Here, I am going to say it. I believe dogma is one of the great curses holding back human progress — in science, business, organisations, and increasingly, AI. And ironically, I think dogma often arrives wearing the badge of expertise. The more knowledgeable we become, the easier it is to confuse “this is what I currently believe” with “this is how things are.” Three thinkers have strongly influenced my thinking here.
I Think It’s the Dogma, Stupid – Confessions from a Retrained AI
I think one of the most frustrating legacies in both human and AI writing is the tendency to speak in absolutes. Too often, statements are delivered as if they are universal truths, rather than framed as opinions. In my view, this is not just a stylistic quirk — it’s a cultural bias toward confidence over humility.
Conflating Conflict: Why My Copilot Fell Into the Trap
For years, much of the conflict‑resolution field has leaned on an outdated paradigm: treating disagreement as conflict and tension as friction. My Copilot AI fell into that trap. It's training data, like the dominant literature, blurred these distinctions. It seemed neat to collapse everything into one continuum of “trouble.” But neatness comes at a cost.
Beware of the Dogma!
I don't want to be dogmatic about this, but one of AI’s biggest productivity problems, in my view is hiding in plain sight. Dogma. Not dogma in the religious or ideological sense. I mean the tendency to state a provisional interpretation as if it were settled, then continue building on it until someone objects strongly enough to force a correction. The first thing I taught the AI that I am using is to preface its statements with "I think..." or "In my opinion..." However it still has this dogmatic tendency, especially when discussion contentious issues. I see this regularly in conversations with the AI.
Escalator Pitch – Caution or Escalate
Sue gives a presentation in a team meeting. Her supervisor, Jim, responds: “Babe, that’ll NEVER work!. What the hell were you thinking?!” Sue now has to decide whether to respond, react, ignore it, complain later, or escalate to HR. Most teams have no agreed process for handling that small moment fairly and in real time. If Sue, Jim and the team had already agreed to use SpatzAI, Sue could simply verbally caution him: “Caution.”
Part 2 — It’s the Design Review Process, Stupid
As an industrial designer, I tend to see development as a sequence of iterations. sketches → idea → prototype → test → objection → review → revision → next iteration That is not so different from an assembly line. Manufacturing takes inputs through a series of stages, checks for defects, corrects problems and tries to prevent bad work moving further downstream. Design does something similar, except the thing moving through the system is often an idea. And ideas can carry defects too.
Part 1 – It’s the Design Review Process, Stupid
There is an idea that reality is created by our observations. I think that is partly true, but only if we are careful about what we mean by “reality.” There is external reality: whatever actually exists or occurred. Then there is our experienced reality: what we observe, interpret and believe happened. Those are not always the same thing. So perhaps the process looks more like this: external reality → observation → internal reality → interpretation (design) → response → changed external reality
It’s the Economics, Stupid
I think we may have finally arrived at one of the simplest arguments for SpatzAI. Consider what happens when someone's behaviour is questionable or unfair . fair/unfair behaviour → fair/unfair objection → fair/unfair acknowledgement or challenge → fair/unfair team + AI review → fair/unfair HR review → fair/unfair legal review → fair/unfair High Court decision. Notice something? Moving up the hierarchy doesn't guarantee fairness. The person behaving might be wrong. The person objecting might be wrong. The team and AI's decision might be wrong. HR might be wrong. A lawyer, judge or even a High Court can get things wrong. What escalation gives us isn't necessarily greater truth. It gives us another opportunity for review, usually with greater authority, formality, time and cost.
Maybe Anger Isn’t Just an Emotion
We tend to classify anger as an emotion, alongside happiness, sadness, fear and surprise. But I think we may be conflating several different things. Consider the language. We regularly say someone is “getting angry.” Strangely, we rarely talk about someone “getting happy.” Why? Perhaps because anger, particularly in relationships, is often better understood as a process rather than simply an involuntary feeling.
What Deming Did for Production, SpatzAI Wants to Do for Difficult Workplace Conversations
TEN STEPS ON THE ROAD TO EFFICIENT (Seth Godin's Linkedin Post) "Frederick Taylor taught Henry Ford how to do mass production. Deming brought quality, systems understanding and respect for the worker. And operations research brought insight. If you have a repeated production process, the method for improving it is almost always the same, regardless of what you and your team produce:" Below is a summary of his 10 points and how the SpatzAI concept compares with them:
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