Beware the Hidden Arms Race in AI Creativity

AI will totally enhance your creativity, they say. A more empowering, exciting work life, they say. And it does! It is! Just yesterday, an HR friend realized her company didn’t have a policy on such-and-such. She typed a simple prompt into ChatGPT and instantly had a PowerPoint presentation for her bosses, detailing the new policy. Welcome to the amazing future!

Here’s what they DON’T say: “You know that presentation deck that used to take the entire team a full week to create? And you, alone, did it in just one hour? Guess what? One hour is now too slow. New expectation: 30 minutes. Next week: 15 minutes. And, oh… Since you won’t need your whole team anymore, we’ll be sacking more than half of them. And next month, based on how fast ChatGPT is improving productivity and efficiencies, we’ll probably replace you with someone with a lot less experience and lower salary expectations. Sorry.”

Every time you leverage an AI tool, getting creative results faster and faster, you are also part of an ever-escalating arms race. ?

Companies SAY they value creativity. And they SAY they value you working smarter, not harder. But, in the real world, when they can get AI creativity on the cheap… they value productivity, speed, and scalable efficiencies even more!

Companies Choose to Value Scalable Efficiencies Over Creativity

John Hagel, recently retired from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, has declared that curiosity (the driving force behind creativity and innovation) fundamentally conflicts with virtually all institutions’ focus on scalable efficiencies. “We can’t slow down our processes for curious investigations. Go faster!”

But you don’t get human-based creativity without curious wonderings like, “What if…”

So, we need to heed Bucky Fuller’s advice: Never change things by fighting the existing reality. (The AI Arms Race.) Build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

We need to change how we be human together…

We need to build new models of working and being together in an AI MoreBetterFaster World.

The Most Creative Thing We Can Do in the AI Era

As Fateme Banishoeib shared in her TED talk, the one remaining space that desperately needs our creativity and innovation is our humanity — how we take care of ourselves and each other.

First, Embrace That the Arms Race is Not a Bug, It’s a Feature

• Your increased stress and running faster and faster on the hamster wheel, just to keep up, is designed into the arms race driven by NextGen technologies. And that wheel is only going to spin much faster — beyond what humans are capable of keeping up with!

Then, Do AI Era Self Care

• Do Personal (non-tech) AI Readiness Assessments — here and here, and here to see how you compare to others — and embrace the results. Know your strengths and areas to work on.
• Understand What Makes You, You: The AI World needs your uniqueness, your amazingness! And you need to build What Makes You, You into your workday behaviors. For example: Knowing which pressures are good for getting your creative juices going, and which pressures just create harmful stresses.
• Take Breaks, Get Creative: Science says that often the best way to solve a problem is to take a break from it — go for a walk, take a bike ride, turn your brain off for an evening — and, amazingly, solutions pop into our heads! Part of what makes you, you is understanding what breaks jumpstart your creativity.
• Dedicate Yourself to Being a Lifelong Learner: Become a micro-learner on all things, everywhere. For example: On that creative walk… Talk to someone new… Take a different route… Try a different coffee shop. Lifelong micro-learning prepares you for constant new adventures!

Then, Care for Others

• Keep an AI Cheat Sheet, and Share It With Others: The most rewarding way to de-stress ourselves is to de-stress someone else. Sharing is caring.
• Understand What Makes Them, Them… In the AI World: Your teammates all fall somewhere on the AI spectrum — from Super Freaked Out to Joyously Geeking Out. Share with each other your struggles and successes. We’re all in this together. And helping them helps you too.
• Speak Up for Others: Most managers and companies don’t know what AI Help to give you and your teammates. Take what you’ve learned about others’ needs, and share it with those above you who can make changes.

If Your Position is to Care For All, Care in New Ways

If you’re in HR, IT, Training and Development, Change Management, or similar functions, help make changes for all…

• Do Department or Company-Wide AI Readiness Assessments: There’s both tech-focused assessments: examples, here, here, and here … As well as the personal-transformation assessments mentioned above — here and here, and and here to see how you compare to others. Additionally: Here is a guide to disrupt and completely reimagine change readiness assessments. Take the combined results to your C-suite, accompanied with recommendations.

From the Jensen Group/Ultimate Software study on Reimagining HR for the AI Era:

• Help HR Become People Scientists: HR’s new role is to help move their organizations from data science into people science — a far deeper understanding of what individuals need to be their best in the AI Era
• Help HR Become Relationship Designers and Catalysts: Work gets done through relationships. HR needs to become the designer of experiences and relationships, using AI tools to help them

The Most Creative AI Era KPI We Can Live By

Finally, this AI Era KPI (Key Performance Indicator) comes from Sohail Inayatullah, whom I met through his role as UNESCO Chair in Future Studies…

Bill Jensen is a seasoned strategy and transformation executive, advisor to C-suite execs, globally-known keynote speaker, and author of nine best-selling leadership and change books, including Simplicity, Disrupt, Future Strong, and The Day Tomorrow Said No. Reach him at [email protected].