 strategies. Is that Michael? There we go. How are you? Good. Welcome. I'm gonna let you do your thing, okay? Thank you so much. What a fantastic presentation you just gave. I was in the chat box just excited. Thank you Michael. Thank you so much for this opportunity to share some ideas and thoughts with you all. I hope you're all having a great day. Hope you're making time for joy, awe, and wonder and some experiences for feeding your soul at this time in our country where there is so much tension and unrest. So my name is Michael O'Brien and I am elated to be here. I know they have my bio material up in some other places so I'm not going to go heavily into who I am. I want to share some ideas with you while I have your attention for a quick moment on this idea of folklore and this idea of future folklore and this unprecedented moment we have to sit at the intersection of a number of confluences or excuse me a confluence of factors that maybe we have not had the chance to sit in at one time with the kind of access to tools and technology that we have in this favorite moment. So I know someone is moving the slides for me so I'm going to ask that you move to the next slide please. So I love Brunet Brown. I think she is a fantastic researcher, thinker, human being and one of the things that struck me in her journey was that she really posited this question to herself and then shared it with the rest of the world. She asked what story was she telling herself about the experience she was having in a given moment with her husband. It's in a famous TED talk. And I took that same advice to my own life and found myself in situations where I would ask myself this question and immediately get to some core insights and some core tensions and some core conundrums that I had to sit in and reason with. Now my background is in music and theater and writing. I've had the privilege of having a career that has crossed multiple sectors. I'm heavily in the sciences now and human development but I still use creativity and art in my work. And the thing about all of my work is I center this idea of innovation and I know innovation is one of the most overused terms to the point where it almost doesn't mean anything. But in this context what I want to think about with innovation and I want to give you a definition that I hold true when I think about innovation. Innovation is about blurred lines and innovation is about taking things that exist in one space and moving them wholly over to another space to be used in ways that they might not have been intended to use to address problems and challenges that they might not have ever been intended to solve. And in this context I'm not saying that Brunei Brown didn't posit this question for us to take to like the largest concentric circle of the world but I am going to posit that like thinking in that way of moving the tool from one space to another I'm going to ask this question what story are we telling ourselves about the experiences the tension the unrest the rebellion I've heard all kinds of terms what story are we telling ourselves about the moment we're in right now locally globally nationally what story could we tell ourselves and how could that story that we begin to reimagine right now support the development of infrastructures of well-being for our children to rest in and settle in as they continue through development so that this idea of future folklore starts to sit in the myth deconstructing the myth of our humanity and the mythos of human development in a way that moves us forward and shifts infrastructure next slide please so what do we know about our story right now we know that the knowing human or homo sapien has gotten us here we're living out the impacts I'm not even going to go deeply into it because I think Nadia spoke about it so beautifully next slide please but in the space to be a bit provocative I want to put out some facts and some ideas that I think gets lost very easily calling your attention to that book on the left there is a legal scholar uh last name whitman first name james wrote this book hillar's american model through his work this is a gugenheim award-winning scholar through his work he was able to throw a gauntlet down and say historically that there is enough evidence to prove that a huge influencer on nazi race law and on hitler directly was american race law jim crow included we need to sit with that and in many places in that book he denotes the fact that there were times when nazi race law deviated from american race law because they felt that the practice was too inhumane we need to sit with that maybe it's because and the reason we need to sit with this is because we hold up world war two and this whole nazi endeavor as the most atrocious thing of the 20th century and I don't know that that is true and here is this legal scholar throwing it out on the right you have a picture of a lewis termin who was the president of the american psychological association in the early of 20th century he took the iq test the benet iq test from france and while he was tenured at stanford worked with the team there to translate it into what became the modern iq test the stanford benet iq test that then went on to undergird eugenics american eugenics this is our history and we have never wrestled with the mythos of humanity that comes from this space that is impacting currently what we see transpiring in the world but particularly in our country next slide please i'm gonna try to move fast and move faster so here's where i think we have this interesting opportunity again for innovation artists creatives we work with narrative 24 7 we work in the space of meaning making 24 7 it is wholly possible in fact i'm going to take a step beyond holy possible i believe it to be true that art and creativity and all the things connected to the creative endeavor and the creative nature of our humanity has been sequestered to utilitarian ideas and over capitalistic ideas around commerce and we have now relegated our best tools and reimagining the mythos and the mythology and the folklore around our humanity into spaces that are just about consumption mostly mostly i'm not going to say everyone but mostly and so what's it like in this space of true innovation to take these artists creatives process creative process and move it into holy separate sectors places to attach it to problems and challenges that need to be answered what's it like to set them free please hit the next slide for me and so to do that i think we've got to get into a little bit of nuance around the mechanics of our humanity and deconstructing the current myth we've got to get into the nuances and mechanics of our humanity to begin to think about how do we build this new narrative how do we build this future folklore our development is in four parts this is pretty much irrefuted developmental science biological psychological social dimensions which probably make the most sense i don't need to explain it but spiritual is not religious spiritual is about meaning making human beings make meaning our species homo sapiens sapiens make meaning out of everything even when there is no meaning inherent just go to an art gallery and walk around and you will start making up stories and making up meaning out of what you're seeing even when the artist intended no meaning what bigger meaning do we have to wrestle with in life or death who am i who can i be in the world who do i want to be in the world where do i come from what does it mean next slide please the other mechanics of our humanity is imagination one of the two nuances with imagination i want to put out the first one is that this is fascinating research that pretty much proves i won't say it's irrefutable right but there's a lot of there's a lot of research in this area where regardless of the type of distance whether it's physical psychological or social if something is distant from you in any of those categories you will imagine with words and relationship to that thing things that are closer to you much more proximal you will imagine with picture and by default metaphor like here's the fascinating part about picture and metaphor artists work in this space around picture and metaphor and one of the things that we've learned in terms of neuroscience in our brain and social cognition the parts of the brain that deal with cognition and the parts that deal with emotion are heavily subsumed within each other in fact the center for the developing child at harvard has a working paper on this that you actually can't fully pull them apart from one another and teleno demacio one of the greatest thinkers on the planet right now in my opinion has a brilliant article called we feel therefore we learn cognition emotions tied hand in hand aren't making us a process we know is heavily tied into the emotional parts of the brain this is really interesting because next slide please symbols the other part of imagination you have symbols for every complex word excuse me you have complex symbols a number of them for every word that you have but here's the flip side you have symbols for things that you don't have words for so it's possible to have symbols for emotional experiences and feelings and ideas without having words for them and i think we have to sit in that and again i go back to artists and art making the art making process regardless of its capitalistic you know end point the process of making the art is completely subsumed in the emotional parts of the brain as much as it's subsumed in the cognitive parts of the brain because they're shared and with imagination as a construct of our humanity what starts to matter is how distant or close are you to the person people things or story that you're trying to engage with next slide please so what are the stories and myths symbols and images that we engage with here's the thing about folklore or myth these are tools artistic tools from our history that are about frameworks for shared meaning if i had time i'd give you an entire anthropological dig on why art making it was a part of larger cultural process in our human history and was a part of indoctrinating the young into the social constructs of the group it was about teaching the history of the group ways of teaching you know ideas around healthy masculinity in the group we've lost that but we've not lost the use of myth things like welfare queens things like food stamp presidents things like anchor babies these are myths that are anchoring how we navigate and maneuver through the world and even think about who's deserving of citizenship who's deserving of humanity who's deserving of innocence who's deserving of support next slide please and so here's where we have this interesting opportunity empathy is an opportunity there are a number of definitions for empathy based on who's the researcher and what the constructs and constraints are but what i'm going to submit to you is that empathy works best empathy connected to activity not just resonant emotional feeling works best when it starts as a selfish endeavor first and what i mean by that is it you will never be able to understand the experience of someone who's had cancer unless you have cancer and to assume that you can know that experience actually minimizes that person's experience it minimizes their narrative it diminishes their personhood and robs them of their humanity you will never know what it's like to have cancer unless you have cancer i will never know what it's like to be a woman unless i was a woman you will never know what it's like to be black unless you're black and this is i will never know what it's like to be a migrant unless i'm a migrant these are just the truths of our experience but to the selfish point if we lose the attachment to the understanding the social factor race identity point of origin medical designation if you lose that and begin to sit in an understanding of emotional experience so for example i might not be a woman and know what it's like to walk in a world where it's culturally appropriate though it's completely inappropriate to talk about a woman's body just however you want right on the flip side i know what it's like to feel powerless i know what it's like to feel helpless next slide please and i know what it's like to feel a lack of control to feel disoriented or confused so i might not understand the social factor but as a starting place i can locate on the inside of myself any most using in my imagination of my own experiences and calling on my own memory recreate for myself those emotional experiences and then ask myself a key question i don't understand the social factor that might be producing this emotional experience in another person but i know what this emotional experience felt like for me and because i don't know that social factor i can't even imagine how this emotional experience might be magnified times 10 for that other person therefore how can i show up as a better listener how can i show up with resources before that person even has to ask me for resources build trust and then ask them for resources but not show up empty handed to the table how can i be a better ally accomplice comrade i do not need to get lost in trying to figure out what it's like to be something i will never know unless i have that direct point of experience but i can start first locating this emotion on the inside and using that as a bridge i call these empathic bridges through emotional experience to get to a place of truly inspired motivated empathic resonance and activity with another on behalf of our humankind next slide please i'm about done so getting to here we go getting to the end of this whole thing right these are my takeaways for you we've got to release artists to begin to help us do this work of reimagining our humanity starting with process that allows us to sit in our emotional experience to close the distance gaps that's the whole point here with the science around our imagination if i can get you to imagine with me about myself yourself others through pictures there's an emotionally visceral response there that words will not have people are not words people are not line items in a budget people are nuanced and complex and they have histories our nation has histories our nation has tension and chaos that we have got to make sense of and in the space of complexity theory it is narrative that does the sense making amongst all these varying factors and social influencers and things that you have to put into a pot and kind of figure out what is the meal here and what are we serving so the first thing i need you to do is find an emotion inside yourself as a touch point to understand another person's emotional experiences with the nuance of understanding that it's still falling short of what that person is really experiencing in that moment the second thing that we need we have to invest in our shared humanity and our shared future we have to invest time money and other precious resources in a reconciliation and healing process that ensures that all of us are on the path to manifesting our full human potential point blank we cannot afford not to any longer i am terrified that in philadelphia that we will find bullets in children i'm just going to be a hundred percent honest the military and national guard of patrolling neighborhoods we have tear gas children who are part of protest peaceful protest that is not the future folklore that i want my young people and my children to sit on 20 years from now we have an opportunity to do something different but we have to put the investments in have to put the investments in i'm going to end with this last a quick example shell as a company does projections for their financial health into the future sometimes 30 years out using this mix of narrative folks creatives economist etc and they do it through story-based work they build scenarios make sense of it then release the projections people have from that world gone over to south africa to help design the transition out of a part time the narrative folks the creatives went we have that opportunity here not without investment in time and resources thank you so much i appreciate you all thank you nadia thank you so much michael you have time for a few questions one thing oh that was wonderful and i think uh much more eloquently stated in many ways around narrative than what i shared before so i'm glad i was able to till the ground for you and you did a fantastic job thank you so much so i wonder if you could like you you started off the presentation saying like uh what asking us the question about what story we're telling ourselves but i wonder if you could answer that question what story are you telling yourself about this experience that we're having right now that well i also just want to say thank you everybody in the chat like i appreciate everything you're saying the story that i'm telling myself right now is it's multi-layered right like the first there are a couple of stories colliding the first is that we cannot rush to solutions before we have adequately framed the problem right as a consultant most of my work is incubating other people's problems to do this activity i call putting the corners on the puzzle so we can figure out what exactly we're looking at to then iterate solutions but we're running out solutions without investing in putting the corners on the puzzle that terrifies me it scares me but i know there are people that want to figure it out and that's the second part of the story i'm telling myself i might feel like there aren't people because we're kind of disconnected from one another who really want to do this type of investigation and uh in investment but they are there and it's my job to find them and connect and i'm yeah so you know i've been having this conversation about um this very conversation about people moving quickly to solutions and what i find is that it's wrapped particularly for those good intention white folks who are trying to be part of the solution and not part of the problem and want to be allies in this work it's to get rid of the guilt and the shame and i find that the guilt and shame is developmental right and that if you don't uh if you don't sit with it and work through it similar to the pain that we experience in death or or the loss of you know a transition in life um and and we don't like to sit through that but i actually think it's developmental and on the other side you have um this you know this way of being able to relate and i think it connects to what you were talking about in terms of starting with empathy so particularly you know if white folks turn too quickly to solutions they miss out on the bridge that you were speaking about and so i wonder um and not and i've been seeing that not able to i've been just thinking about like the the 20 children in Connecticut who lost their lives and how much i cried for them and the and and this opportunity where we have these tears related to you know all of these deaths in our community um and how we create the the bridge to be better listeners or how we enlist those folks to sit with that pain just so that they can empathize how do you and how do you see uh helping uh white white allies in particular being able to do that yeah so a couple of thoughts in this area i think that's a fantastic question and this goes back to that piece around the science of imagination right and i oh if i had time i would dig into all of nuance but when again when things are distant from you you can reason with them with words the word i abstract the linguistic parts of our brain in terms of like writing and literacy in this overly literate format as we know it it's a little that's a later construct for us than picture right we were graphic right and and doing demonstrative things with narrative and storytelling for meaning and building groups in fact there's a lot of research from the uh like evolutionary psych and and evolutionary biology and an anthro and anthropology and that talks about storytelling being the thing that helped us form groups and music making being the things that helped us form groups what i would position the white people the real serious question are we a part of your group if not then we're gonna have to do work to bridge right and to bond that's really technical language from social capital theory but it's real we have got to figure out how to get from being words on a page for you or symbols of destruction for you symbols of chaos for you symbols of antagonism for you to symbols of shared humanity for you and i do think artists artistic process there are ways to take those tools that we have and situate people in experiences with one another where again using the empathy bridge building framework if you can identify with me through an common experience around emotional experience around powerlessness this is me surmising and i wanted to research on this i think we might begin to shift the distance psychologically and socially because now you're not a other now we have some points of identity when we see this happen with policy the moment folks on the GOP side had their children come out and be like i am gay i am bi i am ex all of a sudden the political will started to shift because no longer was the lgbtq person somebody over there that you can reason with in terms of words and line items it was now your daughter it was now your uncle your nephew whatever and it shifted the whole way that empathy operationalized itself so again i have thoughts on designing those kinds of experiences and projects that are doing that around like employers and community members and funders etc but i think there's something there for us to explore and i appreciate that i want to so i'm glad you answered that question about connected to humanity because i don't i often don't feel like folks can actually see us as human human beings and that is what you're speaking of so i'm going to skip to this last question in the interest of time so i spend a lot of time making connections and michael i have got to spend more time with you fascinating conversation um i spent a lot of time making connections between the different components that spell out you know that that you spelled out across you know biology and sociology and that sort of thing and spirit but i don't want to take for granted as we're here talking about entrepreneurs of color and advancing impact and inclusion and access to them that they could actually make the connect that folks are making the connection between art and the importance of art and entrepreneurs and so i wonder if you could just spend just a moment helping folks make that bridge sure um you know not to be self aggrandizing but to uh uh really quickly anyone in the chat that wants to join that conversation you're welcome to join um i'm a creative right my undergrads in music i want to perform in our high school for theater i grew up really poor right i mean there's a there's a whole narrative there i'd be happy to share with folks that were interested in another time but what happened with me in relationship to arts and entrepreneurship and i've been i've done lit review work around this because i wanted to make sense of it for myself and for what i saw happen with other people there are skill sets right that are core to our humanity and what i found is that researchers that look at um the future of work resilience in the face of automation how are we upskilling and re-skilling with the way that automation is changing the world and in the context of COVID-19 that's also become like you know a huge conversation interesting list of skills there that we traditionally consider soft skills emotional intelligence social intelligence blah blah creativity all kinds of things right conflict resolution these are skills that the artist is developing over foot over and over and over again people ask me all the time where'd you learn your organizational psychology stuff i said theater first then i wouldn't got the book knowledge but theater is all about ensemble work it's about listening it's about problem solving it's about collaboration with your director right all that being said there's a second list of skills that i found that mirror that list of skills around resilience in the face of automation and that second list of skills came from organizational psychologists who study and folks from schools of management who were studying the what they call leadership domains and character traits of successful CEOs and entrepreneurs literally the same list right and i looked at them it's like well this is fascinating because this is about upskilling re-skilling upward mobility within the org right because the idea is you want to be a business owner or be in leadership but here and here are the skill sets that people say are worth it last list i found positive psychology and other folks in the space of mental health and well-being did 50 years of laundry excuse me of like lit reviews down research and found that there was a list of what they call character virtues and skill sets that buffered the deterioration of one's mental health or psychopathology right same list so whether we're talking about resilience in the face of automation as it relates to workforce development economic development inclusive economic development at that equitable economic development at that whether we're talking about upward mobility re-skilling upskilling entrepreneurship supports or someone buffering the impacts of trauma and their own mental health in the face of chronic stress and adversity talking about the same in that human skill that only i know art builds the way that it does and there is enough proof to say that arts support is a close second but there's something that art does that is verifiable right even down to medical cortisol levels and stress levels in the body people who hated making art still had the cortisol levels and there's been their bodies right so this is where i think we need to be investing interrogating and research pulling apart and looking at that nexus of stuff and going what can we learn about our humanity from a shared perspective and then how do we take what we're learning and apply it to the spots that are hurting the most to make sure that people have equitable access to skill development and again artists and creatives are one part of that process yes yes michael oh brian thank you so much for your time your energy your investment in this conversation i look forward to the next yeah and now let's welcome to the stage sythia mula