AI, IT, and Meaning: learning from the doors we once forced open
“Secrets are the prisons we make for ourselves.” Locke & Key
We, as IT professionals, have modern stacks and technologies. We have smart and literate teams. We are embedding AI in digital products. And yet, in our daily lives, we experience products and projects that feel lost, pointless, or hollow. Why? Are these projects doomed? Is there a corporate curse on digital teams? Are any transformation projects destined to fail?
We have had doors and keys all along the way: business problems, methods, tools and frameworks. But instead of focusing on understanding what the doors and keys do, we’ve been obsessed with what’s behind the door. What if the magic happens only when you open the right door with the right key? What if the magic is the moment where you understand how both fit? Brute-forcing a door feels like struggle and power play. It consumes resources and leaves a trace of unfulfilled potential.
And when we finally get through, we realise: the next door looks exactly the same.
“These keys are our legacy” Locke & Key
Let me be naïve for a moment and imagine a corporate world where we spend more time understanding the doors and the keys: the mechanisms that help us engineer better solutions, instead of coping and panicking. Curiosity could replace struggle, and discovery become a collective act. Because just like when you play an escape game, there’s no joy, and no meaning, in playing it alone.
“The magic is real. For us.” Locke & Key
In this new series, we will bring together data, organisation and AI professionals to reflect on that shared search for meaning and to propose tangible, and to propose tangible, real-world paths forward.
Each article will begin with lived experiences and collective learnings, and end either with an idea worth pursuing or a dead end worth understanding.
Organisations hallucinate too: reflecting on organisational dysfunctions
Written by
, andIn the last years, we have been even more so focusing on individual performance and personal growth as key success factor for an organisation. On the playing ground, we see over-specialised teams playing without a business objective, and hyper-centralised teams playing for the business but as bottlenecks. Both competing for budgets and glory. We argue that confused organisations create confused individuals. Also that in a complex system, implicit dependencies paralyse decisions. And that, when the system itself is lost, people burn energy trying to make sense of it. How can we rethink systems?
Bias are not a new problem: reflecting on missed value mark
Since the agile manifesto, the rise of product thinking, we’ve have kept re-affirming the need to collaborate with our customers. Yet in practice, data is created by data teams for themselves, dark patterns are features in our backlogs and I have even heard leaders declare “We can all say that we are user-centric, because user-centricity is very theoretical”. Even when collaboration does happen, the time spent discussing perspectives is frequently viewed by both sides as a waste. How can we face this collective inability to express a clear and shared intent? What will happen if IA emphasises our general disconnect from purpose: business, users, and even our ecosystem?
Unsupervised scaling: reflecting on our inability to industrialise data projects
In data and AI, “proof of concept” has become the new comfort zone. We celebrate innovation while quietly avoiding real-life confrontation. Is it because what we want to achieve is neither possible nor desirable, as argued by ethicist Abeba Birhane? And then, that we cannot automate away the messy and relational nature of the world? Or is our obsession with experimentation a strategic way to avoid commitment to value?
Human stuck in the loop: reflecting on a state of permanent change
Do you see yourself working in IT for the next 25 years? Reinventing yourself every year? Change has become our plan. Tools evolve faster than meaning. Complexity replaces clarity. And burnout becomes a rational response to emptiness. Philosopher Shannon Vallor calls this the “moral deskilling” of our time, when constant adaptation leaves us brilliant at reacting but unable to reflect.
We would be honoured and pleased to have you contribute to the next following articles.
If you are additionally interested in writing with us, you can answer the following survey, and we will reach out via substack:
“Just because we figured out a few of the keys, we think we know everything, but there’s so much more that we don’t know.” Locke & Key
We may not have all the answers but we root this exploration in real problems and real solutions, hoping to help you reflect, challenge, and reinvent tomorrow.
A special thanks to
, whose generosity and curiosity triggered this series.🎃 For those who wonder, this introductory article was born on Halloween: mystery, meaning, and magic. If you love stories that blend imagination and horror, read the comics Locke & Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez. And remember:
“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” Alan Watts