How to Foster Creativity in an AI-Driven Environment

The secret to tap into AI? Play! I researched hundreds of early AI adopters for my book, and found the most successful people were playing, experimenting, and having fun to understand it better. Play isn't just fun—it's how our brains are wired to learn. Think about a toddler stacking blocks only to knock them down again and again. That child is actually conducting physics experiments, testing cause and effect, and building neural pathways that will serve them for life. As adults, we forgot this superpower. We've been trained to view play as frivolous—something separate from "real" work. But neuroscience tells us that play is essential not just for learning, but for unlocking our most innovative thinking. Play works magic for three big reasons: 1️⃣ It creates a low-stakes environment where you can take risks without fear of failure. There's no AI manual—its capabilities are discovered through hands-on exploration. 2️⃣ It activates different neural pathways than focused, goal-oriented work. This relaxed state allows unexpected connections to form between ideas that our analytical minds would typically keep separate. 3️⃣ It removes the pressure of performance and judgment. Without the fear of failure looming over us, we naturally experiment with wilder ideas and take creative risks we'd otherwise avoid. And here’s the Power Play: 💪 Play accelerates your AI learning—you build intuitive understanding through experimentation 💪 AI expands HOW you can play—you can even work in mediums in which you have zero skills, just by using your words to create incredible things with the machines (create games, apps, videos, images with just a sentence!) 💪 This enhanced play fuels your creativity—which can lead to breakthroughs you wouldn't find through structured work It's a powerful cycle. So . . . if you want to see what AI is really capable of now—play with it. Test crazy prompts. Throw it quirky challenges. Experiment across different mediums. It's not just the fun way to learn—it's the most effective way. Sometimes, the most important breakthroughs come from the least serious moments. So go ahead... play! ____ 👋 Hi, I'm Alison McCauley, and I focus on how to leverage AI to do better at what we humans do best. I’ll be sharing more about how to Think with AI, and use the power of AI to boost our brainpower. Follow me for more, and share your thoughts below! Balloon Museum World

AI field note: Reducing the 'mean time to ah-ha' (MTtAh) is critical for driving AI adoption—and unlocking the value. When it comes to AI adoption, there's a crucial milestone: the "ah-ha moment." It's that instant of realization when someone stops seeing AI as just a smarter search tool and starts recognizing it as a reasoning and integration engine—a fundamentally new way of solving problems, driving innovation, and collaborating with technology. For me, that moment came when I saw an AI system not just write code but also deploy it, identify errors, and fix them automatically. In that instant, I realized AI wasn’t just about automation or insights—it was about partnership. A dynamic, reasoning collaborator capable of understanding, iterating, and executing alongside us. But these "ah-ha moments" don’t happen by accident. Systems like ChatGPT or Claude excel at enabling breakthroughs, but it really requires us to ask the right questions. That creates a chicken-and-egg problem: until users see what’s possible, they struggle to imagine what else is possible. So how do we help people get hands-on with AI, especially in enterprise organizations, without relying on traditional training? Here are some approaches we have tried at PwC: 🤖 AI "Hackathons" or Challenges: Host short, low-stakes events where employees can experiment with AI on real problems. For example, marketing teams could test AI for campaign ideas, while operations teams explore process automation. ⚙️ Sandbox Environments: Provide low-friction, risk-aware access to AI tools within a dedicated environment. Let users explore capabilities like text generation, workflow automation, or analytics without worrying about “messing something up.” 🚀 Pre-built Use Cases: Offer ready-to-use templates for specific challenges, such as drafting a client email, summarizing documents, or automating routine reports. Seeing results in action builds confidence and sparks creativity. At PwC we have a community prompt library available to everyone, making it easier to get started. 🧩 Embedded AI Mentors: Assign "AI champions" who can guide teams on applying AI in their work. This informal mentorship encourages experimentation without formal, structured training. We do this at PwC and it's been huge. ⚡️ Integrate AI into Existing Tools: Embed AI into everyday platforms (like email, collaboration tools, or CRM systems) so users can naturally interact with it during routine workflows. Familiarity leads to discovery. Reducing the mean time to ah-ha—the time it takes someone to have that transformative realization—is critical. While starting with familiar use cases lowers the barrier to entry, the real shift happens when users experience AI’s deeper capabilities firsthand.

A deeper understanding of possibility literacy crystallized in the AI theory class today. Watching students interact with AI models, I realized we're not just witnessing collaboration - we're seeing the development of a new kind of creative intelligence that emerges from human-AI dialogue. What's fascinating is how students who embrace possibility thinking get increasingly sophisticated at exploring creative territories. One student spent an hour mapping different approaches to world-building - not by asking for direct story ideas, but by engaging the AI in a discussion about how physical spaces shape narrative possibilities. With each exchange, both the questions and responses grew more nuanced, as if student and AI were learning to speak a new language together. This crystallized during our workshop sessions. Students began sharing not just their writing, but their exploratory processes - the branching pathways they discovered, the assumptions they challenged, the possibilities they uncovered. They're learning that skilled prompting isn't about getting better outputs - it's about expanding the boundaries of what they can imagine. I'm starting to see these AI interactions less as tool use and more as exercises in possibility literacy - each conversation opening new doors of perception about what writing can be and become. The technology isn't just assisting - it's helping students develop a fundamentally new way of thinking about creative potential. Next week, we'll lean into this discovery, exploring how different questioning strategies can illuminate previously unseen creative pathways. Pragmatic AI Solutions #AIWriting #CreativePractice #WritingCommunity Saleem Raja Haja Barbara Smith Joel Backon Meena Wood MBA Ed Leadership, FRSA FCCT Nicolas Boitout, PhD Phillip Alcock James Hammer Mike Kentz

On it's own, AI is the fast food of creativity. But that does not mean it's not useful in helping YOU be creative. First let's be real about AI: It's not intelligent, It's not magic, it's over hyped by people trying to raise money, but it is some amazing computer science. On it's own AI is kinda like that one person you know holding on to a massive amount of knowledge but never really actions on any of it. The massive volumes of data used in the models offers new ways to build queries that help us be more creative. Here are some tips for using AI as your muse: 💡 Ask for Ideas, Not Answers: Instead of seeking definitive answers (which it randomly gets wrong), encourage AI to generate fresh perspectives, insightful feedback, and alternative approaches. 💡Provide Rich Context for Meaningful Dialogue: The more specific information you share, the more tailored and relevant the AI's responses will be. Get verbose with your unique circumstances, such as your company's situation, marketing challenges, or personal goals. This will enable the AI to offer more nuanced and helpful suggestions. 💡Leverage AI's Knowledge Base for Strategic Thinking: Ask the AI to analyze problems through the lens of established business frameworks or explore how influential leaders you admire might approach similar situations. Questions like "How would Richard Branson approach this?" or "What would Stephen Hawking think of this?" 💡Engage in Creative Role-Playing. Have the AI to adopt different personas and perspectives. "What if Stephen King wrote Harry Potter?" or " How would Microsoft be run today if Linus Torvalds was the CEO?" posing hypothetical scenarios and unconventional thinking can uncover novel solutions. ❓ Question and Challenge The Responses. Don't take the AI's responses at face value. Encourage it to justify its reasoning, consider alternative viewpoints, and identify potential drawbacks. This will help you refine your own thinking and make more informed decisions.