The hottest, driest place in North America, a landscape so merciless we call it Death Valley is carpeted in wildflowers. Yellow desert gold stretches as far as the eye can see, interrupted by blushes of pink sand verbena, purple phacelia, and the ghostly white blooms of the gravel ghost. The National Park Service describes it as the best superbloom Death Valley has seen in a decade. Visitors who showed up expecting scorched earth and silence are standing open-mouthed in the middle of something that looks like a miracle.

It isn’t a miracle, of course. It’s biology. Between November 2025 and January 2026, Death Valley received more than a year’s worth of rain in just a few months. Seeds that had been lying dormant in the soil, some of them perhaps waiting years for exactly this moment, woke up. They didn’t hesitate. Given the right conditions, they simply did what they were always capable of doing. They bloomed.

I’ve been thinking about this all week, because I keep hearing the voice of Sir Ken Robinson in the back of my mind.

Sir Ken Robinson and the Seeds Beneath the Surface

In 2013, Robinson gave what became one of the most-watched TED Talks of all time: “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley.” His argument was urgent and, in many ways, radical. He believed that our education systems were strangling the very thing they claimed to cultivate – human potential. Too much standardisation, and too much compliance. Too little curiosity, creativity, and individual spark.

But it was his metaphor that stopped people in their tracks.

He talked about Death Valley. He talked about how in the winter of 2004, the rains came, and the following spring the floor of the valley erupted in flowers. He used it to make one of the most memorable points I’ve ever heard made about human beings. “Death Valley isn’t dead. It’s dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable.”

He then turned that thought toward the children sitting in classrooms across the world. “ You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life.”

It was about education. But as I watch the footage coming out of Death Valley this week – tourists in tears, families laughing, photographers on their knees in the dirt trying to capture something they can barely believe – I find myself thinking his insight was never only about education. It’s about all of us. Right now. In this strange, turbulent moment we’re living through.

The Question That Keeps People Awake at Three in the Morning

Because let’s be honest about where we are. Uncertainty is the weather these days. And at the centre of that uncertainty, for a lot of people, is a question that feels enormous and unsettling: what does the rise of artificial intelligence mean for me, for my work, for my children, for the things I’m good at and the life I’ve built?

It’s a question that deserves to be taken seriously. AI is changing things quickly, and in ways that none of us can fully predict. Jobs are shifting and industries are being reshaped. The skills that felt like solid ground ten or even three years ago feel less certain today. I talk to smart, capable, talented people who are genuinely worried. Not in a vague, abstract way. In a specific, keeps-me-awake-at-three-in-the-morning way.

But here’s what I keep coming back to, standing metaphorically in the middle of that blooming desert. The seeds are still there.

What AI Cannot Do

Robinson’s deepest conviction was that human beings are not machines to be optimised. We are organic, creative, relational creatures, and we don’t thrive through command and control. We thrive when the climate is right. When we’re given a sense of possibility. When someone looks at us and sees not our limitations but our latency – the version of us that is waiting, like those desert seeds, for the right conditions to come along.

AI is extraordinarily capable. It can process information at speeds that make the human brain look sluggish. It can generate, analyse, summarise, predict, and produce. It will keep getting better at all of those things, and we should be clear-eyed about that rather than waving it away.

But there are things AI cannot do that matter enormously. It cannot truly connect with another human being. It cannot sit with someone in their grief or their confusion and make them feel genuinely less alone. It cannot mentor, not in the way a great mentor does, reading the unspoken thing beneath the spoken thing, knowing when to push and when to hold back, knowing that what’s needed right now isn’t advice but presence. It cannot model what it looks like to be a curious, fallible, resilient human being who has failed and tried again and found meaning in the trying.

Those things, the things that make us irreducibly human are not a consolation prize in an AI world. They are, increasingly, the most valuable things we have to offer each other.

Climate Control, Not Command and Control

What we need, borrowing Robinson’s language, is climate control. Not the command-and-control version withprescriptions and standardised frameworks and anxiety-driven pressure to “upskill” fast enough to stay relevant. That approach mistakes us for machines that simply need better software.

The climate we need to create in our organisations, our schools, our communities, and in our families is one where people feel genuinely seen. Where curiosity is celebrated rather than just tolerated. Where a broader range of human talents is recognised as valuable, not just the ones that are easy to measure. Relationship between people are often messy, sometimes difficult, but they should be treated as something worth cherishing.

When that climate exists, people don’t just cope with uncertainty. They do something much more interesting. They bloom.

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve met individuals who felt completely written off by conventional definitions of success, but when the conditions shifted, and when someone changed the temperature in the room they found they had something remarkable to offer. Not despite their humanity, but because of it. Their empathy, their stubbornness, their hard-won wisdom, their particular way of seeing the world. The things that couldn’t be automated because they were rooted in the specific, unrepeatable fact of them.

Dormant Is Not Dead

The superbloom in Death Valley will last only a few weeks. Already the park is reminding visitors not to pick the flowers, to stay on the paths, to be careful not to damage something fragile and fleeting and magnificent. There’s a lesson in that too. Possibility, once it emerges, needs to be treated gently. It needs protecting, and needs people who understand its value.

Robinson understood that the role of leadership is not to issue instructions from the top and expect compliance. It’s to create the conditions under which the people in your care can discover what they’re capable of. To give them a different sense of what’s possible.

We are living through a long dry stretch, in some ways. The rain of technological change is falling fast and hard, and not everyone is sure whether it’s nourishing or flooding.

But Death Valley just reminded us of something important: dormant is not dead. And a landscape that looks, from a distance, like it could never sustain life can, given the right conditions, astonish everyone.

The question Sir Ken Robinson kept asking, right up until the end of his life is not whether people have potential. They do. They always do. The question is whether we’re willing to do the work of creating the climate in which that potential can finally, fully, spectacularly show itself.

I think we are. I think that’s exactly what this moment is calling us toward.

Now go and create some conditions. You might be surprised what blooms.

About the author

Matt Symonds is Chief Editor of BlueSky Thinking, and host of BlueSky Media Connect, bringing together b-schools and universities to meet editors from FT, BBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, The Economist, NYTimes and other global / regional media.

He is the S of QS, co-founding QS Quacquarelli Symonds, publishers of the QS World University Rankings. Matt I also co-Founder and Director of Fortuna Admissions, a coaching dream team of former business school and university admissions professionals from top-tier institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS, Chicago Booth, Columbia, Northwestern Kellogg, Berkeley Haas.

Matt co-host the CentreCourt MBA & Masters Festivals with John A. Byrne and Poets & Quants. Author of the international bestseller, “Getting the MBA Admissions Edge” sponsored by Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Bain, BCG, he writes about Higher Education and management for BBC, Times of India and formerly Forbes, The Economist and Bloomberg.

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