#60 Benjamin Igna - The substitutes for real work

Every industry has invented a substitute for the actualwork, and the best practitioners have quietly stopped using it. Sixty episodes in, Ben spends a solo episode tracing onepattern that showed up across 40-plus practitioners in five countries. The"sticker in the drawer" wears different clothes everywhere. Sometimesit's a sprint ceremony, sometimes an AI pilot with no measurable outcome,sometimes a dashboard that counts inputs and calls it progress. What you'll hear: Why Sander Hoogendoorn at iBOOD killed sprints, retros andthe Scrum Master role, and ships changes before lunch instead. Why the agile mindset is always someone else's problem, andwhat the research from Karen Eilers and Christiaan Verwijs says actually movesthe needle (it's leadership behaviour, not more artifacts). The AI section: why every human in the loop is a bottleneck,why time-on-task goes up 20 to 40 percent with AI tools, and the MIT findingthat 95 percent of GenAI pilots show zero measurable impact. The disappearing junior pipeline, and why Sander and Shopifyhire more juniors, not fewer. The MIT EEG study on what happens to your brain when youprompt first and think second. Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork More episodes & all platforms:https://stellarwork.start.page Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork Host: Ben