Is Your Situation Complex or Just Complicated?

AI and Your Confidence

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about what to do when you don’t know something.

At the end, I suggested readers repeat after me: I don’t know everything, and that is ok. Some things I don’t need to know, and I can always learn if I need to. Not knowing doesn’t make me less as a person – or leader.

This week I read about a study from three French and Italian universities that looked at how AI use changed people's confidence and willingness to say "I don't know" (details here).

Here’s the skinny on the findings:

When people use AI to research answers, their willingness to say “I don’t know” dropped from 44% to 3%, and not surprisingly, their confidence rose from 30% to 76%.

The studies used questions where AI models typically fail, and a model that was usually wrong on those types of questions. And yet, when using the tool, people became more confident and less likely to admit they didn’t know.

Here’s the paradox:

One of the ways (but not the only way) to learn what you don’t know is to consult AI, but when we do, we might gain a false sense of confidence.

Which raises three points …

1. Remember that it is ok to not know something.

2. Don’t allow for cognitive surrender. Recognize that AI is a great tool, but not infallible. Come at your quest to know things from a couple of different directions, not a single source before you build your confidence too far.

3. Remember that while it is ok not to know something, in many cases we can find an answer. But depending on the question and its importance, more than one source might be worth consulting.

Is Your Situation Complex or Just Complicated?

I’ve been around long enough to know that important ideas often become the in-vogue term, and then those important words become shallow and lose their meaning. I could give you a list of examples, but that would mostly prove how long I really have been around. I’ll just cut to the word that this is happening to now:

Complex.

Everyone (including me) is talking about the complexity in our world and businesses. We are telling ourselves there is more complexity than ever. It sounds like we know what we are talking about. It (may) helps us sound wise. But in many cases, it is just sloppy language. We call things complex that are in many cases complicated. There is a big difference between these words as ways to define a situation (and the steps we need to take next), and it matters.