Welcome Everybody,

It's good to be back.

The past week was mostly about getting back home and settling in. It’s been really nice to be back, catching up on lost time with Nina and reconnecting with my social life after a month away.

No too much to report on, which is why I wanted to seize the opportunity to delve a bit deeper into a specific breakthrough during my last week in La Gomera.

Enjoy!

✍🏻 Week 32, 2025 - Discovering the Missing Half of Our AI Vision

This week marked my return from La Gomera, and with it came one of those breakthrough moments that perfectly illustrates why trusting synchronicity and rolling with your instincts can lead to extraordinary outcomes. What started as a defensive reaction to an unwanted assignment turned into the missing piece of our AI-first management system puzzle.

Transition: Back to Reality

I had a great catch-up day at Park & Charge, where I was very productive but completely drained by the end of the afternoon. This created a stark contrast with my days in La Gomera, where I had no distractions, no travel time, and quick food access on my own schedule. There, I could easily work and focus the entire day without hitting that wall of exhaustion.

The difference in environment really highlighted something important about how we structure work. In La Gomera, the conditions naturally supported deep focus and sustained energy. Back in the regular world, the friction of daily logistics and social obligations creates energy drains that aren’t always visible until you’ve experienced the alternative.

Recognition: Trusting the Gut Despite Resistance

I want to dig into the main breakthrough that unfolded in that final week at La Gomera, because it’s a perfect example of reading synchronicities, trusting your gut, and rolling with things until they fall into place.

When Sander, my previous boss at Oxand, called me to help with a new assignment at the Municipality of Amsterdam, I initially reacted defensively. I didn’t want to get sucked back into the process modelling assignments I’d been doing for different clients over the years, especially while excitement around Askara was building and new opportunities were presenting themselves.

But something inside also knew that things were different now. With all these new AI tools at our disposal, and this being the line of work where I’d built the most experience and expertise, I was probably the most well-positioned person to figure out how to innovate in this space with AI.

So we went along and rolled with it. We recorded all the sessions with our Plaud.ai voice recorder and waited for genius to strike. Which it did last week.

Through sparring with my colleague from another firm about how we wanted to present our deliverables, I immediately reached out to Claude and Lovable to build something that would create process flow diagrams for us based on meeting transcripts, as well as generate reports on the bottlenecks we needed to address.

In probably the same amount of time and effort as manually modelling the diagrams and writing the report, we built something that would do it for us. Something that can now be used countless times in the future, with us only needing to tweak the final 20% of the work. It strikes a perfect balance between human and machine, saving enormous amounts of time for future process modelling assignments for clients.

Integration: Completing the System

The most exciting aspect of this solution is that it can easily be made available to the client’s team with and AI chat functionality. They can see the process flows but also chat with an AI that uses these processes, as well as the meeting transcripts, as its knowledge base. Elevating the user experience around process management to the next level.

Now everyone in the organisation can know exactly where they’re at with a certain process and where there are still bottlenecks that need solving. This is an ideal solution for people in management positions who need to think about how things can be done better, which is the essence of quality management.

With this AI-first process model, we’ve developed the missing half of the AI-first management system we’re building. We had the entire database of structured management data like KPIs, objectives, risks, roles, and corrective actions etc., but so far there was no AI solution for the process modelling angle—which is what I’ve worked on most in the past few years.

Now there’s perfect integration possibility with the management system solution we’ve developed in Airtable. For example, we can automate a risk analysis on each process with the process chatbot, and this can land automatically in the risk register of the management system. With all these elements accessible as knowledge bases, that collective business intelligence we’ve been dreaming about at Askara is one step closer.

The Synchronicity Pattern

Looking back, this whole sequence perfectly demonstrates the power of staying open to unexpected opportunities, even when they initially feel like distractions. My defensive reaction was natural—I was protecting the momentum we’d built with Askara. But underneath that resistance was an intuition that this could be different, that the timing and tools had aligned in a way that made innovation possible.

The breakthrough didn’t come from forcing anything. It emerged naturally from doing the work, staying curious about possibilities, and having the right tools available at the right moment.

This experience reinforces something we’re building into Askara’s DNA: the importance of staying responsive to synchronicity while maintaining focus on our core mission. The two aren’t mutually exclusive when you learn to recognise the difference between distraction and opportunity.

With care,
Ben

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