Despite their best intentions, executives fall prey to cognitive and organizational biases that get in the way of good decision-making. In this series, we highlight some of them and offer a few effective ways to address them.
Our topic this time?
The cognitive brakes on the gen AI accelerator
The dilemma
A healthcare company had a plan to accelerate its employees’ use of gen-AI-based tools. It invested substantial time and resources into a company-wide, self-paced, interactive training program for its employees. More than 90 percent of the attendees rated the program highly, making leaders believe that it had been a great success.
However, six weeks later, fewer than 10 percent of the attendees had adopted the gen AI tools in their day-to-day work lives. When questioned about their behavior, employees’ replies were surprising: Even in cases where someone’s job would have been made easier, faster, and more enjoyable by using the tools, some had failed to even try them.
The research
The cognitive bias that the company’s leaders had run up against is known as status quo bias. It’s a psychological phenomenon whereby, when faced with a decision, people often take a mental shortcut and default to the current state of affairs. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser’s 1988 “Status quo bias in decision-making”1 is considered the seminal research on this topic. In the study’s experiments, participants faced hypothetical decisions about portfolio allocation, retirement plans, and job choices. The researchers found that subjects disproportionately chose whatever was described as the choice currently in effect.
Status quo bias can cause people to overindex on the risks of adopting gen AI tools (as with, “The robots will replace me”) and underindex on the risks of inertia.
One method for overcoming this cognitive trap is to reframe the choice as one between standing still to suffer potential losses and moving forward to reap potential rewards. Additional approaches include making new-tool adoption the default position, using leader and peer models to encourage behavioral change, and raising awareness of how dramatically the status quo is changing in the wider world.
Bias Busters
The remedy
The company realized that it needed to work on a more intimate, personal level to inculcate the sense that inertia was risky and that adopting gen AI tools was the smartest and safest choice. This time, facilitators worked with specific teams, analyzing each group’s tasks. The focus was on not just recommending the right gen AI tools but helping employees figure out where to fit them into their workflows. The subtext of these small-group trainings was, “This is our default way of working now.”
Meanwhile, the CEO, the CFO, and other senior leaders received one-on-one training that showed them how gen AI could help free their time to work on the highest-value tasks. This approach was important because experts may fear losing relevance if they believe that the tools could replace them. By demonstrating how gen AI could actually improve leaders’ job performance, the company motivated them to become adoption front-runners.
These knowledgeable leaders were then able to identify “super users” on their teams who were boldly experimenting and uncovering real gains through gen AI. These employees were celebrated, rewarded, and deployed as coaches for the rest of their teams. The goal was to leverage the influence of peer models, who are often the most effective at inspiring others to try new behaviors.
One of the most powerful things that the company did was to take specific teams on “go and see” visits to organizations that had integrated gen AI into their operations to surprising effect. People often don’t believe that something is possible until they see it themselves, so they fall back on the idea that it can’t be done. Seeing how much some companies have rewired for gen AI adoption can be a powerful way to dislodge the comfortable sense that there’s plenty of time for change.
The combined effect of these efforts was to dispel the idea that inertia was the safest option. Instead, employees saw leaders, peers, teams, and other companies establish new ways of working. This helped trigger a mindset shift: Employees recognized that the status quo was becoming obsolete and that embracing gen AI was essential to keeping pace and advance in their careers.
Making these moves increased gen AI adoption drastically at the company and revealed a powerful insight: Employees embrace change when new ways of doing things feel not like a disruption but like the new normal.
