In February I will be speaking about The History of Human Collaboration & the Future of Work at the BUILDEX conference with my profound colleague Jacob Simons. Search for “W25” here to register.

Session Abstract:

In the last three years, work has seen unprecedented disruption. The great resignation. Mental health crisis and burnout. Empty offices. Loneliness. How we work, where we work, and the very idea of work itself now lives in a state of immense volatility and uncertainty.

How did we get here and where are we going? What if our work incentivized us to live into our authentic selfhood, to honor our callings, and break from the enchantments of privileged consumption? What if work evoked a sincere joy as an opportunity to focus our attention and care toward something worth nurturing?

The presenters will reexamine the beliefs that drive the nature and form of how our teams work, cover the history of human collaboration, review the belief systems that have shaped “work” over the course of civilization, and how all of this impacts us today.

Attendees will learn:
• How work became what we know it to be today
• The necessary context to begin envisioning the kind of work we want tomorrow
• An advantageous perspective that positions them ahead of change and equips them to make sense of the complexity we face today
• An understanding of the meta forces shaping “work,” workplace, talent attraction and retention, and organizational design

[UPDATE AUGUST 18, 2022 – I WILL NO LONGER BE SPEAKING AT THIS EVENT]

In late August this summer, I’ll be facilitating a workshop titled ‘Reimagining Imagination’ at the 2022 Participatory Design Conference in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. (Learn more at pdc2022.org.) Stay tuned for registration details.

The workshop will cover many of the themes I have written about here before – namely the nature of the crisis we face as a species and the insufficiency of contemporary design practices to address these complex challenges. I will unpack this thesis by speaking to how the epistemological presuppositions of the corporation have perpetuated a bifurcation of human experience where embodied knowing and sensing has been exiled by the disembodied knowing of dataism.

Dataism and quantification are the predominant characteristics of the enterprise conditions within which our modern creative methodologies have been incubated. This enterprise epistemology has quickly atrophied our capacity for abductive reasoning and imagination. I will argue that our inability to solve for the challenges that we face as a society is ultimately rooted in our disembodied state.

I will then propose it is time to reclaim pre-enlightenment practices of non objective imagination and speculation. The practices of encountering, exploring, understanding, and communicating stories of possibility (which I call functional fictions and have written about here.) Functional fictions are narrative containers that posit alternative realities in contrast to the predominant paradigms of our age. They are most often encountered in two innate modalities of human experience that modern creative methodologies and heuristics have long ignored – grief and stillness – two historically innate yet contemporarily rare (or avoided) human experiences that may lead us to a more embodied practice of design. 

The workshop will conclude with an archetype study of prophets – those whose representative voices give social expression to marginalized social constituencies. Prophets are well versed in the acts of imagination that propose the alternative realities that exist in functional fictions. It is the prophetic archetype who encounters functional fictions in the grief of their community and the stillness of reflection, embracing imagination as a legitimate way of knowing. 

Through personal reflection and group based dialogue, workshop participants will have the opportunity to make connections between embodied knowing, grief and stillness as opportunities to connect to self and others, the power of story, and what this may mean for a practice of participatory design. 

In addition to a lecture, workshop participants will have an opportunity to learn a ‘grief practice’ through an intentional listening exercise. Additionally, I will introduce the concept of productive inefficiency and what it means to be ‘time anemic’ in modern life, along with a group practice in embodied stillness. These exercises will provide workshop participants with new paradigms for participatory design, along with ideas for exploratory methodologies that can use in their work.

It’s going to be super nerdy, super human, and super fun. Not your typical design conference breakout. I hope you’ll join me.