What a critical thinking workshop should change for teams that use AI

A product manager pastes a customer brief into a chat window and gets a tidy list of options in under a minute. The room nods. Nobody asks which option the customers would actually pay for, or what the model invented to fill a gap in the brief.

Steve Blank taught Lean LaunchPad the same way for fifteen years. Students learned by talking to stakeholders and refining the product week by week. This year, every team walked in on day one with a finished-looking product built with AI. Blank's teaching team concluded the bottleneck had moved from the time and cost of building to judgment about what to build and who to build it for. That's the muscle a critical thinking day has to train.

What should change after the day

People should leave able to slow a polished answer down. They should be able to name the claim the model made and the evidence that would prove or kill it. They should also know who still owns the decision. A team that does this will use AI faster and still keep the call.

Our critical thinking workshop puts that practice on the team's real work. Staff bring a live brief or a draft the model already wrote. They pull the argument apart to find its assumptions, then rewrite the next question they'll ask a customer before they ship.

What to put on the agenda

Start with a finished-looking AI draft the team already trusts too much. Ask them to find the claim with no owner and the number with no source. Then send them to one real person who lives with the problem, even for a short call. Get them to rewrite the claim with what they heard. Run it in pairs so nobody checks their own work, and keep the original draft beside the rewrite so the team can see what moved.

Close with a simple check the team can run every week. For each AI-assisted recommendation, write one sentence on what would change your mind. Blank's point about evidence theatre helps here. A polished deliverable can look like progress while the team still skips the hard questions. The room needs a habit that separates the two.

What to look for a month later

Ask each manager for one decision the team remade after challenging a model output. If they can name the decision, the evidence and who signed it, the day worked. If they only talk about prompts, the day didn't change how they judge.

Put the rep in a critical thinking workshop on a draft the team already owns. The curriculum shift is in why critical thinking beat AI literacy.