Fearing the A.I. Career Takeover?
Hi There,
A portion of our time during this year’s European C-IQ Collective retreat was devoted to the impact of A.I. on our careers as coaches, facilitators and consultants. I hadn’t even heard of ChatGPT until February. A mere three months later this phenomenon dominated our retreat agenda.
The first session dedicated to A.I. had the impact of a horror movie, as it seemed that A.I. was going to make all of our jobs obsolete. During the session, I felt this ‘threat’ overwhelm my nervous system. The session’s facilitator asked for a prompt with which to ‘play’ with ChatGPT. I was preparing to deliver a workshop focusing on Executive Presence, so I proposed this as our guinea pig prompt.
YIKES! It spit out an offer that would have taken me 2+ hours to compose. To add insult to injury, its spelling was far superior to mine!
And I wasn’t the only person who was spooked. That first session was a mental stretch for most of us. The evidence: We opted to end Day 1 after that exercise.
As I digested what I’d just witnessed, I acknowledged that while a potential client could combine prompts to create a professional development program, it would act as a recipe for training; it could not replace the training itself.
As anyone who’s ever followed a recipe can tell you, there are unwritten nuances inherent in the directions. The subtleties of how to measure a cup of flour and how to ‘add’ different ingredients to a dish are distinctions that come thanks to time and learning. These are the differentiators that seasoned professionals bring to the table.
On Day 3 of our retreat, a colleague brought us through an exercise called “Four Rooms of Change”. The experience made real my point about the importance of human facilitation!
Stunning in its simplicity, “Four Rooms” is a psychological model that helps individuals and groups understand and navigate the process of change. And the takeaways from the experiential exercise, when applied to the way teams work, made so much sense. The bite-sized prompts and digestible questions gave me insights into how I could apply this to teams.
The facilitator had made the implementation seem deceivingly easy, but it was due to her experience in managing the interaction. Meanwhile, if you ask ChatGPT “how to facilitate a team building session using The Four Rooms of Change”, it yields a bland recipe.
While I recognize that ChatGPT adds another potential point of resistance to my facilitation services, it actually provides an opportunity for me to further differentiate myself, my offerings, and the value I provide.
How about you? What do you see as a threat, that when reframed, becomes a benefit?
Cheers!
-Deborah
Deborah Goldstein
DRIVEN Professionals / Forbes / Linkedin
info@drivenpros.com | LinkedIn
DRIVEN Professionals, 35 Adrienne Lane, Garrison, NY 10524