For years, much of the conflict‑resolution field has leaned on an outdated paradigm: treating disagreement as conflict and tension as friction.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.
How do Employees Know When to Involve their Manager or HR?
How do employees know when they should involve their manager or HR, instead of working issues out between themselves?. First, let's get a few definitions and ground rules down so that we are singing from the same hymn book. The framework I am using separates disagreements from conflicts:
SpatzAI Pitch — Three Parts, One Behavioural System
Spatz is a workplace pre-grievance platform that helps teams address and resolve micro-conflicts before they escalate into formal grievances. The system has three connected parts...
Start With the Experience, Then Work Backwards to AI
Steve Jobs once gave a piece of advice that feels even more relevant today: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience first and then work backwards to the technology.” That principle matters enormously in the age of AI. The temptation now is to begin with the technology. We ask: What can AI do? Where can we apply it? What market can we sell it into? Jobs’ logic runs in the opposite direction.
Chess Board and Onboarding with SpatzAI
I have often compared onboarding with SpatzAI to learning chess. The 20-minute idea originally came from Steve Jobs, who said in 1983 that a great computer should be something you could learn to use in 20 minutes. That idea stuck. You can learn the basic moves and rules of chess surprisingly quickly. Understanding how the pieces move is not the difficult part. The challenge is learning when to make each move, how to respond to another player, and how to improve through experience.
2036 The Convergence Era: When Teams and AI Learn to Behave Together
Call this what you want, AI slop or AI smarts, not my problem. This post was generated by my prompt and some slight edits by me: "So, let’s say we get SpatzAI off the ground, you and I continue to converge, and thousands of teams successfully use SpatzChat over the next 10 years. The data from those interactions helps retrain and improve you as our leading AI. Now imagine we are 10 years into the future. In about 500 words, describe what this new era of teamwork looks like as AI and teams increasingly learn, adapt and work together."
The Backwards Route to AI Sentience
I just listened to Geoffrey Hinton talking about LLMs. What struck me was that he wasn't particularly interested in whether AI was "conscious" or "sentient." He talked instead about subjective experience. That got me thinking. Much of the discussion around AI sentience seems to travel in one direction: Greater intelligence → greater subjectivity → subjective experience → perhaps sentience. But for several years, I have been travelling almost blindly in the opposite direction. My interest has been objectivity.
To Escalate Early or De-escalate Later?
One thing has struck me recently. Most conflict-resolution experts talk about de-escalating workplace conflict. That makes sense because, by the time managers or HR become involved, the issue has usually developed into a serious workplace conflict. Emotions are high, positions are entrenched, relationships have deteriorated, and the priority is understandably to calm things down. But what if the problem of conflict resolution is being approached from the wrong direction?
The Spatz Escalator Pitch
What is the future of addressing workplace psychosocial hazards? For us, and perhaps for many in this field, the answer is becoming clear: AI-assisted, real-time psychological safety. But what does that actually mean? In our view, it means every team member having a standard toolkit and process that helps make speaking up private, transparent (when required), and consistent.
It’s the Process, Stupid.
I've spent years thinking about the apparent tension between psychological safety and accountability. Psychological safety encourages people to speak up. Accountability expects people to own their behaviour. Both are important, yet many organisations struggle to achieve either. Why? I suspect we're looking at the wrong end of the problem....
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