On “can we add AI?”
There is a moment in almost every product meeting this year. The roadmap is on the screen. Someone has just finished explaining a perfectly reasonable feature. And then, from the end of the table, usually from someone who has been quiet until now: “Can we add AI?”
the silence after "any questions?"
Every workshop has the same moment. The material is finished. The slides go dark. You ask if there are any questions, and the room does the thing rooms do. It looks somewhere else. At the table. At a laptop. At absolutely nothing, with the intense concentration of someone studying a very important nothing.
For years I assumed this meant the material had landed cleanly. No confusion, no questions, job done. I have since revised that theory considerably, mostly because I have also sat in that exact silence, on the other side, doing the exact same thing, once while the presenter was looking directly at me.
The moment I look for in every leadership workshop
The most resistant person in any workshop I have ever run has never been the most junior person in the room.
It is almost always the most senior position.
This is not because senior leaders are not intelligent. But because they have spent years being the person with answers, a workshop asks them, for a few hours, to be the person with questions. This is a very different posture. For some people, it is genuinely threatening.