Hello Reader !

This week we got the PISA results, showing a huge decline in critical thinking, science, math, and reading among teenagers. And that’s exactly what will happen to you and your team if you don’t take the AI risks seriously. For 1.5 years, I have repeated the same message to leaders: focus on the "why" behind using AI and protect your team's unique human skills.

But I am frustrated. The noise from AI companies and internal IT trainings is far louder than my little voice. The same frustration I have with my teenagers ;).
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What you’ll take away today:

• Why every new tool needs two phases: explore, then guide
• The easy swap trap
• How to build a team manifesto for working with AI

Before we begin, how can I help you?

• Before we begin, how can I assist you?
  • Coach you to build your team GenAI system: skills, mindset and AI/human organization here​​
  • Coach you and your team to design and pressure test your new strategy or product here​
  • Audit and improve your innovation, customer centricity, and ability to adapt to a complex and ever-evolving environment here​

Get comfortable for your 5 minutes of sparks to hack.

✨ Spark

✏ Explore, then guide

When you get a new tool, you explore. A phone. Social media. Now AI. You experiment, you play, and that’s healthy.

But very quickly, you need guidance. Where to use it. Where not to use it. And what not to drop, because you found an alternative that is more enjoyable.

✏ The easy swap

Social media versus reading. An AI summary versus reading the book at school. ChatGPT summarizing a long report vs you reading it. Copilot writing your emails, not you.

The easy option wins, because it requires less effort. But the effort is the point. Reading is what you need to keep doing as a human to maintain your human skills. Writing (dictating -I never "write" nor I write this newsletter) your emails with personal notes shows respect and investment in relationships.

✏ Look at our teenagers

Many of you have teenagers (me too 😅 15- and 17-year-old boys). We gave them phones, social media, and now AI. We didn’t guide them much on what to use and how.

The result landed this week. The OECD’s PISA 2025 test of 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries puts reading, maths and science at their lowest since 2000..

The OECD head, Mathias Cormann, also sees students “rushing through a text and giving a quick wrong answer.” Sounds familiar?

✏ How can you protect if you don’t know the risk?

Here is the real problem. We never went through these changes as kids. So we didn’t know the risks.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt names it clearly: “We have overprotected our children in the real world and underprotected them online.” Parents kept kids safe outside, but gave them full freedom online, partly because they didn’t understand what was going on there. Also very interesting to look at the social dilemma with your teenager if you haven't done it yet.

I love this quote, and now replace "social media" with GenAI; yes, GenAI has its own goals, and it's not necessary to serve your team.

✏ Your employees are next

I don't think every team and every team member will be like these teenagers.

I see, in my current coaching, a much bigger risk:

• in junior people who don't yet have the expertise to challenge AI output and might be very easily drawn to use it more because "it sounds smarter" than they are.
• in people who always look for shortcuts (and are a bit lazy ;)). AI is definitely a big temptation.
• in teams is only efficiency-driven training, only on the tools, and no discussion led by the leader on why we use AI and what we need to protect.

I see a big hype around people writing their emails with Copilot, using a style based on all the emails they've written so far. The result? A boring guy/girl you would never want to date. Self-sufficient, long emails, no humour.

Train them on Copilot in email: don’t be surprised when the quality of your team communication drops. Train and talk only about Copilot in the slides; don’t be surprised when all slides look the same, the titles are off, and the length increases, the substance gone.

Where and how you train them is where they will use it. Today, most people are trained on Copilot by IT people or consultants, not business people or coaches. They learn what to do and how. Never the why nor where.

If you tell people what to do and not why, you risk a drop in quality, cognitive surrender, and a lot of fatigue and frustration for you as a team leader. I already mentioned many risks here.

✨ Hack

So how do you protect you and your team? A big part of the answer starts with you. I'm freely sharing some of the frameworks I teach in our Change program at ScaleU with AI, dedicated to leaders (if you are curious here).

✏ Educate yourself on the risks

If you don’t know the danger, you can’t protect and guide your team. Learn the potential risks of AI, so you can name them.

Once you can name them, you can start the conversation. Or get trained on leading change. This is exactly what we help leaders see. As part of the AI adoption profile we do when we start, we ask whether people are aware of those risks, and we help leaders build the vocabulary to name and lead the right conversation with their teams.

✏ The 2 steps of leadership focus

At the start of your AI journey, as they begin training, focus on what I call experimentation leadership. Let your team experiment. Make it safe to try, to fail, and to share what worked and what didn’t. Exploration is where people build confidence.

Very quickly, your goal is to align and formalize: 1) the high-impact tasks where you want AI to be used 2) the expected mindset and behavior and monitoring any potential negative risk of AI so you can act on it.

✏ Focus on Why and Where at every step of the AI adoption

Even if you only start, already define the why and the where; as adoption increases, you will be able to formalize it further. For ex write a short team manifesto for working with AI:

• Why: which high-impact tasks AI should be amplified; formulate in terms of the thinking process and steps rather than "do." Rather, we do a slide with AI -> We make our communication less technical and sharper so that our audience understands and adopt our recommendations.
• Where AI is not welcome: for example, no AI before you have made any cognitive effort on the question, no perfect email policy (imperfection welcome!), creating an engaging speech, or the end-of-year feedback reviews.
• What we never drop and why: quality accountability, reading the long research, doing some of your own summarizing, writing your own emails,

Writing it is a good start. Repeating it in every team meeting, offsites, and one-on-one is where you need discipline and consistency to guide and protect your team.

One of my clients keeps repeating a simple mantra: “Use your brain first.” It works.

That’s it for today. Which task would you never hand over to AI? Reply with one. I read every reply.

See you in two weeks. Keep the spark alive!

Aurélie

What's up with me?

I gave a workshop on Ecosystem Mapping: how to understand the key influencers around your end user or payer to better define your strategy (for example, when the environment shifts, like with MFN) and/or your go-to-market strategy if you're a startup. It was with 5 startups in the environmental space, solving critical problems such as increasing biodiversity, reducing waste, and improving circular economies.

Reader, hit reply to let me know if you liked this edition or if you tried these tips. I respond to every person who writes to me!