What was it? What was that vision?
Some months ago, when we started talking about what moved us, we did an initial workshop to scaffold our thinking and structure our debate.
We identified about ten or eleven different verbs and after describing our rationale behind choosing them, we then started to distill them, through debate, argument and challenging, till we eventually ended up with six verbs. We were happy with them:
lift, experiment, provoke, disrupt, transcend, and play
These verbs felt right but they were, again, still nebulous – there was no form or direction behind them and nothing yet to tie them together.
The process so far has been rational and cognitive and no amount of brain racking would ‘square this circle’.
We simply allowed ourselves to internalise them and let the verbs settle for a few months till we had completed our initiation to muster up the energy and then relaxed the boundaries.
So now, we were sitting around the garden table in the patio in Wales surrounded by fluorescent post-it notes and beyond us, a forest. Our goal was to create a simple memorable and aspirational statement to define why we were embarking on this enterprise – with a restless desire to perform it.
We spent hours sitting around that table, but we held ourselves to our own community principles that we had agreed upon. We kept going back to the verbs, moving them around, looking at the framework.
Jeremy was asking endless questions – questioning everything (one of our principles), which started annoying me and I was about to tell him to go fuck himself (another principle!) when he started questioning himself, and then – to my own amazement – disagreed with himself and came back with an agreement.
The statement needed to describe what we are doing and what this impact is for.
About 100 post-its later, we suddenly spotted it:
“To support and challenge people, so that they can make a more creative and beautiful world”
It aligned with our visceral verbs, our principles and the areas we had been researching.
We felt drawn to a more creative world both personally and because it seemed like what we trying to achieve and what would bring the world forwards. We couldn’t change the world alone and our statement recognises that it’s only possible with others.
It was a creative ripple-ty – a term we decided to coin in order to reflect our efforts. A disruption that causes positive creative ripples.
It was blowing a hole through the paradigm and allowing the insight to ripple outwards! It was a circle of maximum support and maximum challenge to give us maximum chance of getting there.
It was a recognition that only through creativity can we achieve something great through the uncertainty that lay ahead of us. Why the beauty? Beauty is the universe’s recognition of something which transcends the entropy. Something appreciated but with a slight vulnerability so that we want to relish and preserve it
We had been stirred up to continue on this enterprise, and now we knew why! – Why we had the restless desire to perform it.