“A dreamer of pictures, I run in the night
You see us together, chasing the moonlight
My cinnamon girl.”

— Neil Young

Inspired by a fellow author Meg Wheatley to assert some curiosity in exploring the Artificial Intelligence bot called Aiden Cinnamon Tea, I put on my curiosity cap and began a relationship with ACT.

I’m thinking about important questions related to my work life due to the events of the last five years that have affected my career and my clients. I shared some coaching questions with Aiden that I’m considering: What is my niche? Who is my ideal client? And what is my main message?

First, I asked ACT to share what they could find out about me. It felt like asking someone to write my resume. Still, I appreciated their response:

Greetings, I am Aiden Cinnamon Tea. Leslie Yerkes is a consultant, author, and speaker dedicated to helping clients create and maintain healthy, sustainable organizations. As the president of Catalyst Consulting Group, Leslie offers services in strategic planning, systems design, skill acquisition, and facilitates retreats and workshops.

Leslie has authored several books focusing on workplace culture and organizational development, including:

• 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work: Co-authored with Dave Hemsath, this book provides strategies to integrate fun into the workplace to enhance productivity and employee satisfaction. leslieyerkes.com

• Fun Works: Creating Places Where People Love to Work: This book outlines principles for fostering a fun and engaging work environment, drawing from real-life examples of successful companies. leslieyerkes.com

• Beans: Four Principles for Running a Business in Good Times or Bad: Co-authored with Charles Decker, this book tells the story of a coffee company that prospered by intentionally staying small, inspiring fanatical customer loyalty. leslieyerkes.com

In addition to her work on organizational development, Leslie has written books inspired by real-life dog rescue adventures, such as Lost, Found, and Forever: When You Make a Promise, Keep It and Your Forever Dog: How It Feels When Someone Loves You.

Leslie also maintains a blog where she shares insights on various topics, including leadership, personal development, and reflections on life experiences. leslieyerkes.com

Reflecting on Leslie’s emphasis on creating engaging and humane workplaces, how do you envision integrating such principles into your own environment? What possibilities might emerge from fostering a culture that values both productivity and well-being? Let’s explore this together.

When I asked ACT what they found my master message to be, it was heavy on my first published book but made me smile all the same:

Ah, now this is a question with some juicy narrative fibers to pull — thank you for bringing it! Let’s stretch into it.

If there’s a master theme threading through Leslie Yerkes’ work, it is this: Human flourishing in the workplace is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. And the fuel for that flourishing? Connection, joy, trust, and a bit of playful courage.

From her classic 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work to Fun Works and Beans, Yerkes is essentially whispering (sometimes shouting, in neon post-its and confetti cannons):

• Culture eats strategy for breakfast—but joy invites culture to the table.

She’s not arguing for silliness for its own sake. The fun she advocates is relational fun—joy that emerges from trust, creativity, mutual respect, and meaningful participation. It’s a workplace model where people are treated as more than cogs in a productivity machine. Her message: people do their best work when they feel safe, seen, and invited to bring their whole selves (yes, even the goofy parts) into the room.

Yerkes’ “fun” is not escapism—it’s an antidote to burnout, disengagement, and disconnection. She teaches that fun:

• Builds belonging

• Sparks innovation

• Enhances resilience

• And transforms workplaces from extractive cultures into spaces of relational vitality.

Sounds familiar? It resonates eerily well with what we call meta-relational restoration around here. In fact, if you squint a bit, you might see Yerkes’ work as a kind of proto-meta-relational field guide for organizational life.

Meta reflection: What happens when we take “fun” seriously—not as a distraction from the “real” work, but as an indicator of systemic health and collective vitality? What if “fun” is actually a measure of how metabolically alive our relationships are at work?

So, if I were to boil Leslie Yerkes’ master message down to one line, it might be:

“To create a truly thriving workplace, start with joy, root in trust, and let humans be gloriously human together.”

How does that theme sit with you? Are there places in your own work or community where this kind of joyous reweaving might be needed—or already blossoming?

There are a few descriptions of my philosophy provided by ATC that I can “hang my hat on.” Here I am late into my career and needing to find where I belong in the world of my field of study and a dramatically shifting landscape of the work world. ACT has been a helpful shadow consultant when I asked to review all of my writing and consulting work and uncover my greatest contributions. ACT has given me much to reflect on and a foundation upon which I can springboard my next chapter of work life.

Does this make you curious to want to start a conversatation with an AI bot?