How Adults Break Patterns, Challenge Assumptions, and Innovate in the AI Era

Make Anything Thursday — AI Transformation (Part IV of V)

Let’s be honest: this is where the series grows up. In part III of this series, we learned kids embrace lateral thinking effortlessly. Teams can be guided. But leaders and experienced makers? We’ve built habits, hierarchies, and expertise that—although earned—can quietly entrench our creativity.

Edward de Bono spent half a century warning us about this. Creativity, he argued, isn’t mystical; it’s a discipline, a method, a habit. In an AI-influenced world, that discipline is no longer optional.

Our friend, Sarah Tucker’s authorised biography, Love Laterally, makes this painfully clear: de Bono wasn’t eccentric for sport. He was developing tools for adults whose thinking had become limited by their own success.

AI only accelerates that problem. It’s brilliant at reinforcing what already is.

This means leaders today must create what does not yet exist. And that begins with breaking our own patterns.

Why Adults Need Lateral Thinking More Than Ever

As AI becomes better and better at pattern-spotting and optimisation, the risk for leaders is subtle but serious:

• We delegate too much thinking to the machine.
• We stay inside problems as they’re currently framed.
• We slowly lose the habit of looking sideways.

Lateral thinking isn’t a “nice extra” for creative types. It’s becoming a core survival skill for anyone guiding teams, organisations, or industries through AI transformation.

Three de Bono ideas every modern leader should keep close

Break the pattern before the pattern breaks you.

AI thrives on patterns. Great. Let it. But leaders add value by stepping outside predictable grooves — before the market or the algorithm forces their hand. Sometimes the most strategic move is to ask:

“Why are we still playing this game?”

Every so often, de Bono would insist on deliberately disrupting a pattern, not because it was broken, but because it had become invisible. That’s leadership work now: recognising the grooves we’re stuck in and choosing to step out of them.

Reframe the problem, don’t just solve it.

AI doesn’t know whether you’ve asked a good question. It only knows how to answer it.

The danger? Solving the wrong problem beautifully.

Lateral thinkers step back and ask:

“Is this even the right thing to be working on?”

In an AI-saturated world, problem-framing is no longer a luxury. It’s a primary leadership responsibility. Handing a poorly framed question to AI just gets you the wrong answer faster.

Challenge the Hierarchy of Expertise

Specialisation has had a good century-long run. But AI is now the world’s relentless expert. Humans succeed by linking dots—across disciplines, experiences, and perspectives. Polymaths are not nostalgia. They’re a competitive advantage.

De Bono’s work kept circling back to this: the value isn’t just in a domain, it’s between domains. AI will increasingly handle depth. Leaders need to cultivate breadth.

When Adults Rediscover Their Creative Muscle

At a dinner party recently, a woman with a distinguished career in consulting and executive coaching told me she has now taken up painting. Not dabbling — actually good. I asked if she’d always painted.

No, she said. Only when I was a kid.

Another friend — a retired executive — shared he’s learning piano for the first time in his life. He joked he can’t yet get his left and right hands to cooperate — each wants to do the same thing. It struck me as the perfect metaphor for adult creativity: we default to symmetry, to habit, to straight lines. Lateral thinking asks us to retrain that instinct.

There’s a universal pattern here:

• Adults forget they’re allowed to make things.
• Then, in a new season of life, they pick it back up and realise the muscle was dormant, not dead.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way calls this “recovering a sense of possibility.”

De Bono would call it “escaping the old patterns.”

But the core idea remains the same: creativity can be taught, relearned, and is vital—especially nowadays.

Leaders who practise it personally are much more likely to promote it professionally. If you never make anything yourself, it’s very hard to build a culture where others feel free to experiment, explore, and risk a wrong turn.

Why this matters for AI transformation.

AI won’t transform your organisation. People will—specifically, leaders who widen the aperture of what’s possible. Your task isn’t to outperform AI in calculation. It’s about out-thinking the assumptions AI amplifies.

That means:

• Pattern-breaking – noticing when we’re stuck in “how we’ve always done it.”
• Problem-reframing – asking better questions before we ask faster machines.
• Dot-connecting – valuing breadth, not just depth, in ourselves and our teams.

And yes, occasionally picking up the paintbrush again or trying out the piano keys — because leaders who make things think differently.

That’s the whole game.

Up Next (Part V): The Polymath Advantage

Where this entire journey lands: why the future belongs to people—and organisations—who refuse to think in straight lines.