This came off the back of a comment with @Mira Bradshaw and seeing her experience in real time. Thank you for the inspiration, Mira, and April version of Mira too. I forgot to mention that @Don Roy - Do you use loops? 🔁 post, further compounded to me writing this post too. Attached is a visual representation of Kolb's Learning Cycle beside the Competency Ladder you climb (and slide back down) as you learn ICM. This demonstrates @Jake Van Clief's ethos of learning by doing, and in turn gaining competency. As Thomas Edison said: "Vision without execution is hallucination." You cannot theorise your way up the ladder, you climb each rung by doing the loop. So if you're finding this hard, awkward, or you're getting stuck: that's normal. It's meant to feel uncomfortable. The more you go through the cycle, the more you progress up the ladder, one rung at a time. I did try to render it in the post but no joy, so attached as image. Here is a link to a graphical representation. Personally I prefer the attached image layout.

I've been enjoying my ICM builds and systems. They are living and breathing and battle-tested. Now I've hit the point where I want to scale and expand them more than I practically can. The limiting factor? Me and my taste. My taste... well there's plenty of posts in here that will give you a pretty good indication of it. Human in the loop. Augment that human at every turn rather than cutting them out. My judgement where it matters. Guardrails and governance and stakes considered from the outset - as @Gabriel Azoulay put it, build the refusal and verification first and the rest will follow. (Yes, I've mangled it, it's not a quote, but the sentiment is there nonetheless). And in the middle of all of this, I've had a few ideas that have come in together. @Curtis Hays has agents in his system who sort requirements and building within his system. @Ari Evergreen has been inspiring me to think about where model vs model loops could play a piece in this picture to actually move things further along with my taste still driving all of the outcomes. And somehow this mashed up together into the following. @Bas Rosario taught us about how ICM was like baking a cake. And that moving from a workflow to a workspace was going from having a system that baked a cake to building a bakery. I can bake cakes. I have not one but two working bakeries. Now I need a construction crew. Not any construction crew - ones who know my bakeries and my taste and follow those to the letter. They don't suggest things that aren't compatible with my industrial grade ovens. They know what is and isn't compatible with my delicate equipment. They understand that in my bakeries, my rules govern; and they honour and enforce that. Enter a new workspace where tools are made and bakeries are built. If you want to see them, glimpses of what these look like are already present in the week 8 competition builds - Chalky PRD (now 01 Chalky) and Architectural Thinking Partner (now 02 ATP).