Will you make it?

Being useful in a post-AI workplace.

Thomas Scovell, Creative Strategist

The World We Knew

Expertise + Excellence + Execution = Professional Value

The formula is now obsolete.

The End of Expertise

Knowledge is a Commodity.

AI has read everything. The value of "knowing" has collapsed. The expert is no longer human.

The End of Excellence

Speed is the New Currency.

The audience, rewired for instant gratification, no longer demands perfection. "Good enough" shipped today beats "flawless" shipped tomorrow.

The End of Execution

The Specialist is Obsolete.

The rise of the generalist. One person with AI can now do the work of an entire team—words, images, code—instantly.

The New Playbook

Move 1: FAKE IT

The Path of Efficiency

Use AI to produce 'good enough' work, fast. Leverage speed and the illusion of competence.

Get. The. Job. Done.

Move 2: BREAK IT

The Path of Interrogation

Find the flaws in the AI's logic. Expose its bias. Stress-test the machine.

Create value by proving the system wrong.

Move 3: MAKE IT

The Path of Actualization

An original idea is everything, but a conceptual idea is nothing. Use AI to turn unique insight into a tangible prototype overnight.

Stop asking "what if?" and start showing "what is."

"What will you do?"

FAKE IT? BREAK IT? or MAKE IT?

"Making It" Personally

Sadie's School Run Helper

Sadie's School Run Helper

The Habit Tracker

The Habit Tracker

Sadie's NFC Record Player

Sadie's NFC Record Player

The Birthday Party Audiobook

The Birthday Party Audiobook

The Supermarket Collectibles Swapper

The Supermarket Collectibles Swapper

The "Business-in-a-Day"

The 'Business-in-a-Day'

"Making It" Professionally

The Interactive Comms Strategy

The Interactive Comms Strategy

The Campaign Theme "Tinder"

The Campaign Theme 'Tinder'

The Customer Segmentation Quiz

The Customer Segmentation Quiz

The Persona Idea Catcher

The Persona Idea Catcher

The Educational Boardgame

The Educational Boardgame

Thank you!

www.to-outer.space

How to Run this Play:

Master the Prompt: Your value shifts from creating the content to crafting the perfect query that gets you 90% of the way there.
Become a Curator: Generate multiple options in seconds. Your skill is in your taste—selecting the best output, not creating it from scratch.
Automate the Mundane: Use AI to handle boilerplate tasks—summaries, standard emails, data entry—freeing you up for higher-value thinking.
Prioritize Volume and Velocity: The goal is to produce a high volume of quality work faster than anyone else.

How to Run this Play:

Think Adversarially: Actively hunt for edge cases, logical fallacies, and unintended consequences in every AI output.
Red-Team the Machine: Treat the AI's answer as a hypothesis. Your job is to design the experiment that disproves it.
Audit for Bias and Ethics: Apply your human judgment to uncover the hidden assumptions, demographic biases, and potential for harm in the code.
Find the "Hallucinations": Your value lies in identifying where the AI is confidently wrong, protecting the project from invisible errors.

How to Run this Play:

Collapse the Prototype Cycle: Go from idea to functional demo in hours, not months. Use AI to generate the code, the designs, and the models instantly.
Embrace Rapid Experimentation: Build and test ten different versions of an idea for the cost and time it used to take to write one proposal.
Become a Systems Integrator: Your skill is in orchestrating a suite of AI tools—text-to-image, text-to-code, text-to-video—to bring a complex vision to life.
Champion Your Unique Insight: The AI is a tireless, universal engine. Your value is in providing the unique, original, and tasteful direction.

More about this:

The Idea: A simple way for my wife, my mother, and me to track who is dropping off/picking up our daughter Sadie from school and to manage payments for childcare.
The "Make": A live web app that solves a specific, recurring family logistics challenge. Instead of just wishing for a solution, AI helped build a tangible tool that makes our daily lives easier.
Take-away Advice: Start with the "boring" problems. The small, repetitive headaches in your daily life are the perfect candidates for a quick, high-impact "make".

More about this:

The Idea: My wife and I wanted a shared space to keep track of the daily habits we're trying to build together.
The "Make": A simple web app that serves as a functional tool for personal development. It turns the abstract goal of "forming habits" into an interactive, daily-use product.
Take-away Advice: To change a behavior, build the tool that holds you accountable. The very act of making it will reinforce your commitment to the goal.

More about this:

The Idea: Create a magical, screen-free way for my daughter to listen to her favorite stories and music.
The "Make": A physical, interactive "record player" using a Raspberry Pi, NFC-chipped paper "records," and a Cricut. This goes beyond a digital app, turning a creative idea into a tangible object that exists in the real world.
Take-away Advice: Don't limit your "makes" to the screen. Combining simple tech with physical objects can create truly magical and memorable experiences.

More about this:

The Idea: A unique and personal party favor for my daughter's birthday that would delight her and her friends.
The "Make": A complete audiobook with custom AI-generated images, featuring a story starring all the children who attended the party. Delivered via a QR/NFC-coded bookmark, it's a finished media product that turned a simple idea into a memorable experience.
Take-away Advice: Use AI to create delight, not just utility. A "make" that's a personalized gift or a unique experience can have a far greater emotional impact.

More about this:

The Idea: Like many parents, I found myself with a pile of duplicate supermarket collectibles (Disney discs/cards) and needed an easy way to swap them to complete my daughter's collection.
The "Make": A web app that lets anyone track their collection and share their swaps. It takes a common frustration and builds a practical, community-focused solution.
Take-away Advice: Pay attention to shared frustrations. If you're annoyed by something, chances are others are too. Building a solution for a community is a powerful "make".

More about this:

The Idea: After making custom facepaint stencils for my daughter's birthday, I realized other parents might want them too.
The "Make": A live e-commerce website, launched in a single day. This is the ultimate example of collapsing the distance between an idea and a finished product, turning a hobby into a potential business instantly.
Take-away Advice: Sprint from idea to launch. Use AI to test a business idea in the real world as fast as possible instead of getting stuck in planning.

More about this:

The Idea: A communications strategy for the CAB shouldn't be a static PowerPoint deck; it should be as dynamic as the work they do.
The "Make": An interactive webpage that brings the strategy to life. Instead of just telling stakeholders the plan, this tool shows them, making the strategy tangible and engaging.
Take-away Advice: Stop presenting ideas; start demonstrating them. Turn your next strategy deck into an interactive experience that people can play with.

More about this:

The Idea: Help CAB staff collaboratively decide on campaign themes in a quick, engaging, and decisive way.
The "Make": A web app with a Tinder-like interface that gamifies the decision-making process. It turns a potentially long and subjective meeting into a fast, data-driven, and fun experience.
Take-away Advice: Gamify boring business processes. If you need to make a group decision, turning it into a simple, fun game will always beat another meeting.

More about this:

The Idea: Customer segmentation data is often dry and forgettable. How can we make it memorable and useful for the whole team?
The "Make": A web app that transforms the segmentation into an interactive quiz. It allows staff to discover their own shopper profile, making the data personal, understandable, and actionable.
Take-away Advice: Make data personal. To make insights stick, create a tool that lets your colleagues find themselves in the data.

More about this:

The Idea: We need a better way to gather ideas from across the business that are directly tied to our customer personas.
The "Make": A web app that presents customer personas as interactive cards, allowing users to submit ideas tailored to each one. It's a purpose-built tool that turns the abstract concept of "ideation" into a structured, ongoing process.
Take-away Advice: Build the process you want to see. If you want better ideas, don't just ask for them—build a tool that structures the input you're looking for.

More about this:

The Idea:
The "Make":
Take-away Advice: