Stand-up thinking

Getting on my feet in front of an audience has become a central part of my work.

I don't always know what direction a talk or a lecture will take. I'm happiest improvising, drawing on a collection of stories and lines of thinking, while taking in what's happening in the room. Here are a couple of examples of how this works in practice:

• This video from PSFK's London conference is as close as I get to a prepared talk, because it needed to sit within a day of other very different presentations. I hope it still succeeds in delivering some ideas to which the advertising industry isn't commonly exposed.
• This recording from Landscape/Mindscape, a residential weekend at Laurieston Hall, is far more improvised and intimate. A talk like this would be followed by an open conversation, with room and time for personal reflection.

You can find more videos and recordings of talks elsewhere on the site, the talks & events page has a listing of places I'm going to be speaking - while the reading section has references to the writers and texts I mention.

Themes & audiences

I speak to all kinds of audiences - from guest lectures in art, architecture or business schools, education, social theory or environmental studies departments - to Transition Towns and peak oil networks, free schools and Meetups. I also give keynotes at conferences and talk to public sector and corporate audiences about how the world is changing.

I try to be flexible and imaginative in ensuring that I can make a living, without money being an obstacle to getting to speak with people.

The themes within the reading section give some further clues about what I end up talking about:

• Improvising the future and rethinking our relationship to other times and places.
• "Collapsonomics", or the study of what continues to work when systems we took for granted start to fail us.
• Networked technologies and how we live with them.
• The future of work, and its past.
• How we respond to the crisis in our universities, cultural institutions and economies - and find new possibilities in the chaos.
• The buried assumptions behind our experiences of scarcity and abundance.
• Also the stories and ideas behind my work on Space Makers, School of Everything and the Dark Mountain Project.

If you want to find out more about inviting me to speak, please send me an email: [email protected]