When I was a kid, my father taught me how to sail. At first I sailed in racing dinghy’s never far from the shore. In high school, we graduated to cruising boats. While we never intended to do oceanic cruising, but the shoreline was beyond sight, and one of the challenges was knowing where we were and if we were going in the right direction.
My dad’s solution to this was to teach me celestial navigation. I learned how to use the tools like sextants, compasses, and plot our course on maps with dividers. I thought all of this was almost comical because when he served in the Coast Guard, he was responsible for developing the global navigation systems. Initially, it was Loran, but as satellite navigation was coming into being, it displaced Loran.
I kept whining to him, “Why do I have to learn all this crap? The systems you designed do all the work for us, we just have to set our course into the nav system and it tells us what to do!”
He responded, “It’s important to understand navigation. If the systems go down, you always have something to fall back on. But more importantly, understanding how navigation works helps you better understand what the systems are doing, whether they do the right thing, and when it might be better to override the systems and do something different. If you don’t have the basic understanding of navigation you won’t know how to do this.”
Today, each of us experiences this concept when we plug an address into our GPS systems. While they usually come up with a “right” answer, they don’t necessarily come up with the best answer. We may know short cuts, or where traffic always slows down. I don’t know how many times my GPS systems insistently say, “You aren’t following my directions, you need to make a U turn!!!!”
We’ve seen all sorts of tools that eliminate the need for us to “think.” Again, in high school, I transitioned from using slide rules to my little HP calculator. Addition became so easy, I never had to mutter to myself, “Don’t forget to carry the 4….,” the calculator gave me the answer. And countless tools/technologies have taken over more of what we do. And they have been very powerful, they enable us to be much more productive. I have endless information at my fingertips. I have tools that take care of a lot of the mundane tasks–frankly, those that didn’t require much thinking, but needed to be done.
In theory, many of these tools/processes are intended to free up our time to think and engage others. In theory, these tools should expand our capability to think. AI tools are the latest rounds of these productivity tools. Theoretically, they should help us see things that may have been impossible to see before. They can help enrich our understanding, enabling us to engage each other with far more relevance and effectively.
We can look back at how things have changed in the past couple of decades (pre LLM). It used to be I had to figure out how to make a good prospecting call. I had to figure out who to call, I had to do research, I had to put together a call plan. In that process, I kept thinking, “Is there a better way to do this? What if something goes wrong? Am I considering everything that’s important?”
That process enabled me to handle virtually everything that came up in the conversation. And if I couldn’t, I was equipped with the ability to say, “I need to do some research and get back to you…”
All of these things have been eliminated with modern selling technologies and approaches. We are told who to call, we are provided the research on the individuals and their organizations, we are provided the scripts. We know longer have to think about any of these things, we no longer have to understand what all that means, we just do what we are told to execute.
And we fail! Mountains of data show increasing failure rates. Even though we have all the answers, we don’t have the right answers or the right questions. If we stumble on one, we don’t know what it means and how do deal with it. We fail to connect in virtually every way, but the most important is human to human.
While these tools should expand our capability to think and execute in meaningful ways, instead we are outsourcing our ability to think, reason and engage. And when things go wrong, we can’t respond. And when things go right, we can’t leverage things as effectively as we might. All because, we no longer have the ability to think, reflect, or figure things out, we’ve outsourced the thinking to the tools and scripts.
Overlay this with AI and the LLMs. Where they offer the ability to help us expand our thinking, instead we outsource our thinking to them. And because of the propensity for these models to respond in a way that makes us happy, the bar for the thinking we outsource is very low.
There are chasms in interpersonal, meaningful engagement within our organizations and between our organizations and our customers. We bridge these through caring, deep empathy, and our ability to think things through, with others and figure these things out.
While all the technologies and AI have always provided the capability to help us do this in very powerful ways, we’ve not leveraged them in the ways that help us achieve this.
My dad never expected me to have to use celestial navigation. Our boats had the most current navigational technologies. He taught me celestial navigation to help me learn how to think about it and how to leverage the tools to greater effect than I might have without that background.
Are we leveraging our technologies and tools to help improve the quality of our thinking, problem solving and engagement, or have we surrendered those to the bots?
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