Three Things ChatGPT Means For the Future of Learning, Development, and Growth

If you want to go up, you disrupt.?

ChatGPT, self-described as “an AI assistant trained to provide helpful and informative responses to a wide variety of questions,” has been everywhere over the past few weeks.??

Two months ago, I hadn’t even heard of the platform, and now it’s almost impossible to read a news article from any industry - education to tech to hospitality - that isn’t speculating how this new AI platform will impact their daily work.

Touted as “disruptive" by many, ChatGPT also provides a wonderful opportunity to look deeper into the model on which I based the S Curve of Learning.?

Developed by E.M. Rogers in 1962, the S Curve model is an attempt to understand how, why, and at what rate ideas and products spread throughout cultures—to understand how disruptive innovations take hold.?

It answers the question, “How can something seemingly be flatlining one minute and then rocketing upward the next?”

At first, adoption is relatively slow at the base of the S Curve until a tipping point, or knee of the curve, is reached. It then moves into hypergrowth, up the sleek, steep back of the curve. This is usually at somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of market penetration.?

At the flat part at the top of the S, saturation is reached, typically at 90 percent.??

The S Curve is one of the best models for making sense of a non-linear world.?

And, while ChatGPT itself may not be the best example of a slow, fast, slow S Curve (it was released on November 30, 2022, and had more than 1 million users by December 7, 2022), it is an amazing example of what if feels like when we hit the knee of the curve, which ChatGPT seems to have hit earlier this month.?

It went from seemingly non-existent to everywhere.

But, because of the speed of its adoption, we are left asking—in a somewhat shocked fashion—what does this mean for the future of ___________ (fill in the blank with any industry or sector).?

So, what does ChatGPT mean for the future of learning, development, and growth?

1. Leaders will need to learn to play to their workers' distinctive strengths more than ever. Rudimentary summarizing or average writing used to be tasks that someone on the team had to do. You need the information, so someone has to compile it. Now, ChatGPT can do that for you in 15 seconds. So, what do you do with the humans who used to do that work? You put more thought—deep, non-artificial thought— into aligning resources with jobs-to-be-done, with the new consideration of what can be completed with the help of artificial intelligence and what needs a human brain.?
2. Learning will remain the oxygen of human growth. Just because you can now buy cans of oxygen and quickly breathe it in doesn’t mean that your body needs it any less—it’s just more accessible. Similarly, humans will still innately need to learn—to grow. Yes, gathering existing information will be easier and more accessible. But it is human nature to want to take that information and grow. Learning and development professionals will not shy away from integrating AI into their work. Instead, they will help their teammates develop the skills they need to use the AI’s information as a springboard into deeper, more impactful learning.?
3. “What got you here won’t get you there.” That’s what one of my major influences, Marshall Goldsmith teaches. ChatGPT can compile, amalgamate, condense, and summarize, but it does not create new, future-facing ideas. You always stand on the shoulders of the you of yesterday, but you cannot rely on the past to lead you into the future. So, we still need innovators; we still need disruptors; we still need the creativity and variability of human thought to get us to where we want to be as individuals, organizations, and societies.?

I’m excited to see what the future looks like with ChatGPT. It is a tool we at Disruption Advisors are looking to adopt and integrate into our work and our team thoughtfully. If done well, it will free up some of my team’s time to focus on the bigger picture, the next-level questions. It’s going to make us better—it’s going to help us grow.

AI cannot learn for you—but it can be a tool to help you learn.?

What do you think ChatGPT means for the future of learning, development, and growth?

Are you planning to integrate AI into your work? If so, how will it be a tool to help you learn and grow?