326. Rethinks: The Secrets to Getting the Information You Need from AI
Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques
The episode explores how to transition from using Generative AI as a simple search engine to utilizing it as a sophisticated 'thinking partn
Key takeaways
- Treating AI as an 'oracle' or search engine results in underperformance compared to treating it as a conversational partner.
- The FIXIT methodology (Focused, Ideate individually, eXtend context, Interactive, Team incubation) provides a structured approach to prompting.
Main topics
- Generative AI as a creative partner
- The FIXIT prompting framework
Notable quotes
If you approach AI like an oracle or like a search engine just looking for the answer... you end up underperforming.
Conclusion
To unlock true innovation with AI, users must move past transactional
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:00) Hi, Matt here. I am super excited to share that our September newsletter is now available. Our newsletter shares exciting things we have going on in the next month or so, and you'll learn practical, tactical skills for handling conflict in your life. That's Think Fast, Talk Smart on LinkedIn or under resources at faster, smarter.io. And now a word from our sponsors. Their support covers the cost of production, allowing us to bring you this episode free of charge. The more time I spend thinking, teaching, and communicating clearly, the better I can do the work that really matters to me. And one thing that helps is spending less time just getting up to speed. Before I reply to an email, prepare for a meeting, or follow up on a conversation, there can be a lot of context to sort through. That's why Superhuman Go stood out to me. It's from the makers of Grammarly, which I've relied on for years. And unlike AI tools that require another tab and often require me to explain what I'm working on, Superhuman Go works where I already work. It's already up to speed and right there when I need it. I can make sense of a long email thread, prepare for a meeting, or draft a response without switching apps or losing my place. Go handles some of the most repetitive work that I do so I can stay focused on the work that actually needs me. Try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com. Speaker 3 (1:28) AI can generate answers in seconds, but the quality of those answers depends on the quality of the conversation. I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Rethinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. We're revisiting my conversation with Jeremy Utley and Kian Gohar to explore how conversational AI can become a true thinking partner, helping individuals and teams solve problems more creatively, and communicate more effectively. Enjoy this journey into our communication vault. The promise of AI is tremendous. Yet most of us, if we're using it at all, are using it incorrectly. It's not about a transaction. Speaker 2 (2:17) It's about a conversation and interaction. Speaker 3 (2:21) I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I am really excited to chat with Jeremy Utley and Kian Gohar. Jeremy is a repeat guest to Think Fast, Talk Smart. He's an adjunct professor specializing in creativity and entrepreneurship at Stanford and the author of Idea Flow, the only business metric that matters. Kian is founder of Geolab and former executive director at Singularity University. He's the bestselling author of Competing in the New World of Work. Welcome, Jeremy and Kian. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me back. Such a joy to be here with you. All right, shall we get going? Let's do it. To get us started, Kian, I'm curious, what motivated you and Jeremy to look at the impact of AI on creativity and problem solving? Speaker 2 (3:16) So in my business, we coach teams to achieve complex business goals through team transformation practices. Sometimes this involves tackling a difficult innovation project. Sometimes it's struggling with change management. But it always boils down to this one issue, which is how can we solve this problem? And that usually entails human ideation and prioritization. And I wanted to see if we can bring a new technology tool into the mix to get better ideas. And given that I've been teaching AI in Silicon Valley to executives for a long time, that was always my hunch. But it wasn't until ChatGPT became publicly available that I had the aha. And I didn't quite know how it could be useful. to the issue of problem solving on Teams, but I had a hunch. And so we designed the study together to learn from real world practice of how teams might use AI to get better ideas to solving problems. And what we did was we recruited hundreds of participants from many companies in Europe and the US, and we asked them to identify a particular pain point within their organization or a problem that they needed to solve for, something that was real. And then... we actually gave half of the participants in each of these problem-solving ideation workshops had access to ChatGPT and the other half didn't have access to it. So they were just thinking on their own as humans. And then the other half had humans plus AI. And we went through a problem-solving ideation exercise. And at the end of it, we asked the problem owners or the executives who shared with us the particular pain points to grade all the various ideas. From A, being spectacular, all the way to D, not worth pursuing further. And so we ran this blind study to understand how generative AI can facilitate problem solving, ideation, and collaboration Speaker 1 (5:09) with real world examples. The other thing that we did was we asked participants before and after the session how they felt about collaboration and problem solving and ideation because we wanted to see. What was the impact of just a standard brainstorming session on someone's attitude towards problem solving and collaboration and innovation? And what was the impact of a session that included generative AI? Did it have a differential impact on participant sentiment? And the research to me is fascinating. Jeremy, can you summarize the Speaker 3 (5:42) results of the research you and Kian did and relate it to the quality of idea generation and the feelings people have about... the ideas that were created. Speaker 1 (5:52) Very broadly speaking, we found that teams, if they want to outperform using AI, they need to adhere to certain practices. And sadly, most teams do not. So despite the potential to dramatically outperform, most teams leave the vast majority of their innovation potential on the table when they use AI. When you approach AI like an oracle or like a search engine just looking for the answer, it may feel like magic. but the data shows you end up underperforming. If you want to get world-class results and outperform, you can't approach it like an oracle. You need to instead approach AI like a conversation partner. And that doesn't feel nearly as magical. It feels more like work. And for that reason, the teams that outperform actually feel worse than the teams that underperform. It's very counterintuitive. I Speaker 3 (6:43) find that absolutely fascinating. And I also find that... Interestingly, the ability to have a good conversation with AI is what makes the difference for creating valuable ideas and solving problems. Speaker 2 (6:55) Tian, can you go into a little more Speaker 3 (6:57) depth with the counterintuitive findings that Jeremy just shared? Why do you think it is that AI-assisted teams that delivered worse solutions actually felt better about their work, and the AI-assisted teams who delivered better outcomes actually felt worse related to their non-AI-assisted counterparts? Speaker 2 (7:15) Because rewiring our brains to act differently takes practice. And we professionals have decades of experience or certain ways of doing things. And we're asking them to work differently now with a different workflow. And that's hard. It's like going to the gym after not having exercised for a long time. It really sucks. And you