"AI Is Quietly Killing Your Curiosity! - No.1 Coaching Expert | Michael Bungay Stanier

0:00You have to stop caring so much about the outcome other than to go, I'm really curious as to what the data tells us so that we can then make the next decision about the next small experiment around that. For a culture to accept small experiments, they have to accept what looks like failure. And I think reframing it as we're just collecting interesting data here.

0:24What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty-gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and, well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

1:02Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I'm Jessica Neal, your host, and I'm with my co-host, Peter Clark. Hi, Pete.

1:11Peter Clarke:Hey, how are you? What's up? Still temporary, still guest co-host. I don't know when we'll take the training wheels off. No, no, no. It's a permanent thing in my mind. I'm here to make an intervention, Pete. I'm like, at the end of this, I'm going to hold up a number and kind of give you a score out of 10. And it's like, I'm role modeling talent management for you. It's just like, this is a live or die situation, man. Yeah, I know. Well, what I did tell Pete is that we would do like an American Idol of it all and see if the listeners vote him on or off. But anyways, you all, the listeners, you just heard our guest today.

1:49He just chimed in. He's been on the show before. He's, I don't know. He's on my favorite person list. Many of you have read his books and he just released or re-released, I guess you call it, the 10-year version of The Coaching Habit, which is an excellent book. And also this book, I got it. And I just have to say it is, I don't know, it's one of the prettiest books I've ever seen. And it's just done so well and there's new stuff in it. So it's just not like the old version, but prettier. It's like got even better content. And I don't know. I'm just so excited to have Michael on the show. Michael, welcome back.

2:33Everybody knows you also as MBS. So welcome back to the show. We're so happy to have you. And congrats. Thank you. Look, it's lovely to be back. I already know this is going to be a great conversation. I can't wait to dive in. Yeah, me too. So tell us about what's been going on with you recently, because I haven't seen you in a, I don't know, a few months. How have you been? You did the re-release of The Coaching Habit. I have. So that was a big thing. Every book turns 10 at some stage, but most books, it's not worth celebrating turning 10 because most books have kind of vanished without trace, which is true with the majority of the books I've written as well.

3:10They've come and they had their moment and they've kind of faded a bit. But The Coaching Habit has a life of its own. And it continues to be a really big seller and a popular book, particularly for kind of regular people who are trying to unweird the whole idea of coaching so they can bring out the best in the people that they lead and they manage and they influence. So yeah, we sweated over that. And I really wanted to create a book that would be an artifact worth holding on to because it's AI. I'm not sure if everybody's caught up with that, but AI is happening. Never heard of it. I know. Well, you should keep an eye out for it because I think it's going to have, I think it's going to make a difference.

3:49Yeah. But it means actually that for people like me who write books saying, hey, look, here's how you can do something. Here's a new way of thinking about it. Actually, Claude or GPT or whoever your AI agent of choice is, it kind of has all that knowledge because, you know, they stole it from us and me. So it means that if you write a book, it's not enough just to have great content. It has to be worth keeping on somebody's shelf. and part of that is it needs to have an aesthetic value as well to it so you're right I tried to create a book that was helpful and gorgeous it and it and it is like even if you guys get this book which you should on the inside like it's just I don't I don't know if people know this term breathability but the book is just very breathable and it's you know it's easy on the eye and there's like these illustrations and pops and it's just beautiful.

4:43And the colors are beautiful. And then even on the side of the book, on the pages, there's words on all three sides of that. Yeah, stay curious longer, which is my definition of coaching, which is like, it's not fancy. It's like, can you just stay curious a little bit longer? Because most people are losing that curiosity muscle. And I think more than ever, it's important to kind of stay curious. I agree. And that kind of leads me to something I wanted to talk to you about, which was, do you think AI is killing curiosity or do you think it's fostering more curiosity? Well, I mean, the answer is almost certainly both, but I think the bigger impact it's having is deadening curiosity because it's just so easy to accelerate into a half-decent answer most of the time.

5:39And we get seduced by how fast we can create content, how fast we can kind of get moving on stuff, how fast we can do stuff. And we forget that curiosity, not just about the challenge, but about the context in which we're working with and about the people that we're working with that actually creates the conditions and the connections for success. So yeah, I am pretty worried about AI. I see it in myself. I mean, it's not like I'm some sort of curiosity black belt. I'm like constantly being seduced by just how good AI is in stopping me thinking for myself. I know. Well, I was thinking about myself when I was thinking about asking you this question.

6:22And I was like, am I more curious or I'm less curious? I don't know. I feel like sometimes that's true. You're seduced and it's so easy to get to information and ideas and maybe to your point, a halfway decent answer. But I also like, I like the way that it helps me think a little deeper because I think it's also, I don't know if you agree, but I think it's also how you use it. And, you know, I'm always like, what? Here's all the questions I have. What's the, you know, one question I'm not asking? And it asks this question. I'm like, oh, I didn't think about that. And then it prompts me to go further sometimes.

7:07So for me, I was like, well, I don't know if it's killing it. Yeah. Maybe I'm a curious person.

7:13Peter Clarke:Do you think society actually, or the world we live in rewards curiosity i guess that's one thing i wonder too right it's you know we see it from the venture side of things right we're supposed to be investing in innovative cutting edge curious people i think in general it doesn't seem like curiosity is rewarded all that much i mean it rewards i mean it likes it in theory there aren't many people who come out and go i'm making a stand against curiosity unless you're a cat because allegedly you know curiosity kills cats. But for everybody else, it's like, no, I'm kind of pro-curiosity. And people like the outcomes of curiosity, which is like, I like that we got here because this is a result.

7:54And I'm going to guess there was curiosity involved in that. But people are less keen about the process of curiosity because for a bunch of different reasons. It's messier. It's slower. It makes it feel like you have less control over what's happening. I mean, just at a very basic human level, the difference between you asking somebody a question and then being quiet and waiting for the answer, which is one of the core mechanics of coaching, and just telling somebody what to do, even if it's not very good advice, and even if you're solving the wrong problem, which happens a lot, it feels better when you're telling somebody what to do because you're like, I'm still in control.

8:37I've still got some value to add. I'm still kind of smarter than they are. I've still got some authority. I'm keeping things moving. I've got some pace going. Whereas when you ask a question, you're like, was that a good question? Did they understand the question? What if they come up with a bonkers answer? What do I do with that? What if they come up with an answer? It's just good, but I didn't think of it myself. What do I do with that? There's all sorts of ways that you step into a place of less control, more ambiguity, more uncertainty when you ask a question, which is, you know, in some ways the essence of what curiosity is.

9:10So I don't think people love the process, even though they like it in theory and they like the outcome of curiosity. Yeah. Yeah. Good way to put it. I think I would describe myself as a naturally curious person. And I think some people are more curious than others. And it was actually something that when at Netflix, we looked for as a quality. We wanted people that were really curious and we interviewed for it. And, you know, a lot of it was the questions that they asked us, right, determined how curious they were, right? And if, you know, you were having a conversation and then you got to a certain point and the person was like, oh, but what about, and then did you consider, and then, you know, and that, and those were the people that we were like, oh, yeah, these are the people that we want because they were just curious about everything.

10:05You know, it wasn't like one thing, they were just curious about everything. Do you think it's a skill that can be learned or is it just like an innate quality that some people have and some don't? Well, I think it's absolutely a discipline and a habit that you can practice. And you learn how to ask a question. You collect good questions. You learn how to take a sideways jaunt into something. All of that is definitely learnable. I do think some people are kind of more wired than others. I quite like ambiguity. My wife doesn't. You know, when we're – it really shows up when we're choosing where to go out for dinner, if we're going out for dinner.

10:48I will go, hey, new restaurant could be cool. Why don't we give it a shot? I'm always up for the unknown. She's like, oh, we could go to a restaurant where we know we're going to have a really good meal. Why don't we go there? And I'm like, yeah, but – and she's more wired for certainty and I'm more wired for exploration.

11:10Didn't you guys decide where you were going to move, like on a napkin or something, if I remember correctly? Yeah, we did actually. Beer coasters. We were living in Boston. We knew we wanted to live in Boston. We went and had beers. And after two beers, we each wrote down the name of three cities we thought we might move to. On the count of three, we flipped them over, and Toronto made both the beer coasters. So that's why I've ended up living in Toronto. So you're right. She has moments. But you can guess who came up with that process. Was it me, the curious step into the unknown? Or was it my wife who was like, I hate this process?

11:44So that is absolutely true. Yeah. And Jessica, look. Yeah, I remember that. I am old and I've been practicing curiosity for the 30 some years of my career. And I feel it being chipped away. but I've got a lifetime of practice at staying curious and I'm not casting any aspersions on your age but I suspect you're kind of you've also walked a path where you've been practicing that for a while I had dinner just the other night with a teacher of my a friend who teaches English and she's like I can't get people to to read a book I can't get them to think about a book it's a real challenge to kind of embed that curiosity in at an early age and to Pete's point when an organization values speed and certainty, there's not a great deal of motivation to maintain the practice of curiosity.

12:38So yeah, I think it's under threat. Yeah.

12:41Peter Clarke:I think, I mean, if you have kids, I would say you can look and go, we're all probably born with some innate sense of curiosity, some far more than others. But I would say maybe it's Western civilization and or the United States In particular, I think the education system tends to drive that out of you. Or if you are too curious, you're sort of relegated to the special classes, right? Like, no, you need to go over there because you're too hard to manage. I think that's right. I mean, and now we get into a whole critique of capitalism because, you know, we're still working on an 18th century education system that was designed to have people behave well in the factories and the settings they go into.

13:21So there's a lot of that for sure. Yeah. Well, let's talk about this in the capacity of leadership because it's something that I've been thinking about a lot. I know it's something, Michael, that you've been thinking about a lot. And I think the construct of what makes a great leader is dramatically going to change in this new world with AI. Because, you know, we very much for a long time valued managers that had large teams, big budgets, you know, could operationalize, could, you know, hire and fire, you know. And it was a lot of that functional expertise, operational expertise that was valued.

14:10And now that's going away. Lots of people can get, yeah, what do you do, right? And so I've been thinking a lot about this idea of what makes a great leader. And not to say that we were ahead of the times at Netflix. Go on, say it. You're ahead of the times. Well, we were and we still are. But I mean, for us, this idea that I've been thinking about was very true when we first began and started thinking about our culture and started thinking about leadership and what would scale in the company. And it was this idea of judgment and decision making. And I think that that skill and that attribute, whatever you want to call it, is going to be so valuable for organizations moving forward.

15:04It's not going to be this manager leader that can get 500 people to do one thing. It's someone that can make great decisions in a world where there is an abundance of information and ideas and analysis. And so but but they need to make really good decisions really quickly. And they also need to pivot really quickly when when those aren't going well. And anyways, we always talked about that at Netflix. And to be honest, most of the leaders that didn't scale at Netflix, they didn't have great judgment. Yeah. It's tricky, isn't it? It's a little bit like what people are banging on about around, oh, we need to maintain taste.

15:51It's taste and judgment feel like they're kind of connected. and honestly it puts my back up a little bit because it makes it sound like taste and judgment are this kind of context-free attributes that just float around instead of actually being very influenced by the context you're in and the expectation of the culture and and all of that i mean i can look at i look at some people and i go you have terrible terrible taste. I've seen how you decorate your house and it's hideous. There's way too much leopard skin. There's too much gold leaf. There's too much, I don't know, chandeliers. And they would come into my house or they just look at my podcast and I've got a big black piece of folk art behind me, it's a big black bird.

16:44And they're like, what the hell is the symbol of death doing looming looming over your shoulder. And why do you have your hair like that? And what's with the loud shirt that you're wearing, Michael? They would react to my taste in a very different way. And actually, often, good judgment, good taste needs to be counter-cultural, counter-intuitive rather than just playing along. So when I've been thinking about what leadership requires in the time of AI, I've got four choices that you make as a leader. So let me throw them on the table and we can see if there's anything interesting here. I think it's connected to decision-making.

17:23I think you need to be able to provide clarity over certainty. Clarity over certainty. I think AI loves certainty. It's always pushing to say, hey, this is the answer this is the thing this is what matters whereas i think what a good leader does driven by curiosity is kind of clarity around what matters clarity about what's important not less about an answer but it's more about a direction and about a kind of certainty that we've we've found something so clarity over certainty i think there's context over content we are we are driven by content, by the output, by the stuff, by the doing things.

18:04And so often we lose the situation, the picture around that. And I think what great leaders do is they can paint a picture, put a decision, put an action, put an output into context rather than losing the context. I think a great leader helps provide connection over cocooning. Because I think one of the unintended consequences of AI is that we are working even more by ourselves than ever before. Because it's like, why would I need to talk to anybody? I've just got me and an agent or seven, and it's just me and a screen working now. So connection over cocooning. And then finally, I think there's something about courage over collusion.

18:50Collusion is a kind of a big word, But the pressure is in organizations to behave and to follow along, to do the obvious, to do the expected. That just creates less ripples. And I think great leaders are often about how do I create courage in the decisions I make, in the stance we take, in the choices we have. And I think those three things, so context, connection, courage, and I've forgotten the second one. Clarity. Clarity.

19:20Peter Clarke:Thank you. I think those are all things. They're all driven by curiosity, but they're all things, if you're more on that side, actually allows you to be making better decisions. So maybe it's curiosity plus judgment instead of taste and judgment. Right. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what do you, I mean, we can kind of pick some of these because I think that as you were describing these, are they all Cs? They're all Cs as you were describing all these Cs. There's a lot of Cs. It's like more than the seven Cs, it's the eight Cs, I know. The eight Cs, yeah. I was thinking a lot about, you know, did we do those things at Netflix?

20:06And those were a lot of the things that we did. And, you know, we talked about things like context, not control. And we operated in a world of context. And, you know, we had this, you know, freedom and responsibility culture. But we wouldn't have been able to have that culture if people didn't have curiosity, you know, clarity, context, courage, all of those things. so so how would you jessica how would you support a leader now knowing that the the netflix that you were so uh integrated integrated into is different in this because this wave of ai-ness has kind of shook everybody you know if you were coaching or supporting a leader now how would you help them err on this side rather than that side of those of those four pairs of c's well i think it's it's an interesting question.

21:01I actually wish I had the opportunity to do it. Jessica is available for hire. You probably can't afford her, but she's available. Yeah. No, I can't do it. I don't even know if I can do it again. But anyways, I think leaders really need to get out of the trenches, get out of the day-to-day, lift their heads up, and start thinking a little differently than they've been thinking, which is they've been thinking functionally. They've been thinking, you know, about operations and being excellent in that way, but they haven't been thinking about, you know, am I making the best decisions? Does my team have the context to succeed when information is abundant?

21:54What information is important? How are we going to make great decisions? How are we going to pivot? How am I going to make sure that the people on my team also have judgment and curiosity? Because that's going to be an important skill, not just for a leader, but for the people on your team. And I think that most leaders are still sort of in the information is power. I have the information. I think they're still operating in that zone. And their job is to give certain people the information when needed. But now everybody has all the information. Exactly. And all the answers. Yeah. You want to get steps, everybody can do it.

22:41Yeah. So I think I would be really pushing people on their ability to zoom out, really understand what is most important, what's imperative that we have to do. I think really great, as I'm talking, I know I'm blabbing a lot, but I think really, really great leaders are often so good at describing the trade-offs. This is what we're going to do right now, and we're not going to do this right now. Because there's so much everybody could do, right? Right. And, but, but it's, it's to really be able to have the ability and space to come up with what those trade-offs should be. Right. And when you're in the, in the trenches and the day-to-day doing, you aren't able to, to see the forest through the trees, if you will.

23:39It's one of the questions in the coaching habit book. It's actually called the strategy question, which is if we're going to say yes to this, what must we say no to? And it just surfaces the opportunity costs. And also your yes is meaningless unless you say no to this, because we're already overwhelmed with yeses. So unless we subtract, unless we remove, and Leidy Klotz's book, Subtract, is so good on this. Yes, I was just going to mention Leidy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's such a good reminder because, I mean, I think, you know, we always add. We never subtract. It's like, oh, we have a new problem at work.

24:19Okay, let's add 10 more people. And who's using AI at the moment to subtract stuff, to reduce stuff? Nobody ever is like, I'm pumping out more work than ever. Pete, where would you go with this? I mean, how would you help a leader or a manager or an individual contributor lead in this time of AI?

24:39Peter Clarke:Fun. Actually, I wrote down your eight Cs as you were talking, and I keep looking at them and sort of breaking them into you've got the left side and the right side. And there's probably some left brain, right brain scenario here, but you just look at like the go down clarity, context, connection and courage. Right. I think they all require each other. Like, you know, and we work with a lot of very early stage startups and founders who, you know, ultimately have clarity of vision around the original product. Right. So then when I fit it into the things around team building, right, the clarity piece is one of the biggest challenges because it's like, well, what do I really?

25:17Peter Clarke:need you know there's actually they'd say yes and say no thing too because you know most entrepreneurs and ceos tend to lump as much as possible into something right like i need this thing and oh by the way they will also do these other 10 things right but wait there's more yeah the untenable job spec right well then the context so what are we what are we trying to what problem are we trying to solve yeah right and then the connection piece around okay if i've got you know my clarity and kind of the context i'm going to ideally talk to several other people that are mentors or advisors of mine to sort of understand you know how am i thinking about this and then all of those things when you can get to the point of you know finally having the courage to act right but mostly that's like the courage to act i see tends to be missed a lot because that's great yeah it's amazing and it's all about people right we we're we work with these incredible entrepreneurs who have built something amazing right like invented something or come up with something that no one else thought of and then when it comes to hiring people to the team all of that sort of frontier like innovative thinking it just goes out the window and it's like well what did that other company do right and it's like well what does it matter so like because then I think you flip over to the left side, right?

26:42Peter Clarke:Where it's like, that feels very defensible where I've got certainty, right? I've got data in terms of that. I use content in our world as data, like overwhelm me with data so that I can ultimately not make a decision, right? Because I've, you know, I look at what I have, I have all this information and then I basically isolate myself and my thinking or, you know, the cocooning piece And then the collusion to me is groupthink, right? It's like, well, this is what I think people will think is the right answer. And like it never, I don't know, that never works out. The advice we give and I'm giving bad advice, I would say lately, because my advice when people are saying, what are people doing, you know, organizational and it's like, but do what works, right?