Fall 2026 Facilitation Certification Deadline extended to 9/25
Fall 2026 Facilitation Certification Deadline extended to 9/25
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New Friction | September 11, 2026

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Alyssa Coughlin, Director and Chief of Staff for Autodesk's Data, AI, and ML Platform organization, about what it actually takes to move a large engineering company from AI-enabled to AI-native. Coughlin describes how bottlenecks have shifted away from writing code toward code review, deployment permissions, and design decisions now that AI has made execution fast and cheap. She walks through concrete changes her org has made, including abandoning two-week Scrum sprints for Kanban flow, moving from PRDs to spec-driven development consumable by both humans and AI, and building shared "knowledge graph" brains to catch duplicated work before it ships. Throughout, she frames change management as a balance of carrot and stick, arguing that engineers aren't losing their jobs so much as shifting from author to orchestrator, and that managers themselves must stay hands-on with the tools to coach effectively. She closes by describing AI as an amplifier that exposes organizational seams rather than a fix, so the real work is continuously finding and addressing the friction it reveals.

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New Friction | August 25, 2026

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Jeff Chow, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Miro, about where friction is showing up inside product teams as AI reshapes how work gets done. Jeff describes how PMs prototyping in high fidelity, designers coding, and engineers orchestrating agents are collapsing old role boundaries, and argues the underlying tensions — who owns a decision, who gets paged at 2am, how a designer receives feedback — aren't new, just amplified. Much of the conversation centers on decision-making as the real bottleneck: Jeff makes the case that 10x individual output doesn't translate into 10x business results unless organizations can also accelerate cross-functional alignment and cascade decisions with their underlying context, not just their conclusions. He and Douglas dig into Miro's bet that a shared visual canvas — carrying both artifacts and a decision log of why choices were made — is the connective layer that keeps AI-assisted work and human teams moving together instead of fragmenting into isolated single-player sessions. The two also trade observations on viral AI adoption patterns inside organizations, the psychology of design crits applied to AI-generated work, and the early signs of "ephemeral UI" and custom, vibe-coded widgets reshaping what software teams expect to build for themselves.

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AI | August 20, 2026

AI productivity gains may be creating a hidden talent crisis. As senior employees use AI to take on work once assigned to junior staff, organizations risk “experience starvation,” weakening the pathways that build judgment, discernment, and future leaders. Explore how shrinking entry-level opportunities, skills atrophy, and disrupted talent pipelines could create long-term capability gaps, and why leaders need to design developmental friction into AI transformation. Learn how organizations can capture AI’s speed and efficiency without sacrificing the hands-on experience people need to grow into tomorrow’s experts.