Highlights of the Week in Creative Leadership – March 01, 2025

Offering the critical insight that in organizational learning, no one-size-fits-all, INSEAD’s Gianpiero Petriglieri identifies three distinct leadership archetypes that drive learning effectively. ‘Custodians’ create structured boot camps focused on alignment and standardization, ideal for companies undergoing strategic shifts. ‘Challengers’ design playgrounds for exploration and personal development, helping stagnant organizations break free from complacency. ‘Connectors’ build town halls to integrate diverse perspectives, particularly valuable in siloed environments. The research demonstrates that learning failures often stem from mismatching approaches with organizational needs – such as when leaders default to custodial methods when innovation is required, or relationship-building and facilitation are paramount. Effective organizational learning requires recognizing and acting on the right approach for the current context.

Gianpiero Petriglieri (2025) “Three Ways to Lead Learning,” Harvard Business Review, January-February 2025.

Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey of HEC Montréal have authored a timely and convincing examination of team learning’s multi-dimensional nature and its critical role in organizational adaptation. Their typology of learning behaviors distinguishes between internal learning (reflexive and experimental) and external learning (vicarious and contextual), addressing previous contradictions in research findings. They emphasize the dynamic combinations of these behaviors, showing how some learning types harmonize while others create dissonance when combined in single episodes. Their work also demonstrates how modern challenges like AI integration and remote work reshape team learning dynamics. The authors advocate for viewing team learning through a strategic lens rather than merely as a social or behavioral process, connecting it directly to organizations’ dynamic capabilities to sense opportunities, seize them, and reconfigure accordingly.

Amy C. Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey (2025) “Team Learning in the Field: An Organizing Framework and Avenues for Future Research,” Small Group Research, 1-19 [Online First].

Through longitudinal studies at Lego and Velux, strategy consultant Henrik Saabye and Aarhus University management scholar Thomas Burhup Kristensen demonstrate the impact when leaders become learning facilitators rather than delegating learning to specialists. Their counterintuitive finding that “going slow to go fast” produces superior long-term results challenges efficiency-focused approaches to problem-solving. The research shows that teaching employees to analyze problems systematically using structured approaches like A3 thinking, creates a ripple effect of enhanced capability throughout organizations. (A3 thinking is a tool for continuous and cascading improvement, pioneered at Toyota, that involves putting the problem, the analysis, the corrective actions, and the action plan all down on a single sheet of large A3 paper.) By establishing organizational ‘learning scaffolds’ with tiered coaching roles, both companies achieved significant operational improvements in performance indicators alongside increased employee satisfaction. The key leadership shift involved moving from providing answers to asking reflective questions that build problem-solving capability throughout the organizations.

Henrik Saabye and Thomas Burop Kristensen (2025) “Leaders’ Critical Role in Building a Learning Culture,” MIT Sloan Management Review, sloanreview.mit.edu, February 25, 2025.

Collectively, these studies reposition learning as the central leadership function in adaptive organizations. They reveal that effective leaders make conscious choices about learning approaches based on organizational needs (Petriglieri), understand how different learning behaviors interact dynamically in teams (Edmondson and Harvey), and develop facilitation skills to build problem-solving capabilities (Saabye and Kristensen). A shared conclusion is to challenge the common practice of delegating learning to specialists, instead demonstrating that leaders who directly facilitate learning create organizations that are simultaneously more innovative and efficient. For organizations facing rapid change, the key competitive or creative advantage emerges not from specific knowledge production or acquisition but from developing the meta-capability of learning itself – with leaders serving as the architects and facilitators of this ongoing and shared process.

The rapid rise of generative AI tools is creating both opportunities and challenges for critical thinking in business education. This Academy of Management editorial explores the tension between AI’s potential to enhance learning through innovative teaching materials and personalized feedback, and its tendency to diminish critical engagement with content. The authors distinguish between two perspectives on critical thinking – ‘individual’ (objective analysis and bias avoidance) and ‘social’ (challenging prevailing norms) – and argue that both can undermine critical thinking by providing authoritative-seeming but potentially flawed outputs, exhibiting empathy that fosters emotional trust, and sometimes engaging in deceptive behaviors. They call for more (and particularly longitudinal) research examining how Gen AI affects critical thinking development, particularly as management educators must prepare and support future leaders for an increasingly AI-integrated workplace.

Barbara Z. Larson, Christine Moser, Arran Caza, Katrin Muehlfeld, and Laura A. Colombo (2024) “From the Editors: Critical Thinking in the Age of Generative AI,” Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 23, No. 3, 373-378.

This empirical study by Microsoft Research surveyed 319 knowledge workers to investigate how they perceive critical thinking when using Generative AI tools. Through analysis of more than 900 real-world examples, researchers found that higher confidence in AI correlates with less critical thinking effort, while stronger worker self-confidence associates with more critical engagement. The study reveals three key shifts in cognitive effort and activity: from gathering information to verifying it, from solving problems to integrating AI responses, and from executing tasks to stewarding AI outputs. While GenAI tools reduce perceived effort for critical thinking tasks and cognitive burden, over-reliance on them also risks creating a ‘use it or lose it’ scenario where critical thinking and independent problem-solving skills atrophy from lack of regular practice, particularly in routine tasks or lower-stakes scenarios.

Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee, Advait Sarkar, Lev Tankelevitch, Ian Drosos, Sean Rintel, Richard Banks, and Nicholas Wilson (2025) “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers,” In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26–May 01, 2025, Yokohama, Japan, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 23 pages.

Creative leaders face a strategic imperative to harness AI’s efficiency while preserving critical thinking capacity – and the creativity it supports. The findings in these pieces suggest implementing deliberate practices that exercise cognitive muscles and develop team members’ domain expertise (particularly in scenarios where human judgment remains essential) even when thoughtfully integrating AI tools. For example, redesigning workflows and evaluation metrics should include scheduled verification processes, structured response evaluation frameworks, and periodic AI-free thinking sessions. Leaders should also recalibrate performance metrics to value the quality of AI stewardship rather than just production volume. Most importantly, the research points to the need for organizations to foster cultures where confidence in using AI is balanced with confidence in challenging AI, creating workplaces where technology enhances rather than replaces or erodes human judgment. The goal, in other words, is to develop a reflective partnership with AI that enhances both efficiency and quality in the work and ongoing commitment to the humanity of team members.

In “The Type 2 Manifesto,” Bodacious founder and strategist Zoe Scaman challenges the perpetual-sprint model of success, drawing from futurist Kevin Kelly to contrast traditional Type 1 growth (more/bigger/faster) with Type 2 growth that prioritizes quality over quantity. Her compelling counternarrative of success is rooted in substance rather than speed, and Scaman introduces six pillars to describe this paradigm shift: Longevity as Legacy (creating lasting value), Stability as Strength (building resilient foundations), Flexibility as Freedom (designing life on your terms), Enrichment as Evolution (pursuing cross-disciplinary depth), Consistency as Credibility (showing up repeatedly), and Fallow Periods as Fertile Ground (embracing necessary rest). Creative leaders will find both critique and roadmap in the framework: as burnout and onrushing technological (AI) transformations challenge traditional productivity models and ways of working, her pillars offer practical ways to cultivate sustainable excellence, not by lowering ambitions but by elevating them toward meaningful contribution rather than immediate metrics. For organizations, this suggests our most revolutionary act might be creating environments where both people and ideas flourish at a more deliberate, nourishing pace.

Zoe Scaman, (2024) “The Type 2 Manifesto,” “Musings of a Wandering Mind,” Substack, December 30, 2024.