Long before AI arrived on the scene, as business consultants, who also ran training courses, we worked with a range of phrases in an attempt to communicate the power of “clear deep thinking” in creatively solving business problems.
We would say things like: “apply forensic intellectual energy”; take time out to “agonise” about your critical underlying assumptions, whilst also reminding people that insights are rarely found in the data but emerge from a “fierce strategic dialogue” between the data and each of the stakeholders.
And today we can welcome AI into the clear deep thinking mix as one of the creative sparring partners we can turn to make sense of complexity.
I think this message about AI being our thinking ally not a substitute for human judgement and intuition has landed.
But the point we are making here is that it’s easy to take your eye off the ball and slip into the trap of slavishly and lazily accepting AI’s outputs with insufficient self questioning.
It is easy to default to just accepting AI’s wizardry without working hard to understand its sometimes opaque processes and fail to get under the bonnet of the reasoning it used in arriving at a recommendation or idea.
So if I were to go back to my training sessions on business consultancy pre-AI, I think the phrase about applying “forensic intellectual energy” stands the test of time as we work alongside AI.
Read the latest SubStack article from Adam Riley and David Smith.