Creative Thinking In The Age Of AI

Before we can use AI to boost our ideas, we need to define creativity and understand how our minds are built to come up with surprising ideas. We dismantle the myth that creativity is a rare gift. It isn't. It's a skill that can be trained, measured and improved. Think of this first session as a creative gym workout.

You'll take part in an academic test that measures creative thinking, run live using AI. You'll learn proven techniques for reaching ideas you wouldn't normally reach. Then you'll try to beat your original score.

You'll map your creative skills and processes to work out where you're strong, where you're not, and where AI can lift your output. You'll leave with a clear list of the skills you want to focus on.

The quality of your ideas is almost entirely determined by the quality of your input. This session is about preparing your mind to be fertile ground for ideas, and how AI can speed that up.

We'll dig into how to find the gold buried in a brief, and how to gather the right ingredients for your thinking. As a bonus, what you learn here sharpens your judgement and develops your taste - the very things that separate a stand-out creative thinker from the rest.

You'll see how AI can broaden your perspective, challenge your assumptions and stretch your ideas. This is the opposite of shortcut-thinking that skips the very processes that strengthen your brain. We'll look at how AI can put your mind in the right mode to grow your abilities and build a long-term advantage.

We'll finish with a briefing approach that goes beyond filling a space with a thing, and focuses instead on the impact you want to make. You'll practise it and see how it sets up better ideas.

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.

We'll explore the power of random nudges to push your imagination in directions it wouldn't normally go, and, of course, how AI can generate them for you. You'll learn to build prompts that create random creative disruptions from your own briefs. What comes out is often surprising, sometimes absurd, occasionally brilliant. More importantly, it widens the range of what you can reach.

We'll put AI to work on classic thought-expansion techniques: reframing, substitution, combination, adaptation and analogy. You'll see how to apply it to concepts, writing and visual ideas, and how to avoid producing work that reeks of AI.

When AI can generate more ideas in an hour than most people manage in a career, the most important skill becomes judgement: spotting which option has the most potential, knowing how to make it better, and crafting it into something you're proud of.

We'll look at the different criteria people use to judge ideas, and how understanding them improves your own selection and development. You'll see how to use AI not to judge your ideas for you, but to hand you different perspectives worth weighing - because understanding what drives different audiences makes you far more likely to deliver something that actually lands.

AI earns its place here by helping you explore execution options, so your idea arrives in the world in its strongest possible form. This is about keeping your vision intact and clear all the way to the end.

The graveyard of creative work is full of brilliant ideas that never happened. This final teaching session is about improving the odds that yours become real.

People will tell you a great idea sells itself. It doesn't. Average, unchallenging ideas are the ones that sell themselves, because they make nobody uncomfortable. Great ideas are, by definition, different from what's already out there. They take foresight and conviction to get over the line.

That's what this session tackles, and how AI can help you prepare and persuade. You'll practise making the case for a difficult idea, and answering the kinds of question that can sink it if you're caught short.

Because if an idea dies in a boardroom, did it ever really happen? Yes, of course it did. And that's what makes it all the worse.

1 hour, open format.

This is where the series gets personal. No new content, no slides - just Dave answering the real questions that have built up across the previous five sessions.

Bring:

• a real brief or challenge you're working on
• a creative block you 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

The session is deliberately unstructured. It's where some of the most valuable learning happens, because the questions are real, the problems are live, and Dave's answers are honest.