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.
It’s the Review Process, Stupid
I have been thinking about what sits underneath the SpatzAI process. Previously, I arrived at: “It’s the uncertainty, stupid.” People often hesitate to challenge workplace behaviour because they are uncertain about what will happen next. Then: “It’s the process, stupid.” Reduce the uncertainty by giving everyone an agreed, predictable process. But I think there is another layer beneath both: It’s the review process, stupid.
Fail-Prevention vs Fail-Safe
This is a short story about two very different approaches to designing the first generation of commercial jet aircraft. The British de Havilland Comet was the world’s first commercial jet airliner. Its four engines were buried inside the wing roots, close to the fuselage. It was an elegant aerodynamic solution: embedding the engines reduced drag and produced a remarkably clean aircraft.....
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.
Workplace Disagreements, Objections, Complaints and Conflict Conflation
Workplace disagreement, objection, and complaint are three distinct, open or unresolved interactions. Yet they are often conflated under the broad label of "workplace conflict". We think this confusion makes ordinary disagreement feel dangerous, makes the person disagreeing appear difficult, and leaves minor concerns about behaviour unnecessarily complicated and confusing to address and resolve.
The Speak Up Toolkit and Accountability Process
Many organisations encourage people to speak up. Far fewer provide a clear, fair, and proportionate process for what happens next. Without a shared process, speaking up can feel uncertain. People hesitate because they do not know how their concern will be received, whether it will escalate unnecessarily, or whether it will simply be ignored. A Speak Up Toolkit should do more than encourage conversations. It should guide them.
We Systemised Hamburgers 70 Years Before Processing Psychosocial Hazards
In the 1950s, McDonald’s did not transform fast food by simply expecting employees to work faster or telling them, “Make a burger with a patty, and make it fast.” That instruction described the desired outcome, but not the process. Instead, the the McDonald brothers studied every movement. They designed the kitchen layout, clarified each role, standardised the sequence, created machines, set timing expectations, specified ingredients, created quality checks and established what should happen when something went wrong....
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