Over 20 years ago I read Peter Block’s fantastic book ‘The Answer to How is Yes’ and I took away 2 approaches which have featured in almost everything I have done since:
Its ok not to know how it is going to go- at the start of a project there has to be space for the unknown and that includes ‘failure’
‘Doing’ is the magic- as oppose to thinking about, researching or studying. Of course all these roles have value but doing will always result in something unexpected.
For the first ten years of my career I found it easy to find collaborators to dive into experiments and explore, with this perspective.
Over the past ten years my experience with these approaches has started to shift. Potential clients and partners became uneasy unless they knew what was going to go on, where exactly we would end up and they became increasingly became time poor. At the same time strains were beginning to show in the business model of ‘events’, leaders who were once keen to innovate were increasingly tied to delivering economic returns.
Luckily the point I started my career from (reading a number of impactful books like The Answer to How is Yes ) meant I had some resilience and creativity to keep myself in the ‘doing’. Along with inspiring and collaborative teams I had the experience of my ‘doing’ included:
Virtual place making with a refugee community so they could champion their solutions for climate change
Innovating with purpose led technology that was chosen to be funded by Olympism 365
Championing events as activators of ‘relational infrastructure’ and with the potential to be more important than built infrastructure
Leading a global standard and activating its user community (this includes both those who believed in the standard and also those so attached to old business models that they wanted to stop it
Convening (with neutrality), netweaving, future focusing and many other new terms (to me) that bring to mind new ways of doing things
In 2027 the next step on ‘the answer to how being yes’ starts in the form of a Change Maker programme that is focused on doing rather than learning or knowing. In collaboration with the Positive Impact team and numerous innovators and experts this is a year long programme for 100 people to explore how the world gathers.
It has been a huge challenge for me to write a summary of where I expect people to be at the end of the programme (that is apparently a requirement for funding sign off). I would rather keep telling everyone ‘who knows what the end will be that is up to your situation and your approach to action taking’ and I’m forgetting the world of metrics we live in that require a €850 investment to be justified by x hours of content and y types of resources but I remain incredibly optimistic that the 100 who step into this programme will leave the old metrics at workshop one and quickly realise that a programme of ‘doing’ is the most valuable foundation they could have for their own and our shared future.
The answer to ‘how’ will always be ‘yes’ for me and while I have no idea what the impact of the 2027 Change Maker Programme of ‘doing’ will be, I am confident it will be a connected and collaborative community, questioning the norm, approaching challenges with curiosity and enabling the never done before to become the next normal thing.