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Creativity and innovation newsletter - Emerging Futures - Volume 68
Volume 68
Putting a Bow on 2022
Emerging Futures

Welcome to Emerging Futures - Volume 68! Putting a Bow on 2022...

Greetings, fellow co-creators!

Emerging Futures Vol 68 Newsletter cover

It is time. If you follow the Gregorian Calendar (amongst other calendars) as we do – it’s time to faithfully transition from one year to the next — from 2022 to 2023.

Let’s take a moment to celebrate, but only briefly — for 2023 is a new year filled with many new years. In just a few short weeks we’ll celebrate the year of the rabbit. Till then, the moment belongs to “2023” — let’s not rob it of that! Let’s honor the year properly by placing a bow on 2022, so we can turn to experimenting and collaborating with the possibilities yet to come.

Our intention in writing this newsletter volume was to list the top content we’d created in 2022. Not all that creative — but, sometimes, the creativity has already been done, and all that is left to do is follow. In this case, following the magic of lists…

We love lists. And we love checking out all the personal lists at this time of the year. For us, the trouble in pulling this list together was the sheer volume of content we needed to sift through. To be honest - we had no idea how much we’d published this year. So in pulling this list together for you of what we would deem our best 22 bits of content, really became a monumental task. So, if you would be so kind, humor us for a moment as we take a look at the numbers:

We delivered 23 workshops, 6 keynotes, presented at a few conferences, taught a number of master classes, and worked with many of you individually and in corporate settings across five continents!

And then pretty much every day we posted something on LinkedIn, and on a weekly basis wrote a newsletter and posted other content on our web site. By the numbers this equaled:

Newsletters

  • Newsletters: 54
  • Total Written: 120,227 Words
  • Average length: 2,312 words
  • Shortest newsletter: 471 words
  • Longest newsletter: 4,043

LinkedIn Posts

  • Posts: 461
  • Average length: 250 words
  • Total Written: 115,250 words

Blog

  • Posts: 46
  • Average length: ~1,000 words
  • Total Written: 46,112 words

Images

  • Hand-drawn images and diagrams: 574
  • Best Image:
God descending from the heavens to touch us all

Total words published in 2022:

  • 281,589

This is the equivalent of us publishing one book totaling 1,126 pages… or nearly four 300-page books — where we illustrated nearly every other page! 😱

Mind you; this does not include the drafts that never made it to the light of the public screen. Thousands of words and dozens of images have been left on the cutting room floor – where they belong…

So to be honest, we’re just as surprised to write this as you likely are reading it.

Our daily motivation was both our own curiosity about all things creativity and innovation — and to add value to your own engagements with creativity and innovation processes. And while we lived up to our own curiosity — we’ll leave the judgment of value up to you.

In the end, though, none of the numbers really matter. What’s important to us is that all these efforts to create something meaningful and useful in the space of creativity processes — is what led us to you.

In some way, space, or time, you connected enough with one of our propositions such that we’re here now connected to one another through our keyboards and screens.

We are extremely grateful for this emergent connection between us. It is both humbling and energizing.

And so, because you are here with us - we’d like to say two final things:

First, Thank you! Thank you for being on this journey with us. For the deep engagement — the evolution, critique, feedback and new challenges.

Second, with so much content, the “noise” can be overwhelming. And so, we’d like to offer you the “signal” in our work from 2022 — below please find a list of the 22 best pieces Emergent Futures Lab published this year.

We wish you a peaceful, fulfilling, and creative 2023!

Iain and Jason

Winter Northern Lights

Our personal curation of the 22 best of 2022:

  1. Where does creativity come from in organizations?
  2. When innovation happens, problems are not solved — worlds are made
  3. How does the new come into being?
  4. Creativity is not about ideas
  5. Why do we use models of creativity that are anti-creative?
  6. Three Reasons Design Thinking Principals Are Anti-Creative
  7. How to create novel, disruptive innovations...
  8. Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution
  9. 45 Highlights from 45 Innovation & Creativity Newsletters...
  10. The Five Myths of Creativity
  11. The Greeks Weren't Creative?
  12. The Greeks Did Not Have “Creativity
  13. Resituating Agency and the Mental in Creativity
  14. On Minds and Mindsets
  15. Innovation — It’s About Problems
  16. How to Invent Problems
  17. How to Leave Problems
  18. What is the Use of Half a Wing? Why Ideation Misses the Point
  19. 12 Propositions for Exaptive Practices
  20. Systems are Creative: On Emergence and Creativity
  21. Key Tools for Emergent Innovation
  22. Feeding Forward — the process takes over

Till Volume 69,

Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

We’re How You Innovate

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🧨 P.S.: We facilitate workshops and the accolades are overwhelming.

❤️‍🔥 P.P.S.: Love this newsletter? We'd be grateful if you heap a bit of praise in the comments

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🏞 P.P.P.P.P.S.: This week's drawings in Hi-Resolution

📚 P.P.P.P.P.P.S.: Go deeper - Check out our book which is getting great feedback like this:

Robert Ransick - Book Testimonial

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