Full text of the talk I gave for the panel: "A Future Worth Fighting For: technology, disability, and ways of being" at the Futures Thinking Conference We are increasingly reimagining what it means to be-in-the-world. Particularly, we are accepting that we cannot live in the future as we live in the present. Indeed, if we … Continue reading Holiness. Utopia. Disgust. imagination, disability, and the mechanisms of erasure
Blog
This is the full text of the talk "The Monk, the Mushroom, and the MRI: how creativity could save the world", given at Meeting Minds in Oxford on 20 September. You can download the slides here. I have kept in the slide prompts so you can follow. When I give talks on the subject of … Continue reading The Monk, The Mushroom, and The MRI
Talk for the European Union’s Eastern Partnership Civil Society Fellows given on 11 September Download the accompanying powerpoint here If you asked people “do we need more creativity?” very few people would be likely to say no. Indeed, we know that when people are asked about creativity they want more of it. Business leaders regularly … Continue reading We Need to Build a Better Future: Why Creativity Matters
To implement creative solutions to problems we must create white rabbits, anomalies so curiosity-piquing people are desperate to follow them down the rabbit hole.
What is knowledge is a question that has exercised philosophers for millennia, and is one I'm not likely to solve in a 600 word blog post. On the other hand, at a less fundamental and practical level, you can go a long way to transforming your potential to be creative by changing the way you … Continue reading What Is Knowledge?
George had loved his working life. For 30 years he had been the chair of one of the leading research councils, providing the money that made wonderful things happen. Now he was finally hanging up his hat but he would have a contented retirement ahead of him, happy in the knowledge he had made the … Continue reading What’s a Wonderful Life? The impact of what we do not do
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 … Continue reading The Future
The one secret for building creative teams that almost all organizations miss.
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 solutions.
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 … Continue reading What Is This? The Secret to Learning More Creatively
Rogue interrobang 