"If your team is too busy doing their 'normal job' to experiment with AI, you are preparing them for replacement."
That is how a thought-provoking essay opens, published on October 9 by Geoffrey Huntley, the creator of the Ralph loop for coding agents, and it particularly caught my attention. But I would add that experimenting only after hours tells a team, quietly, that using AI doesn't count.
Most of what is written about AI and work addresses the individual: learn the tools, build something, stay curious. What caught my attention is that Huntley, after a long stretch for employees, turns to managers and calls them "the elephant in the room." His first instruction is to carve out time for the team, the second to adopt the tools first. I think he is right: the time to experiment is a management decision before it is an individual one, and one that needs no new tool, only a different use of working time.
I like going back to etymology, and here the detour is worth it. Manage entered English in the 1560s with the sense of handling and training a horse, from the French manège, from the Italian maneggiare, to handle by hand, from the Latin manus. A manège was a riding school, the arena where horses were trained.
So the word that came to stand for spreadsheets and reporting lines began as one of the most manual verbs there is, and handling by hand (i.e. being "hands-on") is what everyone is now asked to do again, with agents—managers included. Anyone who builds, directs and corrects a harness of their own is a "manager" in the oldest sense.
The manager of a team has a different task, and a paradox to resolve: agents are granted more latitude by the month, longer loops and wider permissions, while the people who direct them often remain confined to a narrow perimeter. Empowerment would reasonably start with them.
The manager has the free rein, and above all the responsibility, to give them the means for their own upskilling: working time, a safe place to try things out, and a culture where sharing what was learned counts as work.
