I recently attended an executive MIT Sloan program on “Digital Business Strategies”.
It was fascinating to deepen my understanding of AI and Learning Machines, Platforms and Blockchain, Crowd Sourcing and the Economy of “free, perfect and instant”. It was also enlightening to get a better grasp of the strategic challenges posed by digitalisation to firms and organisations in general.
As a scientist and technologist at heart and a business executive in my profession, I enjoy keeping myself updated.
But what really excited me was to hear Professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson share their thoughts about the role of humans in a future dominated by machines: beyond the many dystopian and utopian ideas that have been bouncing around for decades, they share a more realistically optimistic view. Humans can thrive and co-exist with intelligent machines when humans are empowered to exercise their judgment and learn to navigate with ethical creativity the complex, complicated and somewhat messy (ambiguous) future world. McAfee and Brynjolfsson refer to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s groundbreaking work on our brains’ two ways of reasoning, effortlessly intuitive (System 2) and effortfully reasoning (System 1); they stress how we must continue to learn and develop both.
I was so enthusiastic about these thoughts, because they added authoritative support to the empirical work that we at Grooa have done for the last 10 years, designing behavioural models and training methodologies aimed at learning and cultivating the synergistic intuitive and reasoning leadership abilities that can prepare us for a challenging, ambiguous and somewhat still messy future of revolutionised machine-humans interactions. Khaneman’s work has always been one of the key foundations of all our “CLEAR Mindset” Leadership Development Programs.
One of the emerging areas of application that we are especially keen on, is the area of Innovation Leadership, specifically applied to crowdsourcing of innovation. As Prof Linda a. Hill (“Collective Genius”) infers, we need to unlearn some of the traditional ideas about leadership and switch to collective abilities to courageously disagree, learn from each other and co-create.
Based on our earlier work on The CLEAR Mindset, we have now designed an online introduction to the social leadership skills that are indispensable to innovate collectively in a digitalised world.
We recently presented a preview at the Innovation Cafe in Eindhoven (you can watch the recorded sessions here.
If you are interested in attending the complete online course (7 sessions of one hour each, starting October 8, 2020) you can register here. If you want more information, you can directly contact me: laura@grooa.dev-projects.tech
Laura Lozza, Managing Partners