Ideation and Sticky Notes are Innovation Theatre
You've sat in brainstorming sessions that produced obvious ideas. You've watched a room full of sticky notes get sorted into categories. You've followed innovation processes: empathize, ideate, prototype – and ended up with only slightly better versions of what already exists.Maybe you ran the workshop.
Maybe you were in the meeting.
Either way, you left asking yourself:
Is this really creative?
Is this truly innovative?
Can these approaches generate anything genuinely new? Or just more of what exists… Is this the best we can do?
You recognize that things are far more complex, non-linear, and unpredictable – you looked for alternatives: Systems thinking. Complexity frameworks. Sensemaking models. Each one named something important. None of them answered the question you kept circling:
If creativity is emergent and doesn't start with ideas, why is this what everyone is still doing?How can we push creativity further, together?
Two Questions Drive Emergent Futures Lab
What Is Creativity? and How Do You Innovate?
These are not rhetorical. We have been pursuing them globally for over three decades – from collaborations in the high Arctic to urban centers, from academia to organizations, and from product design to adaptive systems design.
What we've co-developed, we share: every Friday since 2020 in our weekly newsletter Emerging Futures. In our book – The Innovation Design Approach. And in WorldMakers – our community of practice – where we publish weekly podcasts, host live events, and engage in ongoing research, in and through dialogue with a growing group of practitioners from five continents who refuse to let these questions settle.
What has emerged changes the question itself:
Creativity is not a human capacity that is imposed on a passive world. It is a property of the world itself – something far more ecological that emerges from relational assemblages of agents, tools, materials, environments, and possibilities.
This changes everything about how you live a meaningful life and practice innovation.
If attunement and doing precede knowing, then we need to become more engaged. If the question is never "What is it?" – it is always What can it do? It means the genuinely new cannot be thought, planned, or brainstormed into existence.
It means that it has to be made – collectively, experimentally, from the middle – while navigating states of uncertainty.
We exist to build a thriving experimental movement and community of practice. One that is collaborative, distributed, and centered on deep engagement and experimental doing. One that keeps difference alive in a world that dangerously defaults to sameness.
