Hi —
Earlier this year, Daniel Pink put out a piece naming the top six human abilities that get more valuable, not less, as AI gets more powerful.
Number one on the list?
Asking questions.
Pink built this list off ideas he first explored twenty years ago in his book A Whole New Mind. His point now is that answers used to be scarce, and they aren't anymore. What's scarce now is knowing which questions actually matter.
We know this intuitively from working with AI chatbots: the quality of the prompt has everything to do with the quality of the answer you get back. But often the most meaningful answers come from other humans, not just tech tools.
That's where it's not enough to be curious and ask the right question. You have to make it safe for the other person to share their full and truest answer. And you have to listen between the lines — for content, emotion, and action. And, perhaps most importantly, reflect on what you heard and close the loop by sharing your takeaways and what you plan to do with them. This set of moves, which we call the Ask Approach™, is the fully human superpower that brings Pink's #1 ability to life.
The good news is that these skills are learnable, and we've been refining methods—from large-group experiences to interactive workshops to leadership coaching—to help leaders systematically cultivate them.
Next month, we’ll be offering a webinar on how to grow your ability to ask—not just questions that gather information, but questions that unlock the thinking, experience, and wisdom already at the table.
Stay tuned for more details, and we hope you'll join us!
Stay curious,
— Emily and Jeff
P.S. A big thank you to Karen Abrams Gerber of Collaborative Changemakers for pointing us to Daniel Pink's work! If you see resources or ideas relevant to Ask, we welcome you to share them!
Ask News & Updates
What We’re Reading
Leadership Intelligence: This one actually came out just this week! Caroline Webb spent 25 years coaching and advising leaders, and this is the book she's said she wanted to write for most of that time: Leadership Intelligence: Science-Based Strategies for Mastering 21 Everyday Management Challenges. She calls the framework the Leadership Intelligence System, three science-based principles pulled from neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics that map onto how the brain handles decisions, motivation, and threat. Twenty-one chapters apply it to specific problems leaders actually run into, each one told through a leader who handles that problem well. If you liked How to Have a Good Day, this is worth your time too. Find it at carolinewebb.co/leadershipintelligence.
Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers: What is a question, actually? Turns out, even this is a deceptively hard "question," and Lani Watson has spent years delving into it. We were lucky enough to read an advance copy of her new book, Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers, which traces this topic from Socrates to the debates we're having now about AI. She's studied how people question differently across fields as different as medicine, law, and journalism, and she's just as fascinated by what she calls unaskable and unanswerable questions. You know we're suckers for anything involving questions, and this book didn't disappoint. If you are too, why not check it out? (Was that a question? 😉)