When artificial intelligence takes over tasks that until recently were considered core competencies of professionals in language, communication and knowledge-based fields, the result can be both helpful and relieving. However, it is also the source of widespread unease and uncertainty. “What am I still needed for, and how future-proof is my vocation?” is a question many well-qualified professionals are asking themselves.
Future-proofing is the focus of the ZHAW’s cross-institute project CreAIgile Literacy – Disrupting AI. The project title combines creative agility (or “creagility”) with AI literacy and futures literacy. At its heart lies the question of which future skills individuals and organisations need in order to use AI not only efficiently, but also responsibly and sustainably. Birgitta Borghoff is convinced that, in professions involving language, communication and knowledge, creative agility makes all the difference in how AI is used. The lecturer, researcher, consultant and trainer is leading the project.
Birgitta Borghoff
CreAIgile Literacy project leader
“To engage in a creagile process, we must resist the pressure to present a solution straight away. We remain capable of taking action when we remain open-minded, look at things from different perspectives and allow not knowing to become a productive part of the process.”
Genuinely human skills as a prerequisite
Borghoff says: “Ultimately, the goal is to remain capable of acting – especially in situations characterised by uncertainty and ambiguity.” Together with her project team, she is developing teaching materials, living lab programmes and workshops as well as a competency framework that makes creagile skills in dealing with AI within teams and organisations visible and trainable. These formats are being trialled with employees, managers and teachers from the project’s partner organisations. The skills that participants acquire during the training programmes are jointly reflected upon and developed further.
“AI surpasses us in terms of computational power and efficiency. There is no question about that. But it needs people who can ask intelligent questions and think critically and, above all, creatively,” says Borghoff. These deeply human skills are becoming ever more important and are being fostered through the project’s various formats.
Strengthening inner competencies
According to Borghoff, it is precisely in areas where AI is used extensively that those abilities which set us apart as human beings are most important. These include interdisciplinary skills such as emotional awareness, intuition, ethical judgement, critical thinking and the ability to adopt different perspectives. Only then, she opines, can AI be used responsibly.
At the individual level, this means that among the broad range of skills required in knowledge-based professions, the more personal and “inner” competencies are becoming increasingly significant. These are areas in which we tend to be less developed, as they have so far been regarded as less important in professional life. “Take self-awareness or empathy, for example: we all possess these skills, but we still do not allow ourselves to make the most of them. That is why we place particular emphasis on them in the training programmes we are developing,” says Borghoff.
Trusting the process
These skills are important because they help us to maintain an open mind. “When we work in a creagile way, it is not about finding a solution as quickly as possible, but about examining feelings of being overwhelmed, uncertainty and problems very consciously and with great focus, as if they were objects of research, and asking intelligent questions. If we are open-minded, we remain capable of acting. Then answers emerge by themselves, solutions present themselves, and paths forward become visible that were not apparent at the outset. Questions open up possibilities, answers bring closure,” says Borghoff. “It is about trusting the process.”
Among other things, Borghoff and her team draw on approaches used in art and theatre. Artists do not go looking for solutions. They explore a topic, approach it, immerse themselves in it, and try to understand it in depth. At best, this process results in a work of art or opens up a new realm of possibilities that offers both themselves and others a new perspective on the topic. And perhaps within that new perspective lies the beginning of a solution.
No shifting perspective without feeling
Perspective is an issue that Birgitta Borghoff also emphasises. “We all know that it’s important to shift perspectives,” she says. For example, we might be working on a project or a text and believe that we are repeatedly changing our perspective in order to review our work. “But often we only do so in our minds,” says Borghoff. If we are honest with ourselves, we rarely put the change into practice. We often fail to recognise the emotions connected to it because we hardly allow ourselves to feel our own feelings.
“That is what this is about: feeling our emotions again.” Taking the time to ask ourselves what we are feeling when confronted with a specific dilemma, for example, can help us genuinely change our perspective. “And it is precisely from this feeling that we can learn something that goes beyond pure thinking.”
Learning from our own and others’ experiences
The same applies to exchange and dialogue with others, including in professional contexts. “We know how beneficial it would be to exchange ideas. How much we can learn from each other and from one another’s stories,” says Borghoff. Yet we rarely take the time to do so or to engage with these different experiences. “Our training programmes also provide space for this. We use storytelling practices to learn from everyone’s experiences, including their experiences of working with AI. We learn from one another where and how AI tools can be helpful and where they may potentially lead us astray.”
These skills, which include recognising, allowing, expressing and sharing emotions, are important when working with AI. This requires us to continually shift perspectives, reflect on results and insights, ask intelligent and critical questions, and learn from our shared experiences.
Remaining capable of taking sustainable action
Shaping the future means cultivating openness as an organisation, a company or a university and creating space in which creative agility can emerge. “Creagilising” – a term coined during the project – is both a mindset and a practice. For Borghoff, this means not merely managing uncertainty, but also using it as a starting point for co-creation and shaping a sustainable future.
