How To Show Your Value In The Age Of AI
Nir Bashan for FORBES Magazine
AI has not eliminated creative work. What it really has done is eliminate unoriginal thinking. In a workplace environment where just about everyone is using AI, the ones who are truly creative and innovative are getting ahead. And the ones who offload that to the AI systems?
They are stuck.
The real divide at work these days is between these two groups: there are task doers and people who think differently. The task doers are using AI, but they are not getting ahead. Why? They are simply offloading their creative thinking to a machine. And the machine can never be creative. Sure, it can look like creative. Heck – it may even fool us into appearing creative. But at the end of the day, creativity will always remain a human advantage. So the people who think differently? They are getting ahead by using creativity at every touch point. Even with AI.
Here are three solid ways you can join the ranks of the people who think differently at work instead of being exposed as the task doers who never had creativity in the first place.
Ask Better Questions
Stop asking “What should I create” or “How can I prepare these slides for the presentation.” Start to ask better questions. And imbed them with positivity. Ask instead, “What problem do I need to be solving that everyone else is getting wrong” or “What issues am I seeing that others are solving incorrectly.” These questions drive solutions. Challenging yourself to frame questions in a more positive way often requires a look at issues that are contrary to how most people ask questions at work. And this can yield amazing creative and innovative results.
Recent research has shown that simply changing the way we ask questions to focus on better quality and more positivity can improve responses and outcomes. It is something that takes a bit of practice and effort to do but it is not difficult. It is about accepting that probing further and asking questions in a different and more positive way can lead to unexpected outcomes and a plethora of options that were never there before. Simply because you chose to ask in a different way.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has recently said that “Learning to interact with AI is not unlike being someone who is really good at asking questions,”. He is one of those people who think differently, not a task doer. Ask better questions.
Focus on Meaning, Not Output
In the age of AI, volume has taken a back seat to meaning. Because AI can generate infinite output. Literally AI makes a bunch of busy work seamless. There are a million and one ways that we can ask AI to give us variations, changes and volume for just about any prompt. Ask AI to give you 10 pages of charts based on a one sentence input? It can do that easily. Want 16 pages of spreadsheet based on one calculation? Sure thing. Impressive? I don’t know, maybe. Meaningful? Hardly.
Here’s the secret: AI cannot determine what, in the abundance of results it generates, is quality. It has no idea what is good. Only creative humans can do that. And only creativity gives us that ability to decide what to keep in and what to cut out. That editing capability is a creative tool that people who think differently at work practice often. The task doers just take the bulk output of AI, without pruning for meaning, and think that it makes them look impressive. All it does is expose them as lacking effort at work to be creative.
So instead of focusing on volume and quantity, focus on the meaning and quality of your work instead.
Get Comfortable Being Wrong
Probably the best determination of whether you are a doer or a person who thinks differently at work is your willingness to step out of your comfort zone and get things totally wrong. I mean completely 100% incorrect. Most professionals avoid this like the plague, but that is exactly why they are replaceable.
Getting it wrong in any way, shape or form forces us to find different paths to the truth. And it often comes with an amazing side benefit: it gives us vital and critical feedback. Feedback on how we did. Feedback on where we may have gotten it wrong. Feedback on why the approach may not have worked and feedback on what approach may end up working instead.
It is with this feedback that we can then learn how to ultimately get it right. But we can never get there if we live in fear of making mistakes and we don’t want to be wrong. So step out of your comfort zone, even if it is only for something low stakes like one meeting where you say something incorrectly on purpose or you quote an inflated sales number for instance. These and other techniques can put you on the road to be a person who thinks differently at work.
It turns out that AI did not lower the value of creativity. It raised the standard. If your work was replaceable by AI, it’s not because AI became creative. It is because you weren’t being creative in the first place. The next generation of doers will find it more and more difficult to achieve gainful employment, while the people who think differently using the tools above will forever be in demand. And for those who are willing to invest effort into implementing creativity as a habit, the future is your for the taking.
