 I've got two. I think I'm... Am I working here? Hello, meaningful innovators. It's super exciting to be here. I'm... God, what am I? I was an artistic director of Coney. We made a massive interactive theatre for a while, which basically just means that the audience is the hero. So my job has always been to create frameworks in which audiences do amazing stuff. So it's just a pretty great thing to be able to do. So, for example, the last show I made was called Early Days for a Better Nation, and it basically meant that the audience created a new nation each night. So each night, different audiences across the UK, we toured it around the elections, created it, entered this fictional nation, it's in complete ruins, and they negotiate with each other with different factions and outside forces like the World Council, sort of UN meets US, and lots of different structures, and they create the fundamentals of a nation. So my job is to work with people like academics, experts, audiences in building these structures, so that every night audiences can come together, be absolutely awesome, and have brilliant new ideas. It's pretty good. So I'm now no longer that, but still a little bit. I've just left because Wyatt and The Space asked me to be their creative fellow. I don't know what it means. I have a very strong feeling that they don't quite know what that means, but it's pretty cool. So you then start pondering what you're going to do, and one of the things that I was really interested in, that I speak at these kind of things, mostly in the arts, this is quite businessy for me, so I'm very excited about that, but you speak at these sort of things and it's full of awesome people. I don't know about you, but just hearing the speakers this morning, I was at that speaker's dinner that was mentioned earlier, and everyone is incredibly cool and sort of changing the world, and it's super inspiring. But sort of thinking about this fellowship, I was thinking about who is making the future, because I'm utterly convinced as a theatre maker who makes structures in which awesome things happen that the future and many of our social structures are constructs that are made by someone in sometimes which awesome things and sometimes which awful things happen, and it's about how those are created. And I know, because I do this in theatre, that a lot of the time you don't really notice the structures you're functioning in, you're functioning within the boundaries that are set up by someone or something else that's well beyond you. So the future being sort of relatively important to most of us, and the idea that that's a construct, something that's made by people, or four people, it made me really interesting, so I had a bit of a look around. And what I found is that the future is being constructed before our very eyes, mostly by people like us in this room. Congratulations, you're very, very, very lucky people. But that also means that there is a very specific perspective. So I was interested in whose voices aren't there. So, because you've got the famous quote, the best way to predict your future is to create it, which we are all doing here, and again like awesome people here trying to change the nature of businesses run, but as one of the speakers said, for a lot of people this is just not the reality. So I decided that what would be really interesting is to look at people that might be on edges. So the thing I'm going to do over the next year is create the almanac of the future. It's going to be a practical guide to the next 50 years. It's going to be a practical guide for the next 50 years we want. So it's a relentlessly, I always say, to why it's radically optimistic, which they seem to like. But it's basically a worldwide intergenerational think tank to think of the future we want. So the idea is that I'm going to work with a group of 15-year-olds and 65-an-overs on each of the continents and we're going to dream up the next 50 years. What do we think is important? What do we want to do? What do we want to keep? What do we want to change? What do we want to progress? What do we want to be radically different? Each of the continents, not Antarctica, unfortunately, funding. I'm going to work with each of those groups individually. So 15, I am bringing the generations together on each of the continents and then we're going to link them up together to have a chat about what we all agreed on and what we didn't. I'm really interested to see where the juxtapositions are, like which continent is holding which continent back. Who wants something different that just would be completely opposite to something that's happening across the world. So I'm interested to see the differences geographically, intergenerationally. Where do we agree? What's easy and where are the wars for us? So after that, we're going to hook them up with experts and whoever wants to become involved with it. Just use the power of digital to extend the conversation to bring in people who can answer some of the questions that emerge from the initial process, but also to ask the other people, you, possibly, probably the people already more invested into the future, what they think about the agenda being set by these 15-year-olds with the support of 65-year-olds. So we're doing, because this is wired, a multi-platform publication creating an insight into possible future scenarios from a crowned world. You have to do something. So for me, what's really interesting, as I said, is the dreams we all share and the possible futures that clash. So what lives on the edges of these conversations where what are just the shared values that we have, what are just shared dreams we have, because those should be the easy ones, right? And then where are we clashing continuously? And where are some of the beautiful things that we're saying right here? How is that being received elsewhere in the world or in a different generation, and what does that mean? So I like to think of it as a bit of stargazing, but, you know, with a pattern. So I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things that I thought might transpose from this project and the way I'm thinking about it, because, you know, you have to make it useful. So the first one is that everyone's an expert. So because I'm looking at the next 50 years we want, literally everyone is an expert on that. I thought 15-year-olds would be like the Uber experts because, you know, it's their lifetime we're talking about. And I thought 65 plus would be the other sort of group that are really expert in this because they've really sentiently seen the last 50 years, so they sort of really get 50-year lifespans and what it means. So in my practice, whatever I do, it's very egalitarian. Everyone's an expert. It's just that you need to figure out what they're particularly expert at and what that brings. So I nick the sentence from Seth Godin, whose book this is, it's not an amazing book. It's all right if you're really interested. But I really, really like the title. And, you know, I stole it, so I might as well attribute. But I think it's really interesting that if you start treating everyone as an expert, and it's a bit about that investment of power in a weird way, you know, the thing that we've just talked about, if you take that seriously, if you talk weirdly, lucidly and semi-grown-uply to everyone, and people feel that you're talking in the same way to them as to people they think are different in social hierarchy and that can be higher or lower, they start thinking very differently about themselves within that conversation and start bringing in things that they normally keep back or are either afraid to share or they feel that position they're in doesn't allow them to share, it's really useful. It's also very useful, by the way, that I make art because it's useless, which has been the most useful thing in my career in the universe because it means that people can leave their agendas at the door a little bit. Just as soon as you bring people together, even with the best of intentions, a little bit of agendas come up. Because they all know, nobody's stupid, they all know that this is for something. So people are quite cleverly starting to manipulate and massage the conversation from the start. Being an artist means that I get access to the playful human underneath everyone, the playful expert. It becomes really generous. The other thing that I want to talk about is the long now. Again, stolen. The long now is a sentence that comes from the long now foundation which is a foundation that looks at the long now cunningly enough. I can't remember. I think they look at a thousand years. I just wheeled that back to 50. Apparently I've been recently taught by a futurist that I am part of a new trend called the no long trend. I'm very excited. He said I'm like Dyson's 40 year light bulb, the film Boyhood, which was 12 years in the making and Google's long now foundation. There is a real trend for people that are looking at stuff that lasts again because I think we've become quite bureaucratic about how we think about the future. It's quite incremental. It's making little changes. Again, I'm talking to the wrong audience, not you. Them are there. There's a lot of incremental change. A lot of short term is a lot of changing the status quo by incremental change. Thinking very long into the future allows you to take away a lot of the hobby horses, the politics, the things that were well rehearsed arguments. It allows to transcend politics, current institutions. You no longer have to talk about the NHS, which is awesome, but can talk about health and how we ensure health long term. Again, it frees off people from their rehearsed arguments and they're close by examples. Thinking 50 years from now opens up really quite radical new ideas. Then, like with the Almanac, you work your way back. What does that mean practically for next year then, if that's where we're going over there? I think this is becoming really, really important. Climate change, there's so many really drastic things, antibiotic resistance. There are some really big projects right now that we need to attend to collectively and we have to see as something that we do together. It's something that I was reading the other day. I love making random analogies. I was reading about cathedral builders and it struck me that that's where some of these projects are like that again. These were people who started something they knew they wouldn't finish in their lifetime. They just kicked it off and hoped that four generations from now it would be finished and cool. I always feel a bit sad for the second generation because the first one got to start it and the last one's got to finish it and the one before got to almost see it and the second generation is just like whatever. But I think that kind of thinking, that kind of multi-generational, how can we start things now that are not for us but for well beyond? How do we deal with things so big? Like again, climate change, the antibiotic resistance, there's so much going on that that is long term and we have to work together. We don't only have to work together because it's such a big problem. It's also about diversity and divergence. It was mentioned earlier I think by Miriam. None of us are as clever as we are together and there's a lot of scientific research and again you all know this but it's not being acted upon as much as you'd think that diverse teams in whatever way you look at it come up with better solutions than homogenous teams whether that's geographically, generationally, sex, socio-economical or ethnic diversity. Diversity is good, it's science dude. You can just sort of take this. So for me, I think he's currently on Team Hillary. He is a guy who thinks about social structure and for him it's just a logical next step from Moore's Law. So the power of creativity rise exponentially with the diversity and divergence of the group. So for me this is very much where the almanac comes from is let's get these very diverse voices together and see what they share and it's really important to understand but also see whether they're diverged because those are the things we need to work on. This whole thing is a backlash against instant gratification against getting people together who know already that we're sort of going to agree and self-congratulate about how cool and forward thinking we are. It's also against short-terminism. I think we'll see a bigger and bigger backlash against this. We're already seeing it in culture. I'm sure it will come as it is. When I say culture, I mean like the arts. I'm sure we'll see it in wider culture more and more as well. So I just wanted to break down the project. So think tank and to dream up. So again, the almanac is a think tank to dream up. So the first two cents for me are that they're both fun and challenging. I mean like doing things with meaning is fun. I think there is something about if you want to include different voices, different people, different constituencies that are, you know, we've been talking about the communities that are around whatever it is that you're doing that are so important, get them involved but make it exciting. We're all pioneers, we're all innovators. Everyone is, everyone's got great ideas but speak to that part of people. Not the feedback form. Like the more boring you make it, the more boring the feedback is that you're going to get, the more boring the ideas, the more... You know, I fill them in. I've never said anything interesting on them and I think very few people do. But once you bring people into a genuine conversation about innovation, like literally everyone and anyone I've ever talked to has got brilliant ideas. Also a lot of really, what's the nice word, bad, bad ideas. So it's not about building your entire structure, your entire idea set on everything that people have to say. I mean dear God, I make theatre and I do it iteratively and I get audiences to see unfinished work and they always have the most ludicrous, ludicrous, unfeasible suggestions basically which are film. So you don't listen to that but you do listen where it comes from. You listen where they want and need for like a helicopter with someone absiling over my head right now. Where does that come from? It's probably because I'm a little bit too boring right now. So I can solve the boring bit, probably not by the helicopter. But if you make it fun, I don't know if I can solve the boring bit on my own. Anyway, if you make it fun and challenging, if you genuinely push people to think beyond their own clichés because that's also the thing. We all need to get our clichés out of the way first. Then you can get access to an amazing think tank just from the people around you, from your customers, from your suppliers. Again, I loved the way Mary was talking about the ideas coming from loads of different directions. I think that happens, the unexpected happens if you give it space. Worldwide and intergenerational on my project is diversity. So we're back to cow's law. I think whatever you do, you need to make it as diverse as possible. Make sure that there are opinions that will clash. If you do not have clashing opinions in whatever you're doing or researching or being part of, it's not working. And then the future we want. So I think that working with diverse groups is about destination. It's not about road map, that's your job. Your job is to figure out how to get there. That's not, you know, there might be some good ideas, but that's where the experts, normal experts come back in again. But use your constituencies around you to create a destination point. Something to aim for because, again, this is a stolen quote, but I liked it. Our inability to plan for the future together is ruining our present. I'm well over time, so I'm going to leave that just for you to think about. So I would like to invite you with me to make the world a think tank for the best possible future. Let's do that together. And let's make sure it's fun. Thank you.