---
id: con-adoption-rituals
schema: concept/1
layer: garden
status: emerging
name: Adoption rituals over mandates
aka: ["AI Fridays", "AI hour", "hack weeks", "team AI adoption", "building in public at work"]
summary: >
  Teams start using AI through recurring shared habits, such as a weekly AI hour, hack weeks and leaders
  building things where others can see, more than through orders to use it. Claire Vo's argument from
  leading product teams.
first_seen: "2026-03"
relations:
  builds_on: []
  evolved_from: []
  related: [con-smallest-useful-version, con-skills]
  parallels:
    - idea: "communities of practice"
      field: "organisational learning"
      note: "People who do the same kind of work meet regularly to share what they've tried, and the group learns faster than any one member."
    - idea: "a weekly running club"
      field: "fitness"
      note: "A fixed time, a group and someone at the front doing it too get more people running than a gym membership does."
implementations: []
competencies: [cmp-make-it-repeatable, cmp-use-responsibly]
origin:
  kind: ai-proposed
  by: "seed agent 2026-10-16"
  rationale: "The commons had no concept for team or organisation adoption; this is the clearest named principle in the sources. Evidence is practitioner experience, not a study."
---

Telling a team to "use AI more" rarely changes much. On Zapier's Agents of Scale podcast in March 2026, Claire Vo, formerly chief product and technology officer at LaunchDarkly and now CEO of ChatPRD, argued that what works is a shared habit. Examples she gives: a regular time when everyone tries AI on real work, hack weeks, and leaders who build things themselves where the team can see them, rough edges included. She also suggests treating AI skill as career growth rather than a compliance target.

Ethan Mollick makes a related point in "Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd": many people already use AI without telling anyone, so an organisation learns only when people have a safe place to share what they tried.

This comes from experience running teams, not from a controlled study. It fits small teams and volunteer groups as well as companies.

## Example

A nonprofit's director starts a 30-minute "show what you tried" slot at the Friday staff meeting. She goes first, showing a donor-letter draft that went wrong. Within a month, two staff members have saved prompts the others now use.

## How it connects

- Each ritual tends to produce a **smallest useful version** someone can show.
- Good ideas from a ritual become shared **skills**.

## Try it

Propose one 20-minute, recurring slot where your team shows one thing they tried with AI that week, including failures. Go first.