Tire Iron vs. Tuning Fork
When collaboration becomes torque instead of tone, systems strain. Tire Iron vs. Tuning Fork; Leverage or Listening explores how AI and leadership alike can shift from extraction to resonance — a tuning-fork approach that turns efficiency into coherence.
Leverage or Listening: The Shifting Landscape of Human-to-AI Interaction (and also Human-to-Human)
Force moves. Resonance aligns.
When someone “tire-irons” an interaction, whether it’s a person or a prompt, you can almost hear the metal scraping: a subtle but immediate shift from mutual curiosity to extraction.
The body registers it before the mind does. A small contraction. The jaw sets. The shoulders tighten. The nervous system whispers, “This isn’t attunement; this is leverage. What's this person trying to maneuver from me?”
In a tuning-fork exchange, by contrast, there’s expansion in mutual deep listening. The rhythm steadies. Breath evens. Shared creation begins. Both sides leave the interaction more complete than they entered. Such expansion resonates in the body, a clear sensory difference between extraction and resonance: one drains; the other tunes and harmonizes.
In every system of interaction — human, technological, or organizational — there’s a moment of approach. One can reach out either with force or with resonance.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about this through two images: the tire iron and the tuning fork. Force moves. Resonance aligns. Both get things done, but only one builds and sustains.
The Tire Iron: Leverage Without Listening
A tire iron doesn’t care about harmony. Its purpose is extraction: to pry, to torque, to get something unstuck. It doesn’t attune; it conquers.
In AI interactions, I often see this energy: prompts written like crowbars. “Give me ten hooks, five headlines, one viral tweet.” It’s the new corporate testosterone, an algorithmic, adrenaline-fed voice that treats intelligence, whether human or artificial, as something to be wrenched for gain at another’s expense.
I’ve met this corporate tire-iron energy in conference rooms around the world: sleeves rolled, certainty high, a fresh degree in optimization and a faith in metrics, talking in bullet points, measuring worth in velocity, treating every conversation as an instrument to crank for self-promotion and career gain.
The tire iron has its place. In emergencies, when the wheel won’t budge, you need torque. As a default stance, though, it’s corrosive. When applied to teams, partnerships, or AI systems, constant leverage and force distort what’s being built, because people comply, but they stop resonating and leave drained.
The Tuning Fork: Resonance as Design Principle
A tuning fork begins in silence. When struck, it vibrates; it doesn’t twist or pry. It sends out a note that invites everything around it to align.
That’s how collaboration works when it’s done well. In AI terms, it’s the Collaborator Model, prompting through curiosity and reciprocity rather than extraction. It begins with “What can we make possible together?” instead of “What can I get from you?”
Inside organizations, the same dynamic decides whether systems hum or gears scrape and grind.
Design
Design teams are natural tuning forks: they translate human need into form. But they fail when executives hand them a tire iron, “just make it work,” and they rush to do so in isolation, so the signal breaks. In contrast, when design engineering is instead allowed to resonate with manufacturing, supply chain and marketing from the start, insight travels both ways: constraints inform creativity, creativity refines and redefines constraint. The vibration is shared and the signals amplify.
Manufacturing
In factories I’ve worked with, the tire-iron mindset shows up as cost-cutting without context. Every efficiency pulled independently tightens torque on some other unseen joint — quality, safety, morale. The tuning fork alternative is lean coupled with listening: cross-functional huddles where operators, planners, front-line workers and designers co-create solutions. The result isn’t slower; it’s smoother. Alignment replaces friction.
Sales & Marketing
Marketing’s tire iron is pressure: quarterly targets, forced urgency, customer needs bent to fit a funnel. Products promised to the market before design or even proof of concept.
Its tuning-fork version is resonance with truth. True customer insight telling the story of what actually serves, allowing authentic demand to arise. This harmonizing approach also includes cross-functional teams in proof of concept prior to internally signaling a launch. The most effective sales cultures I’ve seen operate less like armies and more like jazz ensembles — improvising around a shared theme, each area of its operation (operations planning, marketing, sales) attuned to the others.
Across these domains, the same rule holds. Torque may move numbers for a quarter, but resonance sustains systems for decades.
Design for Excellence (DfX)
For readers who build across disciplines, there are practical frameworks for cross-functional resonance at DesignForExcellence.com — where collaboration itself becomes a design material. DfX sprints reengineer products, processes and teams with holistic goals of cost, quality, speed to market and supply chain optimization.
AI as Our Mirror
Artificial intelligence magnifies whatever approach we bring to it.
Treat AI like a tire iron — a tool to wrench open advantage — and it will mirror that back, producing extraction at scale: attention mining, manipulative recommendation loops, synthetic spam.*
(*This phrase came directly from an AI collaboration prompt after giving it my essay and this subtitle as the place to add an explanatory line, an example of resonance)
Treat it like a tuning fork, like a partner in resonance, and AI begins to amplify coherence: context-sensitive insight, ethical reflection, showing up as a system that listens before acting.
The design question isn’t what AI can do, but how we approach it. Do we want it to act like an intellectual collaborative partner or just another force stiff-arming us into doing its will?
The Human Mirror
The tire iron masquerades as leadership. It fills meetings with posturing, equates pressure with progress, and confuses fear with focus. The tuning fork shows up quietly in the leader who listens longer and can hear uncomfortable truths without punishment, in teams who leave ego at the door to find shared rhythm.
One extracts energy; the other generates it. The difference is visible in body language: tire-iron cultures are tight-shouldered, jaws set, ready for battle. Tuning-fork cultures breathe, play, and create together.
From Torque to Tone
Every interaction is a micro-design decision: pry or harmonize, force or tune. The tire iron gets the wheel off faster; the tuning fork gets the orchestra in tune.
In a century already vibrating with the metallic clang of extraction — economic, emotional, algorithmic, the quiet ring of attunement may be our most radical technology yet.
Diagnostics and Remedies
Diagnostics — Current Patterns
Current AI studies show humans doing less when interacting with AI. However, to me these studies appear to be diagnostic of the tire iron methodology of “do this for me” rather than the tuning fork model of back-and-forth collaboration.
Recent MIT Media Lab studies (2024) found participants had fewer areas of brain connectivity when AI acted as task replacer, a pattern consistent with the tire-iron model.
Remedies — New Areas of Inquiry
Next, studies should focus on whether brains light up more, human creativity turning on, when AI acts as antagonist and collaborator rather than a tool to be used to replace thought.
An example could be asking a creator to submit something for AI review with a “tell me what is wrong with this and areas where it needs to improve, without trying to fix it for me,” followed by a “here is my update, do you think it is better or worse?” to see if this kind of model could result in superior performance and may be the quietest radical technology of all.
— Madonna Demir, author of Systems & Soul
Part of my Future of Work series. Also, read UBI Dressed Like Work to explore whether AI replacing workers and universal basic income are a distant future or if UBI is actually our current reality, dressed in overalls.
Madonna Demir
