Drupal AI Initiative: Two Keynotes, One Question: Building Through Disruption at Drupal GovCon

The useful part

Earlier this month, I spent some time at Drupal GovCon, and a striking element was how well the two keynotes fit together. Mike Madison talked about how disruption can be something you do, on purpose, to make your team better. Kerry Greer reminded us that disruption is also something that happens to people, and that holding a team together through it is real work that rarely shows up on a ticket.

How it works

• Put those two talks side by side and you get something close to a complete picture: the courage to lead change, and the care to make sure nobody gets left behind while you do it.
• I want to walk through both, because I think the Drupal community needs both right now.
• That framing is paralyzing, because none of us is going to reinvent a multibillion-dollar industry over lunch.
• Disruption, boiled down, is just "replacing an old way of doing something," and every person in the room already has the standing to do that on their own team.
• Every person in this room has the ability to go and disrupt your team or your organization in a meaningful way — and you can do that without pissing everybody...

Details worth keeping

Read them together and you get a map of the moment Drupal is in. Mike Madison: disruption is a verb Mike (a former Acquian, now Senior Director of Global Web at Zscaler) has spent much of his career being paid, in his words, to "professionally disrupt organizations." His whole framing was a permission slip.