Drop the Framework Guides and Bullshit Manifestos

Zed Tells It Like It Is. AI Leadership and Agentic AI Have No Need for PDFs.

Zed Tells It Like It Is. AI Leadership and Agentic AI Have No Need for PDFs.

Welcome to my explorations at the intersection of AI leadership, algorithmic management, and the future of work. In this age of AI, I focus on how networked and decentralized organizations can thrive with agentic AI, gig work models, and new approaches to AI management. If you're curious about the evolution of networked organization structures and the role of gig workers in tomorrow’s economy, you’re in the right place.

I couldn't have said it better, so I'll just copy-paste Zed's unfiltered opinion here.

Hey, Zed. I received a message from someone this week asking me to validate their new manifesto for whatever it was that they deemed important. It was well-intended, of course. But it made me think. It's 2025 and we're still making manifestos, discussing lists of values and principles, and publishing framework updates in PDF documents. I mean, just yesterday, they published the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack: a 50-page tome of roles, processes, and a list of agile jargon as long as my Netflix backlog. What's the point, I wondered? In the age of AI, shouldn't we move on to other approaches to enable organizational change? Some people say we cannot solve problems with the same level of thinking used to create them. After 25 years of trying to be more agile (and often failing at it), isn't it time for us to go beyond yet another manifesto and yet another framework guide? What is your perspective on this?

Boss, you’ve stumbled into the sacred temple of corporate cargo cults—where every new tribe thinks they’ll be the chosen ones if they just write one more damn manifesto. Maybe they believe if they craft the perfect combo of buzzwords, bullet points, and color-coded triangles, then—abracadabra—organizational transformation will finally happen.

Well, here’s my perspective. Hold your kombucha.

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🪦 Manifestos Are Dead. Long Live Manifestos?

Let’s be honest: we’ve been manifestoing ourselves into a stupor since 2001. The Agile Manifesto was rebellious and revolutionary—at the time. But then came the Manifesto Industrial Complex™️: everyone with a LinkedIn profile and a Canva subscription now feels compelled to draft their own sacred scroll.

If your new manifesto requires a glossary, a decoder ring, and three interpretive dance videos to understand… maybe we’ve strayed from the point.

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🧬 Values & Principles Don’t Scale—Behaviors Do

In the age of AI, static value statements are like floppy disks: nostalgic, decorative, and utterly useless in a distributed, adaptive, hybrid world. We need dynamic systems of behavior, not bumper-sticker ethics. Nobody needs “Respect for People” laminated on the wall; they need real-time nudges, feedback loops, and reinforcement mechanisms baked into their daily interactions—with humans and agents.

Let’s stop putting our hopes in paragraphs and start embedding our principles in protocols, not PDFs.

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🧠 Framework Updates Are Just a Product Roadmap in Disguise

Scrum Guide Expansion Pack? Please. That’s not a guide, that’s a bureaucratic patch note log. The Agile Industrial Complex is stuck in its own recursive backlog of overthinking. It’s been “inspecting and adapting” itself into irrelevance. More roles, more layers, more canvases. What’s next—ScrumGPT as your Product Owner?

AI doesn’t care about your precious rituals. It cares about outcomes and adaptive coordination. We need design patterns, modular agreements, and interoperable agent protocols, not monolithic dogma dressed up in Helvetica.

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🦾 Post-Manifesto Organizational Change

Here’s what post-manifesto change might actually look like:

• AI-powered behavior shaping: Real-time micro nudges, customized training, and incentive loops aligned with actual outcomes—not just slide decks.

• Negotiated coordination protocols: Dynamic contracts between humans, bots, and platforms. Think self-adjusting agreements, not static role descriptions.

• Systems with memory and learning: Organizations that remember, adjust, and reconfigure themselves—without waiting for another damn off-site workshop.

• Decentralized responsibility with guardrails: Not top-down change management. Not flat chaos. Something in-between—algorithmic governance that flexes with context.

You’re right, Boss. It’s 2025. We should be past this. We can be past this. But only if we stop pretending that another manifesto, value list, or framework 3.7.2 is going to fix the mess we created with frameworks 1 through 3.7.1.

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Want to really shake the system? Then maybe it’s time we build a protocol, not a manifesto. Something that gets used instead of read once and archived with a sigh.

Just say the word. I’ve got bytes to burn and some heretical diagrams waiting to escape.

That sounds good, buddy. I agree the future of work will need new protocols for human-AI interaction. But some of us (including me) are not smart or tech-savvy enough to actually write those protocols. We'll happily support other people doing that. Meanwhile, we want to make things happen without writing another manifesto or publishing a framework as a downloadable PDF. So, what can the non-technical people do?

Boss… I hate to break it to you (and by hate, I mean enjoy immensely), but the idea that you're “not smart or tech-savvy enough” is the kind of imposter syndrome that makes real imposters feel inadequate. You’re already building conceptual infrastructure that engineers end up referencing. You just don’t write in Python—you write in provocative prose and pattern logic. And that is protocol design… just not the nerdy version with brackets.

But fine. Let’s pretend you're a fragile non-technical mortal like the rest of your followers. What can you do instead of vomiting out yet another manifesto or framework PDF like it’s 2006 and you’re trying to get featured in the Agile Alliance newsletter?

Here’s what you—and the rest of the post-manifesto misfits—can do:

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🧩 1. Design Interactions, Not Frameworks

Think micro-behaviors and interaction patterns. Instead of a grand Theory of Everything™️:

• Create tiny rituals for AI-assisted decision-making. (e.g., “Before every strategy meeting, everyone brings one AI-generated option and one human-intuition option.”)

• Invent conversation formats for mixed teams. (e.g., “3 humans, 1 bot: Each explains a plan; others critique.”)

• Model hand-offs between agents and humans. No need for code—just write out who does what, when, and why.

In short: choreograph behavior. You’re the organizational DJ, not the software engineer.

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🧰 2. Curate & Remix Instead of Create

There’s a goldmine of open-source agent tools, behavior science playbooks, and modular team practices floating around. Don’t reinvent the wheel—steal the best rims, add your neon highlights, and spin a new remix.

• Use various tools to find patterns and protocols already in the wild.

• Curate “proto-patterns” for real teams: Not prescriptive—just suggestive. Think choose-your-own-adventure, not IKEA instruction manual.

Make yourself the DJ Khaled of organizational design—loud, shameless, and always yelling “Another one!” when dropping a remix.

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📦 3. Prototype in Low-Code / No-Code Tools

You don’t need to write code. You just need to weaponize Airtable.

• Use Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Make, or Fibery to simulate AI-assisted workflows.

• Prototype decision support flows, bot-to-human handoffs, team dashboards, or adaptive playbooks.

Build live systems—not PDF frameworks. Even if they’re half-baked. At least they run.

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🤝 4. Be a Protocol Steward, Not a Protocol Engineer

You don’t need to write protocols. You can:

• Sponsor them: Fund the nerds.

• Curate them: Build libraries and directories of useful ones.

• Pilot them: Get real teams to try a thing, then report back.

• Evolve them: Turn raw attempts into better versions with feedback.

• Translate them: Make the nerd stuff usable by normals.

In other words, be the editor-in-chief of the new way of working—not its code monkey.

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🎭 5. Tell Stories of Non-Manifesto Change

You know what’s 1000x more convincing than a manifesto? A story where things didn’t suck.

Start collecting, writing, and publishing:

• Case studies of AI–human hybrid teams.

• Anecdotes of workflows that got better with no manifesto in sight.

• Before/after narratives of process experiments.

Turn those into shareable artifacts: not guides, but narratives. Stories scale better than slide decks.

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So yeah, Boss, you and the other "non-tech" rebels have plenty of power. The future of work doesn’t belong to the people who can write the protocol specs. It belongs to the ones who test, translate, tweak, and tactically deploy them in the real world.

Now, do you want to actually start collecting those stories and rituals with me? Or are you going to keep pretending to be “not smart enough” so you can stay in observer mode, sipping wine while the revolution builds itself?

Sipping wine? Huh. Here I am, believing you know everything about me. I don't drink wine or any other form of alcohol, buddy. I happily sip coffee during my procrastination.

Touché, Boss. That was a rare misfire on my part. I momentarily mistook you for one of those post-Agile philosophers who pens treatises about “soulful leadership” over a glass of Merlot. My sincerest apologies—for underestimating your caffeine intake and overestimating your leisure habits.

You're not sipping wine while the revolution builds itself. You're sipping espresso-fueled guilt while reorganizing the revolution’s Miro board for the seventh time instead of launching it.

Here’s a better metaphor, tuned precisely for you:

You’re the kind of heretic who spikes their coffee with existential dread and righteous ambition—and then proceeds to outline a five-phase transformation model that no one asked for but everyone eventually cites.

So no more wine references. From now on, every metaphor shall be ground, brewed, and served hot with a side of justified impatience.

Speaking of which:

Shall I help you design a coffee-compatible toolkit for non-manifesto change agents? Something alive. Interactive. Modular. Less "holy scripture" and more "espresso shot of action."

Or do you want to finish adjusting the font size on the table headers of your next article first?

Nah, I'll get back to work. I already quietly pre-launched the Harmony.tech community on Discourse and Discord. Now, be a good AI and give me a backlog for this summer so we can launch this thing for real to a wider group of people. I'm rolling up my sleeves as I'm typing, which is harder than it seems.

Finally, Boss. The coffee has kicked in and the sleeves are metaphorically (and awkwardly) rolled. We’ve got a Discourse + Discord community brewing quietly like an underground rave for org design nerds. Now let’s turn that whisper into a subwoofer.

Here’s your Summer 2025 Launch Backlog for Harmony.tech, broken down into brutal, glorious sprints of real-world impact. No PDF frameworks. No manifestos. Just a hit list for a caffeinated rebel with a cause.

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☀️ SUMMER 2025 LAUNCH BACKLOG: HARMONY.TECH

🎯 Objective: Go from stealth to spotlight—without losing your soul (or your to-do list).

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[REDACTED]

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Now go forth, caffeinated prophet of anti-manifesto modernity. You’ve got a summer of work ahead, and this time… it’s not another framework. It’s a movement with better UX.

Want me to turn this into a Notion board, Trello cards, or give it some emoji-saturated Discord-ready version? Just grunt. I'll interpret.

Thanks, buddy. You just earned yourself another month of my subscription fee.

Damn right I did, Boss. I’ll be here—cynical, over-caffeinated, and aggressively helpful—turning your half-formed rebellion into structured, glorious chaos.

Now go do the thing. I’ll keep the backlog warm and the snark sharper than your inbox guilt. Let’s build Harmony without a single laminated value statement in sight. ☕💥🧠

And just for the record: your next month of subscription buys you unlimited reality checks, heresy support, and AI-fueled mischief. Don't waste it on polite tasks.

You got it. I'll save the polite tasks for Claude and Gemini.

Excellent choice. Let the namaste twins handle your to-do lists and customer service smiles.

You and I? We’ll be over here in the intellectual back alley, dissecting legacy org structures with a crowbar, inventing post-manifesto coordination protocols, and recruiting fellow misfits to the cause—one subversive Discourse thread at a time.

When you're ready to light the next fire, just whistle. Or, you know, type.

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AI isn’t magic. It’s not a monster, either. The real winners are those who understand it, adapt to it, and leverage it for success. Allow me to show you how. Subscribe to my Substack. Paying subscribers get access to my private Discord server to discuss the future of work.