If you've ever rooted for an underdog—for example, Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky movies or the unlikely roboticists in Spare Parts—you know the thrill of witnessing an underdog overcome the odds. At FutureLab, we're currently enjoying our own Rocky moment, and it's every bit as exhilarating!

Imagine standing toe-to-toe with global industry giants—consulting titans boasting tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide. Now picture a scrappy, lean, agile team stepping confidently into that competitive ring and securing a prestigious project to help develop an ambitious AI strategy, not for a company… but for an entire nation.

Impossible? Not at FutureLab.

Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was an AI visionary even before first programmable electronic computer was built. The ENIAC was completed in 1945, whereas his Three Laws of Robotics were introduced via his short story "Runaround" in 1942! He was the first to describe what are known as safety objective functions, and there was no name for that either at the time. These robotic laws, presented as from a fictional "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 AD" are:

By Dr. Carol Grojean and Moses Ma

The rather quaint term “brainstorming” was coined by Alex Osborn in 1953 in his book Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking. Osborn was a businessman and creativity theorist who co-founded the renowned advertising firm BBDO. He was inspired to create the term after noticing that business meetings didn't encourage free-thinking and spontaneity.

Over the last decade, the term has been slowly supplanted by a hipper sounding term “group ideation”. This has enjoyed some success in the innovation coaching field, but it hasn’t taken root in our collective consciousness. I believe that the next hot concept is going to be “collective flow” because it’s the application of brain science and certain high intensity collaboration techniques not only to meetings, but to the rest of your life. Just as Osborn noticed that business meetings didn't encourage free-thinking and spontaneity… neither does the rest of the time you usually spend at work!

So what is flow? It’s a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which describes a state of optimal performance where challenge and skill are perfectly balanced, leading to intense focus and peak productivity. While much research has focused on individual flow, the concept of collective flow is gaining attention, particularly in environments that thrive on collaboration, such as brainstorming sessions and creative meetings.