Interview with Annie Hardy at Cisco Live Amsterdam. Convergent thinking (logical, systematic, best-solution) is what AI is good at; divergent thinking (creative, non-linear, brainstorming) is what strategists are good at. Discusses the DIKW pyramid, the impact on convergent-thinker roles (engineers, mathematicians, project managers), and the leadership gap in helping people bridge to AI-era roles.

Transcript

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Hey everybody, we’re out here at Cisco Live in Amsterdam and I ran into Annie and we were having a conversation that I thought was really fascinating with AI and the human brain and how convergence and divergence make a difference. Can you give us more detail on that conversation? Yes, this is a topic that I think is very underrepresented in the narrative today. So if we think about what AI does and what it doesn’t do, what it does well and what it doesn’t do well, and what the pipeline is for what it will do, we think about how AI synthesizes things. It converges information into a way that we can act upon it. So we look at the DIKW pyramid — that’s data, information, knowledge, wisdom. So the term “knowledge workers” came from the DIKW pyramid. The first layer of computation took data and turned it into information. And now we’ve had knowledge workers that take information and add context to it. And then the wisdom part was actually supposed to take knowledge and determine the best path forward — not just what choices do we have, but what should we do? And so that was always human workers: take the information, synthesize it into actions, then take the actions. So what’s happened is artificial intelligence is taking over some of that knowledge layer, and there are different impacts to the future of work. One of the impacts is people who are convergent thinkers, where they’re really good at taking a lot of information and synthesizing it and providing knowledge — like engineers, for instance, being able to understand code, fix things, provide things. If they’re a mathematician doing calculations and convergent work, project management, executive assistance — there are certain roles being really impacted right now by artificial intelligence. Convergent people who are extra — like their superpower — engineers, superpower is convergence. What they’re going to see is impact, because that’s what AI is really, really good at. And the problem I have with it is every brain is not convergent. Every brain is not divergent. We have a beautiful difference in the way different brains function.

But as AI starts to take over convergent work, I keep hearing leaders saying, “Oh, you’ll be able to be strategic in your job. You’ll be able to go and think about big ideas and do something else and let the robot do that job.” The problem I have with that is that’s not how everyone was created. We have people that are convergent and that’s their superpower and they love to do it and they’re great at it. And then we have people who are divergent, like me, that are like, I don’t really care about the details. I don’t want to deal with the details. I want to deal with the big ideas. But not everybody thinks that way. Prompt engineering, as we discussed, is a great example. I think there’s been a lot of assumptions about, “oh, we’re just going to give you the tool and then you can prompt it any way you like,” but it’s actually — prompt engineering is a bit of an art. It’s not super easy to understand how to do it. It takes a lot of expertise and it’s just not ultra easy to be excellent at prompting.

But we keep saying it. I think it’s a challenge to me that leaders today don’t recognize the fact that some of the superpowers that their existing teams have had — the convergent thinkers who have made so many things happen — they’re going to be heavily impacted by AI. And in the future of AI, the controversial part of my perspective is that I don’t know what we’re going to do with convergent thinkers who aren’t strategists once AI takes over more and more of the convergent task.

I see a lot of examples of people doing the prompt engineering versus programming, and it’s almost an art form. It’s like I’m really amazed by it. I’m not sure I would have thought of it out of the box, but there’s so many just art forms and communication styles, it looks like. Yes. So, I think what’s going to be interesting is I really am hoping that we get better at making sure convergent thinkers — we understand their brains and can help them shift. Right now, it feels like everyone is expecting them to be somebody they’re not, and it’s not giving them a toolkit. Like, you haven’t been given the right toolkit to be really, really good at prompt engineering, for instance. You’re like, “Wow, I wouldn’t have thought about that.” That’s great. The question is, they want you to become a prompt engineer. Leaders have to figure out how to bridge that gap. Expecting you to do it without giving you a very detailed playbook and something to get really good at, helping you find a path forward to what excellence in your role looks like. Right now, leaders need to do more.

Yeah, that’s just some really insightful information — taking human biology into this technical AI world, infusing those. I love this conversation. Awesome. So, if I wanted to keep up with some of the trends or the analysis, there’s resources that you have available that you’ve mentioned before — can you give us some more of that? I have a brand new resource, actually. So one is they can follow me — I’m talking about this all the time on LinkedIn. But the other is there’s a brand new book out called “Paddle Forward.” It’s a book about teaming with artificial intelligence. And the reason it’s really cool is that it talks about people who are convergent thinkers and what their role is as you go into the AI era. It’s something I just started reading last week. Highly recommend it, and I think for any leader, any technologist, they’ll learn a lot from it — but also practitioners, they can try to find their footing a little bit. It’s a place to start. So that’s what I would recommend. That’s awesome. Thanks so much, Annie. I appreciate it. Thank you.

[Book referenced: “Paddle Forward: Teaming in the Age of AI” by Pat Bodin]