Be the Anomaly that Makes the Paradigm Shift

yellow on black "M" logo of Mycelium, with the text "Mycelium: One problem. Five minutes. All the answers you can imagine." At the bottom of the picture, 3 Mycelium cards making up the problem, "after the zombie apocalypse you can choose to save a glacier or a violin. Explain your answer."

Welcome to the start of your new creative adventure.

Sign up for our newsletter and I’ll send you occasional, non-spammy tips, articles, and resources on creativity, and training for your mind, your body, and every area of your life. If you want to talk about how I can empower you to be more creative, email ne at rogueinterrobang@gmail.com

Start exploring here to find out more about

  • How to make yourself irreplaceable in the coming age of automation
  • Techniques to help you become more creative and adaptable, the most important skills for you and for the world in the decades to come
  • How to live the richest, fullest life possible by reframing your goals and the techniques you use to achieve them to reflect the interconnected nature of every part of your life
  • Our products, including the award-winning creative thinking card game, Mycelium

Hire Me: Workshops, Coaching, Consultancy, Keynotes and Motivational Talks

Whether you want a motivational speaker to help your team believe they can create meaningful change in the world; someone to run a workshop to impart invaluable skills; a coach to enable you to achieve a life you never thought possible or just to improve a particular skill; or someone to help you understand what your organization is missing that will help help it not just survive but thrive – I can help.

I have been giving workshops, keynotes and consultations for decades.

And I have a long history of performance – as – so you can be confident that when you hire me to speak, the result will be memorable as well as informative. But most of all it will be practical. It would be easy to describe me as an “ideas person” but for me ideas are only ever as good as the impact they create.

The following is an example of the services I offer and groups I have worked with. Email rogueinterrobang@gmail.com to discuss working with me.

Workshops and away days on creative thinking 

  • Cabinet Office Professional Head of Intelligence Analysis
  • Oxford University Focus Programme
  • Grand Union Doctoral Training Programme
  • HMRC

Public and educational events

  • The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) late night sessions at the Ashmolean Museum, Natural History Museum, and Radcliffe Humanities
  • Cheney School

Unlocking the Potential of a Diverse Workforce

  • Association of Research Managers and Administrators
  • Open University

Motivational Talks and Keynotes

  • EU Eastern Partnership Civil Leadership Programme
  • Oxford University Alumni Weekend Meeting Minds
  • Advice UK

Coaching and Consultancy

  • Money Advice Trust
  • Oxford University Innovation Incubator programme

Tutoring, Mentoring, and coaching specific skills

  • Speed Reading
  • Creative thinking

About

Rogue Interrobang helps you find creative solutions to wicked problems. I help people live their best lives, and I help organizations to empower their members to enable those organizations to create a better world.

I have brought together 30 years of experience as a mind sports athlete, teacher, coach, speaker, writer and researcher; and a lifetime’s experience of seeing the world differently as a result of ADHD and dyspraxia. 

The result is Rogue Interrobang, a spinout company from the University of Oxford dedicated to realising the vast mine of human potential that goes untapped, whether because people lack the techniques to make the most of their minds and bodies; or because organizations lack the insight, structures and resources to empower their most unique members to truly flourish.

I spent decades falling short of my potential because I was told, and ended up believing, there were ways of pursuing optimal performance that were set in stone and to succeed I just had to try harder at doing those things. 

That changed when I realised two things:

  • So many of those systems were put in place by people whose brains worked differently from mine. They “succeeded” not because of any actions or habits they were practising, but because they were working with the flow of their brains not against it. If I wanted to succeed, I needed to switch my focus, and start finding actions and habits that worked with the flow of my brain. I found the result in many of the techniques that had already helped me to win 3 Creative Thinking World Championships and a World Intelligence Championship. 
  • What the world needs, and lacks, is solutions to its most pressing problems. Many of those problems remain unsolved not despite the many attempts to solve them, but because of those attempts. Too often the way the world tries to succeed in becoming better is the same as the way it got into problems in the first place. If we want to make the world better, we need to empower people whose perspectives and approaches are different, not seek to conform them to a model that won’t work.

Once I had realised that instead of leaning in to what I had been told I had to do, I needed to lean in to all the things that made me different, I was able to develop techniques, processes, and systems to empower others to do the same. 

Rogue Interrobang started with one such technique. In 2017 I developed the card game Mycelium to help train the brain to make more and more original connections between objects and ideas. The game won the Oxford University Humanities Innovation Challenge, and two years later, thanks to the support of Oxford University Innovation, the company was born. 

That process of going from idea to company in an organization which itself struggles with change wasn’t without its difficulties. And many of those difficulties have resulted in more and better services I now offer, in particular coaching and mentoring for neurodivergent founders who find themselves in the position I did; and consulting for incubators and innovation cultures that want to empower neurodivergent founders to bring their unique ideas to the world.

Selected Media and Testimonials

“The creative and divergent thinking classes that Daniel has delivered to analysts from across Government have been particularly well received, being both informative and enjoyable.  The feedback has been  universally positive.” Professional Head of Intelligence Analysis, Cabinet Office

I was the subject of a documentary film on speed reading for Quartz’s “Exceptional Humans” series, filmed in the run up to winning my third European Speed Reading Championship in 2019

Products

Mycelium

Mycelium

Mycelium is the award-winning creative card game that makes you more creative while having fun. Devised by Dan Holloway, Mycelium won the 2017 Oxford Humanities Innovation Challenge.

The principle of the game is very simple. Drawing cards from the deck gives players a creative thinking question. For example, “What would happen if ants and a glacier swapped places fpr a day?” Players have 5 minutes to come up with as many answers as possible. Each answer you come up with get points for its originality, and for the elegance and detail of its elaboration. The more people who come up with the same idea, the fewert points that idea scores.

The beautifully produced deck containing 16 question cards and 40 object cards features stunning artwork by artist and illustrator Sophie E Tallis, and the Mycelium logo by artist Sarm Derbois.

Rogue Interrobang’s online store is coming by the end of January 2023, but email rogueinterrobang@gmail.com to buy Mycelium directly now for just £10 including shipping within the UK or £15 anywhere in the world.

Improving Mental Health in the Start-up Community and Opportunities for Neurodivergent Founders

Innovation culture, despite its name, has some fairly fixed ideas about the journey from idea to impact. The result can be devastating to the mental health of founders. And it can exclude altogether those whose brains and lives work differently. The result is to deprive the world full of wicked problems many of the solutions it desperately needs.

I work with incubators and individuals to change that. Ideally, teams running an incubator or innovation ecosystem would hire me as a consultant to help them make their processes more empowering, and to mentor neurodivergent founders, but I am happy for individuals or organizations who want to work with me to get in touch.

I have 15 years of experience campaigning, researching, consulting, and speaking on mental health, neurodivergence, and how to empower disabled people to reach their true potential by enabling them to use their full range of talents while providing the full range of support they need in order to do so. 

I am determined to use this experience of working with some of the most senior people in business, government, and research; combined with my experience of the innovation and start-up scene; and my own lived experiences of ADHD, Bipolar Disorder and Dyspraxia, to make the start-up space more empowering. As a society we desperately need the creative ideas neurodivergent founders and those with mental health conditions bring. But to do that we need to create a start-up culture that empowers, and we need mentors and coaches to help these founders focus on their strengths.

A selective sample of experience:

  • Current member of the Advisory Board of the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute
  • I was on the steering group that drew up the Debt and Mental Health Evidence Form for UK-based GPs.
  • Delivered the 2017 Oxford Disability Lecture on the subject, “A Future Not to Feel Sad About”
  • Shortlisted for the inaugural Oxford University Vice Chancellor’s Diversity Awards for the workshop “Looking Behind the Label” which I have run with a colleague more than 30 times
  • Speaker at conferences such as Advice UK’s annual conference; Mental Wealth; Money Talks; the annual conference of the Association of Research Managers and Administrators