Augmented Collaboration - Print (#BADVERSION)

Stop pushing initiatives through silos. Start orchestrating true value creation.

Most organisations don't have an innovation problem. They have a translation problem. Insights get translated into decks. Decks get translated into briefs. Briefs get translated into roadmaps. By the time an idea reaches a customer, the original tension that sparked it has been compressed, polished, and optimised out of recognition. AI hasn't fixed this — it's amplified it. Teams now generate more strategies, more analyses, more outputs, all moving in slightly different directions, faster than ever.

Augmented Collaboration argues that the way out is not better tools or smarter AI, but a different operating model: one where diverse people and AI agents tackle the same Customer Problem at the same time, in one shared space, around one shared question. The book is a co-created field guide — built by 250+ practitioners — for designing that model and installing it inside a real organisation.

What's inside

The book is structured in five parts, each opening with a Brooklyn-style street art mural that signals the shift from polished theory to lived practice:

Part I — Why innovation is too slow. Three traps every organisation falls into: the linear trap (work moving department-by-department), the speed gap (decisions waiting for the next meeting), and the AI illusion (more output, less learning).

Part II — Start with the Customer Problem. The Innovation Loop — Customer Problem, Customer, Value Proposition, Capture the Value — and why running it as a continuous loop beats running it as a relay race.

Part III — The Collaborative Operating System. The three principles that hold the system together: openness and iteration (Open by default, Share the Bad Version, Dogfooding, Cross-functional partnership), strategic alignment (the Master Command Center, the W-model), and tooling and human enablement (Multiplayer AI, reducing distance between insight and action, human agency stays central). Plus the four workflows — innovation, product innovation, go-to-market, operations — that make the loop operational.

Part IV — AI as the acceleration layer. A practical Human × AI framework: AI sets the pace (analysis, prediction, generation, automation); humans set the direction (empathy, creativity, critical thinking, ethical judgment).

Part V — Installing and scaling. A 90-day plan for getting from first whiteboard to a working innovation operating system inside a single business unit, then scaling out.

Why this book is different

Most innovation books leave you with a framework and an assignment. Augmented Collaboration leaves you with infrastructure. It treats collaboration not as a soft skill or a workshop format but as architecture — the underlying system that determines whether ideas keep their meaning as they travel across people, tools, and time. That framing matters because it shifts the conversation from "how do we be more innovative?" to "how do we design our ways of working so innovation becomes the default rhythm of the organisation, not a heroic effort?"

The book also takes AI seriously without overselling it. AI is treated as the acceleration layer — powerful, but only useful inside a structure that gives its outputs somewhere to land. Without that structure, AI multiplies divergence. Inside it, AI compounds clarity.

Who should read it

Anyone who has ever sat in a room where a great idea died in a handover. More specifically: senior leaders trying to embed innovation as a capability rather than an event; product, strategy, and operations leaders wrestling with cross-functional drift; and anyone introducing AI into a team and noticing that productivity went up while alignment went down.

You don't need to read it cover-to-cover. Part III is the operating manual; Parts I and II make the case; Parts IV and V tell you what to do on Monday.

One line to remember 

"An organisation becomes innovative not when it has more ideas, but when its ways of working allow those ideas to travel without losing their meaning."

If that sentence describes a problem you recognise, this book is for you.