Use Your Brain: Raising Critical Thinkers in an AI World

Your students can write an essay in seconds. But can they still think? AI is already in every backpack, browser, classroom, and assignment.

In her new book, Use Your Brain: Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot (St. Martin’s Press, January 2027), two-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author Erica Dhawan gives school leaders and especially parents a shared language to help students to wrestle with difficult questions, develop deep knowledge, form their own opinions, defend an idea, change their minds, tolerate uncertainty, and recognize when an answer, even a highly polished one, doesn’t make sense. Her keynotes for schools and parent associations empower school communities to strengthen the human capabilities AI can’t replace: original thinking, judgment, discernment, curiosity, and meaning-making.

Use Your Brain: Critical Thinking Intelligence for the Era on Autopilot

Your people aren’t using AI. They’re agreeing with it. We stopped drafting and started approving. We stopped wrestling with the idea and started accepting the summary. It feels like productivity. It’s cognitive surrender, and it’s quietly flattening originality, weakening recall, and producing decisions no one in the room can actually defend.

Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Use Your Brain, argues that Critical Thinking Intelligence is to this decade what Emotional Intelligence was to the ’90s: the differentiator between the leaders who compound and the ones who get automated.

This is a keynote about running at full speed without outsourcing the original thinking that makes your people worth paying for. Based on case studies and practical storytelling, Dhawan sends audiences home with team rituals they can run the next morning: the Think Sandwich, where human judgment opens and closes every AI-assisted task; the Friction Meeting, where someone is assigned to argue how the work is wrong; and a Decision Filter for what to automate, what to augment, and what stays non-negotiably human.

Interactive, immediately usable, and built for teams that think originally and creatively in our modern age.

Learning Outcomes:

• Catch themselves and their teams on autopilot, and put real thinking back around the machine in their organization and with customers/clients
• Pressure-test technology output, stop AI slop, separate signal from noise, and decide what to automate, augment, and protect
• Own high-stakes decisions they can explain, defend, and recall

Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence

Two teams have been working on the same problem for six months. Neither knows the other exists. That is what endless meetings, cross-team dysfunction, duplication, and delay actually cost you. And it isn’t a tools problem. Your people can find any document, any dataset, any answer in seconds. So why is collaboration still hard?

Because what actually moves work forward is their human relationships across silos. The colleague who tried this years ago and watched it fail. The client relationship that makes a hard conversation possible. Tools can retrieve everything your company recorded. It cannot reach what only your people know.

When every organization has the same tools, the edge belongs to those who connect across the lines that divide them. Function to function. Region to region. Level to level.

Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Get Big Things Done, named this Connectional Intelligence, which turns people into superconnectors who break silos and drive breakthrough impact. She shows leaders and teams how to surface what no system captured, build trust fast across boundaries, and unlock the collective expertise of the whole enterprise.

Learning Outcomes:

• Surface the tacit knowledge and relationship capital no AI system can retrieve
• Diagnose where collaboration stalls in your organization, and unstick it
• Break silos and keep teams aligned, accountable, and motivated
• Build trust across functions, geographies, and reporting lines without adding meetings

Collaborate Faster and Further Together

Every message is now well-written. Warm opener. Clean structure. Thoughtful closing line. And you have no idea whether the person actually read your note, cared about your problem, or was even the one who wrote it. That’s the new trust problem.

In the past, the signals were sloppy but real. A rushed reply meant something. A typo at 11pm meant something. A long thoughtful message meant someone spent time on you. Effort used to be visible in the writing. Now polish is free.

Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of the WSJ bestseller Digital Body Language, decodes what actually signals care, credibility, and commitment. Specificity is the new sincerity. Response time is the new eye contact. Showing your reasoning is the new showing your work. And the fastest way to rebuild trust with a client, a peer, or a direct report is to be unmistakably human in a channel where everyone else sounds like a machine.

This keynote will name the norms that are quietly eroding trust, and leave audiences with shared communication rules and guidelines for what gets automated, what gets drafted, and what has to come from a person.

Learning Outcomes:

• Read the signals that still carry meaning, and stop trusting the ones AI made
  worthless
• Create cultures of maniacal clarity across email, phone, IM, text, video, and even live meetings
• Rebuild credibility with clients and colleagues in channels flooded with perfect, forgettable communication

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“Erica’s presentation was an absolute hit.”
— Erik Spoelstra, Head Coach of Miami Heat

“Non-verbal cues are vital to understanding each other. Now that so much communication happens online–and with the massive shift to distance learning and remote workplaces–we need Erica Dhawan’s book more than ever. In Digital Body Language, Erica shares tips and strategies for communicating effectively on chats, emails, and video calls, so everyone can successfully share and connect in the digital age.”
— Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook

“Erica offers a profound look at how to foster inclusion and better leadership in our digital world.”
— Billie Jean King, Founder, Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative

“Terrific. Our leaders were very engaged and had immediate practical takeaways. Erica made a big impact.”
— Mike Fucci, Chairman Emeritus, Deloitte

“Erica’s session was engaging, relevant, and actionable. She is thoughtful, inspirational, and smart with a contagious positive energy. All organizations and executive leaders would benefit from having her as an advisor to drive behavioral change, harness the power of networks, and think beyond traditional cohorts. She is a thought leader in the development of collaborative ways of working, improving productivity and customer engagement and experience.”
— Lisa McCann, COO & Global Head of Customer Success and Delivery Services,
Korn Ferry

“Erica’s presentation was absolutely perfect for our leaders. Our group was diverse and Erica was a hit with everyone! Her storytelling style of presenting along with a healthy dose of informative case studies kept everyone engaged and interested and excited about using connectional intelligence to transform our business.”
— George Chavel, Chairman Emeritus, Sodexo

“As a presenter at our organization’s first large scale virtual conference, Erica delivered a keynote session that was not only engaging and thought-provoking, it was extremely relevant to what our organizational membership is currently experiencing. Erica’s presentation took viewers outside of their home offices and truly felt like a live, in-person event.”
— Hannah DeBevoise, AACSB International

“Erica delivered an outstanding keynote. Her message about digital body language could not be more relevant and timely than it is today.”
— Bridget Dunn, Meeting Planner, Association for Talent Development