Rolling C² out to my team: what stuck, what didn't

I introduced C² to a team that was already using AI agents ad hoc, and the rollout taught me more about adoption than about the method. Some of it caught on the same week. Some of it I had to stop pushing. This is the field note on what stuck, what didn't, and what I'd do differently.

Why I introduced it

The team was getting value from agents individually, but it evaporated between people. One person's hard-won understanding never reached the next. Context got re-explained constantly. Agents relearned the same things across desks. The work wasn't compounding — it was being rediscovered, over and over, by whoever sat down next. C² was my answer to that, and I rolled it out with more enthusiasm than strategy.

What caught on fast (session briefs)

The session brief was an immediate hit, and I should have predicted why: it paid off the same week, visibly. Someone wrote a brief on Tuesday, someone else picked up the work on Thursday and started in minutes instead of an hour — and everyone saw it happen. The habit sold itself because the benefit was instant and personal. Nobody needed convincing after the second time it saved them.

Stuart Leo

The habits that stuck were the ones that saved someone time the same week. The ones I had to justify with "it'll pay off later" mostly didn't.

What met resistance

The things that paid off later met resistance. The fuller PRD and Cascade discipline felt like process overhead to people under deadline pressure — the benefit was real but deferred, and deferred benefits lose to today's deadline every time. When I pushed those hard, up front, I got compliance theatre: documents written to satisfy me, not because anyone found them useful. That's worse than nothing.

The crawl-walk-run that worked

What actually worked was backing off and going crawl-walk-run, which is the same advice for adopting agents and apparently for adopting methods too. I stopped mandating the whole system and started with the one habit that paid off immediately — session briefs and capturing gotchas. Once those were second nature and people felt the context compounding, the appetite for the heavier tiers came on its own, pulled by need instead of pushed by me. The teams that get AI adoption right build day-to-day proficiency first rather than mandating the full apparatus on day one.

What I'd do differently

If I rolled it out again, I'd lead with the cheapest, fastest-paying habit and shut up about the rest until it was asked for. Start with session briefs and gotchas — the things that save time this week. Let people feel context compound before introducing anything that costs effort now for payoff later. The method is right either way. The mistake was rolling it out as a system to adopt instead of a habit to start.

The contextbase habits that stuck were the ones that saved the team time the same week — start there.

Start here: see the crawl-walk-run adoption path, how to write a session brief, or read the method.