Thinking with Machines: AI and the New Habits of Mind

Using generative AI creates a familiar loop: you type a question, get a response, refine it, iterate. But you're not just executing a task differently. You're internalizing a new habit of mind, a pattern of thought shaped by the medium itself.

Consider how the process of writing a report might shift: instead of sitting down to draft in isolation, a team gathers for a discussion, records it, and feeds the transcript to AI for a first draft. What once required hours of solitary composition now happens through collaborative dialogue. The visible outcome is speed. The invisible one is cognitive. Drafting becomes discussing. Writing becomes speaking. A shift not in what we produce, but in where thinking takes place.

Media theorist Christine Nystrom coined the term habits of mind to describe the subtle patterns that technologies instill in cognition. Successfully integrating AI is less about managing code and more about managing cognitive change. Teams that unconsciously adopt suboptimal habits risk becoming passive operators, while those that cultivate new cognitive skills build enduring advantage.

The question for leaders is: what new ways of thinking are you quietly embedding as you scale AI? 

What Are Habits of Mind?

Habits of mind aren't the routines we see. They're the mental postures underneath that make certain actions feel natural. They shape how we reason, what we notice, and where imagination leads.

Writing trained the mind to think sequentially, to hold a thought in place, to build arguments step by step. Television rewarded recognition over reasoning, scanning over sustained analysis. Digital media introduced constant context-switching, training us to skim surfaces rather than dwell deeply.

None of these shifts were consciously chosen. They accumulated through exposure until they felt innate. Nystrom's insight: our media environments embed themselves in our minds, shaping the habits that shape us in return.

The AI Parallel: From Internal to Conversational

For centuries, generating an idea meant engaging in internal process and producing thoughts from scratch. AI introduces a different orientation: thinking becomes conversational partnership.

This shift shows up most clearly in how teams distribute cognitive work. Research on generative AI in teams reveals a surprising pattern: groups where one or two members engaged deeply with AI—developing skill in the conversational exchange—consistently outperformed teams where everyone used AI superficially. The difference wasn't about access to technology. It was about who had cultivated the new cognitive habit.

In the high-performing teams, certain members had learned to think through the system rather than simply with it. They'd developed fluency in the back-and-forth: knowing when to prompt broadly versus narrowly, how to redirect when outputs missed the mark, which suggestions to pursue and which to set aside. This isn't delegation in the traditional sense. It's a form of distributed cognition where thinking happens partially in dialogue with the machine.

The rest of the team focused on different cognitive work: evaluating outputs against strategic context, integrating AI-generated options with domain expertise, making final judgments about direction. The cognitive labor didn't decrease, but it did reorganize. Some people became skilled at orchestrating the conversational process. Others sharpened their ability to assess, synthesize, and decide.

Compare this to teams where AI use remained shallow and distributed. Everyone prompted occasionally, but no one developed real facility with the exchange. The result was generic outputs, underutilized capability, and (crucially) no one building the new cognitive muscles the technology makes possible.

This is the nature of the shift. Thinking is moving from internal monologue to external dialogue. The habit changes from "I must produce everything" to "I must direct, refine, and evaluate." What this means in practice:

• Drafting becomes directing. The cognitive skill moves from composing every word to shaping the arc of an argument, steering tone and emphasis, knowing when to accept a suggestion and when to push back. Someone skilled at this recognizes immediately when AI veers off course—not because they're scrutinizing every word, but because they've internalized the rhythm of productive exchange.
• Searching becomes synthesizing. AI can surface information rapidly, but the meaningful cognitive work is deciding what matters, how pieces connect, what's missing. The person who has developed this habit doesn't just collect AI-generated summaries—they hold multiple threads in mind, test connections, recognize patterns the system can't see.
• Linear planning becomes iterative improvisation. Instead of designing everything upfront, thinking happens through rapid cycles: prompt, evaluate, redirect, refine. But "iterative" doesn't mean aimless. Someone practiced in this mode maintains strategic direction while staying open to unexpected paths. They know when to follow an AI-generated tangent and when to pull back to the original intent.

These patterns form whether we attend to them or not. In this early stage of organizational transformation, it’s worth asking if these cognitive habits are taking shape deliberately, with awareness of what's being developed and what might be eroding, or whether they're simply settling into whatever shape the tools suggest.

Shaping What Forms

No new medium wipes the slate clean. Writing didn't disappear when television arrived; digital media didn't erase sequential reasoning. New cognitive patterns layer on top of old ones, and the core skills—structuring argument, evaluating evidence, exercising judgment—remain essential even as the context shifts.

AI follows this principle. Using it effectively depends less on the technology and more on awareness: recognizing how these interactions shape thought, and guiding those patterns with intention.

The habits are forming now, whether we attend to them or not. The question for leaders isn't whether new ways of thinking will emerge across their teams. They already are. It's whether those patterns will be shaped deliberately, in service of the work that matters most, or whether they'll simply settle into whatever form the tools themselves suggest.

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