Jun 1, 2026 | Issue 53
One signal 🔠| One subtraction ➖ | One analogy 🥾
Created by Sam Rogers, building PAICE.work | Freely available on Substack and LinkedIn | New issue every week
🔠Signal: The Shape You Already Know
Your team has a messy, specific problem. The fix they reach for is a platform that promises to integrate into everything and make sense of it all. You have watched this happen. You may have signed the PO.
They didn’t choose that platform because it fit. They chose it because it’s the shape they know how to buy: the RFP, the big rollout, the single pane of glass. Psychologists have a name for the move. The Einstellung effect: once a familiar solution is in your hand, you stop seeing the better-fitting one even when it’s sitting right next to it. It’s the law of the instrument dressed for the enterprise, more commonly known as Maslow’s Hammer. The grand AI platform is this decade’s hammer, and every problem suddenly looks like an integration project to nail.
The cost isn’t the license. It’s the year spent forcing a cross-everything platform onto a problem that needed one small, well-shaped workflow. Adoption stalls. Most importantly, the business context never actually arrives because it doesn’t fit in the platform. So the “it all” part of the “make sense of it all” promise quietly gets nudged out of implementation.
The problem didn’t change shape. Your catalog of shapes was just too small to see it.
âž– Subtraction: The Platform Shape
Stop buying the shape. Start with the smallest workflow that is valuable enough to be worth doing and small enough to carry your actual business context.
- Pick the one workflow where the problem genuinely hurts this week. Not the portfolio or the “one problem to rule them all.” Just the one, and preferably make it a simple one that’s easy to measure.
- Solve that, end to end, small. Let the shape of the real work tell you what to build next.
- Kill the boil-the-ocean integration plan before it bills you for the ocean.
John Gall said it plainly half a century ago:
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
So don’t buy the shape. Grow into it.
🥾 Analogy of the Week: Desire Paths
The planners drew straight lines. The feet drew the real map.
A university spends a fortune landscaping the quad. Straight concrete walkways, clean right angles, the designer’s plan rendered in stone. Within a month there’s a brown stripe worn diagonally across the grass, exactly where everyone actually walks. The groundskeepers re-seed it. They put up a little fence. The path comes back. The feet win every time.
The smart campuses stopped fighting it. They lay gravel, watch where the dirt tracks form over a season, then pave those. The path earns its concrete by being walked first.
You don’t pour the whole quad and hope the feet agree with your drawing. You watch where the feet go, then you pave. A workflow is the same. Let the real work get walked before you set it in concrete.
🎵 Closing Notes
For me, it’s tempting to build a framework out of an idea like “Solution Shapes”. In writing this, more than one AI told me that I should. But isn’t a grand framework just the oversized shape again, wearing a thought-leadership hat? You and I both know better. So this stays an issue, not a maturity model. Besides, I’ve got one of those already.
This is the first issue of year two. Last week marked one full year. Welcome to June, rounding out Q2 of 2026. Many things that made sense this time last year don’t anymore. We can remove what no longer serves. The job here has not changed, and it’s the reason any of this matters: when AI news breaks, let’s make sure your business doesn’t.
Until next week,
Sam Rogers Watching Where the Feet Go
P.S. If you want the smallest-valuable-workflow approach made concrete, that’s the entire premise of PAICE.work: introduce real business context at a scale you can actually verify, then let it grow into its true shape. No quad-paving required.