Sparks

It’s everywhere. Inspiration: sparks falling in the dry leaves, flames curling and spitting, ideas burning brightly, fanned by the winds of conversation and fed by the fuel of sharing. After two days at the Learning Solutions Conference, my head is buzzing more than usual, sparked by people, technology, stories.

Curiosity is a driving force: but it needs spaces, permissions, time. The revelations we have can be swamped for lack of oxygen or amplification. Insights give us a freedom to act, to co-create, if our community is strong. The connections we forge are global, strong social ties that breach geographical boundaries. As well as questions of trust and identify, the notion of fairness and equality is high in my mind. Without fairness, without equality, we cannot be truly agile, lacking a diversity of perspective and thought.

Technology, lightweight and agile, democratised and prevalent, permits the sparks to spread. There is a fluidity of action when we can share so easily: capture, interpret, share and learn. Hacking old knowledge into something new, something purposeful. Design itself ceases to be something done once then built, but rather a continuous and iterative event, providing scaffolding for learning and tempo to communities. The stories we co-create are authentic from their grounding in application in the real world.

The ideas we share, the communities we make sense of things in, the ideas we have, they form sparks, sparks that turn to flame and spread, wherever anyone is open to listen.