Paint + Pipette
A blog on the art & science of creative action.
Unleash Your Inner Kindergartener
Puzzled by underwhelming results despite your expertise? Discover the surprising insights from a groundbreaking study that can help you tackle challenges and achieve better outcomes.
Declare an AI Recess
One critical reason folks in organizations aren’t imagining radical new applications of GenAI is, their imaginations aren’t stimulated. My recommendation might fly in the face of convention, but it’s been demonstrated highly effective in both this AI-moment and in times past.
If AI Hasn't Made You Giggle, You're Not Pushing Hard Enough
For all the existential angst spilled regarding AI on the news, there's one danger I haven't heard get much attention. It's not the threat of sentient machines or the loss of jobs—it's the risk of AI disappointing us, not because of its limitations, but because of our own.
Mind the (Generational) Gap: Bridge the AI Divide with Your Expertise
Are you an experienced professional watching the AI revolution from the sidelines? It's time to get in the game! Discover why your hard-won expertise is the secret weapon to unlocking AI's full potential and turbocharging your career.
Curate to Create
This insightful guest article conjures the spirit of legendary restauranteur Danny Meyer, who said, “ABCD so you can ABCD: Always be collecting dots to always be connecting dots.” The collection- and connection-instinct is at the heart of a curator. Read on…
Augment Your Intelligence: Embrace AI to Enhance Decision-Making
Generative AI represents enormous potential for innovation. But even well-intentioned leaders can undermine their own efforts to explore. If they aren’t careful, they can end up reinforcing counter-productive biases amongst the very teams they’re trying to unleash.
Question the Question
All too often, the stated “problem” keeps a team from innovation: the problem is the problem. Being willing to question the premise, rather than accept it blindly, is a critical practice for creative health.
The Problem With Human x AI Collab: It’s Not the AI
If you’re getting mediocre–or even bad–results from AI tools like ChatGPT, it’s not because the tech is bad. Research suggests that you’re probably settling for mediocrity.
Go Pro in Innovation
To become a professional in any field takes an enormous amount of skill, and hard work. Routine practice is a hallmark of the “professional” in any context. Here’s how to take a professional mentality into the innovation arena.
Forget About “New Ideas”
Two words most commonly associated with ideas are “good,” and “new.” I’ve often encouraged folks to forget “good.” Here’s the case for forgetting, “new,” too.
Have and Share a Bad Idea
From Steve Jobs to Taylor Swift to Seth Godin, there’s remarkable consistency among “the greats”: having bad ideas is a necessary precondition to having good ones.
Can AI make brainstorming less mind-numbing?
Financial Times Opinion Piece featuring our AI research:
”Generative tech is improving work — but employees need to be as smart as their new assistants”
Prune Your Ideas
To stimulate innovation, ideas and experiments are critical. But how to free up resources necessary to drive new initiatives forward? Start by pruning back some work that’s past its prime. Here’s how.
Take A First Try
Ed Catmull reveals the great secret behind Pixar’s success: they try before they’re perfect. “All our movies suck to begin with. Our job is to take them from suck to not suck.”
Practice in Community
Want to accelerate your pace of learning? Join a community of practice. We learn much more amongst fellow-learners eager to share insights from experiments conducted in radically different contexts.
Decide To Not Decide
Some decisions are so important they’re worth waiting to make. As Tina Fey discovered in one of the most important decisions of her career, delaying a decision is a legitimate creative strategy.
Find Your People
New domains — whether hobbies or entrepreneurial ventures — are fraught with risk and failure. One way to hack the learning curve is to find fellow learners committed to the craft. Find your people, and you accelerate exponentially.
Flex Your Creative Muscle
Creativity is not a binary, either-you-have-it-or-you-don’t sort of thing. David Kelley once told me, “People fail to realize that the first-order goal is to be getting in practice. The first step is training your mind to think differently.”
Test Your Material
Seinfeld brilliantly details the core molecular structure of the creative process: equal parts idea generation and scientific testing. And he approaches the process with yeoman’s determination.
Express Appreciation
As holiday season comes upon us, it’s worth considering the outsized impact that simple gestures like expressing appreciation for others can have on our collective creative potential. One of the highest-ROI activities you can pursue is spurring someone else on in their craft.