Model Knowledge Mindfulness to Transform Your Organization’s Culture
All around the world, educators of all kinds — from grade-school teachers to college professors — are fretting about ChatGPT. Suddenly, every single student has easy access to a technology that will literally do their homework for them — and, in many cases, get better grades than the students would have done themselves.
As a former college professor and administrator, I, too, am wary about the impact of this tool on our students’ abilities and growth. But as a business leader and entrepreneur, I know this is just the tip of the iceberg.
We’re at risk of training a generation of workers whose first instinct, when faced with a difficult task, is to ask an AI tool to come up with a solution for them instead of using their own mental faculties to sort, synthesize, and reconfigure the task or issue at hand.
Humanize Your Workforce
This is a challenge to which many business leaders haven’t yet given much thought. On the one hand, we want our employees to capture the productivity boost AI tools promise to deliver.
But in a world where every employee has access to AI, the only way for companies to make the best of this technology’s strengths — while also being aware of and mitigating the risks it brings — will be to simultaneously emphasize and cultivate uniquely human insights, creativity, and knowledge.
One college professor recently warned his students that AI might be able to write an essay for you, but it can’t “make you into a fully autonomous human being, with your own ideas, feelings, and goals.”
That basic humanity is the secret sauce that every employee will have to bring to the mix to succeed in the AI era — and it’s the thing that every leader will need to work to cultivate both in themselves and their teams.
Empower Your Employees
Bringing out this basic humanity isn’t an easy thing. In fact, it creates significant organizational and cultural challenges.
To succeed as leaders, we’ll need to equip our employees to trust their instincts, listen to others, and make smart decisions when dealing with new technologies, challenges, and opportunities.
Now more than ever, we’ll need to help our employees elevate their knowledge maturity and integrate the learnings and efficiencies that come with using AI tools into a broader landscape of rich and richly interconnected knowledge assets.
Model Knowledge Mindfulness
We can’t micromanage this process or impose sweeping one-size-fits-all rules about how AI tools are used in our organizations. The decisions will need to be made on the level of small teams or even individual workers.
But we also can’t default to damage control. Instead, we need to model knowledge mindfulness for our teams—and trust that the more they see us leveraging the totality of our knowledge and cultivating human connections with others, the more they, too, will choose to lean into their own humanity as they go about their daily tasks.
The key here is that we must offer proactive leadership that helps employees understand their role, the company’s values, and the need to serve the entire ecosystem.
The tech may change, but the core leadership values and skills required for success remain the same. In a world of ubiquitous AI—and in a world of employees who’ve grown up using AI tools—we will need knowledge mindfulness more than ever.
