AI in Leadership Writing
What is your message — what are your thoughts?
Leadership is about human relations — so what does AI know about leadership?
Management writing tradition
There has been a tradition for many years now for writing management literature in a certain way. Maybe engaging, but also lining up a few “facts” that “we all see” in our lives as employees or managers, and how these presumed facts are making company life and especially productivity worse.
Next step of a management book is then to explain a clever new idea to doing this better — and it is typically a very simple idea, easy to explain.
Now, easy is not really what describes human relations, is it? There are so many aspects, so many details that can influence our ways of behaving toward each other, that I think it must be obvious to most people that no easy fix can magically cure all our problems.
Another side of it is that what is described as “facts” may not be that — we may actually not all see those patterns around us, but since they are being vividly described in the book, we can easily imagine such a situation. And we are often so eager to be or become one of the pack that we tend to say “yes, it is true” about such things, just to socialize and create an imagined harmony with the writer.
Most of the writers of management books also give speeches and run a consulting business, and the way of talking, suggesting solutions, socializing — it makes the one popular because understandable and relatable is always popular. Easy explanations and easy solutions are always more attractive than the ugly reality of complexity.
Enter AI
Chatbots generate text on the basis of kind of statistics, typically engaging artificial neural network technology of some kind that has learned the essence of a large amount of input texts. This can then be output as a kind of summary text, also shaped on the bases of statistics. As many input texts have been carefully edited during the past several years, they often provide a certain view on how text should look like. The output, hence, also follow that set of ideas.
On top of the statistical part are some correctional mechanisms that should weed out any possible insults, discriminations, bad language, or even legally disputable claims that could appear in such statistically based material. Any strong elements will be removed, and the result will be weak and unengaging.
The style is usually optimistic, grammatically correct, and paragraphs are of equal length. Certain norms for the shape of different kinds of texts have been applied by the chatbot firms, so for a business text you will often see an introduction, a list of five topics, and then a conclusion.
This whole setup shouldn’t be bad, really, since it follows good traditions, good advice on style, and it is pleasant and unoffensive to read.
But where is the soul of it?
What interesting message could there possible be in a text that consists only of a synthesis of what has already been written?
How can the machine add anything useful about human relations and leadership?
The wish for perfection
Many writers try to reach a level of perfection with their written pieces that they may not be able to do all alone. So, they use technology like spell checkers, grammar checkers, and similar, and since these technologies are getting more and more advanced, they can do quite a lot of changes — seen as improvements by the writer.
But for every bit of technologically introduced change, a similar bit of the original human thought will leave the text. And with a lot of automated editing, the text can become a lot technological, in a sense, and very little human.
The chatbot is the ultimate technology for improving texts, as it can write the text out of almost no input. Just a few words, a vague idea, and off it goes — soon to deliver the complete article… with the synthesis of years of writing presented nicely as a soulless text without any new message.
A writer may be tempted to go that way because it looks good — not a single wrong comma, and some advanced phrases that the writer themselves could not have come up with.
It is a bit like ghostwriting, isn’t it? Someone gets help from an experienced writer to say what they found difficult to express themselves.
Only, the ghost is here in the machine, and the machine is not, like a human ghostwriter, trying to get the thoughts and knowledge out of the client — the machine just invents something.
A misconception has spread that a chatbot can write better than most humans, so many writers believe that they are improving their writing by letting the machine do it for them.
The effect on leadership
Try to imagine that nothing new is ever being said or done, all is repetition. At work, or in any work relation, perhaps spread over distance, nobody even tries to dig into the problems before acting — they just repeat what has been done before.
Repetition is a deed, and many methods build on this deed. Methods for manufacturing, for quality, and indeed also methods for management.
Repetition is often seen as using lessons learned from the past, benefiting from experience.
But blind repetition without looking at the details will often lead to wrong or at least bad results — there is always an element or more that are different in this particular case. And often, it is all different, so the repeated method for solving the problem will not fit at all.
So how will a chatbot-generated article about leadership help improving anything?
At best, it could indicate some kind of average of how people have been suggesting doing things in the past — through the many simplified ideas of many management books that the chatbot has learned from.
But will it fit the situation you are in right now? Will such a situation even exist that matches the idea presented by the machine? Hardly. I would say clearly not.
Because the details, the individualities of the situation are missing and the context is blurry, not matching anything of today particularly well.
Even if you took all the latest management books only and synthesized them into an idea, using the chatbot technology, you would still get a too simple and useless output of it.
The human touch
The machine’s artificial experience is quite pointless, but the exact contrary counts for the human experience. Almost no matter what situations you have been in during your work life, you will have learned something — or experienced something that is about to evolve into learning — that the machine has never even heard about.
This is your unique perspective. It will, of course, fit your unique work situations — shaped by the exact people who took part in it under some circumstances that are not equal to anything else in the world.
But your description of what you saw, heard, felt, thought, and concluded on the basis of your experiences — that is useful as input for other people’s thoughts, helping them to see perspectives in their own situations that they otherwise may not have thought of.
Your unique perspective.
With all its wrong commas, broken logic, and everything that makes it human.
This is what we need. Not the synthesis made by the machine, not the dampened down average of what thousands of management writers have already said.
We need your human touch, or even more than that — we need a human experience, preferably completely untouched by the machines.
Only then we are seriously talking about human relations — about leadership.