Unhurried creativity

Last night, we had the pleasure of hosting ‘cocky adman turned group facilitator’ (his description!) Johnnie Moore.

When he asks people what they think unhurried conversations are, he usually gets 3 responses:

🤔 What is that?
😍 I want it
🙄 It will never work

Johnnie asked us to chat to our immediate neighbour about this concept.

Ideas that came up included:

Hurried = no intention
Unhurried = state of flow

Also the concept of off-task creativity, such as in the shower, where ideas come naturally in their own time. And that we listen more carefully to other people’s perspectives when we’re unhurried.

Johnnie suggests that unhurried is mentality healthier, we’re so rushed in day to day life that we need to intentionally find time to be more human.

Johnnie wrote his book ‘Unhurried’ based on his experiences facilitating conversations across the world.

He previously worked in advertising before becoming disillusioned with the relentless fast ideas, churned out purely to encourage us to buy more stuff. Following this, during his early days in Cambridge he tried joining networking events. Every time he went, he felt he died a little inside. It was mostly white business men. Conversations were bitty, people interrupting each other to sell.

So Johnnie held his own event. Participants had to hold a cup when it was their turn to talk. This was really satisfying. There were long silences. Some participants might find this uncomfortable and awkward initially but it turns out we don’t want to exchange such frantic data.

During team building and facilitation, people get the most out of uncomfortable conversations if they listen.

Some participants even feed back that their marriages improved since working with Johnnie.

So, what is ‘Unhurried creativity’?

Johnnie believes that slowly coming up with ideas is more sustainable for humanity. Ecology will fail if we continue at the current fast pace. We need to stop consuming so much stuff.

It’s about relating to each other not to machines.

We’re all creative. We’re always creating new thoughts and ideas.

Unhurried is our right as human beings.

Thank you Johnnie for taking the time to talk to our group. It truly was a wonderful evening.

Next month we’ll be telling spooky stories. More details to follow…