Integration Intelligence

When you no longer need to be the fastest processor in the room, you can become the best synthesizer instead.

Before the widespread use of tools like ChatGPT, meetings were a race to have the quickest analysis, or the smartest immediate response. But the pressure to perform on the spot was ruining our judgment. We were so focused on having an immediate, "correct" response that we rarely gave ourselves the time to sit with complexity and let a truly wise solution emerge. Now that AI can generate that polished first draft in seconds, we can become thoughtful deliberators…if  we choose to.

What emerges is an undervalued professional skill: wisdom. Watch for people who pause before answering, who reference seemingly unrelated experiences, who ask about second-order effects.

It means saying things like: "Let me run this by three additional people (and AIs) and see what emerges." or “let me sleep on this”.

Wisdom includes being intentional about making sure you’ve addressed these four elements before making a call:

Analytical Intelligence: What the data says is happening 

Experiential Intelligence: What patterns you've seen before 

Relational Intelligence: How people and systems actually behave 

Temporal Intelligence: How situations evolve over time

The key is learning to hold these different information sources in productive tension rather than defaulting to the one that feels most familiar. 

In workforce development, this might look like someone who considers not just skills demand data, but also how local economic development plans might shift that demand, how cultural factors affect program completion rates, and how changes in remote work patterns influence what skills actually matter.

When outputs that used to take you 5 days can now take 5 minutes, it’s easy to make costly mistakes. Slowing down has become a necessity.