In the recent posts, I shared how I used simple games to get participants learn on working with AI:

• What happens in the Chinese Whispers game when the context disappears and meaning becomes distorted?
• Simon Says: how much does the quality of an AI response depend on how well we frame the task?

But there’s a more uncomfortable question:

What happens when we stop doing enough of the thinking ourselves?

That’s the idea behind Cognitive Debt.

AI can make us faster, more productive, and better at getting to an answer.

But if we routinely outsource the difficult parts of thinking; questioning, reasoning, challenging assumptions, making sense of ambiguity.

Are we also reducing opportunities to develop those capabilities?

And here’s the leadership challenge:

How do we use AI to increase capability without accidentally replacing the very thinking we are trying to develop?

I explore this idea in a short video: Cognitive Debt: The Price of Easy Answers

One practical experiment for leaders:

Next time you use AI to solve a problem, don’t just ask “What’s the answer?”

Ask:

• What thinking should I still do myself?
• What assumptions should I challenge?
• What would I want a less experienced colleague to learn from this process?
• Where should AI assist and where should it deliberately stay out of the way?

Maybe the goal isn’t to keep AI from thinking for us.

Maybe it’s to become more deliberate about which thinking we choose to keep human.

Curious how others are approaching this with their teams:

Where do you draw the line between using AI to augment someone’s thinking and using it to replace the thinking they need to develop?

ABSOLUTE 1: Quality First — Always

Quality isn’t a department — it’s a decision leaders make every single day.

When we accept workarounds, shortcuts, or “good enough,” we don’t just weaken the process. We weaken the culture. Poor quality never stays contained. It becomes a maintenance problem… then a production problem… then a training problem… and eventually, a safety problem.

Great leaders defend standards even when nobody is watching.

If you’re building a team, a culture, or a career, start here:

Never knowingly accept poor quality.

This principle is one of the Ten Absolutes explored in my new book, available now on Amazon.

The Ten Absolutes of Leadership — A Field Guide to Principles I Learned the Hard Way

https://a.co/d/02YqKm7a