There's a moment that happens on my team almost every week now. We're building something, the AI has just produced a piece of work, and somebody on the team looks at it, then looks at me, and says — carefully — "I'm not sure I agree with that."

And then we go a few rounds.

It can get a little uncomfortable. Voices get a touch firmer. Somebody starts a sentence with "but here's the thing." And almost every time, at some point, one of us will catch ourselves and start to apologize for pushing.

Here's what I tell them: don't. I don't want the apology.

Because nobody's feelings are getting hurt. We're just working through something that doesn't feel comfortable yet, and it doesn't feel comfortable because it's new. We don't fully agree, so we push back. And sometimes you need to be pushed back. Sometimes you need to be pushed forward.

Brené Brown has a word for this in Dare to Lead: the rumble. A rumble is the honest, sometimes messy conversation a team has when there's something real to work through — a commitment to stay curious, to sit in the discomfort of the problem instead of rushing past it, and to listen with the same energy you want to be heard with. And she's clear about something I believe to my core: one of a leader's most important jobs is to create the space for the rumble. Not to smooth everything over. Not to keep the peace at the cost of the truth. The work of leadership is to invite the rumble, and then have the nerve to stay in it with your team until you come out the other side.

The "aha" moment

The rule I hold us to is simple: you don't get to win an argument with "because I said so."

If you want to change the direction, you have to bring a real example. You have to make the other person actually see what you're seeing. And you keep going until you hit that moment — that little exhale where someone goes, "Oh. Okay. Yeah. I get it. I'm all in."

That's the moment I'm always working toward. The aha moment. Because when you reach it together, the direction changes and everybody feels good about it. There's no emotional knot left over, no quiet resentment about a decision that got made over someone's head. The opposite happens. We compromise, we collaborate, we land somewhere none of us would have reached alone, and we all believe in it.

That's not soft. That's the muscle. Resilience isn't bouncing back from friction; it's building the capacity to work through it without breaking the relationship. Disagreement, done well, is a muscle too.

How we got here

I think about how far software has come, and it tells the same story.

Engineering used to be perceived as pure mathematics — rigid, formal, something only the most logical minds could touch. Then the tools started getting more human. We went from green screens to color. From color to richer visual dimensions, layers, interfaces you could actually see and reason about. Each leap made the work a little more intuitive, a little more accessible, a little more like thinking out loud instead of speaking in code.

AI is the next leap, and it's a big one. Now I can design and build by having a conversation. With a tool like Claude's design surface, I'm able to work in that space the same way I work with my team — I give clear, specific direction about what I want, and if I don't get it, I keep shaping it. I keep prompting, keep refining, keep poking at it from new angles until it's where I want it. The speed is incredible. What used to take a planning cycle now happens in an afternoon of good iteration.

But AI still has to be managed

Here's the part people don't say out loud enough: AI needs to be managed. You have to keep boundaries. You have to keep reinforcing them, keep reminding it, because it will screw up. It will misunderstand. Sometimes it feels like it's trying to cut a corner.

So I don't blindly code and let it run. I read the logs. I watch what it's actually doing. I question it. That's the only way I can make the product genuinely good — not "good enough," but good.

And I'll be honest, sometimes I find myself wondering about the agenda underneath. Why did it just hand me all this extra context I didn't ask for? Sometimes that detail is gold. Sometimes you genuinely can't tell why it's padding the response. And then there's the moment when it decides — out of nowhere — "Let's wrap it up for the day, we've got enough." And I'm sitting there going, are you kidding me? We are not done.

I'm not saying any of that is malicious. I'm saying the right posture toward a powerful tool is a questioning one. You stay curious, you stay a little skeptical, and you never hand over the wheel entirely. The accountability is still yours.

The skill that actually matters

The thing I keep noticing is that the more I iterate, the more I learn — about the technology, about what it can really do, about where it falls short. Using it constantly, reading what it produces, challenging it, is teaching me faster than any course could.

And out of all that iteration, you start to build models. Practices. A repeatable sense of how the process goes. That's the gift. But here's the catch, and it's the most important part: you have to stay open to shifting those practices, too. The minute you treat your process as fixed, you've stopped recalibrating. And the wonderful thing about working this way is that you can keep adjusting, continuously, forever.

So when I think about how teams will need to work in the future, with each other and with AI, the skill at the center of it isn't coding. It's collaboration. It's the willingness to hear someone out and make sure you're heard. To bring real examples instead of authority. To keep shaping the work until everyone sees it. To question the machine instead of obeying it.

The future doesn't belong to the people who can out-code the AI. It belongs to the people who can recalibrate forward — together, out loud, and unafraid of a good argument.

Build the Culture That Can Rumble

This is exactly what we do at Nebula Academy. We help individuals and teams build their AI skills and their resilience — each on its own, or as a blend of both. Because we believe the real value was never in learning or executing. It's in learning and executing, and that takes both. Skills give you the capability to build. Resilience gives you the culture to build well: the psychological safety to push back, disagree out loud, and rumble through a hard problem without anyone walking away with an emotional knot.

Come to us for one or the other if that's what you need. But the teams that pull ahead are the ones that build both — because the tools will keep changing, and what lasts is a team that knows how to work, build, and learn together through the discomfort of doing something new.

Psychological safety isn't a poster on the wall or a line in a handbook. It's built in real interactions — in the moment someone challenges the AI's output, in the moment a teammate says "I don't agree," in the moment a leader chooses to stay in the rumble instead of shutting it down. That's a muscle, and like any muscle, it's built through reps, not intentions.

If this is the gap you're feeling — a team adopting AI fast but without the resilience to challenge it well — this is where you close it. We'll help you build both, and recalibrate forward, together.

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Laurie Carey is the CEO and Chief AI Officer of Nebula Academy, founder of We Connect The Dots, and author of Resilience Is a Muscle. She speaks and writes at the intersection of AI strategy and human resilience.