Learning × resources

What this page is

A complete log, not a recommendation list. Things that turned out to be a waste of time stay in, labelled as such — that is the more useful signal, and it fits a journal that publishes its mistakes.

Each entry has two layers, kept deliberately apart. The facts — what a source is, who made it, what it argues — may be drafted by an agent. What I took from it, where it landed, and whether it is worth your time is handwritten. Same rule as the journal itself.

Which means entries appear here half-finished, and stay that way until I have had my say. Half an entry is honest. An invented take is not.

The log

“AI for Leaders” (Level 1) — Agile Academy

Facilitator

Sohrab Salimi, Founder & CEO of Agile Academy — a fellow trainer and a mentor of mine.

Format

Training. Normally two days, in person or remote; for the ambassador cohort it ran as four afternoons.

Consumed

21–22 and 28–29 July 2026.

Context

Attended as one of the Agile Academy’s ambassadors.

Themes

Leadership model · Business model · Operating model.

Material

The deck is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — free to share, but not for public republication. Not reproduced here; characterized only.

What it argues

The premise is that AI is infrastructure, not software: the ground the business runs on, touching People, Process and Product at once — which makes it a leadership question rather than an IT purchase, and explains why so few AI initiatives return anything. Its central move is the Player Coach: as the cost of delivering work collapses and the value-creating unit shrinks toward one person plus their agents, the coordinating manager role loses its reason to exist and leaders are pulled back into the work itself. The course design follows its own argument — leaders build an agent with their own hands on day one before being asked to lead anything on day two.

What I took from it

• Confirmed: AI is infrastructure, not IT. It has an effect on virtually every aspect and every step of the value chain of products, it can open new markets for new business models, and it reaches the people in the organization and how they work together — including with AI — and therefore how people and companies are led.
• Confirmed: the delivery part of value creation gets much faster and more compact, and becomes possible with smaller teams, all the way down to “1 + AI” teams.
• Confirmed intuition: leadership moves back close to value creation, as far as actively shaping it — the Player Coach.
• Beyond confirmation: the Player Coach makes explicit what I had only thought intuitively — and why I am on this journey at all.
• New as an explicit point: companies and leaders should not outsource the topic of AI, because it has to become part of the DNA of the core business.
• New as a decision: how deeply to take AI into your own hands is an important choice — “only” the application layer, or the model layer, or even the infrastructure layer. In other words, what degree of sovereignty.

Where it landed

• Morten as an agent on Abundly, and Morten as part of a team. The training runs on Abundly too — Agile Academy is their first worldwide partner.
• Morten as part of one team — no dedicated marketing team any more, only a core team. “1 + AI” for the moment, maybe “2 + AI” later. Done on 31 July 2026: the GitHub team marketing became crew, Morten's role in it is Marketing & Sales, and the Slack channels were split into #crew for the normal case and #crew-alerts for escalation. Three days from the training insight to the org chart.
• The move to Player Coach was inspired here as well. It is datable: the line in my team profile about being “back in the game as a player-coach” went in on 28 July 2026 — the same afternoon the training covered the model, and before the source was named anywhere.
• I will check the learning journey for business-model viability — moonshot — the same way I check my existing business and the repositioning. And probably the tool we are learning on as well: the Chronicler.

Verdict

Absolutely worth recommending for leaders who are ready to question an existing understanding of leadership and an existing understanding of organization.

In the queue

Named, not yet written up. No summaries, no verdicts — deliberately blank until they have been worked through:

• Henrik Kniberg on Agentic Engineering — the webinar from 17 June 2026 that started this journey in the first place.

Follow along

The full journal — including the mistakes — is public: github.com/zandercoach/adaptive-x-ai. Back to the journal.