Above the waterline

We make ideas in the world,
to create new value.

Below the waterline

We surface ideas within us,
for who we might become.

Which one is more important: what we make, or who we are?

For twenty five years, I’ve been exploring this via one question:

How do people become fans of things?

It’s taken me from innovating for global Artists and brands, to re-educating parents, teachers and kids. I know, right?

Here’s that exploring:

It started with fans.

Not heavy users, not consumers, nor a segment. People who put a thing at the centre of who they are, which is why ‘selling out’ reads as personal betrayal and not as a marketing disagreement.

And so I built this.

A method to understand people at the depth they already carry. And then apply that knowledge to build and grow fans.

Superfandom.ai

It worked. And it raised the next question, because the people inside the business needed to do the thinking for themselves.

So I went inside.

My first ever session was for Unilever and it went badly. Not because I did not know the content. Because I wasn’t confident enough to hold the room in their own confidence. I have thought about that session for twenty five years.

And so a programme. Ten behaviours. Then hundreds of teams and thousands of people. And it works. Yet, every room was full of capable adults re-experiencing something they had quietly lost. The work was giving them back their confidence to create.

And so I built this.

A programme for people.
Because everyone can,
you just need to (re)learn how.

BetterIdeasFaster.com

Which made me ask why we were rebuilding anybody at thirty five?

At nineteen, the challenge is not what you are going to do. It’s who you really want to become.

And that is an experience. To know the idea of you within, and to confidently express that without. So that young people can have ‘something about them’. That makes employers want to hire them, or collaborators co-venture with them.

So I built for them, and am running it as my PhD laboratory of learning.

And so I built this.

A learning-to-earning pathway, built around young people knowing, creating and making, to become future ready.

IndustryApproved.com

And nineteen turned out to be late.

Young teens is where identity starts forming.

And everything becomes who you are in front of everybody. And yet at this intimate, critical junction, our education system is only focused on binary testing. Yes or no, right or wrong. So a self is developed to get through it, and hide the real one behind.

And so I built this.

A story, not a lesson. To entertain new colourful expression, where the user finds themselves in the story, and writes the next chapter.

Madix and the BIFBOTS

But what of the eleven year old who has already been schooled out of it?

Could we teach the teachers?

Translate creativity and innovation science for educators who have little budget, do six hours a day, thirty kids at a time. To renew creative confidence and make it teachable in any classroom, by any teacher.

And so I built this.

Something any teacher can first learn themselves, then learn to run on any curriculum with paper, pens and imagination.

IdeasSchool.com

Yet six hours a day stops at the gate. How might it go home?

Before the gate there is a table.

Five years old, and a kid completely certain they are an Artist. Or an astronaut. Or an athlete. And a million other things. Nobody gives them that. It arrives with them.

And parents and carers who have them every year before school starts, and every evening after it, and long after that.

And so I built this.

Parents and carers know what they are nurturing and holding. So we put creativity in that mix, and resources to support both.