Interview @ Creative News

Maria did an interview over at Creative News (in Swedish):

“After working so-called "creative field" (which field isn’t?!) in twenty years, in countless constellations and hybrids; in (pop) culture, music, business, dance, directing, media, fashion, art, communication and more. It’s been in and outside Sweden, and this along with a lot of personal lessons, it seemed natural to start looking at the structures and practices around creative work. There are so many nice people who want to do good things, and yet it is so hard to work sustainably and not hurt yourself and others. Then the focus ends up in the organization - how do we collaborate, how do we organize ourselves?

Transponder is currently Tobias Tagesson and I - an organizational consultant / practitioner, and we therefore focus on NextGen organizations (Teal) and how they create the basis for innovation, creativity, and regenerativeness beyond sustainability. An example of many is that intersectional understanding is one thing, but HOW do we take advantage of all "new" perspectives? If we can not do that, then we will not move forward anyway. Another example is how and by whom are decisions made in an organization? Who is directly affected? Is the decision strategic, operational or tactical? How creative can you actually be without self-organizing opportunities? Guess that some who may come to read this know about e.g. Design Thinking, which is one of many process tools.

Here, my movement background also comes in handy because grounding change in the body is fundamental for it to last, and because it is actually social bodies (companies, organizations) and the body of society we work with.

We have fundamentally different backgrounds. Tobias is a former principal and a teacher, then manager in the education and labor market area, often in the public sector, which is a pretty wild mix with me! Today, we work with startups who understand that if they build system-changing solutions for the future, they themselves need to have a regenerative organization as a foundation. Their driving force comes from a real need in the field, the ecology they operate in, which must precede the business idea, the business idea itself becomes a tool to meet the need. The work of listening in and responding to, instead of trying to predict and control, is ongoing.

When the company knows who they ARE, we can communicate it externally to reach like-minded people, a bit like artists do in other words! What unites me and Tobias is that we have both come to the same conclusion despite different backgrounds; this is one of the most important parts of the transformation we all have to go through in order to co-create the future, no matter what context we are in; business, civil society, public sector, tech, culture, etc.”