The Wrong Problem. Beautifully Solved

When a distracted mind gets a powerful AI assistant.

At nine on Monday morning, Neetu Chatterjee settled into her chair with the firm intention of reducing the time customers spent waiting for help. As chief executive, she considered this a reasonable ambition. A gentleman from Pune had written that his complaint was now old enough to attend school, and she felt something ought to be done before it required college fees.

She opened the complaints report and encountered fourteen tabs, uneven headings, and a column titled “Other Final Revised 3.” Neetu liked things properly arranged. In her view, a spreadsheet should not resemble a cupboard into which relatives had hurriedly pushed everything before guests arrived.

While she was examining this offence, she remembered the previous month’s board meeting. Mr. Mehra had peered at her figures and asked whether they were “directionally reliable,” in the sympathetic tone usually reserved for someone whose umbrella had turned inside out.

The recollection settled the matter. They needed better reporting.

Neetu did not notice that the customers, who had occupied the centre of her attention a moment earlier, had quietly been shown into another mental waiting room.

Ordinarily, this would have led to an energetic morning of dashboard research, interrupted by an article about executive productivity and a brief investigation into whether successful people really got up at four. By lunchtime, she would have acquired eleven browser tabs and a mild grievance against herself.

But Neetu now had AI, an assistant of astonishing competence who never said it was just leaving for lunch.

By Wednesday, a working dashboard was ready. By Friday, reports updated automatically, charts revealed trends, and complaints could be sorted by region, urgency, and several other distinctions the complainants themselves had never considered. Fifty people had rearranged their week to assist, because a chief executive’s passing thought rarely remains a private affair.

At the leadership meeting, Neetu demonstrated the dashboard with justified satisfaction.

“We finally have visibility,” she said, opening a chart in a particularly reassuring blue.

From the far end of the table, Mrs. D’Souza asked whether branch managers could now approve refunds without obtaining three signatures from head office. She supervised customer service and possessed the inconvenient habit of remembering what customers wanted.

Neetu paused. The approval process had not changed, nor had the number of people authorised to resolve complaints. Customers were still waiting, although their suffering could now be viewed by district.

The dashboard was useful. That made the detour harder to recognise. Neetu had worked carefully, asked intelligent questions, checked the answers, and completed something worthwhile. AI had helped her finish the task she gave it. It had not established whether this was the task she had meant to give it.

Suppose, instead, she had paused before that first prompt.

She might have taken her hands off the keyboard, felt her feet on the floor, and noticed the chair supporting her. Following a few gentle belly breaths, she could have felt her abdomen expand and settle, returning to that movement whenever Mr. Mehra reappeared with his directional concerns.

Then she could have asked herself what she had come to solve, what she was about to ask AI to do, and whether she had deliberately chosen the change.

Breathing would not authorise a refund. It might, however, help Neetu notice that an injured memory of a board meeting had taken charge of customer service.

In our MindGym Mindful Co-Thinking workshop, we will explore this small space between a passing thought and a purposeful instruction. Bring a real task, practise a brief breathing and anchoring pause, and use AI to question the problem before pursuing the solution.

Changing direction may be sensible. The useful habit is to notice who, or what, has chosen the turn, before fifty colleagues follow it and the gentleman in Pune writes about school admissions again.