TL;DR: Skills only stick when environments, incentives, and systems make the “right” behaviour the easy default. Pair behavioural design (habits, rituals, norms) with systems thinking (guardrails, roles, SLOs, feedback loops) and you’ll get a creative org that compounds capability in the AI era—in weeks, not years.
Remember that “AI for Creatives” workshop you ran last quarter?
The one with the good sandwiches and the trainer who kept saying “synergy”? Everyone got their certificate. Everyone felt energised. For about a week.
Then the old habits, the old workflows, and the same old meetings flooded back in. Was everyone so excited about the brilliant new AI-enhanced workflow? It’s a ghost. A faint memory. A line item on a spreadsheet that proves you “invested in your people.”
Bullshit.
You didn’t invest. You bought your team a gym membership in January, showed them the treadmills, and wished them luck. You didn’t build the gym. You didn’t hire the trainer. And you sure as hell didn’t change the office canteen that only serves deep-fried everything.
Most corporate upskilling is just theatre. It’s an event, not a system. And skills acquired in an event, without a system to sustain them, have the half-life of a mayfly.
The real challenge isn’t teaching someone a new skill. It’s creating an environment where not using that skill feels awkward, inefficient, and just plain wrong. It’s about making the right behaviour the path of least resistance.
This isn’t about motivation or finding “grittier” people. It’s about architecture. You must pair behavioural design (the workout plan) with systems thinking (the gym itself).
Part 1: The Workout Plan (designing the behaviour)
People don’t do things because they’re inspired; they do things because they’re easy. BJ Fogg’s Behaviour Model is brilliant because it’s so simple: Behaviour = Motivation × Ability × Prompt. You can’t do much about a person’s intrinsic motivation, but you can make the task easier (Ability) and stick a trigger in front of their face (Prompt).
- Friction is your enemy. Want people to use new AI tools? Don’t bury them in a sub-folder on a shared drive. Give them one-click access from their toolbar. Create templates that do 80% of the setup work. The goal is to make the desired action so frictionless that it’s harder not to do it.
- Fuel with immediate wins. The dopamine hit from a long-term project succeeding is months away. The tiny buzz from getting a first draft of copy in 30 seconds instead of two hours? That’s right now. Structure workflows to front-load these small, visible wins.
- Script the action with If-Then plans. Don’t just say, “We should use AI for brainstorming.” That’s a wish. Turn it into a rule: “If I open a new brief, then the first thing I do is run it through our 7-prompt checklist.” This, as psychologist Peter Gollwitzer found, isn’t a suggestion; it’s a pre-loaded decision that turns intention into near-automatic action.
- It takes 66 days to build a habit. Not 21. A study from University College London found the median time for a new behaviour to become automatic is 66 days. That means your system needs to relentlessly support, prompt, and repeat that new behaviour for over two months. Your one-day workshop didn’t stand a chance.
Part 2: The Gym (engineering the system)
Great habits in a broken system are like planting a flower in concrete. It’s a nice thought, but doomed. To make behaviour stick, you need to build the scaffolding around it. You need to change the system itself.
This is where we look at Donella Meadows’s work on leverage points. Don’t just change the little things; change the rules, the information flows, and the system’s goals.
- Borrow from the nerds: Creative SLOs. Site Reliability Engineers at Google live and die by Service Level Objectives (SLOs)—hard, measurable targets for system performance. Why don’t we have these for creative operations? Forget vague goals like “be more efficient.” Let’s get specific:
- Brief-to-First-Concept Latency: ≤ 48 hours.
- Brand Variance Score: ≤ 15% deviation from the new brand platform.
- Revision Rate: ≤ 2 rounds for Tier 1 projects.
- These aren’t just KPIs; they’re a performance contract. They give your team a clear, unambiguous picture of what “good” looks like and force you to build systems that meet the target.
- Your org chart is your destiny. Ever heard of Conway’s Law? It’s the observation that any organisation will produce designs (products and campaigns) that copy its communication structure. If you have siloed teams, you’ll get siloed, disjointed work. If you want an integrated, AI-powered creative flow, you need to structure your teams to mirror that flow, not the org chart from 1998. Think cross-functional “strike teams,” not departmental fiefdoms.
- Build the Pattern Library. Stop reinventing the wheel. Every successful prompt, every killer workflow, every effective testing methodology should be captured, tagged, and stored in a central, living playbook. This isn’t a dusty PDF brand guide; it’s a dynamic system that learns. You retire bad patterns and promote good ones. It becomes the ever-improving brain of your creative operation.
So, what does this look like on monday?
This isn’t abstract theory. It’s a set of rituals. It’s time on the calendar.
- Daily (15 mins): The Prompt Gym. Micro-drills. A copywriter gets challenged: “Generate 5 headlines for this product in the style of The Economist.” A designer gets: “Create 3 mood boards for a fintech brand targeting Gen Z.” Spaced, deliberate practice. High-difficulty, feedback-rich reps.
- Weekly (60 mins): The Experiment Hour. One hour. No distractions. Each person runs one small test on a live project. Tries a new prompt technique. Tests a different visual style. The only rule is to log what you did, what happened, and what you learned. This builds the muscle of curiosity and inoculates against “the way we’ve always done it.”
- Monthly (90 mins): The Show & Tell Festival. No boring slide decks. This is a fast-paced demo day where people show their coolest, weirdest, or most effective AI-assisted work from the past month. It makes the desired behaviours visible and celebrated, leveraging social proof to create new norms.
How this all goes to hell (and how to stop It)
We’ve run this sprint enough times to know the standard failure modes.
- The Trap:Training Theatre. Running workshops that feel productive but change nothing.
- The Countermove: Tie every single training module to a named ritual on the calendar and a specific Creative SLO it’s meant to improve. No ritual, no training.
- The Trap:Tool Sprawl. Everyone uses different tools, prompts, and platforms, leading to chaos.
- The Countermove: The Pattern Library is the single source of truth. It has owners, retirement dates for old patterns, and explicit versioning.
- The Trap:Metric Gaming. The team hits their “prototype latency” SLO by churning out mountains of low-quality crap.
- The Countermove: Never use a single metric. Pair a quantitative SLO (like speed) with a qualitative one (like a “Taste Score” from a human critique panel). As Goodhart’s Law warns, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. So, rotate them.
Your team doesn’t need another workshop. They need a new operating system. They need an environment where their intelligence is amplified, their workflow is streamlined, and their creative output is measured in a way that actually matters to the business.
Ready to stop buying gym memberships and start building the damn gym?
Start with our 2-hour Behaviour x Systems Diagnostic. We’ll map your current workflows, identify the highest-leverage places to intervene, and define the first three Creative SLOs to kickstart your 12-week transformation sprint.
✨//A