With AI, in the chat or the prompt, to save tokens, you may drop the use of some words like “Can you,” “Please,” and “Thank you,” and all those nice and polite words that show respect and appreciation. You give the command as is, and acknowledge at the end whether the task was completed or not. After prompting for some time, I noticed that this is causing a behavior shift that can also be carried into interactions with humans. We have to remind ourselves to say "Please" and "Thank you" at the beginning and end of conversations when typing in Teams or sending messages. How to be thrifty and productive without losing human interaction is something we need to watch carefully.
Also, to make the prompt clear, you may stay away from vague instructions in favor of highly specific rules and strict constraints. As AI models calculate probabilities, soft phrases like “I don’t want” or “Please try not to” weaken the probability weight of that rule, and the model might still include the forbidden element if it feels it fits the overall context. Hard command words like “NEVER,” “FORBIDDEN,” or “OMIT” for negative rules, or more specific positive rules, set strict boundaries that stop AI from assuming what you really want. I had a colleague in Saudi Arabia who used to joke when someone faced a hard bug in an application. He would tell him, "لو شخصيتك قوية كانت اشتغلت," which means, “If you have a strong character, it will work.” It seemed unrelated at the time, but now you can see how it relates, and I find myself laughing more when I remember it while coaching someone on how to write a proper prompt. But we don’t shout at our team members and colleagues when we want them to do or not do something. We clarify as much as possible and maintain our human relationships.
Focusing on the human aspect during the transformation is key. The process is already full of emotions and uncertainty. Many times, after introducing today’s tools, you find more than one person in the audience asking, “What are we going to do when AI is now going to do that?” They start to think about their entire career path, and suddenly what was making them special in their area is available to anyone who is only a few tokens away from achieving similar results.
As someone who is interested in team building and development, besides the interest in technology, and as someone who was raised as a Boy Scout, staffed advanced leadership trainings, and will be in charge of a National Youth Leadership Training course at the end of this year, I believe we should focus on character development, leadership skills, a sense of responsibility toward others, and emotional health and wellness as much as we focus on survival skills.
Below, I will try to summarize some observations and advice to help humanize the AI transformation. I will follow the EDGE method we use in Scouting, which stands for Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, and Enable. These terms can be viewed as steps equivalent to Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing in the stages of team building, and we call it Teaching EDGE and Leading EDGE, but I will use them here in the context of transformation.
In the beginning of the transformation journey, when not everyone is yet aware of AI capabilities, some will like what they see and may be amused by the outcome, but some may not feel safe, and this is normal. The question they are thinking about is, “How can you build overnight something that used to take me weeks, and with better results?” Once they know it was built using AI, they feel relief. It is not about their human capabilities; it is about the tools they too can use.
Some people will focus on the outcome. They will start asking for changes to the solution, and this is normal in the beginning. But once they see how easy it is to get started, they begin thinking about others and how they can unlock and ignite the power in each team member and the innovation possibilities. They begin to understand what is coming and the journey they need to join.
You may also face pushback from others: “You’re the smart guy, don’t go use AI and come back and tell us what to do,” or “This is how we do it,” or “Use your AI quietly and do not disturb what we used to do.” The pushback will not literally sound like that, but it is similar to the old days of “Did you know it, or did you Google it?” You can notice it in behaviors, and this is normal in such a big shift that will affect the lifestyle of many people. Do not allow such behavior to slow AI adoption. Face the fear with more training and education. Keep your message focused on not me against you, but rather on the tools we will choose together for each task.
At this stage, you will need to explain, share the vision, and describe what success may look like. Clarify what is known and what is not, and what the risks are. Clarify what is expected from each individual. Ask them to join the mission and help complete the missing puzzle pieces. Recognize the storming that is about to start.
AI is now available to everyone. It is removing the friction between intent and outcome. You have an idea, you specify it, plan it, and implement it. This is opening the gate for team members to cross role and skill boundaries and express their ideas through working solutions. It creates flow and liquidity in ideas. Instead of sharing your idea and hoping someone else sees it the way you imagine it, you can show it to the team as a working solution. This is great, but it will also create overlap and conflict. Things will be built overnight. Some ideas and solutions will look better than others, be demonstrated better, or be presented to different groups that may see the value differently. Collect the ideas, give them equal opportunities, discuss the reasons behind them, the pain points they address, the lessons learned while building them, how they fit into the bigger picture, and then integrate them.
In this flood of solutions, do not ignore the subject matter experts or the team leads. These are often the people who were previously asking for more resources or more time to solve problems. Give them the opportunity to brainstorm, evaluate the solutions, and provide feedback. As someone with a vision for transformation who wants to bring the team toward that vision, you do not only demonstrate success, you share it. Increase the EDGE team. Let others build success stories, and they will start demonstrating and guiding others.
You will also see two different behaviors: the individual résumé builder versus the team builder. One creates solutions quietly, waiting for the right moment to shine and add something to a résumé. The other shares ideas and goals, allows others to own parts of them, and enables them to achieve success as well. These are two very different behaviors that affect transformation and team dynamics: competition to stand out as individuals versus encouraging teams to work together. You do not want to eliminate competition, but you want it balanced with team spirit, especially when ideas overlap or conflict. Remind them: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. When you choose to go fast, it should not be to prove you are better than your teammates, but to unlock possibilities they may not yet be ready for.
Many times, the person who builds a solution is not the person who came up with the idea or the steps to solve the problem. Ideas are often shared in meetings and discussions as things worth building, and sometimes similar solutions are demonstrated by multiple people. But now that AI makes building easier, someone may see an opportunity and create an individual version of an idea. Picking an idea and working on it should be recognized, but not everyone will give credit to the team or the person who initiated the idea. Unfortunately, once people realize that implementation was the easy part, some hide the idea owner, and this is harmful to the team.
In the past, people would say, “I have an idea,” and everyone could evaluate whether it was really their idea or if they heard it from someone else. Now it is, “I built this,” hiding the idea under the hood and allowing the audience to assume it originated with the builder. Team members should be recognized not only for implementing ideas but also for engaging others. Give more recognition to solutions built by more than one person, unless it truly was a one-person effort from end to end. This way, before demonstrating and announcing what they achieved, people will think about who contributed to it. Unfortunately, some will still intentionally hide the names of people they do not like, but at least it creates a moment of reflection and an opportunity to make the right decision.
With AI, you need to work on two parts.
Part one: help team members utilize the tools of the new era to become more productive, move faster through the backlog, deliver more features to customers, improve quality, and respond to issues more quickly. Managers are also looking for lower costs. Let’s face it: paying for more tokens may be more productive in the future than paying a human to perform the same automation work.
On the other side are the humans who may be replaced by AI. As much as you invest in AI, invest in their skills. Not only the skills that help you automate their work, but also the skills that help them survive afterward. Do not only try to understand what they are doing and how they are automating it to ensure you will be okay without them. Open doors for them to advance into other areas that are less likely to be automated soon. As a manager—and hopefully a leader—you have a greater responsibility toward your team.
I started writing this blog during the Memorial Day holiday. The reference is intentional. If you want your team to truly buy in and serve with the best intentions, you need to be one of the leaders who takes care of their soldiers. They should not only be trained to defend your base, or even survive your battle, but also to survive future battles with or without you.
Remember to say please and thank you. Remember to tune your voice for your fellow humans.
At the end, you may enjoy reading my previous posts: “Scrum, Scouting and Micro Financing,” which describes the values and behaviors in the process, and “Assisted Development, Nine Months Later: More Arms, More Reach,” which focuses on the technical side of the transformation journey.
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