Will the (Hallucinating) AI Solve the Example Dilemma in Business Education?
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The concept of "example dilemma in business" was first articulated in Cristian Mitreanu's 2014 manuscript "Beyond the Fun." It was a rather-lengthy 'letter to the reader' meant to complement the second edition of his business picture book "Spointra and the Secret of Business Success (The Aged Edition)," which was published digitally as an Apple iBook in 2013.
The motivation behind and goal of this particular section of the 'letter to the reader' was two-pronged. On the one hand, it was a criticism of a significant part of the business literature that (still) relies heavily on anecdotal evidence and narratives, likely doing a disservice to the field and most of the individual readers interested in professional development and career growth. On the other hand, the section was intended to set the broader context for a model-first book that could help individuals more effectively see through stories and experiences, and thus make better decisions.
The excerpt from the manuscript was published with slight edits as a LinkedIn blog post later in 2014 with the title "The Example Dilemma in Business" (also copied below). Since the beginning, as the general interest of business learners and the focus of the field, mirroring the evolution of broader markets and financial markets, has continued to gradually move "upstream" toward the startup world, this idea has never come across as particularly important.
However, with the generative AI's adoption by the business world growing at an unprecedented rate, the concept of "example dilemma" is suddenly taking a whole new meaning and level of importance. AI's ever-improving capability of instantly generating long-form narratives such as examples and business cases is bringing it into the spotlight and, with it, a more acute need for big picture understanding at multiple scales.
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The Example Dilemma in Business
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[Copy of the 2014 blog post]
"At a superficial glance, their utility or value is rather obvious. Whether we try to compare the performance of the same company over time, or its performance relative to its competitors, we develop descriptions of various business instances. And, depending on the context, these approximations of the observed world range from simple stories to highly structured accounts that play a key role in pattern recognition and, subsequently, in theory development. But their use in business has a dark side that has grown more problematic over the years.
"While examples and the more elaborate cases have always been an essential tool in business education, they made even more sense in the discipline’s infancy, since very little of the business phenomena was meaningfully codified at that time. Unfortunately, they became increasingly seen 'as being most valuable when they encouraged students to abandon the search for theory and to learn how to make realistic and difficult decisions on their own,' creating a vicious cycle, as 'generalizable business theories did not spring forth from case studies' (Gleeson et al., 1993). The lack of integrative, 'big picture' theories led to an over-reliance on cases, which in turn diminished the perceived need for such theories.
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"...most valuable when they encouraged students to abandon the search for theory and to learn how to make realistic and difficult decisions on their own."
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"Beyond the classroom, however, the consequences have been even more troublesome. Attracted by the lucrative field of management consulting or driven by the need to consolidate their respective professional careers, an increasing number of industry professionals have been putting forth a swelling amount of business advice of questionable quality. Enabled by the discipline’s lack of an integrative theoretical underpinning, they have been employing selective evidence ('cherry-picking') to create compelling stories that tend to obscure the need for a solid theoretical foundation (Rosenzweig, 2007). Nevertheless, by their very nature, examples are always narrower interpretations of the actual accounts that they describe.
"As a result, especially when referring to broader issues (i.e., a struggling company’s sudden turnaround), the process of identifying all key causal relationships can be very difficult due to the sheer number of factors involved. Besides, not only that human behavior is partially irrational (Kahneman, 2011), making it rather impossible to talk about a fully predictable chain of events, but the way we see our surroundings is more limited than we think (Simons & Chabris, 1999), and even what we see and experience tends to be remembered differently (Kahneman & Riis, 2005). And it is this duality of value brought on by examples — they can be useful, yet misleading learning tools — that [we should always be acutely aware of]."
References
- Gleeson, Robert E.; Schlossman, Steven; & Allen, David G. (1993), Uncertain Ventures: The Origins of Graduate Management Education at Harvard and Stanford, 1908-1939, Selections, Graduate Management Admission Council
- Kahneman, Daniel (2011), Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Kahneman, Daniel & Riis, Jason (2005), Living and Thinking about It: Two Perspectives on Life, in N. Baylis, F. A. Huppert, & B. Keverne (Eds.), The Science of Well-Being, Oxford University Press
- Rosenzweig, Phil (2007), The Halo Effect ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers, Free Press
- Simons, Daniel J. & Chabris, Christopher F. (1999), Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events, Perception
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Image: Two-Face is "a fictional character, a comic book super-villain that appears in comic books published by DC Comics, and is an enemy of Batman" (Wikipedia, via We The Nerdy).
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Naturally, most readers might wonder whether it is possible to learn and perform professionally without relying on examples. And here, Henry Mintzberg, a leading voice in management and business strategy, has some valuable insights. By describing his own approach in the 2014 paper "Developing Theory about the Development of Theory," he seems to inadvertently point out to a major challenge to generally solve the "example dilemma in business:"
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"Even many of my own doctoral students, sometimes including the best, when urged by me to express their ideas in diagrammatic form, have not gotten past a 2x2 matrix or two."
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“My work is loaded with diagrams, seeking to express every which way how the ideas I am trying to make come together. Aristotle said ‘The soul...never thinks without a picture.’ I try to help my soul think. [...]
"These diagrams really help me a great deal: I can see it all at a glance, even if outside my head. But not always into other heads. I have been puzzled to find that some people are puzzled by these diagrams. They don’t think in such terms, nor are they even able to see it in the work of others. Even many of my own doctoral students, sometimes including the best, when urged by me to express their ideas in diagrammatic form, have not gotten past a 2x2 matrix or two. Maybe this has to do with my education as a mechanical engineer — probably the only thing left of that — or at least my predisposition to do that kind of education, because I like to see things altogether, at a single glance, to quote a famous composer.”
If the underlying dynamics in business — which, inherently, are distillations that tend to be expressed as theories, models, or frameworks — are so difficult to communicate and understand by the broader population, are we doomed to forever remain heavily dependent on examples/cases/stories when it comes to business and business education?
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While the decision of how to handle the "example dilemma" will depend on the particular situation at hand, recent market-level developments and trends seem to point to an exacerbating problem, not one that is being resolved.
On April 8th, Anthropic, one of the major generative AI providers, released their "Anthropic Education Report: How University Students Use Claude," in which they write, "We saw an inverted pattern of Bloom's Taxonomy domains exhibited by the AI: Claude was primarily completing higher-order cognitive functions, with Creating (39.8%) and Analyzing (30.2%) being the most common operations from Bloom’s Taxonomy."
Later, in their conclusion, they write, "There are legitimate worries that AI systems may provide a crutch for students, stifling the development of foundational skills needed to support higher-order thinking. An inverted pyramid, after all, can topple over."
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"There are legitimate worries that AI systems may provide a crutch for students, stifling the development of foundational skills needed to support higher-order thinking."
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In his April 9th Harvard Business Review survey-summarizing piece "How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025," Marc Zao-Sanders writes, "Therapy [...] is the new top use case. There are two other entrants in the top 5: 'Organizing my life' and 'Finding purpose.' These three uses reflect efforts toward self-actualization, making a shift from technical to more emotive applications over the past year."
Finally, in his May 4th RollingStone article "People are loosing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies," Miles Klee's subtitle brings to light other developments that are likely to sip into the business world, "Self-styled prophets are claiming they have 'awakened' chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT."
If this broad-stroke qualitative assessment of the recent market-level developments is any indication, the share of gen AI users who are willing to "outsource" their higher-level thinking seems significant. And that signals not only the growing importance of big-picture thinking for professionals, but also the need to raise awareness around the "example dilemma" concept and possibly the need to develop standardized methods for dealing with it.
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BigBigPic™ — The Business Big Picture Course™ is one of the four key experiential pillars of the human strategist platform Ofmos Universe. Currently in development, BizBigPic™ helps professionals build AI-age decision-making skills with a single project-based course, an integrated toolkit, and a multi-scale understanding of business. (Of course, the "example dilemma in business" will be part of the learnings and conversations.) Stay tuned!
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