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Excellent Executive Coaching: Growing Your Business and Enhancing Your Craft.
EEC 408: How to Thrive (Not Just Survive) in the Age of AI, with Steff VanHaverbeke
00:33:16
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Foreign.
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Worried that AI will take over your job? Steph von Haverbecker will show you strategies how to keep your value in an AI driven workplace. Welcome to the excellent executive coaching podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Katrina, and, and today we have a special guest on a special topic, Steph van der Haberbeck. Steph, welcome.
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Yes, thank you, Dr. Katrina. Yeah, so my last name is a bit difficult. It's Van Haverbeker. It's a Dutch name. It's a Flemish name actually.
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Yes, Van Haveke. Okay, thank you for making sure I pronounce it correctly. So you're an expert in AI, been teaching for many years, 28 years of experience and coaching, facilitating and training cognitive agility. And you came out with a book called Being Replace the five Human Skills that AI Cannot Replace. So tell us first, how can professional develop cognitive agility to thrive despite AI rather than being replaced?
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Yeah, well, I would even argue thanks to AI.
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Okay, I'd like to hear.
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Yeah, yeah. So maybe for a bit of context, I work with people in businesses almost every day, definitely more times per week. And you have to imagine a lot of companies for the moment are looking at AI and how to adopt AI and what to make of it. Lots of businesses, people already working with ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot or whatever. And so they have a lot of questions. Some people are very enthusiastic and want to explore all the possibilities and others they are looking at what's happening. And I actually anxious about, you know, being replaced, and that's that. These are the stories that I hear and the concerns that I address in my workshops almost every day. That's where the idea for the book came from. You know, what will be important for us as human beings to develop skills and meta skills that will make the difference in an age where every business will use one form or another of AI.
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So what are the five skills?
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So just in a nutshell, it's flexible thinking, it's emotional intelligence, its collaborative intelligence and intuition and the ability to innovate. That's how I broke it down.
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Tell us a little bit more about each part of flexibility. In what way do you need to be flexible to compete or work with AI?
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Yeah. For any of us who have already some experience working with AI, we know that these chatbots, they like to keep on track. They are not very flexible in their approach to things. You give them a prompt and you give them some context and then they go with that. And they are large language models, so they are actually prediction models. And just to make that something I like to do. You know, if, if you speak at one point, people were already know what will be the next word, you know, in a sentence. And that's actually what an AI does as well. So they are quite, you know, inflexible in their thinking and something that we have as biological beings, we have a brain and we can really switch very easily from one mode of thinking to another. For instance, at one point you're looking at something or you're thinking about an idea and you feel yourself getting enthusiastic about that idea. But then you hear your inner voice, you know, this critical voice, you know, at the same time. And that is something that we as humans have this ability to be creative and critical at the same time. And that's a meta skill. It's more than just an ability. It's something that we can develop. And you know, working with people around, you know, I've been involved with innovation and creativity, you know, for years. And I. We all know the six thinking hats from Edward de Bono and you know.
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Right.
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This is just one of the examples of that. And this will become even more important, you know, in a future where we have to work with AI and really make a difference.
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I just want to explain for the listeners that de Bono has, I don't know how many way thinking, the critical, the innovative, the doubtful. So we can switch between those as easily as, you know, movement from one side to the other. Okay, yeah, so that's flexible.
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That's flexible thinking, you know, and it's more than that. It's not just, you know, critical and creative. It's all also seeing the big picture and the details. You know, it's all these abilities that we have to chunk information and, you know, be very flexible in this, you know, making connections as well.
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You know, so just to go. So we are flexible. And basically what you're saying is the bots are linear. They're language based, but they're linear. So how can a person that's so flexible like humans better use their flexibility to make AI bring something more positive?
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Yeah, what I like to do is when I work with AI, I'm always thinking one step ahead. You know, most people, when they work with a chatbot, they. They have some kind of idea what they want and they start to ask questions or give a prompt and then they get some kind of answer and then they start to refine along the way until they get some results. But this is actually quite inefficient way of it works. But I like to think one step ahead and Think beforehand. What, what do I want? What would be from my viewpoint, some critical points and some context. And before I even write my first prompt, I already have a good idea in my mind where I want to go to, what would be desired outcome, what would be kind of the hurdles that I want to tackle. So I am able to write a better prompt because of that.
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Yeah. So give us an example.
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Yeah. For instance, let's make it something very concrete. Let's say you want to research some, you want to do a competitor research for your business. Let's make it very practical. So probably you will already have some idea who your competitors are. So you can already write down some of the names of those companies, maybe some URLs even. And then what are the things that I would look for, you know, what are the things that I like to differentiate in terms of, you know, my proposition versus my competitors? How are they doing in the market? How are they approaching the markets? What's the pricing structure? And so, so I think about all these things beforehand and then I construct a prompt. What I actually do, very practically, is all these ideas that I have, I just enter them in the chat bot and then I ask it, you know, help me write a prompt now.
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Oh, really? Oh, that is very good.
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Yeah, that's the hack. So you do some thinking beforehand, then you ask your AI now help me write a good prompt so the prompt becomes more useful. That's the thinking that I can do as a human, because I can, you know, all these different facets I have, you know, I want to, as an entrepreneur, I want to create, but at the same time I have some critical thoughts at the same time, I need to have the big picture, but also, also I have some insight into the details and this is what I do when I work with AI, and then I give clear instructions to my chatbot and I get clear answers.
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You're asking ChatGPT, how should I talk to you? This is what I want now. Give me a prompt so I can talk to you properly.
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Basically, yeah, yeah.
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So that was flexibility. What about emotional intelligence?
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Yeah, that's something. You know, let me just. With a small anecdote. So a couple of weeks ago, we experienced here in our neighborhood, in a street, actually some dropouts with our Internet connection with one of the providers. Yeah. So it's still summer here for the moment. So. And at one of the barbecues in the neighborhood, some neighbors came over and we talked about this and they had exact same problem. And apparently both of us had also exact the same problem. Dealing with that same company, namely, we had to interact with a chatbot. So the customer service was actually not reachable anymore. The first means to interact with that company was through their chat interface. So I asked, you know, we have these problems for over a week. I explained everything. Not only me, it's in this whole street, you know, lots of people. And I got some response in the terms like an operator will reach out to you, you know, in the coming five to six minutes. I waited for five or six minutes. Nothing happened. Then I got on a totally other channel on my phone, a text, yeah, it will be within the 48 hours. I didn't wait for 48 hours to change provider. To be clear, you know, I've had enough. At some point, we want to be able to connect with another human being to explain what's going on, to have a sense that they can empathize with us. We don't want to deal with a wall of tech, you know, and of course, for a business, being able to have this first response, the first help being provided, because most people maybe resetting their modem would solve the problem. I reset it maybe a dozen times. It didn't do anything. And imagine in another context, you know, you have to go to a hospital and you're in pain and you want immediate help and you have to deal with a bot. You want a nurse, somebody who understands how it is to experience pain and to be able to empathize. So emotional intelligence, it's about the ability that we have as beings, as living and breathing beings, to sense what is going on and what is needed and to be able to place ourselves in these shoes of the other person. That's what we need and that we can imagine a future where, you know, a lot of the communication and interaction with businesses will be happening with AI. The businesses who will use humans will make a whole lot of difference for a lot of people.
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Yeah, I see. So basically, I think we've all have experienced that they can superficially help us solve a problem, but that at one point, as soon as the problem is getting so complex or simple, you want to have empathy or urgency, let's say urgency and complexity. Maybe AI today will not be able to do or give us that need we have. Yeah, yeah. So then you said collaboration.
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Yeah, collaboration it is. You know, if there's something that makes us stand out as a species, it's our ability to work together. You know, we develop our whole civilization on this ability to work together, to farm land, to go hunting, to build and create families and Tribes and villages and cities and, you know, whole communities. We have this ability to really pull things together, to get things done. And they've tried to do this with AI. There's a lot of talk now about AI agency and orchestration of agents and. But it's still somewhere in the future because it's not working for the moment.
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So tell the listeners what is an AI agency?
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Yeah, an AI agent. Well, the comparison that is maybe the most useful and practical is, you know, back in the day when you wanted to go on a trip overseas, what you did is you went to your travel agents. You know, this was maybe in your town, some nice office, and you went there and then you prompted your agent, you know, what I would like is to visit this and that. I like this. And they ask some questions and some follow up. So you can imagine this is like prompting with an AI, with an agent. And then the travel agent went off, did their research, they contact some hotels, they had their information, their network and everything, you know, and it came back with a proposal. This is what you could do. This is what you could do. Maybe two or three proposals and then you just picked and choose what's what you like best. And then they did everything else. They booked your tickets, they made sure you were insured and had restaurant reservation. They took care of everything so that you could just, you know, let go. And when the day came that your vacation would start, you could just go. Now an AI agent promises to do the same. You ask a prompt and then it does some research, gets back to you, you make some, you know, further adjustments. And then the promise is that the agent, it would have some tools and, and would be able to do everything. Now this is still something that is in the future. It's not there yet. We are seeing some advancements in technology and probably, maybe when we will do this talk in a year, maybe we will already be there. But certainly as of, you know, second half of September 2025, it's not there yet. But we can imagine a world where this will be the case. And so what will be the difference between, you know, an AI having all these abilities and then a human. What I think what will happen is that we will have hybrid teams of AI agents and human agents working together. And actually the human agents, their job will be to, you know, refine, to make better prompts, make, make the AI agent do their job even better than, you know, as things progress.
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Well, they'll be managers of the AI, basically.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is not so far fetched we can already see some examples of this happening today. You know, there are already some agents, but they're still very limited. They have some tools like a research tool or some other tools, but they're still very limited and still needs a lot of attention from.
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I think you have an AI agent if you have a paid version. Right. You have Chat, GPT or Claude. They have AI agents. Right.
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They have. Well, it's also, you know, there's like this very fierce competition for the moment from all these tech companies to be the first. And they all promise agency. That's the big words in tech in 2025. But it's still a promise. It's. We are not there yet. We see some advancements, but the whole idea of, you know, having like an AI replace a travel agent still is not possible. Well, you could try, but I wouldn't trust.
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Yes, it might be okay back. Yeah. Okay, so thank you for explaining that. And you said next that intuition, AI versus intuition, what is that?
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Yeah, so we as human beings, so we have the, so to say the conscious mind where we have our thoughts, our experiences, our memories and you know, feelings, the things we are conscious of and that are explicit. So an AI can have this also in to some degree. But then there's implicit knowledge. It is the things that are not said, it is the things that we sense. But that is maybe. Yeah, not self evident, not in things that we can observe with our senses.
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I will give an example, Nonaka, who really makes a big difference between explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge. Knowledge it's like in Japanese, women are more and more working and they wanted to do something that could make natural bread and they had the best cooks and everything, you know, try to do the engineering of making natural bread. Well, it was a disaster. So they finally sent an engineer to Japan and to do the work of someone that does it manually for six months to finally realize what was missing in the instructions to create the machine. Because it was implicit knowledge, tacit knowledge. Yeah, So I just wanted to give that example.
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Yeah, it's a very nice example. And like in families, let's look at a family, we all know who the parents are and who the children are and you know, where they live and you know, what, what's in their household, how many animals do they have? You know, these are all explicit, but then there's a implicit information that is invisible, that even the members of the family have to figure out. A lot of times because it is an unsaid, it is unknown until it becomes relevant, until it emerges from the system. And that is a very interesting thing. And we can intuitively sense. Well, one person can do a little bit better than the other, but sometimes we can intuitively sense this. But this is totally impossible for an artificial intelligence to have that experience, to have that kind of, you know, intuitive sense. So all AI is based on explicit information, you know.
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Yes, very interesting point. So. And the last fifth difference.
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Yeah, I will just, you know, in one of my workshops in the beginning of this summer, I was doing a workshop for. Actually for the part of the government here in Belgium, and one of the people there, he asked, you know, will there be a point where AI will take over all of our jobs? You know, maybe far in the future? And I said, well, if there's something that we humans are amazing at, it's in inventing work we'll always find, you know, even in a world where we could imagine such a world where AI will do a lot of the things that we as human beings do now are expected to do now. We will still have other things to do that are not there yet, that are not existing yet, but will make a difference in the world. And that's because we innovate. We innovate all the time. And it's such a driving force for us. And it started maybe with a. The first humans chipping their stones to make sharper stones and to be able to cut things and all these things. And we are innovators by nature and in all kinds of areas. It's not only technology, it's in art, it's in ways of communicating, it's in ways of living together. We reinvent ourselves all the time. And so this is something that an AI cannot do. And the simple thing is that AI is based on, you know, the intelligence is based on rehashing known patterns. So there are patterns that become apparent from their explicit knowledge, you know, their large language models and other models that they use. And when you see that, sometimes we look at an image and we can see that it is AI generated because it is just a recombination of known things. And also when you read something that an AI produced as maybe a text or a book, even whatever you can read between the lines. Yeah, this is really not very novel. So novelty and innovation that will always come from us.
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So what would you recommend people to orient in any particular career? Which. That's one. And then where do you think careers will be taken over by AI? And where is there a space where they'll never do it? I know. I'm asking you. I'M putting you on the spot, but give us some examples.
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But I have a lot of answers for that.
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Good.
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First of all, we really need to be able to think things through to see, you know, further. And one of the things is that we now have the tools. I say we, everybody, the moment you have a smartphone and you can download ChatGPT or Gemini or, you know, whatever, you know, AI app, this changes you from just a user and a consumer to. To a creator. And why? Because you can now ask your AI and ask it to develop something that was not there yet before. Yeah. If you want, for instance, for this competitor analysis example today, the technology is there that you ask Gemini, for instance, a prompt like, okay, you did this research for my business competitor analysis. Now build me an app to do this multiple times for multiple businesses, and it will build it for you.
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Wow, that's incredible.
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Yeah. And people, they don't realize is that this is where we are today with technology. So everybody has become a developer. Yeah. A creator. So whatever you imagine, you can ask your AI to code what you've just imagined, and. Okay, it won't be maybe perfect the first time, and you will still need some refinement. And of course, the more you have some knowledge about coding, the better that will work. Yeah. But even for people who are totally, you know, not skilled in coding, they can already create some things. So the first thing is we have to think about work in a totally different way. We have to think about value in a totally different way because people are now paid by the hour, which is past history. You know, if I would pay somebody by the hour to maybe do my bookkeeping, whereas an AI can do that maybe in a couple of minutes. I give a concrete example again. So this is the first year when I. I'm a freelancer, so I have an accountant. And so what used to be the case is my accountant, he prepared, you know, the. The balance sheets and everything, you know, for review before publication. And he sent it to me, like, two days before, a day before. And I. I was expected to analyze everything and understand everything. But I'm not an accountant. You know, I have some sense of, you know, what's important, but I don't have all. And certainly I don't see all the details. So I just put that, I think, in Gemini, and I asked it, you know, what are the five most pertinent questions that I need to ask my accountant tomorrow?
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Wow.
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And he was, after all, you know, review. He said, I've never experienced that before. I'd better prepare Next time, you know, because if, when everybody will do this. So value is not anymore, you know, having somebody doing the hours, that's fast, that's bygone. As knowledge workers, we need to have a new system actually for rewarding what people do.
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Wow, that will be.
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It's very profound. It goes way beyond, but you have to look way beyond because what will you do? Expect from everybody to just work faster. With AI, that's untenable, you know, and it's not where the value will originate from, because the real value. Imagine a world where every business in one way or form will use AI to a certain degree. How will they make the difference? It is with human value. It's by making sure that humans, because your clients will always be humans, in the end will be able to connect with you through humans. That's where you will make the difference. So the future of the business is not the AI business? No, it's the most human business.
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Well, that's a very key message, that's for sure. We're coming to the end of our. What a pity. You've got to come back on. Okay, let's go to something more tactical. What is the super worker mythology that you propose and how does it differ and how do you gain more productivity? And then we'll end there.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Super Worker journey, it's not developed by me, it's. I borrowed it from Josh Burson, who is a thought leader in hr. But I expanded on it and he describes four levels. Let me just. And the first level is the person who's working with AI day to day and you know, task driven prompts, you know, I need to do this, I need to do that. Help me, you know, I write to, need to write this email, I need to generate an image, I need to analyze this Excel sheet, you know, whatever, you know, task driven. And then the next step is more workflow and workflow automation. So the level 2 super worker is a super worker who is using AI on a day to day basis, but not only looking at the tasks that need to be done, but looking a bit further, you know, what am I doing like almost every day or every week as a workflow and how can AI help me to automate that so that I can free up more time? Actually, then we go to the level three superworkers. And the level three superworkers are the people who work with agents, with AI agents, you know, who delegate not only tasks, but complete workflows. You know, they give maybe one prompt and the AI goes off and gets back maybe a couple of minutes or a couple of hours later with some kind of result. Now this, for the most part, like we discussed, is still in the future because there are some AI, but the output is not there yet. Quality, the quality is not there with what people expect. And then there's level four, which is even further down the road. It is where you actually the manager of a hybrid team and you create value by, you know, bringing in the human factor again in a team where you have people and AI working together and have both have agency. And I added a level zero and the level zero came because, you know, I was presenting this model in my workshops and then I asked the participants, you know, where would you say you are at? And out in the beginning I was expecting that people will say, well, I'm at level two. I, ah, I'm at a level already a little bit playing with the level three. Most of them, they said, I'm not even on the scale. Oh my, I'm at the level zero. Oh, wow, you know, or 0.5 or somewhere. And then I realized, you know, most of us are using AI sporadically or even not using AI, and we want to be a super worker, but we actually not there yet. We don't get yet what the real value is and how AI can actually really help us. That's why I added level zero in that framework. And now when I present it and I ask the question, people say, okay, I'm there, I'm still at the beginning. And it actually is more comfortable for them to say it in such a way because then they can see that they have a journey in front of them. Whereas before people were saying, you know, I'm not in the right course because I'm not in that, you know, I'm nowhere in that scale. And now they have a sense that I'm on that scale. But I still need to do some steps towards level one.
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So there's hope. Yes, give them hope. So tell me, where can people get a hold of you? This was fascinating. I really. Very interesting. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and experience. But where can our listeners get a hold of you?
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Yeah, well, they can reach me through my personal website, which is Coach Steph with two Fs. This Coachstaff Live. And there you can find my books. You can also find some resources there, you know, lots of things you can download, like super prompts. Super prompts are the prompts that I prepared for people who don't, you know, have any idea of how to start. So I help them on their journey to be a level one or level two super worker. So you can just go there and have a look. It's not a big website. It's fairly in your face what you can do.
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B
Wonderful. Thank you very much.
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Get my book. Get my book from Amazon.com being replaced.
- [32:41]
B
Oh wow. Very interesting. Thank you.
- [32:43]
A
Well, it was a pleasure. Thank you. Katrina thank you for listening to the Excellent Executive Coaching Podcast. You can subscribe to all Future podcasts@excellentexecutivecoaching.com join us each Wednesday to learn more about the latest trends in leadership techniques and bring your coaching to the next level. To learn more about Dr. Burris CEO mastermind, use the contact contact form@excellent executive coaching.com.