Are Faster Teams Better?
A while back, I worked with an executive leadership team at a major healthcare system that was completely obsessed with speed. Every initiative was framed around accelerating timelines, shaving off minutes, and executing faster. Yet during diagnostic interviews, senior leaders privately confessed a startling reality: almost none of them knew what the enterprise priorities actually were. They were just pretty sure they needed to do something—anything!—and do it fast.
Today, generative AI is accelerating this exact dysfunction across every industry. Leaders are seduced by the promise of raw speed, asking: "How do we use AI to make our teams more efficient?"
Efficiency is a dangerous proxy for performance. When cross-functional teams tackle messy, adaptive challenges—breaking down organizational silos, shifting enterprise strategy, or navigating market disruption—speed is rarely the real bottleneck. Alignment, critical thinking, and psychological safety are. Rushing to fast, AI-generated outputs without deep inquiry creates an illusion of productivity while multiplying strategic errors down the road.
The real question leaders should ask is: How can AI help our teams perform better?
Solving for Substance: The Action Learning Foundation
This focus on depth over speed is precisely why Action Learning (AL) has long been the gold standard for high-stakes problem-solving.
Action Learning doesn't allow teams to rush toward easy answers. Instead, it gathers cross-functional sets of leaders to tackle complex issues through structured inquiry, deliberate reflection, and shared problem ownership. By forcing teams to pause and ask powerful questions before jumping to execution, Action Learning ensures leaders solve the right problem—building deep strategic alignment and team trust in the process.
When we integrate AI into Action Learning, we don't use it to shortcut human thinking. We use it to elevate the team's collective intelligence.
How AI Serves Action Learning Practices
When brought into a structured Action Learning set, AI transforms from an automated shortcut into an accelerator for human collaboration:
Eliminating "Shadow AI" Through Shared Ownership: When team members query AI privately on their laptops, it creates fragmented, isolated thinking. In an AI-augmented set, AI is projected onto a central screen. The team must collaboratively debate, test, and co-craft prompts together. This co-creation forces leaders to align on their core assumptions and build a shared mental model before seeking input.
Fostering Cross-Silo Collaboration: Recent Harvard Business School research by Elisa Farri and Gabriele Rosani on team innovation revealed that while individual AI use yields quick, incremental answers, the top 10% of breakthrough solutions come from intact cross-functional teams collaborating with AI. The study found that AI acts as a "cybernetic teammate," encouraging commercial leaders to think technically and technical leaders to think commercially.
Enhancing Roles Within the Set: Action Learning relies on clear roles to maintain depth. Assigning AI specific supporting functions leaves the human Action Learning Coach completely free to focus on group dynamics, psychological safety, and interpersonal trust:
The Notetaker: Offloading real-time transcription and theme extraction frees set members to stay fully present, maintain eye contact, and listen deeply while the system synthesizes core tensions in the background.
The Devil’s Advocate: To combat groupthink, the team can instruct the AI to simulate a skeptical board member or aggressive competitor, forcing members to stress-test their comfortable assumptions.
The Inclusivity Advocate: In high-performing "Superteams" (a core concept in Ron Friedman's research on team dynamics), equal airtime isn't just a courtesy—it is an essential engine of collective intelligence. Elite teams are dramatically more likely to exhibit balanced conversational turn-taking than average teams. Acting as an Inclusivity Advocate, the AI tracks real-time participation patterns, alerting the team to who stepped forward, who stepped back, and which voices or perspectives have gone quiet.
From Speed to Substance
Efficiency gives you quick answers to simple technical problems. High performance gives you breakthrough alignment on complex, strategic ones.
AI shouldn't be used to relieve teams of the hard work of thinking together. When embedded into the disciplined framework of Action Learning, AI becomes a catalyst for human collaboration—helping your leaders ask better questions, build shared ownership, and solve the right problems the first time.
At Leading Well, we help cross-functional leadership teams integrate AI into their work without sacrificing human alignment and psychological safety.
Reach out to explore how our Augmented Action Learning programs can elevate your team's performance.
