When social identity researchers study a team, they do not look for a single identity. They look for an identity ecology, the full set of group memberships that any given team member is drawing on at any given moment. A team member is not just a member of this team. They are also a member of a profession, a function, a generation, a gender cohort, an alumni network, a client account team, a project squad, a wellbeing community, a union, a faith, a family.
In an AI augmented team, that ecology now includes AI tools and agents. Those tools are not neutral. They shape how the team gathers information, weights evidence, generates options and resolves disagreement. They have, in effect, become members of the ecology, even though they sit outside the conventional definition of the team.
The first artefact in The Augmented Us framework is the augmented social identity map. Its job is to make the ecology visible.
What the map captures
The map is a two axis canvas. On one axis, the strength of the membership, from peripheral to central. On the other axis, the membership's current pull on the team's behaviour, from low to high. Members of the team plot their own ecology. The team aggregates the maps and discusses what they see.
What emerges is almost always uncomfortable. Memberships that the team's official narrative treats as central (the function, the company, the client) often turn out to be peripheral in practice. Memberships that the official narrative does not name (the WhatsApp group, the alumni circle, the AI assistant, the Slack channel that sits outside the official tooling) often turn out to be doing serious work.
This is not a problem to be fixed. It is the actual landscape the team operates in. Pretending otherwise produces a leadership conversation untethered from how decisions are really being made.
Why AI tools belong on the map
There is a temptation to treat AI tools as instruments rather than memberships. That temptation should be resisted.
A tool is an instrument when the team uses it occasionally, with full awareness, for a defined purpose. A tool is a membership when its outputs shape what the team considers possible, what counts as evidence, what counts as a good answer, and what counts as the team's own work. By that test, the leading models inside most knowledge teams have crossed the line from instrument to membership.
The map asks the team to plot those tools honestly. Where would the team's first draft come from without it? Where would the team's first analytical move come from? Where would the team's sense of what is acceptable in a client deliverable come from? The answers reveal which tools are doing membership level work and which are still operating as instruments.
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How to run the exercise
The exercise takes ninety minutes. It runs best with a leadership team of six to ten, ideally with at least one person from each function the team integrates.
Start with twenty minutes of individual mapping. Each person draws their own ecology onto the canvas. No discussion. No comparison.
Move to forty minutes of structured sharing. Each person presents their map in three minutes. The rest of the team listens. The facilitator captures the surprises (memberships nobody expected, AI tools nobody had named, official memberships that nobody plotted as central) on a separate sheet.
Spend the final thirty minutes on the team level conversation. Three questions carry the discussion. What memberships are doing more work than we acknowledge? What memberships are doing less work than we assume? What does this mean for how we lead this team next quarter?
What to do with the output
The map is a navigation aid, not a verdict. The team is not trying to engineer a clean ecology. It is trying to see the actual one clearly enough to lead it.
Three uses follow naturally. The map informs the team charter, the second artefact in the framework, by making explicit which memberships need to be honoured and which need to be challenged. It informs the human AI division of labour exercise, by making clear which AI tools have crossed into membership level influence and need to be governed accordingly. And it informs the monthly continuity ritual, by giving the team a baseline against which to detect drift.
Try this
Before your next quarterly planning session, run the mapping exercise with your senior team. Add one constraint. Every AI tool that any member uses more than three times a week must appear on the map, plotted honestly. The conversation that follows is the conversation most teams have been avoiding for two years.
Get the full framework. This article draws on The Augmented Us white paper, the evidence based primer with the full six stage practice, the four practitioner artefacts and the research base. Download the white paper or take the team diagnostic.