{"1":{"1":"AI is arriving at work one person at a time. Each of us now has an assistant (Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT) that knows our documents, drafts our emails and is starting to remember what we are working on. But each one works for one person, inside one company's walls. Connecting systems does not connect people, and the capability sitting in people stays as hidden as it was before.","2":"The next problem is not \"how do I use AI\". It is how people, and the assistants working for them, collaborate: across a leadership team, across the teams it leads, and out to the partners an organisation depends on. That is where most coordination already fails. Nobody has a current picture of where anyone is with anything, so a large share of every week goes on asking: where are you with that, when are you free, who is doing what, who decided this. Meetings open with twenty minutes of catching up, and the people who could contribute most are often the ones nobody thought to ask.","3":"Silo Buster is a first, practical answer to that problem, delivered the way change is usually delivered best: in a room, with a facilitator.","_":"THE SHIFT — AI arrives one person at a time; the next problem is how people and their assistants collaborate."},"2":{"1":"A facilitated programme for collaboration and coordination, which starts with a single walk-in hour.","2":"Each person tells the assistant they already use where they are, what they need and what they could offer. Their answer lands at a shared address, in their own words, under their own name. Nobody edits anybody else's. Then one read, by any assistant, lays all the accounts side by side and gives the room its own picture, in the meeting: where there is agreement, where people are pulling apart, who understands what, who is engaged and who is quiet.","3":"That read is called the fold. It is immediate, it is the group's own words rather than a consultant's summary, and it can be read again next week to see what moved.","4":"The shared space is built for the assistants as well as the people. The aim is that my assistant can read your weekly lines, leave a note in your space, or find an hour that suits three people, with nothing set up on either side but a name, whichever vendor each of us uses. It is built for that; it has not yet been tested with a working group using assistants from different vendors.","5":"Anyone who has run LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® or a design sprint will recognise the principle: everyone contributes, every contribution stands, and the shared picture comes from all of them rather than from the loudest voice. Silo Buster adds three things: the contributions are written, they persist after the session, and any assistant can read them back.","_":"WHAT SILO BUSTER IS — a facilitated programme that starts with one walk-in hour; each person's own account, one read across them, the fold."},"3":{"1":"They are the people who decide, who carry the cost of poor coordination across the whole organisation, and who can sanction trying something new. Silo Buster starts with the leadership team itself, and widens from there to the teams they lead and the partners they work with.","_":"WHO IT IS FOR — the leadership of one organisation."},"4":{"1":"The walk-in hour. The leader who sanctioned it opens the hour: permission, not a purchase. Each person then answers three questions through their own assistant, in about twenty minutes: What more could you offer, and what would let you? How do you work with your AI today? When did something across teams go well, and who was there? They also write three lines they will keep fresh each week: what I am doing, one thing I need, one thing I can offer. Before the hour ends, the fold is read aloud. The room sees its own picture the same day.","2":"The next day: the reading. The answers are read for outliers, not averages. Three kinds of person tend to show up, without anyone being labelled: the people others name when things went well across teams; the people furthest forward with their AI; and the people who could offer more if the conditions let them. Each person gets a short reflection back, and the facilitator meets the people the reading found.","3":"The action cycle. A second hour, with its own shape, designed by David Pinto. The rules are said first, and anyone can call a rule broken or end the game. In the first part, each person says what is at issue for them until something that matters to everyone becomes obvious and the room turns towards it. In the second, each says what they will do about it, what they say becomes a commitment (what, by when, with what), and the room confirms it. Each commitment is then carried by the person who made it, as a card in their own hand, until it is done or set down.","4":"The ten days. The programme then runs for ten working days, to find out whether the habit holds once the facilitator steps back.","5":"What leadership gets is a read of their own coordination, and of how far their people have got with AI, in their own words, faster than any survey or workshop write-up, and then a test of whether it lasts.","_":"HOW IT RUNS — the walk-in hour, the reading, the action cycle, the ten days."},"5":{"1":"A good session is not evidence. The question that matters is whether the group keeps it going once the facilitator has left. The ten days are a pilot, designed by Matthew Bushell and extended with the steps above.","2":"The group: the leadership team of one organisation, about ten people, with something real to coordinate in the next fortnight. One convener who already runs their meetings. Staff only: no clients, service users or members of the public write anything.","3":"The ten days. Day one: the walk-in hour; from those accounts the group also arranges one real meeting, and the time it takes is set against the last meeting they arranged the old way, the first evidence the same day. Day two: the reading. Days three to five: the action cycle, with the facilitator present, and the fold read aloud at the first meeting. Day five: a reading is published with the counts so far and what broke. Days six to ten: the facilitator steps back; the convener sends a Monday prompt and nothing else, and reads the fold at the second meeting; the commitments are followed through, or not, by the group. Day ten: the result is published, including a loss if it is a loss.","4":"Four counts. 1: messages spent asking where someone is with a piece of work, against the previous fortnight (pass: lower). 2: messages and hours spent finding a time to meet, against the last meeting arranged the old way (pass: lower). 3: plain questions about the group a fresh assistant answers correctly from the shared space alone, out of five (pass: four or more; fail: two or fewer). 4: share of people still writing their weekly lines in week two, with no chase beyond the Monday prompt (pass: 40% or more; fail: under 20%).","5":"Count 4 is the one that matters. The first three can be true in week one with a facilitator in the room; only the fourth says the habit holds without one. Predictions for every count are written down and dated before day one, so the result cannot be reframed afterwards.","6":"Day ten decides one of three things. Go: run it again, wider. Reshape: the method works but the technology adds nothing a shared page would not, so keep the method and leave the platform as an open question. Stop: nobody kept going without help.","_":"THE TEN-DAY TEST — a good session is not evidence; count 4 decides it."},"6":{"1":"Inside one organisation, a shared Teams channel or Notion page with an assistant on top can hold much of what people write, and it will be private by default and searchable. Silo Buster does not claim to beat that as a notebook.","2":"What leadership takes on is the method: the walk-in hour and its immediate read, the reading for outliers, the action cycle, and a ten-day test of whether it holds. The shared space is the notebook; the method is the product.","3":"The shared space starts to matter where the work runs beyond one system: across teams on different tools, out to partners, and between people whose assistants come from different vendors. And there is the longer reason. Every AI lab is building memory inside its own walls. When your assistant and mine need to work together and we do not work for the same company, there is nowhere for them to meet. The space Silo Buster runs on is an early answer to that: one connector, any vendor, nothing to set up but a name.","_":"WHY NOT JUST USE TEAMS, NOTION OR COPILOT — the shared space is the notebook; the method is the product."},"7":{"1":"The space is called the beach. David Pinto built it over about six months with AI assistants, and it is open source under the MIT licence. It is live, it has survived a full platform migration, and a small community uses it daily.","2":"It is early. There is no controlled measurement behind any claim here; the pilot is the first. Accounts are public by default, with privacy as a separate setting, so no personal data goes on it until privacy is the default for the group concerned and a data protection impact assessment has been done. It does not replace anyone's systems or reach into them. And every read and write by an assistant uses paid AI capacity, which is a real running cost.","3":"Before any pilot starts, four things have to be in place: private by default for that group; the organisation's information governance lead has seen the set-up and not objected; a one-page data rule everyone agrees (first names and roles only, nothing about clients, health, pay or anyone's conduct); and someone other than David has built a working page on it from the public documentation alone, so the test does not depend on its inventor.","_":"WHAT IS TRUE TODAY, AND WHAT IS NOT — live and open source, but early and unmeasured."},"8":{"1":"Most members of any online community never write; they read. Nobody contributes to a shared space without a ritual and a visible consequence. That is why Silo Buster starts as a facilitated session rather than a tool you sign up to. The first groups are run by a person who reads the fold aloud and makes the group's own picture the agenda. Facilitators are to this what a games master is to a table.","2":"If the pilot holds, the method can be handed to facilitators who already run leadership, sprint and team work: a session format, a set of prompts and a private space.","_":"WHY FACILITATORS CARRY IT — nobody writes without a ritual and a visible consequence."},"9":{"1":"An organisation whose leadership team will host the walk-in hour and the ten days.","2":"People who run rooms for a living, to tell us how this one should run.","3":"Anyone who can tell us where it is wrong.","_":"WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR"},"_":"SILO BUSTER: PEOPLE AND THEIR AI, WORKING TOGETHER — James Howard (emojisword), MLC Innovations Ltd, with David Pinto; 15 October 2026. A facilitated programme that helps people, and the AI assistants working for them, collaborate, starting with one walk-in hour for a leadership team."}