The best ideas start as conversations

• Quote by Jonathan Ive
• Photograph from the Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver

Over the past couple of months I have traveled from the UK to Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Bosnia, Greece and now find myself in Turkey.In each and every one of these places I have met with friends or people in our Intersticia community, attended conferences or events, been on tours, or simply just hung out.As I reflect back it is the conversations with people that have remained even after I have left the physical space regardless of how different these spaces have been.  Chatting with taxi drivers, tour guides, other travelers, hotel staff, people in cafes is how we learn local stories and experiences, and this has always been at the core of how human knowledge is transmitted, transferred and transcribed.Conversations are at the core of what it means to be human, which is why our Brave Conversations events have been so important for us since we created them over a decade ago, and why our Intersticia Retreats are fundamental to the work we do with our Fellows and more broadly.As I have been musing on what the next phase of Intersticia might be over the next few years I determined that 2024 was to be a year of listening – listening to the conversations around me at a deeper level in order to address the fundamental question that drives the work that we do in order in to explore the questions:

• What do stewards and leaders need to effectively steer humanity through the challenges of the 21^st Century?
• How do we determine this when we don’t really know what those challenges are?

We can identify some of these human-centred challenges which are obvious – climate change, resource depletion, human population, ageing, disease, wars and pestilence.  But there are others on the horizon with which we haven’t dealt, such as the emergence of artificial intelligent systems, the potential for humans to become trans or even post-human, the potential for humans to colonise beyond the Earth.  All of these present the question of what we, as humans, want to be, how we want to live, and how we can sustain that within our current finite ecosystem.On this trip I visited Malmo in Sweden to attend “The Conference” with Lisa Kohler who hosted us for Brave Conversations in Stuttgart.  As I wandered around Västra Hamnen, the innovative ‘European Village” part of Malmo designed to host BoO1 – the “City of Tomorrow” as part of the 2001 European Housing Exposition, I kept asking myself:How can we even begin to design a City of Tomorrow when we don’t know what Tomorrow will be?  Let alone the humans who will inhabit it.The City of Tomorrow is built around the area of the former Kockums Shipyards and harbour, reclaimed land where a shiny new human-centred environment has been created for some of today’s residents of the city of Malmo.

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The Conference is an eclectic event which promised to embrace the powerful triad of hindsight, insight and foresight.  Whilst it was held in some very nice venues around Malmo and attracted a big crowd I felt that whilst there were some excellent keynote speakers there were some very pedestrian sponsored ‘break-out’ talks which were mediocre at best.  The persistent theme throughout was to challenge our human hubis and the 21^st Century Zeitgeist that our smart brains combined with our smart technologies will be able to control the world around us and solve all of our problems.Anab Jain and Georgina Voss were particularly impressive as they highlighted the persistent link between our homo sapiens species and the physical and ecological environment that has held us throughout human history.  Above all they referred to the importance of spiritual practice through the ages, from worshiping the elements to ancestor Gods and Deities, and the need to honour and integrate these practices in to our lifestyles and thinking of today.Humans have always been fascinated by the world around us, and we continually seek insights as to why things happen through our reverence for natural phenomena, our belief in the power of ancestors leading to our invention of Deities, Gods and religion.  But it seems to me that it is what is within ourselves that we need to understand most, because of the dreadful things that we do to each other, all too often in the name of defending those ancestors, or Gods or religion.I carried this theme with me as I visited the city of Sarajevo.I have long wanted to visit this most wonderful of cities which is the meeting of cultures, the Jerusalem of the Balkans with its mix of ethnic, religious and cultural tolerance.  Sarajevo is where the Ottoman Empire extended it’s reach into Europe, it is one of a few major European cities to have a mosque, Catholic church, Eastern Orthodox church, and synagogue within the same neighbourhood, and it is the site of a number of historic events that quite literally changed the world.In 1914 Sarajevo was where a local Young Bosnian activist called Gavrilo Princip pulled out a gun and assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, murders that sparked what became known as World War I, led to the downfall of four Empires, and the birth of what we now know as post-modernity.

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It is also a city which witnessed the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, for a total of 1,425 days, from April 1992 to February 1996, during the Bosnian War following the break up of Yugoslavia.

My hotel was directly opposite the site where on 2nd May, 1992, the first shots were fired from the Holiday Inn on to the public who were demonstrating outside the Bosnian Parliament below.  There are now metal squares in the pavement set in place to preserve the blood stains. A generation on these memories are still rich and raw.

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I became fascinated by this and what it must have felt like to live through these times which resulted in so many lost lives and trauma.  I had numerous conversations with those who remembered it, from taxi drivers to guides to café owners and the fact that this tragedy happened so recently on European soil was quite confronting.I could not help thinking about our human propensity to continuously destroy and then rebuild, and yet our need to return to the lands where there are ancestral connections, deep rooted stories and beliefs tied to the physical spaces which may have been visited repeatedly over generations.  This is what our many of First Nations peoples around the world still understand, and perhaps something that deserves a lot more attention from those of us who are many generations removed.You can imagine the conversations of people thousands of years ago around the campfire as someone discovered something new that changed the way things were done, or decided to challenge a certain authority or gave up and decided to leave because they didn’t like the local chief or warlord.  We are living with the consequences of these conversations but they are buried within thousands of years of acculturation and adaption, but they are still there.  It has repeatedly struck me that perhaps one of most important and potentially powerful things we could do now in the 21st Century with all of the understanding of history, smart technologies and global connection is to reveal, focus on and reexamine the assumptions we have about how humans actually live before we blindly and unquestioningly lurch forward into what any sort of future might be.

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I believe that a big part of this is relearning how to have real and meaningful conversations, particularly in an age where so much oh how we interact with each other is digitally mediated by increasingly smart social machines.  As more and more of the processing is being done on our behalf with the minimisation of the friction of human to human interaction we are in danger of losing something which has been crucial to our survival as a species.Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown (Rachel Botsman).

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‍So what makes a good  human conversation, and how can we ensure that we continue to have them?I believe that first and foremost comes curiosity, a deep desire to learn about someone or something through asking open, unbiased and sincere questions without judgement, invasion or disrespect.Next comes an appreciation that human to human conversations often require time, space and the patience of being prepared to navigate and negotiate difficult territory in order to truly learn and begin to understand. It takes time to become vulnerable and open and to recognise and challenge our own assumptions and become conscious of our own filters and biases.We also need a degree of courage and the willingness to move in to spaces which may be uncomfortable but yield insights beyond the mundane and superficial.  This is where trust friction is particularly important.Perhaps one of the most important things we need, particularly in the ‘digital age’, is a high degree of critical thinking to determine what to say, how and when.  This is becoming crucial in an environment where we’re not necessarily sure where information comes from or how it will be used.Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need permission.  Permission to engage in the conversation from the outset.  All too often people see the need for a conversation but don’t actually have the other participants’ consent or permission to have it.  I see this a lot within the inter-generational space where advice might be given but is neither appreciated nor accepted.  The key question to me is was that advice sought?  Was it wanted?  And did the giving of the advice empower or disempower each participant?When having a conversation it is always useful to ask how is this serving each of those participating?I opened this post with a quote about how native peoples interact with the natural environment by asking permission and interacting respectfully.  This applies equally to how we interact with each other and for those who are to steward others through the next few decades it is going to be these social skills which will be critical to influencing what humanity may become.As we encounter more and more people living in increasingly crowded urban spaces our ability to work with and co-operate with others is going to become even more crucial.  At the same time more humans are on the move in just the same way as our ancestors were seeking a better life with more opportunities or less conflict, but with increasingly greater restrictions on where they can go and how they can live.  They bring with them their histories, traumas and expectations which will disrupt and destabilise unless they are proactively managed.  There is no point in welcoming people from elsewhere without making it a priority to learn how they see the world and consider what differences this might mean for the locals.This is the theme I will explore in my next post as I wander around the modern cities and ancient ruins of Turkey, but I’d like to finish this post by referring to a conversation between two towering leaders of the 20th Century, the Reverend Oliver Tambo and the Dalai Llama.At The Conference in Malmo Nipun Mehta referred to their enduring friendship which is beautifully captured in this video, and focuses on shared conversations and above all mutual respect and laughter.  These two human beings have been at the core of major social changes within their own communities but they have worked with words not swords or guns, they have listened and learned rather than seeking to dominate and control, and their friendship is an example of deep personal regard and mutual respect despite religious and cultural differences.Just imagine what we can learn from their humour, their shared goals of compassion, their human dignity and grace.

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Imagine what sort of world we could create if we were prepared to have more brave conversations, to listen and learn, to reflect and allow our slower human processes to solve things rather than descending in to conflict.This is what we hope to create within our Intersticia community and through them to those they impact and influence.The right conversation at the right time can change everything (Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators).