How do we stay human while harnessing the power of AI?

When faced with solving problems, leaders will increasingly turn to AI to look for inspiration, advice and support. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude provide an amazing sounding board for ideas and can generate useful suggestions that might trigger solutions. But how do we balance the role for us humans with the capabilities of these new thinking machines? 

That was the question that I posed this weekend, with the goal of producing a picture that would help me make sense of this for myself.

I started by capturing the processes that we might use to think about a big issue facing a company or a team; around innovation, digitisation, transformation or workforce culture. I’ve run many workshops for leaders and there are lots of steps we can take to analyse and explore.  As you will see these steps are not really linear with many feedback looks and interactions but a rough order might be:

1. Explore the problem
2. Draw the system
3. Sense the changing environment
4. Look beyond immediate effects
5. Consider the nature of the solution
6. Prioritise what matters
7. Generate and test solutions
8. Balance competing demands
9. Use gut decisions informed by evidence
10. Embrace technology with confidence 
11. Engage in playful experimentation
12. Manage problems don’t solve them
13. Turn weak signals into trends
14. Delight beyond functional needs

A rough flow of these steps

I could combine these into fewer steps. The traditional Design Thinking model (Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test) covers many of these but I wanted to add additional layers such as thinking about the bigger picture, considering the nature of the problem, and balancing trade-offs. I also wanted to add in elements of future thinking and playfulness. These feel very human.

Exploring each step

My next task was to explore all of the human elements of each task. I asked myself three things: what was this step about, what was the key question at the heart of this step, and what were the human leadership behaviours that are necessary to enable the step? 

The final task for this exercise was to think of ways that AI might be used to augment and improve each step of the process. 

This is not exhaustive but it was rewarding to think through such a wide variety of applications.

Here then is the completed picture:

Reflecting on the value of this exercise

My biggest insight from creating this model was to reinforce my conviction that relationships between teams, with clients and involving customers are all human dominant activities.  Of course we could hand these to an AI but the result would be poorer decision making and certainly poorer leadership. Of course, AI has the potential to help at every step and if we applied the strengths of technology and data to every step, we’d actually enable better human decisions.

I was also struck by how easy it was to imagine the range of applications and I’m convinced that I need to spend a bit of time in the near future producing examples for each of them. I’m excited.

What do you think? Do you have a opinion about where I should change the model or focus my next efforts? Get in touch.

In case you are wondering, this post was developed without any help from AI!