human works design - building meaningful futures - issue #11
(You are receiving this newsletter because you were previously subscribed or by invitation of Canay Atalay, co-editor of this newsletter)
Welcome to the rebirth of my “building meaningful futures” newsletter.
People who know me well and who have been following me throughout my journey know I have always been interested in the new and fascinated by what’s coming. I am grateful I have been able to develop my talent to predict the changes coming to society and business and being able to map what really matters.
I started off as a saxophone player in Belgium exploring new waves of musical expression in the eighties, I anticipated the changes into electronic music and the coming of the internet in the nineties, I was at the crossroads of the mobile era in the early days of this century, I participated to a Singularity University program at the start of this decade and have been talking and writing on the impact of exponential technologies on business and society since then.
And now… We’re on the verge of another new influential era in the evolution of humanity.
Anyone with some healthy human sensors left in his body can feel and see this emerging already, it’s happening all around us. People who sense this turn of a new era are already taking responsibility towards building a different and better future, for ourselves, our children and our communities around us.
We just cannot keep doing things the way we used to do, real change starts from within.
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” - Nelson Mandela
For me, it started when I hit a professional wall 2 years ago, when I realised that the way I was doing things was no longer working for me. Since then I’ve been searching for a way out towards a new purpose in life and towards creating more meaning and value for myself and others around me. I’ve been trying out different transformation methods, as I moved forward in my journey. I quit alcohol and sugar, I started exercising again, and become vegan over the summer.
Becoming vegan provokes a radical change, not only in your body but as well in your whole being, everything becomes so pure. You start seeing and experimenting everything with more clarity and focus. Going vegan is also one of the best lifestyle choices one can make in contributing towards a greener planet. Follow @veganband on Instagram to see the goods we’re cooking and eating and read how to reduce your carbon footprint as a starter.
“The second most important lifestyle change is to eat less meat, with particular emphasis on meals containing beef and lamb. Cows and sheep emit large quantities of methane, a powerful global warming gas. A vegan diet might make as much as a 20% difference to your overall carbon impact but simply cutting out beef will deliver a significant benefit on its own.”
My transformation started by learning to face and release my deepest fears, forgive the ones who have hurt me most and forgive myself, turning negative thought streams into positive ones, clearing decade-old assumptions and addictions, neutralising old beliefs that have been keeping me down or blocked for a very long time.
Looking around, it’s easy to see how many people are struggling with themselves and their environments. Most people prefer to stay focused on work in a task-driven and fact-based world without examining whether the things they do make them truly happy. Going through ones own fears is not an easy thing to do, it takes a lot of courage; the good news is that bliss awaits on the other side.
We live in a world based on fears, so we need to break through those old assumptions, addictions and negative thoughts to build a new world we believe is full of love and focused on creating happiness and prosperity, not creating or contributing to generate more fear everyday on the news or in our social media feeds. The more we watch, hear and indulge ourselves with bad and negative news, the more it influences our own system with bad and negative thoughts. The first thing to do is to break that paradigm.
I took my decision and decided to act by creating positive flows for myself, the people around me and my community.
I hereby introduce my 2 new projects:
human works design
human works design is a new company, I co-founded with Canay Atalay, with a purpose to empower the game changers of tomorrow to build meaningful futures. We assist leaders to grow in designing conscious business and make themselves future proof with innovation & technology trends, philosophy and exponential business models, provided by a selected network of international thought leaders, designers & futurists.
human works design unlocks the change maker within every business leader or entrepreneur and offer international experience, various transformation methods and technological tools to bring the conscious change needed to bring meaningful, innovative, value-driven, sustainable businesses and projects to life. We are working side by side with business leaders, entrepreneurs as well as children to take action on designing a better world.
Read more about the why we do this and what we can offer to you with our value-designed services.
human works design at The House of Beautiful Business in Lisbon
Palacio de Conde de Óbidos Lisboa
human works design is pleased to participate again at The House of Beautiful Business, taking place in Lisbon before and during Web Summit. The House of Beautiful Business is a pop-up community for meaningful conversations about technology and humanity. During the week-long event, the House will serve as salon, stage, and sandbox for people who are keen on re-humanising business in a playful and intimate setting.
We are offering a workshop in The Palacio on Saturday, November 4 (15:30 – 17:30) on how to elevate humanity by designing a conscious business.
We have 10 Membership passes available for our readers (value €450/pass) with access to all programs from November 3 - November 10, 2017 in The Studio and The Palacio. We are distributing 5 passes now and 5 in our next newsletter. Send us your thoughts on conscious business and include a great example of a conscious business in your network. TIP: you can increase your chances to win a pass by liking us on our social media channels :)
Wapaland
The second project we started this summer is Wapaland.
Wapaland is a place where children learn to become the game-changers of tomorrow, where they can design their own future focusing on their own values, and by creating deep human connections through music, art, dance, philosophy and other disciplines. Based on the principles that all starts from within a healthy body, an open mind, and a good heart. A place where they can learn the tools, skill sets and capabilities to become an outstanding game-changer of tomorrow, learning how to be aware of what’s happening around them, how to take responsibility for themselves, preserving our planet, and connecting as human-beings, equally, respecting other cultures.
Join us!
We are currently prototyping our workshops with experts in Istanbul and are planning workshops in different locations across Europe. Anyone interested to learn more, organise a Wapaland workshop, or wants to contribute with coding our platform, please get in touch.
building meaningful futures
With this newsletter we want to contribute by documenting more about our journeys, and by creating more awareness on how we can all contribute to bring the change everyone is longing for. How we can become more responsible in making our business more conscious and by contributing to create a better society. We will do this on a bi-weekly basis by curating content of projects and people who are creating such a better world.
Canay will co-author and edit our bi-weekly newsletter from here on. With her, this newsletter series will be more inclusive, not only by bringing in a voice from a different cultural geography, but also the female archetype - which the world urgently needs - embracing abundance and sharing it openly with care.
She is an innovation strategist, working with business leaders to unlock purposeful innovation by designing new narratives, exponential business models and customer experiences for their organisations, using a unique blend of design thinking, philosophy, business model design and cultural transformation.
Read her full bio on our website.
You can read her contributions in this week’s newsletter here below.
Enjoy the reading and feel free to send us your feedback on our topics, projects and content.
Reading suggestions
Children First World Design
“Exponential change -technological tsunami, communication noise, challenged biodiversity, greedy politics and ‘winner takes it all’ business narratives – and its impact on us is affecting the most vulnerable humans, children more than we seem to accept. I propose to not to fix existing systems but to redesign everything from the scratch, putting children first and everything after that, including profits and growth.” - Read all about Canay’s passion project and fill in the Children First World Design survey.
WHAT are consciousness, conscious business and living?
Consciousness is the ability to experience reality, to be aware of our inner and outer worlds. It allows us to adapt to our environment and act to promote our lives. All living beings possess consciousness, but human beings have a unique kind.
Future of humanism and sports
“In the future, where anything that can be digitized and atomised will be, we will not have to do anything that doesn’t include creativity or critical thinking. While many see this as a threat, I look at it as a great opportunity. With our increased idle time, energy and hopefully consciousness, we can finally focus on real questions like “What is a good life?” “What is meaningful work?”. For better life designs, obviously ‘sports’ has utmost importance in both individual and social dimensions.” - Read Canay’s article published in September’s Digital Age.
As Millennials Demand More Meaning, Older Brands Are Not Aging Well
Ask millenials and boomers what companies they value most and you’ll get very different answers. If brands want to make an impact with the consumers of the future, they need a clear mission.
Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?
The long read: Philosophers and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes human beings more than complex robots
Touching Grace – umair haque
“So peace comes to us through grace. And grace comes to us not from winning wars. Not wars to be wanted, desired, respected, admired, nor even wars of kindness, mercy. It comes to us only through the wars we can’t win. The wars we can’t win teach us what is really universal, constant, necessary, worthy, beautiful, true, in life. Suffering is always with us. But so is love. Love is greater than suffering, because one can undo the other, but the other cannot undo the one. And so the wars we can’t win teach us that life is not really a war at all. It is just a way home, a crossing to the other shore, a return.”
How Silicon Valley is erasing your individuality - The Washington Post
Big tech companies are after automating the choices, suggesting the news we read, the goods we buy, the paths we travel, the friends we invite to our circles. The tech companies gesture towards individuality - to the empowerment of the ‘user’ - but their worldview rolls over it. We obviously are going through a transformational revolution. The question is, will we wait to think and act till we see the consequences where it might be difficult - if not impossible - to restore our lost individuality?
How Optimism Could Save Us - A Hundred Years
”If you truly think things are getting worse, won’t you grab everything you can, while you can? Reap now, sow nothing. But if you think things are getting better, you invest in the future. Sow now, reap later.” It is that belief in a better future that drives rapid change, innovation, and scale in relevant start-ups, and it’s the lack of the same belief that has so many large organisations dwindling with their focus on extracting maximum returns in the short-term.
Commons and 'Commoning': A 'New' Old Narrative to Enrich the Food Sovereignty and Right to Food Claims
How did we get to accept that food, one of the three essentials for life, along with air and water, can be produced, distributed and destroyed for profit?
Workplace culture and the alternative workforce
Managing organisational culture, often a challenge, is getting even harder with the rise of the alternative workforce. How can leaders bring independent contractors, telecommuters, and gig workers into their organisation’s culture when so many of the traditional levers don’t apply? Download the “Navigating the future of work report.”
Wall Street Firms to Move Trillions to Blockchains in 2018
Blockchain technology may well prove itself capable of handling many aspects of the financial system more aptly than humans ever could. Whether it will shift the balance from walled-off, corporate networks to wide-open, distributed systems will boil down to which we ultimately choose to trust.
I used to think social media was a force for good. Now the evidence says I was wrong
“Kurt Vonnegut said: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” This seems especially true now we have reached a new stage of marketing where we are not just consumers, but also the thing consumed. If you have friends you only ever talk to on Facebook, your entire relationship with them is framed by commerce. When we willingly choose to become unpaid content providers, we commercialise ourselves. And we are encouraged to be obsessed with numbers (of followers, messages, comments, retweets, favourites), as if operating in a kind of friend economy, an emotional stock market where the stock is ourselves and where we are encouraged to weigh our worth against others.”
Delicious Nutritious Sustainable
Gigafood creates organic plant-based vegan dishes that are marvelous to eat, high in nutrition, good for your health and sustainable for the planet. (…) For every time you choose Gigafood, you also save up to 90 % of climate emissions and sustain our gorgeous planet. We are committed to simplify delicious nutritious eating within planetary boundaries.
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We are delighted and grateful to be able to do what we love and can share these wonderful stories and knowledge with you. How about you?
You can read the previous editions of this newsletter here.
If you’d like to book us for a presentation, workshop, or to contribute to an awesome project please get in touch.
Be kind to yourself and your loved ones.
Have a great week!
Rudy and Canay.