Chris Gagné

Come Prepared to Die

An Engineering Leader’s Field Guide to the Leadership Paradigms AI Is Exposing

In a nutshell

Your engineers are faster with AI, but the business isn’t seeing the full value. In this book I argue that the organisation around the tools has to change too: who owns what, who approves it and what gets rewarded. The leaders carrying those changes have their own work to do, examining the assumptions they bring to decisions and learning to act differently. It is written for engineering leaders.

All 23 chapters are out, here and on LinkedIn. The death in the title is the old leadership paradigm and the identity built on it. Each axis chapter stands alone; if you’re new, start with chapter 1 below.

Want the whole argument first? Read the essay that became the book, the core ideas end to end, about a 30-minute read. Who I am and how I coach are on my About page.

  • Come Prepared to Die: An Engineering Leader’s Field Guide to the Leadership Paradigms AI Is Exposing

    Chapter 1 of Come Prepared to Die. Someone will soon offer your service as software. The old you will have to die along with the way you provide your service today.

  • Invisible paradigms and a practice that survives

    Chapter 2 of Come Prepared to Die. You decide through your paradigm, not with it, so you can’t see it. The practice that makes it visible: the mirror, the Immunity Map, and the double-loop move.

  • AI as productivity layer vs AI as impetus for org redesign

    Chapter 3 of Come Prepared to Die. Is AI a productivity layer you bolt onto the org you have, or the reason to redesign it? The cheapest mistake is the wrong tool; the expensive one is the wrong org.

  • Utilisation vs flow

    Chapter 4 of Come Prepared to Die. Keeping everyone busy feels like good management. In knowledge work it quietly makes the whole system slower, and the maths takes five minutes to teach.

  • Espoused theory vs theory-in-use (Model I vs Model II)

    Chapter 5 of Come Prepared to Die. The gap between what a leader says they value and what they do under pressure is the one axis you cannot self-diagnose. Here is how to close it.

  • Pushing people vs changing the conditions

    Chapter 6 of Come Prepared to Die. The behaviour you keep failing to install isn’t a people problem. It’s punished by a loop in the conditions you designed. Stop pushing; change the loop.

  • Plan as commitment vs plan as hypothesis

    Chapter 7 of Come Prepared to Die. When plan and reality disagree, most leaders load one reading: someone didn’t try hard enough. The other says the plan was a hypothesis and the gap is data.

  • Local optima vs system constraint

    Chapter 8 of Come Prepared to Die. Improve every part and you can still wreck the whole. Performance is not the sum of the parts; it is set by the one constraint that governs the system.

  • Output vs outcome

    Chapter 9 of Come Prepared to Die. You shipped more this quarter than last, and your customers are no better off. Which number is the work actually being judged on?

  • Attached to outcome vs attached to inquiry

    Chapter 10 of Come Prepared to Die. You defended a decision after it failed. But the decision was a hypothesis, and a hypothesis that fails is data. What you ultimately defended wasn’t the decision, it was your identity. Reading the result and protecting yourself are two different jobs, and the second one eats the first.

  • Just This

    Chapter 11 of Come Prepared to Die. Every framework in this book is a tool for contact with what is, and a trap the moment you obey it instead of using it.

  • Socialised vs self-authoring vs self-transforming

    Chapter 12 of Come Prepared to Die. Robert Kegan’s three developmental stages, and the capacity that lets a leader disagree with a confident voice, including an AI’s.

  • Analysis vs recognition

    Chapter 13 of Come Prepared to Die. You list five options, score them against criteria, and pick the highest scoring. The experienced operator already knew what option to choose, their skill long since dropped below conscious thought.

  • Your AI transformation will fail the way your Agile one did

    A bonus edition of Come Prepared to Die. Nearly nine in ten change programmes fall short of what they set out to do. Your AI transformation is being set up to join them, and the reason has almost nothing to do with the technology.

  • Deviation vs conditions

    Chapter 14 of Come Prepared to Die. You’re looking for the deviator who failed. The deviator was doing what the system trained them to do.

  • Safety as absence vs safety as presence

    Chapter 15 of Come Prepared to Die. The incident counter your team reports up is at zero. What it can’t show you is how the work actually gets done safely and how to keep it that way.

  • Batch and push vs single-piece and pull

    Chapter 16 of Come Prepared to Die. You set WIP limits and they’re being ignored. Your batches are getting larger. Your lead times are getting longer. The PMO says everything’s fine.

  • Leader-follower vs leader-leader

    Chapter 17 of Come Prepared to Die. You spent Tuesday in approval meetings. You spent Wednesday wondering why your team can’t make a decision without you, and why the function still can’t ship faster.

  • Theory X vs Theory Y

    Chapter 18 of Come Prepared to Die. Your values slide says you trust your engineers; your approval process needs four signatures over $500. Your team is reading the signatures.

  • Expert vs facilitator

    Chapter 19 of Come Prepared to Die. You’re the last word on the technical call. You’re also the bottleneck on every material technology decision. Both are true.

  • Compromise vs integration

    Chapter 20 of Come Prepared to Die. You split the difference and called it fair. Next quarter, the same argument is back. What brought it back?

  • Had by your assumptions vs having them

    Chapter 21 of Come Prepared to Die. You’re surprised by your own pattern when it surfaces. The pattern was running you well before you saw it.

  • Recognition: what the leader sees in themselves, what recognition needs

    Chapter 22 of Come Prepared to Die. A new self has been forming, and you can’t see all of it from the inside. Recognising it takes company.

  • Just this: what the organisation does with the leader who comes back

    Chapter 23 of Come Prepared to Die. A leader comes back changed to a role built for the person they were before. The most senior leader is also the one who can build what receives that change.

Chris, smiling slightly, in a dark hoodie against a dark background.

Chris Gagné, AI Transformation Lead

All 23 chapters are out. To hear what comes next, subscribe to the Come Prepared to Die newsletter on LinkedIn.

The operating companion to this book is live: Minimum Viable Bureaucracy, a forkable field guide for running the organisation on the other side of the shift.

Some of this work still needs a human in the room.

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