Talk At TEDx Tottenham: Thinking Outside Your Head
“I learned a painful lesson which is: most big organizations get really bad ideas when they think about the future.”
BY MIKKEL RASMUSSEN
Mikkel Rasmussen from ReD Associates took the stage at TEDx Tottenham to ask: Do you like cooking?
He describes big business' vision of the future kitchen - 3D-printed meat, drones delivering pizza, and tiramisu built by a robot. Underneath this vision, Rasmussen argues, is a fundamental misunderstanding of people: technology assumes humans don’t like to cook when, anthropologists tell us, cooking is one of the activities that most makes us human.
Rasmussen suggests this misunderstanding comes from a problem with the philosophy of business: the way they think. Businesses think from inside their head: they follow ideas and orthodoxies that feel familiar - the sharing economy or co-creation, for example. These ideas blind our ability to be curious.
Doctors think about children as medical patients, blinding them to the original thought that children don’t cease to be children in hospital. Spending time with children allows businesses to see medicine differently. Original thinking - new and good ideas - doesn’t come from inside our heads, it comes from outside, in the real world.
Watch the full TEDx talk here