Are you one of the 87% of people who use AI at work? If so, which pattern sounds more like you?
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A
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B
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Next question: Which of the above patterns produces long-term value for the organization?
The answer:
Pattern A: Applying critical thinking to AI creates long-term value.
(Pattern B is a liability and may damage value)
We've always needed critical thinking
Everything your secondary school teachers told you is true. Turns out critical thinking is important after all, although how we apply it in the workplace has evolved.
Critical thinking is the mechanism that drives sound judgment and decision-making because it challenges what’s in front of it.
There'd be no Uber if Garrett Camp hadn’t questioned the status quo after struggling to find a cab in central Paris — asking both, “Why is this acceptable?” and “What if it didn’t have to be?”
The same principle of critical thinking applies to every innovation we’ve ever experienced.
Critical thinkers don’t just challenge the status quo; they also help ensure progress is made carefully and thoughtfully. When good ideas like Uber surface, it takes teams of critical thinkers to test those ideas and turn them into reality.
Ten points to the teachers; they were bang on.
The risk of not thinking critically when working with AI is profound
And profoundly concerning. Two terms have emerged to describe how we think when working with AI:
This is when we outsource mental tasks like counting (your calculator), scheduling (your calendar) or tracking nutritional macros (your fitness app). For the most part, cognitive offloading has been a boon to human productivity, and AI is already helping us become more productive. If you’re in the habit of summarizing meeting transcripts or use it to help you write emails in a language you're not comfortable with (yet), you’ll know exactly what we mean. |
Steven Shaw and Gideon Nave of The Wharton School define cognitive surrender as ‘adopting AI outputs with minimal scrutiny, overriding intuition and deliberation’. The risks of cognitive surrendering to organizations include:
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Is cognitive surrendering taking a toll on organizations?
These concepts are quite new, but there’s a growing body of research that points to the answer (if you’d like a deeper dive into the data, read this article).
According to Glean’s Work AI report, we know that the majority of workers use AI every day:
- 87% of people use AI at work
- 75% say it makes them more productive
However:
- Only 13% believe their organization is performing better
The report breaks down how workers use AI in the workplace, categorizing behaviors as either botsitting (when we apply critical thinking to AI output – pattern A in the earlier chart) or the colorful term botsh!tting (when we cognitively surrender to AI output – pattern B in the chart).
Botsitting takes time. AI writer and professor Tom Davenport expressed it well in his Substack when he said:
"If you use genAI in the “right way,” you don’t save a lot of time and effort. The right way, at least if you want to create high-quality content and avoid rotting your brain, is to employ multiple prompts until you get something close to what you want, and then to review it for possible hallucinations. Then edit it to take out the cliché phrases and to add your unique perspective."
On the cognitive surrender (botsh!tting) side, we only need to consider the outcome of mistakes; things like rework, course correction, lack of problem solving and skills atrophy to recognize that it’s going to cost organizations their productivity.
(And this is why, no matter how much time people save upfront by abdicating their thinking to AI, it doesn’t help the business.)
While Davenport suggests that, even at its best, AI will take time, the head of Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, Erik Brynjolfsson, reminds us that the productivity lag is temporary.
He believes that organizations will surge ahead once they’ve had time to re-engineer processes and integrate AI into redesigned workflows.
But for those who surrender their cognition to AI, there’s no U-curve when it comes to diminishing returns; no light at the end of the tunnel.
In fact, before it gets …worse, it’s gotta get worse.
Research from The Wharton School this year found that AI boosts performance when it's right.
When it's wrong, however, people do worse than they would have without AI, because they stop trusting their own judgment.
That’s why the only answer to mitigating productivity losses from cognitive surrender is deliberate training.
How to develop critical thinking skills in the workplace
"When something looks polished, sounds confident, and arrives quickly, as AI content often does, it's surprisingly easy to accept it without fully testing whether it's right."
-Dr. Tanya Boyd, Industrial Organizational Psychologist, Insights
Build a baseline
The first step in critical thinking training is for your people to map out their natural thinking styles and preferences. Understanding our thinking strengths creates a strong and positive foundation for growth.
Why: It’s rare these days to think about our own thinking (very meta) let alone take a moment to celebrate it. But it’s important that people have the confidence to move forward, and knowing where their human thinking fits into this new AI-enabled workplace is a big part of that.
This step also raises awareness of our hidden biases and may illuminate blind spots in our way of thinking that could be holding us back.
Provide opportunities to practice
Tomorrow, when you work in your favorite LLM:
- Challenge one AI output
- Ask one colleague to review it
- Go deep into the research report/article it cites to find the exact quote or research
- Record one decision you almost accepted without questioning
Insights Discovery Critical Thinking
If cognitive surrender is a learned behavior (it is), organizations need a structured way to reverse it.
Insights Discovery Critical Thinking is built on the award-winning Insights Discovery four-color learning model. It’s a facilitated application designed to help organizations develop critical thinking at scale, even across large groups.
Leveraging the Insights personal profile, it introduces a formal decision-making framework to help learners - from solo contributors to the C-suite - weigh evidence and make sound decisions.
How Insights Discovery Critical Thinking works
The experience has six steps.
First, learners bring a real-world challenge to the table and address it using a structured decision-making process.
The problem can be anything from “I need to find 20% savings in my department’s budget” to “My star employee is burnt out, and I’m not sure how to support them.”
Then, working with the Insights decision-making framework, learners consider different solutions to their challenge. They apply practical strategies to eliminate bias and test assumptions, and ultimately become more confident when making judgment calls.
The program leverages the Critical Thinking chapter of each user’s Insights Discovery profile. It includes supporting digital resources and coaching check-ins at the 15 and 60-day mark to embed learning and demonstrate impact.
The result is stronger business performance and teams that can collaborate and innovate, even when working at pace.
The future is bright for critical thinkers
If there’s one thing you can take from this article, let it be this:
The research is clear: Critical thinking is human thinking
Those who lean into our uniquely human skills, things like empathy and discernment, will thrive alongside automation. Those organizations that keep people at the center -and have the foresight to invest in these skills- will quickly outperform those who do not.
Resources used in this article:
Kosmyna, N et al. Thinking Fast, Slow and Artificial: Generative AI Reduces Cognitive Effort While Thinking. SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646
Glean. Work AI Index. https://www.glean.com/work-ai-institute/reports/work-ai-index
Davenport, T. Ten Reasons Why We Won't See Productivity. Substack. https://tdavenport.substack.com/p/ten-reasons-why-we-wont-see-productivity (tdavenport.substack.com)
