AI might be helping us critically think
There is more and more discussion about AI, how it is being used, its impact on our environment, and the impact on human thinking.
In my experience, the success of an AI inquiry is based almost entirely on the prompt. If you mess up that prompt, if it is too vague or too general, you will get a response that mirrors the quality of your prompt.
Granted, a better prompt doesn't guarantee you will get the information you want, but it is guaranteed you will not get the information you want without putting in a spot-on prompt.
On one hand, you can argue that AI is taking away our thinking skills.
I'm arguing that AI might be helping our critical thinking skills because it demands that you write a solid, critically thought through prompt, if you are going to get the intended results.
In parallel, that AI prompt-writing is a lot like determining the scope of a continuous improvement project. If that scope is not tight, the initiative will fail.
Off the top of my head, there are several reasons why continuous improvement scopes set up the project for failure:
People try to boil the ocean and fix everything at once
People are frustrated by so many broken things and they struggle to narrow down the litany of frustrations to one tight starting point
Inaccurate identification of the best starting point
Lack of hope that any focus will make a difference
Even with a tight scope, and the plan for improvement is solid, the plan may still fail for these reasons:
The leaders who need to see the problem don't want to see it and therefore don't champion the needed improvements
The right people aren't a part of designing the improvements
The timeline is unrealistic for the work that needs to get done
I'm partnering with a continuous improvement specialist right now and we are supporting a lieutenant learn the skills of continuous improvement. The first challenge in this work is understanding the problem and getting to a specific, narrow, well-written scope of what that first project is going to zero in on.
I can't wait to see where this project takes my client. Kerri
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