In the age of AI, the people who win are the ones asking better questions.
Better withdrawals beat more depositsKnowledge no longer has to live in your head; the scarce skill is the question that pulls it out.
The wrong question is the real riskAI never checks your question — it answers confidently, so a correct answer to the wrong question is the biggest danger.
Teach enough to ask, then get out of the wayCutting content and adding soak time turned his course into the version people actually applied.
Executive SummaryAI
Brian opens with a colleague's exam that asked students to prove they had learned the course by supplying five good questions — many great students failed and nobody got a perfect score.
He set the same task for 12 senior leaders with 200 years of experience between them, and not one could put together five good questions; the room went silent.
He blames the banking model of learning named by Paulo Freire: it made sense when knowledge was scarce, but AI now supplies unlimited knowledge, so what we need is better withdrawals — questions.
A Harvard and Wharton study of Boston Consulting Group consultants found AI plus good questions raised work quality by 40%, while those who trusted AI without questioning it made 19% more mistakes.
Applying the method to himself, he compressed his own five-day innovation course into ten-minute trainings over ten days, and 76% of the last cohort applied what they learned within 10 days against about 20% for off-site training.
Key Quote
“Not one of them was able to put together five good questions.”
— Brian
Key Quote
“What we need is better withdrawals. And a withdrawal is a question.”
— Brian
Key Quote
“The biggest risk in the age of AI is not bad answers. It's not the hallucinations.”