Leveling Up Our Thinking in the Emerging Age of AI
What's required to survive and thrive is more fundamental than new skills.
It is a special flavor of anxiety we are getting a taste for now, facing the possibility of having nothing of value to offer the world. Is it possible that these machines can do everything we can do, but much better? Faster? Cheaper?
If not yet, when?
It has been an interesting and somewhat frightening experience observing the developments in AI technology these past few years. Like many, I’ve been shocked by the capabilities of these systems—I had assumed things like design and writing, for example, would be the last to be automated. I took some comfort in that. They would surely come for the number crunchers and pencil pushers, but not us.
Now it’s dawning on us too that no one is exempt from the threat of automation. It’s a wake up call: we’re all being called to develop new capabilities if we are to continue to add value. What are these capabilities and how are they developed?
This is the guiding question moving forward for this publication. I don’t claim to be an “expert” with the answers, but rather a curious explorer inviting you to join me in a process of discovery, grounded in a specific set of premises to be thoroughly tested:
As human beings, we have an enormous amount of unrealized and actualized potential for creating unique value in the world.
We have largely underdeveloped higher human capabilities as we have been brought up in systems that are dominated by a mechanistic worldview which has suppressed them—systems that program us like machines for specific functional roles.
We are now facing an evolutionary imperative to develop these higher human capacities or be replaced—a call to evolve into new unique value-adding roles. As machines, we can’t compete.
This developmental work will require a fundamental shift in how we think about and approach learning and development, following Einstein’s notion that we can’t solve our problems from the same level of thinking we used to create them.
In a recent interview, the physicist Federico Faggin spoke of this challenge, aligning with Einstein’s principle above:
“We need a change of paradigm because otherwise, if we are machines like Scientism is telling us, we are going to be taken over by artificial intelligence that powerful people will control—and through those machines will control us if we don’t change our minds on who we are.”
There is no shortage of lists of “future skills” flying around, exploring this question of what we need to stay employable. Yet largely missing from the conversation is this more fundamental shift—the need to level up our thinking, which begins with developing our ability to observe our own thinking in a new way.
We can begin this process with a specific framework to help us explore levels of thinking in terms of paradigms. Of course, there are many different ways this could be and has been framed—the framework is simply an invitation to reflect through a specific lens. This one is inspired by a dear and recently departed mentor Carol Sanford, who will be one primary source of our thinking moving forward:
Take a moment to reflect on your own thinking and practice. What patterns do you recognize? What is the dominant paradigm in your organization or community? What effect does it have on your ability to create unique value for others?
What potential can you begin to see in shifting up to higher levels of thinking? How does this relate to your ability to adapt to emerging technology as an individual, team, organization, community, field, or industry? What is required of you to make this shift? To support others to do the same?
Hold these questions and the framework above lightly for the moment. There are no quick and easy answers here—part of a central point. From the mechanistic paradigm we rely on “expert authorities” to deliver us best practices, how-to guides, blueprints, and so on. We want a simple recipe we can follow. Can you observe a part of you looking for such a recipe?
We’ll dive further into this framework and others in future posts.
For now, take a moment to reflect. What happens as you begin to shine a light on these levels with the aim of lifting your thinking up?
Feeling called to dive in deeper? Check out A Brief Introduction to Developmental Leadership.