Thinking beyond your head | Mikkel Rasmussen | TEDxTottenham
Big corporations tend to generate poor future predictions because they rely on internalized philosophies of thought, such as those rooted in their specific industry paradigms. The speaker argues that true innovation and meaningful ideas must instead originate from the "real world" and direct, embodied experience, like play or craft. This process requires abandoning internally derived "sirens"—popular trends—in favor of contextually rich observations. ## Speakers & Context - Unnamed speaker (professional consultant/speaker). - Background: Spent 20 years helping large corporations find their future, focusing on relevance and "next big bet." - Key realization: Most big organizations generate "really bad ideas" about the future due to systemic patterns in thinking. ## Theses & Positions - **Core Thesis:** Most attempts to predict the future by thinking *within* one's head (internal philosophy) result in bad ideas. - **Source of Bad Ideas:** Thought patterns are trained by specific philosophies (e.g., economics focuses only on price/markets; law focuses only on justice). - **Solution:** True, original, and meaningful ideas must come from the "world beyond the head"—the real world. - **Humanity Argument:** Cooking, preparing, and eating food is presented by anthropology as the most important aspect of being human; suggesting otherwise is inherently flawed. - **Innovation Critique:** Modern trends (sharing economy, 3D printing, IoT) are not original; they are copies of existing ideas circulated through our heads. ## Concepts & Definitions - **Philosophy (in context):** The underlying way of thinking that dictates how we generate ideas; where thinking is confined to "inside our head, our brains." - **Slavery (metaphorical):** The state of being forced to cook, which the speaker notes is the core problem that technology wrongly tries to "free" humanity from. - **Embodied Engagement:** The state of being completely immersed in an activity, such as a carpenter using his hands or a footballer playing, where the self is not separated from the world. - **Sirens (metaphorical):** Popular, trending ideas (like those from big corporations) that are captivating but misleading, leading people astray. ## Mechanisms & Processes - **Idea Generation Constraint:** Thinking confined to the internal mind leads to "hidden assumptions, beliefs, and values" that limit curiosity. - **Cross-Disciplinary Bias:** The same phenomenon viewed by different experts (economist vs. lawyer vs. feminist) leads to entirely different, biased conclusions. - **Modeling "Good" Future Design:** Designing a children's hospital based on observing how children play and view the world, resulting in playful, integrated design elements. - **Skill Acquisition:** A great carpenter or footballer operates from a state of total engagement, not conscious calculation. ## Examples & Cases - **The Food Company Scenario:** A major food company presented a "future scenario" for 2030 showing 3D-printing meat, drones delivering pizzas, and automated cooking/robots. - **Anthropological View on Cooking:** Removing cooking/food preparation from human activity reduces a being to merely an animal, stripping it of humanity. - **Evidence of Human Connection to Food:** Food magazines and TV programs are cited as evidence that cooking remains a deeply cultural interest, despite technological overhauls. - **Children's Hospital Design:** Mia, a four-year-old with brain damage, suggested the hospital should incorporate play to maintain a sense of childhood, regardless of the clinical setting. - **The Odyssey Parallel:** Odysseus's men were drawn to the sirens' beautiful songs, but Odysseus successfully warned them to bind him and use wax in his ears to block out the seductive, dangerous lure. ## Named Entities - **Mia:** A four-year-old patient with brain damage at the hospital where the speaker conducted an anthropological study. - **Odysseus:** Character from Homer's *Odyssey*, warned about the Sirens. - **Homer:** Author of *The Odyssey*. ## Numbers & Data - Timeframe for corporate future projection: **2030**. - Duration of speaker's work: **20 years**. - Age of Mia: **4 years old**. - Number of operations Mia has undergone: **11 times**. ## Examples & Cases - **Drones delivering pizzas** to the home. - **Automated cooking/robots** making a specific dish like tiramisu upon verbal request. - **The best evidence for human interest in food:** Food magazines and TV programs. - **The structure of a good hospital design:** Must be playfully integrated, not just having a separate playground. ## Tools, Tech & Products - **3D-printing meat:** Technology featured in the corporate future vision. - **Drones:** Used in the corporate vision to deliver pizzas. - **Touch screens:** Used for shopping experiences in the imagined future. - **Tiramisu:** Example of a specific meal automated cooking can produce. ## References Cited - **Anthropology:** The field of study invoked to argue for the fundamental importance of cooking to human definition. - **Homer, *The Odyssey***: Classic literary work used as a parallel warning regarding dangerous allurements. ## Counterarguments & Caveats - The speaker notes that the corporate future visions are often sensational but lack "human meaning" and evidence. - The general assumption that ideas must come from internal, trained thought processes. ## Conclusions & Recommendations - Future planning for crucial areas (climate crisis, healthcare, community development) must shift focus from internal "head-thinking" to observing the "real world" and direct human experience. - The goal is to let "good ideas lead us" by studying the real world, rather than being blinded by familiar trends. ## Implications & Consequences - Allowing bad ideas (derived from limited viewpoints or trends) to dominate leads corporations and societies to fail because they ignore fundamental human needs and contexts. - By focusing on the real world, we can find inspiration for solving major issues like climate change and improving healthcare. ## Verbatim Moments - *"A really painful lesson, which is most of the time big organizations get really bad ideas when they think about the future."* - *"philosophy in the terms of how we think."* - *"What's the human meaning of these ideas?"* - *"apart from sex, cooking, and preparing and eating food is the most important thing of being a human being."* - *"When we take away hunting, gathering, and cooking? Well, then we are just animals, we are not humans anymore."* - *"They all are about one idea, one meaning, which is: humans don't like to cook. That's the idea. It's slavery!"* - *"I'll give you another example. The same set-up, the same phenomena can look very different if you are an economist. Everything is about price and markets, and everything would look like price and markets."* - *"the sirens of today. They blind your thinking, they take you ashore, and they eat you alive."* - *"when you are a child, you do not stop being a child just because you are ill."* - *"good ideas come from the real world and not your head."*