Stop Operating, Start Orchestrating: Why Innovation is Now a Parallel Process

Most people are still operating when they should be orchestrating.

I realized this last week when a big-time leader asked me a thorny strategic question late at night. Old me would have either stayed up wrestling with it or let my subconscious work on it while I slept. Instead, I deployed a ChatGPT agent before going to bed.

I woke up to a thousand-word executive summary, a 10-page slide deck, and multiple CSVs of research sitting in my inbox. The agent had spent 48 minutes and 17 seconds making progress while I slept.

Cleverly deploying AI is not merely speeding up innovation—it's unlocking a fundamentally different relationship with the creative process.

The BCG Tiger Revelation

Waking up to a meaningfully advanced work product reminded me of my early days at Boston Consulting Group, where I started my career. We had this service called "BCG Tiger"—an outsourcing shop where you could fax hand-drawn slides and wake up to polished PowerPoint decks. I loved sending assignments to BCG Tiger before signing off for the night because it made me feel productive even while I slept.

Now everyone can have that feeling, whether they work for BCG or not. But most don’t. Most people are treating AI like a better pencil when they should be treating it like an entire design team that never sleeps.

The difference? Operators work linearly. Orchestrators work in parallel.

The Parallel Prototype Revolution

Here's where this gets interesting. Historically, if you wanted to build a prototype, you'd use popsicle sticks and construction paper (the d.school still teaches this). If I told you to "do it again," you'd need another 10 minutes with scissors and tape. Linear. Sequential. Operator thinking. Even if you wanted to “host a shoot out” Rick Rubin style (I’m a huge fan, by the way!), that approach still requires more bandwidth, or more resources.

But now? Fire up three Replit windows. Same product requirements document. Deploy three prototypes simultaneously.

Because these are non-deterministic models, each prototype will be slightly different—weirder and more unexpected in ways you can't imagine. You're not just building faster; you're exploring a spectrum of possibilities that would have taken days of sequential iteration.

I now feel like it's a waste of agent credits if I don't prompt an agent to do something before I go to bed. Why wouldn't you? Your subconscious can work on problems while you sleep—why not deploy digital collaborators to make progress too?

The Orchestration Mindset in Action

Think of yourself as a conductor. You're not playing every instrument—you're coordinating multiple players to create something bigger than any single performance.

Instead of this (Operator):

• Generate 10 ideas

• Review them

• Pick the best one

• Build a prototype

• Test it

• Iterate

Do this (Orchestrator):

• Open three ChatGPT windows

• Generate 10 ideas in each simultaneously

• Build three prototypes in parallel

• Set an agent to test scenarios overnight

• Request the agent to perform multiple iterations

• Wake up to insights + next iterations

The time investment is nearly identical. The exploration space is exponentially larger.

Your Next 30 Minutes

Stop reading and try this orchestration experiment:

Tonight (15 minutes):

1. Open three browser windows with the same AI tool

2. Ask each the same question about a challenge you're facing

3. Don't look at the responses yet—just let them all generate

4. Compare the three outputs and notice the variation

5. Before bed, set an agent to work on the most promising direction

Here's the exact prompt for step 5: "I need you to spend significant time developing [your chosen direction] into something potentially workable. Research similar concepts, identify potential obstacles, suggest three different implementation approaches, and create a basic action plan. Then simulate three different variations of the action plan deployed. What happens in each case, and why? Take your time and be thorough."

Tomorrow morning (15 minutes):

• Review what your agent created overnight

• Pick the most surprising insight

• Use it to inform your next steps (perhaps another round of parallel experiments!)

The Compound Effect

This isn’t just theory. I watched this play out before my very eyes in a recent workshop. Several innovation teams had imagined a suite of new offerings would require ~8 weeks and $50,000 (sound familiar?) to turn into prototypes for testing. Over the next 30 minutes, my partner and I built multiple working versions of multiple of their ideas. Not mockups—functional prototypes. We had originally planned to build just one, but while we were waiting, we launched a second version of the first, and then a second concept, and then a third... bouncing back and forth between windows, advising agents to make changes… the teams got the point. We were demonstrating not just a different set of tools, but a completely different way of working.

That's the power of orchestration: you're not just moving faster, you're exploring solution spaces that linear thinking could never reach.

The bottleneck in innovation used to be execution capacity. Now it's imagination capacity. Are you thinking like someone who has access to one brain, or someone who can coordinate multiple intelligent systems working in parallel?

Your competitive advantage isn't your ability to work harder. It's your ability to orchestrate smarter.

The tools are here. The question is: are you ready to stop operating and start orchestrating?

Related: Host A Shoot Out
Related: How to Have an Innovative Idea: Three Simple Steps
Related: Your Team Just Quoted 8 Weeks. What if They’re Off by 99%?
Related: Beyond the Prompt: How Entrepreneurs Can Compete in the Age of AI

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