The best creative breakthroughs come from play and a little pressure, not shortcutting straight to the answer.

We abandon childlike imagination partly out of ego, and now can hide our unfinished thinking behind AI polish.

Businesses now pay to reintroduce the childlike thinking we've trained ourselves out of.

The way back isn't a new app; it's a pencil, paper, and permission to make a mess.

In my years in advertising, those of us in the so-called Creative Department of the agency often worried we’d had our last good idea. But eventually, we always proved ourselves wrong. Our imaginations and our conversations with each other would create a flurry of improbable connections and laugh-out-loud silly notions, yielding something magical out of nothing.

The magic came from the play, and yes, a little from the pressure too. Both forced us somewhere we couldn’t have gotten on our own.

Today we’ve short-circuited both, defaulting to the easy solution: offloading the thinking onto technology, fast-forwarding past the childlike part that produces the unexpected........

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