Today’s businesses are widely embracing AI to boost efficiency and save money, especially when it comes to parsing, generating, and analyzing data. AI, however, can do so much more when paired with “softer” skillsets centered around inquiry.
MIT Sloan senior lecturer Hal Gregersen and EY’s Global CTO Nicola Morini Bianzino explored this gap in Harvard Business Review, urging leaders to consider a fuller picture of what artificial intelligence can help companies achieve.
As they note, pairing skills like “critical thinking, innovation, active learning, complex problem solving, creativity, originality, and initiative” with AI can accelerate the abstract questioning our complex world necessitates. And while the developers of AI systems are compelled to ask astute questions that quash bias, AI can, in-turn, encourage end users to ask more innovative questions as well—the kinds of questions that hone creative problem-solving skills.
These insights from Gregerson and Bianzino are based on research they conducted with tech-forward business leaders across industries and around the world. The pair discovered that these leaders tended to follow one of two paths in order to “strengthen their (and their teams’) inquiry muscles.”
Path 1: Changes to the cadence and pattern of questions
According to Gregerson and Bianzino, one path focuses on using AI to modify how questions are posed, in three areas:
- Question velocity. Because AI can answer questions quickly, 79% of leaders use AI to ask more questions, enabling novel insights. One caveat: more doesn’t always mean better and human judgment remains an imperative part of the inquiry process.
- Question variety. Given AI’s capacity for drawing connections humans can miss from high volumes of data, 94% of leaders ask different questions via AI than they might otherwise. As an example, Gregerson and Bianzino referenced the team at Colgate-Palmolive who used AI to “ask hundreds of less-obvious questions to spark creative thinking about future trends that may be lurking in unexpected places.”
- Question novelty. AI can enable “category jumping” questions, transferring knowledge from one field to a completely different domain—this occurred for leaders using AI 75% of time. The wide span of data AI is able to parse inspires “wilder” questions that can result in answers that incite innovation.
Path 2: Catalytic questions challenge the comfort zone
Because AI often changes where questions lead us, the results can be uncomfortable. A second path, focused on catalytic questions (or questions that give rise to change), can result in leaders realizing where they might be wrong. This process, as Gregerson and Bianzino share, involves “becoming emotionally uncomfortable and behaviorally quiet—the very conditions that, we’ve found, tend to produce game-changing lines of inquiry.”
While this open and, ultimately, vulnerable stance can yield powerful results, it can also be challenging for leaders and teams alike to completely trust and engage with AI. Indeed, the technology can be both supernormal in terms of what it can do and unpredictable in terms of outputs.
The onus is on leaders to create conditions where psychological safety prevails such that AI can open teams up to explore what they may get wrong or don’t yet know. When teams as well as leaders are able to persist in this tension, the outcomes can be exciting enough to fuel even greater perseverance and drive.
A partnership framework
Not unlike humans, AI is still very much a work-in-progress, with shortcomings including a reactive, backward-looking approach to data and inconsistent (or even incorrect) training inputs. As Gregerson and Bianzino observe, “Leaders and their teams must manage such limitations if they are going to treat AI as a creative-thinking partner.”
Leaders must work to keep the relative strengths of humans (imagination and morality, for example) and AI (the capacity to process high volumes of complex data) at the forefront in order for this partnership to be successful. The potential outcomes, including breakthrough thinking and innovation, are well worth the effort of prioritizing inquiry in the business application of AI.
Upcoming Executive Education courses with Gregersen include Questions Are the Answer and Creative Transformation Amid Rapid Change.