Creativity and Storytelling: Use It or Lose It

Something shifted in my inbox this June, and I have been thinking about why.

The end of the financial year is the season of “use it or lose it” training budgets, last-minute workshop bookings, and crafting experiences quickly. I love the fun of seeing the types of requests that land in my inbox. This year, there was a definite theme.

It was creativity.

Juicy, lovely human creativity. Things that went beyond a capability framework. Teams were asking for the thinking and training that is impossible-to-automate creative work. Exploring the nuances of storytelling. Getting into what stories do to us on a physical and emotional level. Being playful and learning in an embodied way. In person, physically, spatially, and with their whole selves.

I hadn’t run some of these sessions in a while. When generative AI arrived, there was a widespread assumption that it would unlock creativity. That LLM’s could generate ideas, images, and drafts in seconds; the creative problem was solved.

Two years later, the thinking has changed. Thank goodness!

AI is extraordinary at producing content quickly. But now, with the rise of AI slop, we are feeling less than impressed. The content feels stale and lifeless. An LLM that has never felt an emotion, sat in discomfort or known when to hold space for a new idea to emerge. All it does is scrape and regurgitate. I think regurgitate is the operative word here. The requests coming in show that organisations understand this.

For this reason, I focus on teaching embodied storytelling. An experience that happens throughout your physical person. Most of us have been trained to think of communication as something that happens in the mind. You sit at a desk, write a document, test the messaging, and refine the language.

When I bring people into a space where they can move, play, and test a story with their body, everything changes. The story stops being an intellectual exercise and becomes something they can feel. You discover rhythm, pacing, and emotion in ways that sitting at a laptop will never reveal. You know physically when something is working or not because you feel it. Once you know something feels right, there is no going back. You seek out emotion as a huge driver.

I have been in workshops where I have teared up when the story arrived at a place none of us expected. That is not something that can be planned for; you can only create the conditions by using your body.

This is the correction happening right now. The conversation has switched from what AI can do to what it can’t do.

It can get things done quickly. But the art of human connection? Not at all. That is our job. And truly is the one thing we were all put on this earth to do. To love, care for, discuss, create and collaborate. And we should enjoy it so much that we do not want to hand it over to machine learning. To explore and learn through acts of play.

These are not soft skills. They are beyond the definition of a skill. Done well, storytelling supports the foundational building blocks of humanity and culture. It is beyond words. It is that feeling you get at a concert, and the band plays the song that everyone has been waiting to hear. There is a force surrounding us all that we cannot name. But we feel, it binds us as we breathe and sing as one living organism. It is simultaneously bigger than us and part of each of us on a nano level. The power of stories is in each of us. The word skill to me is a bit lacking for me. It is us, our world. It is what got us to who we are today. And supporting us to become who we will be in the future.

Talking about where we are headed, after two years of racing to adopt, people are pausing to ask what they actually need. And it turns out it is what we have always needed.

We make sense of the world, each other and ourselves through stories. And much like a training budget at the end of financial year, it is a use it or lose it situation. Do not give up your power of story to an LLM. Use it, don’t lose it.

If you have been curious about the power you hold as a teller of stories, as a team, an organisation, or your creative practice, I would love to hear from you. Just get in touch.