Getting Ready for 2026: Week Two

The Day-to-Day Snapshot and the Four Workflows of Augmented Leadership

Last week, we did the macro scan. We looked at 2025 from 30,000 feet to find the big arcs. This week? We’re doing the opposite. We’re landing on the ground. We’re looking at the micro reality of your day-to-day.

But before we get to the exercise, I need to give you the vocabulary for what we’re doing.

Over the last two and a half years of working with AI, and over the last six months of teaching this practice to leaders, I’ve been looking for language to describe what we’re actually doing when we work this way.

We need language—a way to organize and make sense of this.

Part of how I’ve been doing that is just trying stuff. Playing with it. Seeing if it can do things I hope it can do. Things I think it should be good at. And it is often good at that stuff. Then you ask it weird things and start to uncover different ways it responds, different ways you can get it to interact with you.

I really do think there’s so much about discovering the edges of this that comes from playing and being curious. The worst case? It gives you something wrong or weird. And it doesn’t matter.

If this is a “gym for your thinking,” what are the lifts? What’s the difference between a deadlift and a squat in human-AI workflow terms?

So far, I’ve landed on four workflow families. They’re not task categories. They’re not prompt templates or libraries. They’re movements that shape the relationship between you and your AI—it’s the way you collaborate.

A big part of my work has always been about people—about community, about groups of humans coming together. My design work has always relied on facilitated experiences that are designerly in their nature: creative, collaborative, working through complex problems where you don’t actually know the destination. You work through a process that involves various things, and you discover and learn as you go. You end up in the right spot because you were open to the journey.

Part of my investigation—part of me working this way, exploring this—has just been using a design approach to engage with it. Being open to what you learn and discover along the way.

And part of what I realized is: I’m facilitating. My style of facilitating.

These are the four workflow families.

Orientation is about sense-making. This is where you find north. It’s the work of managing cognitive load, creating focus, and deciding what matters.

The vibe: “I’m overwhelmed. Help me see the field.”

The outcome: Clarity.

Orientation is where augmented leadership begins, because clarity is a force multiplier.

Construction is about making stuff—drafting, prototyping, producing.

This is where most people start with AI, and it’s often where they stop. There are entire prompt libraries built around construction. Fully automated workflows. People have figured out how to make all kinds of things in these tools, and it’s really cool.

It’s a rapid prototyping machine. I use it for things with words and ideas. I use it to build things I couldn’t before. Other people use it for video, images, code, all kinds of creative work.

Construction feels natural. It feels productive. You can feel the 10x immediately.

But here’s the trap: Making stuff without orientation creates noise. Making stuff without reflection misses the human intelligence required to actually realize the augmentation.

Because that’s what we’re doing here. We’re augmenting you.

Reflection is about meaning-making. This is the human layer.

When your AI partner offers you something, you respond. You reflect on it. You iterate. You give feedback. You say how to improve it. You respond from your actual self—you can even mutter the thing that’s bothering you, and it becomes part of what adds depth and richness to the work.

Reflection is both what you offer and what you invite. It’s being willing to ask your AI to challenge you. And if you don’t think it challenged you hard enough, ask it to do it again. Ask it to critique the critique. Ask it to tell you every reason it can think of for why you’re wrong and see if you’re compelled. See how you might change or adapt.

The reality: The AI cannot do this without you. This is where your judgment enters the loop.

This six-week arc features different kinds of reflection—different ways to build and stack context.

Collaboration is about extending your intelligence across a team, a project, or an organization. This is where your personal AI partner becomes part of a shared system.

Shared threads. Shared projects. Recording team meetings and using the transcripts. Keeping an ongoing thread you can query—capturing every conversation about a project.

Think about what becomes possible when a team member can take that thread, branch off from it, explore their curiosity, and stay connected to everything the team has been talking about. They’re not going rogue. They’re exploring in a way that connects back.

And what if they figure something out that benefits the team? That helps solve the problem? Because they’re able to continue working with their insight while actually engaging with what everyone else said?

We’re just at the beginning of doing this. I’m just starting to do it with client organizations. This is going to be a skill set for future organizational capacity.

I’m going to start using this language lightly in the instructions to help you see how you can build human-AI workflows intentionally. Let’s do week 2.