The future is a learning problem: how do we change together?

Themes: AI | Sociotech | Teams | Architecture

Note: this session will run through the afternoon break

Ward Cunningham's original technical debt metaphor in 1992 was not about bad code. Debt could be a business and learning strategy: we build with the understanding we have today, use the software, learn something new, and discover that yesterday's good design no longer fits what we now know.
More recently, Kent Beck has framed a similar tension as Features vs. Future: delivering value now while preserving our ability to respond to what comes next. In this sense, the future is the optionality and capacity for change.

What happens when AI dramatically accelerates one side of that equation? Faster execution loops, better DDD-informed specifications, disciplined TDD, and stronger AI harnesses can help us produce software faster and keep it modular and changeable. Our capacity for the future, however, also depends on our ability to learn and change together.

How do we understand the problem, notice our assumptions, let our mental models shift, decide what matters, take ownership, and act under uncertainty? What happens to these capacities as more of the work of producing software is delegated to AI? And what might we need to become better at, individually and collectively?

Drawing on Domain-Driven Design, collaborative modeling, cognitive science, and dialogical practices, we'll explore thinking together as part of software design. Through framing, dialogue, and reflection, we'll examine how our interactions with each other shape what we are able to notice, understand, and imagine, including possibilities that we could not have specified in advance.

Finally, borrowing Kari Zeller's language, we'll ask how we might re-place ourselves as AI changes how software gets made. Instead of simply inserting AI into our existing processes and ways of thinking, what would it mean to rethink how we work with each other and with AI, where we create value, and what we take responsibility for?

Participant takeaways:

• The future is a learning problem. Revisit technical debt through single- and double-loop learning, and explore what happens to our capacity for change when AI accelerates the execution loop.
• Thinking together is part of software design. Experience and reflect on ways of noticing assumptions, opening perspectives, and learning with others, informed by cognitive science and dialogical practice.
• Re-place ourselves and take leadership. Explore leadership as a distributed capacity available to all of us: the capacity to step forward when certainty has not arrived, rethink where we create value, and reclaim our agency and accountability as the ground keeps shifting.

This session:

• Framing moments and presentation 
• Dialogues and reflections