“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
-Sir Ken Robinson
Last night I rewatched a TED talk by Sir Ken from 2006. He talks elegantly about the power of creativity and diverse ways of learning that help people flourish in a natural way.
*Side note. If you have young children, watch this. You’ll love it.
I believe it’s the most widely watched TED talk of all time. Probably because he’s as funny and warm as he is educational.
Robinson’s whole argument is that we build systems to standardise people, then act surprised when nobody comes up with anything original!
I was thinking about this and how helpful the way he looks at life would be for recruitment.
Half our world runs on ratios, KPIs, frameworks and systems. The things we can measure.
And on the other side we have this unlimited opportunity for creativity: gut feel, empathy, reading a room, knowing when to push, when to take a chance, and when to shut up and listen. None of which is really measurable.
But here’s what’s exciting.
We’re at a point now where we have more creative firepower than ever, thanks to AI.
Imagine if one of the most creative entrepreneurs of all time, Sir Richard Branson, had AI when he was starting out.
What would he have done?
Would he be downloading and copying prompts, or would he have been looking at his clients’ problems and exploring unique ways to solve them with AI?
Every major advancement in history has started with creativity.
The Wright brothers had no formal training and a fraction of the budget, and beat a fully funded team to powered flight by tinkering instead of following a plan.
Gutenberg fused a wine press with a goldsmith’s coin-punch technique. Two completely unrelated trades into the printing press.
3M was trying to build a super-strength adhesive, failed, and got a weak, oddly repositionable one instead. A colleague saw a use for the “failure” and called it a Post-it Note.
Every one of those came from someone playing with what was already in front of them, not searching for someone else’s instructions.
What if instead of trying to shoehorn our businesses into a particular AI framework, we started to think creatively and loosely about AI?
I’m seeing a lot of founders do this already, and they’re taking off.
It’s exciting to see.
I have so many people say to me, “I just want you to give me the workflow.” And whilst there are frameworks and processes worth following, there’s nothing more satisfying than being brave enough to colour a little outside the lines and stand out as an original thinker.
I think if we were a bit more game in recruitment to do this, we might just be surprised by the businesses we create.
Not just with AI.
But it is a BIG lever.
If you like the sentiment here and want a place to actually play as you build AI into your agency instead of just watching another webinar, I think you’ll like our new weekly AI Labs workshops.
If it sounds at all interesting, reach out and I’ll share the info.
Cheers
BK
PS Don’t forget to watch the TED talk, it’s terrific.
