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AI is quietly reshaping the workforce in ways most leaders aren’t measuring. While concerns often focus on entry-level job loss, the bigger risk is the erosion of apprenticeship and skill development. Drawing on research from Cornell, MIT, Yale, Microsoft, and real-world examples from organizations adopting generative AI, this article explores how “AI chains” remove the learning experiences that turn juniors into future experts. Learn why experience starvation threatens leadership pipelines, how hidden AI adoption creates governance blind spots, and what organizations can do to preserve mentorship, judgment, and long-term capability while still capturing AI-driven productivity gains.

AI adoption is accelerating, but many organizations are discovering a troubling disconnect between leadership expectations and employee reality. While executives report strong productivity gains, frontline workers often see little impact and remain uncertain about AI’s role in their future. This article explores the growing perception gap revealed by recent enterprise AI research, why traditional change management approaches are falling short, and how trust, involvement, and collaborative decision-making influence successful AI transformation. Learn why the biggest barrier to AI success may not be the technology itself, but the human dynamics shaping how organizations adapt to change.

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 when teams lack collaborative habits. They introduce the concept of "multiplayer AI"—moving beyond individual productivity gains toward team-level collaboration. The conversation emphasizes that facilitation, judgment, and organizational health are now the critical differentiators. Practical takeaways include assessing whether your organization operates in "single player" or "multiplayer" AI mode and intentionally slowing down at key decision points to maximize human impact.

Organizations are no longer debating whether AI matters. They are being pulled into two very different futures. This post explores the growing divide between companies investing heavily in AI infrastructure and automation, and those focusing on the human capabilities required to make AI actually work inside organizations. Drawing from nearly a decade of experience in facilitation and AI transformation, it examines why trust, decision-making, collaboration, and organizational adaptability are becoming the real differentiators in the age of AI. A thought-provoking look at the widening gap between technological acceleration and human readiness, and why the middle ground is quickly disappearing.

The 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit brought eight extraordinary facilitators together in Austin, Texas to explore the theme of Edges: the moments of tension, uncertainty, and emergence where the most powerful work gets done. Across two days of hands-on sessions, participants explored collective wisdom, whole intelligence, embodied presence, trauma-informed facilitation, the power of metaphor, and what it truly means to show up as a facilitator rather than just perform as one. This recap covers every session with links to the full blog post and video for each speaker, offering both a window into what happened and a practical resource for your ongoing facilitation practice.

Most organizations are investing heavily in AI adoption but seeing little return because traditional training models fail to create lasting behavior change. Research from organizations like Gartner and Anthropic reveals that employees quickly forget one-time AI training and struggle to integrate AI into daily workflows. While licenses and training programs increase, real usage and collaboration remain low. This article explores why AI adoption is a design problem rather than a training problem, highlighting emerging research, behavioral insights, and a new three-part framework that helps organizations build true AI fluency through practice, iteration, and collaborative ways of working.

At the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit, Trudy Townsend closed two days of deep work with a session that went straight at a topic every facilitator encounters but rarely names: trauma is already present in every room you enter, and it shapes how people show up, engage, and disengage. Drawing on the ACEs study, Dan Siegel's hand model of the brain, and years of practice, Trudy offered facilitators a grounded understanding of how the nervous system works, what dysregulation looks like in a group, and what it actually takes to create safety. Not a checklist, but a stance. A must-read for anyone committed to building spaces where participants can genuinely show up as their best selves.

New Friction is a podcast from Douglas Ferguson on the real organizational challenges of AI transformation. AI made execution almost free but most organizations are still stuck. Not because the technology doesn't work, but because the people problems got harder: decision-making, governance, and trust friction. Each episode features practitioners navigating AI change at ambitious organizations — what broke, what they tried, and what actually worked. We explore the shift from building to deciding, the 4x perception gap between leaders and the workforce, multiplayer AI organizations, and how the next generation learns judgment. Episode 1 drops May 26, 2026.