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Emerging Futures is the innovation and creativity newsletter answering the questions:
In-depth articles based on bleeding edge research, backed by science.
Analyzing and synthesizing the process of creativity and innovation that doesn't focus on or begin in ideation...
...So you can deliver your most impactful work.
Join a community of leaders: C-suite executives, curriculum designers, social or environmental change-makers, artists, academics, product developers, service and or user-experience designers.
lain Kerr and Jason Frasca, this newsletter is amazing. Absolutely *disruptive* to my scrolling behavior. The hand-drawn images are👌, and I don't know if l've ever seen a more efficient use of space than that Michael Anderson quote in Volume 7.
What will you receive?
Do you want to shake the way you perceive the world and every moment? I encourage you to discover the world of Emergent Futures Lab. For the past few weeks, I have been receiving their Creativity and Innovation Newsletter every Friday... and it blows your mind. It is one of the best newsletters that can be received when we are interested in complexity, change in companies and transformative management. With the help of simple graphs, they make accessible complex concepts such as: multiple dimensions, emergence, non-linearity, nesting, etc.
Today, two dynamics are highlighted: converging processes and alternative potentials. And you know what? I saw it as a direct link with the mechanisms I work on that explain and govern resistance to change in companies. Definitely next Friday!
Subscribing to lain and Jason's newsletter on creativity & innovation is mandatory if you want to help shape a world that needs much, much more than 'developmental change'. But it also comes with a
warning label: It's deep, thoughtful work that upends established views on creativity. It will keep you awake at night.
I feel my insight and intelligence quota going up when I read your newsletters. Thanks for such nutritional mind food.
OK, this latest newsletter, 7/1/22, holy wow EFL. happily blown mind.
Great stretching of the mind, as usual.
By the way, Jason and lain's weekly Friday morning email is a delight. My sour, dour world-weary stress eases back when I catch their always unique opening salutation—something like "hello fellow assemblages of positive potentials..." Puts a smile on my face. With a sip of coffee, my world has a bit more hope, a world we can change for the better.
I look forward to this newsletter each week. While it meshes well with my personal thinking style, every issue still challenges me and forces me to think.
Thank you for a newsletter on innovation that is actually worth reading. It is itself novel in topic selection and treatment, it is responsive to the community, and it has depth.
And while squarely in the space of innovation, the multidisciplinary approach means it hits on so many levels. There is also a special art to it. The drawings, the word choices... it feels special, real, alive.
lain Kerr and Jason Frasca, I just read your newsletter and I found it insightful! Was fun to participate in it and share ideas!
Nothing makes me more appreciative of being alive and active in these days than the work of Jason & lan. The impact is a daily meditation before I launch into action.
When I read Emergent Futures Lab newsletters, I found a recount of my own journey with this concept called "Creativity".
I grew up believing art meant #creativity and did my best to hang out with artistic folks. And I believed it was innate in some people, a 'talent'. Later I realised that is nonsense. Art works also have plenty of what Thich Nhat Hanh called the "habitual energies" aka repeating scripts.
Instead, I embarked on another muddled journey of Creativity as a skill.
Once you cast something as Skill, immediately other phrases follow- "mastery", "upskill", "agency", "excellence", "education" and so on.
I puddled trying to extract 'tools' used by what was assumed as 'creative geniuses', ', read immense creativity research literature, learning sensory play, body work and using rituals and practices to, well, spit out that creative moment. And yes that Janusian practices of holding paradox (within me).
Notice the hyperindividualism in my endeavour.
At some point, I was enchanted by evolutionary biology and soon came to consider creativity as an always present quality in every being.And that one had to have appropriate conditions for this quality to blossom. The loci continued to be the individual.Entering the world of Bateson ideas, General Semantics and Cybernetics changed it. Now I had no clue what was Creativity. All the research articles andpractices showed up as distorted.
A dense fog. Massive confusion.
Which is where the EFL newsletters opened a portal. I won't attempt to define it anymore nor summarise what must have taken years to reflect and publish the 100+ newsletters. (Honestly, I have read only a fraction of the resource and it was plenty.)
My current play is this: a new idea/opening is what emerges when being-with in a state of deeply-perceived #complexity of the whole relationship.
I know it will evolve. This in itself is profoundly exciting.
