shortcuts
AI, Thought Leadership, and Time
Human beings love shortcuts. For many, this probably starts at a young age. You’re a kid, 10 or 12 years old, and you’re walking to school. (Fact: I grew up walking to school. It was a long time ago.) And you discover a path, and that path takes you on a more direct route to the school. You shave ten minutes off the walk. More time to goof around with your buddies before the bell rings.
So the shortcut is a good thing. But it’s not always a good thing. Sometimes the path is muddy, and you mess up your new sneakers, they of the white leather and correct brand. Sometimes the path is a foot deep in snow (I grew up in the North Country), but you try it anyway, only to have to turn around and make your way back to the start where the road has been plowed.
And is it still a short cut if it’s just the norm, and all your friends use it too? You’ve “priced in” the time savings, sleeping a little later every morning, and your “competitive advantage” over fellow students has evaporated.
Isn’t this true as well for the many tech shortcuts we use today? Some days, the shortcut helps. Others, you end up with mud on your shoes. Consider instant communication, a shortcut that helps speed up collaboration with colleagues in distant cities or working from home. But sometimes you wish it weren’t so instant. You hit Reply All. You forgot you weren’t on mute. You hit Send in anger.
Another problem with shortcuts is this: many tasks are not susceptible to shortcuts. We know, for example, that there’s no shortcut to becoming a trained doctor or nurse. There are no self-taught bridge builders. Professional golfers do not learn to hit it close to the pin from thick rough using AI. You have to put in the time, pass the exams, earn the certifications, hit the ball again and again.
The core activities of thought leadership fall into this category.
You—you thinkers, researchers, analysts, writers—you’re like the medical specialist, the engineer, the athlete. Practice and effort. Practice and effort.
Consider “ideation” (an awful word and yet one that is hard to avoid). I often think of the 1990s as a Golden Age of thinking about business and management. In that decade, terms such as disruptive technology, core competence, emotional intelligence, and “built to last” entered the lexicon, among many other ideas of enduring value. Would AI have come up with any of them?
Even good ideas that are more time-bound take a tremendous effort to develop. They develop over many fits and starts, doubling back, sparks of inspiration, cold water thrown on the sparks, long discussions with trusted colleagues—who come up with all sorts of inconvenient questions, curse them. What do we have that is new here? Why would that be of value? What evidence will we be able to provide?
Sorry, folks. No shortcuts here.
How about another core pillar of good thought leadership: writing and editing. Surely AI can help here. We’re just looking for a way to get started. Once that happens, no problem. So just give me a draft I can work with and all shall be well.
The trouble is, we’re already seeing that this doesn’t work. A study from MIT suggests that, far from helping people write better, the use of AI for writing leads instead to what the researchers call “cognitive debt.” Another writer likens the process as going to the gym, only to cede the actual workout to a machine. No pain, no gain, indeed. And one columnist argues that the human ability to engage in complex thought is at risk: “We must think very carefully before ceding our minds to screens and AIs,” he concludes.
This brings us to the point in any self-respecting blog where useful advice must be proffered. Possibly “three steps,” or better yet, “action steps.” Here I’ll just say to those laboring in the vineyards of thought leadership: resist. Resist the temptation, and the pressure, to outsource your thinking and your writing.
Let’s go back to that young boy contemplating the shortcut to school again. With AI now in play, he takes a few steps in and sees now seven paths. He contemplates each for a while. They seem to offer different possibilities. One looks interesting but he can’t see over a ridge to really know for sure. Another goes by a pleasant looking stream. A third looks quite direct but is rather overgrown with ferns and foliage. And so on. He starts down one but soon finds himself confused, if not lost. Better go back.
Finally, he ends up on one path and the school looms in sight. He hears the bell ring. He’s late.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls…
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