Creativity Is Not What You Think

It is not ideation. Not brainstorming. Not a flash of individual genius.

Creativity emerges from the middle of doing, from the relationships between processes, agents, tools, materials, and environments. It is complex, rich, surprising, and always more-than-human.

Emergent Futures Lab is a collaborative community of practice that is home to a movement to radically transform how we understand and engage with complex creative processes.  

For nearly a century, we've engaged with creativity as though it begins in the head: individual, idea-focused, human-centered. But creativity is something else entirely: it is an emergent worldly process. 

What new radical possibilities will open up when we begin to take this seriously?

Emerging Futures+ Newsletter: Hundreds of Volumes Into the Experiment

Every Friday, we publish Emerging Futures – a long-form newsletter working to create a paradigmatically new approach to emergence, complexity, creativity, and worldmaking. Each volume builds on the last: affordances, exaptation, assemblages, enactive cognition, the limits of Design Thinking, complex adaptive systems, and what it takes for unique leaders and progressive organizations to produce something meaningful that has never existed.

Our arguments emerge from our concrete experiences of making, as well as global philosophy, the complexity sciences, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, ecological practices, and far more.

And we do it in a voice that treats you as someone who has already done the work – and is ready for what comes next. Our global readers come from a vast diversity of fields: innovation and change facilitation, complexity practices, academia, organizational development, foresight, ecology, and beyond.

What keeps them engaged is the richness, specificity, and depth of the community dialog. We name things. We make bold speculative claims. We develop processes… 

And we discuss all of this in an ongoing participatory dialogue. 

The newsletter is far more than an online broadsheet – yes, it’s that, plus available as an extended audio version that includes more examples and details, and an active, robust space for community discourse.

Over time, the newsletter doesn't just give you new concepts. It rewires what you pay attention to — the unintended outcome, the thing no one planned, the affordance hiding in plain sight – and ultimately how you act.

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Want More Than the Newsletter?

The question we hear most often: How do I participate in this?

WorldMakers is our answer.

Not a course. Not a content library. Rather, a genuine community of practice where the experimental inquiry becomes embodied — in live conversation, in shared experiments, in the slow collaborative work of building a different approach to creativity alongside others who refuse to settle for the old one.

Our growing global community comes from AI research, healthcare, education, consulting, foresight, organizational development, ecology, and fields that resist clean labels. What they share is a conviction that the world is more creative, more relational, more alive than any framework can hold — and a desire to act as if that were true.

What bonds and weaves this community together isn't content — it's the ongoing collective act of making something that doesn't exist yet: practices, languages, a way of working with emergence that has no precedent. Thirty-plus live events a year, two weekly podcasts, creativity exercises, and a complete annotated bibliography — these are the resources. The community is what we build, one collective, creative, and meaningful engagement after another – making the path in walking..

The shift members describe is both profound and concrete: they stop leading with narrow plans and start leading with engagement. They stop asking "What's the idea?" and start asking "What's emerging?" Their practice changes because their orientation to creativity has changed.

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$1 for your first seven days, cancel antytime.

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What Our Members Are Saying

Florian Rustler

Organizational Developer and Consultant for Effective Collaboration

"WorldMakers is a special place for me. Every week, I am inspired and challenged. The community is different from all other communities I have experienced because of the stance it takes on what creativity is and how we as human beings can participate in the creative process."

Ozgen Bagci

Educational Consultant, Trainer & HundrED Community Lead

"I knew the experience would be good, but I wasn't expecting the depth, thoughtfulness, and quality that you've brought to it. Everything – from the content to the curation, the way you hold space, and the connections you foster – feels intentional, grounded, and genuinely meaningful."

Steven Greenstein

STEM Innovation Professor @ Montclair State University

"Their book is so good, bits of radical insight every time I open it, but nothing beats experiencing their work in WorldMakers. I've always valued the experience of learning over its output, and their work gives me new ways to think about those things."

Tom Pauly

Director Digital Transformation

"It became my new social media so to speak in a kind of intellectual challenging way. I am hardly on LinkedIn anymore... you are my social platform limited in reach, but deep in content."

Read Them All

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.

Subscribe to Emerging Futures Newsletter

Two questions, every Friday since 2020:

What is creativity? and How do you innovate?

A weekly experiment in emergence, creativity, and change-making.

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