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Combining Powers
There are obvious connections between what’s going on in the world of artificial intelligence and the strategic thinking that executives need to engage in. AI is not only going to change strategic thinking, it’s pretty much going to change everything. It’s incredibly important that every leader out there do their best at this stage to understand what AI is and what its potential capabilities are and begin to use it to augment their strategic thinking.
I use AI tools, multiple ones, every single day. They are conversation partners to me. They provide background information to me on certain things. They help me flesh out ideas. I am completely combined in the work I do today with a number of these AI tools. A good place to start in thinking about this is to understand the different levels of AI capability and how they influence your ability to engage in strategic thinking. And those levels of capability range from just basic information processing of a form we’ve had for many, many, many years through social and emotional understandings, which we increasingly see in the in the chatbots, to increasing capabilities to engage in planning and learning processes, and ultimately, the emergence of artificial general intelligence with its own sense of consciousness and its own agency.
But until that moment, that human-machine capability is really what’s incredibly powerful. If you’re not prepared to embrace that, you are going to dramatically impede your ability to engage in effective strategic thinking on behalf of your organization. Every one of the six disciplines of strategic thinking is something that AI can help you do. It can help you recognize patterns. It can help you build system models. It can help you see things from different perspectives. It can help you think about problems in a structured way. It can help you envision possible futures. It can even give you advice about political situations. Don’t be shy about embracing these tools. Recognize that they really are going to change everything, and understand that if you don’t take this on board, you’re not just jeopardizing your own career, you may be jeopardizing the future of your organization.
Riding the Wave
Given current levels of artificial intelligence capability, the most important skill leaders need to develop is what’s conventionally been called prompt engineering, but I think that doesn’t really do justice to the core of the work you need to do to figure out how to get the very best out of these systems. I never personally take the first answer it gives me on anything. I often say to it, this is good, but I think you can do better. I think you can be more creative. I think you can give me more information about this. Are you really sure about that fact? So there’s so much that’s about really learning to engage in a conversation, a creative conversation, an analytical conversation with these aliens, right, that are really what these these machines are.
Don’t fixate and use only a single AI model. Different AI models offer different possibilities. It’s often highly valuable to me at least to be able to compare the output from different systems. There’s a tsunami coming. You want to be riding that wave. There are people that believe we are on an exponential growth curve of capability that could lead to artificial general intelligence within relatively few years. That’s an astonishing possibility. But what is certainly true is the tools themselves are evolving at a reasonably fast rate. And so the capabilities they have, the ways you best interact with them are also evolving. The only antidote to this is by very proactively embracing the technology and understanding its capabilities for strategic thinking.