The hidden cost of speed: sameness
Right now, someone in your organisation is putting the finishing touches on the business case for an AI tool. It’ll probably look promising enough: efficiency increases, costs fall. The PowerPoint with an adoption curve pointing up and to the right. The board agrees and the tool gets bought.
One question never made it into the presentation though: what happens to our creativity while we turn to AI?
Almost everyone is asking that question, even if nobody says it out loud. You should ask yourself the same thing, because your answer decides whether AI becomes your engine or your autopilot.
Let’s roll out AI, right?
Let’s see what science has to say about that question. Penn State psychologists Clin Lai and Roger Beaty paired 208 people with either another human or with an AI model, and put them through a proven creativity test: think of unusual uses for an ordinary object.
The people paired with an AI wrote longer answers. The human pairs not only came up with better ideas, the ideas were also way more varied.
Here is my take on this: AI models produce clever results at first sight, but they keep recycling them. Over and over, the outcome stays the same. Do this often enough, and you end up with a very narrow set of conclusions.
The trap we’re chatting ourselves into
A lot of organisations think of AI adoption like a switch you flip. Get the tool, train the people, et voilà: the transformation arrives.
Spoiler: it doesn’t. Not your organisation’s transformation, that is. At best, you’ll get a bland template solution that will not fit your DNA, your uniqueness.
You cannot prompt your way out of a problem that needs adapting to. As the study shows, handing your creative potential to a system quietly leads everyone towards the same answers. Longer answers are not better ones. Especially not when everyone is rolling out the same solutions. This is where companies win or lose.
By template, or by design?
Two roads from here.
The first: implement every new AI tool and squeeze the livelihood out of every process. Hand over the thinking. You will certainly entertain the finance team for a quarter. Then you will notice “your” best ideas look a lot like everyone else’s. And in turn, your stakeholders will look at you less.
Option two: empower your people so they can actually thrive. Sure, let AI handle routine and volume (I mean, who wants to go back to the typing pool, right?). But leave the creative soul of your organisation to humans. Design the conditions for it on purpose, because in an AI default world that will not happen by itself.
One road sees people as a cost centre. The other treats them as the winning asset competitors cannot copy.
Not even a penny for your thoughts?
I have been in meeting rooms where leaders admit they are at best guessing at AI strategy. I have seen substantial money spent on tools that promised to think for the organisation, while barely a euro went into how their people were supposed to think together.
Skip that second part and technology just amplifies the default: more speed, more volume. And only the same ideas.
Let’s solve this
If you lead a team, or an organisation and you need to evolve without losing your unique DNA, it’s time to book a session with me. Together, we draw your situation, and find where human creativity and curiosity still decide the better outcome. From there we build a roadmap that lets your people shine.
That is the Future-proof Roadmap workshop. Built for individual teams and executive boards plotting a route forward you can execute.
At C-level, if your values are not showing up in your results, we run the Live Your Values workshop. It is for leaders who know authenticity carries real power and cannot yet unlock it fully.
Act now. The window for getting the human-machine balance right is narrower than you think.
Book an orientation meeting with me today. Start the conversation. Evolve before your outcomes become a copy of a copy of a copy.
Source: AI may quickly generate ideas, but working with people leads to more creative ones (The Conversation)
Written by Krispijn Plettenberg, assisted by AI tools for images and editing. As this article argues: the tool did the drafting, the human did the deciding.
