Talk to Strangers
Colgate-Palmolive couldn't figure out how to get fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube without it scattering everywhere. Its own chemists were stuck. The company did something that should have been absurd. It posted the problem to the open internet and offered a reward to anyone who could solve it.
Not consultants. Not a rival lab. Anyone, in any field, anywhere in the world, through a platform called InnoCentive, built by the drugmaker Eli Lilly for exactly this kind of problem.
A Canadian engineer named Ed Melcarek solved it. His answer was to put a positive charge on the powder and ground the tube, so the particles flew where they were sent, basic physics that Colgate's chemists had never thought to apply. He was paid twenty-five thousand dollars. He did not work at Colgate. No literature search, no recruiter, no one inside the company would ever have found him.
InnoCentive has run this thousands of times. Researchers studied 166 scientific problems from the labs of twenty-six companies, attempted by more than twelve thousand solvers. Roughly a third of the problems that had defeated experienced corporate scientists were solved by outsiders. One especially stubborn problem drew solutions from a carbohydrate researcher in Sweden, a retired aerospace engineer, and a veterinarian, not one of them in the field. And the further a solver's expertise sat from the field of the problem, the more likely they were to solve it.
Not as likely. More likely.
The Expert's Groove
This runs against the premise every organization is built on, that the person deepest in a domain is the one most able to solve its problems. The InnoCentive data says the reverse. The chemist working the chemistry problem carries a disadvantage the aerospace engineer does not.
The disadvantage has nothing to do with how much imagination the expert has. The expert has spent decades imagining inside the field, picturing how molecules will behave, running scenarios a novice couldn't follow. The trouble is direction. That imaginative power has been pointed one way for so long that it now runs in a single groove. Show the mind a new problem and it reaches for the pattern that solved the last one, and the answer forms before the question has been examined. This is the cognitive entrenchment described in What Gets Harder When AI Gets Better, the wall that expertise itself builds. The novice has no familiar pattern. The expert reaches before seeing the problem has changed.
The outsider has no groove. The aerospace engineer looking at a chemistry problem cannot route it through twenty years in the field, because there are no twenty years. There is only the problem and a set of instruments shaped by an entirely different world. The engineer's imagination builds what the specialist's can no longer build, the thing the field had trained its experts to stop seeing.
What Imagination Is Doing
When you picture something that isn't in front of you, a solution, a strategy, a conversation that hasn't happened, your brain runs a coordinated process across three networks. The default mode network builds the scene, stitching fragments of memory and knowledge into a plausible new construction. The executive control network evaluates what the default mode produces. Is this realistic? Useful? Worth pursuing? Between them, the salience network decides what deserves attention and when to hand control from free construction to hard evaluation. When the three cooperate, you can drift into an idea, test it, and move on it with confidence. When stress or fatigue or pressure knocks them out of sync, the construction either drifts without aim or shuts down before the idea takes shape.
When neuroscientists Eleanor Maguire and Demis Hassabis mapped this system, they confirmed that the regions the brain uses to remember the past are the same ones it uses to imagine the future. Memory isn't a recording. The hippocampus binds fragments of experience so the mind can recombine them, letting you walk through a remembered kitchen and an imagined boardroom with the same fluency. Imagination is memory turned toward what hasn't happened yet.
Roger Beaty and his colleagues found that highly imaginative people show stronger connectivity among these networks. Connectivity, like any pattern in the brain, rewires with use. Neuroscientists call this neuroplasticity, and it means the capacity is not a fixed trait handed out at birth. It strengthens through practice, the way a muscle strengthens.
The expert hasn't lost the capacity. The networks are intact. They've been running the same two jobs for so many years, planning the path and defending what works, that the third job, building what doesn't exist yet, has fallen out of practice. The stranger has no special talent for this. The stranger's networks simply aren't grooved on your problem, so they build freely where yours build on rails. The capacity rebuilds with practice. The only question is where the practice happens.
And With Whom
The earlier piece, What Gets Harder When AI Gets Better, ended right here, on the claim that the competence rebuilds with practice and not in the rooms that caused the atrophy. It left the harder question open. A reader answered it with an analogy. AI is like handing everyone the keys to an airplane with no flight training and no air traffic control. The training is individual capacity. Air traffic control is the collective frame. Most of the AI conversation treats the engine as the whole problem and skips the question of where we're flying, and with whom.
And with whom. That is the part that goes missing, and the InnoCentive results show that who's in the room decides everything.
Rebuilding imagination gets framed as a personal exercise. Protect time on the calendar. Ask a different question. Catch the dismissed idea before it leaves the room. All true, all necessary, and all of it still assumes the room is yours, your team, your industry, your building, the people who share your training, your blind spots, and your standing. That room is the problem the InnoCentive results expose. Put a group of experts from one field on a problem from that field, and the room runs in a single groove, multiplied by everyone sitting in it. The same pattern gets reached for around the table. The same thing gets missed. Conviction rises while the range of what anyone can picture stays exactly where it started.
The solo answer fails for the opposite reason. Thinking alone frees you from the room's shared blind spot but starves the imagination of the raw material other minds supply. The default mode network builds scenes out of what it has. Give it nothing new and it recombines the same fragments. Neither the room of your own people nor the desk by yourself is where the competence rebuilds.
The Two Things the Room Has to Do
What rebuilds the competence is a room that does two things at once, and they pull against each other. Range wants strangers. Safety, in most rooms, comes from people who already know you. Chase one and you lose the other.
The first is range. Minds from outside your field, whose imaginations run in grooves yours never cut, able to build the scene you have lost the ability to build. InnoCentive got this through distance, broadcasting one problem to thousands of strangers who never met. A room gets it through proximity, putting the outsider across the table from you. Either way the principle holds. The point is accuracy more than variety. The outsider is the one positioned to tell you the problem on the table is the wrong one.
The second is harder to build, and most rooms get it wrong. The room has to be safe enough that people will think out loud. Comfort is not the same thing. The safety has to be structural, where no one present can grade you.
Across decades, research on group idea generation has found that people produce fewer original ideas under evaluation, and the effect compounds when the evaluator holds power over them. The expectation alone is enough, with no one saying a word of criticism. Put a senior leader in a room with peers who will remember, reports who are watching, or a board that controls their future, and the salience network reads threat and hands control to the protective mode, the one built to defend what already works. The default mode network never gets to build. The generative work shuts down before the conversation starts. The leader performs certainty. They will not risk the unfinished thought. And the unfinished thought is the raw material imagination needs.
This is why the room that rebuilds imagination cannot be your own organization. Your organization is the one place you can least afford to be seen building badly on the way to building well.
A Room Built on Purpose
Pixar's Braintrust exists to take an unfinished film apart. Smart people in a room, finding everything wrong with work that isn't working yet. It functions because of two rules its founders made explicit. The people giving feedback hold no authority over the project, and the director can use all of it or none. And they never prescribe the fix. They name the problem and leave the solution where it belongs. Strip the authority out and honesty becomes possible. The moment feedback carries power, the threat response takes over and candor gives way to performance. The most senior people in the building could hear the hardest things about their work, because no one in the room held power over it. They credit the Braintrust with a run of films that doesn't happen by accident.
Pixar solves the safety half. The range half comes from rooms built across fields, the way InnoCentive built one across thousands. Put both halves together and you have the room imagination needs. Minds from outside your field, in a space where none of them can grade you. Range and safety, at the same time, on purpose.
That room is close to impossible to assemble for yourself. The calendar won't produce it. Your network mostly returns your own field. The people who would make it work are the ones you don't yet know, in industries you don't operate in, with no stake in your standing.
The Work That's Still Yours
What gets harder when AI gets better is the generative work — picturing what isn't there yet, deciding what deserves to exist, recognizing when the question itself is wrong. That work is imagination, the human competence this era demands. It rebuilds with practice, and the practice needs a room. The room that works is the one your instincts and your calendar will never build, because every instinct says to solve the problem with the people standing closest to it.
The leaders who rebuild this competence will stop trying to think their way out alone, and stop relying on the only room they already have. They'll go find the strangers. They'll make the space where no one can grade anyone. And they'll prove for themselves what the InnoCentive results have said all along, that the person who can finally picture your problem clearly is almost never the one who has been staring at it the longest.
Colgate's chemists stood closest to the problem. A stranger solved it with physics.
The Executive Imagination Lab on June 24 is built as that room. Twelve senior leaders from different industries, ninety minutes of protected space, the same idea worked through the lens of each one's work, with no one present who can grade anyone else.