Month: June 2019
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The Future
One of the fascinating things about being part of the Futures Thinking Network has been trying to answer what should be the simplest question of all: why am I interested in the future? I mean, of course I am – it’s the future! It’s possibility, excitement, discovery, a treasure map of life and so on and…
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The Problem of Creativity is the Problem of Difference
The one secret for building creative teams that almost all organizations miss.
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The Writing on the Wall: Creativity and Paradigm Shifts
The challenge in implementing creative solutions to problems is finding a receptive audience. We often think that we need to work within existing frameworks, and nudge them in the right direction, but a new perspective on how paradigm shifts can occur suggests it more be possible to win over audiences more quickly to more radical…
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What Is This? The Secret to Learning More Creatively
Whenever we start to learn something new our most instinctive question is “how do I understand this?” That’s exactly the right question, of course, but too often what we mean when we ask it is “where do I put this?” We think of our knowledge as some kind of architectural blueprint, and what we want…
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Take an Idea for a Walk
I often say creativity is broken down into two very simple parts. 1. Know lots of things about lots of things And 2. Be able to join those things together Taken together these two elements harness the real power of what it means to say that knowledge is not the sum of what you know…
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Why most brainstorming doesn’t work
It can seem on the surface that a lot of what I teach is very similar to the hardly innovative technique of brainstorming. That’s because most techniques for idea generation are, let’s face it, trying to do the same thing – generate better ideas. And yes, if you have ever been through a creative thinking…
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The City and The City and the city, and
The final piece about my “Can Blue Planets Find Space for Rainbows?” project is the book outline. Expect the following 9 chapters, largely in manifesto form, then detailed papers based on each. 1: A Tale of Two Scientists Using responses to the broadcast of Blue Planet 2 to illustrate the way that much-needed activism in…
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You Cannot Be Serious
One of the most important things Greta Thunberg has highlighted is the structural problem with neurotypical discourse. It is acceptable in this discourse to say one thing “we must tackle the climate crisis” and do something totally at odds with that (doing nothing).For me, it is this disconnect that has been the single greatest cause…
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How Radical is Technology for Disabled Rights?
It is impossible to overstate how important technology will be in reframing the conceptual dynamic between abled & disabled people in the coming decade. It has always been a matter of choice (or, too often, simply not thought about, and therefore a result of unintended consequence) for abled people whether disabled folk have a place…
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Can Blue Planets Find Space for Rainbows?
Disabled people have been erased from many well-meaning visions of the future, for example in environmental circles, through the adoption of the theological and philosophical notions of holiness, utopia, and disgust. I make the rather mild suggestion that the answer lies in dedicating our resources to provide infrastructures to the world that allow different groups…
Rogue interrobang 