A couple of years ago, I started noticing a quiet anxiety beneath the surface of nearly every leadership conversation I was having. It wasn’t about talent pipelines or quarterly earnings. It was something more existential: the fear that in racing to adopt every new AI tool, organizations were inadvertently engineering the most human parts of their culture out of existence. The spreadsheets were getting smarter. The people felt less seen.
This tension sits at the heart of my new chapter, “Algorithms and Awe,” in the second edition of The Creativity Leap. What I’ve come to believe through years of working with executives, researchers, and entrepreneurs is that we are not living through a technology revolution. We are actually living through a human revolution. And the leaders who understand the difference will be the ones who define the next decade.
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We are now in the imagination era
We have moved beyond the Information Age and are now firmly rooted in what I call the Imagination Era, a time when ideas and thinking differently are our primary currency. In this landscape, technology is not replacing our humanity; it is demanding that we deepen it. AI means nothing without your imagination. It is a starting point, a lever for building new possibilities, not an endpoint.
At the 2025 Adobe Summit, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen declared that “creativity is the new productivity.” I believe he’s right and the implications are profound! Success is no longer measured solely by speed or output. It is measured by our ability to forge emotional connections through imagination. The leaders who thrive won’t be those who automate the most. They’ll be those who imagine the best.
The ethics of ease
Every leap forward in technological convenience brings an ethical echo. I call our current moment the “Ethics of Ease”: the temptation to mistake creative convenience for creative progress. While technology’s promise is efficiency, creativity’s purpose remains meaning. And these two things are not the same.
This creates what I describe as a creative double bind: a simultaneous desire to embrace AI’s potential and a fear of being replaced by it. When we pursue ease without ethics, we erode the very wonder we seek to amplify. The antidote is what I call WonderRigor™: the alchemy that happens when technological innovation meets moral imagination. Wonder without rigor is fantasy. Rigor without wonder is bureaucracy. The sweet spot is where the most durable creative work gets done.
Trading fours with AI
The most useful metaphor I’ve found for describing the human-AI relationship is jazz: specifically, the practice of “trading fours,” in which musicians take turns improvising, four bars at a time. AI riffs, and we respond. We lead, and AI follows. Like great jazz, this collaboration requires a mastery of the rules, and the courage to bend them.
As machines handle the mechanical tasks of drafting and structuring, we reclaim the cognitive space to do what only humans can: make meaning, sense emotion, and weigh ethics. This reframing matters enormously for how we invest in our people and design our organizations. Instead of asking “How can AI make people more productive?” we must ask “How can AI help people flourish?” Flourishing means having the time to think deeply, move naturally, and rest intentionally… the three pillars of my MTR (Move. Think. Rest.) framework for human performance.
Awe is the competitive advantage you’re not tracking
AI is the new medium for knowledge work. But awe, that spark of curiosity and connection that stops you mid-sentence and makes you lean in, remains wholly human. You cannot automate wonder. You can only cultivate it or crowd it out.
Navigating the Imagination Era requires what I call the 3 I’s of creativity: inquiry, improvisation, and intuition. Together, they form our compass for deciding when to let algorithms lead and when to let human instinct steer. Inquiry keeps us asking better questions. Improvisation keeps us agile when the script runs out. Intuition gives us the pattern recognition that no training data can fully replicate.
Success in the Imagination Era will belong to those who practice wonder as their mindset and commit to rigor as their practice. These are not soft skills. They are strategic infrastructure.
You don’t adapt to the future. You compose it.
The leaders I most admire right now are not the ones who have the most sophisticated AI stack. They are the ones who have the clearest sense of what makes their organization irreducibly human, and who protect that fiercely while still embracing what technology makes possible.
When we pair the alchemy of algorithms with the discipline of awe, something remarkable happens. We don’t just adapt to the future, we compose it. We become the jazz musicians, not the backing track. We reclaim the creative agency that the industrial productivity model trained us to surrender.
The Imagination Era is not a threat to be managed. It is an invitation to lead differently, with more curiosity, more courage, and more wonder than we thought a business context could hold. The question is not whether you will respond to that invitation. The question is whether you will do so intentionally, or by default.
Adapted from The Creativity Leap (2nd edition, June 30, 2026)
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