As a trainer, I get a kick from the smile on the face of someone I’ve trained as they walk out the door (or leave the Teams call). Because they feel a wee bit better about writing, or presenting, or storytelling, for example.
But my biggest fear is that they go back to their laptops, and after a few heady weeks, slip back into their safe old corporate ways. For lots of understandable reasons – lack of time, the feeling of pressure to fit the corporate mould, or plain old force of habit – the good work slowly gets undone.
What already helps
Over the years, we’ve come up with lots of good ways of combatting this. Top-up coaching, just at the point on the forgetting curve that people start to forget what they’ve learnt; teams of champions to praise the good practice they see, and to gently nudge the bad; Toney.
Where AI comes in
I think AI is another great tool to add to that arsenal. But there’s a big caveat.
Great writing, great presenting, great stories, all depend on you doing some good, hard thinking first. And the last thing we should be doing is outsourcing our thinking to AI: that way lies slop.
But once you’ve got some ideas, or a first draft, AI is great as a ‘thinking partner’. Ask it to challenge your argument; get it to critique your writing; let it play the role of a tricky audience and see how it reacts.
Of course, you shouldn’t take its word as gospel; good training helps you develop the critical skills that’ll help you decide what to listen to and what to ignore. (We even have training on using AI more intentionally.)
But because AI is just sitting there on your laptop, you can use it regularly as a sparring partner. That means you’ll end up thinking more about what you do, every day, not less. And that’s a habit we want everyone who comes to our training to get into.
Written by Neil Taylor, Director of Training at Definition.
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