Sam Grayston

Category: coaching

  • We’ll need to get better at thinking.

    We’ll need to get better at thinking.

    As soon as ChatGPT started to take off, I started saying,

    We’ll have to get better at thinking. We’ll have to start thinking more deeply and think harder if we want to stand out and succeed.

    Turns out, it’s even more dramatic than that!

    Excessive use of ChatGPT is rotting your brain! Fact.

    A fascinating study, just released from MIT, shows that excessive use of ChatGPT is actually reducing the quality of cognitive function.

    Research shows that LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels when performing writing tasks.

    • Neural: EEG brain studies found that there was a 47% reduction in brain activity with heavy ChatGPT users. Their brains were using 47% less neural connections when they were writing with the model.
    • Behavioural: 83% of heavy model users couldn’t quote anything from what they had just written, compared to about 10% from using no technology to write.
    • Linguistics: neutral analysis found that writing with LLMs was ‘soulless, empty, lacking individuality, typical’.

    Listen to this great podcast with Cal Newport and one of the writers of the study, Brad Stulberg, to get the full picture.

    They use writing as a proxy for thinking as it is a cognitively hard task requiring lots of neural, linguistic and behavioural levels. It is, in essence, one of the ways we make sense of our thoughts. To put them to paper. And we are increasingly outsourcing our thinking to LLMs.

    They use the metaphor of physical fitness to make sense of the use of LLMs in writing: using LLMs being the equivalent of taking a forklift truck to the gym – sure, you go to the gym, but you don’t get the physical benefits. Or munching on junk food as the equivalent of consuming TikTok videos. It’s a good metaphor that they continue by coining the term ‘cognitive debt’ and even start to consider the possibility of a cognitive obesity crisis equivalent in the future.

    It’s incredible to think that brain function decreases by using and relying on LLMs. We’re not absorbing what it puts out and building new understanding, we’re actually losing our ability to think and reason!

    It’s a massive warning to those companies pursuing LLMs in everything – particularly for their own workers. In essence, you’re reducing the quality of thinking in your workforce if you promote high use of LLMs in solving the company’s challenges.

    This is where something like Time to Think comes into it’s own. It becomes the kind of ‘cognitive gym’ that Newport and Stulberg talk about in the podcast. It’s a protected way of being that encourages the very highest quality, independent thought. It’s going to become essential.

    I said it before, and I’ll say it again – we’re going to need to get better at thinking. We’re going to need to practice it more. We’re going to have to go deeper and harder with our thinking to flourish and thrive as a species.

    I’m not afraid of that. In fact, I welcome it. If you want to think with me, get in touch.

  • Sam vs. the LLM: A Coaching Scorecard

    Sam vs. the LLM: A Coaching Scorecard

    In the last 24 hours, I’ve discovered both a validating limitation and a powerful liberating use of LLMs. It’s not all good or all bad—sometimes it’s both. I’d like to share these stories with you.

    Coaching: the human advantage

    One of my clients had been using a popular LLM to do a bit of self-coaching to work out what he wanted to do next. He’d become a bit fed up with his current role after a couple of years, and was looking for change. But because he’d become part of the furntiure, he couldn’t really remember what fired him up. So he went looking for answers through an LLM. Interestingly, the LLM explored what he didn’t like about roles in order to build a profile of what he should be looking for. A fine enough approach – and one I might have taken myself as a coach. But what he came out with (and what so often comes out of LLMs) is a very generic sounding list of ‘you sound like you might find project management satisfying’.

    When I was coaching him through this, and listening deeply, I noticed that actually there was an underlying lack of feeling being expressed. He would talk about his out-of-work sporting endeavours with a smile on his face, energy in his body language, and spark in his eyes. He would talk about work as ‘quite enjoyable’, or ‘quite satisfying’ with that very rational list of things we all do to justify why something is ‘fine’ or ‘ok’. The LLM couldn’t experience the energy, so came up with something generic.

    As two humans interacting, we tapped into the energy and started to map out a compelling map for his next decade.

    Sam 1 : 0 LLM

    Refining an OKR: the LLM advantage

    The second example involves using an LLM to refine an OKR for a piece of new work. OKR stands for Objective and Key Result. I often frame these simply as:

    Objective: what do you want to be better or different?

    Key Results: what would be the result of that?

    I had some alright starter thoughts and context which I put into the LLM. Although this time I’d been reminded that, of course, LLMs don’t ‘run out’ of ideas. I’d assumed that I would put a prompt in and it would generate the single ‘best’ answer. But it could write OKRs all day if I wanted it to.

    So I asked it to come up with 10 versions of the OKR that I’d written. And without breaking a sweat – because it doesn’t sweat – but it probably is environmentally damaging – sorry – it came up with ten versions.

    I could then pick the best Objective and Key Results for the work based on my understanding.

    Spoiler – they weren’t all from one version, neither were they from the first version.

    Next time you want to come up with an improvement using an LLM – ask for loads of them and pick the best ones.

    Sam 1 : 1 LLM

    A fair match, played to our strengths.

    PS – I wrote this myself, not with an LLM. Although I did ask the LLM to come up with 20 titles. This is the one I chose.

    PPS – I have permission from the coaching client to share his story.