Everyone is training their teams on AI right now. Good. It has to happen, and we are doing it too.
But AI hands the same tools to everyone, to you and to your competitors. Eighteen months from now, your teams and theirs will write the same prompt, produce the same draft, save the same hours. An advantage everybody has stops being an advantage.
What will make the difference is not the tool. It is what your teams dare to do with it: the question nobody else asks, the idea that makes people a little uncomfortable, the attempt someone makes on a Tuesday morning without written approval. Their creativity, in other words. Not the kind on the posters in the elevator, the kind that plays out in meetings.
And that does not come with a Copilot license. In twenty years of running innovation workshops, we keep seeing the same five conditions decide what happens to ideas:
Time
Can someone on your team spend an hour this week on something that is not in their job description? If the answer is “once everything else is done”, the ideas will wait forever.
Permission to fail
The last idea that did not work: what happened to the person who proposed it? Everyone on the team knows the answer, and it is that answer, not your values statement, that decides whether anyone proposes the next one.
A known path for proposing
Do your teams know who to take an idea to, and what happens to it next? An idea with no path always ends up in the same place: in a notebook, then nowhere.
Managers who pass it on
Are your managers measured on what they bring out of their team, or only on what they deliver? You get what you measure, never what you put on the wall.
Follow-through that exists
Six months on, what is left of the thirty ideas written down at the last offsite? This is the condition that locks in all the others: with nothing to anchor them, every burst of enthusiasm fades by the following Tuesday.
Where does your organization stand?
We put these five dimensions into an online diagnostic: 15 questions, 4 minutes, and the lever to pull first, the one that is making ideas fall flat where you are.
September is a reasonable moment for it: everyone comes back with intentions. It is free, and the result shows up right away.
Valérie Jakobowski runs Papaya Consulting and leads the “Innovate day to day” workshop in French, Italian and English.
