The room where it happens

“You can’t use an old map to explore a new world.”
– Albert Einstein

There’s a design question underneath a lot of AI learning work that doesn’t get asked enough: Who should actually be in the room together — or in the conversation?

The default is mix — pull people from across the organization, expose them to the same content, send them back. It works for culture, for connection, for shared language.

It doesn’t work particularly well for changing how work gets done.

What we’re seeing is that AI capability builds fastest when intact teams work on reinventing their own workflows. Not abstractly. Not hypothetically. On the actual work they’re doing this week.

The logic is simple: The people who share a workflow share the friction. They know where time gets lost. They know which handoffs break down. When you put them together with the right structure and access to AI tools, workflow redesign happens quickly — and it sticks, because they built it themselves.

This runs counter to how most learning is designed. It also happens to be how AI actually creates value.

The question worth asking before the next AI program goes live: Are we designing for awareness, or for reinvention? Our job, increasingly, isn’t to teach people about AI. It’s to create the conditions for teams to reinvent their own work with it.

If this resonates with what you’re seeing, forward it to a colleague, contact us, or talk to your Advantage partner. We’re working with leaders and teams on exactly this right now.

One great thing for 02.24.26 – Crush Your Job (with a little help from AI) – A practical tool for discovering where AI gives you the most leverage — in your actual work.