One Thing to Teach in the Age of AI | Bryan Cassady | TEDxUniversityofSalford

I have a colleague >> >> that wrote what I think is the greatest exam question ever.

It wasn't hard because of what he asked. It was hard because of what he didn't ask. What he didn't ask for was answers.

His exam was simple. Prove you've learned the material in this course by providing me five good questions.

Stop for a second. Could you give me five good questions about your area of expertise? It's harder than you think and probably more important than you think.

He In this course, many great students failed and nobody got a perfect score. I loved this method so much, I've repeated it again and again and again.

One of the places I do it is with companies and I'd like you to take you inside a moment with a company. I want you to imagine this moment.

I'm sitting with 12 senior leaders in a room.

Between them, 200 years of experience. These are the best people in the company. In a past life, you might have called them the Renaissance men. These were the people for every question had a dozen good answers.

We've been talking about strategy all morning.

I stopped the projector. I said, "Let's stop for just a second. I got a question for you." I said, "Imagine you have an AI that knows everything we talked about today. Everything about your competition.

Everything about the company. Can you give me five questions that proves you know what we talked about today and you could actually use it?"

They came back. They said, "Brian, this is really easy."

I said, "Give it a shot." What happened next is interesting. They started and then the room went quiet.

These were 12 of the best people in the company.

They knew their stuff. 200 years of experience, not one of them was able to put together five good questions.

There was silence. Not hesitation.

Not discussion. Just silence.

It was at that moment there that I decided to write the talk that I'm giving right now. These people weren't unprepared.

They weren't poor in their job. They were the best people in the company.

People paid very well to have answers. The moment didn't show me a gap in their knowledge. It showed me a gap in the way that we train and develop people.

For a long time we've taught people what we call the banking model of learning. And I have to look Paulo Freire is the guy who put that together. How does it work?

The teacher deposits knowledge in the head of a student. The student stores the knowledge. The student is more valuable or the employee is more valuable the more knowledge they have in their head.

And for most of history this made a lot of sense because knowledge was scarce. Because knowledge was valuable.

So, what did we do? We added more and more and more. Exams, certifications, other things. We measured people by the balance of knowledge. And I wonder how many of you are doing that today?

Something came up recently. It's not that old right now. There's AI that's been around for a long time, but when we talk about AI today it's very different. AI arrived and it gave me and it gave you an unlimited account of knowledge.

The knowledge doesn't need to live inside your head anymore. It's there waiting for your question. But we're still training people as if the deposits are what really count.

To be honest with you, we don't need more deposits. Maybe a few.

What we need is better withdrawals. And a withdrawal is a question.

But here's where things get dangerous. Most of you and me are lazy when we ask questions.

And a bad question pulls from the wrong place. AI doesn't check to see if you've given it the right question. It just gives you a reply back. It's confident. It's certain.

It might even tell you how brilliant you are.

The biggest risk in the age of AI is not bad answers. It's not the hallucinations. It's a confident answer.

Even a correct answer to the wrong question.

Now, this isn't just theory. There's a landmark study that was done with Boston Consulting Group consultants.

These are bright bright folks. As smart as you can get. Done by Harvard and Wharton. They took these people and gave them AI.

When they had AI and a good questions, the quality of their work went up by 40%. Good questions, 40% better.

But there's a catch. That same group who trusted AI too much without questioning it made 19% more mistakes. So, AI is here. It's a multiplier. It puts things up and it puts things down. Better questions are the things that make things different. Now, to be honest with you, you might say, "Well, I'm not an academic. Do I need to know this?"

It's not rocket science. It's quite simple. If you ask the wrong question, you are going to get the wrong solutions.

Now, I've learned this lesson myself a lot of ways, a lot of times.

But, I'm going to tell you about one story.

I built a 5-day innovation course. I trained close to 5,000 people. It was a great course. And I had high hopes for the future.

Companies kept on telling me the same thing. "Brian, we don't have 5 days for your course."

But, I said, "You know what? I'm going to make this course so good, so amazing, >> >> that nobody can say no." And I worked on it, and I worked on it.

And it was pretty damn good. Unfortunately, that was the wrong question. The real question should have been, "How do I make this thing fit their schedules?"

Now, the irony here, and it's not lost on me, is I teach people how to ask better questions for a living.

Regardless of how much you know, you have to think about the questions you're asking. The questions are critically important.

Pushed by some clients, I did some few things.

I took my 5-day course, put it in four.

Four was better than five. I said, "Oh, four is great. I'll throw some AI in, and I'll squish it down to one."

The 1-day course left people exhausted. We expanded it back to two, and that was the best version. Good, we got it.

What we did at that point in time is I was teaching the same course again and again and again. With one company we ran out of time. We weren't able to finish the course in two days. I said, "Okay, you know what we're going to do? We're going to come back next week and we'll do another half day."

This was the best course ever. Why? Because people had time to think, they organized their thoughts, they came back, they had what people are calling soak time to let their brains process what is there. I sat forward in my chair and I thought, "My goodness, why didn't I think of this?"

And the answer for that Oops.

Stop clicking.

The reality is I didn't ask enough good questions. If I'd asked two simple questions earlier, I could have saved myself a lot of time. The first one, how might I make this course fit their schedules?

Second question, how could I give people time to think?

The answer was sitting inside the questions I didn't ask. Now, the formula for results has always been the following. Results are the product of knowledge and execution. In my 5-day course, I loaded people with knowledge. When I cut the course, I cut content and focused on single messages. I taught people just enough to be able to ask good questions and then focused on application.

Then I let AI take up the slack. So, here's the one thing you need to know.

If you want to teach people and you want to teach them well, you teach people enough to ask good questions and simply get out of the way.

That's it. That's what you need to remember. It's not more complicated than that. That is it. But what I'd like to do is tell you a little bit more.

As I said earlier, results have always been the same equation.

Execution has changed, but it hasn't changed that much. But where it's changed dramatically is in the area of knowledge.

Knowledge what used to be what was sitting inside your head.

Knowledge is now what's sitting inside your head.

What's sitting with AI and your ability to ask questions.

The person who wins isn't the one with the fullest head. It's the one with the sharpest questions. Now, let me show you how you can do that. >> >> There are literally a hundred ways I could teach you to ask questions.

I like simple solutions. The simplest one out there is just three words long. >> >> How might we? Take those three words, add a challenge.

That's it.

Now, I'd like to show you how you can do this with a real practical problem.

Imagine you're the HR director in a company. You're working on client new employee onboarding. You got a problem. People arrive, they feel overwhelmed, they're not producing very much, they're not adding much.

I'd like you to sharpen that. How might we help new employees feel confident, clear, and useful in their first 10 days?

Do you notice how those two things are different?

You're starting to look for a solution. Even better, add a little bit of tension. How can we do this without increasing any management time? A weak question gives you something to look at. A good question gives you something to discover.

Now, the good news for all of you here is this is something I can train you to do. Something you can learn to do. A lot of research has been done on the ability to train people to ask better questions and use AI more effectively. With a training on how to ask better questions, you can find your success rate going up dramatically. In this study, it went up to 78% of the time you got the job done right. Without the training, 45%.

Double the results. Well, not exactly double, almost double the results, just by asking better questions. Now, I've seen questions work everywhere. Companies left, companies right, but I want to take you on a more personal journey.

I want to introduce you to somebody where the banking model of education never worked.

This is my son. This is one of my favorite pictures of my son. One minute after this was picture was taken, the goat butted him in the head.

And then what he did, he charged the goat and head butted him back.

My son has always been stubborn, unbelievably stubborn.

He got kicked out of school four times, from four different schools.

Then he got serious. We worked together at home.

Four years of high school, three months. He graduated, got into some top schools.

I said, "Yes!" What does he do then? He drops out.

He tells me, "Dad, you know what? They were giving me facts, but I wasn't learning anything." So God.

By every measure of the old model, he had failed.

But he hadn't.

At 22, with no medical background, no business experience, he had had some powerful experience in his life. One of them was with psilocybin. He asked the question, "How might I introduce other people to this?" He did some research. He find out he could set up a retreat business in Mexico. Imagine this, he didn't speak a word of Spanish. Moved to Mexico, set up a company.

He was there, was running. He said, "How might I make this better?"

He moved the business later in the year to Jamaica.

Jamaica, things went better, but he didn't make a lot of money.

But what I find impressive is his ability to just go out and do it.

When he's in Jamaica, he said, "What What can we do to make more money?"

He said, "What do I have? I got a business growing mushrooms.

I got great production systems and a lot of guano."

See if you can guess what's going to happen.

He had a retreat business in Mexico. A retreat business in Jamaica.

He became a bat guano supplier. And set up a very successful business supplying bat guano around the world.

He's 28 now. Less involved in bat guano than before.

Successful. Investing in many different areas.

He's an obsessive reader. One passion at a time.

He asks a lot of questions. Probably more than any human being I know.

But what I do know is it's the ability to ask questions that make things work. Looking at the success of people like my son, I know almost everything is figureoutable if you keep on asking the right questions.

He didn't learn how might we in school. He never used those words. Maybe you heard me in a meeting with a client. He got it from himself. He got it through experience. With big challenges, he challenges the question naturally. That's his superpower. And I think the thing that we need to teach everywhere in the world.

Why? Because when you ask the right questions, you're on your way to the right solutions.

Now, looking at my son, >> >> looking at my course, looking at the world of BCG, I saw the same pattern coming up again and again.

Learn enough, not too much, so you're able to ask a good question, and then rapidly go and apply it.

That's the learning loop of the future. Now, we all know the doctors who smoke, the cobblers that have bad shoes.

Sometimes you have to follow your own medicine.

I asked myself a how might we question. >> >> And that how might we question is how could I take this program that I've developed and make it even more compressed to focus on high-performance people that are starved for time.

We went from 5 days to 2 1/2. You might say that's the place to stop.

Right now, we've taken that 5-day program, made it in 10-minute trainings over 10 days. Each day we supply just enough information to ask a good question. People apply it and move on.

What have we seen? Well, in the last run of the course, we had 76% of the people saying that they were applying what they learned within 10 days.

This is important. It's not remembering it, applying it.

If you do an off-site training, you'll be lucky if people remember the name of the training. And 20% using it would be a really good number. Now, for me, this is the essentials of what you need to teach. The essentials of one thing, enough to ask a good question, then time to use the answer. I believe this is what the future of learning looks like in the age of AI. It's not a firehose of content that you forget. >> >> Now, who do better questions help? A 22-year-old kid who pivoted business three times in a year. A father who took a course that was too long and now turned it into a model of efficiency teaching things amazingly fast. The real question now is not how you cram more into the courses, but how in the age of AI, how do you get better questions? This will be the future. It's not what to ask. It's about what to test.

The questions you need. Einstein famously said, Oh, today the formula has not changed.

It just made the cost of skipping the questions more expensive. In the old times, the Renaissance man had all the answers. Today, the Renaissance man has the good questions. A good question makes all the difference. Einstein famously said, if he had a tough challenge and 1 hour and his life depended on it, he'd spend 55 minutes on the question, 5 minutes on the solution.

He said the solution is the easy bit. Now, I'm not Einstein. You're not Einstein. So, I'd like to set the bar a little bit lower. Let's swap the numbers around.

5 minutes. When's the last time you spent 5 minutes thinking hard about a question before you pulled out your phone, before you looked at Google, before you answered AI?

5 whole minutes. Most people can't remember.

Now, we've got a lot to figure out. Your job, your kids' education, all the sustainability challenges we saw today, even what a week of work is going to look like in 5 years.

But I believe passionately with the right questions, everything is figureoutable. The future is this.

Better questions are the answer.

>> >> Thank you very much, welcome.