Designed Learning, the Peter Block company I work with as an associate, has just published a concise and timely white paper: Collaboration at Work in the Age of AI.pdf . It is worth your time if you lead in complex organisations and are trying to make sense of what AI actually changes, and what it stubbornly does not.

The central argument is one I regularly make in programmes: the constraint on AI adoption is not access to tools. It is the quality of human relationships around those tools. The paper cites McKinsey research showing that while 92% of companies plan to increase AI investment, only 1% of leaders describe their organisations as mature in AI deployment. The bottleneck is not the technology. It is leadership, trust, and the willingness to have honest conversations.

That framing will resonate with anyone who has sat in a senior team where technically excellent recommendations die quietly because no one truly owns them.

What the paper gets right

The strongest contribution is the distinction between speed and depth. AI can accelerate information work: synthesising, drafting, modelling, organising. What it cannot do is sense the resistance behind polite agreement, negotiate real commitment with nervous stakeholders, or build trust through presence and courage. These remain irreducibly human capabilities.

The paper anchors this in Peter Block’s three practices: partnership (clear agreements, shared responsibility, resistance treated as information), belonging (convening people around possibility and ownership rather than compliance), and empowerment (changing culture through everyday encounters, not just formal programmes). These are the ideas that sit at the heart of Flawless Consulting and Leader As Convener, so if you have encountered those frameworks before, this paper will feel like a timely update rather than new territory.

What strikes me as particularly well observed is the data on adoption. Gartner’s finding that organisations with above-average healthy change adoptione year-on- report twice thyear revenue growth is the kind of number that reframes the conversation. Collaboration discipline is not part of the soft skills agenda. It is a business performance issue.

Where I would push the thinking further

The paper is deliberately accessible, so some of the harder edges are smoothed. In my experience working with senior leaders across matrix organisations, the challenge is not just that people withhold commitment privately while agreeing publicly. It is that the systems they operate in actively reward that behaviour. Political safety, career risk, and structural ambiguity all make authentic contracting genuinely difficult, not just uncomfortable.

The playbook offered is sound, but the toughest item on it, building commitment before implementation rather than confusing approval with commitment, requires leaders to tolerate a quality of conversation that most organisations have not practised and do not yet reward.

That is not a critique of the paper. It is the conversation I hope it opens.

Who should read this

If you lead a transformation, a cross-functional team, or any initiative that depends on people choosing to act rather than being directed to comply, this is a useful provocation. It is short, well-structured, and grounded in real data. It will not give you a formula, but it will sharpen the right questions.

You can find Designed Learning and their programmes at designedlearning.com. I have crafted a series of summaries of Peter Block’s books.