You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly pulse of must-reads for anyone orchestrating teams, people, and work across the modern digital workplace—whether you’re managing sprints, driving roadmaps, leading departments, or just making sure the right work gets done. Curated by the team at Steady.
The Myth of “More People”
Adding people doesn’t always add progress. In fact, sometimes it subtracts it. Alex Ewerlof walks us through the diminishing returns (and rising dysfunction) of oversized teams. Drawing on research, historical anecdotes (hello, Brook’s Law), and plenty of real-world scars, he illustrates how bloated teams often get stuck in coordination hell. More bodies mean more communication lines, more meetings, more wait time — and less ownership, trust, and momentum. It’s not just about headcount; it’s about shape and structure. Ewerlof recommends splitting large teams into “cells” that have clear purpose and boundaries, while still syncing through a shared backbone. If your team feels slow, bloated, or unclear, it might not be underperforming — it might just be too big.
— Alex Ewerlof’s Blog, 9m, #teamdynamics, #coordination, #leadership
The Stability Paradox
AI can move fast and break things, but your team shouldn’t. In this timely piece, David Swan explores the tension between the breakneck speed of AI adoption and the slow burn of sustainable workplace culture. While tech leaders salivate over generative AI’s promise, employees are quietly buckling under the pressure of too many tools, too few boundaries, and unclear ROI. The article urges orgs to pump the brakes — not on innovation, but on chaos. The smart play? Match AI agility with the ballast of strong leadership, clear communication, and intentional integration. Swan spotlights examples showing how companies can thread the needle of upskilling without burnout and innovating without destabilizing trust. The TL;DR? You can’t automate your way out of cultural debt. AI is a tool — not a compass. And no amount of machine intelligence makes up for poor human coordination.
— The Australian, 6m, #ai, #leadership, #culture
Brain Drain
AI isn’t just taking your job, it might be taking your brain with it. According to this spicy critique, we’re offloading so much cognitive effort to generative AI tools that we’re losing the ability (and motivation) to think deeply, remember details, or even form original ideas. The piece draws a line from autocorrect to autopilot, arguing that convenience is making us mentally flabby. When everything from brainstorming to summarizing gets outsourced to the machine, our own neural networks start gathering dust. Unlike past tech revolutions that demanded new mental models (like spreadsheets or search engines), today’s AI asks less of us while promising more — ushering in a comfy, compliant future of intellectual atrophy. There’s also a fascinating link to robotics: researchers warn that if we build humanoid machines that move like us and talk like us, we might start mimicking them back, flattening human expression in the process.
— New Atlas, 6m, #cognition, #ai, #futureofwork
Empathy Is a Power Tool
In the arms race between humans and AI, there’s one tool large language models can’t fake: felt experience. That’s the thesis of “pivotal empathy,” a practice that combines rigorous listening with the guts to act on what you learn. Unlike performative or “toxic” empathy (think: nodding along while changing nothing), pivotal empathy involves being changed by what you hear. The article walks through how real empathy — empathy that pivots you — unlocks better leadership, design, coaching, and decision-making. It’s less “I feel you” and more “I’ll adjust because of you.” In a world drowning in pattern-matching predictions, it’s the only way to truly see what’s novel or non-obvious. Bonus: the piece breaks down four tangible pivots (emotional, perceptual, narrative, and behavioral) that help leaders evolve instead of entrench.
— The Structural Skills Project, 7m, #leadership, #ai, #emotionalintelligence
Async, Not Absent
PostHog opens the kimono on how their all-remote, all-async team actually pulls it off without falling into the trap of becoming a ghost town of unread docs and overdue decisions. The magic trick? They don’t just use async tools, they build a culture around them. That means fewer meetings (but not no meetings), overcommunicating decisions in writing, and defaulting to transparency. At the heart of the system are clear principles: ship updates weekly, document everything, and use discussions in the tools, not in private chats. The result: high autonomy without chaos.
— PostHog Newsletter, 8m, #asynchronous, #remote-work, #team-culture
Teamwork for the AI Era
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