Category: Decision Making

Six Skills to Survive AI

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Will AI take over the world, or at the very least, take your job?

With the rise of all manner of AI tools and agents, it is fair to ask how humans will compete against machine learning. Will all the degrees and job skills destined to be replaced by a computer? Is there anything we humans can do better than AI?

In his recent newsletter, author Daniel Pink wrote and shared a video about the Six Skills You Need to Survive AI. Pink is not an AI doomer, as he sees a future where people and AI collaborate in ways never before seen. To that end, he believes that there are specific skills and talents that humans have that AI cannot master. In the video, he shares six abilities that complement each other.

• Asking better questions
• Developing good taste
• Iterating relentlessly
• Composing pieces into something meaningful
• Allocating human and machine talent
• Acting with integrity

Let’s dive into the first one that he calls asking better questions. Pink points out in his video that AI is great at generating answers. In fact, it can provide dozens and dozens of potential answers to any inquiry. However, answers are worthless unless the questions are meaningful. It calls back to the old computer maxim of “garbage in, garbage out.” He believes that humans have the intrinsic ability to consider the meaning and objectives of a idea or problem in a way that computers simply are unable to do. To ask better questions, Pink suggests several starters, such as beginning inquiries with words such as, “What Does”, “What If”, “Why Not” and perhaps the most important question of all, “What are we trying to solve here?”

To strengthen your questioning skills, Pink suggests using a simple exercise known as The Five Whys. It is technique developed by Sakichi Toyoda for Toyota. The Lean Enterprise Institute has a good explanation of this approach.

5 Whys is the practice of asking why repeatedly whenever a problem is encountered in order to get beyond the obvious symptoms to discover the root cause. … Without repeatedly asking why, managers would simply replace the fuse or pump and the failure would recur. The specific number five is not the point. Rather it is to keep asking until the root cause is reached and eliminated.

I invite you to consider the recent questions you are asking at work, at school, or anywhere in your private life. What techniques can you use to improve the quality of your questions? Also, be very clear on the problem you are trying to solve when you ask them. By being very deliberate, the questions you ask today could lead to a groundbreaking insight tomorrow.

To learn more from Pink about the skill of asking better questions, along with the other five abilities, please see his video in the Pink Report.

Is It Ever Too Late?

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Have you ever heard someone say, “It’s too late to pursue that dream.”

When we are young, it seems like there is an abundance of time and energy to complete every goal set, finish every project started, and see the entirety of the world. Then as we grow older, time slips away and those youthful dreams feel unobtainable. And while some avenues may realistically close up as we age (like becoming an Olympic athlete in your fifties) is it really ever too late to chase most dreams?

According to Shola Richards, the answer is an solid “NO!” In a recent post on his website titled It’s Never Too Late, he explores why people give up on goals.

It’s never too late to do anything. So, why do we often think that it is? …

Sure, those dreams can be pushed aside, discouraged or ignored, but if you think that by saying “it’s too late” will succeed in killing those dreams, then I’ve got some really bad news for you.

Our dreams are persistent AF, and as long as you live, …

Shola clearly states that the only time your dreams die is when you do! In other words, so long as there is breath in the body there remains a path forward to obtain the goals that inspire and excite. He says:

Your dreams didn’t come to you so that you could throw your weakest excuses at them. They came to you so that you could literally do the damn thing.

If nothing else, remember this: persistent dreams only visit the souls who have the ability to transform them from imagined reality to actual reality.

With this clarity in mind, why not put this advice into practice.

Take a few minutes to consider the goals, projects, and dreams that have been shelved in your mind. Are you working under the misconception that they are no longer obtainable? Consider them one by one and ask two questions for each:

1/ Does this goal, project, dream, still excite me?

2/ Is there a very specific, undeniable, hard truth, no arguments about, scientifically valid reason this goal, project, dream is no longer obtainable?

If the answer is YES on question one and NO on question two, then I invite you to reengage. Write down exactly what success would look and feel like for this endevour. Then create ONE actionable item that can be done to move it forward in the next 24 hours.

Once that’s complete, decide on the next step and the next one after that. Before you know it, the dream will be realized.

Enjoy the journey!

Upcoming Webinars

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I’m excited to share information on three upcoming webinars that I’m presenting over the next two weeks. Registration for all of them are open now. This is your chance to get more comfortable with public speaking, be more productive, and became a better supervisor.

Thank you to the Florida Library Association and the American Library Association for sponsoring these webinars.

Florida Library Association Webinar
The Art of Public Speaking
Thurs. Feb. 19, 1 pm EST

In this webinar, you will learn the art and science of public speaking based on the Toastmasters approach. Free to FLA members. $20 for non-members.

ALA Webinars
A Plan for Personal Productivity for Library Staff: From Inbox to Completion
Wed. February 18, 2:30 pm EST

Is your inbox overflowing? Is your work spilling onto every available surface? Do you want to get more stuff done in less time while looking effortless in the process? In this energizing webinar, you will learn methods for workflow management based on the internationally recognized Getting Things Done (GTD) system. These practices work in any type of library and at any level of employment. With many libraries seeing record vacancies, mastering workflow is vital for peace of mind and completing valuable tasks. ALA Member Price: $80.10; Non Member Price: $89.00; Student Member Price: $44.50

ALA Webinars
Managing Employee Performance Using the SBI Method
Wed. February 25, 2:30 pm EST

The success of any project or plan relies on the work of your staff. All too often, library managers rely on employee assessment that feels like nothing more than a pointless exercise in filling out forms for both manager and employee. How can we manage library employee performance without stress, without unnecessary conflict, without busywork, but with positive results? In this webinar, learn a simple and widely tested approach to interacting with your employees that takes some of the stress out of the process. Using the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) Model, supervisors can speak with staff in a way that is direct, yet supportive, while keeping the conversation on the topic at hand. SBI can be used to address poor performance or acknowledge great work. ALA Member Price: $80.10; Non Member Price: $89.00; Student Member Price: $44.50

Please note that all proceeds from these webinars go to the sponsoring organizations. Sign up for the webinars through the links provided.

The Wednesday Rule

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How many times have you looked back on a recent decision and wished you had done something different?

Regret happens far too often. It would be helpful if there was a way to consider the wisdom of your future self before making a decision today without the need for a time machine. However, maybe we can bend time and space after all. Not with a time machine, but instead with the assistance of a little imagination.

The Minimalists have created a simple approach to decision making that anyone can use to avoid future regret. It is called the Wednesday Rule. They explained it in a post on their website.

Here’s how it works…

Before you make a decision, simply ask yourself one question:

Will I be delighted with this decision next Wednesday?

It’s that simple.

They claim this approach can be used for any type of decision. By imagining how your future self will look back on this choice is surprisingly easy to do. The answer you receive will be revealing.

If the answer is yes, then it’s probably a good decision.

However, if the answer is No, I will not be delighted by this decision, then the decision is already made for you:

When in doubt, opt out.

What decision are you facing right now? Consider the options and then think ahead to the future having selected each one in turn. The correct choice may reveal itself immediately.

Read the whole post on the Minimalists website.

Time for a Yearly Review

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With 2025 coming to a close, have you taken the time to review the entirety of the past year?

A core component of the GTD methodology is the weekly review. This is an ongoing opportunity at the end of your workweek to review what was accomplished, identify unfinished work, and to look ahead to the following week. In fact, David Allen, GTD’s Creator, has always stressed the importance of this habit.

“The Weekly Review is the time to: Gather and process all your stuff. Review your system. Update your lists. Get clean, clear, current, and complete. You have to use your mind to get things off your mind.”

A yearly review is the logical extension of the weekly review, but on a higher level of focus. This is an opportunity to consider the status of your larger goals and update your long-term vision. It is a chance to bring clarity to the big dreams and ambitions that provide forward momentum. Keep in mind that it doesn’t have to focus solely on your job. The yearly review can cover all aspects of your life, including personal goals, health concerns, financial plans, and relationships.

Where does the yearly review start? It can begin with the following questions:

  • What were your wins?
  • What are you grateful for?
  • What risks did you take?
  • What is your unfinished business?
  • What was your biggest surprise?

After evaluating the past, the yearly review shifts to exploring the future. Again, focusing questions help with this task.

  • What would you like to be your biggest win?
  • How are you planning to improve your financial situation?
  • What are you looking most forward to learning?
  • What will be your biggest risk?

Are you ready to take on this challenge? If so, then dive right in. The steps to do a yearly review can be found on the GTD website.

Happy 2026! I wish you all a great new year!

How to be a Great Gift Giver

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It’s the holiday season once again!

While it is time to enjoy seasonal delicious food and the sparkling lights, there is one thing that many people dread: picking out the perfect gift. With a wide range of options, it is easy to get overwhelmed and default to boring gift cards. If you have experienced this problem, have you ever tried to figure out of there a way to become a great gift giver?

An article in Vox may resolve this yuletide tension. In a piece titled How to become a truly excellent gift giver, journalist Eliza Brooke shares insights from several gift giving experts. The first piece of advice is simple. Not every gift has to be life-changing, and a meaningful gift doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.

“We often give ourselves this challenge of being like, ‘What is the gift that only I could give them? What is the gift that proves I know them so well?’ And that’s kind of impossible,” says Erica Cerulo, who runs the recommendation-filled A Thing or Two podcast and newsletter with her business partner, Claire Mazur. (Cerulo and Mazur previously co-founded the retail destination Of A Kind, which shut down in 2019.) A great gift doesn’t have to change someone’s life, Cerulo says: It can just be something that’s fun and nice and comforting.

Photo by Karola G on Pexels.com

The experts Brooke speaks with also provide a simple three-point strategy on gift selection that helps narrow down options quickly.

Because creativity thrives with constraints, Cerulo offered the following three-point framework for thinking about gift-giving: “Can I introduce someone to something they might not otherwise know about? Can I get them a nicer version of something than they would buy for themselves? Or can I make them feel seen?” If you can check one of those three boxes, you’ve probably got a good present on your hands.

Also, Brooke points out that gift giving doesn’t have to be an end of year cram. Identifying potential gifts across the entire year rather than just in December is a useful stress reliever.

Almost universally, great gift-givers are doing legwork throughout the year, not just in the weeks leading up to a birthday or major holiday. Many keep lists of potential gifts for their friends and loved ones, which they update every time someone mentions an item they’d love or when their internet travels turn up a particularly great present idea. You can do this in any way that suits you: Cerulo has a single note in her phone dedicated to gift ideas, Mazur keeps individual notes for individual people, and Rosner uses friends’ contacts as a place to log food preferences, birthdays, and present ideas.

Learn more useful tips on how to be a great gift giver by reading the rest of the article on the Vox website.

The Winner’s Curse

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Can you win and yet still lose?

It is a common assumption that winning is a positive thing and most of the time that is true. However, are their situations when being the winner is actually a net negative experience? According to Nobel Prize winning Behavioral Economist Richard Thaler, this happens more often than you think.

In a recent Planet Money episode, host Greg Rosalsky, explores Thaler’s concept of “The Winner’s Curse.” This idea arose from Thaler’s pushback against traditional economics.

In column after column, Thaler shined a spotlight on anomalies that didn’t fit with the tidy, mathematical portrayal of humans in popular economic models (“Anomalies” was actually the title of the column.)

One anomaly Thaler highlighted was what he called “The Winner’s Curse.” The winner’s curse refers to the winners of auctions. That includes the classic auction with auctioneers speaking really fast, selling antiques or paintings or whatever. But it also applies to markets where people competitively bid against each other to buy something, which includes things like bidding wars over buying a house, companies competing to acquire other companies, and sports teams fighting to sign star rookies in a draft.

Richard Thaler

What Thaler challenged was the idea that winning is everything. In his view, sometimes it was better not to win because the economic benefit of the item in question is outweighed by the cost of acquiring it in the auction.

In the standard economic way of seeing auctions, the winner is someone who values it the most after a careful cost-benefit analysis of what they’re bidding on, using the best available information. Presumably, the winner is, well, the winner. But what if the winner is, more often than not, actually the loser? What if winners, systematically, are the ones who pay too much for what they’re buying?

In one of his columns, Thaler suggested exactly that. That, actually, in competitive auctions, the winner is often the one who makes a mistake and overpays. That is, the winner is someone who — perhaps irrationally — buys something for more than it’s worth. Hence the curse.

The Winner’s Curse is not limited to auctions. Think about the number of times you have rushed to buy the last item on sale and later discovered it wasn’t worth the money. Or consider the game show contest who wins a prize yet is now required to pay high taxes afterwards in order to claim it. We see it in professional sports teams who trade away too many players and draft picks in order to claim on supposed superstar who then flops.

So how does one avoid The Winner’s Curse? Thaler has a simple answer.

Thaler told us: “The way you have to think about bidding in an auction is: if I win the auction, will I be happy?”

To read more about The Winner’s Curse and how to avoid it, please read the rest of the Planet Money article.

Boundary Intelligence: The New Smart

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Have you ever misplaced an important document and felt less smart because of it?

Whether it is a computer file or a piece of paper, items that we have to invest time searching for limit our ability to make effective use of that information. Contrast this to files that are readily available at our fingertips or through an easy computer search. That information can be retrieved at a moment’s notice and is therefore much more useful. This distinction forms the basis of a new approach to understanding how we process information, known as boundary intelligence.

In a recent article on his website called Boundary Intelligence: Why What You Can Access Matters More Than What You Know, Tiago explores why boundary intelligence is a vital concept to understand, especially in the age of AI. He starts by referencing another writer, Venkatesh Rao.

Rao proposes a new definition of intelligence in the age of AI: intelligence is defined by what information can be accessed under constraints of cost, availability, and time.

The reality is that storage is now cheap. Computation is even cheaper. What’s expensive is short-term memory access – the ability to keep the relevant details “in mind” for a given problem.

You might think that the amazing computational power of AI would render this a meaningless problem. However, Tiago believes even the fastest computers run into trouble with deciding what information is important to keep close at hand.

Thus, a computer’s “intelligence” is now constrained not by the power of its processor, but by its ability to keep the right fragments of the past (and the imagined future) close enough to inform the present. In other words, the bottleneck of a system’s intelligence is how cheaply it can remember.

If you look at how modern computers perform, you can see this principle at work. A CPU can perform billions of operations per second, but is often stuck waiting for the right information to arrive from memory. Storage is cheap and computing is abundant, but what remains tremendously expensive is getting the right data to the right place at the right time.

It’s not the price of knowing that limits intelligence now, but the price of remembering.

This brings Tiago to the definition of boundary intelligence.

Rao calls this “boundary intelligence” – the ability to make good decisions at the boundary about what information becomes “knowable” at any given time.

How does this end up working practice, whether it is a person or AI model? In the end, it often comes down to practicality.

They are not retrieving the ideal memory; they’re retrieving the affordable one. Intelligence in this view isn’t about optimizing across all known information, but optimizing for accessible information under constraints.

A deeper study of boundary intelligence leads Tiago to an interesting understanding. He believes intelligence is no longer about what one single person or computers knows or has in storage. Instead, it is about knowing where to get the information at in the right time, no matter if you are a person or an AI model.

This means that boundary intelligence is fundamentally social. It isn’t just about what to retrieve, but from where and from whom. You have to know who to trust, what information or resources they possess, on what terms you can acquire it, and what is expected of you in return.

How can one use the power of social intelligence to improve their boundary intelligence? Read the full article at the Forte Labs website to learn more.

How People are Really Using ChatGPT

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Are you concerned that AI is coming for your job?

Since it exploded onto the scene in 2022, ChatGPT and its AI cousins have created a sensation. Aspects of knowledge work that were always assumed to be the province of humans can now be done in mere moments with the proper prompt. This has led many prognosticators to assume that AI will take over all white-collar work. After three years of these AI tools, what is the actual truth?

A recent post from Daniel Pfeiffer on the website Choice360 sheds light on what people are actually doing with ChatGPT. In a review of a study of 1 million conversations, Pfeiffer discovered that the assumed absorption of knowledge work by AI tools is not what it seems. For starters, more people are using ChatGPT outside of work than at the office.

One of the key takeaways from this report is that, though work-related usages of ChatGPT continue to grow, they are wildly outpaced by nonwork-related usages, which have grown from 53 to 73 percent of all ChatGPT messages. This finding raises two important questions: Given its ostensible economic promises, why isn’t work-related usage growing faster, and why is nonwork usage growing so much? 

Pfeiffer speculates that the clean AI interface has become preferable for regular searching than the messier Google page. The results are also easier for the average person to interpret, saving them time previously used to click through to other websites.

Another assumption is that most people are using ChatGPT to write the original copy of documents. However, actual use appears to be different.

Given the prized role of writing in educational environments, many academics might assume that when people use ChatGPT “for writing,” they’re using it specifically to generate new text from scratch—hence, the return of blue books. What this report finds, however, is that about two-thirds of all writing tasks have ChatGPT modify existing text, e.g., editing it for errors, adjusting the tone, or offering critiques, rather than generating new text. 

On closer inspection, Pfeifer wonders if this finding holds for all types of users.

As we await more data, I think it behooves us to keep in mind that “writing” encompasses a range of activities. While we might imagine that students are asking ChatGPT to “write a seven-page essay on the Civil War,” for instance, they might well be using it to “make this email sound more professional.” 

Image generated with WordPress AI

A third issue considered in the study is the economic impact of generative AI on workers. The media discussion often assumes that AI will take away jobs, especially lower-level knowledge work. Again, that may not be the case yet.

To get a more granular picture, researchers ran all the work-related messages through a different taxonomy based on common work activities, e.g., communicating with supervisors, scheduling events, and training others. They found that 57.9 percent of work-related messages fell into two broad categories “1) obtaining, documenting, and interpreting information; and 2) making decisions, giving advice, solving problems, and thinking creatively”. In other words, people are using ChatGPT less as a replacement worker and more as an advisor and research assistant. 

Reflecting on this finding, Pfieffer comes to this conclusion.

“ChatGPT likely improves worker output by providing decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs where productivity is increasing in the quality of decision-making.”  

Finally, Pfieffer speculates on the impact of hallucinations. As librarians have long complained, it is easy for people to believe what AI says rather than confirm that it is true. The study does not measure the effect of wrong information on people’s productivity and decisions.

The full blog post is worth a read. You can find it on the Choice360 website.