This morning I was reading Billy Oppenheimer’s Six at Six newsletter (highly recommend) which recounted a conversation with artist/author Austin Kleon. Kleon was essentially saying that AI is geared toward delivering an outcome – a finished product. But creativity is about process and the change it activates in the person/s doing the creating.
As someone who has written a novel, I can tell you that rewriting that damn thing several times over four years left me feeling more accomplished than the finished book ever has.
I haven’t re-read my own book in over a year, but I am forever changed by the process I went through to write that thing. I am better in a hundred ways as a result of struggling through that work. If I had keyed in a prompt that wrote something similar or better, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t feel the same.
Would AI write a better book than me? Who cares? There are already thousands of better writers out there so that’s irrelevant.
Leadership teams can get stuck in the same ditch. We tend to get hung up on the outcome when it’s worth noting that the process is where all the growth happens. Teams that don’t experience much adversity don’t have many opportunities to bond, grow, and problem-solve at their team level.
There’s a tendency to find the shortcut or hack so we can be done with whatever problem is in front of us and move on to the next thing. But working through the problem, taking the long way, is the process that makes us better at everything we do.
I spent last week with a creative team wrestling with how AI will change their industry. They're optimistic about it, leaning in, learning. But they know that to navigate what's coming, they have to be a strong team first. As part of that work, we spent some time writing a manifesto specifically for the leadership team itself and one of the lines they came up with is this:
We believe becoming the best team we've ever been is worth THE WORK.
By ‘the work’ they mean sitting in discomfort, having candid conversations, being vulnerable with each other, and radically supporting each other, even when it feels hard. Especially when it feels hard.
So don’t take the bypass. It’s seductive to skip the challenging thing because we feel busy, tired, or conflict avoidant. But you already know how that goes. The shortcut gets you the outcome. The long way gets you the growth.