Transformation Failure — Food for Agile Thought #558
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TL; DR: Transformation Failure — Food for Agile Thought #558
Welcome to the 558th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,366 peers. This week, Nigel Thurlow and Stephanie Leue tackle leadership: Thurlow analyzes patterns of transformation failure, showing that leaders seek change only when they hold power, while Stephanie Leue proposes that steady presence, not control, builds authority. That maturity matters because, as Roman Pichler warns, bolting AI onto broken practices accelerates dysfunction. Andreas Horn reveals how agentic AI costs spiral unchecked, John Gruber calls Anthropic’s text watermarking a sacrifice of clarity, and Aaron Horwath asks what happens when AI strips knowledge work of meaning.
Next, Eddie Pratt warns that PMs who use AI solo build "reasoning silos," while David Pereira proposes that decision-making, not building, is the real bottleneck. Pavel Samsonov agrees: velocity without judgment ships net-negative software faster. Governance lags, as VB Staff reports that 21% of enterprises lack cost controls despite running an average of three orchestration platforms, and Zvi Mowshowitz finds Anthropic’s safety case weaker than advertised. Also, Rudrendu Paul and Sourav Nandy urge B2B sellers to redesign for AI agent buyers.
Lastly, Jenny Wanger proposes that influence grows from trust and a readiness to change your own mind, a theme Ryan Murphy extends: good managers coach rather than control the room’s mood. On the tooling front, Paweł Huryn compares four AI prototyping platforms for PMs, and Avi Chawla walks through SpaceXAI’s Grok Bot, which features persistent cloud agents. Finally, John Cutler warns that "return on tokens" risks becoming the next proxy trap, echoing story points.
Disclaimer : I belong to those who read Charniak/McDermott’s book on "Artificial Intelligence" decades ago. Of course, I make use of AI, for example, for research, proofreading, challenging story arcs and article structures, or summarization.
🎓 🇬🇧 $199 — The A3 Delegation System Founding Workshop: September 28-29, 2026
Your team already delegates work to AI: reports, research, customer feedback analysis, stakeholder communication, or parts of operational workflows.
But can you answer these questions without improvising?
What may AI decide, and what must remain a human decision?
What does "good enough" mean for this particular work?
Who verifies the result before somebody acts on it?
Who checks whether the delegation still works after the model or workflow changes?
If those answers live in one person’s head, or nowhere, your problem is no longer prompting. You have a delegation problem.
The A3 Delegation System gives you a practical way to decide what AI may do, hand over the work clearly, define acceptable results, and inspect the delegation over time.
During two hands-on sessions, you will apply the system to a workflow. You will leave with a clear understanding of how to apply the A3 Delegation System to your workflows so that team members or stakeholders can understand, challenge, and continue your AI delegation work. Everything you learn is directly applicable to your situation the next day. The class is in English .
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