Translator: Anna Zavyalova Reviewer: Denise RQ
I spent the last 20 years
working with some of the biggest corporations in the world
to help them find their future,
you know, the sort of things - how can we stay relevant in the future,
what's our next big bet, what's our future going to be like.
And I really learned a painful lesson from doing that.
A really painful lesson, which is
most of the time big organizations get really bad ideas
when they think about the future.
And I also found a pattern to why it is
that most of us get the future wrong
and get bad ideas about the future.
And there is a certain pattern to that, which is the philosophy behind it,
and philosophy in the terms of how we think.
Because we have all been trained and schooled to think
in a specific way, with a the specific philosophy,
which is the philosophy that ideas and thinking come from our head,
inside our head, our brains.
You're totally focused on that.
Today, I'm going to talk about
why that is a really bad way to get ideas.
Does anyone here like cooking?
Can I see your hands? Right.
Who likes shopping for food?
You like eating?
You like interesting recipes?
Well, I'm going to talk a little bit about the future of the kitchen.
And let's start with the biggest food company in the world
who just came out with a so called future scenario
of how we are going to cook in the future.
And it looks like this.
So here you see an image of the future,
this is supposedly 15 years from now, 2030.
And you see a woman, and a man, and a sort of machine,
that sort of 3D-prints meat.
And she has red wine.
This idea is, I think, a very futuristic idea, of course,
but is it also true, and is there any kind of meaning to it?
And if you go on Google, you should do that,
and Google "kitchen of the future",
you'll find the very same sort of ideas that this company had,
this is one of them 3D-printing food;
the other one was having drones delivering pizzas to your home,
a third one would be having automated cooking,
so you just say, "I would like a tiramisu,"
and it will make a tiramisu;
having robots cook for you;
all those sorts of things.
Having shopping on big touch screens,
all those sorts of things.
And if you Google this, it kind of looks like this,
these are images of prototypes of how we think about the kitchen of the future.
Now, I want to go back to my first idea.
When we think about the future, what's the philosophy behind it?
How do we think?
And just yourself look at these images, and think about this:
what is the meaning of these ideas?
Not what is the technology but what's the meaning of these ideas?
What's the human meaning of these ideas?
When I look at these ideas: 3D-printing food,
drones delivered pizzas, robots that cook for you,
they all are about one idea, one meaning, which is:
humans don't like to cook.
That's the idea.
It's slavery! And technology - 3D-printing meat, for example -
can free us from the slavery and the burden of cooking.
How true do you think this idea is?
Well, if you ask an anthropologist,
who really knows about human behavior and the history of human civilization,
they would say, apart from sex, cooking, and preparing and eating food
is the most important thing of being a human being.
It's what makes us human.
And you can go back to archeology, and say,
what happens, if we take away hunting, gathering, and cooking?
Well, then we are just animals, we are not humans anymore.
So, from an anthropological point of view this idea is a really bad idea.
Because you are taking away the essential ingredient
to what it means to be human,
which is we like to cook.
Is there any evidence behind this kind of idea?
Let's talk about magazines for a moment.
You know that magazine business is not doing so well.
You know, they are not selling so many magazines.
Except in one category. What is that category?
Yeah. Food. Food magazines.
TV programs!
You can't swing a cat these days
without hitting a TV program that's about, you know,
cooking cakes or cooking something else.
What's the most instagrammed item on the Internet?
OK.
So there is no evidence behind this idea.
There is no evidence.
So why is it that the biggest food company in the world,
when they have ideas about the future, have ideas that are really bad,
do not have any human meaning, and have no evidence to it?
Isn't that strange?
And there is a reason why.
Which is the philosophy, how they think.
Which is: they think, and we think often,
that when we think about the future, these ideas should come from our brain,
the ideas we have.
And inside our brain are hidden assumptions,
beliefs, and values that blind our ability to be curious.
I'll give you another example.
The same set-up, the same phenomena
can look very different if you are an economist.
Everything is about price and markets,
and everything would look like price and markets.
If you are a lawyer, everything is about justice.
If you are a feminist, everything is about the social pressure.
And it can be the same phenomena you are looking at,
but you have very different ideas,
and that will guide your thinking,
and it will copy your thinking into the future.
The scary thing is that most of us think that we are free thinkers,
we think we have our original thoughts.
But then why is it, when we look at, when we talk about the future,
or even watch the patterns in TED talks,
it's the same damn ideas again and again and again.
Right now it is the sharing economy, 3D printing, co-creation,
the internet of things.
And they are not bad ideas, they are just not original ideas.
These ideas come into our heads, and they create a kind of copy machine,
that then copies these ideas into our meaning,
and when we then express something about the future,
it's really just copies of somebody else's idea.
And that's not good if you are a good corporation,
but it's not good either if you want to solve the climate crisis.
Because we need original, curious thinking.
And where should that come from?
Well, I'd argue, it shouldn't come from inside your head,
it should come from the world beyond the head.
The real world.
So, let's imagine you want to design a new hospital,
and this hospital should be made purely for children.
Alright?
And I want to introduce you to Mia - here is Mia -
and she is four years old.
Mia has a brain damage, she has been operated 11 times.
I met Mia because I was part of a large, anthropological study of her hospital,
that means going in and trying to figure out
how do kids experience a hospital.
So I sit and go down here and ask, "What's your hospital like?"
And when you do that, you get pieces of this;
this is sent by her mum on a phone to me,
her mum writes - you can see she is in her ballerina dress
and has bows up here, and so on - she writes,
"Here is the princess of the hospital on the way to her operation."
And what's the meaning behind this idea?
Like the kitchens I talked about.
The meaning behind this idea is: when you are a child,
you do not stop being a child just because you are ill.
You do not stop being a child just because you go to a hospital.
And what is a child? How do children make sense of the world?
Well, play is the way children make sense of the world.
And this picture is showing us that.
She is telling us something very important about the future of hospitals,
which is, what if we designed a hospital that was made for children,
that was playful, not only in the playground over there,
but was completely integrated in everything?
Have any of you read Homer, the Odyssey? Or heard about it?
He warned us about this 2,800 years ago.
There is a story about Odysseus, who is on a big journey.
They come to an island, and there are these sirens,
which are these fish-like really beautiful women,
and they sing to you, just like we just heard a song.
And you kind of go, "Oh, I want to go there," right?
And there is also a little bit of erotic sensation to it, I think,
and what the sailors do: they jump overboard, and swim to the island,
just to discover that these sirens are vampires,
and that they eat you.
And what Odysseus does, he asks his men to bind him to the mast,
to put wax in his ears, so that he does not listen to the sirens,
and is able to sail past them.
Now, the ideas inside your head,
particularly the popular trends that you hear all the time,
those are the sirens of today.
They blind your thinking, they take you ashore,
and they eat you alive.
And you end up having really bad ideas.
So what does it take to have good ideas?
Let's talk for a minute about what does it mean to be a human being,
what does human mean?
Do you know anybody who is skilled at something?
Let's talk about a carpenter.
What makes a carpenter a fantastic carpenter?
Is it his brain, is it his body, is it his tools?
Well, it's everything, isn't it?
So when you see a very good carpenter,
he can't explain what it is he does with his hands;
he's completely embodied in his hands,
he's completely engaged in the world, he's not separated from the world.
What about a great footballer?
If you talk to a great footballer, who does fantastic dribbling,
you say, "How did you do that?"
And he would say, "I don't know",
because he's part of the whole mood of the stadium,
the team, the ball, the players, the smell of the grass;
he's completely engaged in the world of that moment.
What is a great teacher?
A great teacher is somebody who is completely engaged
with each individual pupil, who loves maths,
who's engaged in the school, the smells, the mood of the school,
that is what it means to be a human being.
And when technology and bad ideas take away that context,
take away that humanity,
it becomes really bad ideas.
And then, for a big company, it means, it fails,
because it produces and reproduces ideas that we don't need,
and have no meaning, and take away our humanity.
And I would really love you to, when you're "thinking beyond",
just for a moment think about, when you think beyond,
also think beyond the world outside your head, the real world.
Because it's so inspirational, and you could be very curious
if you actually study it.
And I think, ladies and gentlemen,
this is how we are going to solve the climate crisis;
this is how we are going to make healthcare better;
this is how we are going to make communities like Tottenham better,
not by letting bad ideas lead us but by letting good ideas lead us,
and good ideas come from the real world and not your head.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)