The Curiosity Coach In Your Pocket

What if I told you AI could take your people skills to the next level?

A growing conversation about AI and work has made one thing abundantly clear: the future belongs to those most skilled at being human. About 92 percent of executives agree that people skills are more important than ever. Yet despite widespread calls for greater investment in “people skills” like communication and collaboration, few have considered how AI can be used as a tool for up-leveling these skills.

People’s ability to learn from and connect with those around them is often the factor that determines success or failure.

The good news is that these two essential capabilities share an underlying skillset: asking the right questions, in the right ways. While AI cannot understand and connect to other people for us, it can assist us in up-leveling our ability to ask in three ways: awakening curiosity, framing better questions, and listening to learn.

Using AI to Awaken Curiosity

Curiosity drives us to challenge existing beliefs, discover new solutions, and understand the world and the people around us. Yet despite the many documented benefits of curiosity for individuals and organizations, it remains an underdeveloped skill. Instead, we stay stuck in our certainty, looping on a set of conclusions about a given situation or person. As a result, learning and growth stagnate.

This is where AI can help, by acting as an objective thought partner free of the cognitive biases that often prevent the human brain from seeing alternative perspectives and possibilities. We can counteract this tendency and stir curiosity by asking AI to generate alternate interpretations and potential blind spots.

Think of a recent interaction where you and a colleague disagreed about something, one in which you feel pretty confident that you are in the right. Summarize your view of the situation: for example, “My colleague Adam is refusing to take on a project I asked him to do. I’m so frustrated.” Then add, “What am I missing?” When I type this into ChatGPT, it generates seven situations that might be leading Adam to resist taking on the project. Whereas my mind immediately zoomed in on one or two explanations, blocking all other options outside of my awareness, AI presents the full buffet, without any filtering. Maybe he has other, more pressing priorities that I’m not aware of. Maybe he’s worried he doesn’t have the skillset or expertise needed to deliver high-quality work. Maybe I haven’t explained the scope and details of the project well enough for him to feel comfortable committing.

It doesn’t matter whether any of the potential explanations generated by AI are the real reason. The power of using AI in this way is to disrupt your certainty about a situation by widening the lens of what else might be true. This opens you to the possibility that there is something more for you to learn and motivates you to find out.

This strategy can be applied to more complex situations as well. For instance, you could input a recent email exchange, a transcript of a recent meeting, or a longer description of a scenario. By exposing the limitations of our perspective, AI can shake us out of our certainty and increase our ability to get curious, even when it is most counterintuitive to do so.

Using AI to Brainstorm Better Questions

AI can also help you brainstorm more effective questions for specific situations. Unfortunately, most people have limited question repertoires and little practice designing quality questions. You probably have a few go-to questions. “Help me understand.” “Does that make sense?” These are common among leaders. Our go-to repertoire is pretty narrow compared to the range of situations we’re in, the challenges we face, and the breadth of things we might learn. This is where AI can help you break out of your default and start asking quality questions designed to surface the information you most need in a given situation.

You can also use AI to brainstorm better questions that can break you out of the back and forth and help you truly understand another person’s perspective or even discover a third option neither of you has considered. Type the scenario into AI (or even input an email chain or transcript of a conversation) and then ask, “What questions can I ask?”

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AI immediately generates a list of questions designed to expand the conversation in a variety of ways – from increasing your understanding of another person's perspective to getting her insight on aspects of your proposal you might not have considered:

• What do you see as the biggest advantages and potential drawbacks of focusing on our existing customers?
• Are there any risks you foresee in my idea of targeting new customer segments that I may be overlooking?
• What specific data or insights do we have about our current customers that suggest they will be the best target for this new product?
• What are our common goals for this product launch? How can we align our strategies to achieve these goals?

There’s no guarantee that an AI chatbot will provide you with exactly the right questions. What it can reliably do, however, is generate an initial brainstorm that you can filter and build on. What’s more, using this strategy over time can help you become better at building questions yourself.

Using AI to Listen to Learn

You can even enlist AI as a listening partner for real interactions. The majority of communication occurs virtually, whether through text (email, Slack, texts) or voice (phone calls, video meetings). One upshot of this is that it’s easier than ever to record and transcribe (with permission, of course) exactly what was said instead of relying on memory, making it possible to listen for multiple channels of meaning: content, emotion, and action. Of course, most people struggle to listen well to just one of these channels, let alone three. But AI has no such limitations, and can easily analyze an interaction at multiple levels if prompted.

Consider a situation in which you are a sales lead trying to motivate your product manager, Dan, to advocate for your idea on how to better meet customer needs in their next team meeting. You have the following conversation:

You: Hey, have you thought any more about my ideas for adding those features to the product?

Dan: Yeah, I put it on the agenda for one of our upcoming product team meetings.

You: I just think it would be a total game changer for our clients. Plus, our competitors are encroaching, and we need to keep standing out.

Dan: Definitely.

You: So you’ll push for this in the product meeting?

Dan: Um, yeah…I just have to think about the best way to raise it.

You came away from the conversation feeling good, confident that Dan was on board with the idea and would push for it at the next product meeting. But the meeting passes and there’s still no movement. You input the transcript into AI and ask the following three prompts:

• “What were the key points or messages that Dan was conveying during our meeting?
• “What emotions might Dan have been feeling during our conversation?”
• “What actions was Dan taking throughout the dialogue? What actions was he trying to get me to take?”

When you ask these questions, the AI not only outlines the key content of the conversation but suggests that Dan may be feeling pressured and uncertain about the idea. What’s more, when the AI analyzes the action level of the conversation, it reports that Dan may be asking you to give him space while he considers how to present your idea or to trust his judgment on how and when to best raise the idea with his group.

The idea is not to let AI do the listening for you. No technology can (yet) mimic the complex, emotionally rich act of interpersonal listening. But it can act like another set of skilled “ears,” offering a perspective against which to weigh your conclusions. And unlike a sympathetic friend, AI doesn’t care about hurting feelings and is more likely to give you an objective read on the situation.

The AI revolution has just begun, and there’s no telling exactly how it will change the future of work. But one thing is clear: the future of human skill is interpersonal. Now is the time to invest in our ability to learn from one another – to get more curious, ask better questions, and listen effectively. AI can help you do just that.