Slowing Down: Reflective Practice in the Age of AI

Apple Intelligence is coming this Fall (or Autumn, as we like to call it on the Island). It promises great things, increasingly seamless integration of capability into personal context and workflow. It may make me more efficient. But what i do with that efficiency is left unsaid.

Microsoft Co-Pilot is already here, as we see the Age of Emergence (into popular consciousness and App ecosystems) shift into the Age of Integration (AI coming to/for you, instead of you travelling to meet it). The dynamic shifts from ‘have you engaged with it…’ to ‘could you even escape it…?’

Dialogic, adaptive, and supercharged, the historic barriers to knowledge and creativity, to expression and curiosity, are falling like dominos. It’s easier than ever to be an ‘expert’, at the very time when ‘expertise’ may be superseded by transdisciplinarity and interconnection. It’s easier to be both productive and credible, at least until we recalibrate the value propositions behind those terms.

But we may wish to consider how we integrate this new capability into a delicate balance.

Speed versus slow reflection.

Certainty and scale versus fragility and doubt.

If we see Generative AI purely in terms of ‘solving’ or ‘speeding’ things (interrogating knowledge in new ways, being more efficient), or in terms of accessibility and abstraction (making us all artists, filmographers and photographers, removing barriers to creativity), we may miss the opportunity to be more productively slow, more deliberately reflective, and engaged in our practice.

In ‘Engines of Engagement: a curious book about Generative AI’, Sae Schatz , Geoff Stead and I sought to consider the evolution of our cultural context and legacy expressions of value, truth and trust. To take a considered perspective on what, exactly, is changing, and what it means for us at the broadest level of the human experience, and at the narrow level of Organisations capability, and individual skills.

In that vein, i find myself wondering about the smallest of things.

In my work over on Social Leadership Daily, i talk about us being a community ‘in dialogue with our practice’: in this space we spend sixty seconds a day in that conversation. Sixty seconds being the smallest amount of time, but nonetheless an important – and scarce – one.

Slowing down is hard. Pausing to reflect. Sometimes simply pausing to breathe.

I am an advocate of these new technologies, but not a blind one. I think a balanced future is one that is constructed socially, and facilitated by technology. Not simply one that is driven to a state of efficiency and speed, but rather also one that accounts for experience, reflection, and fragility.

Within a methodology such as #WorkingOutLoud – the methodology by which i write and work – failure, fragility, uncertainty, and doubt, are integral to the experience. In this space writing is seen not simply as a means of storytelling, but rather a mechanism of sense making in itself. Hence writing is intentionally difficult, in that what we seek is not the artefact of the written page, but the ‘meaning’ created behind it. Streamlining creativity is good, but not at the cost of the valuable experience.

Whilst i try to be objective, i do of course feel some bias, and can comment on such. I take pride in writing: the idea of automating it is painful, and offers i constantly receive to ‘take the work away’ are to entirely miss the point of writing (for me – in this context – at other times, in other contexts, writing is more utilitarian and activity, and could happily be automated, streamlined or enhanced). Similarly, the evolution of my art is the evolution of my practice. The slow pace of development is perhaps inherent to the evolution of thought. Or maybe not. Maybe i’m clinging to legacy conceptions of value.

Slow thinking, and holding fragility in our work, are human experiences. Not necessarily ones that are automatically enhanced through technology. But technology may the feature of our system that gives us to time to attend to them. So the question may be, how do we use our time?

Organisations tend to operate on cultures of busyness. They are not accidentally, or naturally, busy. They create busyness. To be seen to be ‘idle’ is a damnation. How would you be rewarded if you were highly efficient and simply picked up a book everyday at 15:00? Maybe ok these days, if you hid it from Teams. But the point is, we make the busy the hero. But at great cost.

Reflection is not an idle activity, rather it’s a foundational one. It allows us (if we learn how to do it well) to engage in some of the coolest sounding ideas of our time – metacognition and systems thinking approaches. It allows us to take stock of where we stand, and to consider the foundations that we stand upon.

I am constantly surprised by this: that i do not run out of things to think about in my reflective practice. After all, logic would say ‘you’ve thought all you need to think about this subject…’ and yet still we find more cracks to lever open.

Dialogic tools can be a vital part of that: in my current doctoral research i find that dialogic technologies are invaluable to refine and partition my thinking, helping me set context, but the point where i put them aside and get lost again is perhaps the most valuable use of all.

To move into fragility, to slow right down. Indeed, to feel the frustration of it as i try to make sense of things – these are not aberrations within our cognitive system, they are creative features of it. It is through these things that our art and practice evolves.

What do i need to watch out for?

In the book we talked about the trap of the familiar: just because we are used to one model of artistic development, or creative expressions, does not mean it is inherently better. It’s easy to say that AI enhanced or enabled ‘photography’ is not real photography, but that is to deny the evolution of the art. Should we banish airbrushed painted works, or digitally reproduced love poems?

There is a wonderful feature of our intellectual and creative life in that it’s infinitely reconfigurable – the landscape can get broader and broader – if we permit it to do so.

There is space for the human and the technologically moderated.

But as we consider the evolution of our work – our art – and even our broader social constructs of work and learning – we should take time to consider the important of time. And specifically slow thinking and fragility in thinking.

Slow thought is not simply a feature of time, and fragility in thinking is not a matter of being right or wrong. Both are delicate tools to unlock our curiosity, and – if we dare to slow down enough – and trust our human frailty – tools to insight and understanding.

We can have both, if we travel both fast and slow. In certainty and with doubt.