Eight months into writing, we realised the working title was lying about the book. Here is how Alex and I arrived at the name it should have had all along.
For most of the past year, I introduced our new book to people as Create the WOW. The title came naturally. The original Kickstarter campaign had run under that name. It described our process. It said what we believed about innovation at the most practical level: the moment a customer feels real value is the only moment that actually counts. As a working title, it was honest, descriptive, and modest enough to invite people in.
Two months ago, sitting across from Alex Knezevic in one long conversation, I realised the title was wrong. I want to write down why, because the lesson behind it is the lesson behind every project I have worked on for the past twenty years, and the moment I am about to describe is one I almost missed.
Why "Create the WOW" stopped fitting
A title like Create the WOW puts the spotlight on the process. It describes what we do with leadership teams. It says, in effect, here is a method, and here is what teams can do differently next Tuesday morning. For the first eight months of the project, that framing felt accurate. We were writing about a method, and the title named the method.
The longer we wrote, the more the book pulled in a different direction. Every chapter argued, in one way or another, that the team itself was changing. AI was no longer something you bought, switched on, or trained. It was something that sat at the table next to you, listened to the same brief, picked up the same problem, and gave its own contribution back. The book was quietly making a case for a new player on the team, not a new tool for an existing team.
That shift took me a while to see. Books, in my experience, take their final shape only after enough of them is written that you can step back and notice what you actually built. By month eight we had built something the original title was no longer describing accurately.
The conversation that changed the name
Alex and I had been writing in slightly different chapters, but the same suspicion had been forming in both of us at the same time. We met, talked it through, and put one question on the table. What is this book actually about?
We listed everything the book argued. We listed everything the book did not yet argue but should. We held each candidate title up against that list. By the end of the conversation, neither of us could defend Create the WOW any longer. It described the wrong thing. It put the focus on the process when the focus needed to be on the players.
We renamed the book to Augmented Collaboration. The 250 co-creators of the book gave the change their full weight. The book itself got sharper in the weeks that followed. Tools got rebuilt. Chapters got reordered. The argument that the work had been quietly making for months finally got to be the title on the cover.
What the new name actually says
Augmented Collaboration says, out loud, what the book is about: a new kind of team made up of humans and AI agents, working together on the same problem, in the same shared space, around the same customer. Not AI as a tool. Not AI as a copilot. AI as a teammate. That single shift, from describing the process to naming the players, is what made the book feel finished.
It also changed the audience the book is for. Create the WOW asked the reader to admire our method. Augmented Collaboration invites the reader into a team they may already be part of without realising it. Different name. Different conversation. Different book.
Naming is positioning
I want to share the larger lesson, because I have watched it play out enough times now to be confident in it. If you do not have the right name for a thing yet, you do not have the right thing yet. Naming is not a copywriting decision. It is a strategy decision. The name is the moment your work declares what it is for, and to whom.
If you are working on something this year and you cannot quite name it, that is worth paying attention to. The work teaches you what it is really about, but only if you are willing to listen and willing to throw out the name you started with.
Where to find the book
Grab your copy of Augmented Collaboration. The #badversion of the book, our limited working edition co-created with more than 250 contributors, is available now as a softcover and as a digital edition. The final version, with QR codes linking each tool to a live Miro template, arrives on 1 September 2026 and can be pre-ordered today.
If any of this resonates, the rest of the book builds on the argument the title now finally tells you it is making.
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