A conversation starter from Combined Arms Consulting: Is this conversation worth pursuing for your enterprise? Please reach out.
**Points covered:**
1. Don't replace the self
2. AI is dangerous if it's the only pathway
3. Dealing with uncertainty builds leaders people want to follow
I have to confess. Over the last week I have been using AI to help me generate these posts. Is that acceptable? Do these conversations represent my insights and intellect?
Yes, they do. Let me explain.
When I did my B.Eco, Post-Grad in Marketing, and my Doctorate in Family Business, the hi-tech tool I used was a quill and inkwell. I had been in the workforce and aligned creative and business networks for over 30 years — review my résumé — so my creative and critical thinking brain was well developed. And then came AI.
What I found was that AI was a great tool to augment those skills, not replace them. And so I generated an AI draft as a basis for my posts. I don't need to, believe me. It just made it easier.
The result: 5% of what AI generates makes it to the final draft. The rest is pure me.
The challenge now is that your brain is quietly switching off. AI is a drug.
Consider what AI brings to the table: access to knowledge, formatting, creation of documents, strategy pathways. Useful. But AI is now outsourcing opinion, creative insights, the wrestling with messy questions. In many cases, these acts replace the human-centric critical thinking that organisations need to survive.
AI is not the problem.
The technology is neutral. A calculator helps a mathematician. GPS does not mean you cannot read a map.
The problem is the person who outsources themselves — as exemplified by university students and professors who prefer to press a button rather than think. Now that's a problem.
The mind muscle makes people valuable. Howard Gardner noted five key variables for effective leaders: cognitive ability, synthesis, creativity, empathy, and ethics. AI can assist in these. But it is the human brain that must drive them.
A leader who outsources their thinking is not more efficient. They are lazy, out of touch, and quite frankly, a problem. Looking for certainty is not a useful characteristic of a leader.
Discomfort forges leaders. Don't outsource it to an inert machine.
The deeper irony is that AI is most powerful in the hands of someone who thinks. It amplifies the thinker rather than replacing them.
A leader without original thought is simply editing someone else's draft — and gradually, they will not know the difference.
Innovation does not emerge from convenience. It comes from friction, from failure, from the stubborn refusal to accept the first answer. It comes from asking why when the easy answer is already sitting in front of you.
The most dangerous thing AI can do for your leadership is make thinking optional.
It never was.
*Asking questions never asked — Combined Arms Consulting*