Building an AI mindset

Setting aside the media dust thrown up by the advent of mass-market AI adoption, what’s the most fundamental leadership challenge we need to embrace now? Harnessing the full potential of human capacity whilst simultaneously leveraging the power of AI will be one of the most significant tests facing us in the coming months and years. It starts by recognising that our mindset is the fulcrum of transformation, where our self-awareness can enable us to sink or swim in any disruptive transition.

This time last year, the world was awash with hucksters on TikTok claiming that ChatGPT could earn you ￡10K in weekly earnings if only you learned their prompts. The social media and AI platforms worked their switch and bait PR strategies to focus the debate on the existential threat of conscious AI to draw our attention away from their data land grab as they train their large language models with the uncredited and unpaid for intellectual property of artists, academics, and content creators. This repeats how the significant players built much of their value with our complicit silence in the first era of e-commerce, outlined in forensic detail by Shoshana Zuboff in her book Surveillance Capitalism.

There are very pressing, moral questions that will continually need to be answered, but for me, the practical leadership challenge right now is: ‘What are humans for in terms of value creation in organisations in an automating world?’ ??Many leaders are avoiding the question in the belief that it’s their subordinates who will be most influenced. That’s potentially a fatal assumption. Right now, leaders must ask themselves that question and consider how the answers will shape their future.

New research published in January 2024 by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suggests that AI will directly impact 40% of global employment across all low to high-skilled jobs. Whilst past waves of technological disruption have most affected routine tasks, thus affecting and eliminating lower-skilled jobs, AI is different. It will disproportionately impact high-skilled jobs – up to 60% will be affected - thus creating a threat and opportunity to advanced economies.

This coming reality is not something to delegate to find answers. Leaders need to remain fully engaged in this as one of the most significant reality shifts in their lifetime.? If you look at why most digital transformations have failed in the past decade, it’s because the C-Suite believed it was a strategic technology move, so they tried to hire the best digital leader they could find and asked them to lead the charge. Worst still, they relied on their existing IT director to make it happen. As a result, less than 30% of digital transformations delivered against their goals.? One of the key underlying reasons is that digital transformation is not primarily about technology; it’s about how technology can enhance or create a new business model. Without that recognition, the C-Suite will inevitably fight every implication and tough choice that challenges their existing beliefs about the business model.? Witness the confused, fear-driven arguments that ensue as a result.

AI is even more significant in its ability to challenge and transform an organisation's underlying business model.? But it’s not just the strategic challenge of leaders envisioning their organisation’s future; it’s also about learning to be in a new, highly conscious relationship with technology.? Leaders who don’t get to grips with AI will not only fail to grasp the opportunity for their organisations fully, but they may also not see the potential in transforming their own impact.

?What do leaders need to do?

The first move is to focus on what this means for you, not your teams or the organisation. You need to understand how it can become an empowering co-pilot. All too often, we feel a slave to technology: our in-boxes rule our focus and feelings more than they enable us to achieve our goals.? So, let’s start by establishing some healthy principles as we learn.

?1.?? Establish what we do best. Even though AI can sometimes create an illusion of thought, it has none of the unique complexity that can enable us as humans to do four things:

• Make sense of complex and ambiguous situations
• Creative problem-solving
• Decision-making (weighing up risk and uncertainty)
• Forming and enriching relationships

These are our core sources of human value creation in an automated world.? The knowledge and skills we’ve built up over the years inform these things, but clinging onto them as our primary source of value is like imaging that a brilliant proficiency in using a slide rule to make calculations would maintain our value in a world of people using a HP-9100 pocket calculator. (Huh? Gen X onwards; click here).

Figure 1 is my initial attempt to map out the four sources of human value creation as AI's impact is felt. In each area, there are opportunities to challenge our assumptions about what can and can’t be supported by AI effectively.

2.? Experiment to find capacity. ?So far this year, I’ve set aside 30 minutes to review everything I’ve done each week and plot where it fits with areas of most significant value. See Fig. 2 (forgive the Outside acronyms and phrases, like GPP – our personal growth and performance plans). ?In each case, I’m asking where I could accelerate, make it more efficient or automate with AI tools.? Aside from testing the various AI platforms, such as ChatGPT and Bard, I’ve played with how more task-specific tools in research and content generation can help. For example, there's a growing array of new platforms that can help you wade through and make sense of science research, cutting down the time it takes to assess the quality and status of ideas. ?Examples include Elicit and Unriddle.

In building an ‘AI mindset’, I’m adopting the co-pilot metaphor initially coined by Microsoft, seeing the platforms and tools as either a way to automate repetitive tasks or rapidly process information. I’m being alert to the assumption I might be making that AI ‘knows’ something, its conclusions are correct, or even mine.?

I am being conscious of raising my attention to assumptions I’m making about what are facts and what are stories, and where the seemingly polished summaries that can be produced are reasonable interpretations of a situation or only partial pictures.?

Being doubtful is key. AI, like every technology, can switch off the creative impulse if we’re not careful. Stepping away from the screen to think is essential to harness our full capacity.? Research by Dr K Kim on the analysis of the Torrance creativity test taken by millions of children in 50 languages over the past 50 years shows the correlation to lifetime accomplishment is more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ. As the Internet started to be used by children in the 1990s, whilst IQ scores kept rising, creative intelligence started to decline. Kim asserts that technology weakens our ability to think and be aware, much like people drive blindly into a lake if their sat nav tells them to.

A friend of mine highlighted an insightful response to AI use.? He was dedicating an hour each morning using ChatGPT to process his emails and reports, ask challenging questions and then presenting the findings as his in meetings. “The temptation to look smarter and more productive than everyone else gave me a buzz, he confessed, until I was caught out with something that looked good but was completely wrong.”? The takeaway is that technology typically amplifies our innate qualities for better or worse, so zoning into the think, see, feel dimensions of mindset is vital if we want an ally rather than a dysfunctional friend.