Studies on business performance have shown the reality that disruptive destructive AI in the workplace can be a real outcome today.
This is especially true in the absence of group decision-making that I discussed in this article, “Daniel Kahneman, Thinking and Team Building.” Individuals using AI without integrated support from others can make bad decisions and not generate the optimal performance results they anticipate.
Here are the takeaways quoted from BCG’s research article, How People Can Create—and Destroy—Value with Generative AI, with my highlights:
A first-of-its-kind scientific experiment finds that people mistrust generative AI in areas where it can contribute tremendous value and trust it too much where the technology isn’t competent.
- Around 90% of participants improved their performance when using GenAI for creative ideation. People did best when they did not attempt to edit GPT-4’s output.
- When working on business problem solving, a task outside the tool’s current competence, many participants took GPT-4’s misleading output at face value. Their performance was 23% worse than those who didn’t use the tool at all.
- Adopting generative AI is a massive change management effort. The job of the leader is to help people use the new technology in the right way, for the right tasks and to continually adjust and adapt in the face of GenAI’s ever-expanding frontier.
There is a lot of good information in the article. What the article does not seem to do is to look into the advantages of GROUP decision-making and System 2 thiniking to optimize innovation and change in a business environment.
“When using GPT-4 for a task within the tool’s current frontier of competence, nearly all participants improved their performance. Those who used GPT-4 for a task outside this frontier performed worse than those who didn’t use the tool.”
and
“Our study shows that the technology’s relatively uniform output can reduce a group’s diversity of thought by 41%.”
This is a long but interesting reasearch study clearly distinguishing key factors involved with using AI in business situations, too detailed to summarize clearly, so I hope that if this general issue is of interest, do read the actual article. It shows the positive impacts on performance that is attainable, but also points to the current limitations of using AI in its current versions.
Artificial Intelligence and LLMs are a powerful tool for improving individual, team and group performance, yet we continue to need GOOD decision-making from the human brains involved directly in our performance improvement initiatives.
I discuss the bad side of AI and individual’s working solo in my article about “Coffee Shop Collaboration” and the dangers of the “me and my machine” approach in competitive workplace cultures in a short blog. The link is here.
The old “Survival of The Fittest” / competitive days of old need to quickly be shifted to the “All of Us know more than ANY of us” / collaborative work environments.
We must build more collaborative cultures, with individuals at all levels willing and able to look at each other’s works and a culture focused on The Collective Mind and the experiences throughout the organization. There is no silver bullet to optimizing results; what there needs to be is more collaboration across the silos and the divisions.
The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is a powerful tool for smoking out the competitive tendencies and demonstrating the values of good planning, collaboration between teams, active engagement of participants and key aspects of leadership. From the powerful debriefing that can be clearly linked to the above issues and also those of alignment and organizational culture, we can help your organization drive more collaboration at every level and across boundaries.
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Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools.
Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant who is trying to retire!! He now lives in Cuenca, Ecuador.
You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.
Here is a link to a press release about The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine teambuilding exercise and its 30 years of positively impacting people and performance.
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