It Started with a Bicycle

My older daughter learned to ride a bike when she was six. I explained the whole thing in about ninety seconds: here are the pedals, here’s the brake, steer with the handlebars. She now understood everything a bicycle does. She still couldn’t ride it.

That took practice, wobbling, falling off, getting back on, and me running alongside her holding the seat until she found her balance. She could have figured it out alone eventually, but it would have taken longer and hurt more.

I was speaking recently to a roomful of small business owners and leaders, and I asked who had given their teams some kind of AI training. About a quarter of the hands went up. Then I asked how many had given them time to actually practice with it. Fewer than three hands. After the session, I got chatting with one of the attendees who, as it turned out, owned an AI consultancy. But when I asked about critical thinking programs or AI collaboration training for their team … nothing. They’d taught people where the pedals are. That was it.

This is the pattern everywhere, and Gartner is worried enough to predict that by 2026, half of all organizations will need “AI-free” skills assessments because critical thinking is actually atrophying from over-reliance on generative AI. And a Bright Horizons study found that 42% of employees expect their role to change significantly because of AI, yet 42% also say their employer expects them to figure it out on their own.

In other words, “here are the pedals, good luck, try not to hit a tree.”

Where Tool Training Runs Out of Road

Most AI training right now is tool training. Here’s ChatGPT. Here’s the interface. Here’s how to write a prompt. And that’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far.

McKinsey found that as AI takes on more routine work, the human contribution is shifting toward framing better questions, validating outputs, and applying judgment. The skills aren’t disappearing. Where and how we use them is what’s changing.

So which human skills actually matter most? I’ve been digging into the research from the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, Workday, and others, and the same capabilities keep showing up. I’ve pulled them together into a framework I call the 5 to Thrive. (Yes, I named it. Yes, I’m proud of the fact that it rhymes. #languagenerd)

Companies are teaching people where the pedals are and wondering why nobody’s riding.

The 5 to Thrive

Five human capabilities that become more valuable, not less, as AI gets better.

1. Judgment

Can your team tell when AI is confidently wrong, or are they just accepting things because the output looks polished? Judgment is knowing when to question, when to push back, and when to say “I’m not buying that.” It’s the most in-demand human capability across almost every piece of research I’ve read, and it’s the one most at risk from over-reliance on AI. (My dogs are also very confident. Doesn’t mean I trust them to run the business.)

2. Creativity

AI is very good at generating variations on existing patterns. What it can’t do is come up with a genuinely new idea rooted in your specific context, your market, and your understanding of what your customers actually care about. Creativity in the AI era isn’t about volume. It’s about the spark.

3. Connection

Building trust, reading the room, knowing when someone needs a phone call instead of an email. If you read my recent post on the Delegation Dial, this is the meaningful end of the spectrum. And 83% of leaders say AI is making these human skills more important, not less.

4. Curiosity

The drive to keep questioning, experimenting, learning, and the resilience to keep going when it doesn’t work the first time. Or the second time. Or the seventh. The World Economic Forum ranks curiosity and lifelong learning as one of the fastest-rising skills globally, and I’d add that curiosity is also what breeds adaptability. Which is how your team handles whatever comes next.

5. Conviction

When AI makes it easy to sound like everyone else, conviction is what keeps your work distinctly yours. It’s standing behind your values, your brand, your point of view, even when the path of least resistance is letting AI smooth everything into sameness. You’ve probably heard me say that AI is raising the floor so, the best need to be building their Second Story Strategy. This conviction is what protects your Second Story. It’s critical to your competitive advantage that can’t be copied.

AI can make your team faster. Only these five skills can make them better.

Putting the 5 to Thrive to Work

Here’s your homework. Three things you can do this week.

1. Assess. Rate yourself or your team across all five: Judgment, Creativity, Connection, Curiosity, Conviction. Where are you strong? Where are the gaps? Be honest, not generous. (If everyone scores themselves a 9 out of 10 on Judgment … that might actually be a judgment problem.)

2. Buddy up. Pair people with complementary strengths. Your strongest critical thinker next to your most creative risk-taker. Your most empathetic connector with someone who has conviction in spades. Skills grow faster when they rub up against each other, and your team gets more resilient when strengths are shared rather than siloed.

3. Build it into your AI systems. This is the one I get most excited about. Design your AI workflows and agents to actively develop these skills during use, not bypass them. An agent that surfaces three options and asks “which one and why?” is building judgment. One that flags generic-sounding output and asks “what would make this distinctly yours?” is building conviction. If your AI tools aren’t encouraging human thinking while people use them, they’re quietly eroding it. (And remember that Gartner stat about critical thinking atrophying? This is how you prevent it.)

If your AI tools aren’t encouraging human thinking during use, they’re quietly eroding it.

• • •

The Leader’s Job Right Now

Your team doesn’t need another workshop on which buttons to push. They need time to practice, permission to get it wrong, and someone willing to run alongside them while they figure it out.

That’s you.

If that’s a conversation your audience needs to hear, my keynotes are built for exactly this. Let’s talk about bringing it to your next event.