Life on earth can be really difficult at times, which is when we most need the most imaginative ways to bring hope and possibility.

Human imagination is an amazing thing.  We’re able to bring together thinking and ideas from all kinds of places, people, and times, and makes something utterly different.

Frans Johansson writes about intersectional thinking, when we’re able to mix up ideas, visit different places, explore unfamiliar sources, meet new people who are different to us:

‘Can you make your environment more collision prone?’*

We see some practical examples of this in Theory U’s empathy walks (allowing us to step inside the experiences of another), stakeholder interviews (allowing people to more deeply explore the relationships they already have), and field trips (which allow people to visit a business, community, or some work of interest to them – ideally for at least a day).**

Collisions equal exposure to new thoughts and ideas.^  Off the peg just won’t make for a better future.

‘You’ll never stumble on the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.’^^

Tribal Leadership authors Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright argue that tribes are how we live – societies being made up of many, many tribes.  Basically these exhibit five kinds of “tribeness.”

The first tribe claims “Life sucks” – they can’t see much good in life (these people are mostly in prisons and gangs).  Then there’re those who claim “My life sucks” – the corollary being that the lives of others don’t.  After this there are those who hold that “My life is great” – the following corollary then is, “But yours isn’t.”  In the fourth tribe people begin to say “We’re great” – though there’s still a corollary, now “The tribe over there isn’t great.”  The fifth tribe, though, have found a way of connecting both within and without their group to be able to say “Life is great” – they’re ready to tackle the big enemies facing the world: poverty, illiteracy, disease, environmental concerns.*^

New encounters and new experiences lead to new language which comes with: ‘the distinctive power, the capacity to speak in ways that evoke newness’^*  Language is important because its the vehicle by which we move relationships and ideas forward.

By this time, we’re becoming infinite players:

‘Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon.  Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary.’`*

I’ll never reach the horizon; it always is out there, calling me.  If I keep moving towards it, I’ll eventually return to where I began and know it differently – in a larger way.  Though the aim is not to return, but to keep journeying:  wherever I am, I can rotate 360 degrees and look upon a different horizon at any point.

“What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.”`^

Our curiosity leads us.  Questions provide us with purchase we need to push forward.  Questions that open our minds, open our hearts, and then open our wills. Big, open, beautiful questions.`*^

(*From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.  I use the acronym of TEESA to keep before me the need to read around technology, environment, entrepreneurship, society, and arts.)
(**See Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)
(^Perhaps a different lens through which to reflect on the UK’s stay in or leave the European Union on grounds of migration?  Instead of seeing migration as being the problem, what if we could use migration to find the imaginative solutions to why people are dispersed around the world?)
(^^From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(*^See Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright’s Tribal Leadership.)
(^*From Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination.)
(`*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(`^Jonas Salk, quoted in Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit.)
(`*^In her Udemy course, Krista Tippett claims that to ask a beautiful question elects a beautiful answer, a generous question elicits a generous answer.)

On a good day: When we’re inspired by someone else’s work to begin something new.*

On a bad day: When there’s been nothing original in the work we’ve been doing for way too long.

Like those flipping-frogs out of a Christmas cracker?  Every year they’re in the crackers, and every year they’re less recognisable than the year before – and they don’t even flip.

What if we could derive from the future instead of from the past.

With imaginations provoked by what might be, we’d be able to create the present from the artefacts we’ve received from the past in new ways, without repeating.

First of all, we need to get unfocused.

Becoming too focused on something means we can miss the signals from the future.  I’m grateful to Nassim Taleb who introduced me to the idea of the flaneur (female: flaneusse): literally an idler, and, more specifically, someone who has slowed down their life to be able to see more.**  Doodling does this for me: from dawdling. I am able to slow down and wander down unfamiliar paths my reading introduces me to.

Frans Johansson writes about the need to sometimes “take our eye off the ball” to be able to make more “click moments” happen – when new possibilities become visible to us:

‘Unfortunately, by rigidly pouring all of our effort into one approach we miss out on the unexpected paths to success.’^

You don’t have to doodle, you can take mindful walks, or try a different way to work – every day for a year, or one new recipe every week, or scan Twitter for fascinatingly different news-feeds for 15 minutes a day, or create some other Chris Guillebeau-like quest,^^ just to stir things up, to see things differently.*^

You can follow on from this by finding a group, or groups, of people who help you to see and experience things differently.  Other people help us to see the world differently.  To see something through the eyes of another may be one of the most transformative of human experiences available to us.^*

‘What do we mean by empathy in terms of creativity and innovation?  For us, it’s the ability to see an experience through another person’s eyes, to recognise why people do what they do.’`*

The future opens more when we get off track – there are more means than there are people, and we begin looking together – more dreamt than derived.

We see more clearly.

(*I’ve been inspired by and am grateful to Seth Godin for his blogging/writing, and Hugh Macleod for his cartooning.  Between them, they got me blogging every day as long as I could include a doodle.  I can’t write like Seth, though, nor doodle like Hugh, and I must develop my own style.)
(**See Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan.)
(^From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(^^See Chris Guileebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(*^To move beyond the derivative and predictable, Pixar encourages field trips for it’s people so they are able to get a better idea of how animals behave, or what a certain terrain can look and feel like, or how ratatouille is made in the kitchens of a Michelin rated restaurant – rather than sitting in a design studio assuming they know what’s needed to tell a story.  See Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(^* Yesterday, I heard a politician talking about how refugees must be stopped coming to Europe, and especially to the UK.  I wondered whether this person had met and listened to the story of a refugee.  This morning I listened to an interview from someone from a military background heading up a refugee charity, his heart breaking, telling the stories of refugee’s, speaking of how we’re all humans.
(`*From Bernadette Jiwa’s Difference.)

‘It was as if they had chosen a particular kind of life and then changed other circumstances to accommodate it.’*

“It all started with a dream, but then I followed that dream.  Following the dream made all the difference.”**

Sometimes I catch myself breathing tightly, usually because I’m concerned and anxious about something.  I need to relax my breathing, to be aware of it filling my whole body, my whole life: rigidity is my enemy.

Rigidity is not only about my breathing, but also the way I see and understand things.  What do I do when I become the obstacle to who I want to be and what I want to do?

”Rigidity – by which I mean the determination that one’s own view is the correct one – can be hard to recognise at first.’^

Rigidity makes me my own worst enemy.

When I relax, though, I hear the thin|silence, sometimes coming from without, sometimes from within – a greater reality, a more generous possibility.

‘The opposite of click moments are planned situations with expected outcomes.  On their own, these don’t generate the chaos and randomness needed to discover new, unique ideas.’^^

It is in the thin|silence – where I am most open-minded, open-hearted, and open-willed – that I find myself most hopeful.  When I am closed – another word for rigid? – the problem is yours, or the system’s, but not mine.  I am the system, though; I am the obstacle.

‘By reinforcing the separation of people from their problems, problem-solving often functions as a way of maintaining the status quo rather than enabling fundamental change … where problems often arise from unquestioned assumptions and deeply habitual ways of acting.’^^

When I deal with my rigidity, I find myself able to pursue my dream and do all that change stuff with my circumstances to accommodate it.

(*From Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(**Musician Stephen Kellogg, quoted in Chris Guillebau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(^From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(^^From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(*^From Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski,, Otto Scharmer, and Betty Sue Flowers’s Presence.)

Bonus!: 365+1 in 2016.

Some fear failure so much that they will never risk.

Others have risked and failed and will never risk again.

People like Seth Godin have discovered that to risk often may bring many failures, but there’ll also be successes:

“If I fail more than you do, I win.  Built into this notion is the ability to keep playing.  If you get to keep playing, sooner or later you’re gonna make it succeed.”*

To be aware of something that is important to us, and do nothing, is a primary failure.  Burning questions are a great place to start, but questions need to turn into quests.  An initial question may be enough to carry us across a threshold, but there’s a difference between a threshold and a horizon – we can cross many boundaries and never reach the horizon.

Questions are important because they take us outside our normal, embedded ways of seeing and understanding, into “regions of uncertainty” – an “anchor” preventing us from moving forward:**

‘As in the case of lines, you are likely to stop when you are no longer sure you should go further – at the rear edge of the region of uncertainty.’**

The best questions make it possible for us to reach for the horizon, not just to cross a boundary.

We get at least 365 opportunities a year to ask our questions.  When all of this builds up in a single direction, it becomes a powerful thing.

(*Seth Godin, quoted in Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(**From Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.)

‘The mantra of the traveller is to make peace with waiting.  The mantra of the quester is to keep moving forward.  Whatever it takes, whether facing an immense challenge or spirit-sapping tedium, just keep making progress.’*

The early Celtic missionaries would throw their coracles on the waves and set out on a journey to “who knows where.”  They belief was that wherever they ended up was where their God wanted them to be.

There’s a lot more to their example than “blind faith”  and maybe more than the Celts even realised.

For a start, they didn’t stay home waiting for something to happen, for a sign to appear.  They assumed they were made to travel to the edges, and they believed the waters would carry them there.  After that, they were prepared to accommodate the complexities of currents, weather systems, and whatever else awaited them.

We humans are strange creatures.

In one moment, we arrest activity in order  to reflect upon our breathing.  In another moment, we are walking the earth, scanning the horizon, and dreaming of the future.

Another way of saying this is that we are divergent, emergent, convergent people.**

We open ourselves to more possibilities, we sense the future calling in some of these possibilities and not others, and then we focus our skills on making something happen.

This is the adventure of opening our minds to more, opening our hearts to what is calling us, then opening our wills to craft the future.^

Being a dramatic journey rather than theatrical one, we do not know what lies ahead.

Frans Johansson adds more nuance to this exploration when he describes the crafting of randomness, including: connecting with more people (elements of divergence/opening minds); making more bets (elements of emergence/opening hearts); and, actually doing stuff in a complex world (elements of convergence/opening wills to prototype and create).^^

(*From Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(**See Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo’s Gamestorming.)
(^See Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)
(^^See Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)

When we use our gifts fast, we create possibilities.*

These gifts are the creativity that follow our unique ways of seeing; because of this they are random, unexpected, serendipitous.**

They’re the means of “prophetic imagination,” taking us from the centre to the edge – prophets are edgecraft people. Our curiosities and questions propel us to the edge of the bubble and across thresholds, into the undefined, and into possibility.  The bubble is what we create to resist the random, where predictability rules, where laws are laws and everything aligns – and also “despairing conformity.”^

From “I-in-me,” past “I-in-it,” to “I-in-you,” and onwards into “I-in-us,” we move towards the emerging future.^  Small groups of such imaginative people do not worry about their size, only about their openness to one another:

“The part is a place for the presenting of the whole.”^^

What is your gift?  How fast are you using it?  Who are you connecting to?  How fast are you employing your eco-gift?*^

‘[W]hat I am saying is that randomness should be the plan. … This approach only works if we can not only increase the amount of randomness in our lives but also capture it when it present something amazing.’**

(*Gift, element, art, genius, calling, purpose, strengths, 
(**From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(^A term used by Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination.)
(^From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)
(^^Henri Bartoft, quoted in Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, Otto Scharmer, and Betty Sue Flowers’s Presence.)
(*^From oikos – the whole house.)

‘The purpose of strategy … is not to find the right answer, because you will be wrong anyway.  The purpose of strategy is to move us to act. … You have to think you know what you’re doing while still opening yourself up to serendipity.’*

We want to identify the right path before we do anything.

Just to move is more important; we find we build a path when we do.

Moving means we show up to possibility.  In a random universe, we never know when or where opportunities or possibilities will show up.

For Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, it came in the form of a question from his three year old daughter Jennifer, on a trip to the beach.  Jennifer asked why they couldn’t see the picture Land had just taken and not have to wait.  Land could have ignored the question, but instead he took a step back, suspended the way he saw and understood,  and allowed the question of a three year old to begin a quest – a path he hadn’t been looking for.**  Which brings us to a strategy for moving forward.

‘Humble inquiry maximises my curiosity and interest in the other person and minimises bias and preconceptions about the other person.’**

Whether it be a person or some weak signal of future possibility, asking open questions makes it possible to move, to be open to the randomness.

What’s your question?

(*From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(**This story is told in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^From Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry.)

When you’re expressing a combination of love and self-discipline, what are you doing?

Where would you travel to and who would you meet with to be able to express this?

What makes you train harder and travel further, is likely to come from deep within.

There’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

When people talk about carrots and sticks, theyre usually referring to acting upon others – somehow making others do what they want.  As Mary Poppins would say, “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the medicine go down, the medicine go down.”

Just as extrinsic motivation can be sometimes a carrot and sometimes a stick, so intrinsic motivation comes in different forms, though.  There’s motivation from within and motivation from deep within.

‘Whoever must play cannot play.’*

The world isn’t a rational and orderly place, but that’s the kind of choices we try and make.

Deep choices allow us to play, but often appear irrational.

Play is how we live life from the core of our being, made possible by human imagination.

‘[I]f we want to develop a sustainable approach to reaching success we must simultaneously acknowledge the world is random while retaining some sort of rationale in our approach.’**

We need a rationale in order to act, but we’re terrible at using a rationale of randomness – yet the universe is random.

‘I just wanted to do it!  It was an internal drive that I couldn’t ignore.’^

Our best guide is found deep within.  It’s what makes us follow the rabbit, begin an adventure, enter the game.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(**From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(^From Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.  Guillebeau is referring to his desire to visit every country on the planet before he reached 35 years of age; he found other things happened on the way, too.)

‘We are conditioned to search for similarities, not differences.’*

‘Our futures enter into each other.  What is your future and mind becomes ours.  We prepare each other for surprise.’**

As we reach out into a world and universe of randomness, we try and see patterns and similarities where there are none – maybe trying to find more people like us, comparing this experience with that, and this person with that person.

Nassim Taleb describes a black swan.  First of all we don’t expect it – there was a time when Western hemisphere dwellers thought all stand were white.  So we are deeply impacted by what we didn’t see coming.  Thirdly, when we’ve recovered, we write a back story to explain how we ought to have seen it coming, rationalising or justifying the phenomena – we see patterns where there are none.

It’s really hard to be as open as we need to be in a random universe; our brains want to fill in the gaps of what we don’t know, enabling us to make a speedy judgement – something to do with survival from our ancient past.

In this post, I’m pulling disparate thoughts together from various authors and thinkers I happen to be reading today.  Frans Johansson is writing about randomness, Ed Catmull writes about the hidden, and Chris Guillebeau mentions a book publisher called Random, and I begin to see a pattern.

But there is no pattern, there’s only coincidence.

However, if I’m aware of this, and still pull these different thoughts together into a new idea – realising this is exactly what it is – then I’m expressing something exciting about being human.  We are generative beings.

We create patterns which allow us to play within the universe through the entirety of our lives – we may well be acted upon and respond much of the time, but we also act upon the universe, we initiate.

All of us do this, so it’s surprising that we don’t create an impossible chaos.  But then another incredible human ability kicks in:

‘Our futures enter into each other.  What is your future and mind becomes ours.  We prepare each other for surprise.’**

We play together in order to create bigger patterns or stories within which we are able to live together.  Yuval Noah Harari suggests that humans have created political, national, and religious myths to live in communities larger than 150 members:

‘Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another.’^

I like to think of this as the alchemy made possible by those who know they’re playing an infinite game: inviting as many as possible to play and ensuring the game remains open and running for as long as possible.

Here we are, opening our lives to one another, recognising we are all in the dark about things way more than we’re in the light, together reaching into the random:

‘Accessing your ignorance, or allowing curiosity to lead you, is often the best guide to what to ask about.’^^

(*From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(^From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(^^From Edgar Schien’s Humble Inquiry.)

“I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me”*

There is wisdom that allows everyone to bring their remarkable contribution.  Too often, however, something gets in the way, like when we compare ourselves with others, or others compare us with someone else.  Why do we have to be like someone else to have anything valuable to bring?

Richard Bachman’s novels weren’t as good as Stephen King’s in the eyes of those selling and buying books – the trouble was that Bachman was King.  It turned out to be the name people were purchasing; King was writing under a pseudonym so he could break out of the culture at the time of only being able to publish one book a year.**

On my favourite Saturday morning radio show, the presenter Danny Baker was asking his listeners if they’d ever been at the front of a queue, and how did they get there?  One of the stories that came in was of a family who’d drive down through the night from Aberdeen to Dover, to be the first in the queue for the ferry.  One year they managed it, only for the ferry to dock poorly so another queue was let on first.  Getting to the front of a queue is a random thing.  All the people at the front of their respective queues got there way more randomly than they know.

I wonder whether we place ourselves better in the universe if we accept randomness, searching for the remarkable everywhere.  How the person who’s number one may not the best, and that kind of thing.

When we see how everyone can bring something special, we open ourselves to possibility, then the world can only be a richer place.

(*Dawna Markova, quote in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer for the 18/5/16.)
(**This story is told in Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)