A few weeks ago, Greg Storey published a great article called It’s Time to Work Different. It reflects work he, Sean Wood, and I have been doing to understand AI adoption, the obsession with tooling, and how companies—from the Fortune 500 to mid-sized firms—are facing both the challenge and opportunity of AI.
His best line in the article is: “Toss the hype. Index on humans.”
I want to double down on his take: We need to move from hype to human.
Agile –> Agency
I’ve been around long enough to remember when Agile was the hot thing—everyone talked about it before they talked about human-centered design. The promise was speed. Move fast. Break things. What could go wrong? Turns out a lot.
What we should really be talking about is agency. Agile might make you faster, but agency gives people the autonomy and creativity to solve the problems they’re closest to—and to do it as a team.
Pivot –> Adapt
Pivoting was another badge of honor in tech—proof you could change course. That’s not enough anymore. What we need is adaptability: the ongoing capacity to adjust beyond that one-time pivot you put in a deck and get signed off by management.
Disruption –> Resilience
Disruption is still a buzzword—desired and feared in equal measure. The truth is, we’re all being disrupted. We’re swimming in change, much of it unpredictable. What we need is resilience: supportive structures that help us pace ourselves, looking up and out for risks, opportunities, and building a culture that takes a disciplined, long view.
Prompts –> Literacy
The world is obsessed with prompts—how to write the perfect one, why yours are failing, prompt, prompt, prompt. Prompts are just a tool. Literacy is the goal. Literacy means fluency: understanding context and nuance, knowing when to trust the machine and when to set it aside. Without literacy, prompts are just repeated phrases chasing outputs we don’t fully understand, nor do we understand what the model is actually playing back to us.
Innovation –> Ingenuity
Innovation is another word companies love to say they’re doing. Sometimes they even fund it—often in a cordoned-off space with special people. But it rarely becomes the way the company actually operates. Ingenuity, however, is a state of being. It’s what we should be building in our teams. Ingenuity produces innovation—not the other way around.
Phases –> Loops
Phases imply you can march neatly from now to the future, making a messy path seem simple and trackable. But phases often lie. The world doesn’t move cleanly through staged gates. It moves in loops—trial and error. Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test—again and again. Loops beget loops. As you cycle, you gain clarity on what’s working and what’s not,. You can change direction quickly without pretending there’s a fixed future map with phases that promise, but rarely deliver.
Moonshots –> Stepstones
Moonshots get TED talks and headlines. What you don’t see are the thousands of moonshots that left the atmosphere and never landed—still drifting in the dark blackness of space, burning money and opportunity. We should be looking for stepstones: incremental but meaningful wins that stack into a solid foundation—stone by stone—until you’ve built a tower that gets you somewhere new.
Transform –> Evolve
Ah…transformation! I’ve sold transformation. I’ve helped lead it. I don’t hate the word, but it sells an end state that rarely exists. Life doesn’t work like that. You don’t wake up and say, “We’re transformed.” What actually happens is evolution: decisions, changes, and persistence over time—usually slower than you’d like—until you realize, looking in the rear-view mirror, that you’ve changed. Calling it “transformation” often reflects survivorship bias. It only looks clean when you look back.
Adaptability, Resilience, and Confidence
So what does all this mean? We believe it adds up to viewing your organization through three lenses: Adaptability, Resilience, and Confidence.
Adaptability means you develop muscle memory for curiosity. You build literacy around your tools, and as they change, you remain steady because your default state is to learn and adjust. It’s not theater. It’s not chasing flashy, non-repeatable wins.
Resilience means your team has trust and safeguards around AI work. You’ve built capacity to iterate without burning people out, without over-relying on the model, and with enough endurance to play the long game.
Confidence means you have the credibility to act and a narrative to support it. You’re confident in how you use new technology, how you communicate with your teams, and where AI can create meaningful change—and where it’s just not ready yet.
We’re still early in this AI cycle. The organizations that embrace Adaptability, Resilience, and Confidence will win over the long haul.
They’ll make it—versus the ones that fake it.