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Hey Subscriber First Name,

There's a word that's been floating around a lot recently: slop. Merriam-Webster made it their word of the year in 2025, mostly because of the flood of low-quality AI content being published everywhere with no real thought behind it. But slop isn't new. It just has a new costume.

If you've been in project management for any length of time, you'll recognise slop immediately. It's the twelve-slide status deck that takes three hours to build and changes nothing. The weekly meeting that exists because it's always existed, where everyone gives an update nobody acts on. The risk register that gets reviewed every fortnight but never influences a single decision. The Gantt chart that's been out of date for six weeks but nobody wants to say it. The governance report that ticks a box but tells no story.

That was slop before AI. Polished, professional-looking output that added no strategic value whatsoever. We just didn't have a word for it.

Now slop has a new flavour. Instead of spending three hours building a status deck manually, you can get AI to generate one in three minutes. Instead of writing a risk summary by hand, you can prompt a tool to produce something that reads well, sounds thorough, and says absolutely nothing. The format is better. The speed is faster. And the substance is exactly the same: zero.

The tool has changed. The habit hasn't. And here's what worries me most about where this is heading.

Think about the cognitive load on you and your team right now. There is more data, more reporting, more AI-generated content flying at everyone than at any point in history. Dashboards updating in real time. AI summaries landing in inboxes. Automated risk reports, sentiment analyses, predictive forecasts. It sounds impressive. A lot of it looks impressive. And that's exactly the problem.

There's a well-known bias in psychology called the lab coat effect. Put someone in a lab coat and people trust what they say more, even if the words are identical to what someone in a t-shirt just told them. The presentation carries authority regardless of the substance. AI has essentially put a lab coat on every piece of output in your project. The status update reads beautifully. The risk summary sounds thorough. The stakeholder briefing hits all the right notes. But underneath the polish, how much of it is actually saying something? How much of it is smart-sounding nonsense that nobody has stopped to question because it looks too professional to doubt?

As a PM, your job now includes protecting your team from this. Because when everyone is drowning in polished data that sounds authoritative, the people around you will start making decisions based on outputs they haven't critically evaluated. They'll trust the dashboard because it looks right, not because someone checked whether the assumptions behind it still hold. And when something goes wrong, the trail will lead back to a beautifully formatted report that nobody actually read with their brain switched on.

Leading in this environment means being the person in the room who asks: what does this actually tell us? What decision does it change? Is anyone thinking about this, or are we just looking at it?

Simon Sinek built an entire body of work around this problem. In Start with Why, he makes a distinction that I think about constantly. He says most people and organisations start with what they do, then how they do it, and rarely get to why they do it at all. The Golden Circle, he calls it. And he argues that the ones who inspire, the ones who build lasting trust, always start from the inside out. Why first. Then how. Then what.

Apply that to your week as a PM and it's uncomfortable how much of the work starts with what. What's the status update. What does the report say. What's the RAG rating. What are the actions. It's all output. None of it starts with why. Why are we building this status deck? What decision does it inform? Why are we having this meeting? What outcome are we trying to reach? Why does this report exist? Who reads it, and what do they do differently because of it?

The moment you start asking why, half the slop falls away. Because a lot of it exists for no strategic reason at all. It exists because someone set it up months ago and nobody ever questioned it. Or because it makes people feel like the project is being managed, even when the activity isn't connected to any outcome that matters.

Sinek tells the story of Walmart to illustrate what happens when an organisation loses its why. Under Sam Walton, Walmart's purpose was clear: serve the community, look after people, and the business would follow. The company was loved by employees, customers, and the towns it operated in. After Walton, the company confused its purpose with its method. It stopped asking why it existed and became obsessed with how to drive prices lower and how to maximise efficiency. The what and the how took over. And within a decade, the company that was once welcomed into communities was facing lawsuits, scandals, and towns actively fighting to keep it out. The operation was running. The purpose was gone.

Projects do the same thing. They start with a clear purpose, a problem to solve, an outcome to achieve. But somewhere along the way, the machine takes over. The rituals of project management replace the thinking behind them. The weekly rhythm becomes the point, and the reason for the rhythm gets forgotten. You're producing, but you've stopped asking what for.

AI has accelerated this. Before, you had to put effort into producing slop, so there was at least a natural limit on how much of it you could generate. Now there's no limit. You can produce an entire suite of project documentation in an afternoon without thinking strategically about any of it. And because it all reads well and looks professional, it passes through governance reviews, gets filed in shared drives, and becomes part of the project's reality without anyone asking whether it reflects genuine thinking or just generated output.

The PMs who are going to thrive in this environment are the ones who use AI to handle the mechanical work and then invest the time they've saved into the strategic thinking that the tool can't do. Use it to draft the report, then spend the time you saved actually thinking about what the report should be saying. Use it to pull the data together, then sit with your team and ask what the data means for the decisions ahead. The tool does the what. You bring the why.

Now, a word of caution. Asking "why" directly can rub people the wrong way in a project environment. If someone has spent a week preparing a report and you open with "why does this exist?", you've just made an enemy. The intent is right but the delivery matters. I've learned to get to the same place without making people feel like their work is being questioned. Instead of "why are we doing this?", try "what decision does this help us make?" or "how are we using this to move things forward?" You're still getting to the purpose, but you're framing it around the outcome rather than challenging the activity. People engage with that. They feel like you're trying to make their work more valuable, not less relevant.

The same applies when your team is drowning in AI-generated data and polished dashboards. You don't walk in and say "this is all slop." You say "there's a lot here, help me understand which parts are changing how we think about the delivery." That one question cuts through the noise without making anyone defensive. It invites people to filter with you instead of feeling filtered out.

That's the shift from slop to strategy. And it's a judgement call you have to make every single week.

MAKING IT HAPPEN: Your Weekly Strategy

Do two things this week. First, look at your recurring meetings, reports, and updates. For each one, ask: what decision does this help us make? If you can answer clearly, keep it. If you can't remember the last time it changed anything, you've found your old slop. Cancel it, simplify it, or replace it with something that moves the project forward. Second, pick one AI-generated report or dashboard that lands on your desk regularly and read it with fresh eyes. Ask yourself: which part of this actually changed how I thought about the delivery last time? If you can point to a specific section, that's the value. If you can't, have a conversation with your team about what they'd actually find useful and reshape it around that. The goal is output your team engages with, not output that just exists because the tool made it easy to produce.

CHEAT SHEETS

The free cheat sheet library is here. I'll keep adding to it. Save the link and grab whatever helps.

If this one landed, forward it to a PM who's been working flat out and still feeling like nothing's moving. Sometimes the answer isn't to work harder. It's to step back and ask what's actually worth the effort.

bilaljamil.com | Newsletter archive | Hit reply and tell me what piece of slop you're going to kill this week. I read every one.

Take care and speak soon, 

Bilal