Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Learn more about Theo’s work at https://www.theoedmonds.com/. Details on his Creativity America initiative are at https://www.creativityamerica.com/.

Theo recommends these books for more detail:

• The Handbook of Organizational Creativity (two volumes) – Ronnie Writer Paulman, editor; specifically its chapter on the cognitive neuroscience of creativity (Roger Beatty), and the chapter on organizational creativity (Paulman).
• Robert Schiller’s Narrative Economics; it’s in paperback at https://amzn.to/4jfPWPr and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3FMqVge.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– Amazon Execs Share How Innovation Delivers Your Future with Dave Carbon, John Love, Dr. Vin Gupta, & Tye Brady

– The Creative Mindset: Mastering the Skills that Empower Innovation with Jeff DeGraff

– Fostering a Culture of Innovation with Mastercard’s Chief Innovation Officer, Ken Moore

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Theo Edmonds is a Culture Futurist®, entrepreneur, artist, and poet reshaping the future of innovation by uniting the best of culture, commerce, and brain science. Over the last 30 years, he has spearheaded transformational projects for Fortune 100 companies, governments, and universities. In 2024, he launched Creativity America, a multi-year initiative to build America’s Wonder Economy. This groundbreaking collaboration with top pioneers in cognitive neuroscience, industrial psychology, business, and the arts aims to increase America’s Creative Brain Capital by 25% within a decade. Recognized as an unconventional trailblazer, Theo is a sought-after speaker and executive advisor in strategic foresight, leading organizational creativity and culture change management.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is Innovating Leadership Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in that mission today is Theo Edmonds culture, futurist, entrepreneur, artist, and poet. We’ll be talking about whether American innovation lost its sense of wonder.

Theo, what are the big problems that are causing innovation to stall right now?

Theo: The big problems today are are, think of threefold. Before we get to the problem, we have to lay out the logic model around what is wonder, because it’s kinda like the moon, and the moon is always in our lives and we write sonnets about it, and we sit at the moon and we anthropomorphize the man in the moon and all those kinds of things.

In reality, I. Even though the moon is omnipresent, we don’t really know that much about it as a human. So wonder, creativity, we use these words all the time without really digging into what they mean. And so what I mean by them [00:01:00] is I’m focusing on wonder as the fuel of creativity and wonder is this balancing point between awe and curiosity.

Awe is this expansive state and curiosity is more of this kind of finite state that you can get curious about something with a little effort. You can scratch that itch and you may become curious about something else, but it’s terminal. Whereas awe is ever expanding. You spend too much time at one side or the other, too much of curiosity.

You’re gonna lose sight of the big picture. You spend too much time and awe, you may actually never get anything done because it is can be existential, it can be fearful even. And so wonder is what keeps the balance moving between those two things. And we need both of them. Wonder’s an epistemic emotion.

It’s our discovery emotion. It’s why we want to know more. And just beyond wanting to know more, it’s what drives us to actually enjoy the pursuit of knowledge. I think it was, uh, Socrates that first said, you know, wisdom begins in wonder. So if we can agree that wonder fuels creativity, creativity fuels [00:02:00] innovation.

Innovation fuels growth, that our problems kind of sit somewhere in that. So in America, when culture and commerce, where they intersect is in business, innovation, culture and commerce. When they’re not connected intentionally, innovation suffers. And where we see the big problems today are, are three big buckets that call fear, frustration, and fragmentation.

So when we think about fear at this intersection of culture and commerce, we see a lot of industries underperforming in innovation skills. We’ve all gotten kind of used to that world economic forum, future of work, job skills report. The first five on there are analytical and creative thinking, or one and 2, 3, 4, and five for self-awareness, resilience, and curiosity.

Those are just five of the eight or nine skills that we have combined into understanding creativity. Innovation is the application of creativity. When we think about underperforming [00:03:00]innovation skills, that should be concerning, but it also should be good news to us in some way, because skills are transferable, they’re teachable.

You can upskill them. There is action that can be taken. Teams and companies often overlook and misunderstand and, and certainly fail to measure many of these innovation skills that the world economic points to as being critical for success in the future of work. Another thing around fear is that executives have internalized a narrative that says.

If you lean too much into creativity, that productivity will suffer when in actuality the research says just the opposite. I’ve thought a lot lately about Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That still holds true today. Fear is the top barrier to innovation.

It is reported by 85% of practitioners in the innovation ecosystem, and even though it’s the top fear, less than 11% say that their companies even acknowledge it, let alone do anything to address [00:04:00] it. And so as you kind of disaggregate mountains of data, what we see is that wonder, trust, freedom, and joy are specific strategies that have lots of empirical science behind them for overcoming fear in teams and being able to unlock the courageous innovation that moves beyond incrementalism.

That fear contracts and causes into the kind of transformational breakthroughs that the markets are demanding today. Fear of the unknown. Fear of being able to know what to do with something. Once you really have it defined, then there’s frustration. We don’t really have baselines and we’re not measuring them.

There’s no baseline on them. And so with this lack of effective tools, with that lack of effective measures, it really leaves a lot of the creative potential of our society untapped. When you’re talking about innovation, that is not a good thing and it causes a lot of leaders to be frustrated. So fear, frustration, and then fragmentation experience in America teaches us that when we put [00:05:00]together and unite the very best from business science and the arts, that’s what discovery breaks wide open and begins to happen.

Uh, put a human on the moon. It gave us the microchip, it gave us Hollywood and hip hop. I would even go so far as to say that our sense of wonder is perhaps our nation’s legacy to the world. We have a sense of wonder that is unparalleled in human history of what we have been able to do in terms of a convergent goal direction around using that wonder to bring new things into existence that have created incredible value for many, many types of stakeholders around.

But today we have also set up our systems. Business, science, arts, different industries, they’re all still operating in silos. What happens then is that misses the bigger picture, and that’s why a lot of them are struggling, and so we have these fragmented creativity networks. We fail to integrate cognitive, emotional and social aspects of creativity into our research insights.

We fail to [00:06:00] advance technologies. And then finally there’s the AI driven industries. When we think about all of the investment that has been made in bringing forth. AI strategies in companies across sectors, the massive investments that are being made in this, and yet every CEOI talk to doesn’t really fully understand how those investments are going to be converted into enterprise value.

They know that there is a loose definition. They know that everybody’s doing it so they feel obligated to make the investments. But until we could do a better job of connecting strategy with foresight, we’re gonna be continually frustrated about why aren’t these investments paying off? Also, importantly, with ai, there’s one more thing and that is sameness in monoculture.

In nature, we see that when an invasive species like kudzu is this big invasive species that kind of takes over an ecosystem, when that takes over an ecosystem, what it makes appear is, is that there’s sameness in [00:07:00] monoculture when we know that under that layer there’s incredible variety and vibrancy, and when nature gets too heavy on the monoculture side itself corrects.

We see this all the time. And so think about social media without really even trying, kind of made us all a little bit more alike. If you’re traveling on the interstate, this stop is gonna have the same collection of stores and fast food restaurants as the next stop. And so as we become more alike, as we become more of a monoculture, because we are paying attention to all of these signals around us, that’s not good news if innovation is your goal.

Because if you don’t have that variety of options to choose from, your innovations are gonna constantly have a blind spot that is just not good.

Maureen: Theo, how did these problems show up in the marketplace as signals and trends?

Theo: It’s a great question. They first show up as stories. Robert Schiller had a brilliant book a few years ago, narrative Economics, where he looked at, it wasn’t, say, events like the Crash of 29 that led to the recession, but it was [00:08:00] actually how the stories about that event got told in the media that led to changes in people’s behaviors, and I think so.

Stories is where these things first show up, and those stories can look a little bit different in a lot of ways, but I look for them as a culture futurist in four areas. If we can think about innovation as the story we tell between where we are and where we think we want to be and how we’re gonna get there, any changes in that story or signals that we should be paying attention to.

If you think about the wheel and the internet, they did something almost identical to each other. The wheel changed people’s conception of time. It changed our expectation of how long we expect, fill in the blank activity to take exchange, our expectation of how work gets done. And so anything, the internet did the same thing.

Anytime that there is an innovation that shifts our conception of time, it’s something that I pay a lot of attention to. Those changes in expectations convey through stories. And so if we [00:09:00] have stories around how time is changing, it’s gonna change how we do things. If we have stories around identity shifts, it’s gonna change how we experience and interpret things.

If we have changes around motivation and our stories that we tell about why we do as a society, certain things, it’s going to color how we feel about those things. And if we have changes in. How we explore, that’s gonna change how we’re thinking about things. So those do experience, feel, and think. Those are all questions around how innovation stories find their way into our culture.

Maureen: I was on a conversation earlier today about Gartner’s predictions. It used to take us 14 days to do something, and now it takes four minutes back to the fear. Companies will be delighted that the cost presumably is lower when you look at the AI costs and they’re sparking humans to be afraid.

Theo: Yeah. You break up the cost.

That’s a really great point that you made because the other side of [00:10:00] cost is opportunity cost. That’s where I mentioned earlier about connecting strategy and foresight. If we are only executing on strategy and a piece of that strategy is cost. As we’re assigning it to, you know, risk mitigation or, or human resources productivity, and we’re not thinking about the opportunity cost from doing it this way versus that way.

That way is getting ready to change. With ai, our expectations around how something is supposed to get done is getting ready to change because of ai. One of the things that I see in every organization I go to, I call it innovation grief. I love that. It’s a powerful thing. Grief is a in the brain. It’s a relearning process.

Our brain is relearning around things that are no longer physically there, that we expect it to be there. It’s a hard kind of period for any one of us to go through. When you think about grief, that doesn’t go anywhere or doesn’t get processed, that’s never a good thing because there’s a whole lot of [00:11:00]science that shows what that does to the body, leading to this kind of thing called the neurodynamic process that ultimately can cause inflammation in the body that can ultimately cause different kinds of diseases.

But innovation, grief is a specific. Kind of thing. And if you think about how the market demands these rapid cycles of innovate and we, you know, we often valorize failure as kind of this wonderful thing to be able to fail fast, fell off those kinds of tropes. But if you’re together with a team in a company and you’ve been working for 12 months, 16 months, something happens in the marketplace, that completely changes.

The reason you all were going this direction rather than another direction, and the CEO comes in and with inside of a week, that team that had been part of your identity had been part of your purpose, gets assigned to a different project, doing something else, maybe gets split up a new team forms. If you go through that enough times and nothing is really in place, that helps the team members successfully [00:12:00] navigate those identity shifts that they’re gonna go through.

It’s going to contract their ability to be creative over time as a group together, it’s gonna contract it because you know it’s gonna impact how they trust each other. It’s gonna impact how they trust leadership. It’s gonna impact how they feel like their contributions matter. And we’ve got all of our systems set up today just to manage the mechanics of that team change.

We don’t have anything set up to manage the KPIs. Key performance indicators around the identity changes that people are going through that we know in the research unlocks creativity.

Maureen: So I understand my team used to be part of supply chain and now they’re part of business development and there’s a slightly different objective and shift on the org chart, but we also shift how we do business and our stakeholders are different.

For some individuals, their job, the identity they carry with that job [00:13:00] is now changed. That chipping away at what is meaningful to me or my meaning in the world will become more significant with ai,

Theo: it absolutely will. There’s also the positive side of that. It can become more significant in a very beneficial way if leaders understand how to lead creativity in teams.

So much of the way we talk about creativity has been focused at this individual level, and that’s not what I’m talking about here. My work focuses a hundred percent on team and organizational level constructs. When most people talk about creativity, they say, oh, that’s a creative person, or What a creative product that is.

In those situations, we’re using creative as an adjective to describe an individual, to describe an individual thing, but creativity is a process. That process to go anywhere and to become enterprise value, to become value in society is a team level approach. Again, going back to the stories, Maureen, we’ve got [00:14:00] this beautiful story about American exceptionalism through the years, and that’s true.

We’ve done amazing things. Stories change over time, and we often tell the story in America of the lone genius, you know, in their scientific lab or the garage in Palo Alto or wherever it might be, that comes up with this world changing idea. In reality that is just a lone person working in a lab or in a garage, unless those ideas connect into larger systems and connect with teams who can build it out.

This idea around genius as as a lone enterprise. When you go back to the etymology of the word genius, it means the protective spirit of a person or a place. Hmm. And when you look at it that way, genius is really pointing to this alignment between individual and society. Individual and collective. You know, our brains are wired to be social for almost that very reason.

And so we think about genius as a cultural outcome. The ability of a group of different people coming from [00:15:00] different backgrounds to work together to do something that just one of them could not do on their own. Navigating that creative tension that comes along with that, and being able to sit in that tension long enough without having to feel like you have to solve the tension away in order to find the deeper questions.

That’s what leads to the transformational impact that we want innovation to have that synchronization between you and your environment, you and your team, you and your social networks, it’s incredibly important because at the end of the day, that’s where new cultural and economic value come from.

Maureen: It’s crucial thinking about, oh yeah, it’s not scientists sitting in their lab solving a problem, but that only becomes a solution when it’s put into practice.

Theo: Yes, the work in the lab is very important, but it’s only a piece of a much bigger picture.

Maureen: How can wonder become the spark for re-ignition?

Theo: Wonder is what activates focus. In some ways, if we think [00:16:00] about our brains and how creativity works in the brain. There’s something called the Salience Network and the Salience Network.

It really gives focus and attention to a specific area. It connects three other networks. It connects the default mode network, which is where we hold memory and identity and default mode kind of operates, you know, like in the background it operates to focus the executive control network, which is how we make our decisions.

You know, it’s where we’re really engaging in executive task. And importantly, there’s always this kinda limbic system that, that emotion that we’re all feeling, you know, like our brains receive new information. Metaphorically, but also scientifically, emotionally, before we receive that information logically.

And the salience is what gives focus to all three of those working together. And so if we know that’s how our individual brains work, what does that look like? When you scale it up to an industry or to a nation or to a a, an economy culture is kinda like our default mode network. It’s always [00:17:00]operated, it’s always shaping.

It’s holding memory. It’s helping us form our identity. Commerce is our executive control. That’s our innovation systems. That’s how we’re making decisions that create value. And media today operates like a limbic system. It’s carrying that emotion between culture and commerce telling us how we’re to feel about this or to that.

It’s either causing us to fear something or it’s causing us to really like embrace it. Wonder at a societal level becomes then very important because it’s what gives, like Robert Schiller talked about those stories in narrative economics, wonder becomes the base of the stories that we tell about our culture, commerce and the media are interacting and where we should be focusing.

All of the immense resources that come along with all three of those fields. And so if you take our individual brain and what we know around how creativity works in the brain, you scale that up to societal level, culture, commerce, and media wonder then becomes the north star. It becomes the trigger, it becomes the [00:18:00] catalyst.

It becomes both the story and the strategy that we use in organizing culture, commerce, and media together to really do something exceptional. Culture is what creates a narrative and gives it meaning. Commerce is what transforms that meaning into action. Media is what makes it impactful and wonder is that activator that focuses the attention of those three other things.

On the potential for a breakthrough. As I’m working with a client, how do I do this? What’s it look like? I’ll give you a a perfect example. There’s something that I often. Use an exercise when I’m facilitating a group of executives or a company, and I call it the Wonder Walk. And depending upon how big the room is and how many people are in the room, I’ll say to the participants, pick a number between one and whatever.

Depending on the size of the room, they pick their number, and then I have ’em stand up and face a direction, any direction, and I ask them to walk that number of steps. And then they do that, and then I ask them to find three things right where they are. [00:19:00] That sparks a sense of wonder. One of the very first times that I was ever using this exercise, there was a CFO in the audience.

The way the room was set up that CFO had walked the perfect number of steps to land him toe to toe, looking at a blank beige office wall. And I thought, well, this, this should be interesting. It was that person that came up with so many things that just lit the whole Rube open. And here’s what he said in the report out.

He said, when I got to that wall, I thought, Ugh, I don’t get it. But then he saw there was a little chip of paint. That he saw the color it was before it been painted, the color that it was at that moment. Then he said, well, huh, I wonder what the wall looked like. I mean, it was that a color, and who chose this color?

Where did this color come from? And like, was it a. Paint company and who mixed this color and decided it was gonna be this shade of beige and not that shade of beige [00:20:00] and where did they live and what they have for bright. So he just, he just kept unfolding in this really beautiful way because he was letting himself go back and forth between curiosity and awe at the immensity of the most simple things are connected to all the other things.

So the interconnection that he was able to find from that wonder wall is just what example of what that can look like in very practical terms. But going back to those kind of three problems that we have, and fear, frustration, and fragmentation, we don’t do a really good job of what. That CFO did very simply standing in the front of a beige wall.

He was able to overcome those three things and find this amazing creativity and curiosity and sense of awe. That was all around him in that moment. I think if we can engineer, I. That back into our innovation processes and also connected to the return on investment, wonder becomes this really, really powerful tool.

The good news there is that we have a lot of science that [00:21:00] can be leveraged to manage and help us to focus or to get the biggest bang for the buck.

Maureen: How is creativity America leveraging these insights first, what is Creativity America?

Theo: Creativity America is, it’s a brand new initiative, but we’ve been building it for the last three years over the next 10 years.

It’s a movement that is a collaboration between some of America’s top cognitive neuroscientists and industrial and organizational behavioral psychologist, artist, and business leaders. All around increasing the creative brain capital of the American innovation value chain and workforce by 25% over the next decade.

It’s the wonder economy. It’s the human side like we’ve been talking about, of technology and the future of work. And in the wonder economy, creativity is currency. We live at such a unique time because of things like generative ai that the value of a question, especially one that is. Not a question that is normally asked has [00:22:00] emits economic value today in ways that maybe just even three years ago it wouldn’t.

But it’s the technology that has forced this intentional conversation around what is human creativity and also caused us to start to put a value and economic value on that human creativity. That potentially is more valuable in monetary terms than many of these small, incremental products and services that go around AI because a good question is going to lead to a higher output because of the way the technology works.

So as we’re developing the wonder economy, so there’s a leadership component to what we’re doing with creativity in America. Then the second piece, there’s a research component, which is the developing this creative brain capital, this measurable, actionable scientific dashboard to allow teams to measure creativity, cognitive, emotional, and social creativity.

As a KPI. In their innovation portfolios. And then finally, a six step process. Just like business [00:23:00] accelerators teach the core business skills there may needs, we’ve got a six step process called Wonder that allows teams to pick up a lot of those human side skills that we all know are so important, but.

Beyond platitudes around them. We haven’t had really good measurements, science and tools to be able to implement them in a systematic way across industries. And so we’re trying to bring some precision to this very, very important conversation.

Maureen: Why would a leader who’s trying to balance between employee engagement and customer journeys and.

Dropping money to the bottom line. Why would they choose to invest here and create one more thing that employees have to do or teams have to do? I love this question and

Theo: I get it a lot. The reason that the World Economic Forum says that analytical, creative, faking self-awareness, resilience, and curiosity are the top five skills.

Is not because the World Economic Forum wants everybody to feel good. It’s [00:24:00] because they are critical to economic performance. When you think about engagement, all the things that you just said, those are these one-off siloed out things. Let’s stress engagement as if it’s a standalone. Let’s stress employee wellness as if it’s a standalone.

Let’s stress all the things. And as long as we have these standalone approaches, we really miss how humans work. Humans work based upon this integrated, interconnected set of things that they bring to the table. If we look at the success of employee engagement programs, I just saw Gallup produce its latest findings just about a month ago.

Employee engagement is at an all time low. If we look at employee wellbeing, how many companies are out there supposedly delivering employee wellbeing? Those are not going the the right direction either. In terms of metrics, entrepreneurs also are very specific area of concern for me because those are our nation’s.

Net new [00:25:00] job creators and entrepreneurial teams could be a startup company where it could be an entrepreneurial team within a company. I. When we look at the mental wellbeing of entrepreneurs, it’s been declining for 10 years and it’s recently just gone off a cliff at just at a time when we’re needing them more.

So what I would say to executives is part of the frustration that you’re feeling is because all of these things have been disconnected, all of the things you named, we have a side to hr, hr, adjacents. Pieces of an organization. So when we do that, what we’re assigning, employee engagement, employee wellbeing, those types of things to, we’re assigning them to cost centers that have a risk mitigation function in organizations.

And we separate that out from where we’re placing our bets to grow the company when we know those things are connected. And so it’s about connecting those things. When I talk about it a while ago about connecting strategy and foresight, that’s what I was talking about. Cultural futurism answers three questions.

Where does a company take action? How does that specific company know that the [00:26:00] action they’re taking is a wise action? And what are they gonna need to stay resilient and curious when the unexpected absolutely will happen? And so we bring those three questions into radical clarity. For leaders so they can make horizon planning decisions rather than making these one-off decisions about a little incremental bump here or, or something there based upon, you know, I’ve picked up the magazine in LAX and by the time I get off in LaGuardia, I’ve got the one answer.

Magic bullet’s gonna fix everything. Those do not exist. And so with creativity, America. It’s a holistic, integrated solution that is very human in its presentation, very human in its approach. We’ve gathered the best scientists to bring scientific rigor to it, but not everybody’s gotta have a PhD to understand it.

That was very, very important to us. A 25% boost in creativity. You know what I talk about is creative brain capital. Think about the billions that could unlock in GDP, the new products, the new services, the new [00:27:00] business models. It could fuel. That’s the reason that the World Economic Forum focuses so much on creativity.

Come along with that, the higher return on investment, innovation, grief goes down, burnout, all of these things that we’ve been talking about become possible when we introduce the right tools, the right processes, and the right metrics to measure and manage creativity as part of an organization’s portfolio in the KPI, in the same way that we’re measuring the return on innovation investments that we’re making.

Maureen: We’ve talked about story. Help me to see the story and how it actually plays out for a company. Tourism

Theo: maybe an interesting place to start. If we think about companies like Airbnb that have become really, really successful in customer experience, what they’ve been able to do is to personalize and connect individual travel to individual meaning, and then build a community online, built around that kind of experience.

So [00:28:00] that’s one example because when we’re traveling to someplace, we’re traveling based upon a wonder based principle. We’re wanting to learn something. You know, I was telling somebody the other day, I went to a, a state travel association meeting here recently. They were putting these very big numbers up.

That travel in this state was almost a $300 billion annual boost to the economy of the state. And I asked them, you know, I said, I’m sure you have ways of reinvesting that economic benefit that comes because of travel. Of course we do. We have all these ways. Uh, then I said to ’em, but the number that got me is that you also said that there was about 200 plus million discreet individuals that were coming through.

When you travel, if you’re a rudder like I am, that run that you take becomes a little bit easier. You’re noticing things that you feel a little lighter. You start to look at things more deeply than you might have before, certainly than you do if you’re, you know, back in your home city and you’re driving to work, you, we stop looking at things, [00:29:00] we stop noticing things.

But when you’re traveling, that wonder comes back. That engagement with the world comes back. It was striking to me that there was no conversation around what the curiosity, the wonder, et cetera, that these travelers were having, these insights that were happening because of the place they were in. They were going back and enduring to businesses and development wherever they were coming from.

So we collected, we invest the economic benefit from the travel industry that comes from the heads and beds. We don’t do anything with the curiosity, the ideas that happen because of the travel.

Maureen: We went to Egypt and Dubai a couple years ago and I wasn’t that excited about, let’s just go to another city, Dubai.

I’ve been to big cities, but what was fascinating is what. The UAE has done in 50 years of converting a society that was predominantly nomadic ouen to [00:30:00] one of the most sophisticated technological cities in the world. And one of the safest, I went from ah, city to absolute salute wonder. They have accomplished something that has not been done at a scale.

It’s not like there’s a building. The world’s tallest building right now is built on sand, which meant that they had to invent new technology. So I come back fascinated about how did that happen? How did they structure their society? How are they. Structuring society for a post oil world so that it’s not gonna be a, oh, we were fabulous and then we decline.

What can we learn from that? That would be then pulled back into culturally appropriate for companies I’m consulting with.

Theo: It’s a fascinating proposition what you just said, isn’t it? Because what you laid out, while we’re talking about travel, you could apply that to high-end consumer goods. You could apply that to financial services.

You could apply that for [00:31:00] sure to healthcare. For the longest time, we have kind of done this reductionist approach to let’s create a solution that works for the most people. But now the expectation because of artificial intelligence and other things has been, I want my solution that works for me. Our identities as consumer is beginning to change and those expectations are beginning to change.

Talking to a friend of mine the other day, and we were talking about the potential for some of the massive advancements in neuroscience when combined with applied quantum computing and so forth. To be able to have an entire industry sector that doesn’t exist today based upon the buying and consuming of memories, whether they’re yours or other people.

That will be fascinating. And so as we think about the things that we’re talking about now, that’s the things that I’m looking at is what doesn’t exist today or exist in some other form as a signal, as a trend. That when we ask a different question of it [00:32:00] can point us to where there might be new opportunity.

Because the one thing I want your listeners to be sure they understand is we’re not laying out in creativity America with the work that we’re doing, another risk mitigation or cost management strategy. What we’re helping organizations do is to prepare their workforce, their bo, their r and d teams, especially, how to become prepared for anything.

As opposed to focusing all of the effort and burning through the time, talent, and treasure on trying to be prepared for everything. Everything is a risk question. Anything is an opportunity, and then and science is really caught up to where it can really be applied in a fascinating new way that allows leaders to think about things like creativity as an actionable strategic asset that can be invested in grown and empirically measured.

Maureen: I love the idea that it’s an actionable strategic asset. And I had a conversation actually this morning with a client about how their [00:33:00] organization is preparing. As you’ve said, we know that stuff’s gonna happen, so we do need confidence that we can navigate, that we can thrive no matter what happens. And thrive will look different depending on the scenario.

Theo: That’s it. That’s it, exactly. And that’s where, if you spell out the word wonder work, like artist. Artists have a, a courageous imagination about them. So, you know, it’s a lot of these again, world Economic Forum skillset sets. We’ve done the heavy lifting. Everything I’m getting ready to tell you all have these skill sets that World Economic Forum says.

So work like artists, oh, observe, like researchers. I identify these patterns. These insights navigate like entrepreneurs learn how to pivot, adapt to creatively, to new challenges. Dazzle like nature. There is a lot of information around us if we just look at nature and how nature operates. Explore mystery like humans.

We often sideline mystery in the business context. And yet when you look at, uh, how [00:34:00] over the last 50 years organized religion has gone down, we’ve seen an exact growth in spiritual, not religious. People identify as spiritual but not religious, and that decline in organized religion also coincides with increases in purpose-driven marketing, workplace wellbeing, all these kind of things that we look at as holistic wellbeing.

That. Well once for the province of something else, we’re now assigning them to, you know, our work lives. Entrepreneurship is a great example of that. So more mystery like humans. And then finally radiate like stardust. Uh, I love leaving people with that ’cause I could see their, their minds start to turn just a little bit.

1. That idea came from the chair of the, the Chamber of Commerce here in Denver, Colorado, where I’m located. He’s also the CEO of the Nature and Science Museum. And a couple of years ago at a big chamber meeting he made, he made, I thought, one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard said in a business context.

He said, look, I understand that we’re all here for BA business and, and that’s what we should be here [00:35:00] for. Economy’s very important. But I want you to remember this, that everything that you think you’re here for, that you feel so sure to you, your corporation. This city, the buildings that we’re in, everything that humans have ever created to experience, life is created from just two things.

The things that we have pulled from the earth and human imagination. Both of those things come from the same place. They were quite literally bored at the heart of a dying star. Both of those things are stardust. So how is it that this building and your imagination are actually made from the same materials?

So when I talk about radiating like stardust, this is that kind of final invitation to explore this incredible connection that is already there if we just look to see it, and sometimes it’s as as easy as landing face to face with a blank beige wall that prompts us to find it.

Maureen: Theo, thank you. How do people

Theo: learn more about you?

They can find me at my own [00:36:00] website, Theo Edmonds, and that’s Edmonds with an o.com or@creativityamerica.com. Thank you. Thank you, Maureen, for having me. It’s been a pleasure to be with you.