INSIGHTS & REFLECTIONS

As early as 1999 David Bowie predicted the future possibilities of technology in disturbingly accurate detail. Just as Bowie imagined a world where ‘the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about’, today we see AI integrated seamlessly into our daily motions through constant new advances.

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AI is accelerating everything it touches. Writing, analysing, synthesising, predicting – tasks that once required hours of expertise now take seconds. Yet, if we look beyond the surface, something counterintuitive is happening. The more powerful AI grows, the more essential human thinking becomes – especially the kind that happens when we work together in the same room.

Presence Changes the Brain

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Neuroscience explains what instinct already knows. When humans think together in a shared physical space, we achieve neural synchrony – the phenomenon in which shared attention causes brain activity to align, intensifying focus, emotional resonance, and recall.

This synchrony struggles to happen online. A Stanford study found that video calls substantially increase cognitive load by disrupting natural processing of the micro-cues (tiny shifts of posture, breath, and eye movement) that help us read each other’s intentions and emerging thoughts.

In a room, these signals shape the conversation. On a screen, they disappear. Of course, we can exchange information digitally. But to generate great insights, we depend on the presence of others.

Insight is a Chain Reaction

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Insight is rarely a neat epiphany. It’s a progression, a cognitive cascade.

Think alone and you activate one set of neural circuits. Say the thought aloud and many more circuits fire. Hear someone build on it, reinterpret it, or resist it, and a far larger network lights up.

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This is the how new meanings and ideas form, beyond the ones each individual came into the room with.

AI is astonishing at reorganising what already exists, but it cannot replicate the dynamic, socially driven evolution of ideas that happens in real time. We’ve found that the most effective way of achieving this is through real-life, active orchestration.

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AI Facilitates, Humans Orchestrate

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Most organisations rely on facilitation, but very few understand the nuances that good orchestration can bring.

Facilitation manages process (timings, activities, templates). Orchestration manages the emergence of ideas. While often conflated, these are entirely different disciplines.

An orchestrator:

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• Senses when the conversation is circling the obvious.

• Introduces friction without destabilising trust.

• Spots the idea that arrives half-formed and rescues it before it disappears.

• Connects fragments across functions before anyone else notices the pattern.

• Adjusts the room’s cognitive temperature – slowing when insight is close, accelerating when energy stalls.

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This is attunement – driven by instinct and active emotional response. It turns a group into something more than the sum of its parts. It makes randomness useful. It makes newness possible in a way that cannot be achieved with AI.

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So, as AI tools become both broadly available and broadly similar, organisations that depend on AI for orchestration are dangerously destined to converge at parity. Same models. Same efficiencies. Same analytical power. As Bowie once aptly proclaimed: ‘There’s no new way of saying anything’.

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Defining the Necessary Line Between AI and Human Disciplines

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The question, then, evolves from what machines can do to what humans should do.

We believe that humans should take on the work that has no blueprint. The ambiguous, the contradictory, the emerging, the un-patterned. The work that requires interpretation, intuition, dissent, reframing. The work that depends on seeing the familiar differently.

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Because while AI can redescribe the same thing endlessly and generate many variations of the same expected outputs, our competitive edge as humans lies in:

• Reframing what others take for granted.

• Sensing possibility early.

• Combining knowledge across functions in unexpected ways.

• Advancing ideas no model would propose because they break the pattern on which the model relies.

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The most valuable organisational breakthroughs aren’t born from perfectly defined problems and answers. They emerge from orchestrated rooms – where presence heightens cognition, where randomness becomes revelatory, and where the right question arrives at the right moment.

AI accelerates the work. But rooms filled with human minds are where the direction changes.

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In Bowie’s own words, ‘Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming'.

THE T ROOM