TECHNICALLY JOYFUL - Building Change Capacity in the Age of AI
Change is coming faster than ever. Joy helps us keep up — and shape what comes next. Look closely at the people doing hard things extraordinarily well — creating change that lasts, building what didn’t exist before, turning ambitious ideas into reality — and you’ll notice something: joy is often part of the fuel. They are technically joyful. Host Gabrielle Kohlmeier has used joy again and again to build with others what seemed impossible — and create outcomes beyond what anyone thought possible. In Technically Joyful, she shares what she’s learned and brings together people doing hard, consequential things differently: leaders, builders, thinkers, and wonderfully curious humans exploring what they’re seeing, what they’re learning, what isn’t obvious yet, and what the rest of us can use. We’ll tackle the hard questions. We’ll make the invisible work of change visible. We’ll find signal in the noise. And we’ll get practical about what actually helps people and organizations move — from technology, strategy, and systems to judgment, incentives, relationships, courage, and the wonderfully human messiness in between. Instead of fear as fuel, we use curiosity, connection, usefulness, awe, and the gentle persistence of joy. Joy gives us energy to engage with hard things — to stay curious longer, see more possibilities, connect more dots, and keep going. Every episode is designed to leave you seeing something differently, understanding something useful, and feeling more capable of acting — at work, in your organization, and in the much bigger experiment we’re all part of as AI reshapes our world. Expect hard questions, fascinating people, useful ideas, unexpected connections — and to come out stronger than you went in. Change is a muscle. Joy helps us build it. Welcome to Technically Joyful. Some Questions We‘ll Explore: Why does being a beginner feel so threatening once you’re successful? What happens when the work that disappears was also the training ground? Why do some people seem energized by uncertainty while others freeze? What are we losing when efficiency becomes the dominant measure of value? How do you know when doing nothing is actually the riskier choice? What becomes possible when we stop treating curiosity as frivolous? What does AI reveal about work that was already broken? How do we keep our judgment while changing how we use it? What becomes more valuable — not less — as AI gets better? Why might joy actually make us better at doing hard things?
Episodes
What do you hold onto when the technology, possibilities, and even the questions keep changing?
Maureen Naughton, Chief Innovation & Information Officer at Lowenstein Sandler, has spent her career figuring out how organizations actually change. For Maureen, leading transformation no longer means having the next three years mapped out. It's about knowing what shouldn't change, building strong enough foundations to adapt around it...
What builds momentum when something feels too big to start?
In this solo episode of Technically Joyful, Gabrielle Kohlmeier explores how a manageable, meaningful first step can get us moving, and why the value of that step isn't only where it gets us. It changes what we can see from the new place.
Gabrielle draws on the unlikely way a Philadelphia Eagles rookie got her interested in American football, a first-week meeting as market g...
What do we already know about courage, change, and ourselves that can help us find our footing right now?
Alison Levine has climbed the highest peak on every continent, skied to both the North and South Poles, and served as team captain of the first American Women’s Everest Expedition. She has navigated environments where conditions can change without warning, the path forward is rarely certain, and knowing when to keep going ...
What happens when AI can summarize the report, review the documents, draft the memo, and analyze the contract? Does that mean the work itself is disappearing, or have we mistaken its most visible tasks for the whole job?
In this solo episode of Technically Joyful, Gabrielle Kohlmeier challenges the scarcity story surrounding AI and work by asking a more fundamental question: What is the work?
Drawing from her own experiences in law, ...
What if the biggest barrier to learning, leading, and taking a risk is the permission we haven’t yet given ourselves?
Laura Belmont has spent her career asking who a system was built for, who it leaves behind, and how it could work better, from disability-rights advocacy and Big Law to Comcast, Civis Analytics, and now The Suite.
Laura and Gabrielle explore what it means to learn out loud in a profession that prizes being right...
How do you make a strategy when the terrain keeps changing underneath you?
We often want a map to tell us what will happen next. But maybe that’s asking a map to do the wrong job.
In this episode of Technically Joyful, Gabrielle Kohlmeier explores what maps can teach us about navigating uncertainty: from her children learning to find their way around Berlin to Cold War ghost stations, an infamous story about lost soldiers carry...
What happens when AI agents stop being tools we occasionally use and start becoming members of our teams?
Geoff Schaefer is literally writing the book on it.
Geoff joins Gabrielle to vision what the agentic organization will actually look like, and how we can build it deliberately rather than simply letting it happen to us.
They explore Geoff‘s framework for Building an Agentic Organization, and Gabrielle’s change framewor...
What if the reason you can’t figure something out isn’t that you haven’t thought hard enough? What if part of the answer lives with someone else?
When change is moving quickly, no one person has the whole picture. The knowledge we need is distributed across the people closest to the work, technical experts, skeptics, customers, people navigating risk, and sometimes the person who quietly tried six months ago what e...
How do you lead through AI-driven change when the map hasn’t been drawn yet?
Anna Gressel, partner and global co-head of AI at Freshfields, has built a career exploring questions without established answers, from neuroscience to some of the hardest legal, safety, governance, and strategy questions in AI.
In this conversation, Anna and Gabrielle explore what it takes to move into unfamiliar territory with curiosity, creativity, ...
Feel like everyone else has figured out AI while you’re still trying to catch up?
Here’s the problem: “caught up” may be the wrong goal.
AI is changing too quickly for any of us to finish learning it. The leaders who will navigate this era best won’t be the people who know everything. They’ll be the people who build the capacity to keep learning, ask better questions, exercise judgment, experiment,...
What if joy could make us better at navigating change, not by making hard things easier, but by helping us stay curious, engaged, and willing to keep going?
As AI reshapes how we work, lead, and make decisions, the challenge isn’t simply keeping up with technology. It’s building our capacity to navigate constant change and having the agency to help shape what comes next.
This show explores the people, ideas, systems, and ...
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