369: AI Is Exposing How Work Really Gets Done with David Dean
Welcome to the PMO Strategies Podcast + Blog, where PMO leaders become IMPACT Drivers!
PMI Talent Triangle: Business Acumen
There is a lot of pressure to prove your organization is keeping up with AI.
But the most important question is not whether AI is already inside your tools. It is whether your organization understands the work well enough to know what AI is about to amplify.
AI is exposing the difference between the way work is documented and the way work actually gets done. The process map shows the official steps. The real work often moves through conversations, relationships, judgment, informal decisions, and workarounds that never make it into the workflow.
I’m joined by David Dean, author of An Inbox Between Us and an enterprise AI strategist with two decades of experience in transformation. David calls AI a mirror because it can help leaders see the behavioral system operating beneath the formal one. That visibility can reveal where decisions stall, accountability drifts, people wait for permission, and teams quietly compensate for an operating model that is not helping the work move.
This matters for PMO and transformation leaders because the wrong first move is often to automate the process everyone already knows is frustrating. As David explains, AI can scale useful behavior, but it can also industrialize dysfunction. The better move is to slow down long enough to understand the pattern, solve the human problem underneath it, and then decide where technology can create meaningful business IMPACT.
What you will hear:
🔹 Why AI is revealing how work really gets done, not simply replacing tasks.
🔹 How the written contract and the unwritten contract shape organizational performance.
🔹 Why self-service AI and controlled AI require different expectations and guardrails.
🔹 What AI can reveal about slow decisions, unclear authority, and hidden workarounds.
🔹 How a simple spoken digital journal can be a starting point for organizational self-awareness.
Press play to hear how PMO and transformation leaders can use AI as a mirror, protect human judgment, and improve the operating model before they accelerate the wrong work.
Connect with David Dean
Connect with David on LinkedIn
P.S. AI can expose the real problem. The next IMPACT Application Lab helps you turn that problem into a leadership-ready reason for action. Make Your Case is live on August 20 and free for everyone who owns The IMPACT Engine. Get your book and join Make Your Case here.
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Warmly,
Laura Barnard
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