Yesterday, Block announced 4,000 layoffs framed around AI productivity.. the stock rose 22%
Speed sells. Depth doesn’t… and organizations feel that pressure in how they make decisions about AI and change.
This post is about critical thinking and how important it is, especially when it comes to AI and change work.
See, AI tools are trained to respond, which means:
-They don’t help you see -They don’t help you doubt
What they do is help you move on fast, which is not great for critical thinking, especially when one of the things that helps critical thinking is taking time to reflect before moving forward with a decision.
In change work, the decisions you’re making about why people aren’t adopting, what barriers to prioritize, how to intervene, those are exactly the kind that need that reflection.
Whether it’s a leader deciding to restructure an entire workforce, or a change team designing an intervention for a new process, the question is the same: did you think it through, or did you move fast because moving fast felt like progress?
See, when people say, I use AI every day, they usually mean that it made their job easier, which is fair, it’s what it is made for.
However, easier isn’t smarter or more thoughtful, and if we only want easy and fast, we risk designing interventions that look good on paper but miss what’s actually going on.
This is how the typical user probably uses AI: (not a power user)
Prompt -> Accept answer ->Copy/use -> Move on
But this omits important steps like: -Challenging -Reframing -Countering -Synthesizing -Validating
This isn’t the user’s fault, low-friction and fluent systems make easy.
Now, i’ve had this discussion before and people have told me, Robert, if you are worried people will lose their critical thinking, what critical thinking are you referring to, since most people:
-Don’t ask good questions -Confuse opinions with arguments -Prioritize speed over depth
Now, you could take a more uncomfortable view and say…maybe AI isn’t the problem, It’s a mirror that reveals how shallow most thinking already is.
But I would say that if this is the case, then critical thinking is even more important now, especially for the people designing and leading change inside organizations.
We know most workplaces already reward confident answers, speed, and output, however I’m optimistic.
Critical thinking can be learnt, but it needs practice and reflection, because if we ignore it, we will keep confusing critical-sounding output with real thought.
So if you’re using AI for change work, ask:
-What’s missing from this diagnosis? -What would the counterargument be?
Use AI as a sparring partner, not an authority and validate outputs against what you’ve actually heard from the people going through the change.
Ask the model to explain its reasoning back to you in your own logic flow to test for coherence - and have others check.
What do you think about critical thinking in change?