Episode 35: How to change the world one question at a time, with Creating the Future co-founder Hildy Gottlieb

The Life Well Lived Podcast with Shane Breslin

This is Episode Number 35 of the Life Well Lived Podcast, with the co-founder of Creating the Future, Hildy Gottlieb.

Hildy Gottlieb is a social scientist and the founder of an organisation called Creating the Future.

Creating the Future is focused on helping people and organisations to change the systems they find themselves in, to aim those systems at bringing out the best in people, all by changing the questions they ask.

The movement is a multi-year experiment to answer the question, “If people everywhere are asking the kinds of questions that bring out the best in themselves and those around them, how much more humane could the world be?”

During this wide-ranging conversation we talk about:

• The discovery that despite great work being done by bright people in forward-thinking organisations, nothing was changing
• Creating the Future’s "Catalytic Thinking" framework, based on research on what makes positive change happen - and what, specifically, is not happening when people struggle to create change?
• The mission of Creating the Future to conduct a multi-year experiment with Catalytic Thinking, and share the lessons learned through the work so that anybody can create change
• The blurring of the lines between traditional for-profit, non-profit and public sector organisations and the trend towards "profit for purpose", "conscious capitalism" and other ideas around "business for good"
• The disconnect between the stock market and the world that the vast majority of people live in
• How big systems, which can cause a convoluted mass of problems in so many ways for so many people, might be challenged and changed
• The concept of “collective enoughness”, and why competition has in many ways created the unsustainability that the world is grappling to deal with now
• How systems have coached generations of children to feel not enough, and how that manifests in tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world
• The neuroscience of thinking from a place of fear, and how it is utilised by advertisers, marketers and politicians, and how love can overcome that fear
• How trying to ask the right question is the wrong approach
• Navigating the "messy middle" between where we find ourselves and where we might want to go

I do hope you enjoy this conversation with the co-founder of Creating the Future, Hildy Gottlieb.

Links mentioned in the show:

• Creating a Better World Means Asking Better Questions [Stanford Review article]
• The Creating The Future website
• Watch Hildy Gottlieb's TEDx talk here