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.  

What do we, as Humans, want to become? And what do we not?

I began this trip with a visit to 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.

In this 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. We have continually sought to understand why things happen and then to influence the through invoking higher powers, whether they be natural phenomena, the power of ancestors or the invention of Deities and Gods. But the more I travel and observe different human cultures the more I am convinced that it is humanity as a collective that we need to understand because that is what has the most direct impact.

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, to have to risk Sniper Alley to run for groceries, to have felt beseiged and cut off from the rest of the world whilst encircled by ruthless gunman in the hills above. I had numerous conversations with those who remembered it, from taxi drivers to guides to café owners and people in bars and felt disgusted that this tragedy had happened so recently on European soil.

But I also felt the resilience and could not help thinking about our human propensity to continuously destroy and rebuild, our almost primal connection to place and space and our need to return to where there are ancestral connections, deep rooted stories and beliefs which are at the core of our human identity. 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 on, and often continents away, removed.

The conversations I had with people keep this identity alive, connected with hope and the determination to make things better, to remember the lessons and work to prevent these terrible things from happening again, and yet they keep being repeated.

So what needs to change? And what can we do to help make that change?

You can imagine the conversations of people thousands of years ago sitting around a campfire talking about how things need to get better, or coming up with a new idea, or sharing some insight. We are the living embodiment of those conversations because this is how we humans have evolved.

We have never had the breadth and depth of an understanding of history, a plethora of smart technologies combined with global connectivity, nor the sheer number of humans that we have now. Nor have we had the starkness of choice as to what sort of tomorrow we might want to make for ourselves.

We have the most sophisticated technologies in all of human history and humans are no longer able to converse, to hold a meaningful conversation. (Yuval Noah Harari)

I believe that the most important tool moving forward is the ability to have real and meaningful conversations.

So what makes a good human conversation, and how can we ensure that we continue to have them?

Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown (Rachel Botsman).

A big part of this is curiosity, a deep desire to learn about someone or something through asking open, unbiased and sincere questions without judgement, invasion or disrespect.

This is often driven by a high degree of courage and being prepared to move into spaces which may be uncomfortable but yield insights beyond the mundane and superficial. This is where trust friction is particularly important because this friction so often rubs off the veneer of politeness in order to reveal the hidden gems beneath.

We need a degree of courage and being prepared to move into spaces which may be uncomfortable but yield insights beyond the mundane and superficial. This is where trust friction is particularly important because this friction so often rubs off the veneer of politeness in order to reveal the hidden gems beneath.

Not always, but often, this takes time and the patience to give the conversation breathing space, to allow the vulnerability and openness which comes from the challenging of assumptions and the revelation of filters and biases.

In order to really enable this there needs to be a high degree of critical thinking to analyse and interpret what is being said, and not being said, both through the verbal and non-verbal.

If we can harness all of this then perhaps the most important element for a meaningful conversation is permission. Permission to engage in the conversation from the outset because there is an openness and willingness to both listen and be heard.

How is this conversation serving me and serving the person I'm talking with?

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 our planet becomes increasingly crowded with more urban spaces and we continue to be on the move in just the same way as our ancestors were, seeking a better life with more opportunities, fleeing conflict, or just for leisure and entertainment, we are going to have to become much better at having conversations. We each bring with us our histories, traumas and expectations which are all part of the 21st Century human melting pot.

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. 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.

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‍The right conversation at the right time can change everything (Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators).