You Cannot Fix Fear with a Spreadsheet

The Collapse of Process

Here is what changed. In the old world, execution was expensive and slow. You had an idea, then you sketched it, then you modeled it in CAD, then engineering picked it up, then tooling, then production. Weeks. Months. Entire teams moving through a sequence that everyone understood because everyone had always done it that way.

That world is gone.

In the new world, execution is free and instant. Milliseconds. The entire chain from idea to output collapsed into a single step. Which means the bottleneck moved. It is no longer process. It is intent.

Most executives missed the shift. They picked up AI and used it to do the same things faster. Generate emails. Summarize reports. Optimize what already exists. The result is not transformation. It is acceleration toward the average.

Feed AI generic prompts and it returns the average of the internet. Every company starts sounding like every other company. Every strategy deck reads like it was written by the same mind. This is the real crisis. Not that AI replaces people, but that people use AI to replace their own thinking with something blander, safer, and more forgettable.

The Creative Fingerprint, the specific, messy, human point of view that makes a company irreplaceable, gets compressed out. This is what I call creativity collapse. And it is happening everywhere, silently, one prompt at a time.

From Business Friction to Strategic Fiction

The workshop introduced a methodology that inverts the instinct. When a business hits a deadlock, the reflex is to apply more logic. More data. More analysis. More spreadsheets. Dig the same hole deeper. This is vertical thinking. It optimizes known variables: cost, budget, headcount. Excellent for efficiency. Useless for breakthroughs.

The alternative is lateral thinking. Dig a new hole somewhere else entirely. Translate the business problem out of its native language, numbers, KPIs, quarterly targets, into a completely different medium. Narrative. Story. Simulation.

Not because stories are soft. Because they surface what spreadsheets structurally cannot: the emotional and cultural forces that actually drive decisions.

The Simulation

Fifty executives sat down with a real deadlock. The sentence was familiar: "We cannot innovate because we have no budget." A sentence spoken in every boardroom on earth. They had been arguing about numbers for months. Two sides, same hole, no movement.

We used AI to rewrite the argument. Not as a memo. Not as a presentation. As a dramatic script. The CEO became a Ship Captain steering through a storm. The CFO became the Quartermaster managing supplies below deck. Same conflict. Different medium.

Reading the script back, something became visible that had been invisible for months. The room solved the root cause in minutes. Not by arguing harder, but by seeing the argument from outside itself.

The CEO stopped debating the spreadsheet and started discussing the existential risk of not moving. The narrative reframe made the invisible visible.

The Physics of the Bulldozer

AI is not a typewriter. It is a bulldozer. This distinction matters because it changes what you aim it at.

A business problem is a rock blocking the road. The amateur picks up a hammer and tries to smash through it. Manual effort, brute force, incremental progress. The master uses the bulldozer to move the dirt around the rock. Clear enough away and you realize you never needed to break it. You just walk around it.

The rock was never the problem. The dirt was. The assumptions, the framing, the unexamined context, all of it packed tight around the actual obstacle, making it look immovable. Narrative simulation moves the dirt. It strips the framing away from the problem until the problem reveals its actual shape. Which is almost never the shape everyone assumed.

A Flight Simulator for Strategy

Executives test strategies in the real market. This is expensive, slow, and dangerous. The workshop proved something simpler. AI-powered narrative simulation functions as a risk-free flight simulator. Crash the ship in the story, not in the quarterly report. Run the scenario, find the fear, fix the framing, then execute in reality with the invisible problem already solved.

The mistake is believing the first one can do both.

The deeper lesson is about compression. AI compresses everything toward the average unless forced otherwise. The only defense is intent. Knowing exactly what makes your thinking different and injecting that specificity into every interaction with the machine. Generic in, generic out. Fingerprint in, breakthrough out.

The executives who understood this left with a tool. The ones who internalized it left with a weapon.