DevSecOps Engineer, Author, and Mentor

I was in a conversation about AI and Leadership recently and a number of themes were common while some were less so.

We were discussing someone who was trying to position themselves as a thought leader by regularly posting articles that showed all of the hallmarks of having been written by AI.

Using AI is fine. I have no problem with people who use AI. That's not my problem. My problem is when someone posts, publishes, disseminates, etc. a piece of content and calls it their own when they did not, in fact, craft it. My problem is when the responsibility for human judgment is abdicated in preference for expedience and speed. My problem is when fear and a desire for comfort edges out creativity and risk.

In my mind, these are not the traits of a leader.

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Additional patterns that support the same values

The three ideas I mentioned are the core of what I would recommend. There are also several supporting patterns that reinforce the same values.

Use bounded collaboration windows

Pairing, mobbing, and shared working sessions can be excellent tools when they are bounded, purposeful, and chosen for the kind of work at hand.

There are situations where intense synchronous collaboration is exactly the right tool:

• onboarding
• incident response
• shared debugging
• risky migrations
• hard architectural knots
• knowledge transfer in fragile areas of the codebase
• moments when a team genuinely needs to think together in real time

The problem begins when the tool becomes the atmosphere.

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What Better Collaboration Looks Like in Practice

In the first two parts of this series, I argued that some collaboration models carry costs their advocates rarely name clearly enough. On the human side, continuous managed availability can create chronic vigilance, bodily constraint, public diminishment, flattened expertise, and a workday in which a person is never fully allowed to settle into the problem. On the business side, the same model can reduce deep-work capacity, increase transition cost, misallocate senior talent, create shallow understanding, inflate ceremony cost, and quietly lower the return an organization gets from expensive technical labor.

That would be enough reason to reject the worst versions of the model.

It is not enough on its own.

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