AI and People: Thinking Critically About Our Future – Part Two

In last week’s blog, we covered some of the issues inherent in an AI-driven workplace, including job losses, fruitless upskilling initiatives, and the dumbing down of people in general when AI is allowed to do our thinking for us. This week, we’ll take a look at how you can work at striking a balance between leveraging AI’s speed and efficiency and valuing the critical thinking skills your team brings to the table.

The Ultimate Upskill: Critical Thinking

Did you know that 81 percent of employers say critical thinking abilities are more important than communication skills? What’s more, over 75 percent of jobs listed on the U.S. Department of Labor’s website list critical thinking as a required skill. A recent study of people in the workplace, found that those who scored higher on a critical-thinking test tended to have better workplace performance evaluations.

But what does it mean to have strong critical thinking skills? It means that when AI inundates you with facts and figures, you have a well-honed ability to step back, consider the information from multiple angles, and make the right choices regarding what to do with all of the information, including what actions to take next.

Defining Critical Thinking

The Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking says it is, “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” Reboot, an organization that seeks to “elevate critical thinking in a time of vast technological change,” offers a five-step action plan for people (especially students, employees and employers) to develop these skills, called SHARP, which is an acronym for:

1. Stop:  The first step in better thinking is to intentionally engage in thought. Pause and think about all decisions, apply rational thought, and actively work against responding based on emotions, biases or instincts.
2. Hone: Engage in focused thinking by asking lots of questions. Curiosity and openness improve both thinking and reasoning abilities.
3. Accumulate: Effective thinking requires deep research of ideas and facts. Analyze evidence, gather as much valuable data as possible, and avoid extraneous or illegitimate information.
4. Reason: Use evidence to confirm or discount each hypothesis. Every idea or approach needs to be supported by both evidence and reason.
5. Perspective: Expand your perspective by looking at problems in different ways and from different vantage points. This is particularly important when collaborating with others.

How to Promote Critical Thinking in the Workplace

According to Anisa Zulfiqar, the Business Development Manager at Pearson, a global educational company, “Regardless of the technical requirements of a job or occupation, nearly all require some form of problem solving, creativity, decision making, organizational skills and strategic thinking — and critical thinking helps with all of those.” Anyone whose watched Masterpiece TV in the last five years has undoubtably been exposed to Viking Cruises’ billionaire CEO, Torstein Hagen’s, heavily accented advice to all to “be curious.” This simple life principle of Hagen’s helped build his billion-dollar travel empire, and we daresay putting it into practice at your place of work could do the same for you.

Turn Teams Into Problem-Solving Think-Tanks

Whereas many companies are tempted to layoff people upon discovering AI can do their jobs, that is a knee-jerk reaction that leads to more issues than it solves. After all, who’s going to be buying your products and services during an economic depression caused by companies everywhere laying off employees in mass? A better approach is to think critically about your problems. Let’s line up two out of the dozens of potential variables and use Sureshot’s THINK approach for workplaces to critically assess possible outcomes:

THINK About Problems and Potential Outcomes

1. Layoffs save money in the short term, but have the potential to deplete morale and foster a toxic culture of fear in the long-term. In the process of cutting your losses, you may inadvertently lose great employees, who find another job out of fear they could be next.
2. Thanks to AI, your employees have more downtime and less of the traditional tasks that once kept them busy and productive. You have invested a lot of money in your employees. What if you actively tried to recoup that investment by giving employees bigger problems to solve?

HEAR What Leaders, Peers and Others Think

1. Listen to what other industry insiders and thought-leaders in your predicament have to say about how they handled too much time and not enough work. To obtain honest answers you will likely need to have off-the-record conversations.
2. Consider your founding principles and values and whether or not all possible courses of action are in alignment with them. If not, what needs to change, the values or your actions?
3. Ask all employees about other interests they have within the company. Have them submit problems they see at work that they would like to help solve.

INVESTIGATE All Options and Solutions

1. Consider giving everyone a skills assessment to discover hidden talents you can access.
2.  Develop an inventory of problems that need to be solved across all departments and make it accessible to all. By keeping things open, you invite fresh perspectives. Serendipity favors the curious.
3. Conduct brainstorming sessions and pair employees with different problem-solving partners to invite more innovative thinking. Tie problems to realistic timelines to encourage activity and results.

NEGOTIATE Next Steps to Take.

1. Develop a prioritized list of actions to take. Consider using the Value Complexity Matrix from our webinar transcript on Integrations and the Future of Marketing Automation to develop an unbiased approach.
2. Track each action taken and its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to determine whether or not the actions are a success, a bust, or an opportunity to go back to the drawing board.

KEEP a Record of Lessons Learned and Knowledge to Be Shared

Critical thinking is a process that seeks to empower people to make better decisions. Dictionary.com maintains we arrive at these better decisions through “disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence.” In short, it’s a data-driven approach to better outcomes. Finally, in the immortal words of critical thinker Albert Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

Let’s Solve Problems Together

Here at Sureshot, we take a hybrid tech approach. Yes, we love and use AI, but we also employ an amazing team of people who are skilled in helping you and your team use AI to do more with your data. If you’d like to see what our people + AI approach can do for you, start by taking our free Martech Assessment.