Six years ago, a mysterious virus began circulating the globe, and with it came widespread fear and uncertainty. Today, we know the perpetrator as COVID-19, and it has become as treatable as the common cold. But back then, the coronavirus pandemic presented a highly threatening set of unknowns, which we advised people to manage through a mixture of optimism and realism: optimism that we’d get through it all, but realism to accept it would be extremely difficult along the way.
Nowadays, AI presents a similar kind of threat. Nobody knows exactly what impact AI will come to make on our lives, but we do know it’s already creating a massive sense of threat within our organizations. People are scrambling to make sense of the new technology, much as they were sent scrambling to understand COVID-19. They’re asking questions like, What does this mean for my livelihood? Is my job safe? What am I going to do? Out of fear or anger, many are actively sabotaging their company’s AI efforts.
The wisdom for today’s leaders is much the same as it was for our last global crisis. Leaders need a way to help employees see AI as a useful tool while being pragmatic about its dangers. Specifically, leaders’ focus should be on managing people’s sense of threat, staying growth-minded to build skills that help them adapt to the new tools, and focusing on delivering clarity over certainty.
If leaders can help their team members see AI as a tool that presents new opportunities to learn and grow, rather than a threat to avoid, organizations face the best chance of thriving where others merely survive.
To the brain, change is scary
Whether it’s a warning light on your car’s dashboard or a global pandemic, change makes us uncomfortable. Worse than that, it usually fills us with dread. We can thank our ancestors from thousands of years ago for giving us brains highly sensitive to change. When resources were scarce, ancient humans relied on the safety of strong social ties and a semi-predictable food supply to survive. Threaten those, and we become highly alert and vigilant to protect ourselves.
The same happens today, even with all our modern creature comforts. Now it happens mostly in social settings, like when your boss tells you to start using an AI platform that can seemingly do your job in a fraction of the time. All at once, your brain goes into panic mode. The SCARF® Model of social threat and reward helps explain this response. AI can easily trigger a five-alarm fire of threat to our senses of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness — and perhaps for good reason, given the research tying AI use to burnout.
We’ve even seen massive technological change send us into panic mode before. Today, electricity is widely accepted as an essential, basic need. But in the early 20th century, during the advent of electricity, it was anything but. People rejected the mysterious force and wondered what good it could serve to have heaps of live copper wire snaking through town. Professional lamplighters revolted.
More than a century later, the backlash and fear around AI certainly seems to echo electricity’s spread into the mainstream. We may not yet know how AI will ultimately be most useful to society in the way electricity has become essential to modern life, but the early benefits of AI are clear enough to merit thoughtful consideration. (As we’ve seen firsthand, AI holds great promise to reinvent leadership coaching on a massive scale, for much less cost.)
Here is where we arrive at a paradox: Change is scary, but it often produces changes that improve people’s quality of life. So, what is the right mindset for navigating such a tumultuous era?
The need for a growth mindset
Vice Admiral James Stockdale offers a model for enduring difficult times without losing one’s sense of hope. During the Vietnam War, Stockdale spent seven years as a prisoner of war in one of North Vietnam’s most brutal camps. In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins describes Stockdale’s blend of optimism and realism as the Stockdale paradox: He knew times were tough, but he always believed he’d eventually make it out.
Stockdale’s optimism reflects an attitude tilted toward improvement. Psychologists use the term “growth mindset,” meaning one’s situation or skills can be improved with persistent, focused effort. Our new AI era demands a growth mindset from every team member. Change is simply too rampant and widespread to stick one’s head in the sand. Managing threat effectively requires a belief that what’s happening can, in some ways, leave a positive impact. Co-existing with AI means accepting it may have some small benefits, even if the downsides are perceived to be far greater.
Likewise, Stockdale’s realism reflects the understanding within growth mindset that not everything can be perfect. We can’t all become the best in the world at a particular skill, and AI won’t be the silver bullet that allows us all to carve out lives of leisure. A more reasonable mindset views AI as a tool that can help us become more effective in certain domains, and perhaps free us up to think more deeply about topics we deem more important. A growth mindset also prompts us to think about how we can improve our effectiveness with AI over time.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella famously called his culture at Microsoft a company of learn-it-alls, not know-it-alls. That is the goal with AI: Focus on learning and adaptability, and don’t get discouraged if it feels strange for a while. Progress is what matters.
Navigating an uncertain future
Looking toward the future, there’s still a lot we don’t know. That itself is a point of clarity: our lack of foresight, or what is commonly referred to as a “known unknown.” So often, managing change within organizations is about identifying and communicating to others the known unknowns — and then communicating when ignorance turns into knowledge, to keep people feeling safely in the loop.
For example, AI’s primary use within organizations is currently an assistant-like agent that can perform tasks and respond to users’ prompts for information. It’s possible that in the not-too-distant future AI will come to take an entirely different form, with more autonomy and intelligence. Because of these unknowns, leaders should be mindful not to offer too much certainty prematurely, or optimism masquerading as realism.
Instead, whenever there is extreme uncertainty, like there was at the beginning of the pandemic, our advice has always been to focus on creating clarity. That means emphasizing knowns and unknowns, specifying timelines, and giving frequent updates when leaders learn new information. While certainty requires reliable knowledge about a situation, clarity allows for ambiguity and lack of knowledge, which itself is calming during times of widespread uncertainty.
While our tech interfaces are getting more seamless, the technology we use to process these changes hasn’t changed. Our brains are ancient machines. They demand more care and attention to work properly than we are used to giving to our everyday tech. But by managing people’s mental states amidst massive change, whether a pandemic or a technological disruption, leaders put their organizations in the position to stay engaged and capable of high performance. Team members will be able to respond productively if an unpredictable technology remains unpredictable.
