Creativity Unlocked: LIVE

Before you can use AI to boost your creativity, you have to understand what creativity actually is and discover that you already have it. We dismantle the myth that creativity is a rare gift. It isn't. It's a skill. And like any skill, it can be trained, measured and improved. This first session is a creative gym workout. Participants take part in Guildford's Alternative Uses Test, a classic academic measure of creative thinking, but run live using AI. You will generate ideas, the AI scores them on volume, breadth, elaboration and originality. It's energising, competitive and immediately tells people something true about how they think. Then we move into a concept-combination exercise: take two unrelated things, smash them together, make something new. (Croissant + donut = Cronut. What's yours?) Again, AI is the facilitator, challenger and feedback-giver. You finish with writing and visualisation exercises, not to produce finished work, but to develop the internal creative muscles that all idea generation relies on. The takeaway: Creativity isn't mysterious. It's trainable. And AI is an extraordinarily patient training partner.

The quality of an idea is almost entirely determined by the quality of what goes into it. Most creative work fails not in the execution, but in the preparation. This session is about filling your creative mind with the right raw material. Specifically: truly understanding the people you're trying to reach and the problem you're actually trying to solve. You will use AI prompts to go deep on audience motivation, not a standard demographic description ("35–45, high income") but a real human picture of what someone wants, fears, hopes for and believes. Dave calls the usual demographic briefing "an umbrella made of cheese: in theory it covers the important stuff, but in reality it stinks." Then you will build an audience persona, a real person to picture when you're generating ideas. You will discover what AI can surface about human behaviour, emotion and psychology that most briefs never think to include. We close this session with a transformational briefing exercise: mapping where your audience is now versus where you want them to be, and defining the path between the two. Dave describes it as "a creative GPS" and leave with a brief you actually want to work on. The takeaway: You can't generate a great idea without the right ingredients. Use AI to build a far richer understanding of the person you're trying to move.

Most of us circle the same mental roundabouts and keep arriving at the same place. This session is about using AI to knock you off the predictable path and send you somewhere unexpected. Dave introduces the Random Nudge, inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's legendary Oblique Strategies card deck. A simple idea: when you're stuck, you need a random intervention to break the pattern. AI is brilliant at this. You'll learn to use prompts to generate random creative disruptions based on their real briefs. What emerges is often surprising, sometimes absurd, occasionally brilliant. Then work with analogies, one of the most powerful and underused creative tools. Good analogies make complex things accessible and memorable. Bad ones make you want to use a lightbulb to represent an idea. AI can generate dozens in seconds; participants learn to spot the gold. Finally, use AI to generate visual prompts, image descriptions you can drop into tools like Midjourney or use simply to stretch their thinking. Sometimes all it takes is a picture. The takeaway: The best creative thinking often starts with an unexpected connection. AI can throw hundreds of connections at you in moments. You just have to be open.

Coming up with a rough idea is the beginning, not the end. This session is about taking the sparks from session 3 and building them into something real. You'll work with the Logical and Illogical Conclusion technique, a classic from Dave's advertising career. The brief: take your idea and push it to both extremes. The logical version is clear and grounded. The illogical version takes it to cartoon-land. Both are valuable; one of them is usually where the magic lives. Then explore the art of the spokesperson: who (or what) could embody the idea most memorably? It doesn't have to be a celebrity. It could be a dog, a bacterium, a sneaker with opinions. AI can generate a cast of unusual and unexpected candidates. Finish by using the Flesh Out prompt, a rapid concept expander that helps participants see whether a rough idea has real potential, across multiple executions and formats, before deciding whether to invest more time in it. The takeaway: Most ideas die too young. With AI as your development partner, you can quickly test whether something has legs, without the exhausted sighs you'd get from a human collaborator at 4pm on a Friday.

The graveyard of creative work is full of brilliant ideas that never happened. This final session is about making sure yours do. Use AI as your production thinking partner by mapping out what it would actually take to bring an idea to life. Resources, team, timeline, likely obstacles. Dave's advice: come up with an idea you could achieve for half the budget. Use the rest to make it great. Then the session closes with the hardest creative skill of all: selling your idea to someone who didn't have it. Dave is candid about his own early failures here, blaming clients for not "getting it" before realising he hadn't done the work of understanding what would make them say yes. You'll use a structured prompt to prepare your pitch: understanding the decision-maker's motivations, anticipating objections and framing the idea in terms of their success, not just yours. The takeaway: An idea that can't be sold, produced or executed is just a daydream. AI can help you test and prepare for every obstacle between your idea and the world.

1 hour, open format This is where the series gets truly personal. No new content, no slides, just Dave fielding the real questions that have been building up across the five sessions. Participants are encouraged to bring: A real brief or challenge they're working on A creative block they can't get past Questions about specific tools, techniques or prompts Anything that didn't make sense or made too much sense and needs unpicking This session is deliberately unstructured. It's where some of the most valuable learning tends to happen because the questions are real, the problems are live, and Dave's answers are honest.