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If the machine answers in seconds, what is left for us to do? Thinking, and most of us have no time for it.
What mastery of thinking is
Three decisions made on purpose. What deserves my head this week. How much time it gets. And what exactly I am asking, before I ask it. Most of us make all three by accident.
The quality of an answer comes from the clarity of the question. Clarity comes from time spent thinking. There is no shortcut through the machine.
Why it matters now
A poor question always cost a week. The week was also a buffer, and somebody had time to notice the question was poor. Now the poor answer arrives in seconds, and somebody acts on it the same afternoon.
Ask AI the same question as your competitor and you get two versions of the same plan. It draws on what everybody already knows. Two studies found exactly this. People working with AI did better work one by one, and more similar work as a group (Doshi and Hauser; Anderson, Shah and Kreminski).
What changes the substance is what you put in that nobody else has. Your customers, your numbers, your history, your judgement. Innovation is not born by asking the same questions as everybody else.
Waiting for answers is the one old habit that does not carry over. The thinking habits matter more now. Nothing else slows you down enough to check.
Who masters it
Everyone should think about this, leaders most. Their questions set the direction for everybody else, machines included.
I recognise the ones who master it by three things. They can say in one sentence what they want before they ask. They put their own context into the question, the part the machine cannot know. And they check what comes back instead of forwarding it. The more confident people are in the tool, the less they think for themselves, a survey of knowledge workers found (Lee and others).
How they do it
They know where they are before they plan the route. I have sailed across the Atlantic, and the navigator's first job is to know where the boat is. A company that plans from last quarter's report plots a route from where it used to be. With AI the wrong plan just arrives faster.
They check the question before it goes out. What do I want from this, exactly? If I cannot say it in one sentence, I am not ready to ask.
Where the time comes from
In the companies I have worked in, too much of a leader's week went to reporting, and to sales reports that were out of date when printed. Habit, mostly. Nobody stopped to ask whether a human still has to do it.
Before the next report, ask who reads it and what they decide with it. If the answer is nobody and nothing, the report can go.
What helps a leader
Before any tool, the basics. Stress and poor sleep switch thinking off first, and no tool switches it back on.
Then the tools. There are many, and Company Brain is one of them. When they work, the gathering and the reporting go to the machine. That is the promise, and I sell one of these tools, so weigh my words accordingly. In the worst case, a company buys the tools, keeps the reporting, and blames the tools when nothing changes.
It is hard to think big with a head full of somebody else's spreadsheet. The hours can come back, one report at a time. Whether they go to thinking, or to a longer report, is to be seen.