What is your mum’s phone number?
Not her name in your contacts. Her actual number. The digits.
If you had to dial it from a stranger’s phone right now, could you?
Most people cannot. And it is not because they don’t love their mum. It is because they haven’t needed to remember it in years. Their phone remembers it for them.
That is not a problem with memory. That is a preview of something much bigger.
We have been quietly outsourcing our cognitive load for a long time. GPS replaced the need to build a mental map of a city. Google replaced the need to retain facts. Calculators replaced the need to do arithmetic in our heads. Social media trained us to consume in eight-second bursts, and to produce in them too. Posts get ignored if they run longer than five lines.
We adapted. Mostly without noticing. And each time we did, we quietly retired a skill we no longer needed to practise.
But those earlier tools only offloaded tasks. Remember this. Calculate that. Get me there. What we are dealing with now is different in kind, not just in degree. AI does not just handle a task. It handles the thinking behind the task. It drafts our emails, summarises our meetings, structures our arguments, and generates our first answers before we have had a chance to form one of our own.
For the first time, the skill being disrupted is the act of thinking itself.
I run workshops on high-performing teams, and some of them are about thinking and decision-making. One of my favourite exercises is an improv activity borrowed from comedy training. I play a video of three comedians on stage. One of them starts a sentence. A second comedian calls “stop” mid-way, and the first one has to go back to the beginning and finish the sentence differently. The same opening, a completely new ending.
Yesterday I went for a walk and lay on the grass. Stop. Yesterday I went for a walk and found a penguin. Stop. Yesterday I went for a walk and decided to become a llama farmer. Stop.
Then I ask the room to try it.
Experienced professionals. Smart, capable people who run teams and manage complexity every day.
They freeze.
Not because they are unintelligent. Because they are filtering. Before a single word leaves their mouth, they are already editing it, wondering if it is good enough, clever enough, appropriate enough. The internal censor activates before the creative impulse even gets a chance.
What I notice more and more is that people arrive with the capacity intact but the muscle cold. They have not lost the ability to think creatively. They have just stopped asking it to show up.
When a tool can generate three options before you have thought of one, the muscle for generating your own options quietly starts to go unused.
Every leader in that room had the capacity to improvise. It had not disappeared. It was just waiting for someone to ask it to show up.
And if leaders cannot finish an improvised sentence without seizing up, what does that mean for their capacity to generate a new idea under pressure? To pivot when a strategy stops working? To innovate when the market shifts?
When we stop practising a cognitive capacity, we gradually lose access to it. And right now, we are offloading faster than we realise.
The answer is not to use AI less. It is to use it differently.
When anyone can generate ten answers in thirty seconds, the answer is no longer the differentiator. The question is.
So, instead of reaching for AI to generate the answer, try reaching for it to sharpen the question. Use it to stress-test your thinking, not replace it. Ask it to push back on your reasoning, find what you might be missing, or make the case against the decision you are already leaning towards. Some of the most valuable things you can do with a powerful AI tool are the ones that make your own thinking harder, not easier.
A leader who uses AI that way is not outsourcing their judgement. They are exercising it.
That starts with understanding how you think. Not just what you know, or how experienced you are, but the specific cognitive capacities you rely on most, and the ones that may be quietly going unused.
That is exactly what the Thinker Style Assessment was built for. It maps 16 cognitive capacities across four thinking styles, Analytical, Experimental, Practical, and Relational, and shows you where your natural strengths are and where you might be leaving capability on the table. It takes about ten minutes and it tends to make people go quiet for a moment when they see their results.
You can take it free at lisonmage.com/thinker-test.
And if you are curious about how your team thinks, and what that means for your performance (and your team’s), let us talk. Book a 30-minute call and we will map it together.
Lastly, here are a few questions worth sitting with this week. Not answering immediately. Sitting with.
- When did you last ask AI to push back on you, rather than agree with you?
- Which cognitive capacity in your team is the most at risk of going unused?
- What is your mum’s phone number?
I hope you enjoyed this newsletter, and thank you for reading it.
To your success,
Lison
If this sparks something for you, here’s how we can work together:
- Join my 1-1 coaching program designed to elevate your performance, leadership, and positioning. Whether you’re looking to gain clarity, strengthen your leadership presence, or take your career to the next level, I’ll help you achieve tangible results. Book a call to explore how we can work together here.
- Book one of my workshops or keynotes for your team to elevate energy and performance.  More information here.
- With my first book Act Before You overThink to learn how to make better decisions faster and liberate your mind from the constant chatter that hinders your potential. You can buy it here.
PS: If someone has forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here. It’s free. Your information is protected. And I never spam. Ever.
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