Bay Area Agile Leadership Network

This session is for curious professionals who want to work more intentionally with AI—without turning it into another prompt hack.

Most advice about working with AI starts in the same place: learn to write better prompts.

If you’ve tried that, you may have noticed something frustrating. As prompts get longer and more precise, the interaction often feels more pressured—not clearer. You start optimizing too early, evaluating while you’re still exploring, and quietly wondering whether you’re “doing it right.”

The result is often fluent output that somehow misses the point. In practice, the issue is rarely the AI. And it’s rarely a lack of intelligence, creativity, or effort on your part.

What’s usually missing is a clear structure for the conversation itself.

When exploration, decision-making, refinement, and evaluation all happen at once, thinking collapses into optimization before anything has had a chance to take shape.

In this workshop, we’ll take a different approach.

Instead of focusing on better prompts, we’ll work with a simple, repeatable conversational flow that reduces pressure by separating these moves intentionally. The emphasis is not on what to ask, but when to ask it—and when to stop.

We’ll work in short passes, pause earlier than feels comfortable, and treat unfinished thinking as a feature rather than a flaw. You’ll experience how small shifts in pacing and sequence can noticeably change the quality of both your thinking and the AI’s responses.

No clever phrasing needed.
No intuition required.
The structure does the heavy lifting.

You’ll leave with
- a clearer mental model
- a reusable conversational prompt
- and a felt sense of when to open, shape, and stop an AI conversation

To get the most out of this session you will be experimenting with AI privately, so be ready with your favorite tool.

About our speaker:
Volker Frank helps seasoned leaders reclaim their clarity, energy, and sense of self while navigating complex, high-pressure work environments.

With a background in coaching, facilitation, and organizational development, Volker works with people who are tired of the grind, navigating team dynamics that drain them, or wrestling with the invisible weight of always holding it together. His clients often feel stuck in systems that reward over-functioning and performative leadership—and they're ready for something more honest, more spacious, and more human.

Volker’s approach blends insight with deep empathy and just the right amount of play. He helps leaders recognize the patterns that keep them spinning, reconnect with what really matters, and step into leadership that’s both clear-eyed and heart-led.

Whether he’s coaching one-on-one or hosting peer-driven gatherings, Volker creates spaces where the masks come off, the nervous system can breathe, and real transformation takes root.

We are community of agile practicioners in the San Francisco Bay Area, with regular monthly events on zoom.

While we are working on our programming for the 2026 we are interested to hear back from our community what matters the most and what learning is relevant - so please drop us a line via Messages so we can solicit speakers on the topics that are of interest to YOU!

And if your company wants to host an in-person event - let us know too! There is nothing better than meeting with like-minded passionate and curious people in-person ....