Encouraging Intelligent Disobedience.
Edition #184
Introduction
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Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession, to drive peak performance.
When AI Thinks Too Much Like a Human.
In this interesting article in Kellogg Insights, the authors argue that Generative AI models are susceptible to the same errors that humans make when interpreting statistical results.
Here are some key highlights from the article:
Humans tend to view the world as dichotomous, rather than as continuous.
“When AI mimics human errors, that’s obviously a bad thing when accuracy is the goal.”
“As with people, this ‘dichotomania’ seems deeply embedded in the way the AI models respond.”
“If they(AI models) perform so erratically on our questions, it raises doubt about their capability for these much more ambitious tasks.”
Read the entire article here.
Leadership Lessons From Indian Army, Mukesh Ambani, Anand Mahindra And Gautam Adani.
This episode from the Indian Business Podcast is an extremely good one on leadership and timeless for a couple of reasons:
First, it has leadership principles with a lot of learnings and insights from India, the Indian Army and iconic Indian businessmen. This is unlike a majority of books and podcasts, which are largely US-centric, with many phenomenal examples from the US. Here, you get to listen to what it takes to be a leader with a lot of nuanced local or country-specific flavour.
Second, there are some really lovely, unique insights and anecdotes from Capt. Raghu Raman, as to what he learnt from the Indian Army, and a lot of the leadership attributes and skills he talks about are truly one-of-a-kind, powerful and inspiring.
If you are an aspiring leader or an experienced one, there are tons of examples, real-life situations of leadership behaviour, advice, and tips from Capt. Raghu Raman, who has generously shared them in abundance across this conversation.
You can also listen to this episode on:
Is McKinsey Losing Its Crown To AI?
Is AI disrupting the Consulting Business? That’s one question that has been hotly debated as companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity have introduced deep research tools that can rival the knowledge and experience of consulting firms.
In this video by The Economist, Jason Palmer, Co-host of The Intelligence podcast, and Tom Lee-Devlin, business editor of The Economist, discuss the business impact and growth that is affecting one of the world’s leading consulting firms, McKinsey.
They argue that McKinsey's nearest competitor, BCG, is growing robustly while McKinsey’s growth and hiring have slowed down. They also highlight that new types of competitors are emerging for consulting firms like Palantir, which grew by 50%. They talk about Palantir’s business model. Although it is an AI software company, Palantir embeds engineers in companies, which end up as competition to these consulting giants.
The real question is, therefore, whether AI is eating consulting?
Click the above link and watch this video. There is also a longer podcast that you can listen to on this topic, if you're interested.
Encouraging Intelligent Disobedience.
‘Intelligent disobedience’ is a term that Capt. Raghu Raman used in his conversation about leadership.
As you think more and more about this term ‘Intelligent disobedience’, you will see that it is such an important aspect to be developed as a culture in an organisation. Also, aspiring leaders need to build this trait as they grow in stature, position and experience.
Why do we need a culture of ‘intelligent disobedience’ in a company?
Today’s companies are no longer like the assembly plants of the industrialised world. They get disrupted because of new technologies and competitors that emerge suddenly. New competitors and technology disruption used to happen once every couple of decades in the past, but today the incidence of this happening is a lot more frequent. Also, the line of business is blurring across many industries. The example of a software AI company like Palantir becoming a competitor to consulting firms was never heard of in the past. Therefore, companies need to build a moat against these disruptions, and the only way this can be done is by creating a culture of ‘Intelligent disobedience’ in their people.
The most curious and paranoid people are those who are constantly looking at businesses as they are today, and they pick up these disruptive signals far ahead of the rest. They are the ones who question why things can’t be done another way, or come up with ideas or solutions that tend to disrupt existing business models and processes. This makes the senior leaders and people around very uncomfortable, and most often discouraged from either expressing themselves or not given the freedom to experiment with some of those ideas. They are forced to ‘follow the herd’ and the norms, and that, in a way, affects the company and its growth over the long term. When a company encourages ‘Intelligent disobedience’, it is a way of encouraging these people to share and bring these early warning signals to the table and find solutions. Therefore, such a culture encourages innovation, incremental improvements, and sometimes breakthrough ideas that the company can benefit from.
Why do leaders need to build the ‘Intelligent Disobedience’ trait?
When you are a leader, the traditional authoritarian or hierarchical leadership is the most comfortable way of doing things. Also, companies build this structure and aura around these leaders through designation, power, position, and span of control. Therefore, as a leader, you will hear more of the same and see more same behaviour in people who work with you.
‘Intelligent disobedience’ is an exact anathema to this way of working. When, as a leader, someone working with you questions your strategic approach or decisions, it makes you feel vulnerable in front of others. Therefore, when you build this trait, it allows you to take in signals that are contrary to your thoughts, your information and experience repository. It allows you to look at opportunities and challenges through a new lens and process signals that are thrown at you, which you may have a blind spot for. Building this trait can make you an intuitive leader, where you curb your instincts to jump to conclusions, but make you consider different perspectives and sense hidden opportunities better. You will also give space to the people you work with and not treat them like assembly workers. Remember, even assembly workers have a mind of their own and can find new processes and ideas, if given an opportunity. The Japanese manufacturing management methods have taught the world about this.
‘Intelligent disobedience’ is the art of giving thinking space to people to sense new opportunities that you have a blind spot for.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Ask yourself one question: ‘How is AI disrupting my role and expertise as my company’s business gets transformed or disrupted?’
What is the level of leadership competence that you exhibit today or are prepared for - Gardener leadership, Tactical leadership, Strategic leadership or Doctrine leadership?
‘Intelligent disobedience’ allows you to sense signals that you have a blind spot for.