Do we still need interpersonal skills in our AI driven world?
In a world of instant information delivery and artificial intelligence, what is the point of interpersonal skills?
Jon Bircher spoke to an audience last week on a live recording of Thinking Outside the Fox about decision making.
He talked about how recently he has used AI with his son as an experiment to see how it could help him make a very important personal decision.
They used it to gather information, to weigh up different points of view and even to use the entire published works of Warren Buffet to help guide the decision.
It was amazing to listen to and the results were fascinating.
So given this situation, why would we bother with interpersonal skills? Are we becoming obsolete?
The crusades in the 10th Century were a series of religious battles that shook the world, a battle of east versus west when men gave up their lives, their families and their business and travelled across the world to fight.
When I watched a documentary about it, the thing that stood out for me were the stories of the traders.
These people saw opportunity in chaos.
They found products, they built relationships and trust and bought and sold goods that brought wealth, riches and joy to many.
They saw past rhetoric, hatred and fear and found the individual they could trust.
That is the magic of interpersonal skills.
Subtlety, empathy, remorse, kindness, forgiveness and partnerships.
Right now technology cannot do these things.
People make decisions, they recruit, they buy, they sell, they create partnerships and they forge alliances.
We are in a world of chaos now with competing ideals and difficult choices. It takes people with interpersonal skills to be able to navigate these barriers and build trust.
So the magic that has enabled humans to succeed for tens of thousands of years was our humanity and so it remains.
That is the value of interpersonal skills so if you are not focussing on your listening skills, your empathy, connecting with people and forging partnerships you are missing the chance to see value in the niches that others will miss.