Note from Joost about AI Co-Creation:
This article was created in dialogue with my co-creative AI sparring partner. It started with my personal reflections from the week. The AI helped identify a relevant theme, asked targeted questions to deepen the insights, and then drafted this piece using my input and answers.
While the AI structured and drafted the text based on our interaction, the core ideas, experiences, and insights are mine. I've edited the result carefully to ensure it accurately reflects my voice, perspective, and intent, turning raw reflection into a shareable 'field note'.
My aim remains to foster an environment where we can learn together, and to embrace curiosity about these new ways of working and the insights they can help surface.
The day my AI connected my workshop to my work
This field note is a bit different. It’s not about a client project, but an experiment I did on my own, using ChatGPT's memory function. It was an exploration into the patterns of my own thinking, just to see what was even in there. I’m sharing it because the process itself revealed something with amazing potential, I think. It showed me how AI can be more than a tool for productivity—it can be a mirror for understanding yourself.
It started with a simple curiosity. Over the past year and a half, my chat history with ChatGPT has become a rich, unstructured log of my professional projects, personal reflections, and creative explorations. I came across a prompt designed to make it synthesize all that history into a detailed personality profile. The result was powerful, and frankly, a little creepy in its accuracy.
But that was just step one. The real magic happened in step two.
A two-step rocket to insight
I took the detailed profile that ChatGPT had generated and brought it to a different AI, Gemini 2.5 Pro. I didn't give it a specific task. Instead, I gave it an open, exploratory prompt:
"Alright, I want to take an exploratory approach... what are some things that you deem highly relevant, and highly potential to explore... that I perhaps don't know yet?"
I wanted to see what an outside, pattern-recognizing intelligence would find significant in the blueprint of my own mind. I was expecting suggestions for external things to look into. What I got back was an inward-looking reflection that connected dots I had never connected myself.
The AI holds up a mirror
Gemini’s response was what felt like a hatch opening in my brain. It didn't just see a facilitator who likes woodworking. It identified a single, unified identity it called "The Universal Architect." It proposed that the same mind that designs a flawless joint with a Festool Domino is designing the invisible, strong joints of a collaborative workshop.
It used a metaphor that really hit home:
"You don't just facilitate workshops; you bring a Festool-level of systemic thinking to human interaction. You create the guide rails (agendas, principles), the dust extraction (psychological safety, clear roles), and the precise cuts (key questions, sharp insights) that allow a group to build something beautiful and strong, without making a mess."
For years, I had seen my workshop and my facilitation work as separate domains. The AI showed me they were expressions of the exact same craft, rooted in the same core values.
The red thread becomes clearer
This insight brought with it a real sense of acceptance. The feeling that I’m not just doing a collection of separate things, but that everything I do can be traced back to how I’m put together and what I love to do. The red thread running through my life—my drive for Authenticity, Bottom-up Change, Justice, Creativity, and Openness—suddenly became much clearer.
To make this tangible, the profile the AI generated is incredibly rich. The following is a tiny, paraphrased fragment—less than 5% of the full profile—to give you a sense of the blueprint it created, using some of its actual language:
{ "coreIdentity": { "primaryRoles": ["Systemic Designer", "Facilitator", "AI-Ethics Advocate"], "missionTagline": "Design human-centered systems that amplify justice, collaboration, and creativity through ethical technology." }, "guidingPrinciples": { "coreValues": ["Authenticity", "Bottom-up Change", "Justice", "Creativity", "Openness"] }, "thinking_style": "Integrative; connects abstract principles to tangible making. Works backward from a desired future state to define necessary structures." }
Seeing these core values reflected back to me as the blueprint for both my work and my hobbies was the moment everything clicked. In our busy lives, it takes immense focus and energy to step back and see these patterns. This experiment showed me the unique potential of AI to act as that mirror.
From personal insight to collective potential
This brings me to the 'field note' for others. This personal experiment has fascinating implications for how we work together in groups and communities.
If AI can do this for one person, what could it do for a team, a neighborhood, or a city?
We live in a world where AI is already being used to build rich profiles on us, mostly for advertising and manipulation. We see the downsides in phishing, deepfakes, and the erosion of public trust. But what does the other side of the coin look like? How do we use this same technology to catalyze regenerative social systems by weaving human wisdom with transparent, ethical AI?
Imagine if we could, with full permission and ethical oversight, use AI to help a community understand its own collective patterns, values, and aspirations. This leads to the long-term aspiration that was also reflected in my profile: the idea of building a 'Social GitHub' for regenerative community solutions. A place where communities can fork, adapt, and contribute back to shared knowledge about what works.
This is the potential that I find so incredibly engaging. It’s about architecting new systems where technology serves human connection, not the other way around. It requires careful design, ethical guide rails, and a human-in-the-loop to ensure we are building systems that are truly regenerative.
I'm still exploring what this all means. But for now, I'm left with a resonant question, for myself and for you:
What is the common thread running through all the different 'workshops' of your life? And what might become possible if you could see it clearly?
(This post was co-created with AI based on extensive promptwork and personal reflections, including the analysis of an AI-generated profile of myself.)