It’s no secret I’m in the camp that believes deeply in the value of learning and development within organizations. In particular leadership development. I’ve done nothing but practice and think about it for the last 15 years and have seen its transformative benefits for individuals, teams, organizations and beyond countless times.
However I didn’t always see things this way. After a brief stint in mechanical engineering I started my career in software development. It was technology, process, and then strategy that I thought held the keys to performance. And while now I see leadership as holding those keys, I’ve stayed very interested in how tech, and in particular, AI is transforming the way we work and learn.
One of the most exciting opportunities in this area (and I may be biased here!) is the potential for the new wave of AI to make leadership development truly scalable: giving people the space, inspiration and accountability they need, right when they need it, and at a time when we need it more than ever.
This vision has been Adeption’s driving force for years. We integrated AI into the first version of our digital platform when we first built it a decade ago. Our goal back then was, and still is today, to resolve two core challenges in leadership development:
- What works well in developing people (intensive, personalized coaching and cohort programs) is different to what typically scales (digital content delivery). We like to say, it’s the paradox of what works doesn’t scale and what scales doesn’t work.
- Most efforts to build leadership capacity takes people away from their day-to-day work. Work and development aren’t explicitly connected, so most of the time work wins the battle for our scarce attention and we don’t develop as much as we might (or should).
Today, advancements in AI are enabling our team to accelerate progress towards overcoming these challenges and delivering our vision. I’m blown away by what the technology we’re currently releasing is doing, let alone the AI features our team is in the process of developing. It’s a long way from where we started.
The early days: A ring binder and an AI vision
If you were a participant in one of Adeption’s early leadership development experiences in the 2O1O’s (we were called JumpShift back then), you might have been surprised to receive an empty ring binder on arrival with just a few tabs in it. There was no content or worksheets.
During the program, you’d be given sets of hole-punched pages each featuring a leadership tool or framework. The facilitator would ask you to think about your current context at work – including a tough challenge you were facing – and invite you to scan the tools and choose those most relevant to your challenge, before discussing them at your table and group.
Instead of passively taking in content that may or may not help you, our approach empowered you – the participant – to ‘pull’ the most relevant inspiration for your challenges (including insights from others). Then once you’d identified a few ideas to try, you’d design simple on-the-job experiments to make progress on your current challenges. Finally, you’d make time to reflect and deepen your insights from taking action.
And wow did it work. Reflecting, seeking inspiration and taking acts of leadership on-the-job – directly linked to the participants’ most important priorities – built new habits, evolved mindsets and grew capacity. All while delivering immediate and measurable performance!
It worked so well that we got thinking about how to scale it. We believed that everyone deserved access to experiences like these but getting groups of people together multiple times with facilitators was logistically and financially expensive. To cut a long story short, the Adeption platform was born! The first version of the platform makes our team laugh today (we’ve come a long way since then), but it did the job of using AI to match leadership tools to leaders’ challenges.
Our next big step came in 2O19 and crystalized while I was visiting our incredible tech team in Pune, India. We got to work on replacing our platform’s question-box interface with a conversational one. It transformed the participant experience, enabling a more human-centric way of interacting. More importantly, the conversational interface laid the foundation to build an engaging AI powered platform that could share and capture real leadership insights to and from large groups of leaders – right when they needed it.
Today, we’ve inspired almost four million responses, insights, and on-the-job leadership experiments through the Adeption platform.
Where we are today: AI that thinks like your best leaders
We’ve recently taken Adeption’s AI to a new level with our suite of ‘Aiva’ features (a name that means ‘to breathe, to live’) which take a human-centric and social approach to AI.
The first feature in our Aiva suite, Aiva Insights, is already having a big impact for a number of our clients.
Aiva Insights captures the insights leaders have during development experiences – wisdom usually lost to all but those people who you directly share the experience with – and makes them accessible to anyone in your organization, at any time.
Aiva Insights aren’t generic LLM powered insights scraped from the web. They’re not even the generic and abstract leadership research and content* that supplements most AI leadership coaches. Instead, Aiva is powered from the wisdom and experience of your own organization’s leaders, fine-tuned to be useful by Adeption’s vast experience and insights from working with thousands of leaders globally. This enables Aiva to provide personalized and deeply contextual guidance to leaders to inspire them to try new approaches, and build their capability and capacity in the process.
To bring this to life, imagine an always available coach who has spoken to every leader in your organization, recalling each conversation, action taken and reflection in detail. Whenever you’re struggling with a leadership challenge, they can instantly summarize the approaches others with similar challenges have tried – all with actionable coaching commentary – helping you see new possibilities to move forward. That’s Aiva Insights.
Note: Aiva can be supplemented with leadership content if required. For example organizational leadership playbooks, existing tools and content or even company strategies, values and behaviors.
The power and impact of providing insights in the leader’s context can’t be understated. Our own data and external research shows that the more relevant and applicable content is, the more likely it is to be acted on and retained. The shift we often talk about is:
From people using technology to learn to people using technology to learn from people… your people.
Inspiration is one thing. To get real results, build habits, mindsets, and ultimately increase leadership capability, leaders need to take action. The knowing-doing gap is real and is a significant challenge to overcome in leadership development. This is where Aiva Assist comes in.
Recently launched, Aiva Assist provides leaders with real-time feedback when they’re setting development actions. Thanks to our experience with 1OO,OOO’s of digitally captured planned actions and post-action reflections, we know a LOT about what makes an effective leadership action or experiment. We know the types of actions leaders follow through with and then come back and reflect on – an essential element of development. Aiva Assist uses this research to ask questions and nudge leaders to strengthen their action plans, making them more effective and follow-through more likely.
This active and direct support to cross the knowing-doing gap is one of the holy grails of learning and development, and we’re already seeing Aiva Assist have a big impact.
Aiva Insights and Aiva Assist are powerful additions to Adeption experiences – and they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
Where we’re going: Continuous development ecosystems
I’m incredibly excited about the potential of what’s next in our AI roadmap to empower leaders with the leadership inspiration they need, when and where they need it.
Here’s a quick snapshot of what’s coming soon:
- Ask Aiva: An anytime AI tool accessible from the Adeption dashboard where leaders can ask a question and get instant advice and inspiration (including recommendations from Aiva Insights and matched leadership tools).
- Aiva Coach: A fully AI-generated Adeption workout customized for each leader based on their immediate work and development need – and structured using our Be Conscious, Be Curious, Be Better (B3) framework.
- Aiva Recommendations: Just when development normally fades at the end of a development experience, Aiva will suggest personalized workouts and experiences to leaders based on their individual progress and responses.
Together with Aiva Insights and Aiva Assist, these features are designed to support continuous leadership development journeys for individuals, and powerful development ecosystems that connect work and development within organizations.
How we’re taking a mindful approach to AI
Advancements in AI bring both risks and benefits. At Adeption, we’re committed to developing secure AI that is in service of our clients, the leaders who use our technology, and humanity. We’re constantly updating our thinking and principles to this end and have our own AI manifesto and Aiva constitution that articulates why and how we use AI. Our development is built on key principles and guardrails, including:
- Closed-loop AI: We run a secure, private, closed-loop system where the focus is on sharing and aggregating leader insights at the organizational level for the benefit of leaders in that organization. Client data is not used to train public models.
- Preserving independence of thought: Giving people ‘answers’ for their challenges builds dependence and undermines their agency to deal with new adaptive challenges. Our B3 methodology and digital platform is designed to nurture the leader’s internal locus of control and build their capacity. Instead of providing answers, it probes first to help deeper exploration of challenges and then suggests multiple relevant tools and perspectives for inspiration, before encouraging leaders to learn through cycles of action and reflection.
- The right balance of development and engagement: True development comes from working through challenges. However, asking leaders to participate in action-focused development can sometimes feel like selling healthy kale on a street of fried chicken vendors! The fried chicken approach (aka engaging but not developmental) wins most times – and is easier than ever with AI. Yet as we see with platforms like social media, engaging content isn’t always helpful to us, let alone healthy. At Adeption, we aim to find the right balance to ensure our development experiences are both developmental and engaging: the “krispy, crunchy, roasted kale chips” of development.
- Keeping a human in the system at all times: Our model is a human-in-the-loop system. Critical processes, like our AI-scored assessments, involve human verification and oversight to ensure accuracy, quality, and context. Our AI also elevates human coaching by acting as a powerful pre and post-session reflection tool – doing the upfront work so human coaches and participants’ managers can quickly get to a powerful coaching moment in just a few minutes. Every Adeption experience has a human coach assigned and each Aiva interaction and the actions leaders plan and reflect on are shared with this human coach.
As you can tell by the length of this article, I’m deeply passionate about the work we’re doing with AI to support continuous learning and development at scale – and the potential to do more. As humans, we learn best from other humans. The true power of Leadership AI is in connecting us as individuals with collective leadership wisdom, helping us see new possibilities and navigate our way forward with a deep and developing sense of consciousness through the complex, adaptive challenges we will continue to face.
If you want to dive deeper, I’d love to connect. You can reach me at carls@adeption.io
* Jeffrey M Schwartz, M.D., USA, leading neuroplasticity researcher and co-author of You Are Not Your Brain and the ground-breaking books Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain; Department of Psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine