Financial Times Opinion Piece featuring our AI research:
”Generative tech is improving work — but employees need to be as smart as their new assistants”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Inside every single human being lies the potential to discover hence-unknown possibilities, to have an epiphany. My mission in life is to teach others the tools that turn that seemingly-magical moment into a methodical, repeatable reality.

Dr Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist obsessed with improvisational jazz, conducted a fascinating study on creative flow. It has profound implications for what we practice, and what we value, in our individual lives and organizations.

The instinct to get out into the world for inspiration is one that’s got to be cultivated. Malcolm Gladwell, Tina Fey, and Twyla Tharp all have slightly different recommendations… but they rhyme!

Amos Tversky said, "The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours." Here are some tactics for productively wasting hours…

Business leaders should take a page out of one of the most brutally-straightforward innovation laboratories in the world: lessons from Jerry Seinfeld and Steve Martin’s stand-up routines.

Bernard Arnault became the richest man in the world — surpassing Musk, Bezos, and Buffet — not by focusing on profitability, but by foregrounding desirability. We all should.

It’s a well-known fact that Albert Einstein shattered the paradigm of physics as an “unqualified” outsider. Some might suggest his lack of status was actually a benefit.

Steve Martin’s reflection routine as a fledgling magician gives a masterclass in learning through experimentation: if you don’t reflect, you can’t connect the dots in unexpected ways.

One of the greatest misconceptions in innovation is that folks start with a good idea. How rarely that’s true. Here’s to starting, followed by enlightened iteration.

Great ideas are not the function of episodic, haphazard bursts of effort. They’re the function of a well-honed individual and organizational ability. So before you sprint, do this…

We've all been there: struggling against some challenge, banging our head against the wall. Even Albert Einstein. How he broke through teaches us something fundamental about creativity.