HRHeadStart #78: Will AI Fix Work; Creative Thinking

The Talent Agenda

AI holds great promise to completely transform the way we work. It might just offer the panacea to escape the drudgery of work and free up time for value-added work. A recent study from Microsoft highlighted three key findings:

• Digital debt is costing us innovation. The ever-increasing flow of data, emails, meetings etc. often outpaces our ability to process it all meaningfully. Everything feels important and we are always playing catch-up. We struggle to find uninterrupted focus time in our workdays. And we spend more time communicating than creating.

  

• There’s a new Employee-AI alliance. While 49% of people say that they are worried about AI replacing their jobs, 70% would prefer delegating as much work as possible to AI to manage their workloads. Employees seem to be looking at AI to assist with administrative tasks, analytical work, creative work and information search. Business leaders are also more focused on applying AI to increase productivity rather than reducing headcount.

  

• AI literacy is key. Leaders surveyed said it’s essential that employees learn when to leverage AI, how to write great prompts, how to evaluate creative work, and how to check for bias. Skills such as analytical judgement, flexibility in integrating AI with workflows and emotional intelligence will become even more important.

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Working Better

We all want to be the person who comes up with creative ideas to solve problems. But how could we build this ideation muscle? In this compelling talk by Adam Grant, you will learn how everyone can challenge the status quo, come up with original ideas and make an impact. Some insights that you might enjoy:

• Moderate levels of procrastination allows us to come up with unconventional ideas.

• The first mover advantage is a myth; what matter is the ability to come up with different and better ideas even if you are building on others’ ideas.

• Original thinkers have a mindset of rejecting the default option and exploring alternatives.

• The best thinkers actually have a large number of bad ideas. They fail the most because they try the most. But they increase the probability of coming up with a winning idea by continuously trying out new ways of doing things.

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Tiny Thought

“Education isn’t something you can finish.” ~ Isaac Asimov