What changes, and what doesn’t, when AI enters the room. A conversation series on the human side of AI adoption. Hosted by Douglas Ferguson.
For thirty years, the friction in knowledge work was the stuff facilitators are built for. Alignment. Decision making. Getting the right people in the room and getting them to agree on what’s next.
AI is quietly changing what the friction even is.
When anyone on the team can generate a plausible answer in seconds, the bottleneck moves. It moves to judgment. To trust. To knowing which answer to act on, who’s accountable when it’s wrong, and how to keep the team actually thinking instead of outsourcing the thinking to a model that sounds confident.
That’s the New Friction. It’s not less work for facilitators. It’s different work. And it’s the work that decides whether AI adoption actually lands or stalls out in a pile of abandoned pilots.
This series is where we explore it. One conversation at a time.
One hub, three formats, one thesis.
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Taran Lent, Chief Technology Officer at Illumia, about how his organization moved from individual AI experimentation to enterprise-wide capability. Lent describes building
AI has made eliminating workflow friction easier than ever, but removing every obstacle can create hidden organizational risk. This article introduces the concept of friction discernment; the leadership skill of distinguishing between draining friction
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Sarah B. Nelson, Distinguished Designer at Kyndryl and co-founder of Kyndryl Vital, about why AI’s promise to remove friction is actually surfacing
In this episode of the New Friction podcast, host Douglas Ferguson speaks with Peter Bell, founder of Gather.dev and author of the forthcoming O’Reilly book Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering. Bell draws on his
In this episode of the New Friction podcast, host Douglas Ferguson speaks with Jeff Grabill, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo, recorded in the immediate aftermath of
In the inaugural episode of New Friction, host Douglas Ferguson and Erik Skogsberg explore how AI has shifted organizational friction from execution to decision-making and alignment. While AI accelerates production, it magnifies existing dysfunctions
Writing on what changes, and what doesn’t, when AI enters the room. Field notes from real engagements and the patterns showing up across leadership teams making AI stick.
We run AI transformation engagements for leadership teams navigating adoption inside real organizations. Facilitation-led, pragmatic, and built for the messy middle.
New episodes, essays, and field notes on the human side of AI adoption. Sent when there’s something worth sending.
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