, “Oh, we’re going to burn a bunch of stuff because it’s rotting in the front yard,” fire. And yeah, it just makes me think of the tools and the process and the context of that and tending too, and especially never leaving a fire that’s burning.

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Chris:
Yeah.

Brian Buck:
Yeah. No, great. Great multiple examples of it’s sustaining, it has practical impact. Yeah, let’s have one more other person down here.

Speaker 4:
[inaudible 00:19:24], but this is about what I’m going to say. I’m from Oregon and I own a very large cattle ranch.

Brian Buck:
Oh, nice.

Speaker 4:
And this makes me think about, as a facilitator, what happens when you are doing your best to manage that fire and a wind comes up and all 10,000 acres burn. What do you do then? Tending fire takes an awful lot of care. That’s it.

Brian Buck:
Thank you for that. Thank you for that. So, a lot of times when you’re learning something new, and my job over the years in tech industry, as well as being at Progressive is helping complex things seem easier to adapt or adapt to. So, through the master’s program, I worked on a capstone project for my company, but this is me, Brian, speaking to you. And what I developed here is me and me in my journey. And what I developed was a three-part model that’s helping me move forward and understanding the gift of the fire that is showing up, the souls. If a person of faith, like an image of God or whoever you see coming in, that valuable human life that’s coming into your spaces, do you see that as something to cherish and to welcome? And it’s like the same beauty as when we look at a fire and fire’s unpredictable to what you just said, right? And so, guess what? Human beings are too, right? So, I want to talk about three edges of fire that could help frame how you can approach your facilitation as you continue maturing.

First is ember, how you show up, you as a facilitator. Second, how you hold space as a facilitator, that’s kindle. And the third one, which is the disruptor one I’m hoping today will be for you, which is illuminate how you see others. And for most of us, we may have never really thought about, when we originally start working with people, do I diminish people? Do I see someone and put them in a box and I haven’t even talked to them for two seconds or this person’s going to talk too much, so oh, they’re going to be a talker? Oh, I got to manage around that, right? So, I’m going to go through each one. And I also want to help invite you to say you could see yourself both as how you practice, but also yourself in each one of these. So, ember is about your internal work.

This is about regulating before you facilitate. Depending on your culture background, I can speak for the frenetic American that some of us were born into and we don’t even notice until we talk to people in other countries and they’re like, “You Americans live very high.” Like you never relax, you never focus, you never contemplate. I’m not going to generalize our entire country, but I’ll just say other people from other places say, “It feels different when you come to our country.” And so, a lot of times as facilitators, are you showing up frazzle, fried? Did you even breathe before you started your sessions? It’s all about being grounded and if you’re unsettled, the room’s going to feel it.

Does everybody relate to that? So, your belonging starts with you first. And honestly, I won’t go into a lot of details, but I went through a big life change where I didn’t accept a really big part of myself for many years. And when I finally did and I allowed my full self to show up, my facilitation took off because people knew this was fully me. And so, I welcome you however you’re made, however you look, whatever you… Be kind to yourself and just say, “This is me and this is how I’m going to show up.” It goes back to what Renita was talking about.

The intent though is work on that core self. This is where I think a lot of us are functioning right now, which is on the edge of kindle. This is the part… I love Chris how he did the imaginations. Could you all relate when he was sharing like you’re going out? Some of us can’t if you’re into camping. It’s always like, how am I going to stack the wood and how’s it going to be perfect and what am I going for? Am I going for like a gigantic bonfire or I just want to try to cook food? But it’s this idea of really thinking about how am I holding the space? So, I think a lot of you do that, but here’s the difference. Often this period here is your flame is what everybody’s following.

People are looking to your flame and that’s good in some cases. You may be facilitating some things where they may need that. You are an expert in a particular area, but this is where I stood for many years being a technologist, we could talk regularly to people. I was put in these situations where, “Hey, put him in here because he’ll translate.” What I found though was that was helpful, but it’s limiting. And I don’t know about you, but lost opportunities really annoy me, like really good opportunities where there’s more treasure to be found and it’s left unrealized. So, again, it’s not bad to be at kindle, there’s time for that, but here’s where things shift. I highly recommend a mentor of mine put me in front of a book. Has anybody read David Brooks, How to Know a Person? Raise your hand.

Hasn’t it changed your way you look at people? And by the way, I don’t make any commission for any book sells on this book, but he said, “The ultimate gift you can give another person is to see them deeply, to understand them and to make them feel known.” I have found in most cases and most challenging facilitation scenarios that most people just want to feel seen, heard and valued. Heard that? And sometimes the facilitation work is before the facilitation event. It’s meeting with some of the people that you identify as, I need to sit down with them and hear them and help them to feel seen before I get into the fun with the larger group. So, it’s this idea of seeing people as already worthy. Catch yourself if you’re finding that you’re judging people before you even get a chance to look at them as there’s a story here.

They’re the only person on the planet that has this DNA sequence. That starts baseline. There’s no one like them, right? There has to be depth. There has to be mystery, not just problems. It’s moving from labeling to understanding. And you as a facilitator have the opportunity to really impact someone’s life and amplify what is emerging in that person, not just in the topics you’re facilitating, and that’s where you’re pivoting.

Not only are you working on your presence, but now I can let go of being the content driver, and now I can be the person who shows up in the space and starts igniting the fire of other people. My flame is strong because I’m still doing that centering, that grounding, but now it’s not so much, “Hey, I have an opinion. I want to drive.” What gets decided so much is I want… [inaudible 00:27:54] smartest person in the room is room. Dan talked about that, right? I’m getting a tattoo. I’ll make sure if I summit next year, I will show it on my arm because I love that phrase, because that’s the treasure. But what are we doing to ignite it?

So, recognition creates… When we start doing this, it’s calling for their fire, not calling it out. It’s recognizing, creating belonging, and that belonging then deepens when people feel fully known, but you have to illuminate that. So, my invitation to you today has become an illuminator and not a diminisher. And some of you might be looking at me right now like, “He’s so weird.” But hopefully you’re shifting your mindset like, “I have a story, you have a story. Are we looking for that side of that?” So, it’s not about your fire and kindle, it’s about igniting theirs as an illuminator. So, illuminators don’t spotlight answers, they spotlight people who have the answers. So, when people feel seen, they participate differently, they contribute differently, they risk differently. That’s how belonging comes to collective intelligence. That’s one thing I was trying to figure out was like, okay, I agree. It’s all about how do we pull forward as… We all do strategic alignment, but how do we do that collective intelligence? And often it’s because we’re not really igniting the fire of others and there’s ways to do that. I’m going to talk about that.

But here’s the part that I really enjoy about this model that’s helping me right now because I’m… By the way, I have not arrived. This is something that I’m using for myself is you need to sense the edge. Where are you? Are you doing self-awareness like, “You know what? I need some ember time. I’m fried. I am burnt out. These people are annoying me, whoever I’m working with, whatever. I love them. They’re great, but I need some extra grace required.” But knowing when you need to work on that ember part, and maybe sometimes because some of you are in specialized facilitation roles, you are doing the kindle part. You’re helping create… We all need to be making sure that we’re creating the container of how the space is being held, but maybe you can lean in a little bit on that you are an expert in this space. But where the magic really happens is when you tap into that illumination and you can move in between.

It can happen in one session. So, it’s a very flexible model of… But hopefully it gives you a lens like what Joe was talking about of how to approach how you’re engaging the space. So, let’s have some three other people. So, let’s start-

Speaker 5:
I actually have something.

Brian Buck:
Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 5:
So, here, I’ll just sit down. So, we’ve talked a lot about how the world is like… My gosh. We’ve talked about how the world is divided. I’m just going to stand. We’ve talked a lot about how the world is divided. And I come from a family who’s very politically ideology. There’s a huge difference between me and the rest of my family. And I had a conversation with my aunt recently where we were doing something like this. And if you want to find a flow state, this is the way to do it. As a facilitator, that was so incredibly gratifying to just ask her questions. And we didn’t agree by the end of it. But you know what she did? She ended up telling me things that she wanted to take to her grave. I ended up coming out to her after 15 years and we have been closer than ever. And so, I want to praise this methodology because it is so gratifying and so needed at this time.

Brian Buck:
Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah. All right. Let’s have… You were middle, right? So, why don’t we try down there? Anybody want to comment? Anything hitting you? Anything resonating? Yes. I like your purple color, by the way.

Speaker 6:
Thank you. I think what came up for me is I really appreciate the thought about moving from labeling to seeing people is already worthy. It feels easy right now in the world and very divisive to assume that some folks don’t have much to bring to the table because they’re so far apart.

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Speaker 6:
And I appreciate that lens of seeing everyone is already worthy and having value in this space. Yeah. Thank you.

Brian Buck:
Sure. And I highly recommend if, again, if you’re a book reader, Brooks really goes through a whole new paradigm of how to engage people. Yeah, it’s amazing. Down here. Yes. Hi.

Speaker 7:
When you were talking about tending to the ember, like, am I at a point of burnout? Do I need to come back? I know facilitators, especially if you’re being paid and you’re like, “I need to be on,” and it can feel selfish or difficult to go inward. I like thinking about that ember, like if it’s too light, you’re not giving warmth in the space.

Brian Buck:
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7:
And so, if you can think of it as like, “Oh, I really am providing if I tend to that.”

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Speaker 7:
You’re creating a warmer room for people, so.

Brian Buck:
Yeah. And taking the metaphor, you can’t really have a bigger flame if you don’t start with something in the embers and it’s sustainable. The other piece I forgot to mention too, thanks for your comments, was it’s also an analogy of how you can see yourself as an evolving facilitator. Some of you have mentioned in passing, some of you are hearing some of our clinical language and nodding. And a lot of you are coming from very different perspectives. Ember is like a description of maybe where you are in your facilitation. In kindle is where you’re learning your craft and letting your flame… Because it’s important that your flame is seen because you’re building that trustworthy with whatever group you’re coming to. But then when you go… What I’m excited about is I know I’ve seen glimpses of one I’ve gone to illuminate and I’m like, “What just happened?” Like, whole what?

Even when you’re camping where the flame… Like you’re somewhere in the remote area and the fire’s going and then suddenly something in the fire makes the fire go big and then the whole darkness around you lights up that you didn’t see before. Think about that as a way from revelations to the talent that’s in the room and half the battle, a lot of times when we’re facilitating is people don’t feel like they’re providing or being helpful, right? Like, “I don’t know if I’m doing enough.” So, when we illuminate, we’re actually engaging people more and then you’re going to have that high-performing team effect. Great comments. Thanks everybody.

So, we’re going to have a table exercise now. Here we go. So, we’re going to move from concept to experience. So, I hope to see and guide you through how it’s going to feel the difference between facilitating with each other at kindle versus illuminate, okay?

So, what we’re going to do is in this first round, there’s going to be a… I can go to the next slide here. We’re going to pair up again, so just two by two. What I encourage you to do is find a partner that you haven’t known, because you’re going to be asking some questions that’ll just help to get to each other to know each other better. Use your discretion as far as how much of yourself you want to share, but you’re going to take turns speaking and listening. And the prompt for these discussions is sharing a real facilitation challenge you’re currently navigating.

Speaker 5:
Not have a handout?

Brian Buck:
Yeah. And the handout actually will come a little bit later, which I will reference that.

Speaker 5:
Oh, I’m so sorry. I thought it was this-

Brian Buck:
No, you’re fine. You’re fine.

Speaker 5:
Someone take the mic away from me.

Brian Buck:
No, you’re fine. Her fire’s showing. Did you see that? So, what you’re going to do is we’re going to take about five minutes or it’s going to be a 10-minute… The first part of this is 10 minutes. So, we’re going to practice kindle. Okay? So, what you’re going to do is… I’m going to leave this slide up here so you can reference it when you’re discussing the things. Partner A is going to speak for five minutes and person or partner B will listen. Then you’re going to switch. Person B speaks for five minutes and then partner A listens. So, the listener, you want to think about creating warmth, ask open any questions. You’re all really skilled at doing this, right? Like creating psychological safety. What I would suggest doing is not trying to solve things for them or… You just want to really help them think mostly.

Don’t reframe things. Don’t interpret identity. Don’t amplify strengths. Imagine when you’re in a… Especially some of you in certain facilitation standpoints where you just don’t have the context to be able to go that. You just want to be curious. Okay? The speaker again is sharing that challenge. I’ll lead you through the next session, but let’s go ahead and get started. Find a partner and I’ll guide you. I’ll tell you when it’s five minutes in where you can switch speaking. So, ready, set, go.
All right. We’re going to pivot a little bit. Do you want to wrap up? Now, that was experiencing kindle, which is probably what you’re often doing in most of your sessions. Okay? Now, what I want to introduce you to is there’s a sheet on their table. We’ll go over this chart, the empty chart later, but look at the one that has the words on the back. There’s like a little picture of me at the bottom. So, what does it mean to illuminate? Okay? You can see in this chart and you can kind of reference it and nobody has to be like… Don’t feel shy if you’re glancing down while you’re listening to the person speaking. Okay? But here’s the shift. Okay? If you can see here the illumination principle, these are based on my interpretation of Brooks’ book on how you can do illuminating questions, how to do accompaniment.

It’s a whole different approach of how to work with someone, both individually and in a group setting. Okay? So, you can see here, there’s illumination principle on the left, what it looks like in the room, and how you as a facilitator can practice each of these areas. Okay? I’m not going to go ahead and read through. I’ll just let you kind of jump in and start cooking. Okay? So, I’m going to set… You’re going to now pivot and as we practice illumination, what you’re going to be doing is we’re not just holding space now. What you’re going to be invited to do is you’re listening for who this person is becoming, okay? So, you want to assume depth. Be curious. There’s stories in each of us. All right? And there’s mystery and there’s magic.

Listen for strengths, reflect identity, call forward potential, and name what you genuinely see. So, listener, it’s basically what I just said here is on the left-hand side, the prompt for the speaker. We’re going to add a little bit more to that original prompt. Share the same real facilitation challenge you are navigating, but this time speak about how it is helping you grow professionally, personally, grow in general. Okay? So, let’s take another five minutes. Ready, set, go.

Okay. Now, we’re going to make this tangible both visually and hopefully meaningfully for those of you that are like more tactile. So, in a moment, each of you will receive a small fire pin and they are all at the tables. And if some of you already put them in your lanyards, that’s fine. Go ahead and take it off because this is the activity, an activation activity. What I invite you to do is look to your partner that you’ve been talking to, hand them the pin. You can hand it to them or if they want you to put it on their lanyard, feel free, whatever space thing that you feel comfortable with, but simple thing, if you feel comfortable, look at them in the eye and say, “I see you.”

Ready, set, go.
Okay. I’d like to bring everybody’s attention back. Hopefully you’ve done your pinning. All right. Let’s have some discussion. I was going to originally have you do at the tables, but I think everybody’s quite warmed up. The dialogue’s just been incredible to hear up here. Why don’t we do sharing across the room, okay? So, mic runners, if you can get ready for your workout. So, the first question I want to ask to the group, everybody, is what changed between round one and two for you? How did it feel different? Raise your hand if you want to share. Okay. Why don’t we go here and then we’ll go here? Go ahead.

Speaker 8:
I think when we started round one, I was really thinking about, and I think we were both thinking about a challenge and something kind of hairy that we’d been struggling with. And by round two, I had clarity. So, I felt… And something that I’d been dealing with for about 18 months. And so, I really had some clarity around what my next step is in both how I tend to myself to make that happen, but also the people that I’m working with.

Brian Buck:
And did you feel through the conversation you had, like that’s how the revelation happened, being able to feel seen or you want to-

Speaker 8:
Yes, being seen and also just asking the right questions. So, being able to ask each other the questions, which is so much of what we’re trying to do, asking each other the questions, to think about the questions that we’re going to ask of the other questions. So, it was like all of that tied together.

Brian Buck:
Okay, great. Great. No, the questions are a really big thing. And again, I don’t want to sound like I’m always pitching Brooks’ book, but he talks about even something… These illuminating questions of when someone gives an opinion, a lot of us will be like, “Oh, okay, that’s interesting.” Or might not even say anything. He invites people to say, “Wow, how did you come to form that opinion?” That’s just one example of where then you start seeing the person deeper and then you have these breakthroughs. So, congratulations. That’s awesome. Woo. All right. Next person.

Speaker 10:
Hi.

Brian Buck:
Hi.

Speaker 10:
I felt that this really resonated with us a lot. Actually, I feel between one and two, we were more problem-focused on like, “Oh, this is all I’m struggling with.” But then round two, it really makes you become vulnerable and have a way more open conversation. And we actually really enjoyed pinning the pin on each other too. It felt like really special. And I don’t know, I think admitting the vulnerability that you have really creates an opportunity to be like, “Actually this is,” and you can understand the person way better. And I just really loved how that was framed and [inaudible 00:45:31]-

Brian Buck:
And hopefully you’re all going to walk around the rest of today and see everybody’s flames now symbolically. So, you can remember there’s a story, right?

Speaker 10:
Yeah.

Brian Buck:
There’s a story, you have dimension, you have value, you have worth, and we can help remember that.

Speaker 10:
Yeah. And when we said we were like ICU, when you said it, we were all like, “Oh.” But then when we actually did it, I was like, “Oh, my gosh, you do see me.” It was just really wonderful.

Brian Buck:
And a lot of people ask, “Well, how can I do that in a large facilitation session?” I had a big challenge where I had to lead… There’s someone in the room here, Mike, who was with me, 11 top-tier domain architects think Sheldon plus, okay? And at first, it was like all the alphas and it was mixed genders too. It wasn’t just your typical Sheldon male. It was people were not used to being in the same space together. And what we learned through that exercise and we stumbled into it, but then that’s what started this was we started meeting with people individually and boy did their continents change when they felt seen, heard and valued ahead of the larger meeting. So, for some of you, you’re like, “How am I going to do this in a larger group?” You may need to spend time with these important people one-on-one and do the same kind of questions ahead of it.
Now, if you have already a strong, tight, strong belonging group, then go use the illuminating questions, but you may need to illuminate one-on-one, okay? And that’s what we did here. How about down here? Anybody? Any revelations, thoughts? What was different between one and two, between kindle and illuminate?

Speaker 9:
I think what was a challenge in round one was just listening and asking clarifying questions.

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Speaker 9:
And I noticed that I’m a fixer and I like to jump right to ideation, which is funny because when I’m facilitating, I try to pause the ideation, but when I just shut up and listen to what he was really saying and felt he was struggling with. And then in the second round, A, it was great to be able to shout out what I saw as being potential and promising, but B, it was really cool to hear my partner reframe it as opportunity instead of challenge.

Brian Buck:
Great. And did you see this is where the fire model works. Your fire… Typically, in kindle, we’re structuring around the space, we’re doing all our facilitation stuff, right? But we leave space to intentionally illuminate in the sense of, what am I doing to ignite? And so, that’s what I’m practicing now. This is a journey I’m on. If you want to come with me, let’s go. But it’s like, how do we now take our fire and ignite someone else’s? And I love both of these stories because they came from the person, not from you. You weren’t the fixture, right? You revealed, you illuminated, and that’s a great example. Okay.
So, you’re probably wondering, how can I apply this in real life? So, this is the other side of your sheet. Again, my German side, I’m like, “I need to plan.” So, what you’re going to see here, and it’s not filled on in your side. So, this is for you to take some time and reflect and do some contemplation on your own. You can do it here, you can do it back at your hotel or on the airplane tomorrow if you’re flying somewhere or wherever you have it. But what I did is broke out, and let me introduce you to a new term that I’ve developed, which I was inspired by all my peers in master’s. Again, I had no idea I was going to end up here. So, this is like a Forrest Gump moment for me, like, “How did I get here?” But it’s combining what a lot of us know about presence with this idea of intentional illumination.

Your fire is important. You got to where you are because your fire burns bright and people look at it and they follow it. But our story is not stopping there. It’s about igniting with your fire igniting others and then watching that whole thing light up, the whole room. But that’s different, right? So, how are you going to get there? So, the value direction is I’m now going to be a presence eliminator the rest of my facilitation journey. I’m never going to stop doing it. It’s going to be challenging in some ways of breaking old behaviors or thinking I have the answer when it’s really the room. The first is I need to tend my own fire. What am I doing… Somebody mentioned therapy the other day. Oh, my gosh, therapists. Every facilitator should be in therapy. Right? I mean, you talk about tips that only work on yourself, but then you’re like, “Oh, that person’s transferring.”
You have language, but my point is without joking, what am I doing to prepare myself? Are you slowing down enough to work? You deserve to be kind to yourself, to think about how you’re showing up and setting boundaries around that. Tending the fire box. Uncontained fire is dangerous, like our friend over here talked to us. It can be very destructive. So, what firebox are you creating? What is that container and kindle that you’re doing to make sure that your session? And that’s hard too. We live in a very busy time. But again, these are all value directions. It’s aspirations that you can continue to work on. In each of these, it’s like, what are my tactics? What are my goals and what does it look like? I’m giving you an example of what mine are, and I’m going to continue to develop them because value directions, you just never stop.

So, these are almost like goals you could set inside your value direction. The third one is tending the spark. How am I coming into that session expecting to ignite other people in a good way? Am I coming in with, “Oh, these people are going to be a really… They’re going to be really tough or this person that’s in their [inaudible 00:52:07], who was it?” How am I going to prep myself for that? And then lastly, how am I doing like designing questions that surface the spark? I think all of you are successful because you do preparation ahead of time, but it’s a different mindset of how you can frame it.
And that’s what I wanted to help with because there’s such a rich amount of facilitation techniques and methods, but how am I showing up as an identity? And this is what this is. It’s a combination of me and how I had to be healthy, but an outward focus of… Because you’re all change agents. Most facilitators are doing transformation or some big thing in most cases. So, what I’d like to do is… Any questions on how this works, I guess is my question before we go to the next slide? Does this make sense? But here’s the key thing. We are intentional in leaving that blank because this is your journey. Yes, Daniela.

Daniela:
Could you give an example of tactics of [inaudible 00:53:23]-

Brian Buck:
Yeah. On which one? On all of them or?

Daniela:
Any.

Brian Buck:
Okay. You know what? I like the one. I’ll go on illuminate because that’s the one I think a lot of us might be newer to. So, on illuminate, it’s designing questions that surface and spark insight and it’s about practicing intentional restraint. Our friend down here talked about that. It was a repositioning of, you want to help, right? But how can I help that was meaningful to the person? And it’s also name and reinforcing contribution. So, that’s the tactics. So, it’s almost, again, books like David Brooks or others, look for resources or our friend, ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, start asking your AI partner, how can I ask illuminating questions that are aligned with David Brooks’ book? Okay?

The goals would be for tending this spark is it should help foster participant ownership. When I talked to you about that domain architect example, we had kind of, it was like friction and then suddenly when they started feeling like… Showed up, we, Mike and I, they knew that we had their back. They felt like that we had built a trust bridge with them. There was a lot more participation and it also changed the way they talked to each other. It was a lot less ringer. And then they get collective intelligence because a lot of you are taking people probably from multiple disciplines. So, the outcome would be when you’re doing these… Some of those questions may not be to the same people.

So, it may take a little extra work to understand what goals could be for the different types of groups that you could be leading. And then lastly, I think some of you have seen the spark. I’m thinking, I’m sure you’ve been somewhere where the collective intelligence happens and it’s like, “What just happened?” And sometimes I think you could kind of stumble into it, but often it’s because somewhere you let everyone feel seen, heard and valued, but that doesn’t always show up automatically. And so, taking this approach intentionally. And now what I love about this model is it lets you decide what ingredients you want to do, how you want to do it. But the fact is that as a value direction, you’re going to make space now to try to spark the fire of other people, not just have them look at your fire.

And then what does it look like? Participant-generated insights increase, not insights from you necessarily, unless you’re the expert that was brought in. Broader, deeper participation and the feedback reflects empowerment. You feel like… Like with these architects that we had someone go into another role and there was a replacement. This group got all upset because they’re like, “Wait a minute, we’re this group and now we have this new person.” They felt like we bonded and now we had this outsider and we had to quickly bring them in. So, you’re going to find when you do this, like the belonging’s going to be very powerful because people feel safe, they feel like we created this thing. Did that help a little bit? Okay. Yes. Question.

Speaker 11:
How do you not over index here? Because this is like my life. This is why I’m around. This is who I am.

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Speaker 11:
And so much for people sometimes.

Brian Buck:
Thank you for this question. I have these things called Buckisms, and one of my favorite one is your biggest strength can be your biggest liability when you overpivot. That’s been my case at least. And so, I think it goes back to some of the messages about reading the room and understanding the temperature of what’s going on. I think honestly, what I’m seeing is I think, and it takes more time, there’s a lot more to facilitation in the session that you’re doing. There’s a lot of pre-work and post-work and mid-work, right? I see a lot of nods and that it’s how do you balance that? But I think it’s judging, is this room ready to go here? Right?
And you can signal, you ca

n try little things, like watch if you get the reaction like, “Oh…” Or suddenly everybody, cameras go off or whatever. What are the non-verbals that you see when you try it? So, you might want to try an incremental approach to this, but often you’ll find is once you start the conversation, what I found is people are already ready to do it, right? Yeah. So, it goes back to the experiments Chris talked about. Do some experiments with it and see how it tests you, because it needs to be genuine on your side too, right?

Speaker 11:
I just realized that if the room isn’t ready, [inaudible 00:58:47] for a long way.

Brian Buck:
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 11:
So, it doesn’t have to be a…

Brian Buck:
And isn’t that make it fun as a practitioner, you’re like, “Ooh, I’m cooking. I’m helping create the space. Now, you can play with it.” And if some of you have been bored, like I’ve been doing kindle my whole… Now, it hopefully opens a whole new realm of there’s untapped treasure in these folks that you’re probably working with because not everybody’s taught how to go down this path. And again, I think my mentor who gave me this book. All right. So, with that said, I think you’ve seen ember, kindle, and illuminate give you a new framework to think about how you’re facilitating. Okay? Hopefully this is helpful to you. I want to say I have to acknowledge… Or the prompt that I want to leave you with is what is waiting to be illuminated through your facilitator presence?

If you were to adopt a presence illuminator identity, this is how I’m going to show up. How does it look and where could you start applying that now? I have to acknowledge my sources of inspiration. So, Standing in the Fire, some of you know that from the certification programs. There’s Brook’s book. The coaching Habit, this is such, what’s it called? The advice monster. This is really an anecdote for us fixtures that I always want to fix. And then Liberating Structures has a thing called heard, seen, respected. And then I also have to call out, we should do these things in community. So, Kathy Ditmore over here and Skye Osunde who helped me as I was working through this and bouncing off the ideas like, “Is this going to make sense to people? Is it too esoteric or is it too symbolic or whatever?” We should do these things develop in community and I just want to call them out and embarrass them a little bit. Skye can’t be here, but I told her I was going to name-drop her. So, thank you.

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