Raise the Floor Not the Ceiling AI Rollout Team Adoption

The worst part was always being on deck.

Not the match itself. The minutes right before it, waiting for my turn. The suspense, the unknown, the excitement, and the fear, all rolled into one ball of emotions sitting in my stomach.

I felt that before meets in elementary school. I still felt it in high school.

I started wrestling about the day I was born. I grew up in a wrestling coach's home. As far back as I can remember, I was at practices, rolling around on the mat, grappling with my younger brother. Wrestling wasn't something I picked. It was the water I grew up in, and I'm thankful for that.

My sophomore year, I suffered a season-ending injury. The injury itself was just a pause. But it turned into a reset. I realized I had other athletic interests I needed to chase, and I never went back to the mat.

Wrestling still shaped who I am. It just took me decades and an AI rollout to understand what it had been teaching me.

The math of a wrestling meet

If you've never been to a high school dual meet, here's how it works. Two teams. One match at each weight class. Each win puts points on the team score: three for a decision, four for a major decision, five for a technical fall, six for a pin.

Here's the part that matters. If your team has no one at a weight class, the other team gets 6 points for the forfeit. That's the same as your best kid pinning someone.

Read that again. Your star's best possible night is worth exactly as much as one empty spot in the lineup.

That's a sport that won't let you win on your stars. A few great wrestlers can't carry the meet. The kid in the weight class nobody watches, the one who just needs to lose by a decision instead of getting pinned, can swing the whole night.

And that kid is out there alone. Nobody can step onto the mat with you. Whatever ball of nerves you're carrying on deck, you carry it out there by yourself, and the team's score rides on it anyway.

Two teachers at the dinner table

My dad taught art and coached wrestling. My mom taught English. She saw the same thing from the front of a classroom. A great teacher isn't the one with a kid who aces the test. A great teacher gets the whole class to perform well.

Between the two of them, I learned one thing in my bones: you're only as good as your team's lowest member. If you want to level up a group, you don't celebrate the front-runners. You bring up the person in the back.

That's not charity. That's how teams get strong.

Why I stopped caring about my best AI users

Every company I talk to has two or three "AI people." You could name yours in about a second. They're impressive. They build things in an afternoon that used to take a week.

And for a while, that's who I built for. I celebrated them. I showed off what they made. The highlight reel looked great.

But a highlight reel is a team with three stars and a half-empty lineup. The stars keep getting better, the rest of the team watches from the bleachers, and the gap between them gets wider every week.

So I'll say the title plainly, because I mean it: I don't spend my energy on my best AI users anymore. They're going to be fine. That's what being a power user means. My energy goes to the empty weight classes.

Be wary of the hero with the cape

There's a pattern I've learned to watch for. One person keeps getting tagged as the one who'll save every project. People talk about them like a hero.

I used to see that as a strength. Now I see it as a warning. When someone keeps reaching for the cape, it usually means the team couldn't do it on its own.

And honestly? For a while, the person reaching for the cape most often was me. (I wrote about that last week.) I was building alone, fast, and proud of it. The team wasn't getting stronger. I was just getting busier.

Teams win. Heroes are what you're left with when the team can't.

The research says the floor is where the payoff is

Here's what surprised me when I went looking. The people who gain the most from AI usually aren't the stars.

When Boston Consulting Group and Harvard researchers gave 758 consultants access to GPT-4, the consultants who started below average improved their performance by 43%. The ones who started above average improved by 17%.

That's the back of the room gaining more than two and a half times as much as the front.

So if you're pouring your time into the people who already get it, you're coaching the kid who already pins everybody. The points are at the other weight classes.

Raise the floor, not the ceiling

Here are three things I do differently now:

1. Build a shared language first. Three fluent people speaking three private languages don't make a fluent company. They make three islands. When everyone knows what we mean by a prompt, a project, and a workflow, the person in the back has a way into the conversation.

2. Pace to the most nervous person, not the most excited one. The excited will be fine either way. The nervous are the whole game. I know what that person feels like. For a lot of people on a team, AI is being on deck: the suspense, the unknown, a little excitement, and a lot of fear in one ball. Make the first ask small and the stakes safe before you raise the bar.

3. Give the stars a teaching job. Their energy is real. Point it at helping someone else get their first win, instead of at their next solo project.

A lineup card, not a highlight reel

I've started looking at our AI rollout the way a wrestling coach looks at a lineup card. Not "who's our best?" but "where are we empty?"

Every weight class counts the same. Every person on the team counts the same. That's not a nice sentiment. It's the scoring rule.

That idea runs through every page of Everybody In. It's not a playbook for the two or three people who already love AI. It's for leaders who want the whole team on the mat.

Everybody In launches this month. If this sounds like your team, join the waitlist at everybodyin.ai and you'll be first to get it.

Sources

• FloWrestling, "How To Score A High School Wrestling Match," David Bray, August 9, 2023. flowrestling.org

• Village News (Fallbrook, CA), dual-meet scoring and forfeit points, February 6, 2015. villagenews.com

• Dell'Acqua et al., "Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier," Harvard Business School and BCG, September 2023, as reported by Consultancy.uk, September 25, 2023. consultancy.uk

• Story details: Ben Kalkman, and Everybody In, Chapters 1 and 4.