Generative Human Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence seems to be changing everything. But it raises and even deeper question.
What kind of human being must we become to thrive in a world with AI?
Generative Human Intelligence is a field in which to answer this question. Generative Human Intelligence is an opportunity to illuminate the most important aspects of being human, the aspects we need to preserve and enhance going forward.
Generative Human Intelligence and generative artificial intelligenceare different categories of intelligence and take care of different things. Humans cannot compete with gen AI capabilities, but measuring humans against machines is a mistake. AI cannot do what humans do, where humans create shared futures and lives with other humans. AI doesn’t change this.
AI is powerful, fast, and with access to vast sources. It produces and can make things, text, audios, videos, images, code, and anything that can be guided digitally. It can have conversationsand imitate human beings. But human beings create in a different domain from AI. We are creators of the future, of commitments whose consequences we are responsible for. Welive the consequences of our choices, and create relationships for a lifetime. We create lifeand meaning. Humans create shared futures beyond the past, and care about and take care of others.
Human beings, and now AI, share the domain of language, and most importantly, the coordination of action. They both have conversations that specify actions and results. And here is where AI enters territory that has always been, and always will be, the domain of human coordination, including leadership, teams, relationships, and the shared space of actions and lives of any human group. The structure of coordination and language has requirements for our attention. Requirements for trust. Clarifying outcomes. Coping with mistakes and breakdowns. Creating shared backgrounds. Setting standards. Making assessments of outcomes and more.
The structure of coordination of action in language has been the foundation of the development and application of the discipline of Generative Leadership since 1981[i], and is the work of the Institute for Generative Leadership (IGL), founded in 1993.[ii]Generative Leadership has always found that action and organizations had to be grounded in the realities of being human. It had to understand human beings as creatures that care. And include the big questions of life and living, of action and relationship, in creating shared futures with practical execution of generative practices. It had to address how we design and live a goodlife with others. How we clarify what we care about individually and together. And how we take care of what we care about most deeply.
Interacting with AI in language has become prompt engineering to clarify with precision what is being requested. Clear requests and coming up with new, valuable criteria for requests has always been one of the human challenges of leadership, coordination, and design. For humans the power of languagegoes far beyond clarity and possibility, because it is how we createshared futures, identities, shared worlds, and takeresponsibility for them. While AI can combine and imitate from the past,humans create life and lives and live with the consequences of choices. We can imagine and create good lives, and we must face our mortality.
We must see that AI exists to respond to human concerns in the matrix of human to human relationships. While AI can be creative, it is a human being that must be its guide, customer, and evaluator, unless a process has been mis-designed. This is the old problem of leaving out the human being.
Generative Human Intelligence as a term has been used by a few people[iii] to name particular skills or capabilities. I ask: what is the source of those capabilities, and how do we cultivate them. I view generative human intelligence as the conversation of an entire field. The field of identifying the foundational dimensions and processes of human development and becoming. The field of what kind of Generative Human Beings we can become. Of how our human capabilities and language create shared futures, lives, and meaning. Of how we coordinate actions to bring these into existence.
The need to attend to generative human intelligence was present but largely invisible prior to AI. While AI brings unprecedented levels of linguistic, creative, and productive capabilities, as well as speed and scope of sources, the fundamental kinds of challenges it raises are not new. The challenges of facing and adapting to change. Deciding what must be conserved in the process of adaptation. Of facing the unknown. Of learning and developing new skills. Of adapting to new technological processes. Of re-understanding our roles in perturbations to our old games, and the opening of new frontiers.
The impact (threat?) of technology, that many feel, has already been with us, as well, before AI. It is the mechanical common sense that has come to dominate our culture’s understanding of action in which people came to be seen as units of production. In this understanding all action results in activities external to the body, defined by external movements and external outcomes. Even the advent of knowledge work still kept the mechanical logic of activity for external outcomes, leaving out the human being and the internal states and lives of human beings. This view has combined with an imperative of utility, making everything raw material to be used. It subjugates all action to create more, leading to the sacrifice of life, living, meaning, and the sacred asdisposable.
For the Generative Human Being, and thereby for generative human intelligence, action must be recovered as arising from the human internal states of care, commitment, emotions, and valuing what is shared with others. Generative Leadership is a discipline of care in action, creating shared futures, not the coordination of units of production.
From the principle that all human action arises in and from conversations, we have a path to design our relations with AI as we design our relations with each other. Conversations declare futures, care, and commitment. They shape practices and action. They assess outcomes. They connect and disconnect us. They guide our embodiment. These are our human powers of creation.
The path of conversations and practices for the design of our future includes the steps to: find our center and emotional environment for choice; face the edges of our fears, the unknown, and possibilities; explore; learn; design; innovate as developing the adoption of new practices in a community[iv]; then navigate and evolve.
Let us walk these paths together and look for answers to what kind of human beings we will become.
Onward!
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Invitations:
1. I invite you to engage in the conversations of Generative Human Intelligence, the Generative Human Being, and Generative Leadership as a new opening to illuminate our choices for what kind of human beings we will become, including creating good lives, a better world, and a world in which everyone thrives.
2. I invite you to the question: How do human beings become capable of creating lives and futures that are worthy of them?
3. I invite you to the practice of exploring what you most deeply care about, the source of value, satisfaction, and meaning, with the question “What do I care about most deeply?” And to practice to ask yourself with your every interaction with AI, “what is it that I am responsible for in what I’m creating that cannot be delegated to a tool, no matter how intelligent?”
[i]My own engagement with the language of coordination and action began in 1981 with studying with Fernando Flores and his colleagues. Flores’ research preceded that including collaboration with Terry Winograd, who worked with software recognizing natural language as early as 1968. There work was based on the originating work of distinguishing speech acts by John Austin in the 1940’s. I worked with Flores in developing conversational practices of management and leadership between 1986 and 1993.
[ii] IGL was founded by Bob Dunham, and there are four IGL organizations – IGL Global, founded in 1993, and three affiliates: IGL India, founded in 2012 with Sameer Dua; IGL LATAM, founded in 2019 with Maribell Gonzalez, and IGL US spun off in 2023 with Greg Karl. IGL India has relaunched in 2026 with co-founders Ajit Pandalai, Jagadish Babu, and Tanmoy Java.
[iii]On line searches showed the term “generative human intelligence” being used by very few: a consulting company, a design company, a William and Mary University program, and several commentators in July, 2026.
[iv] This is the interpretation of innovation from the book The Innovator’s Way, which I co-authored with Dr. Peter Denning.
