"Stay in Your Lane"
And other advice we ignore at Second Draft Labs
Second Draft Labs: #0004
We publish the best ideas in AI and education, from the people doing the work.
Our publishing pipeline is pretty much full through 2027.
And we just started this last month.
Since I started posting regularly on LinkedIn about 14 months ago, I’ve tried a lot of things.
I did a ton of keynotes. Ran some yearlong AI workshops. Have done a bunch of consulting and coaching.
Earlier this year I co-founded Pend AI, a cultural diagnostics platform that helps organizations understand exactly where they stand in their Human+AI readiness. Check out the updated page if you want to run this with your team.
It has been so much fun pulling on all these threads.
The most unexpected work, however, is this: Second Draft Labs.
In many ways, it’s also the most exciting.
Get Out of Your Lane
What Education Becomes started because I had an idea and realized I would never have the time to pull it off on my own. And even if I did, a collaborative volume with multiple perspectives made better sense for the topic.
And, through the process, I learned I really loved running the project. More than writing or getting “my ideas” out there, I got so much more satisfaction having an idea and bringing together the right thinkers to bring it to life.
It seems I’m not the only one.
I was just talking to a colleague. They were sharing their idea for a book about relationships, trust, and AI in higher education. They’d turned those ideas into formal proposals for making some changes to how work gets done in their academic unit. The reception from their academic unit was what you might expect and amounted to “stay in your lane.”
Yup. If you’re reading this you probably know the feeling.
There was so much passion behind the project. IMO, there was urgency behind implementing it. But, higher ed . . .
Anyway, they were so energized by the idea that they had already sketched out an entire outline for what it could look like in book form. They had the chapters mapped, a bunch of contributors in mind, and an overall thesis amounting to a truly unique contribution to the discourse around what AI is doing to trust and relationships in higher ed and how leaders and practitioners are currently navigating it. I know, right? So good!
Almost resigned, thinking about what it would take to pull this project off, they said, “Well, it’s a book I want to read, so I guess I’m gonna need to write it.”
And that’s where the power of SDL comes in.
The 3 Ps of SDL
As we’ve been working through what SDL is and what it’s becoming, I can see three ways we support authors and their ideas: permission, process, platform.
Permission means you don’t need someone else to tell you it’s okay. You already have the idea. You already believe in it. You’ve already tested and refined in “in the wild,” even if not through a committee or peer-reviewed journal. SDL removes the part where you wait for an institution to validate it.
Process is how we make it so easy. You write your chapter or your manuscript. We handle the architecture, the framing, the timeline, the editorial, the promotion, the distribution. We’re getting better at this each time, so you don’t even need to think about it.
Platform is the collective. SDL is a growing syndicate of thinkers who want to see good ideas reach audiences. When your chapter or volume gets published through SDL, you’re not going it alone. You’re part of a community that wants you to succeed and is actively supporting you to make that happen!
Value Add
We think this value proposition is appealing. And it seems the world agrees.
Adam Pryor, SDL’s Managing Editor, just submitted his solo manuscript: The Civic Register: Reclaiming Institutional Governance in the Agentic Era.
We’ve got volumes in development on AI and entrepreneurship, AI and judgment, AI and trust, analog responses to AI, AI at the intersection of SoTL, and of course Volume 02 on emerging approaches to reflection and transparency, dropping this fall.
And we’re not just going to publish these as books. We’re going to turn them into short and longer form articles, podcasts, and maybe some custom and practical interactive artifacts to add to the experience. Overall, we’re just going to go Savannah Bananas on it to figure out what it actually means to publish in 2026 and beyond.
Even though the pipeline is full, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for you.
As always, check out the Second Draft Labs site and/or connect directly if you’ve got an idea that’s too good not to share.