Is it the end of humanity or the dawn of a brilliant tomorrow? Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its new uber popular disciples Chat-GPT etc. have us spinning about in psychic confusion and chaos as we mortal humans try desperately to keep pace with the monster unleased.
So, who better to demand answers from than those in the eye of the storm and about to be catapulted into the Canadian workplace? At University Canada West this Spring we assembled 15 teams from 68 students in both the MBA Change Management and Leadership courses. These students with workplace experience from about 10 different countries had a “simple” mission. Produce a team paper in three months that shows through empirical research and critical thinking just what the heck does the latest chatbot explosion of awareness, use, and investment mean to society, culture, business, academia, and especially leadership and change approaches.
The result? A total of about 79,000 words, charts, tables, insights, dozens of references, personal tales, and conclusions about this futuristic airplane of global knowledge that we’re flying while we’re not just still building it, but not even certain if we have the right parts and navigation tools! Here’s just a small taste of their work taken from a sampling of papers:
- “Society, in general, is facing a significant challenge due to the presence of this new actor that directly influences many aspects of the daily life of the planet’s inhabitants. The key to this great challenge lies in how and to what extent to use them without affecting or tarnishing our ethical integrity.”
- “Future leadership styles will be redefined by Al, working in collaboration with human leadership to enhance the management of companies. Therefore, Leaders need to investigate how to alter their leadership style to make greater use of AI decision-making capabilities (Xiong, 2023). In this regard, visionary leadership, which some researchers consider a form of leadership, has lately gained popularity.”
- “However, in today’s world, writing and research ethics have significantly been flawed through various mechanisms, such as plagiarism and the utility of artificial intelligence, as posted by Muhammad Shidiq (2023). In our opinion, this practice has a great impact on the students utilizing ChatGPT as it limits their capacity to maintain ethical practices and critically unable to grasp concepts that need to be learned during the research process (M. Mijwil, et al., 2023).”
In some cases, the student’s collective work was parallel to current and emerging thinking about AI. However, in many other cases the application of imagination and critical thinking by students revealed some very big questions, not dissimilar to the post-pandemic leadership period we are still stumbling through.
What is leadership in an AI world? We hear tidbits of the phrase “AI Leadership,’ but is this just another flashy and opportune marketing label regurgitating the same old, same old? What is apparent is that the ancient labels of transformational, transactional, servant, situational, and the list goes on, just don’t quite address the nature of AI, a powerful machine applying instantaneous iterations of the world that exists, offering to program our responses in a mechanistic, deterministic fashion not too unlike Frederick Taylor’s good ol’ Scientific Management of the 1920s.
What is “change management” in an AI dominated world? The very nature of AI “personifies,” (“machinifies?)” not only constant change but exponential changes occurring in a nano-second of imperfect “evidence-based” results. Successful change approaches are not about “change” at all and certainly not the false predictability of “management.” They are more about what William Bridges teaches us about transitions going from one psychological state to another with emotions and the human factor foremost in guiding the way.
Will AI, machine learning, snappy algorithms tracking our every tap of the keyboard replace the intuition, empathy, and emotional connections that our brain’s over one billion neurons, snapping synapses, and clever dendrites offer?
Eli Lawrence Sopow Ph.D. 