I am, at this moment, actively sabotaging the growth of the thing I was hired to grow.
Not by accident. Not through incompetence, although I want to leave room for that. I am doing it on purpose, with both hands, and I put it in writing to an outside partner in August so there would be a record.
Here is the paragraph. I have not cleaned it up:
“We largely just agreed that I should always be moving towards scaled repeatability with my curriculum and content, but that the in-person experiences have been our secret sauce to date. I could easily ‘scale’ by removing in-person learning, make them a bunch of videos, and my calendar will magically free up, but I worry enthusiasm would too (and the wind in my sails along with it). I’m knowingly acknowledging, reinforcing, and backing a stick in the spokes of scaling by emphasizing in-person, but that’s a hill I think I’ll die on (for now).”
Read that last bit again. For now. Two words doing an enormous amount of load-bearing work. That is not the sound of a man who has won an argument. That is the sound of a man who has filed a continuance.
Let me back up.
Somewhere around the spring, I had a realization that deflated me for most of a week. I was building an AI fundamentals module, doing the thing I do, arranging concepts and examples and the little on-ramps that make a person feel like they might not be the dumbest one in the room. And it occurred to me, with the clarity of a diagnosis, that Copilot could probably write this. Claude could definitely write this. Not a worse version. A comparable version, in about ninety seconds, with better formatting than mine and no typos.
That is an unpleasant thought to have when a meaningful chunk of your professional identity is the word curriculum.
I sat with it. I went for a long run, which is what I do instead of processing feelings in a supervised way. And by mile nine I had arrived at something that was either wisdom or oxygen debt: the content was never the thing. The content is the pretext. What I actually bring is the room. The forty-five seconds after somebody says out loud that they are afraid this makes them obsolete, and nobody laughs, and I do not rush to reassure them, and the person across the table says “yeah, me too.” You cannot ship that as an MP4.
I know this because I tried.
I made a tutorial video once. I was proud of it for approximately one afternoon. Then I watched my own footage like game tape, and it was rough. Not a single judgment beat in the entire thing. Not one moment where I said here is where this tool will lie to you. I pulled the transcript and it was essentially the phrase “it’s really good, it’s usually really accurate” on a loop, over and over, a man narrating a slot machine. And then it ended. Cold. No landing, no callback, nothing: “So there you go, thanks for listening, see ya.”
My own verdict, written down at the time, was that I had produced the tool tour the whole kit is built to avoid. I had spent a year telling people that watching someone click buttons teaches you almost nothing, and then I made a video of me clicking buttons, and I signed off like a man who had just realized he left the stove on.
So that is one side of the ledger.
The other side is my calendar, which has become a kind of ongoing performance art piece about the limits of a single human body. Weekly office hours started in November of 2025 with twenty invitees. Twenty. I remember worrying nobody would show. By the middle of this year it’s around eighty, across MillerKnoll, Maharam, Holly Hunt, HAY, DWR, and CBS. Roughly a hundred and thirty license-intake tickets came through in one seven-week stretch. Copenhagen. London. Bath. Pennsylvania. California. Connecticut. Atlanta. Chicago.
In-person does not scale. Demand does. Those two sentences are the entire problem, and I do not have a third sentence that resolves them.
I did go looking for money. I asked my boss’s boss whether there was budget for real video production, thinking that if I have to make videos, they should at least not look like a hostage tape filmed in my basement. He pointed me toward a video guy. My honest reaction, which I also wrote down, was “that ain’t it.” But the useful part was not the referral. The useful part was learning that dollars exist. Maybe twenty-five to fifty thousand of them, if I ask at the right moment with the right face on.
Then a CEO resigned and the org chart turned into a snow globe, so the right moment has been rescheduled indefinitely.
Meanwhile I have been leaning on an outside partner for design help, and I told them the truest thing I have said all year: “I’m starting to feel like a lingering mooch with you all, which I hate.” That sentence is not strategy. That sentence is a Midwestern man discovering he has been accepting hospitality on credit and would now like to pay for the coffee, please, and no, he insists.
Every enablement program eventually stands at the same fork. One road reaches everybody, thinly. The other reaches some people, deeply, and leaves the rest waiting. There is no third road, no matter how many decks promise one. I picked deep. I picked it knowing it caps my reach, knowing it keeps my calendar full of airports, knowing that a video library would make me look far more scalable on a slide and far less useful in a room.
And I picked it against my own interest. A program that scales is a program that survives a reorg. A program that lives in one guy’s travel schedule is a program with a single point of failure, and I have met the point of failure, and he loses his sunglasses roughly once a month.
The clock is running. I can hear it. Eventually somebody with more authority than me is going to look at the cost per participant and ask a completely fair question, and I will not have a completely good answer. Somewhere in a drawer I already have the outline for the video version. I know exactly how I would build it. I just have not.
On the long runs I keep coming back to this: the part that makes the work matter is the part that cannot be copied, and the part that cannot be copied is also the part that cannot be multiplied. The thing I am defending and the thing that limits me are the same thing. I have not yet found the version of that sentence where I come out looking principled rather than stubborn, and I have had a lot of miles to try.
So the hill stands, for now, with a stick jammed firmly in my own spokes and a man standing next to it insisting he meant to do that.