“… like we used to do…”

There’s a concerning, if fascinating, trend emerging in organizations around the world.

What happens when you work with people, but can just prompt a bot to get all the information you need? You no longer need to tap someone on the shoulder or post in a Slack channel.

If you as a leader aren’t careful, you’re depriving your people of an important, if previously under-appreciated, phenomenon in the modern workplace.

Shared context.

Asking a question (there’s no such thing as a dumb question!) to an individual or a group of people is one of the most precious gifts you can have.

Questions are how our own brains get prompted.

If someone asked a question about a product area or customer you had forgotten about, you might remember that thing you were going to get back to. Or someone else might have specific ingrained context that isn’t written down anywhere.

Instead, what’s happening is outputs over outcomes. People writing documents for the sake of writing them, so other peoples’ robots can consume them. It’s what’s happening across the internet, on a micro-scale. And now, people use their own robots to write documents for other robots to consume.

It’s the quiet erosion of collaboration, shared context, and nuance.

Protect the dumb questions, write down the why and not just the what, and make deliberate room for the gaps between genuine collaboration, decision making, and output.