Amplifying Cognition - John Hagel on moving from threat to opportunity, the passion of the explorer, learning platforms, and scalable learning in practice (AC Ep13)

John Hagel on moving from threat to opportunity, the passion of the explorer, learning platforms, and scalable learning in practice (AC Ep13)

10/04/23 • 38 min

“I believe that if we’re focused on the opportunity of scalable learning, the excitement should be whether I can free up all the people who are currently engaged in these mindless, routine tasks, tightly specified. I can then redirect these individuals towards a different form of work, which I describe as addressing unseen problems and opportunities to create more value.”

– John Hagel

About John Hagel

John Hagel has been a leading Silicon Valley based entrepreneur, management consultant, author, and speaker for over 40 years. After working in senior positions at McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Atari, he founded Deloitte’s Center for the Edge which he led for many years. John is on the board of trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, is faculty for Singularity University, and has won multiple Harvard Business Review awards for best articles. He is the author of 7 books, most recently The Journey Beyond Fear.

Website: Johnhagel.com

LinkedIn: John Hagel

Facebook: John Hagel

Twitter: @jhagel

What you will learn

The importance of acknowledging and overcoming fear through cultivating positive emotions (02:58)
Introduction of the “Passion of the Explorer” as a distinct type of passion characterized by excitement and impact (04:33)
The concept of finding excitement in the face of unexpected challenges (05:42)
The profound impact of collaboration, trust, and shared excitement in problem-solving and personal development (06:00)
The importance of learning through the creation of new knowledge (08:34)
How challenges lead to groundbreaking discoveries and transformative technologies (11:22)
The intricate nature of narratives (16:01)
The geographic narrative that fuels Silicon Valley’s continuous growth (18:12)
Balancing threat-based narratives with inspiring opportunities (20:07)
The nature of unlimited opportunity (21:36)
Transformative concept of scalable learning, highlighting its potential to redefine work and drive organizational evolution (24:29)
Summarizing the essence of balance in organizational dynamics: empowering individual initiative through collaborative workgroups and inspiring leadership (28:55)
True transformation through scalable learning (33:05)
Embracing the “Explorer Mindset,” shifting from expertise to impact (34:56)

Episode Resources

Book

The Journey Beyond Fear: Leverage the Three Pillars of Positivity to Build Your Success by John Hagel III

Transcript

Ross Dawson: John, it’s an honor and delight to have you on the show.

John Hagel: A pleasure to be here. Absolutely.

Ross: I’ve been a big fan of your work since the 90s. You’ve always been ahead of change since that time. I’d love to ask you that question. In a world where we need to amplify our cognition, how do we do that? Where should we start?

John: There are many different areas to explore in that context, but one of the key themes in my recent work at least has been the notion that to really amplify cognition, we need to expand our horizons and focus on our emotions, not just on mental models and frameworks and approaches that we can use in our minds, but looking into our hearts and saying, what are the emotions that are driving us. My most recent book is The Journey Beyond Fear. I started writing it because I was traveling around the world and everywhere I went, the dominant emotion that I was encountering was fear, at the highest levels of organizations, lowest levels out in the communities. While I think fear is an understandable emotion, if you’re focused on cognition, it is a limiting emotion. What we need to do is, first of all, acknowledge the fear, because many of...

– John Hagel

About John Hagel

Website: Johnhagel.com

LinkedIn: John Hagel

Facebook: John Hagel

Twitter: @jhagel

What you will learn

The importance of acknowledging and overcoming fear through cultivating positive emotions (02:58)
Introduction of the “Passion of the Explorer” as a distinct type of passion characterized by excitement and impact (04:33)
The concept of finding excitement in the face of unexpected challenges (05:42)
The profound impact of collaboration, trust, and shared excitement in problem-solving and personal development (06:00)
The importance of learning through the creation of new knowledge (08:34)
How challenges lead to groundbreaking discoveries and transformative technologies (11:22)
The intricate nature of narratives (16:01)
The geographic narrative that fuels Silicon Valley’s continuous growth (18:12)
Balancing threat-based narratives with inspiring opportunities (20:07)
The nature of unlimited opportunity (21:36)
Transformative concept of scalable learning, highlighting its potential to redefine work and drive organizational evolution (24:29)
Summarizing the essence of balance in organizational dynamics: empowering individual initiative through collaborative workgroups and inspiring leadership (28:55)
True transformation through scalable learning (33:05)
Embracing the “Explorer Mindset,” shifting from expertise to impact (34:56)

Episode Resources

Book

The Journey Beyond Fear: Leverage the Three Pillars of Positivity to Build Your Success by John Hagel III

Transcript

Ross Dawson: John, it’s an honor and delight to have you on the show.

John Hagel: A pleasure to be here. Absolutely.

Previous Episode

David Berkowitz on AI in marketing, gaining superpowers, amplifying marketers, and the future of agencies (AC Ep12)

“There’s no substitute for trying everything. The great thing about AI is how immediately usable it is. As soon as you hear something mentioned in the news, a friend’s LinkedIn post, or elsewhere, just go and try it.”

– David Berkowitz

About David Berkowitz

David Berkowitz is a veteran marketing agency and technology leader and Founder of Serial Marketing and the AI Marketers Guild. Previous roles have included SVP at Mediaocean, CMO of Publicis agency MRY, and co-founder of the emerging market division of Dentsu agency 360i, advising clients such as Apple, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Porsche and Visa. He has written more than 600 columns for leading publications including Advertising Age, MediaPost, VentureBeat, and Adweek, and has spoken at 350 events globally.

LinkedIn: David Berkowitz

Twitter: @dberkowitz

Websites:

AI Marketers Guild (AIMG)

Foaf

Serial Marketers

What you will learn

Leveraging AI as a marketing superpower (04:18)
Streamlining speaking proposals with AI (07:21)
Utilizing AI to streamline repetitive tasks and iterations (10:45)
Discussing the evolving landscape of AI at the organizational level (13:46)
Balancing AI and human expertise (15:20)
Exploring the changing landscape of entry-level work in marketing (21:12)
Highlighting major agencies’ ability to adapt and restructure in response to industry changes and internal challenges (25:08)
Emphasizing the immediate usability and versatility of AI in various applications (28:57)
Establishing confidence in the value of AI-augmented work for clients and stakeholders (34:12)
Recognizing AI tool limitations is crucial for addressing and improving them (35:59)

Episode Resources

Transcript

Ross Dawson: David, it’s awesome to have you on the show.

David Berkowitz: Great to see you, Ross.

Ross: David, you’ve worked for a very long time in marketing. All the time I’ve known you guys, you have been at the edge of new emerging developments in making marketing and marketers better and stronger. Today, what’s most exciting about how we can amplify the capabilities of marketers?

David: Well, I’ve never seen anything like this wave of AI. A big part of it too is I’ve always gravitated toward experiential learning and just that act of learning by doing. In part, because I fell into the marketing world, I didn’t have the experience, I didn’t have some MBA, let alone from a fancy school or anything, there was just so much I lacked, but I was very eager to try anything I could. Now in this wave of generative AI and other recent developments, there has never been so much that one could actually try.

Ross: You’ve been trying and sharing some of your and your colleagues’ learnings around that. This idea of amplifying cognition, the marketers are amazing thinkers, and very creative, that’s a lot of what their work is, so what are some of the ways that AI is amplifying marketers?

David: For marketers, AI can be this added superpower for basically anything and everything you’re doing. This is where if marketing is 10% of your job, then it can give you ways to do things that you just couldn’t possibly put together before. I’m working on some very scrappy products and projects right now. If you spend some time getting an idea on paper, then once you have that core of the idea and that core of the message that expresses what you want to express, then there are so many ways that you can take that right now in terms of creative content, building a website, generating i...

Next Episode

undefined - Toby Walsh on the differences between human and artificial intelligence, our relationship to machines, amplifying capabilities, and making the right choices (AC Ep14)

Toby Walsh on the differences between human and artificial intelligence, our relationship to machines, amplifying capabilities, and making the right choices (AC Ep14)

“There’s no point trying to teach ourselves to be better calculators because machines are much better calculators. We should be playing to our strengths and handing over those tasks, many of which we never actually like doing, to machines that they’re better at.”

– Toby Walsh

About Toby Walsh

Toby Walsh is Chief Scientist at UNSW.ai, the University of NSW’s new AI Institute. He is Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at UNSW Sydney. His many honors include winning the prestigious Humboldt Prize, the NSW Premier’s Prize for Excellence in Engineering and ICT, and the ACP Research Excellence award. He appears regularly in global media including ABC, BBC, CNN, NPR, New Scientist, and many others, with a profile piece in New York Times featuring his prominent work on the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. He is author of four books on AI, with his most recent, Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World, just out.

LinkedIn: Toby Walsh

Twitter: @TobyWalsh

What you will learn

Human Intelligence vs. Artificial Intelligence (03:36)
Alien nature of AI Intelligence (08:06)
The complexity of defining intelligence (09:38)
ChatGPT and its deceptive design choices (12:27)
Symbiotic relationship between human creativity and AI capabilities (15:40)
Role of Probabilities in Large Language Models (19:27)
Growing sophistication and personalization in Large Language Models (21:26)
Outsourcing human tasks with AI’s evolving roles (23:43)
Human advantages over AI (25:40)
Amplifying human strengths and recognizing AI distinctions (29:37)
Preference for human judgment over machine precision (33:07)

Episode Resources

Resources

Book

Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World by Toby Walsh

Machines Behaving Badly: The Morality of AI by Toby Walsh

2062: The World that AI Made by Toby Walsh

It’s Alive!: Artificial Intelligence from the Logic Piano to Killer Robots by Toby Walsh

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Toby, it is absolutely awesome to have you on the show.

Toby Walsh: It’s good to see you again, Ross.

Ross: Toby, you have just come out with a new book Faking It, which gives some really powerful insights for people into understanding where AI is today. One of the interesting things is that you started the story by questioning whether artificial intelligence was the right term, and then you concluded that it is a good description of what we’re dealing with. How did you come to evolve your thoughts about that?

Toby: Ross, it mainly comes with a lot of baggage. It was invented by John McCarthy in 1956. It was a pleasure, indeed, to know John McCarthy, and he came up with a name, as far as I can tell, because it was just different from anything else that was in use at the time. It was not cybernetics, that might have been the name chosen. It’s problematic, and it comes with quite a bit of baggage. It is an invitation for people to make jokes about natural stupidity and other such things. I must admit, I remember in the early days of AI, when I told people I was doing AI, they could always think artificial insemination and said, confusion as... Intelligence is not a very well defined concept itself so naming something...is problematic in that sense.

But over time, indeed, just in the last couple of years, I’ve come to increase...actually fortuitous, it was quite a fortuitous, quite a good choice. Because it is about trying to build intelligent machines that replicate the sorts of things that humans do that require intelligence. But that other word that’s there, ...