Pattern

Most leaders think employee experience is a state. Good or bad. Healthy or toxic. A number on an engagement survey that either clears the bar or doesn't. That's the wrong model. Employee experience is not a state. It's a slope. It drifts. Slowly, quietly, and mostly out of view — until one day the work is worse, the people are tired, and nobody can point to the moment it went sideways. There wasn't a moment. There was a slide. And the customer meets the bottom of that slide l

In the last post, I argued that "AI slop" is a signal, not just an insult. I laid out three patterns for how people experience AI inside a product or content stream: Invisible Assistance, Visible Augmentation, and Slop. And I promised to come back and expand them. Here's the twist I saved for this one. When people talk about these patterns, they picture customers. The user staring at the feed. The reader reaching for the report button. The audience that can smell a machine-wr

LinkedIn just added a "Seems like AI slop" button. Think about what that admission actually contains. A platform built on professional self-presentation, owned by Microsoft, deeply invested in the AI moment, looked at its own feed and decided it needed a formal mechanism for users to say this feels fake. Its chief product officer said the company blocks hundreds of thousands of automated slop comments a day and has stopped billions of automation attempts in a matter of months

When people reach out to talk about my dissertation, they rarely want to talk about the whole thing. Fair enough. They usually want to talk about one line: your product or service experience is often just an outward expression of your employee experience. I have never formally named that idea, mostly because I did not want to brand it unless I had a name good enough to deserve it. But for now, this will do: The Inside-Out Employee Experience Principle. The idea is simple. If

I saw The Odyssey yesterday. It's a great movie — the kind that reminds you why people still leave the house to sit in the dark with strangers. Nolan shot the whole thing on IMAX film, and it shows. Go see it. But this isn't a film review. It's about something Nolan said afterward that I haven't been able to shake. Asked whether AI might be a Trojan horse — a gift you welcome in, only to watch it turn into something darker — he laughed and said, "AI is a Trojan horse that eve

When I was a student at Creighton, I got to see Warren Buffett speak in person a handful of times. He never dressed up his message. Year after year, he came back to the same warning: when corporations chase quarterly profits above everything else, the quality of their products and services suffers. That idea stuck with me. Not because it was clever, but because it was so obviously true and so widely ignored. Most companies don't invest in their infrastructure until something

This morning I found the cherry tree stripped bare on one side. Deer, sometime overnight, working through the tender new growth with the calm efficiency of animals who know you're asleep. I've gardened in Colorado long enough to expect this. You plant, you protect, you plan — and then reality wanders in on four legs and reminds you who's actually in charge. I've been at this for years now, gardening through drought that keeps getting worse. The Colorado River is running low,

There's a rule so old and so obvious in my field that we sometimes forget to say it out loud. It's number one on Jakob Nielsen's list of usability heuristics, and it's been sitting at the top since before half the people building AI today could ride a bike. It's called visibility of system status, and it boils down to a single, almost parental idea: tell people what's going on. That's it. When something is loading, show a spinner. When a file saves, say "saved." When the elev

Let me start with a confession that probably won't surprise you by now: I keep finding the Dunning-Kruger Dark Age everywhere I look. It's like learning a new word and then hearing it six times before lunch. Once you name a pattern, it refuses to stay quiet. But I genuinely did not expect the cleanest example of it to be the entire AI industry — the very people building the future, the ones who keep telling us they're the smartest folks in any room they walk into. So here's t