Blowing up toilets and pelting customers with rotten vegetables

I love AI. It does all the things I was never very good at, better and faster than I would or could. It gets me from A to W so much quicker. It’s then my job to add the X factor…and the YZ. AI is rubbish at reading the room. Its comedy timing and improv skills are an embarrassment. It can’t walk into a room, change the temperature, and inject some much-needed energy. Its leadership qualities are underwhelming. Its chat is dull, and I definitely don’t want to sit next to it down the pub.
 
This is where we come in. These are the things that are innate in us all. They show up differently dependent on our quirks and idiosyncrasies, but that’s the point. We’re not robots. It's our personalities that make us interesting and irreplaceable in the workplace.
 
Play to your strengths and let AI play to its. Then we’ll both get on just fine, but I’m driving (and navigating and choosing the music). AI is sat in the back somewhere providing stimulus when I need it.
 
When it comes to creativity, AI is a brilliant tool. It’s amazing at generating relevant stimulus and creating momentum. But a core strength, that we all possess, is the unique ways we see the world, make connections, and imagine. Creative thinking, problem solving, it's never a straight line. It’s messy, random, and playful. Our ability to thrive and navigate in this space is our superpower.

Two examples of this.

1. When working with global retail bank on a project to improve customer experience, we were having ideas with the client. One of my colleagues was getting bored and mischievous and presented the following idea. “What if when people entered the bank with a bad credit rating, alarms went off, they were put in stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables”. We laughed. But then the client said, “there’s something in this. Obviously, we can’t do that. But currently, when people walk into our banks, we have no idea what their needs are. If we did, we could service them so much better. What followed were lots of ideas around self-service queuing that were later adopted successfully worldwide.
2. Working on new toilet cleaning product ideas, one of the team flippantly suggested, when looking at a photo of a really disgusting toilet, that they wanted to chuck a grenade in and blow the toilet up. Much hilarity was had but it quickly led to a new insight platform and ultimately a range of new ‘foaming toilet bomb’ cleaning products.

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AI doesn’t create - it recombines. It looks backwards, pulling from what we already know, analysing past data, predicting likely patterns. This is its greatest strength - and its fundamental limitation.

Humour, improvisation, and the visualization of possibilities beyond reality, remain uniquely human qualities.

Creativity isn’t a computational function; it’s a human experience. It’s lived, felt, and shaped by our emotions, instincts, and intuition. If we lean too heavily on AI to do this work, we don’t just risk recycling old ideas, we risk forgetting how to think beyond them.

So yes, obviously invest in your AI capabilities, but don’t take for granted the creative currency of your people. According to the World Economic Forum, creativity, originality, & initiative are the key skills for 2026.  So, it's on us, as humans to create the conditions for creative thinking, reward and prioritise it, invest in the skills and techniques, and to generate the energy that feeds it ... And send your people on one of our creative mastery workshops!

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